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So I apparently went through a phase in high school where I kept insisting I was half Vulcan. I don't remember to what extent I thought I was joking; my mom says I was adamant about it. It was more than just being obsessed with Spock (which also happened, because Spock is awesome), it was actually saying/pretending/believing/whatever that I was half Vulcan. (The sort that looked human, because no pointy ears here.)
Fast forward to today, when my TNG rewatch continues, and I get to the episode Hero Worship, wherein a human kid that survives a traumatic incident that kills everyone else on his spaceship basically imprints on Data and starts maintaining that he is an android, and talking/acting as though he is. The show is not really very subtle about the whole "androids can't experience emotions, he wants to escape his fear / terror / bad memories / trauma, being an android allows him to do that for a while" thing.
And something clicked in me. Because Vulcans are (at least in theory) good at *suppressing* emotion, and replacing with logic, and while they tend to be imperfect at it, there is the whole theme of struggling to overcome emotion. And I was at the time dealing with a whole bunch of shit -- high school is stressful, puberty and associated change is stressful (even though I didn't have any sexual complications going on), surgery and chemo and similar things are stressful, scary untreatable progressive medical conditions are stressful -- and ... yeah.
Huh.
Fast forward to today, when my TNG rewatch continues, and I get to the episode Hero Worship, wherein a human kid that survives a traumatic incident that kills everyone else on his spaceship basically imprints on Data and starts maintaining that he is an android, and talking/acting as though he is. The show is not really very subtle about the whole "androids can't experience emotions, he wants to escape his fear / terror / bad memories / trauma, being an android allows him to do that for a while" thing.
And something clicked in me. Because Vulcans are (at least in theory) good at *suppressing* emotion, and replacing with logic, and while they tend to be imperfect at it, there is the whole theme of struggling to overcome emotion. And I was at the time dealing with a whole bunch of shit -- high school is stressful, puberty and associated change is stressful (even though I didn't have any sexual complications going on), surgery and chemo and similar things are stressful, scary untreatable progressive medical conditions are stressful -- and ... yeah.
Huh.