labingi

(A friend of mine linked me here because she knows I am all about the Vulcans, and I hope you don't mind a stranger coming by and jumping into this.)

While I haven't seen much NuTrek, from what I have seen, I agree with just about everything you said. I really do think they lost the thread on the Vulcans with some of the things they did in Enterprise, although at least in season 4 they tried to retcon some of it into the Vulcans of that time having become corrupt and needing to re-learn the Real Meaning of Logic or whatever.

Old Vulcan society never existed to be a morality play for how we should behave.

1000% this. I hate when people try to write Vulcans as some sort of Utopia. No! They're not better than us, they're different from us. Some of the stuff you mentioned, especially the rigid social expectations and the arranged marriages that aren't always easy and having to keep close hold on their emotions...that's the stuff I'm interested in.

I especially like playing with things that would be terrible for humans but, because Vulcans are aliens, with alien psychology, might actually be good for them. Is it a good idea to arrange marriages in childhood with basically no way to separate if it ends up not working out? Not for humans, but maybe for Vulcans the disadvantages are outweighed by the advantages. Or repression of emotion. I want a human character to tell a Vulcan character how bad it is to repress emotion and for the Vulcan to pull out fifteen hundred years of rigorous, well-designed longitudinal studies showing improved mental health in people who follow Surakian logic and just raise an eyebrow and say "our brains are not the same."

But I'm digressing. Basically, I completely agree, Vulcans are aliens and should be allowed to be alien, and parts of their culture should feel strange and maybe a little uncomfortable to us the viewer because they are not like us and we shouldn't expect them to be.