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Or. Um. My interpretation, specificially as an Aspie, of same. I'm not sure I want to post this, and may take it down later? But for now:
I recently found a link to a meta by Saucery about OTP pairings, and how they're based on a fundamental dichotomy between the two characters that the viewer finds appealing. Like Arthur/Eames (solidity/fluidity) or Steve/Tony (responsibility/irreverence). Like that. And I was looking at my own pairings, and the only one that immediately pinged for that was Spock/McCoy (logic/emotion), except it was more complicated than that (mind you, I suspect it always is).
So I ended up thinking about that. About that binary and the way I interact with it as presented in media. Logic vs emotion, the perpetual war that people seem to think exists between the two. The old romanticism vs enlightenment debate, which seems to run in cycles through most of modern history (and thus a lot of media). And about Spock/McCoy, and why that pairing pinged so visceral a response because of that.
I recently found a link to a meta by Saucery about OTP pairings, and how they're based on a fundamental dichotomy between the two characters that the viewer finds appealing. Like Arthur/Eames (solidity/fluidity) or Steve/Tony (responsibility/irreverence). Like that. And I was looking at my own pairings, and the only one that immediately pinged for that was Spock/McCoy (logic/emotion), except it was more complicated than that (mind you, I suspect it always is).
So I ended up thinking about that. About that binary and the way I interact with it as presented in media. Logic vs emotion, the perpetual war that people seem to think exists between the two. The old romanticism vs enlightenment debate, which seems to run in cycles through most of modern history (and thus a lot of media). And about Spock/McCoy, and why that pairing pinged so visceral a response because of that.
Biases up front: I'm an Aspie. My default MO is to rationalise my experiences via logic, and I find understanding things not readily explainable in logical terms very difficult. However, I'm also an idealist and an incorrigible romantic (I've actually had my writing described using the term 'romanticism'). I have very little one-on-one social interaction or emotional interaction (at least in the physical sphere, online is slightly different), but I'm fascinated and intrigued with the larger systems of emotionality in the world, the rationalisations that people put across them.
[I read something somewhere, that female Aspies might tend to do this: might focus their urge to systematise things on social and/or emotional functions because society tells girls to be social. I'm not sure how much merit that has. Mind you, I remember a conversation with another Aspie in college, who asked me why I picked human rather than physical geography to focus on when I'm an Aspie and wouldn't the physical make more sense? I was trying to explain that human geography gives you a physical and rational window through which to study the large scale operations of human emotionality and society, that you can have physical, tangible evidence of what motivates humanity (see cities, cities are intrinsic physical manifestations of humankind's fears and dreams), and that that both fascinated and comforted me. So. For me, personally, that might have some merit as a theory.]
So ... this is a very id-related, provoking debate for me, yes? This logic/emotion binary, and its depictions in media, tends to catch me coming and going, and usually not favourably.
There are a range of attached ideas to 'logic' and 'emotion' in the general (Western) consciousness. Logic gets: male, enlightened, cold, inhuman, mechanistic, futuristic. Emotion gets: female, primitive, warm, human, empathic, fantastic. Both of them have their positive and negative stereotypes attached (and as a female Aspie, I tend to think I get the worst of both, really: female, primitive, cold, inhuman - not from my POV, you understand, but from the stereotypical one). Portrayals of the presupposed conflict in media usually swings towards the negative of one while forwarding the positive of the other. A few portrayals manage to debate the pros and cons of both. Sadly, though, most of them pick a side and go with it, damn the consequences anyway.
Right now, I'm thinking we're on a romantic swing. A lot of media right now seem to be using the 'cold, arrogant logician' vs the 'warm, human empath' version of the debate, or at least trying to (Hannibal, BBC Sherlock, Person of Interest to an extent with the whole Finch vs Ingram, Avengers to an extent with the whole individual vs the system).
And the problem I'm having with a lot of them is: both of those archetypes seem to be increasingly shifting towards exaggerated, one-dimensional versions of themselves. The 'cold arrogant logician' is seen, almost uniformly, as a dick. A genuine one, portrayed as such and meant to be read as such. A lot of the time they're also right, but they're always removed from the people around them, and usually bitter and/or cruel because of it. Meanwhile, the 'empath' character is often overwhelmed, unable to function properly, and prone to being a doormat. They're possibly morally superior, their compassion highlighted as more desirable, but they're also often ineffectual. (BBC Sherlock pretty much epitomises this, but things like Stargate Universe with Rush vs Young, Hannibal seems to be starting here with Hannibal vs Will, House MD, etc). Over on Doctor Who, the Doctor swings wildly between over-emotional and destructive and coldly, uncaringly pragmatic, and is pretty much horrible in both extremes (though he hits the middle ground every so often and we can breathe again).
I'm ... I'm not sure what to think, right now. Generally speaking, the emotional is trumped over the logical, but the logical is often increasingly portrayed as right, albeit an asshole about it. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground (though, as I said, POI is being interestingly complex about this, with the whole individual vs the system, needs of the one vs the many thing it's got going on, and Avengers was surprisingly complex about it too, despite being the quintessential blockbuster, with its depiction of SHIELD). In many cases, though, there just seems to be a rapid and violent oscillation between extremes (and one specific version of both extremes), with not a lot of meaningful interaction between them.
(Important caveat: personal opinion only, and also this gets me in the id-place, so I'm less rational than I'd like about it).
So, I go back to other portrayals of the debate. I go back to Spock/McCoy. Because part of what appealed to me about how the dichotomy was portrayed inside that pairing was that it actually went and picked apart the substance of the debate, and fairly equally (fairly, there was still weighting towards the emotional, 'human' end of things). I went through a few episodes again recently, looking specifically at this, and I've been figuring out why it hit me in the id-place at the time.
First things to note: like a typical Aspie, I identified most strongly with Spock. Perhaps not like the typical Aspie, my favourite character was McCoy, as aggravatingly emotional and occasionally volatile as he was. It took me a while to figure out why.
We'll take Spock first, because he's easiest and also because my reaction to McCoy was predicated on my reaction to Spock. With Spock ... Spock, all on his own, represents the logic/emotion dichotomy within himself. He's a Vulcan/human hybrid. Even if he wasn't, Vulcan history actually encompasses both in itself: the logic is their shield against the roiling emotional stew that's their natural disposition. Spock, because of his unique position, grew up taking the brunt of a culture that is rigidly attached to logic while also having a more visibly emotional background via his mother. He seems to have responded by trying to basically out-Vulcan the Vulcans in his personal interactions, while also nursing a small rebellion in the form of his joining the predominantly human Starfleet instead of the Vulcan science academy. Spock is ... deeply conflicted at all points across the series and movies, and he fluctuates between extremes as he tries to find a reasonable compromise between his perceptions of his dual heritages (note: his perceptions of them, not necessarily their actuality).
He acts out that search for compromise in various ways. On Vulcan, pre-series, he seems to have been rigidly logical in all interactions, while being uncomfortably aware that it was a far more shallow shield for him than it was for those around him (so he thought, anyway: 'Journey to Babel' and 'Amok Time' both seem to indicate that even full Vulcans are plenty emotional at the best of times). He probably went to Starfleet in an effort to see if dealing with the dichotomy among the other extreme would be any easier.
It pretty much wasn't. The major difference between Vulcan and Starfleet, as far as I can see, is that he actually found friends in Starfleet, which enabled him to feel more comfortable visibly acting out his search for compromise. However, in terms of providing viable answers to his internal conflict, no, I don't think it was helpful. Mostly because, much as the Vulcans had wanted him to be purely Vulcan, most of the humans want him to be purely human and act visibly emotional towards them. In some cases, his attachment to the ideals of Vulcan logic is openly mocked (the end of Galileo Seven, for example). His major problem was always that he was too much of both to ever be fully comfortable inside a society that valued primarily one or the other. Vulcans placed an over-emphasis on logic, and humans place an over-emphasis on emotion. No matter where he went, he was stuck.
Over the course of canon, we see him try a number of ways to deal with that. The original series saw him move slowly into more open emotion, while retaining a core logical MO. Sometime after the end of the five year mission, however, apparently he felt that approach had become unsustainable, and the first movie interrupts him in the middle of a Vulcan ritual attempting to purge himself of emotion altogether. Over the course of the movies, he proceeds to act out great emotions through logical means (Wrath of Khan, needs of the many). Having his soul kept inside McCoy for a while, at the same time as having many of his memories damaged, seems to have reset him slightly towards the emotional end of the spectrum (possibly via the loss of some of his Vulcan training at the same time as cohabitating with the single most emotional soul on the Enterprise).
Spock's story across the canon is essentially a search for compromise between his perceived natures. The thing is, Spock is both genuinely logical and genuinely emotional. His baseline appears to be fairly strong emotion framed/controlled by a logical thought process (which is, basically, the Vulcan baseline, which he might have realised had he not spent his life struggling with his own perceived 'human' weaknesses), with his major shifts being the relative rigidity/fluidity of his attachment to one aspect or the other compared to those around him and his own previous positions.
Spock is, for an Aspie viewer (or at least this one), someone for whom emotions are powerful, omnipresent and frightening things, sometimes shameful, practically inescapable, which must be regulated and viewed through a logical lens in order for them to make sense/be controlled. He can't escape them, even inside himself, though there are many times he desperately wants to. He suffers for their presence in other people, his comparative 'coldness' making him a target of anger and derision, while at the same time the imperfection of his own logic reminds him that he can't even be the thing they mock him for, not in totality.
(He's also, for the record, a brave, moral, sarcastic bastard who's thoroughly amusing to watch, I'm just picking up the parts that ping me regarding this binary).
See, the problem with being an Aspie is that I still, in fact, actually have emotions myself. In fact, I often have incredibly powerful, debilitating emotions, which I find difficult to control primarily because I just don't understand them well enough to figure out what's going on, either inside me or around me. Much like Spock, I can't actually escape the fact that emotions get everywhere and interfere with everything, even the purity of my own thoughts, and there's nothing much I can do about it. (I'm slightly jealous that Spock gets to cheat a little via touch-telepathy, which at least lets him identify what people around him are feeling, even if he mightn't always get why). Emotions don't make a lot of sense viewed through a logical lens, and when the logical lens is your default and the only means by which you can interpret the world, that leaves you at a disadvantage when it comes to places and people who value emotion more strongly.
So, obviously, I sympathise with him pretty strongly. Which might make it slightly weird that I'm so attached to McCoy when McCoy and Spock canonically DO NOT get on, and also that I'm attached to McCoy at least in part because of his relationship with Spock.
But you see, the thing is, what McCoy actually does with Spock is provide a means to test out the dichotomy. Because McCoy is actually quite similar to Spock, just coming at it from the opposite angle. McCoy is simultaneously two things: one of the most emotional, empathetic souls in creation, and a trauma doctor on a frontline starship who regularly has to make incredibly pragmatic decisions regardless of his feelings on the matter. While Spock struggles with the necessity of emotion from a default logical standpoint, McCoy struggles with the necessity of ruthless pragmatism from a default emotional one.
The both of them react so strongly against each other because they each see in the other the manifestation of the thing they most struggle with. Spock sees in McCoy the relentless anger and disdain directed at him in the human worlds for the very thing he himself tried to value most strongly among Vulcans, reminding him constantly that he's failing in both worlds, and McCoy sees Spock as the manifestation of the ruthless laws of triage that shred him internally over and over again even though he knows for a fact that they're right and necessary a lot of the time, and that makes it worse because it means he can't dismiss them no matter how much pain they cause him.
But they also, primarily through their shared friendship with Jim and their service together, see each other as good, compassionate, courageous men who will do everything in their power to save those around them. And see, that's one of the things that I love so much about this relationship: they're both portrayed as moral, both portrayed as compassionate. The whole morals vs ethics debate is there, yes, but they each take turns on either side of the line.
For example, in 'The Tholian Web' it's actually McCoy who says they have to move away, even if it means abandoning Jim, because staying is killing the rest of the crew, and it's Spock who wants to risk staying longer to save Jim. The 'needs of the many/needs of the one' debate that echoes through the show actually finds both of them on both sides, depending on the situation. (Which Kirk, in that same episode, had recognised enough that his last wish for both of them was to lean on each other to provide those alternate viewpoints and enable each other to find the middle ground).
They act out the debate, but they act it out equally. In 'The Immunity Syndrome', Spock highlights the potential limitations of human empathy compared to vulcan compassion, pointing out that humans pour such effort into caring about individual lives/pains that they have trouble mentally encompassing larger tragedies on an emotional level (the 'million is a statistic' phenomenon), and says that if they could, they might be less violent. McCoy asks if he'd really wish that on a people who do react with that level of emotion towards even one person's pain. They both have a point: the Vulcan combination of telepathy and emotional volatility was probably what led to the rigid adherence to logic as a defense in the first place. If you care more widely, in sheer self defense you must care less deeply, at least on an individual level. The question of which approach is better is left unanswered, both textually and subtextually, since both Spock and McCoy have been established to be moral people.
So I love the way their relationship engages with and demonstrates multiple sides of the debate, the whole 'logic vs emotion, enlightenment vs romanticism, compassion vs empathy' thing. I love how neither side is dismissed, and though the interaction between them occasionally gets very volatile and downright vicious in places, at the end of the day the proponents of both viewpoints get the most success by working together.
But I also love that they manage to do that without dismissing either of their fundamental natures in the process. While Spock fluctuates over how much he wants to purge and/or embrace his emotions, he never stops having a logical default setting, and while McCoy is more or less pragmatic depending on the situation, his default bleeding heart never changes. They learn to lean on other people who embody their opposites, they don't fundamentally change themselves. As in, it's okay to have either default, so long as you try to acknowledge and engage with the other as best you can.
And that, too, shows in their personal reactions to each other. McCoy is one of the few people who consistently doesn't forget that Spock isn't human. A lot of the other crewmembers basically treat him as a human with pointy ears and a laughable attachment to logic (including, and it's one of the few things that I genuinely can't forgive him for, Kirk himself - "Of all the souls I have encountered, his was the most human." Because, y'know, it wasn't like Spock had just spent his entire life trying to reconcile both parts of himself, only to have his best friend casually dismiss a full half of him out of hand at his funeral, or anything. For fucks sake, Jim). McCoy, however, is always aware that he's a 'pointy-eared, cold-blooded hobgoblin'.
On the one hand, that's throwing in Spock's face that he's no more at home with humans than he was with Vulcans, but on the other it's also acknowledgement that Spock comes from a fundamentally different culture and background and thus has reasons for his difference in outlook. As someone once said in an essay, the problem with 'passing' is that few people acknowledge that you're struggling, because your difference and thus your struggle, while still very real, are invisible to them. If people don't know or willfully ignore the fact that you are different, sometimes that makes things harder, and dismisses your pain.
(Um. I'm aware this is a significant debate in its own right, on a number of fronts. I'm just pointing out one POV, since it's relevant and, ah, possibly close to home?)
And McCoy, while he consistently and repeatedly pokes at Spock regarding Spock's emotions, never actually tries to force him to have them, only to admit them. As soon as McCoy realises that Spock is currently having emotions and struggling with how to deal with them, he backs off ('Bread and Circuses', for example, and 'The Tholian Web') and goes 'It's okay, I'm struggling too'. They pretty much all know that Spock does actually feel things (after 'The Menagerie', where Spock potentially threw away his entire career just to salve Pike's emotional pain, it'd be hard to deny that), it's just the fact that he doesn't show them that's the problem (see 'Court Martial' for McCoy blowing up at him about this). The one time someone tries to force foreign emotions on Spock ('Plato's Stepchildren'), McCoy flips out at them for it.
On the flipside, Spock provides an external voice for the hard choices that McCoy doesn't want to face. Spock is frequently the voice of hard, cold logic that lets McCoy flip out and vent emotionally before acknowledging that yes, triage has to happen. Spock constantly needles McCoy for being overly emotional ('The Ultimate Computer', to name one example), yet also acknowledges that McCoy is ruthlessly professional when the situation requires. Spock knows that McCoy will make the hard choices, but also that he suffers for them. Spock isn't always nice about this ('Operation: Annihilate!'), but he is consistently understanding of it (see 'Miri' and 'The Empath' where Spock both forgives and mourns McCoy's desire to take the hit because the alternative pains him, and 'City on the Edge of Forever' where Spock tries to remind a McCoy who's too distraught to remember it that Kirk suffers for having done what was necessary too).
They both know the nature of the other. They both get angry and upset and defensive about it, they both needle each other desperately for it, but in the end they both forgive each other for it, and do their best to help each other with their specific problems. They're both suffering from essentially the same problem from opposite sides, and the lion's share of their interactions actually consist of helping each other to try and hold the middle ground that they both desperately need to function. McCoy keeps Spock from trying to abandon emotionality altogether, despite how much it pains him, and Spock reminds McCoy both that ruthless pragmatism is sometimes necessary, and that it's forgivable. They both teach the other to forgive the aspects of themselves that pain them, mostly because they embody that part and have proven its value by their actions.
And it's telling to me that, while Kirk was the man Spock was willing to give his life for, McCoy was the man to whom Spock entrusted his soul. Despite McCoy's emotionality, despite their myriad disagreements over the years, in extremis it was still McCoy to whom he entrusted his katra, McCoy he believed would keep it safe.
This is ... See, that? That presses a lot of buttons for me. Because I'm an Aspie, and my default setting is logical, but I'm also inescapably emotional and romantic. I'm the worst of both stereotypes, according to many modern interpretations of this binary. I'm female and emotional and inhuman and cold. Like Spock, I'm not enough of either world to be comfortable: I'm more engaged with emotion (if haltingly and not always very competently) than your average TV Aspie/intellectual, and more cold and icily pragmatic than the ideal empathic human TV tells me I'm supposed to be. I'm too much of both and not enough of either. [I'm also a female Aspie, which a lot of people believe doesn't happen - 'logic' = 'male', remember?]
I also love people. I hate the complications of interacting with them, but I also fundamentally love the fact of their existence, their myriad complications, their shattering flaws and surpassing graces. I love the idea of people, I love the individual people put before me, I love watching and struggling to understand the ways in which they connect.
So Spock/McCoy pushes buttons. Because in these two characters, you have a message that having either an emotional OR a logical default is acceptable, that it can be worked around, if you're willing to suffer for it and work at it. That you can find a form of middle ground, albeit painfully and precariously. And, more than that, that people from both sides of the line can work at it together. That it can get to the point where you can trust someone so different from you with your very soul, with all that you are. That you can disagree with someone, vehemently and viciously, and still value and protect everything that they are, still love all that they are. Spock and McCoy would each have cheerfully died for each other (pretty much did, on several occasions), would protect both each other's physical AND emotional safety, would snipe at each other until the cows came home but turn on any stranger who tried to do the same. They were safe with each other, if not always particularly happy, and sometimes even that too.
It just ... it pings a lot of buttons, okay? *smiles crookedly*
Um. Which, I think, boils down to the eventual point that I think Saucery's meta has some merit, at least as regards my specific reasons for shipping this pairing. Heh. And, too, possibly my reasons for still shipping it, despite the fact that it's one of the rarer TOS pairings and runs in the face of more popular ones. Because the binaries that appeal to me are probably not the binaries that appeal to other people, and the approaches I favour towards that binary are probably not quite what other people favour either. Heh. People have a visceral reaction/attachment to relationships that portray conflicts which are important to them.
... Even if the person in question happens to be a cold, emotionally stunted machine who probably should be more logical about this sort of thing -_-;
[I read something somewhere, that female Aspies might tend to do this: might focus their urge to systematise things on social and/or emotional functions because society tells girls to be social. I'm not sure how much merit that has. Mind you, I remember a conversation with another Aspie in college, who asked me why I picked human rather than physical geography to focus on when I'm an Aspie and wouldn't the physical make more sense? I was trying to explain that human geography gives you a physical and rational window through which to study the large scale operations of human emotionality and society, that you can have physical, tangible evidence of what motivates humanity (see cities, cities are intrinsic physical manifestations of humankind's fears and dreams), and that that both fascinated and comforted me. So. For me, personally, that might have some merit as a theory.]
So ... this is a very id-related, provoking debate for me, yes? This logic/emotion binary, and its depictions in media, tends to catch me coming and going, and usually not favourably.
There are a range of attached ideas to 'logic' and 'emotion' in the general (Western) consciousness. Logic gets: male, enlightened, cold, inhuman, mechanistic, futuristic. Emotion gets: female, primitive, warm, human, empathic, fantastic. Both of them have their positive and negative stereotypes attached (and as a female Aspie, I tend to think I get the worst of both, really: female, primitive, cold, inhuman - not from my POV, you understand, but from the stereotypical one). Portrayals of the presupposed conflict in media usually swings towards the negative of one while forwarding the positive of the other. A few portrayals manage to debate the pros and cons of both. Sadly, though, most of them pick a side and go with it, damn the consequences anyway.
Right now, I'm thinking we're on a romantic swing. A lot of media right now seem to be using the 'cold, arrogant logician' vs the 'warm, human empath' version of the debate, or at least trying to (Hannibal, BBC Sherlock, Person of Interest to an extent with the whole Finch vs Ingram, Avengers to an extent with the whole individual vs the system).
And the problem I'm having with a lot of them is: both of those archetypes seem to be increasingly shifting towards exaggerated, one-dimensional versions of themselves. The 'cold arrogant logician' is seen, almost uniformly, as a dick. A genuine one, portrayed as such and meant to be read as such. A lot of the time they're also right, but they're always removed from the people around them, and usually bitter and/or cruel because of it. Meanwhile, the 'empath' character is often overwhelmed, unable to function properly, and prone to being a doormat. They're possibly morally superior, their compassion highlighted as more desirable, but they're also often ineffectual. (BBC Sherlock pretty much epitomises this, but things like Stargate Universe with Rush vs Young, Hannibal seems to be starting here with Hannibal vs Will, House MD, etc). Over on Doctor Who, the Doctor swings wildly between over-emotional and destructive and coldly, uncaringly pragmatic, and is pretty much horrible in both extremes (though he hits the middle ground every so often and we can breathe again).
I'm ... I'm not sure what to think, right now. Generally speaking, the emotional is trumped over the logical, but the logical is often increasingly portrayed as right, albeit an asshole about it. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground (though, as I said, POI is being interestingly complex about this, with the whole individual vs the system, needs of the one vs the many thing it's got going on, and Avengers was surprisingly complex about it too, despite being the quintessential blockbuster, with its depiction of SHIELD). In many cases, though, there just seems to be a rapid and violent oscillation between extremes (and one specific version of both extremes), with not a lot of meaningful interaction between them.
(Important caveat: personal opinion only, and also this gets me in the id-place, so I'm less rational than I'd like about it).
So, I go back to other portrayals of the debate. I go back to Spock/McCoy. Because part of what appealed to me about how the dichotomy was portrayed inside that pairing was that it actually went and picked apart the substance of the debate, and fairly equally (fairly, there was still weighting towards the emotional, 'human' end of things). I went through a few episodes again recently, looking specifically at this, and I've been figuring out why it hit me in the id-place at the time.
First things to note: like a typical Aspie, I identified most strongly with Spock. Perhaps not like the typical Aspie, my favourite character was McCoy, as aggravatingly emotional and occasionally volatile as he was. It took me a while to figure out why.
We'll take Spock first, because he's easiest and also because my reaction to McCoy was predicated on my reaction to Spock. With Spock ... Spock, all on his own, represents the logic/emotion dichotomy within himself. He's a Vulcan/human hybrid. Even if he wasn't, Vulcan history actually encompasses both in itself: the logic is their shield against the roiling emotional stew that's their natural disposition. Spock, because of his unique position, grew up taking the brunt of a culture that is rigidly attached to logic while also having a more visibly emotional background via his mother. He seems to have responded by trying to basically out-Vulcan the Vulcans in his personal interactions, while also nursing a small rebellion in the form of his joining the predominantly human Starfleet instead of the Vulcan science academy. Spock is ... deeply conflicted at all points across the series and movies, and he fluctuates between extremes as he tries to find a reasonable compromise between his perceptions of his dual heritages (note: his perceptions of them, not necessarily their actuality).
He acts out that search for compromise in various ways. On Vulcan, pre-series, he seems to have been rigidly logical in all interactions, while being uncomfortably aware that it was a far more shallow shield for him than it was for those around him (so he thought, anyway: 'Journey to Babel' and 'Amok Time' both seem to indicate that even full Vulcans are plenty emotional at the best of times). He probably went to Starfleet in an effort to see if dealing with the dichotomy among the other extreme would be any easier.
It pretty much wasn't. The major difference between Vulcan and Starfleet, as far as I can see, is that he actually found friends in Starfleet, which enabled him to feel more comfortable visibly acting out his search for compromise. However, in terms of providing viable answers to his internal conflict, no, I don't think it was helpful. Mostly because, much as the Vulcans had wanted him to be purely Vulcan, most of the humans want him to be purely human and act visibly emotional towards them. In some cases, his attachment to the ideals of Vulcan logic is openly mocked (the end of Galileo Seven, for example). His major problem was always that he was too much of both to ever be fully comfortable inside a society that valued primarily one or the other. Vulcans placed an over-emphasis on logic, and humans place an over-emphasis on emotion. No matter where he went, he was stuck.
Over the course of canon, we see him try a number of ways to deal with that. The original series saw him move slowly into more open emotion, while retaining a core logical MO. Sometime after the end of the five year mission, however, apparently he felt that approach had become unsustainable, and the first movie interrupts him in the middle of a Vulcan ritual attempting to purge himself of emotion altogether. Over the course of the movies, he proceeds to act out great emotions through logical means (Wrath of Khan, needs of the many). Having his soul kept inside McCoy for a while, at the same time as having many of his memories damaged, seems to have reset him slightly towards the emotional end of the spectrum (possibly via the loss of some of his Vulcan training at the same time as cohabitating with the single most emotional soul on the Enterprise).
Spock's story across the canon is essentially a search for compromise between his perceived natures. The thing is, Spock is both genuinely logical and genuinely emotional. His baseline appears to be fairly strong emotion framed/controlled by a logical thought process (which is, basically, the Vulcan baseline, which he might have realised had he not spent his life struggling with his own perceived 'human' weaknesses), with his major shifts being the relative rigidity/fluidity of his attachment to one aspect or the other compared to those around him and his own previous positions.
Spock is, for an Aspie viewer (or at least this one), someone for whom emotions are powerful, omnipresent and frightening things, sometimes shameful, practically inescapable, which must be regulated and viewed through a logical lens in order for them to make sense/be controlled. He can't escape them, even inside himself, though there are many times he desperately wants to. He suffers for their presence in other people, his comparative 'coldness' making him a target of anger and derision, while at the same time the imperfection of his own logic reminds him that he can't even be the thing they mock him for, not in totality.
(He's also, for the record, a brave, moral, sarcastic bastard who's thoroughly amusing to watch, I'm just picking up the parts that ping me regarding this binary).
See, the problem with being an Aspie is that I still, in fact, actually have emotions myself. In fact, I often have incredibly powerful, debilitating emotions, which I find difficult to control primarily because I just don't understand them well enough to figure out what's going on, either inside me or around me. Much like Spock, I can't actually escape the fact that emotions get everywhere and interfere with everything, even the purity of my own thoughts, and there's nothing much I can do about it. (I'm slightly jealous that Spock gets to cheat a little via touch-telepathy, which at least lets him identify what people around him are feeling, even if he mightn't always get why). Emotions don't make a lot of sense viewed through a logical lens, and when the logical lens is your default and the only means by which you can interpret the world, that leaves you at a disadvantage when it comes to places and people who value emotion more strongly.
So, obviously, I sympathise with him pretty strongly. Which might make it slightly weird that I'm so attached to McCoy when McCoy and Spock canonically DO NOT get on, and also that I'm attached to McCoy at least in part because of his relationship with Spock.
But you see, the thing is, what McCoy actually does with Spock is provide a means to test out the dichotomy. Because McCoy is actually quite similar to Spock, just coming at it from the opposite angle. McCoy is simultaneously two things: one of the most emotional, empathetic souls in creation, and a trauma doctor on a frontline starship who regularly has to make incredibly pragmatic decisions regardless of his feelings on the matter. While Spock struggles with the necessity of emotion from a default logical standpoint, McCoy struggles with the necessity of ruthless pragmatism from a default emotional one.
The both of them react so strongly against each other because they each see in the other the manifestation of the thing they most struggle with. Spock sees in McCoy the relentless anger and disdain directed at him in the human worlds for the very thing he himself tried to value most strongly among Vulcans, reminding him constantly that he's failing in both worlds, and McCoy sees Spock as the manifestation of the ruthless laws of triage that shred him internally over and over again even though he knows for a fact that they're right and necessary a lot of the time, and that makes it worse because it means he can't dismiss them no matter how much pain they cause him.
But they also, primarily through their shared friendship with Jim and their service together, see each other as good, compassionate, courageous men who will do everything in their power to save those around them. And see, that's one of the things that I love so much about this relationship: they're both portrayed as moral, both portrayed as compassionate. The whole morals vs ethics debate is there, yes, but they each take turns on either side of the line.
For example, in 'The Tholian Web' it's actually McCoy who says they have to move away, even if it means abandoning Jim, because staying is killing the rest of the crew, and it's Spock who wants to risk staying longer to save Jim. The 'needs of the many/needs of the one' debate that echoes through the show actually finds both of them on both sides, depending on the situation. (Which Kirk, in that same episode, had recognised enough that his last wish for both of them was to lean on each other to provide those alternate viewpoints and enable each other to find the middle ground).
They act out the debate, but they act it out equally. In 'The Immunity Syndrome', Spock highlights the potential limitations of human empathy compared to vulcan compassion, pointing out that humans pour such effort into caring about individual lives/pains that they have trouble mentally encompassing larger tragedies on an emotional level (the 'million is a statistic' phenomenon), and says that if they could, they might be less violent. McCoy asks if he'd really wish that on a people who do react with that level of emotion towards even one person's pain. They both have a point: the Vulcan combination of telepathy and emotional volatility was probably what led to the rigid adherence to logic as a defense in the first place. If you care more widely, in sheer self defense you must care less deeply, at least on an individual level. The question of which approach is better is left unanswered, both textually and subtextually, since both Spock and McCoy have been established to be moral people.
So I love the way their relationship engages with and demonstrates multiple sides of the debate, the whole 'logic vs emotion, enlightenment vs romanticism, compassion vs empathy' thing. I love how neither side is dismissed, and though the interaction between them occasionally gets very volatile and downright vicious in places, at the end of the day the proponents of both viewpoints get the most success by working together.
But I also love that they manage to do that without dismissing either of their fundamental natures in the process. While Spock fluctuates over how much he wants to purge and/or embrace his emotions, he never stops having a logical default setting, and while McCoy is more or less pragmatic depending on the situation, his default bleeding heart never changes. They learn to lean on other people who embody their opposites, they don't fundamentally change themselves. As in, it's okay to have either default, so long as you try to acknowledge and engage with the other as best you can.
And that, too, shows in their personal reactions to each other. McCoy is one of the few people who consistently doesn't forget that Spock isn't human. A lot of the other crewmembers basically treat him as a human with pointy ears and a laughable attachment to logic (including, and it's one of the few things that I genuinely can't forgive him for, Kirk himself - "Of all the souls I have encountered, his was the most human." Because, y'know, it wasn't like Spock had just spent his entire life trying to reconcile both parts of himself, only to have his best friend casually dismiss a full half of him out of hand at his funeral, or anything. For fucks sake, Jim). McCoy, however, is always aware that he's a 'pointy-eared, cold-blooded hobgoblin'.
On the one hand, that's throwing in Spock's face that he's no more at home with humans than he was with Vulcans, but on the other it's also acknowledgement that Spock comes from a fundamentally different culture and background and thus has reasons for his difference in outlook. As someone once said in an essay, the problem with 'passing' is that few people acknowledge that you're struggling, because your difference and thus your struggle, while still very real, are invisible to them. If people don't know or willfully ignore the fact that you are different, sometimes that makes things harder, and dismisses your pain.
(Um. I'm aware this is a significant debate in its own right, on a number of fronts. I'm just pointing out one POV, since it's relevant and, ah, possibly close to home?)
And McCoy, while he consistently and repeatedly pokes at Spock regarding Spock's emotions, never actually tries to force him to have them, only to admit them. As soon as McCoy realises that Spock is currently having emotions and struggling with how to deal with them, he backs off ('Bread and Circuses', for example, and 'The Tholian Web') and goes 'It's okay, I'm struggling too'. They pretty much all know that Spock does actually feel things (after 'The Menagerie', where Spock potentially threw away his entire career just to salve Pike's emotional pain, it'd be hard to deny that), it's just the fact that he doesn't show them that's the problem (see 'Court Martial' for McCoy blowing up at him about this). The one time someone tries to force foreign emotions on Spock ('Plato's Stepchildren'), McCoy flips out at them for it.
On the flipside, Spock provides an external voice for the hard choices that McCoy doesn't want to face. Spock is frequently the voice of hard, cold logic that lets McCoy flip out and vent emotionally before acknowledging that yes, triage has to happen. Spock constantly needles McCoy for being overly emotional ('The Ultimate Computer', to name one example), yet also acknowledges that McCoy is ruthlessly professional when the situation requires. Spock knows that McCoy will make the hard choices, but also that he suffers for them. Spock isn't always nice about this ('Operation: Annihilate!'), but he is consistently understanding of it (see 'Miri' and 'The Empath' where Spock both forgives and mourns McCoy's desire to take the hit because the alternative pains him, and 'City on the Edge of Forever' where Spock tries to remind a McCoy who's too distraught to remember it that Kirk suffers for having done what was necessary too).
They both know the nature of the other. They both get angry and upset and defensive about it, they both needle each other desperately for it, but in the end they both forgive each other for it, and do their best to help each other with their specific problems. They're both suffering from essentially the same problem from opposite sides, and the lion's share of their interactions actually consist of helping each other to try and hold the middle ground that they both desperately need to function. McCoy keeps Spock from trying to abandon emotionality altogether, despite how much it pains him, and Spock reminds McCoy both that ruthless pragmatism is sometimes necessary, and that it's forgivable. They both teach the other to forgive the aspects of themselves that pain them, mostly because they embody that part and have proven its value by their actions.
And it's telling to me that, while Kirk was the man Spock was willing to give his life for, McCoy was the man to whom Spock entrusted his soul. Despite McCoy's emotionality, despite their myriad disagreements over the years, in extremis it was still McCoy to whom he entrusted his katra, McCoy he believed would keep it safe.
This is ... See, that? That presses a lot of buttons for me. Because I'm an Aspie, and my default setting is logical, but I'm also inescapably emotional and romantic. I'm the worst of both stereotypes, according to many modern interpretations of this binary. I'm female and emotional and inhuman and cold. Like Spock, I'm not enough of either world to be comfortable: I'm more engaged with emotion (if haltingly and not always very competently) than your average TV Aspie/intellectual, and more cold and icily pragmatic than the ideal empathic human TV tells me I'm supposed to be. I'm too much of both and not enough of either. [I'm also a female Aspie, which a lot of people believe doesn't happen - 'logic' = 'male', remember?]
I also love people. I hate the complications of interacting with them, but I also fundamentally love the fact of their existence, their myriad complications, their shattering flaws and surpassing graces. I love the idea of people, I love the individual people put before me, I love watching and struggling to understand the ways in which they connect.
So Spock/McCoy pushes buttons. Because in these two characters, you have a message that having either an emotional OR a logical default is acceptable, that it can be worked around, if you're willing to suffer for it and work at it. That you can find a form of middle ground, albeit painfully and precariously. And, more than that, that people from both sides of the line can work at it together. That it can get to the point where you can trust someone so different from you with your very soul, with all that you are. That you can disagree with someone, vehemently and viciously, and still value and protect everything that they are, still love all that they are. Spock and McCoy would each have cheerfully died for each other (pretty much did, on several occasions), would protect both each other's physical AND emotional safety, would snipe at each other until the cows came home but turn on any stranger who tried to do the same. They were safe with each other, if not always particularly happy, and sometimes even that too.
It just ... it pings a lot of buttons, okay? *smiles crookedly*
Um. Which, I think, boils down to the eventual point that I think Saucery's meta has some merit, at least as regards my specific reasons for shipping this pairing. Heh. And, too, possibly my reasons for still shipping it, despite the fact that it's one of the rarer TOS pairings and runs in the face of more popular ones. Because the binaries that appeal to me are probably not the binaries that appeal to other people, and the approaches I favour towards that binary are probably not quite what other people favour either. Heh. People have a visceral reaction/attachment to relationships that portray conflicts which are important to them.
... Even if the person in question happens to be a cold, emotionally stunted machine who probably should be more logical about this sort of thing -_-;
