Was watching some TOS vids lately and came across
this one that brought up some revelations about fanon vs canon.
No, I'm not talking about a potential Spock/Uhura match. But rather, how he interacts with the rest of the Enterprise crew.
For one thing, fanon seems to have adopted the view that vulcans hate to be touched, ostensibly because they're touch telepaths. And, of course, the fact that he and Kirk get a lot of physical contact is a sign of his feelings for Kirk. (I'm guilty of this myself because it can be a plot device used to drive slashy plotness.)
However, based on that vid, it's obviously not true. And I'm betting that there are a lot of other instances where Spock manhandles fellow crewmates without any problems. (He also gets into physical altercations with enemies, but naturally those don't count.)
Also, I did a brief search through ENT scripts to see if this fanon idea originated from that series. But no. Nowhere in ENT does it indicate vulcans avoid physical contact. T'Pol does say vulcans don't like to touch their food with their hands, but that just might be an etiquette quirk. When they visit P'Jem, she's careful to tell the crew not to touch any artifact or speak out of turn with the monks, but don't mention anything about not touching said monks.
So yeah, total fanon.
The other thing I noted is that clip at the end of the vid, where Spock does an extemporaneous musical performance with Uhura singing ad hoc lyrics that's pretty much making fun of him. He does this in the middle of the rec room, with lots of other junior crewmembers around to listen and laugh along. He also shows a lot of expressions, including smiles, grins, and exasperated eye-rolls. Now, you could say that this was in TOS season one where they haven't nailed down vulcan stocism... but this episode came after "The Man Trap" (the clip before it) where Uhura berates Spock for being emotionless on receiving news that a member of the landing party (potentially Kirk) had died. So yeah.
Anyway, back to the earlier point... TOS fanon tends to depict Spock as awkward and not well socialized for human contact, and needed Kirk to teach him how to socialize with the human crew. This...is very obviously not true, given that rec room clip. Spock seems to get along with other humans in a recreational setting just fine. Also, even lacking that clip, the idea is unlikely, given that Spock had previously served at least a decade on the Enterprise under Pike, and he gets along just fine with others in "The Cage".
Besides, do we even see TOS!Kirk ever socialize with any of this crew that isn't Spock or McCoy? Now there's a question.
EDIT to add:
One more fanon item I've noticed... A lot of TOS fics have stuff like Kirk and Spock sparring with each other while off duty. Now, I don't think it's out of the question for the Enterprise to have a gym/dojo. The security guys have to get their exercise somewhere. I can even buy TOS!Kirk occasionally working out with his security guys, given how often he breaks into the melodramatic flying kicks.
But Spock? I dunno. Aside from "Amok Time", where he was hopped up on the really good vulcan hormones, his record of fisticuffs with various alien bad guys, when compared to that of his human colleagues, isn't all that special. Certainly it doesn't seem to match up to the 'vulcans are 3x the strength of humans' claim.
Honestly, I think it would make more sense to think of him as the geek who sits in a lab all day and *doesn't* do practice martial arts in his spare time, and thus why his abilities in fights are comparable to his human teammates. Also, the whole '3x strength' thing could just be comparing the average (pure) vulcan against the average human, and not Spock himself in particular.
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