#parallel post to this one about how kirk's life is irrevocably changed by spock coming when??? mm idk. maybe someday.

[lepertamar]

So seeing as you’re also a fan of Star Trek TOS and vulcans, I thought I’d share an observation........in the stars that rise at dawn, the whole Tamar-Elīya drama/the Tamar Incident when she runs away to become a holy, is kind of a deep subversion of the thing in the first Star Trek movie where Spock runs away from Kirk and the Enterprise and tries to take the Kolinahr ritual....but of course Spock was wrong and Tamar was right :’)

EDIT: i got and wrote out this ask in mid 2022 and then never posted it because ???? forgot it somehow. or maybe i had a reason, bc it was complete. anyway here, this is not quite up to my 2024 standards possibly but w/e:

Okay okay I need to like REALLY luxuriate in this. wow. ehehehe. omg the extent to how exhaustively this follows the star trek incident and also how many subverting switches/equal-and-opposite reversals go into every step. how, blow-by-blow the subversions here are. especially in terms of like....especially the stuff I've kept talking about regarding the way Sehhinah does so much 'subversion' of both like, mythology and common genre tropes: it subversions are best when it really sticks to subverting only by changing a couple things mostly about the connotations/emotional affect/motives involved, or "what actually happened, if you described it while projecting as few connotations and assumptions onto it as possible" and this is like.....wow?? one of the most intensive ones?

but okay okay okay so like..........compare/contrast, Tamar runs away because Eliya doesn't know who she is anymore and their friendship is based on nothing, a holding pattern, vs Spock running away because Kirk knows him TOO well and his love friendship for Kirk is too intense and makes him not-himself. Tamar runs away mainly to run to something (to cleave to a people and to a god and to experience an irrevocable sight that will become an addition to herself) and her getting away from her friends without warning is mostly secondary to that, a sort of perception that what has been awakened in her (her self-understanding, her desire, the things she has come to know and be, even before her actual burning) is an impassable disconnect with her old friends and life that she doesn't know or care about enough to try to salvage without being untruthful to herself. Spock runs away mostly to get away from his life with Kirk, in space, with humans, from the fear and shame that he is becoming polluted and un-Vulcan and too-human from their influence and the feelings and desires this life stirs in him, and he tries to take the Kolinahr not for its own sake but because it's a socially acceptable and very Vulcan/not-human way to prove to himself that he's a Real Vulcan and eradicate the human half in him that makes him ashamed and self-loathing of himself. uh hang on where should i put a cut

And also.....Spock fails the ritual because the elders at Gol sense that he is not genuine in his desire or his reasons, and Tamar succeeds because she is truthful, she begs and states simply "I want to see Your soul, all of it, even though it is brighter than anything at all." But that's not even the crux of things, is it? It doesn't mean the parallels diverge there, because Tamar's changes vis-a-vis Eliya came from her decision and desire and the fact that she perceived that she could not continue to live as she had; and this is in fact also true of Spock! They both return, reluctantly, due to the intervention of an outside factor, to their old place and their old friends, and the barrier continues. They are unfitting and different and the same. For different reasons, Tamar IS different and has grown away and knows things about herself and the world that Eliya hasn't, and the things she has seen and life she has built in the meantime have integrated into her Self sincerely, and she won't pretend otherwise. Spock is not as different, but he wants to be different, he wants to not belong here and wants to belong on Vulcan instead, and he has made a (he thinks) irreversible break anyway, which is helping him lie to himself and everyone else as hard as possible.

The Eliya parallel and divergence from Kirk role too: There's the similarity: Eliya does not understand why Tamar left, like Kirk doesn't understand why Spock left. She is hurt and confused. Kirk is too. She genuinely doesn't care as much about Tamar burning out her eyes as much as she cares (at first) about the fact Tamar broke their childhood promise and did not share this important thing with her and ghosted and left her, and (later) about the evidence that burning out her eyes must have been something so Much and big and truthful about Tamar's Self that Tamar thinks Eliya can't share in her life anymore because Eliya doesn't understand what it's like to feel a trembling Much truthful sureness and self-seeing of desire that extreme and that worth anything. Kirk is hurt and confused that Spock left but also from the start is astonished and alarmed that whatever it was, it was so extreme and intense that Spock tried to purge all his emotions about it, and didn't and still won't even explain properly. Eliya insists and assumes it was her fault, and tries to put words in Tamar's mouth about it, "sorry for whatever I did to drive you away." Kirk fears and suspects the same thing about Spock but tries not to assume so, but the thing is that Kirk is right and Eliya was not, and over the movie it grows. Kirk offered Spock friendship and love and duty and stirred humans desires and emotions in Spock and revealed Spock to himself, revealed truths about himself to himself, in a way that Eliya never once ever could. Eliya could never have been a Kirk to Tamar but she also could never have been a brown-haired-anime-boy-childhood-friend to Tamar's white-haired-anime-boy-childhood-friend who mistakenly throws his lot in with a force too Big for him out of arrogant assumption that his friends aren't enough or that his friends make him soft. because she was not and never had been the site of potent revealing-of-the-self-to-one's-self -- the woman with the burned tongue, Safira, the concept of seeing the face of G-d and living the rest of one's life with such knowledge, batshit interspecies (.....''''species'''') bond winning out over intraspecies ones, was the Kirk thing, and Sarek, not Kirk, is closer to Eliya here.

Other contrasts with mirrors: the Kolinahr is a ritual that purges emotions irrevocably and that is its point, whereas becoming a holy is all about intense emotional passion, but irrevocably causes you to lose something as well, but the loss is the direct opposite of Kolinahr in its effects and motive, given it makes you continually subjected to EXTREME emotions and stimulation and intrusion of g-d etc and the price is of losing a part of yourself (a bodypart/sense organ, your abled-ness, your purity and rest/silence/privacy/(....singlethood)) and the price is just kind of inherent to it, not the purpose of it.

Aesthetics also: desert, judaism vibes, god(star trek humans)-and-its-creation(v'ger)-dynamics. uh. 'star' in title. poor pacing. i'm killing it here etc. oh yeah.