Romulans Never Struck Me As This Passionate Race
- Thread starter Photon
- Start date
As passionate as bureaucrats can be.
The Romulans are more cautious than courageous. They are tough hiding behind cloaks, decloaking and shooting their enemies to dust. But they never want to be the ones to instigate fights. I think we got a good insight into Romulan psyches in Face of the Enemy when Troi had to impersonate a member of the Tal Shiar.
I think Photon means the opposite -- that Romulans have a reputation of being the Vulcan offshoot that didn't embrace logic and thus retained their innate passion, but their actual portrayal onscreen is more cold and calculating. I'm not sure I'd agree; we have seen a fair number of pretty emotional Romulans, like the "Enterprise Incident" Commander, Tomalak, and Nero.
But it's a fair question -- according to episodes like TOS: "All Our Yesterdays" and ENT: "Impulse," pre-Surakian Vulcans were savagely, almost uncontrollably emotional and violent, hence their need to strictly discipline their emotion with logic. So if that's the natural state of the species, and if the Romulans are unreformed, non-Surakian Vulcanoids, then why are they so controlled and calculating in their military, ruthless way, instead of being as over-the-top impassioned as Klingons? It's an anomaly.
Diane Duane posited in her novels that the Romulans/Rihannsu had simply found a different philosophy for governing their passions, mnhei'sahe -- a philosophy built around complicated notions of honor and interpersonal obligation, and around embracing and directing one's passions rather than suppressing them. Of course, screen canon has gone in a different direction, but I tend to assume a similar principle applies, that Romulans manage their emotions through martial discipline rather than pacifistic logic.
They have to hide their passions to avoid getting dragged away by the secret police.
Passion looks different to different people. But for the Vulcans, their passion was contained by logic. For the Romulans, their passion was contained by paranoia, cautiousness, and calculating. But it expressed itself in different ways.
One could also argue that Vulcans ARE an extremely passionate race because they are so entrenched in logic. They are very passionate about the use of logic... so much so that it can almost be called a religion, given how it is used in every aspect of their lives.
Some might compare it to the real world example of being OCD: if you’re gonna be OCD no matter what, try to direct it into something productive if possible. Likewise with Vulcans and their passion. But in practice, I find Vulcans to be more stoic than logical. There’s some overlap between those ideas, but they’re not the same. Some of their rituals and apparel, for example, are not rooted in pure logic per se. That doesn’t make them bad, but what they really practice is stoicism more than anything else.
