Do Romulans undergo Pon Farr?

[T'Girl]

Vulcan is not a monarchy

Based on what please?

We know that for a time the planet was administered by the High Command, and there's evidence that the High Command still exists in the twenty-fourth century. None of that precludes a monarchy.

Not does the establishment of princesses mean that the entire planet has some kind of monarchy, just that one (or more?) exist. There are monarchies on Earth, here and there.

Or there could just one big monarchy.

It would have made more sense if he'd said "priestess" because we know Vulcan had those.

And we know by dialog that there are princesses too.

I'm vaguely assuming that Sybok's mother may have been a descendent of a family that once had hereditary rulers before their political system was overhauled.

Possibly, but it's also possible that there is a ruling Vulcan royal family with a civil government taking care of the actual administration of the planet. The royals set policy, and the chancellery, high command, council, etc handle the picky little details.

So there was no official royal family that actually led, but perhaps she still used a formal but outdated and empty title.

Similar to the various American royal families.

There's the Hawaiian royal family, no power, but a lot of local respect and social position.

Several native american tribes (of the several hundred) have royal systems, with hereditary leadership .

It's an interesting idea that a Vulcan's pon farr can only be satisfied with their mate.

I keep coming back to Spock's statement that there is a compulsion to return home and take a mate. Not have sex, but to take a mate. As in a spouse. So there's something more than (wink wink nudge nudge) simply having sex going on.

Pon farr is Vulcans being compelled to form a family.

The Vulcans have invested a lot of cultural taboos and ritual into the biological state of Pon Farr, so that some of what we see may be caused by psychology and telepathic bonding instead of purely from the natural state of Pon Farr.

I see the child pair bonding and the Kalliee-fee as a way for modern civilized Vulcans to try to control something that they basically have no real control over.

 

[Lance]

Yeah I concur with the general sentiment stated above that Romulans don't undergo Ponn Farr. A lot of the peculiarly Vulcan customs are related to their traditional supression of emotion (note: Vulcans do not lack emotion, they merely have cultivated a way of supressing those urges). Ponn Farr is one a few rare times when their inner passion comes to the surface, as a part of a ritualistic mating procedure, but Romulans do not supress their emotions and that is one of the fundamentals of their society. So I suspect that no, there is no Ponn Farr or equivalent, the Romulans just do as they please, when they please.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I wonder if Landru visited Vulcan?

 

[TiberiusMaximus]

Also, let's not forget that Vulcan females also go through pon far ... ENT

Vulcan females are referred to experiencing pon farr only in the bizarro mirror universe. In the mirror universe male Vulcans don't get pon farr.

Because it's the mirror universe.

No, T'Pol believes she is experiencing Pon Farr in "Bounty" which takes place in the regular universe.

What I wonder is why the holodeck worked for Tuvok but not for Vorik.

 

[borgboy]

I HATE that Tuvok got around his Pon Farr with a holodeck program. Shouldn't there be a telepathic component? It ruins any future Pon Farr story if it can be resolves so easily.

 

[TiberiusMaximus]

Well, the other way to resolve pon farr is to have the living crap beat out of you. Maybe that's what Tuvok actually did in the holodeck, got his holographic wife to slap him around.

No, on second thought probably not.

 

[publiusr]

Also of note is that moving to a planet with a different rotational period will throw things off as well.

 

[Jono]

What I wonder is why the holodeck worked for Tuvok but not for Vorik.

Tuvok was much older, already had a mate and had a lot experience with pon farr. The medication he took might not have cured him, but it could have also helped.

As for Vorik, he was young and that was his first pon farr. Given he didn't have a mate already he might not have wanted the holodeck therapy to work and he didn't get it a proper go. Tuvok on the other hand would want it to work so to maintain his marriage vows.

 

[Timo]

If pon farr is a mate-finding urge and is dealt with by finding a mate, then Tuvok is already in the clear and should not have pon farr. That he does may be due to the excessive telepathic distance from his wife, but it still leaves him much better off than Vorik who has no wife.

The seven-year cycle existing because Vulcans cannot hold back the urge for any longer is not a likely explanation, because different individuals would fight the urge for different lengths of time, and Spock makes it clear that it's seven years for all Vulcans. (He might mean "all male Vulcans", but he could not mean "it's seven years, give or take four"!)

As for resolving a pon farr, it's said to involve either finding a mate or fighting to the death. Spock does neither and survives. Vorik does neither and survives. So the "to the death" part is probably just traditional hogwash, intended either to discourage young hotheads from choosing the fighting option - or to make it easier to control situations where two males covet he same female. In an enclosed desert community heavy with telepathic linkages, failure to kill one of the competitors would lead to a lifelong grudge endangering said community...

That Vulcans procreate need not mean that pon farr involves copulation. That part could follow at their leisure, and we'd be much better off continuity-wise, not having to match character ages with undue precision. Hell, there must be way too much precision involved in the process of finding two Vulcans with matching pon farr dates to start with!

...Really, a standard matchmaking process most probably only requires one side to be in pon farr. It might be the male by tradition (since T'Pring clearly didn't have the symptoms in the only wedding we witnessed), and said chauvinist tradition would simply ignore female pon farr, or subjugate it to the male one by pairing off all the females before their health or sanity is endangered by the issue. Or then whichever half of a pair gets it first sets the date for the celebrations. If being telepathically bonded in childhood isn't enough to ensure synchonized pon farr, then probably nothing is!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Merlanthe]

My impression was that male vulcans got pon farr and the telepathic link with his bond mate would cause her to experience pon farr when he did and any unbonded females wouldnt have to worry about it.

Spock and T'pring were bond mates since childhood but she didnt want him, she rejected him, imo its believable that this weakened the telepathic bond between them so she wasnt affected by Spocks pon farr especially if she had started to form a bond with that other guy. Once Spocks pon farr is satisfied the bond with T'pring is ended i think because it was weak to start with and did not get renewed/strengthened through a physical bonding.

Vorik has no bond mate so he tries to find one and once he has formed a basic bond with B'elanna no one else will do. Kinda like how Spock was driven to find T'pring specifically rather than just satisfy his urges with the nearest agreable female.
Tuvok had been married for many decades and his telepathic bond with his wife was presumably very strong. He had to make do with a holgram of his wife cause, as with Spock and Vorik, the pon farr urges can only be satisfied with his bondmate and no one else. Maybe the physical form of his wife was enough to satisfy his pon farr without the telpathic part though i always assumed part of the pon farr was the urge to renew the telepathic bond already in place.

T'pol goes through pon farr because of some virus infection. Its possible that the virus affected/stimulated the same areas of her brain that would have been affected/stimulated by a bondmate experiencing pon farr.
Its also important to note that T'pol has a fiance that she has presumably been bonded to since chidlhood though probably a weak one since she isnt very enthusiastic about him and starts forming a bond with Trip. Its never outright said that females experience pon farr just that this isnt supposed to be happening to her yet. Maybe she wasnt expecting to experience it til her fiance did and its possible that being bonded however weakly to a male is what allowed the virus to trigger her pon farr.

At any rate the point I'm trying to make is that pon farr, for males at least, has a definite telepathic component to it. They are driven not just to mate but to mate with the one they are telepathically bonded to. Presumably vulcan sex involves at small amount of instinctual mind melding. At least pon farr sex probably does.

Romulans dont have the telepathic abilities of Vulcans. Without the telepathic side of things and the lack of emotional repression Romulans probably dont experience pon farr but probably do get really horny every several years or so in a totally non life threatening way which they probably satisfy by a friend/coworker/stranger with benefits type scenario.

Thats my take on it anyhow. Sorry for such a long rambly post.

 

[Timo]

Spock and T'pring were bond mates since childhood but she didnt want him, she rejected him, imo its believable that this weakened the telepathic bond between them so she wasnt affected by Spocks pon farr especially if she had started to form a bond with that other guy.

Might work. Or then it all fell apart simply because Spock was half human and couldn't maintain the bond for that reason.

Yet nobody in the ceremony is the slightest bit surprised when T'Pring shows up calm and composed. This includes T'Pau, who is visibly surprised by the later developments and should know exactly what female pon farr looks like. So either T'Pring not being in pon farr was perfectly normal and expected in a pairing like this, or then T'Pol's very visible pon farr symptoms in ENT were atypical for some reason.

Vorik has no bond mate so he tries to find one and once he has formed a basic bond with B'elanna no one else will do.

...But apparently Torres, not being a Vulcan, only accepted part of the telepathic onslaught and basically became a Vulcan male in the process - a competitor to Vorik, rather than a mate.

Romulans dont have the telepathic abilities of Vulcans.

Don't they? We never hear them mentioned - but we never heard any Vulcan telepathic abilities mentioned, either, until circumstances conspired to place Spock in such a corner that he had no option but to reveal the existence of the mind meld or the nerve pinch or the blood fever or the katra or...

The point is, Vulcans don't volunteer such information. And while they might hold it back because Surakism makes them especially ashamed of it, Romulans certainly have their own reasons for never volunteering information.

Sorry for such a long rambly post.

Umm, with me sharing the thread, you never need worry about that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Vorik has no bond mate so he tries to find one and once he has formed a basic bond with B'elanna no one else will do.

Actually, Vorik did have a mate back home.

 

[borgboy]

It's worth pointing out that in the New Frontier novels, Selar has a gay brother who doesn't go thru Pon Farr, which is a point of contention between him and his father, who objects to the brother having a (male) partner since he doesn't go thru Pon Farr. (Vulcan fathers, yeesh!)
But in Vanguard there's a lesbian Vulcan who does go thru Pon Farr.
I don't know if that's definitive proof of anything, but it's interesting to me anyways. While Selar's brother could be unusual in not going thru Pon Farr, it does seem like it's because he's homosexual. Taking this information at face value, it seems like homosexual male Vulcans don't go thru Pon Farr, but homosexual female Vulcans do.
I never really liked the point of gay male Vulcans not going thru Pon Farr, and I also didn't like the issue with the father not approving of his son having a partner. It felt too much like illogical homophobia, although it's supposed to be because he had a relationship at all without Pon Farr. But if only gay males don't go thru Pon Farr, the father's reaction is effectively the same, although I suppose he probably isn't bothered by non Vulcan homosexuality. IIRC we never actually see the father on the page anyways, we only hear about him second hand from his children.

 

[T'Girl]

What I wonder is why the holodeck worked for Tuvok but not for Vorik.

Tuvok is a old married guy, Vorik (iirc) isn't married.

It's possible that the first pon farr is the most intense, subsequent pon farrs are less so.

 

[The Wormhole]

What I wonder is why the holodeck worked for Tuvok but not for Vorik.

Tuvok's ponn farr was three or four years after Vorik's. Plenty of time for the program to be perfected.

I HATE that Tuvok got around his Pon Farr with a holodeck program. Shouldn't there be a telepathic component? It ruins any future Pon Farr story if it can be resolves so easily.

Kind of makes you wonder why Vulcans serving in space just don't bring along a blow-up doll. For that matter, could masturbation relieve ponn farr?

 

[Timo]

Given how much trouble Spock and Vorik were in, or T'Pol for that matter, I think most of the straightforward solutions are ruled flat out.

"Amok Time" put a great emphasis on Spock's need to return to Vulcan, like salmon. We don't know if T'Pring instead traveling to the Enterprise would have worked as well. But the salmon analogy is readily accepted by Spock, despite the obvious characteristic of the salmon only ever doing it once. So it could be that location plays a crucial role; people, less so.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[TheSubCommander]

What I wonder is why the holodeck worked for Tuvok but not for Vorik.

Tuvok is a old married guy, Vorik (iirc) isn't married.

It's possible that the first pon farr is the most intense, subsequent pon farrs are less so.

Also I think Vorik had a crush on B'elanna to begin with, and this was not a typical Pon Farr. When Pon Far hit, all rationality went out the window. On top of that B'elanna ended up getting the Pon Farr, too, due to Vorik's telepathic link, and both had to end up beating the crap out of each other to purge the Pan Farr.

 

[Enterprise1701]

What I wonder is why the holodeck worked for Tuvok but not for Vorik.

Tuvok is a old married guy, Vorik (iirc) isn't married.

It's possible that the first pon farr is the most intense, subsequent pon farrs are less so.

Also I think Vorik had a crush on B'elanna to begin with, and this was not a typical Pon Farr. When Pon Far hit, all rationality went out the window. On top of that B'elanna ended up getting the Pon Farr, too, due to Vorik's telepathic link, and both had to end up beating the crap out of each other to purge the Pan Farr.

I honestly think that while it was a reasonable solution to have pon farr resolvable by intense physical combat, that fight was too short for something that resolves a blood "fever".

 

[Merlanthe]

Actually, Vorik did have a mate back home.

Depends how you view it. He did have a betrothed back home but they werent married yet, the pon farr he experienced on VOY was meant to be his first, and he said she had probably given him up for lost and moved on.

At any rate he didnt consider his betrothed as his mate or he would have been consumed by yearning for her instead of trying to court Torres. I dont consider him to have a mate but like i said it depends on how you interpet the situation.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ It would have been illogical for Vorik to 'yearn' for a mate he can't possibly reach.