The teaching angle is to emphasize the Vulkan angle since you were making arguments for the Romulan angle already. Even the “emotionless” Vulkan don’t constantly reach out for the obvious logical solution because there are sociological reasons they expect no purchase. Reasons that purposefully reflect faults of humanity, and thusly are inherently illogical to some degree given the “Vulcan” prescription of excellent logic.
If you want to be charitable to the writers, it’s a great way to point out how bigotry trancends logic. They might actually make headway with outreach, but they do not, because Vulkans are the know-it-all types. I sort-of stated the expected dynamic backwards, but it still works because I’m sure Romulans would still dismiss the intelligence of Vulkans for nearly the exact same reason: they think they already have it figured out.
Yes, it’s illogical, but that’s part of the point: Logic is not wisdom. Someone can be plenty intelligent and yet still be a fool.
It’s worth not over-analyzing, though, since it is a situation set up for allegory of human folly in a TV show, not one written in to a planned book series where it might have to stand up to stronger cohesive scrutiny. All you have to do is not explain things well, and suddenly the script isn’t cohesive with canon. They are written to be laughably similar species to reinforce how dumb bigotry is, so something basically HAS to make little logical sense, because bigotry is illogical.
The teaching angle is to emphasize the Vulkan angle since you were making arguments for the Romulan angle already. Even the “emotionless” Vulkan don’t constantly reach out for the obvious logical solution because there are sociological reasons they expect no purchase. Reasons that purposefully reflect faults of humanity, and thusly are inherently illogical to some degree given the “Vulcan” prescription of excellent logic.
If you want to be charitable to the writers, it’s a great way to point out how bigotry trancends logic. They might actually make headway with outreach, but they do not, because Vulkans are the know-it-all types. I sort-of stated the expected dynamic backwards, but it still works because I’m sure Romulans would still dismiss the intelligence of Vulkans for nearly the exact same reason: they think they already have it figured out.
Yes, it’s illogical, but that’s part of the point: Logic is not wisdom. Someone can be plenty intelligent and yet still be a fool.
It’s worth not over-analyzing, though, since it is a situation set up for allegory of human folly in a TV show, not one written in to a planned book series where it might have to stand up to stronger cohesive scrutiny. All you have to do is not explain things well, and suddenly the script isn’t cohesive with canon. They are written to be laughably similar species to reinforce how dumb bigotry is, so something basically HAS to make little logical sense, because bigotry is illogical.