Data was an artist on a level organics cannot achieve and I appreciate him.
it continues to astonish me how much Data is proof of neurotypical writers being unable to conceptualize an actual lack of emotion. As an autistic viewer, i always found him deeply, profoundly emotive, driven by passionate interests and deep bonds, with a strong sense of personal identity. But the text of the show constantly affirmed that none of that was true, that he didn’t feel anything—which, of course, made it all the more absurd that he wanted to feel, because someone who was truly lacking emotions shouldn’t feel the pangs of desire to feel them.
we constantly see Data exploring creative pursuits, immersing himself in different art forms and cultures, while his organic (and especially human) crewmates mostly entertain themselves at the holodeck and other such diversions. How many times was Data’s exploration of an art used in an attempt to convince the audience that he didn’t understand, that he couldn’t feel, when neurodivergent viewers could immediately see a sympathetic attempt to learn a new skill by someone who was inexperienced in it?
Data’s appreciation of a unique poetic form from an ancient nonhuman culture is presented for absurdity, while the series tells us it’s perfectly normal that a bunch of space explorers want to play at Robin Hood (what, were there no other great works of storytelling between the point of timeline divergence and the start of TNG? That’s centuries!)
As a fellow autistic Star Trek fan, Data has always held a special place in my heart. His drive to be more human, his constant desire to understand the human experience resonated with me as a child and young adult who also struggled to be human in the way others demanded of me, to feel and display emotion and to fit in with the society in which I was immersed without standing out like a sore thumb. Data’s earnest attempts at understanding and communicating and fitting in with others, and the frequency with which people got upset or frustrated with him for not being like them reflected my own experiences trying to emulate the behavior of those around me but never quite getting it right. It took me a long time of wrestling with the contradiction between Data’s obvious desires and feelings, and stated “lack of emotion” before I came to a satisfactory answer. Obviously, Data possesses emotions. What he does not seem to possess, however, is a good way of talking about his emotions, of naming and processing sensations and making sense of them. There’s so much within him that he doesn’t understand and can’t articulate; he can’t cross-reference and compare one feeling to another, give it a name and refer back to it. In other words, Data is deeply alexithymic. He doesn’t know how to connect his behaviours to what he feels inside, how to make the connection and understand the relationship between one and the other. As someone who, in the midst of a deeply distressing and unsafe childhood, could only muster up “calm” or “okay” or “i don’t know” in response to any inquiry about my emotional state, who understood emself in terms only of “angry” and “not angry”, my favorite android’s quest to comprehend his own mind and heart (his oh-so-very-big and beautiful heart, my sweetest of mechanical darlings) and make sense of himself was desperately necessary. And seeing that he had friends, companions, loved ones and meaningful relationships with people who desired his company and included him in their community without condition, was also necessary. I love Data.
