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Agent Rouka's Blog
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My asoiaf canon speculation playground. House Stark. Sansa. Jonsa. Stark Sisters. Arianne. Elia. Young Griff. Theon. Targaryen critical. Game of Thrones critical.
i also just feel like grace's entire character arc of learning to be brave/finding someone to be brave for does not mean much and is not very interesting if you're not prepared to acknowledge that he was. in fact. kind of a coward beforehand.
Have discovered this is a real mural where they were filming so not deliberately related to any foreshadowing, however if you wanna tell me they didn't USE it as foreshadowing then BLEH!
my bf just graduated law school, and his gift is art!!!!!! :D
this is a scene from chapter 3 of living just to die, @cedardivine's eva-goes-on-the-hail-mary fic! it's funny and emotional and very, very worth your time if you like strattland. ♡
i absolutely LOVE grace's character arc in phm of learning how to be really truly selfless BUT the thing i don't get is people acting like that end state of selflessness is somehow this natural effortless default for him and not the cumulative result of very hard work and deliberate choices. grace's default state and the way he acts for most of that movie's runtime is this bizarre mix of entitlement and insecurity. he's like the classic undersocialized white male academic who both prides himself on self-sufficiency yet laments his isolation. he thinks he should be able to get whatever he wants. his personal comfort is worth more than everyone else's.
he's obviously the Fun Teacher but he still is slightly patronizing to those kids. they aren't stupid, they're paying attention to the news, they know what's going on with the sun and what the implications are. but he's talking down to them like they haven't figured out what the true stakes are when they clearly already have. it's sweet and noble to want to keep them calm, and sometimes keeping kids calm requires lying by omission, but the kids still had to trap him in the rules of his own hackey-sack game to get him to actually answer their damn questions instead of waving them off like he wanted to.
on some level he resents where he's at in his career and is ashamed of it, but at the same time, he insists he didn't do anything wrong to get there. he is shocked when somebody else is able to find out what he did and call him on acting like an innocent victim of censorship when he was actually excommunicated for his temper tantrums.
he enjoys all the freedom and authority of being the hotshot microbiologist on the project and fully believes he has worthwhile skills to contribute, but he wants none of the responsibility when it's time to put his money where his microscope is. he insists he knows what he's doing yet acts surprised and inconvenienced when people order him to do it. he is also upset that being privy to top secret intergovernmental information requires a limited range of movement and minimal exposure to the outside world.
he woke up on somebody else's spaceship with no memory of what it was out there for, what its budget was, or who was responsible for its deployment (any sane person would assume the answers to those questions are "something very important", "billions of dollars", and "government(s) that will likely not appreciate sabotage") and was immediately like "well let's scrub everything this ship was intended for so i can go home and be comfortable asap."
he was genuinely pissed off at the only other sapient lifeform around for lightyears, who had previously admitted to living in total isolation for decades and is clearly deeply traumatized by the all death and loneliness, for moving onto his ship so they can save their home planets more efficiently and socially.
the only belongings he will have access to for the forseeable future, his use of which the existences of entire stars are depending upon, are whatever's already on that ship, and he punched one of the damn laptops and broke it.
and again, like, HE GOT BETTER, he absolutely Learned His Lesson, but being a brave and protective guardian angel is still not his default state and it's something he had to first be completely broken down and humbled for. this guy went through a dickensian odyssey to learn the importance of generosity and charity.
like seriously we have got to stop always making the blonde one a sweetiepie, everyone's always hitting the blue eyed blondes with the princess peach beam and it drives me a little nuts. ryland grace would put a hole in drywall during an argument
Some thoughts on Eva Stratt and post- launch trials and imprisonment
Lawblr, please indulge me in some thinking about the question of Stratt being jailed. I get that "Stratt goes to jail" is an interesting (and to some people necessary) concept for fandom to explore, but I personally don't see it-- partly because I don't see Stratt accepting her work is done yet, but partly for questions of jurisdiction and international law.
Factually, Stratt knows she is the most effective administrator they could have-- and will need-- to keep things going until they know if the projects succeed. She has the three thousand year, literally exospheric perspective needed to manage it all.
With Grace gone, someone else has to wrangle the scientists toward the ongoing work, and Stratt's historical view includes the understanding that sometimes a leader (or tyrant) is the main way things get done. In the book, Stratt says she expects to go to jail, but I think she's as likely to just be saying it as she is to actually believe it. I don't see her giving up after the PHM launch. Nuking Antarctica and paving the Sahara didn't break her. Asking someone to commit suicide in space is "actually ... isn't" hard, as she says on the ship in the movie. Grace's betrayal and cowardice wouldn't have broken her.
The movie directors say that her neck tattoo means life in prison, implying either a breakout, a supervised release, or a commutation of sentence at the time of the Beatles' return (and give me a hundred of those yesterday, please)-- but that doesn't make sense procedurally.
How does any US court, any major nation's court system, or thr ICJ even have jurisdiction?
In the book, she has a preemptive pardon from the American President for any crimes committed in the US. She also has permissiom to act under an international treaty ratified by the US-- and presumably by at least China and Russia and France, given their cooperation in the Task Force, which means three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council approve of her actions.
We see southeast Asian and African members in the start of the movie, watching Grace to see what happens as he takes the first look at Astrophage. We know New Zealand is involved in the Astrophage farms. India, the EU, and Japan are in on it, too. It's safe to assume they are all treaty signatories, and many of those countries are rotating members of the Security Council too.
ICJ jurisdiction depends on a resultion to refer a case from the U.N., and usually on consent by all parties to jurisdiction. It issues advisory opinions. It has no enforcement power at all. And-- even if the UN was to refer the case to the ICJ-- and even if any signatory to the treaty tried to indict her under their own laws, there's still the question of the treaty (and in the US, the larson) superseding jurisdiction.
Any one country or any international alliance at the U.N. would have to repeal their signatures to the treaty-- a massive endeavor of parliamentary procedure, and a nightmare scenario for enforcing every other treaty also in effect. If it can be undone so easily, where's the incentive for peaceful accords? Or the U.S. president would have to rescind a pardon, something there is no constitutional authority to do.
Why would Eva Stratt consent to jurisdiction? And even if she did, why wouldn't she defend herself (with excellent lawyers paid for by allies) by more or less calling every world leader and space administrator and technocrat to the stand to confirm that they'd meant at the time to let her do whatever was needed, with no restrictions? Going back on that committment with a blubbering "that's a bridge too far, we didn't mean that," lets Stratt attack every failure to commit to the world's survival on the public stage. The press coverage and the diplomatic tensions between countries would be insane.
Look: I know it's fiction and fandom can do whatever they want, but it irks me that in a book that spends so much time on making the science plausible, the same rules don't apply to the mechanisms of "justice." Partly it's Weir's gloss on "politics," and his disinterest in examining the social and administrative structures that make his imagined "Woo! International Scientists Assemble!" available in the first place, but the humanism of the book also presupposes that there is more international cooperation by some countries, at least.
But if we're applying "real world" cynical politics, someone gave her the nukes. There is no evidence that the home countries of her commandeered staff demanded their return. Hell, there isn't even evidence that any scientist, once briefed, really disagreed they had the expertise needed to lead the work. The Petrova Task Force hired people, too. People wanted to work there. They believed kn what Stratt was doing.
Stratt delivered massive economic investment and infrastructure to the African coalition. China and Russia/Kazakhstan lent her materiel, men, and physical bases for her work-- like hell were they going to let the U.S. or the E.U. boss them around on the economic and political stage anymore.
So no, I don't see Eva Stratt consenting to any court's jurisdiction to jail her, and the minute some country tried to extrajudicially disappear her, I think multiple countries would work to get her back by many, if not any means.
The diplomatic furore and the threats of sanctions and war (and maybe even action) would arise because the world was terrified, and this administrator had delivered impossible things. She was terrifying. She was capable. I think she weighted her competence and the end over her means, and kept going.
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