Minor | AroAce | They/Them pls | I like frogs, taking photos, art, reading, DC, FMA, KOTLC, HASO, and other stuff I guess | I use #religion and #tumblrstake for religion stuff
As funny as it is that rocky sees grace and complains about grace and humans in general as a terribly inefficient blob of water and fluids and teases constantly...
I REALLY think this should be a relatively rocky-exclusive perspective. He's watched this incredibly stressed human drip all kinds of tears and goos while they were floating around in space, and grace let down basically all of his guard around rocky personally, have discussed and understood eachother over life threatening missions. To Rocky, grace is Grace!
But grace does have some naturally combative push to him (see, the commentary that got him stonewalled in the scientific community in the first place, and being able to keep up with and handle Eva stratt) and further more, when an eridian is Not Rocky, i.e. not incredibly socially withdrawn and traumatized and maybe on their own spectrum of divergence before his ill fated mission and was very susceptible to latching onto a strange and unusual creature in just as much crisis as him...
That is to say. The eridians are going to meet grace with wildly different priorities and expectations. And what they're going to get is a human dangerously close to deaths door, and cornered and dying humans aren't always the most friendly or cooperative and friendly, even the Nicest Humans You Can Get.
So they get a dying human. And as tumblr loves to say, humans are terrifying to aliens, and fuck do they persist. Rocky's so-described "pathetic space blob" grace is terrifying to most eridians, especially the scientists studying him.
He drinks solvent and breaths combustion. Instead of simply dying when his body runs out of nutrients and calorie stores, it has begun to Digest Itself. His body is pumping chemicals they do not understand and every chemistry panel they run shows new levels of new chemicals and hormones. The human body replaces most of its cells constantly because even breathing, especially at a higher atmospheric pressure, is destroying their own lungs.
This thing "hears" things they cannot comprehend and he is unable to describe beyond "color" and "brightness" which are things you can not contextualize, and calls the strangest things beautiful. It has no entirely discernable traits you can understand ecologically as a predator- no armor, no weapons- and yet it eats meat and that is one of the many nutrients it needs to survive. You as a resident of erid do not have many creatures with "eyes" and so have no idea that the strongest mark of a predator is neither claw nor fang, but forward facing eyes, all the better to catch your prey, to meet a foe head on and fearless. You just know it "sees" and that it eats meat, and many other complicated things.
And in place of not receiving all those nutrients, it's body will litterally digest itself and keep going without them. Oh, this new chemical in it's latest blood panel allows it to ignore it's own pain to the point it won't realize it's injured. It can wake up from a dead sleep if you are too loud or too "brightness" around it. It speaks in an archaic graveling noise and is capable of imitating the strangest things, including a haunting near-vocalization of the eridani language of its own, which it calls "singing" and it does this at the strangest of times, when happy and when nervous. It is neither fast nor slow, but over time and observation, you realize this strange towering bipedal creature expends an entirely minimal amount of energy to walk, a process of controlled falling turned mobilization. You hypothesize that for lack of predatory weaponry like claws or sharp teeth, this thing simply evolved to follow you. To "see" you with it's forward facing eyes even in total stillness, total silence, and follow for as long as it takes: it won't spend much energy, and it won't starve waiting for you to exhaust. It'll start digesting *itself* while waiting for it's prey to lay down and have to sleep. It will "watch" you sleep with "eyes." You cannot wake up the way it can, and it will eventually catch up to you.
Also sometimes it cries excess amounts of saline rich solvent when you compliment it's latest research paper. Rocky calls him an idiot and the overseeing eridian scientists watch on with a sense of morbid eldrich horror. Right, right, just a "leaky space blob", sure.
They're kind of terrified of the future delegations with this planet. They litterally get to space by explosion. Not only are they scary- they're INSANE. And they're told the one they have is "a push over".
I maintain that the best summation of my feminist beliefs are that men and women are not fundamentally different. There are a few quantifiable differences if you average out every woman and every man, but they are not qualitative. And most of them are socially constructed, and would be fixed if we started treating men and women the same. Neither is inherently smarter, neither is inherently kinder, neither is inherently more stoic or stronger or angrier or softer. Everyone is obsessed with the differences between women and men, with finding them and creating them and distancing themselves from the "other half". It's fucked up
While often different in practice, cissexism, transphobia, and homophobia are all rooted in oppositional sexism, which is the belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and nonoverlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires. Oppositional sexists attempt to punish or dismiss those of us who fall outside of gender or sexual norms because our existence threatens the idea that women and men are “opposite” sexes.
Thanks to ultrasounds, the genders can be assigned before birth. The people are so excited to conform they throw “Gender reveal parties” to make sure their offspring exist in a strict binary since before they can even form thoughts.
HEY SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE GIRLIES, ITS OUR TURN TO ENDURE THE DARK DAYS NOW, BUT STAY STRONG. THE WORLD IS NOT ENDING; THE SUN IS JUST SETTING AT 5-to-6 PM. BUT SHE WILL COME BACK TO US SOON. TAKE A VITAMIN D AND HANG IN THERE.
every other week, my mom would make a giant pot of vegetable soup. she'd pack half of it in a tupperware and take it to her best friend's house. they both had three kids whose ages aligned. they'd lock us out of the house and go through each room, finding every piece of dirty laundry and then spend the afternoon keeping the washer and dryer running, folding and putting away each load while gossiping.
every alternate week, her best friend would come to our house with a tupperware full of chicken spaghetti. they'd stick us in front of a tv with a stack of disney vhs tapes and go through each room, finding every dirty dish, and then spend the afternoon at the kitchen sink, washing each dish by hand while gossiping.
it wasn't always soup and spaghetti and laundry and dishes. but it was almost always a meal and a chore. here is a night you don't have to cook dinner. here is a chore you can cross off your list. and here is a day you don't have to spend alone. because really food and friendship and a feeling of accomplishment are what we all need most.
I posted a simplified version of this in a tiktok comment section earlier, but honestly it deserves a longer post because honestly Rocky and Grace are both shockingly young to be on death missions.
Rocky says that he is 291 years old. He also says that the average Eridian lifespan is 689. He's roughly 42.24% through his life. If we say that this is equal to the average human lifespan (I'm saying 80y bc I'm lazy) and that he's 42.24% of the way through 80 years; Rocky developmentally is basically some 33 year old who has just spent about 6.97% (5.5 human years) of his life alone in space.
Meanwhile, Grace is somewhere in his early 40's when he wakes and meets Rocky. Assuming he's like 42, that's 6.1%ish of the Eridian lifespan making him appear in Rocky's eyes as some 5 year old that just pulled up driving his own spaceship.
This is an insane comparison but I cannot stress enough that Rocky is a 33 year old highly trained astronaut tasked with teaming up with some hyper intelligent alien that's only been alive for 5 years because the alien's kind decided to throw that 5 year old on a one way space trip just to see what happens.
Obviously this is a gross simplification of their ages and how aging works for Eridians, for all we know Eridian maturity can happen at a rate similar to cats, where there's a rapid maturation with a certain period of time rather than a consistent maturation over a lifetime.
But even with that in mind, Rocky and Grace both seem to be at a similar level of maturity where they're old enough to understand the seriousness of their situation, but young enough to still show the side of themselves that's naturally inclined to be some goofy nerd that's just overly excited to discover (friendly and intelligent) alien life.
That being said, though, if anyone’s curious about Adrian, using this kind of math to see how long Rocky's been with his mate we get 27% of his life or 21 years which would mean if they were human that they would have met when they were 12 (Even if we say humans live an average lifespan of 100 and compare that number to 689, that would still make Rocky only 15 when he meets his mate—they're childhood sweethearts!!!)
Amazing that we call him the cookie clicker guy and not the "this website's hate mail game is insane" guy because one of those things had a much bigger impact on Tumblr culture than the other
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