ava enjoyers sound off
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
will byers stan first human second
DEAR READER
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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@araviir
ava enjoyers sound off
Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus)
April 3, 2026
John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, Tinicum, Pennsylvania
love red-winged blackbirds and their built in epaulets ❤️💛🖤
it's 1pm at the marsh! come on down, we've got
𝓃𝑜𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒷𝓊𝓉 𝒷𝓁𝒶𝒸𝓀𝒷𝒾𝓇𝒹𝓈!!!
if a person refers to themself as a “silly little guy” they are usually filled with a deep evil
it is okay sometimes, to just look at a thing and love it without leaving your mark on it.
i told you i was saddened - too many people feed wild animals, mistakenly believing “once won’t hurt”. too many people think that wild animals are just bigger/smaller versions of domestic animals - they see a fox running around a house on youtube and think that’s a catdog and i could keep it. i told you that the worst part of working with wildlife was having to take care of the aftershock of this. in my state, any nondomestic animal that bites a human must be put down to check for rabies, even if we are positive the animal is safe. the government just slashed the budget again, no more EPA. around this time every year, we spend hours on the phone trying to rehome creatures that can’t survive in the wild anymore - someone thought a feral animal could be “taught” to be a pet.
a woman cries to me. the fox in the basket is growling. “i thought it was like a dog,” she says. “I didn’t know it would be this much trouble.”
i told you - why can’t people understand that care can look different on different bodies. that sometimes love for one thing is not love for another. that it can be selfish to want to hold something that was not meant to be held. the lovely thing is that we have plenty to hold, and each other, and a whole world; but there are things with hearts that should stay in the woods. it’s not yours to touch, is all.
you told me: let people have their fun. it’s one raccoon. it’s one bird full of bread. it’s not that big of a deal.
much later, long after you had been washed out of my hair and my life and my hurting - i realized you would leave little bruises on me, but hated whenever my lipstick smudged across your cheek. you used to say - i just don’t like the feeling. you would bite my lip until it bled and look down at me and say - marking my territory.
my sister watches me fold my laundry. she says it’s nice to see me slowly coming back to happy. i thought i had been tamed by you; she saw i had actually just been broken in half. she smiles when she hears me laugh. you are regrowing your wild heart. and honestly… thank god for that.
a couple of people in the tags of that post i made earlier are talking about masking and although obviously masking is a very real thing a lot of autistic people have to do to get through their day, i think framing any and all attempts to meet other people where they're at interpersonally as masking is pretty unhelpful and has some bad implications.
if we say that caring about other peoples preferences for how they want to be treated or spoken to or thinking of social interaction as more than just a potential opportunity to info dump count as "masking", then we're essentially presenting a version of reality where autistic people are innately self centered and any effort that is put in to not be that way is Hiding part of yourself or otherwise inauthentic. but i don't think that's true at all.
and importantly it's not like The Neurotypicals get to act exactly like they want with no consequences in social interactions either! everyone has to put the effort in to treat each other decently. there is no person on the planet who can just speak to everyone around them exactly as they're inclined to with no consideration or effort and end up with a bunch of healthy mutually fulfilling interpersonal relationships that way. everyone needs to put the work in. its just harder for some than others.
Bargeist
ink and watercolor on cold press, 4x6 inches
original art for sale: https://ko-fi.com/s/454312c411
prints: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/mxmorgan/bargeist/
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limited edition prints of version 2 and 3 are located here: https://www.inprnt.com/editions/mxmorgan/
laughing at a joke about the "refusal of the call" but shaking my head the entire time so the audience knows i don't approve of the monomyth as an effective structure for literary analysis
Cut this out of the larger BTS image because it goes so fucking hard
Hm. Your interpretation of this character displeases me. Guards! Take them away! Make them read the source material once more, and if that fails, the stocks.
Rose-bellied Bunting (Passerina rositae), family Cardinalidae, order Passeriformes, endemic to a small area of southern Mexico
photograph via: Birdquest
Shippers get a lot of lashings for being annoying and “forcing romance” but not enough is being said about people who force the nuclear family structure on everything. Nothing against found families, but the amount of people who seem to cram every dynamic into a cookie cutter nuclear family mold is driving me insane. It’s another lowkey reductive way of engaging with characters that pretends to less reductive than the shippers they constantly complain about. Not every relationship can be categorized as “sibling coded” or “father-daughter” because most relationships are more complicated than that. Don’t even get me started on the way these people use “coding” *cough* their headcanons *cough* to shut down ships they dislike.
I’m not going to tag any of the original PHM posts I’ve seen across various platforms with this take bc (1) they seem to be mainly informed by a movie-only perspective, and (2) I don’t respect Andy Weir enough as an author to insist that reading his work is vital to understanding this story. But I’ve seen various posts going around to the effect that “Ryland Grace loved his life and loved Earth so much, and this is why being forced onto the mission was such a Great Tragedy (TM)” when that’s…not really???? True???? At ALL??? Of Ryland Grace????
The ENTIRE POINT of Grace’s arc is that he is a Coward, with a capital C. He is a coward not only in his refusal of the Hail Mary mission, but in the way he lives his life before the Petrova Line was ever discovered. Grace has no close friends or coworkers, no pets or hobbies, no partners (short or long term), no family that we know of. His two main drives in life are (1) being a Cool Teacher to his students, and (2) nursing a grudge over getting kicked out of academia for proposing wild theories about life forms not based on water. As Stratt ACCURATELY points out, both of these things have large self-serving components. Grace genuinely loves his students and is good at teaching, but it’s at least partially because his classroom allows him to demand respect and attention without returning emotional vulnerability in the same way a peer relationship would. His academic theories were also largely motivated by a desire to be The Specialest Boy - and while Grace DOES prove himself very smart and capable, his pet theory wasn’t supported by his work with astrophage. Grace doesn’t jump at the chance to work with Stratt when she first approaches him, and he isn’t out there Living LIfe to the Fullest every day. He ADMITS to himself and to Stratt that he IS a coward, both for the way he’s lived up to PHM and for refusing to go on the mission when the timeline made it clear that there wasn’t enough time to bring another candidate up to speed and have the same odds of success. He straight up tells Stratt that he’ll sabotage Project Hail Mary if she tries to force him, DESPITE HIM KNOWING that Earth is headed for a literal apocalyptic Ice Age, and that everyone on the planet - including his beloved students!- has a pretty good chance of DYING if the mission doesn’t succeed! Stratt has to give him a coma cocktail that induces mild amnesia, and bet on him being at least good Enough (TM) not to kill the whole planet because he hated her for doing this to him.
(Also no hate for Eva Stratt, I love her and I will SUPPORT THIS WOMAN’S WRONGS until my dying day, she committed so many crimes and I cheered the whole way)
Despite Ryan Gosling’s very pretty Sad Boi eyes and sweaters, Ryland Grace is NOT a manic pixie dream scientist in love with Earth and its life and cultures. He just ISN’T. And if he WERE, then. Well. He certainly didn’t love Earth enough to fully embrace it while he was here, OR to volunteer to save it when he had the chance. This IS one of those situations where the distinction between “I love life” and “I don’t want to die” is a meaningful one. Does this make Grace a Cancelled Villain of All Time? No - it makes him a coward, but that doesn’t mean he inherently deserved to die. Does it ethically or morally justify forcing him onto a suicide mission while he fought and pleaded not to go? No! It makes Grace ORDINARY. Just some average fucking guy, not evil but not valiant, either. It’s like trying to claim Laika was the top search and rescue dog in the city when she got put into the pod. You don’t NEED to give Ryland Grace all these Tender Tragic Qualities of “loving Earth/Life” to have empathy for this poor dude who got launched into space.
In fact, Grace’s arc DEPENDS on him STARTING from that place of “I don’t really have a reason to be here” to “I have EVERY reason to turn my back on survival and do this act!” Grace wakes up on the Hail Mary, and has no context for why he’s on the ship but assumes that he was a Heroic Volunteer, like Yao and Ilyukhina. He sees their personal effects and Reasons Why They Volunteered, and keeps searching for his own Reason Why until he remembers that he didn’t HAVE a “reason why.” He was never a heroic volunteer. He comes to terms with the fact that he’s going to die, and IS. IN FACT. AS STRATT PREDICTED. A GOOD ENOUGH man to want to save the earth anyway rather than die alone without even trying to figure out the Petrova Problem out of spite. And he can do some pretty neat science along the way, which has always been one of his life motivations! At least he can do that before he dies, in the absence of anything else!
But the thing that Grace ACTUALLY loves enough to die for is ROCKY. The one in a million friend! Who saved his life and opened up his entire view of the universe! Grace’s core trait was NEVER “loving the Earth,” or “loving life.” The WHOLE FUCKING EARTH wasn’t enough to get Grace willingly onboard the Hail Mary! What made him turn the ship around was his GOTDAM SINGING ROCK FRIEND. The whole point is the change! Humanity’s capacity for massive apathetic cowardice and also astonishing bravery and hopefulness in connection. Andy Weir has his head in his ass about politics in his work, but you see?!?! You see, right!?!?!?!
And hey. If you really want protagonists who loved the Earth and life? Yao. Ilyukhina. Dubois. The original crew of Project Hail Mary. THEY loved the Earth. THEIR sacrifice was tragic in the specific narrow way that the “Grace loved life” posts want Grace’s to be. Dubois, who started a relationship with Annie even though he knew one or both of them was sure to die because why waste any time? Why not enjoy what they had in this moment? Ilyukhina, who had the absolute darkest sense of humor and packed a giant bag of vodka, who asked to go out via the most pleasurable cocktail of drugs imaginable bc why not enjoy herself after living such a straight edged life? Yao, who volunteered to go last after both Dubois and Ilyukhina were gone, just so he could make sure they didn’t suffer, who carried a picture of his family and never lost courage. THEY were the ones full of love for Earth and life, while the whole point of Grace is that he never really was, and he found it in space when he’d already left Earth behind.
the thing that bewilders me about a lot of fantasy readers is that they read about settings and plots featuring imperialism, war, and slavery and then call the inclusion of violence, abuse, and sexual exploitation "edgy" and "gratuitous" and it's like what did you think was happening. why were you under the impression that you were going to get a cozy story about fascism or something. far be it from me to criticize anyone for not wanting to read about torture in their spare time, and there are certainly cases where heavy subjects are poorly executed, but is it not equally insulting to sanitize them for a feel-good adventure.. like no one put a gun to your head and forced you to give your fantasy novel an enslaved protagonist. sometimes writing is supposed to make you feel bad
Happy pride month, statement!! 🏳️🌈
Shrimp Thimble before Mermay is over