Since we'll hopefully be getting out of the VnC hiatus soon, and this new arc seems to finally be turning the spotlight back to Noé and calling out some of his more troubling traits for the first time, I've been thinking a lot about him recently.
I've talked before on this blog about Noé's inability to recognize or process bad things when they happen to him alone. He bounces back from and idealizes almost any experience as soon as it's over, even when he absolutely shouldn't. It's one of my favorite traits of his, and it's been lampshaded a couple of times in-manga. Louis calls out how weird his attitude toward his kidnapping is during the mémoire 9 flashback, and the "be a little bothered" from Vanitas and co in mémoire 57 has the same effect.
We also recently got a whole extended sequence of Vanitas and Domi complaining about how Noé also never anticipates harm before it might come to him. He waltzes into dangerous situations like it's nothing, almost as if he thinks he's unkillable. Combined with the above, this is just more of his strange brand of optimistic denial. Everything is fine in Noéland! It can't possibly not be fine! He always trusts and thinks the best of people and situations by default, never wanting to expect they may do wrong, and so long as a given event doesn't involve harm to external innocents and/or Noé's loved ones that he can't rationalize away, he compartmentalizes and denies harm once it's done. Thus he carries on in blissful ignorance, his past suffering having no effect on the blithe trust with which he treats the world.
But in addition to all that, Noé is also very notably divorced from the consequences of his own actions. It's not that he's *incapable* of considering his own effect on people, and he certainly tries to be kind and decent, but much of the time, it just doesn't seem to occur to him that people will have reactions to the things he does. He does as he sees fit, and when his deeds impact the people around him, especially if they produce a reaction that could upset him, it bounces off his mind in the same way that potential traumas do.
On the more lighthearted end of the spectrum, this leads to things like Noé never noticing when people are attracted to him. It may also have something to do with his airheaded messiness—the way he's always thoughtlessly making a mess of the hotel room and incurring Vanitas's wrath in bonus materials. On the heavier end of the spectrum, this causes a lot of genuine problems for the people around him. He's largely oblivious to the depth of Dominique's mental health problems until she's pushed to her breaking point at the amusement park, despite the fact that he's inextricably entangled in the cause of them. He also completely loses sight of Vanitas's reactions to him when he gets caught up in his protective rage at the start of the vanoé fight, and it takes an outside reminder from Jeanne and a literal mirror to make him realize that his own actions are part of why Vanitas has devolved to such a state.
This lack of self-perception on Noé's part feeds back into the other problems I laid out at the top of this post, his obliviousness toward his interactions with the rest of the world helping to facilitate his denial. It's part of the happy little insulating bubble that he interacts with the world through. And as the other side of that coin, his automatic, unthinking denial of things that could hurt him is part of what enables him to ignore his own impacts on the people around him. You can't reckon with or worry about harming other people when you live in Noéland where everything must be fine. I think the fact that he wants to be a good person that doesn't harm others actually makes it harder for him to confront the truth of how he impacts the world, because him hurting others is a Bad Thing that would cause him mental harm.
We've seen Noé mess up, understand his mistake, and apologize for it before. He apologizes to Vanitas for making assumptions about him after the bal masqué, he apologizes to Vanitas again at the end of the amusement park fight, and he apologizes to Riche for speaking with ignorance about dhampirs. However, I think the bigger a mistake of his is, the more harm it causes other people (and the more understanding would hurt him as a result), the harder it is for Noé to comprehend his wrongs. He's clearly trying to make things right with Domi, and he's told her that he values her, but I don't know if it's yet occurred to him to conceive of their mess as a situation where he's done her active wrong. He also literally passes out on her mid-conversation, leaving Domi and Vanitas to carry him back to bed when he was supposed to be comforting her.
But I think the most fascinating example, the moment where all this comes together into Noé's most feeble and blatant act of denial yet, is the first time he sees Misha after clawing up his face. The anime actually changes this detail, which is its own can of worms to get into, but in the manga, when Noé sees Misha's injuries in the light of day after attacking him, he immediately fucking turns around.
At the end of his wits at the amusement park, Noé claws a child across the face in a fit of anger and protectiveness. I'm not interested in condemning Noé for this, especially given that the child in question was actively trying to stab Vanitas at the time, but I will say that his actions are quite extreme. Given Vanitas's response and the way Misha's injuries are portrayed, I think it's clear that the manga wants us to see how Noé hurts Mikhail as something troubling and extreme. He gives that kid a pretty horrible injury, and Misha will likely have scars on his face for the rest of his life.
And regardless of how justified he may or may not have been in hurting Misha in defense of Vanitas, it's clear that Noé himself is upset by the true extent of what he does to Mikhail's face. When he looks at him in the light of day, when he sees a numb-looking child with his face wrapped in still-bloody bandages, though we only get to see a small segment of his face in that moment, he looks sick. He knows that he's done something troubling, and I'm sure he feels all kinds of heavy and unpleasant emotions.
This is one genuinely bad thing he's done that Noé cannot deny. He can't rationalize this one away and make it all copacetic. He can't conveniently forget the emotional reality of suffering and harm, because that reality is standing ten yards away from him. And he can't just apologize for things either, because apologies cannot undo physical harm, and frankly, I'm not sure he'd be able to give an honest apology for his one. Sickness at the results of his actions doesn't mean he fully regrets hurting Misha, at least not at this moment when emotions are still raw.
But Noé, confronted with this undeniable source of guilt and pain, is still ultimately unable to look the pain he's caused in the eye. A problem piercing through the happy veil of Noéland and forcing him to acknowledge it doesn't mean he's capable of reckoning with that problem. Instead he just. turns away from it.
Noé, forced to acknowledge a harm he's done and unable to employ all the many layers of automatic insulation that usually protect him, physically turns around because he cannot bear to look at the person, the child, that he's hurt. He employs the very last possible form of avoidance available to him, even though it's useless in the ways that matter. Not looking at Misha doesn't mean he gets to un-know the fact that he maimed him, but he simply cannot bring himself to look.
Noé is extremely good at playing "I do not see it" with things that hurt him. He's good enough that I think he has genuinely no idea he's doing it a vast majority of the time. Whatever mental shield he has that's protecting him is automatic enough that the badness that could hurt him doesn't ever even seem to cross his conscious mind. But no matter how automatic and subconscious, this tendency of his is still, and the end of the day, nothing more than an unhealthy coping mechanism, and this moment helps to put that to our attention.
What's the difference, really, between him cheerfully acting like Jean-Jacques and Chloé's assaults never upset him and him turning around so he doesn't have to look at the wounds he gave Mikhail? Noé can't look at pain, can't acknowledge the things he finds upsetting (at least not things that cause him alone pain, as others' pain often triggers his savior complex and spurs action). This scene with Misha throws that into the light, forcing Noé to desperately cling to his avoidance in an obvious and physical way.
Even when there's no way to deny the harsh reality of having done something he finds horrific, Noé Archiviste cannot make himself look directly at a painful truth, be it others wronging him or his own wrongdoing. It takes an external hand to step in and force him to turn his head and acknowledge/reckon with a problem. And even then, who knows if intervention can always be successful.
The start of the dham arc so far has drawn a lot of attention to this pattern of behavior, with Vanitas having to sit Noé down and explain to him in detail why his words said in well-meaning ignorance make Dante so upset. This is Noé being forced to look at a harm he caused because he couldn't or wouldn't look at and comprehend the problem (his fellow vampires' racism) in the situation he was in. But upsetting Dante is ultimately a low stakes problem for Noé. He put his foot in his mouth and offended a peer; he didn't shred Vanitas's little brother. He's able to accept his wrongs and feel his discomfort without resorting to physically turning around and avoiding the issue.
I want to know what Noé will do if/when this arc forces him to confront a source of pain he can't handle in a context that's more high stakes than a social faux pas. I want to see what he'll do when something really forces him beyond his ability to believe that everything is fine. How badly would he have to be hurt to lose his ability to filter an event/events through rose colored glasses? How badly would he have to hurt someone else? Or is his instinctive shield good enough that he'll never get out of it on his own? And if so, who else might step in to make Noé own up to reality?
Teacher and the Archivistes are becoming plot-relevant now, and our attention is being drawn to Noé's issues. I think there might be something coming soon that even Noé can't turn away from and cheerfully pretend isn't hurting him. Teacher even ends his appearance at the amusement park with a little speech about having to "wake and face reality," which makes me even more certain that a wake-up call for Noé is imminent.
Either that, or Noé's going to mess up and hurt somebody even worse than he hurt Misha later this arc, and in that case, we might get to see a feat of denial even worse than him literally turning around to avoid looking at the wounds he caused.
I'm fascinated by the Noé stuff in this chapter. I feel like Mochijun has been working toward calling more attention to his particular comprehension problems as we move into the new arc (like the "be a little bothered" reaction back in 57), and I can kind of see a way this slots into that.
One of Noé's biggest issues is that he seems to be utterly incapable of processing most trauma as trauma. His optimism goes beyond the point of what's healthy to straight-up incomprehension of reality. I don't even want to call it denial, because I think denial requires some small degree more of awareness than what Noé has going on. I've used this line before, but it's like bad things roll off of him like water off a raincoat, never making an imprint in his conscious mind. The guy was abducted by human traffickers while mourning the death of his foster parents, and he seems to have been injured in the process. Yet he laughs it off and says the experience was fun! Like taking a trip!
And I think I see that same tendency as the roots of how he acts in this chapter.
Noé is aware that mistreating and/or de-personing the Dante and co is wrong. And that's what all the other vampires are clearly doing in this scene when they refuse to call them by their names—they're de-personing them. But! Noé likes the other vampires in that scene. He likes Nox, Manet, and Orlock, and he thinks the world of Domi, so I think he really struggles to comprehend that they're purposely doing something he knows is hateful and wrong. "My friends whom I respect are being hateful and actively de-humanizing other people I care about" is not a concept that's going to find easy purchase on Noé's denialbrain. So his lovely toxic optimism lands on the easier answer instead. They must just not have been introduced!
To take Dante's phrasing, I don't think he's doing it on purpose, and he's not stupid. He's just sheltered and hopeful to a truly spectacular (and unhelpful) degree.
Thus far, Noé's over-optimistic incomprehension of reality has only been with regards to things about himself. His friends might get a bit concerned when he brushes off his suffering, but he's never accidentally hurt others or brushed off their pain before. However, this time his inability to confront or even process the Bad Thing—the fact that his friends are dham racist—has affected other people (the people actually suffering the racism). If nothing else, it's a really interesting way to call more attention to his slight disconnect from reality.
[Image Description: Tumblr tags by user daggryet. They read: "#only thing I'd say is that he's not sheltered even if domi and vanitas seem to think so #he's experienced some of life and people's most horrendous sides #otherwise spot on #vnc. End Description.]
@daggryet I hope you don't mind me jumping on your tags, but you make an interesting point! I think the problem is that Noé is some types of sheltered, but not others.
You're absolutely correct that Noé isn't sheltered in the sense that he has not been spared from the dark sides of the world. He's been through the afforementioned human trafficking, the traumatic death of Louis and their friends, and several other horrors to boot. He very much knows that there are dark and awful things happening in the world.
However, I'd say he *is* a very specific type of sheltered in that he grew up completely isolated from his own society. Vampire society, especially that of the wealthy and powerful, has some pretty unsavory aspects that you cannot miss if you live in the midst of it. It's condescending toward/dismissive of humans (when it's not predatory toward them), it's outright hateful to dhams, and it treats curse-bearers as monsters to be tossed away. A kind, healthy society would not create bourreaus. And this latest chapter goes out of its way to show via Domi that even people who try to be kind and without prejudice are still at risk of picking up some of that cruelty and hatefulness subconsciously. Everyone around you calls dhams and humans by their race rather than their names, so you start doing it too.
Noé, on the other hand, grew up in a bubble. He was picked up by his teacher at a young age and tucked away in a castle with an equally isolated child as his main playmate. And then when he was in his young teens, all of his friends died, and he was more or less cut off from the world save for teacher, Domi's visits, and whatever scant staff teacher's castle has. Even if he wasn't completely locked away, we know from his own words and Domi's that he was *very* isolated.
Time and again, Noé has proven to be almost completely ignorant of vampire society. He'd never heard of one of the most important figures in both history and modern politics, he never thinks to check whether people he meets are vampires (which is called out as weird by Jean-Jacques), and he's apparently unaware of how goddamn racist (speciesist?) many other vampires are. He was, in a pretty literal sense, sheltered from the cultural context most other vampires grow up in. He was tucked away in a closed-off place where society couldn't get to him. And that specific social isolation/sheltered-ness is what leads to things like him being able to convince himself that surely, Orlock and co just don't know Dante, Johann, and Riche's names yet.
stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation with the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.
"I'm notttt doing the dnd thing" no no no, that part's very important. and if you don't assign the dnd classes then you don't get to do the cha cha slide.
I think it’s fine if you don’t like Akito for all the shit she did (I personally don’t like her), but if I see one more brain dead person online say she, “didn’t *deserve* her redemption arc,” personally, I will be crashing out.
The story of Fruits Basket is about change. The mangaka basically TELLS you that you don’t have to forgive Akito, showcased that Rin herself says she could never forgive her for what she’s done to her.
Genuinely I do think the people who say she’s evil and didn’t deserve redemption and deserved to rot in the cat’s cell,
1.) hate any type of mental illness/trauma response that isn’t uwu cutesy
2.) lack critical thinking skills, and also empathy
3.) would probably call you disgusting for being so depressed that you haven’t showered in 2 weeks
A person’s trauma is never an excuse for their behavior, so I don’t think you can excuse her abusive behavior at all. She defenestrated and also stabbed someone, plus the loads of abusive she put on everyone from a young age.
That doesn’t mean that she can’t decide to change for herself. She didn’t change for you to like her. Bad people are allowed to change for the better, and you don’t have to forgive them for their past if you so choose.
Besides the fact that saying she deserved to rot goes against everything Fruits Basket is about, I think it also really feeds into this stale way of thinking. That “once you’re bad you’re always bad”, and when you push that narrative it actually will cause bad people to just never change because society is telling them they can’t, so why would they even put in the effort?
Anyway, never thought I’d defend Akito. I just need people to like experience empathy, critical thinking, and media literacy for 5 minutes because y’all piss me off.
Hello! I'm alive and I realized I never posted my analysis of the Case Study of Vanitas volume 9 cover so I'm doing that now. (spoilers)
Image I stole from google:
The rest of this is going to be in bullet points in an attempt to not jump back and forth between subjects.
-the pins: While this is probably one of the easier ones to figure out, I still wanted to give my interpretation of them. I think that they're intended to represent the pain that Mikhail causes Vanitas (poking into the frame with a picture of Vanitas inside) but also the way in which he does it. Pins only cause pain in one specific area representing how Mikhail strategically makes Vanitas remember specific moments so that he's easier to manipulate.
-the chains (and their connection to the pins): The chains represent how Vanitas was trapped by Mikhail. The fact that the pins specifically are holding the chains up shows that their relationship causes Vanitas harm and that it is built off of his pain. It also shows that Mikhail wants Vanitas to be isolated as his portrait is covered in chains possibly so that nobody will touch it.
-the blue butterflies: There have only been two times in the series that I can think of where butterfly motifs were used, on this cover and when Ruthven hypnotized Noé, thus butterflies can be associated with manipulation and control. While Ruthven's butterflies are red, most of the ones on the cover are white/light blue. Both of these colors are highlighted in Mikhail's design, so they represent Mikhail's manipulation and control over Vanitas. The quantity of them is likely meant to show how long this manipulation has been happening for and how deep it goes.
-the red butterfly: This one specifically stands out because it contrasts the mostly blue color palate of the cover. As mentioned previously, the only other time (correct me if I'm wrong) when we see butterflies like that is when Ruthven is hypnotizing Noé. As far as I am ware, Ruthven has no connection to Mikhail or the events of this volume, so it most likely represents Noé. Continuing with that interpretation, it's probably supposed to show Noé trying to get past all of the lies and manipulation to end the fight, explaining the contrasting colors.
Uh... yeah. Let me know if there's anything I missed
I love this analysis. I think the red butterfly is also there to emphasise the parallel between Vanitas and Astolfo. Red/pink is a colour associated with Astolfo, and the Astolfo’s cover art (volume 6) features a blue butterfly (blue obviously being associated with Vanitas). Also emphasises the manipulation aspect since the volume 6 cover art is about Astolfo being caught in the ‘web’ of others’ schemes.
I finally caught up with Vanitas No Carte (the manga) and I must say, it's nice to see Vanitas' obvious love for performing finally shine through. Because that man is such a theatre kid that I'm surprised it hadn't come up before.
And, while it was just a way for him to get what he wants, he seemed so confident and sure of himself on that stage that it feels as though this is where he was always meant to be, like he was in his element despite never having done anything of the sort before. And he looked like he was enjoying himself too.
Him coming up with an idea for a stage performance on the go and improvising the whole thing with Noé and Riche while also making himself the narrator of the story, as well as providing the play's music, is such a him thing to do.
He really does resemble his mother in more ways than be realizes. He may be mainly a doctor, just like his father was, but he also most definitely inherited his mother's affinity for arts and performing (which I assume is what she did, as we know she was travelling with other performers, like a travelling circus).
I just adore how he carries the legacy of every single one of his caretakers with him still. His father's medical expertise, his mother's passion for the arts and Luna's connection to magic through the book of Vanitas. I love that, despite how he claims to have forgotten about the people in his life that raised him and made him the person that he is today, his actions and ambitions say otherwise.
Because he is, essentially, a human tapestry made out of pieces of everyone who has ever loved him enough to leave parts of them with him and I think that's beautiful.
Character duo where one *remembers I don’t like fitting characters into trope boxes* is a completely fleshed out and realised person *remembers treating characters as real people and not story devices written with intent is bad* who is written by the author and *remembers death of the author* uh. And *fumbles and drops my pile of queue cards* ah fuck wait no *the menacing horse* what was that.
I know every aroace Ryland Grace post starts with “it is so important to me that” but like, this representation really is so important to me because for once I see someone on the same life path as me, and I don’t have to figure it out on my own anymore. Like, I get to be the Ryland Grace in my community! I get to be my own person and love my friends and it isn’t even weird that I live on my own and don’t have a partner. And I’m excited! It’s going to be okay! Because I got to see it on a giant movie screen! In a story that took my breath away!
It’s just. The way basically almost everyone in the fandom agrees that this character is aroace-coded is so special to me. In every other fandom I’ve been in or just witnessed from a distance, the very few characters who are canonically aro and/or ace have been denied their identities by the rampant aphobia within those fandoms. And the characters who are aro/ace only in fanon are almost always chosen for those headcanons because they are the stereotype of the unloving, unlovable aro/ace.
And then there’s Ryland Grace.
This character who has so much personality, who is so lovable, who is so full of love, of love for the world around him, love for his students, love for science, love for life on Earth, love for his best friend. This character who laughs, this character who cries, this character who cheers and screams and makes corny jokes and throws stuff to the ground out of anger. This character who is afraid. This character who lashed out and fought for his life when everyone else was taking it away from him. This character who clawed at the dirt and grass when he was being violently manhandled, who desperately tried to hold on to the earth because he didn’t want to go. Who tried his hardest to go back home. Who was afraid because he didn’t want to die. Because he loves life.
The fandom saw Ryland Grace—a character who could’ve just as easily as any other male character be thrown into a straight romance with Stratt but somehow wasn’t—saw how much he loves and how much he grieves, and decided: this one. This is the one. I relate to this character. I feel the same way. Everything was taken away from me, too, for being marginalized. For being queer.
And somehow, even though the most popular queer headcanon could’ve been about Grace being gay, or trans, or anything else like it, the consensus was that he would be read by the fandom as aroace.
And I know there’s more to it than that. I know that the line “You have no immediate family, you don’t even have a dog” resonated within a lot of aroace fans (me included), I know that he’s very aroace-coded in the book, I’ve read it. All of these elements play into it. They’re the main reason why I started seeing him as aroace myself.
But I just can’t help but wonder how this happened.
How we collectively as a fandom started agreeing upon this one main headcanon. How we all looked at this main character—whom Andy Weir most definitely thought of as a cishet man when writing the novel—and decided that he would be aromantic asexual. Because many aroace fans see themselves in Grace, of course. But also because he lived for himself. He lived for himself and his life was taken away from him because that was not enough of a reason to allow him to stay on Earth. Ryland Grace’s life does not matter, he is expandable, because he has no one in his life to love romantically. Because he is no use to society if he won’t reproduce. So might as well give him a use. Even if he doesn’t agree.
Ryland Grace lived for himself. He loved his life and he shared that love with himself, and that’s it. And that was enough to make people read him as aroace. And as a result of that, I’ve been seeing so many people talk about it online ever since I saw the movie and joined the fandom. And it’s making me dizzy, in a good way.
Hell, I don’t know what I’m writing anymore, I got carried away. I might actually cry. This character is so dear to me.
I guess what I wanted to say is this: Ryland Grace is aromantic asexual in the hearts of many Project Hail Mary fans, and they talk about it. They won’t stop talking about it. I hope you never stop talking about it.
Because it might just be a headcanon, it might not be real in the canon of the book/movie, but hear me out: I found out I was aroace when I was 15 years old. I’ve been using this label for nearly five years of my life, and I’ve not been alive a long time—I’m only 20.
I have never, never, ever, felt this represented in my entire life. I have never felt this seen in my entire life. I am literally shaking as I’m writing this. This simple headcanon that has taken the fandom by storm has been making me feel more represented than any canon aroace character ever could. I have never felt more understood than I have since I joined the PHM fandom about a month ago.
Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you, PHM fans, for allowing me to be who I am, and to be loved and celebrated for it.
To me, Project Hail Mary presents the perfect intersection of very specific narrative tropes + whump tropes + aroace sensibilities I lean into...
Competent character with no main character syndrome; aka "I am NOT burdened by Glorious Purpose" (narratively good soup)
Secondary Character who will absolutely do The Necessary in service of the greater good, even if it means brutalising the Main Character (mmm, yes, tasty... moving into whump)
Secondary Character telling Main Character he is less worthy of being spared because he has No One to Live For (nooooo, but on the other hand I too would be tying that man to the trolley tracks)
A moment of intimate emotional connection that DOES NOT lead to characters kissing/groping or even Wishing They Could if only the world wasn't ending 💜💚🤍🖤
Deep, DEEP, self-sacrificial friendship
Said friendship being assigned all the resources that a typical romantic/sexual relationship would
QPR in action
I am not saying any of the characters are canonically aro or ace; I am just speculating. But the movie displays all the traits a person starved of aro/ace representation ZOOMED IN ON LIKE A HOMING MISSILE. Namely me.
So excuse me while I wrap my arms and legs around this movie and love it with all the intensity of a starving anaconda. (Meaning: I will crush it with my love AND THEN I will eat it.)
ok but anywhere else the happily ever after would be being in a romantic relationship. maybe going back to earth and being celebrated as a hero
but grace's happy ending is getting to spend the rest of his life with his best friend. and teaching kids about science. and that's actually so important to me
Thinking about how PHM is such a beautiful Aro love story even if it doesn’t mean to be. Thinking about how Grace saved his one true love: The world. But he didn’t just save the trees, or breeze, or fog. He saved the people, the kids, the dog he never had, the cities. He loved every aspect of the Earth. He still loves it. His biodome is a true recreation of what he loved because he can’t ever escape it. He can’t ever escape the one he never said goodbye to. He can’t escape the regret of not being able to say “I love you” one last time. He’ll never see it again. He’ll forever love it all.
Or at least, made me 10x prouder and happier about being aroace. Don't get me wrong, I was never ashamed or anything. But Grace being aroace-coded and the fandom taking that and running with it really healed something within me, not to be dramatic or anything. This was the first time id ever seen such a common aroace headcanon for a character. And the headcanon makes so much sense! I relate to him so much in such an aroace way. He only mentions having one relationship in his life (and its not actually clear what kind of "mate" he means, romantic or queerplatonic or whatever) but it didn't work out. He doesn't seem too broken up about that either. He doesn't have any sort of romantic arc, nor does he need one to be a full person with wants and needs. The only relationship that really matters to him is his deep friendship with Rocky and I really love that. They hug, they look out for each other, they risk their own lives to save each other, and they are best buddies in the universe. Also, Rocky does have a mate, but doesn't prioritise that relationship over his friendship with Grace. I absolutely adore that about their friendship, because I've been set aside for friend's partners far too many times.
Anyway, aroace Ryland Grace is very important to me
they don’t put aros in the movies cause it’d make us too powerful. hasn’t even been 24h since i watched project hail mary and i fear i’ve developed a god complex
blakekathryn
gracieabrams
baratheonpilled
theartofmadeline
titsay
romaincrisis
yousharknotpass
jacobvanloon
