i’m kinda obsessing over blipmary here’s some random thoughts
the hail mary was constructed by sending various parts to the ISS and putting them together in orbit if i remember correctly. maybe the ISS is a mother-like figure to her. the beetles are carrier pigeons!
the hail mary has a lineage, other spacecraft behind her. but blip-a doesn’t. she is the first of her kind and is determined to not be the last
the hail mary destroying herself because she couldn’t save ilyukhina and yao, she has every bit of human information and she couldn’t keep two humans alive. blip-a helplessly watching 22 eridians slowly dying and being unable to do anything. she simply can’t interact her crew in the same way mary can, nor does she have any clue what’s going on
mary and blip-a are so so different. yet, they’re fundamentally the same. last ditch efforts from dying planets. even as they gawk at each other, wondering how the hell does that work, they both instinctually know what the other is.
their first meeting is a dance. they circle each other, learning everything they can, before joining hands and preforming an uneven waltz. as the two learn more, the dance gets smoother
blip-a pacing anxiously while mary, grace, and rocky go to adrian. watching mary fly back and seeing the damages on her hull, and still believing that she kept rocky safe.
the xenonite fuel tanks on the hail mary are like their mating marks/weddings bands!!
as blip-a was losing power from the taumeboa, she devotes all of her energy into keeping rocky alive. she can’t help erid anymore, but maybe she can keep rocky alive for just a little longer. she watches mary’s engines grow closer to them. perhaps blip-a dies in the hail mary’s arms, trusting her hail mary and saving grace to protect rocky and save erid
on erid, grace eventually degrades and can’t make the trip back to earth. mary is no longer useful. eridians can’t use it and grace won’t be able to. her use extended way beyond going to tau ceti and seeing what’s up. she was a home for four years and then waiting to be a trip back to earth. she was never designed for this, but she persists
she dies with grace, knowing her perseverance saved two entire planets. eridians take the hail mary down to erid. they reconstruct a replica of blip-a and display them in a museum together, linked by a jagged xenonite tube. forever in dance, the hail mary and blip-a are symbols for being the connecting pieces between humans and eridians