We always talk about how Stratt is haunted by Grace's screams and cries at night, but what about Carl?
Carl, the guy Grace built an entire hypothesis around.
Carl, the guy that learned to have fun with Grace while doing science.
Carl, the guy that fueled Grace's addiction to Skittles and Twizzlers.
Carl, the guy that was there every step of the way until the end. And then he was forced to stand by and watch as Grace was pinned to the ground, pleading for help, calling for him of all people.
I'm willing to bet Carl is kept awake just as much as Stratt was if not more so, utterly tortured by what he'd done to Grace.
Imagine Eva Stratt years after sending her favorite guy to boss around to space. Getting the logs and recordings and finding out that her guy made first contact with sapient alien life and it IMMEDIATELY started bossing him around too. Like what if you surrendered your dog and it got adopted by an alien instantly. Happened to my girl Eva Stratt
I know we all know how much the rest of the Hail Mary crew would’ve loved meeting Rocky (RIP Olesya Ilyukhina you will always have a special place in my heart) but you know who we totally forget would’ve loved to meet an actual, intelligent alien?
Eva Motherfucking Stratt
Everyone forgets (especially movie fans since I don’t think they even brought it up for y’all) that Stratt wasn’t a scientist like the rest of her crew. Sure, she was definitely smart enough to understand most of what they told her, but it wasn’t her field of study. She wasn’t a biologist or a chemist or an astrophysicist, she was a historian. She was also recommended for the project because she was an incredibly talented diplomat. Canonically, she’s fluent in at least seven languages, and probably speaks several more- give her a day, and she’ll understand Eridian almost as well as Grace. The atmospheric testing, the experimentation with Xenonite, that’s all her crew. But getting to know an alien race, learning all about their language and their history and their culture? That’s her thing, right there.
TL;DR: If anyone would have been absolutely fascinated to sit down and learn about society on another planet, it would’ve been Eva Stratt. Thank you for coming to my TED talk
knowing middle schoolers, i imagine one of grace's students had a tumblr blog where they'd just yap about their life and get like 3 notes per post. grace would come up at times less like a teacher and more like a friend the student worries about because while he is an excellent teacher he is also just kind of deeply pathetic. one day the thing they post is titled: my fucking science teacher just got launched into space??? it goes viral. grace accidentally makes one of his students a niche tumblr microcelebrity.
Love that Ryland Grace is the opposite of so many male protagonist "heroes" in media and yet he's still so incredibly brave, resilient, and strong. That flimsy little science teacher saves the day.
But he also,
Throws fits when things don't go his way. Not a "I'm a bad bitch" destroying everything-type fit, but tossing a trash can, breaking a screen-type fit.
Cries. A lot.
Pleads. He begs.
Doesn't answer the call to action.
Shows weakness. Being a coward and being fearful are two things he defines himself with.
Doesn't end up with the girl. In fact, that girl isn't even interested and he isn't, either.
Cherishes friendship over a romantic plot or something stereotypically brave like, "I'm going to save Rocky so I can save his world." No, he wants to save his friend, first and foremost.
Squeaks. He squeals. He screams, loudly and very high pitched. He whines. He complains. He physically struggles to open a jar. He's clumsy as hell. He makes some of the least graceful noises one can make.
Is not afraid to be the primitive species lowkey.
I love him and everything he stands for as a male protagonist. Men need to know that they can be just like Ryland Grace and still be just as much of a hero and a man.
I very recently learned that headcanon is now a term being used for "presumed canon". And I dont know when that transformation happened.
Basically (I guess from the bygone era that I come from), "headcanons" are innately assumed to be not canon because they were specific to the "head" that it came from. Ergo, not part of the larger, public, main canon. Ergo, not enforceable on a populace larger than one. Do people seriously not know that anymore??? Why do you think we differentiate between "canon" and "headcanon"???
The word "theories" exist. Y'all remember "theories"?? When you suspect, that something is canon, with varying levels of proof (from some to none), that's called a theory. When you assert that something is canon without any proof, at best, that's called a theory. When you assert that something is canon with proof against it, that's called being wrong.
Or at least, it used to be called these words. We need a fucking dictionary updated in real time when words change meaning, my god. We truly don't speak the same language all the time.
I occasionally indulge in a mind fantasy where I imagine that I get abducted by aliens. I wake up on a ship in some kind of small terrarium built to look like a little grassy space, clearly constructed with a human being in mind, while on the wall is a two way glass window where a strange creature watches back. I'm, for whatever reason, the first human contact these aliens meet. I always think about what I could do in this situation, where language is impassible, to show what humanity is like. Hank Green once talked about tapping out the Fibonacci sequence to prove intelligence, and I've decided that if I ever do end up being the first human representative to alien life, that's what I'd do. The aliens would watch, then one gets really excited and a deep bass rumbling of a voice communicates to the other, and the other gets equally exited.
I love the idea of humans existing in the same space we so often put hypothetical aliens in with pop-culture. We're the subjects of study to a very curious extraterrestrial. I'd be great at being an alien's groundbreaking scientific study in life beyond their planet, which is something normal to want and possible to achieve. I'd do my best at drawing out arabic numbers, explaining what they are as a concept, and then trying to understand what they mean with their corresponding methods. I'd learn bare bones words in their rumbling language, I'd be good while they figure out how the hell human anatomy works ("carbon?" they'd think, "why is it made of carbon? and OXYGEN? The burning chemical of death?").
All that to say I really vibed with Project Hail Mary's depiction of first contact. Ryland Grace being slowly explained whats going on by Rocky with symbols and diagrams, each learning from the other so they can survive and thrive. God I love that movie.
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".
there is a bronze statue of ryland grace outside of grover cleveland middle school. the knuckles on his hands are shiny and worn because it has become tradition for students to give him a fist bump on the way in to school.
was absentmindedly typing out the to be or not to be soliloquy (as one does) and the recommended word after outrageous was whimsy. who up suffering the slings and arrows of they outrageous whimsy.
Biblically accurate Ryland Grace from Ryan Gosling himself.
[VD: A Project Hail Mary animatic titled "We ask the Project Hail Mary crew what they would take on a trip to space". The art is toned in purple, yellow, and orange. The characters answer with audio from interviews with the movie actors as microphones are held towards them.
Grace, sweating and laughing sheepishly: "Well, I wouldn't go to space... Just like never, I would run."
Ilyukhina, smiling: "A picture of my family."
Dubois smiles and stands with Yao, who nods seriously: "Nerds Gummy Clusters."
Grace, smiling nervously: "Why do I have to?"
Stratt: "My phone."
Grace: "Can I pick three? (He counts off) Coffee, donuts, and then, like, some choose-your-adventure novels so I can get a few multiple reads out of them. (He holds up his hands defensively) But I don't want to go. Just to be clear."
(Hands appear to drag him away, and Grace looks and sounds mildly panicked.) "Why are you sending me--?" End VD] Cred: @nebulations
romaincrisis
izzy806
discoholicmusic
theartofmadeline
ellievsbear
gummygunk
origamiaround
kaledo-art
