~ blue ~

‘05 | they/them stay, atiny, p1ece, evol, phannie

[enthyrea]

ryland’s best friend

[homeless-dionysus]

actually simon's willingness to be vulnerable in shocking, when you think of his backstory and his situation. i don't think it can all be chalked up to the intensity of what he's going through at the time. for example:

it's one thing to not be able to completely hide your emotions, but to express a need about them, and even to be in touch with oneself to this extent at all (rather than constant callousness and lashing out or total withdrawal, which are pretty typical in male characters especially), says a lot about the strength of his nature. that is, for someone to have a painful life where they aren't well-supported, the ability to still feel and express as deeply and vulnerably as this isn't easy to hold on to.

so in shipping terms, it makes the most sense to believe he would be totally aware of how he feels and both willing and able to openly discuss it, and have a warm attitude toward human connection, without denial or hostility toward (for example) grace.

tbh if you wanted to say one of them would be "better" at this kind of communication, i would pick simon for his emotional honesty.

grace can teach middle schoolers, but struggles to communicate or set boundaries with adults. he gives up or lashes out but doesn't take the risk or make the effort to reveal anything deeper about his feelings, if he doesn't think they will be "acceptable" to others.

simon doesn't hide his feelings to protect himself or to be polite, so everything he shows is just because that's how he really feels. and again and again in the film we see that how he really feels is empathy, compassion, as well as a sense of his own value as a person worthy of survival and respect just like everyone else.

grace is going to have to learn how to get in touch with his own feelings and lower his defenses for them to have good communication in their relationship.

[amazing-gr4ce]

do you reckon the wall we kick our pussies up also has the lady door on it

[ottrauva]

mermaid AU bloodymary. Don’t ask me how all that works, while creating this bunch I was driven only by a mysterious force of beauty and whimsy

[fuckhugeoctopus]

For years, sci-fi has asked, what if aliens were wetter than us. Project Hail Mary posits a new, daring question. What if we are the wet aliens

[mouse-doubleo100]

the thing that i adore the most about project hail mary is the fact that, after travelling god knows how far, saving multiple worlds, and living on an alien planet, grace ends the film not as some big hero, but as a teacher

its just so nice that the film sits there and says ‘ryland graces job as a teacher is important’, because its very common in these kinda films that the protagonist starts off as a teacher purely to give a bit of exposition before the government person shows up and goes ‘youre the best (insert science here)ist in the world, and we need your help to save the world’ or whatever, and i assumed at first that thats what this film was doing as well

but its not

grace starts the film as a teacher, he goes through the film as a teacher, and he ends the film as a teacher. he is a teacher to his students. he is a teacher to the astronauts. he is a teacher to rocky. and at the end of it all, he is a teacher to his students.

ryland grace saves both worlds not because he is some big hero, but because he is a teacher. and his reward at the end of it all is that he gets to keep teaching. and isnt that beautiful

[autisticlittleguy]

"Grace Ryland is Rocky's dog" is such a funny fucking dynamic when you think about it

Eridians are further behind than humans technologically right? They dont have computers, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. In fact, Eridians probably dont even know about the Big Bang because their atmosphere would filter out most of the cosmic microwave background radiation we use to detect it. On a human timeline, theyre anywhere between like early-mid 20th century. Rocky's basically a cosmonaut.

So the human civilization is pretty advanced from Rocky's perspective. Rationally he understands this. On a conceptual level he knows this to be true.

But at the same time... imagine youre one of the first ever cosmonauts to make it into space. Then you meet a 10 year old alien dog who cant do 2+2 without pulling out its calculator. It forgets everything constantly and has to keep notes everywhere, like it basically lives in Memento (2000). Also if it doesnt nap constantly it gets even stupider. And you somehow has to reconcile this with the fact that this dog has a better understanding of physics than your entire civilization does. Like the dog knows how the universe started.

[autisticlittleguy]

This isnt better from Grace's perspective btw. Eridians never developed computers, so all their ship systems are steered using basically the manual labor of 24 Eridians. Also theres no radiation shielding on their ship. Actually im pretty sure half the reason why Rocky is always busy fixing shit is because the radiation keeps frying all the onboard electronics, so hes always building and fixing and replacing components

Like imagine being a modern day sailor navigating the Pacific with GPS and strong hulls to protect against the raging ocean. And from portside you see like an honest to god viking ship. Except its made of some high tech carbon fiber material. But like, its still very definitely a viking ship. You can clearly see there's 24 oars along the hull where sailors are supposed to use to manually row their ship. Also the ship is leaking and theres like one little dude on board whos skittering around patching the holes constantly. Also this little dude is blind and doesnt know about water. Thats how insane Eridians look being an interstellar species without computers or radiation shielding.

Both of them thinks the other one is the completely ridiculous and absurd one and theyre both totally amazed at how far the other has come in spite of it

[audhdspacewizard]

Knowing that Eridians have much longer lifespans, and also he can't be at every school on the planet at once, Ryland Grace decides to record a bunch of entertaining science lessons with Rocky's help.

Hundreds of years later, Eridian kids still get excited when the substitute teacher rolls in the 3D shape projector, because they know they're in for an episode of Friend Grace the Science Ace.

[penny-anna]

Do Eridians know they are different colours. I bet Grace's alien kids love finding out what colour they are. It means absolutely nothing to them but they're like :O :O

[penny-anna]

Some of them think he's making this whole 'colour' thing up to mess with them and try to catch him out by asking again on a different day to prove he's just saying random noises but he's like you are still blue buddy and they're like :O :O

[penny-anna]

Like if we met an alien species who had extra senses & they said that some humans felt spingly and some humans felt spoingly I bet we'd all want to know if we were spingly or spoingly humans

[hayleywilliamsfan84]

i keep laughing at the way that eridian culture in the movie and eridian culture in the book are not contradictory at all, if you accept that movie rocky is just a total FREAK

grace: boy i sure can't wait to meet other eridians haha! rocky, putting on a shirt for the first time in four years: rocky has something to tell grace but does grace promise not to be mad, question?

[hydrangea-pop]

I can't leave this in the tags lmaooo

[forgetful-dorito]

I like to think that Grace and Adrian have very similar problems

[ramqiu]

t minus 12 hours to launch

[aomaoe]

this one is more recent, because of a recent trend on twitter of folks wanting more art of simon smiling...!!!! so here's a soft one for u all

[orlando-in-love]

[castielrisingabove]

When it’s announced that a Bay Area middle school teacher is one of three heroes sent to save the world, San Francisco clamors to rename things to “Ryland Grace.” Grover Cleveland Middle is quick to the draw, becoming Ryland Grace Middle the very next school year. Grace also gets a street, of course, a science wing at Stanford, a state park along the coast — by the time the Beetles return, you could probably throw a rock in San Francisco and hit a Ryland Grace reference.

Eva Stratt, meanwhile, is a stain. Graffiti tucked away in alleys and under bridges, forever painted over by the powers that be. A name meant to be forgotten. Stratt has always known this was part of the deal: after all, humanity needs a villain just as much as it needs its heroes. The best she can hope for is to be erased entirely on Earth.

And yet, light-years away, there is a beloved body of water, its surface dancing with artificial waves, that Ryland Grace wistfully refers to as The Sea of Stratt.

[gobelindoll]

they match each other's freak- NO!! they match each other's stupid

humanity's first miscommunication with an intelligent alien race <333

[psychedelicmoonpie]

My favourite Adrian headcanon is that they're a biologist/zoologist who has seen so much shit, they're completely unphased by any and every alien habit of Grace's.

I mean full-on khaki-shorts-wearing, traversing-wilderness-with-nothin'-but-a-machete Adrian who yoinks snakes outta trees and pets swamp puppies and will unflinchingly dig around in elephant faeces for signs of a rare parasitic tapeworm if needed.

Oh, humans eat socially? No problem, Adrian has observed many many animals eat. Did you know that an obscure species of small underground dirt creature from the north side of Erid also eats socially? Adrian can give you a not-so-short presentation on them.

Oh, the human has no external carapace and so its internal sounds are absurdly loud, wet and off-putting? No problem, Adrian was just conducting an expedition last month researching the incredible eridian animal, the Wet Loud Worm from the south-east region of Wet Loud Wormland. They're desensitised, it's fine.

Oh, Grace leaks often from many orifices and it can be a bit of a learning curve to get used to? No problem for Adrian, see Wet Loud Worm paragraph again!

Meanwhile, Rocky is bewildered as to how he's managed to third-wheel both of his relationships, because both Adrian and Grace are nerds who nerd out about things, and Adrian is shaking in their carapace with enthusiasm to learn more about human culture and biology, not to mention everything about earth animals. And yeah, sure, Grace might be a molecular biologist, but he'll be damned if he'll pass up an opportunity to learn about alien fauna from a fellow scientist, and yes, Adrian, he'd love to hear about the small underground dirt creature from the north side of Erid, and he's so excited to learn more about the Wet Loud Worm, do go on.