Hi my name is Robin (20, they/it). I'm aroallo and also really horny so I reblog a lot about that. sometimes i post things. could be anything really. drawing (occasionally), books i'm reading, old terrible sci-fi/superhero shows, theater shit and like. Being horny about machines. Mostly I Reblog things tho the rest of that is rare.
this post is inspired in part by this one by @cheshirepirouette and sponsored in part by convos w @asteriis and @indouscurse here’s to y’all!! this post also goes out to my brothers, who are pale as hell for reasons unbeknownst to all of us (this is a joke).
like any good headcanon, this started as a joke because i thought to myself: Ryland sounds like the type of name that somebody’s Black child would have and only use on church sundays. nobody actually has ever called him that in his whole entire life, except maybe his mama SOMETIMES and that’s why he doesn’t remember it right away. i feel like every Black person knows somebody who is called literally anything except their god given name. people call him lil r, lil grace, gracie, ry, ryry, riri, RG, lando, mr. grace, dr. grace, but nobody calls him Ryland, which is part of why he Can’t Remember for so long.
so of course i went back to the source material to see if he ever actually mentioned being white anywhere and unfortunately it is very much at the beginning of the book. so THEN i started to think about how i could get around that while remaining at least largely canon compliant (as a little treat for myself). what i came up with is what i have affectionately dubbed my “litebrite baby” headcanon.
grace was not particularly dark skinned to begin with, and then spent years in a coma with literally no sunlight. he is downright vampiric by the time that he wakes up, and upon seeing his white ass skin, assumes that he is in his own words, a Caucasian male.
unfortunately for him, this fits in really well with his theme of lack of identity and lack of connection. i think for most Black people it would be extremely hard to forget that we’re Black regardless of how light or dark our skin tone is. but throughout the book, even when Grace is thinking about his old, slowly resurfacing memories, he never thinks about family, he never thinks about friends. except for his students and Project Hail Mary, he is completely unmoored.
i’ve seen a few different headcanons for why this might be: he was an only child whose single parent died young, he was cut off by his parents for some reason or another, he just isn’t ever triggered to remember. but no matter the reason, grace is disconnected from crucial aspects of himself. i think that by making him Black, and his Blackness something he can’t remember, it add an extra heartbreaking layer to his characterization. Blackness is such a communal experience, and when it’s not, it leaves behind an ache. growing up Black in White Suburbia i know well both the experience of clinging to one’s own in a hostile world AND the hurt that comes with being severed from one’s community. grace loses so much of himself with the amnesia, unable to recall who he is at the deepest of levels, and i think if he could remember to grieve it, it would devastate him.
i do think he would remember eventually, either when his hair starts growing out (because in the book Armando shaves him iirc), or when he can finally catch a glimpse of his reflection clearly, or when he has a memory of someone in his family. my personal belief is he has a memory beamed directly into his brain of asking “Mama, am I white?” and his poor, long-suffering mom saying, “Now who the hell told you that?”
and then it still never becomes relevant because he has negative desire to explain the nuances of human racial categories to an alien who quite literally cannot see color.
'rocky learns to swear in english' is great and all but have we considered the equally hilarious alternative: rocky makes grace a little harmonica so he can use tone indicators in eridian, does not realize how terrible of a mistake this is until it's too late. grace catches onto tone indicators FAST and he is DEVASTATING with their application. grace does not use eridian swears but rocky gets to hear "are we choosing kind words" and "I'm not mad I'm just disappointed" in eridian roughly thirty times per day
#grace figures out Disappointed Teacher tone indicators in less than twenty four hours#the first time he uses it rocky is suddenly shaking with flashbacks to being a 30yo eridian in school#pov you are stuck in deep space and your middle school teacher alien roommate has just figured out how to scold you in your native language#rocky is a mechanic. they are immune to being cussed out but the Teacher Voice works on them solidly seven times out of ten#when the beatles get back to earth stratt watches the hail mary footage and every time rocky cringes as grace harmonicas at him#she's like 'ahhhhhh the teacher voice <3 I do miss that'#because when he was still on earth stratt would sometimes sicc grace on members of the phm team#because sometimes the Disappointed Teacher Voice was more effective than the Angry Boss Voice
[ID: A Project Hail Mary comic. Rocky is in an iridescent xenonite tunnel behind Grace, which he taps on the wall of to say, "Grace being a little bitch today, statement." Grace startles, then whirls around with a frown and asks, "... What did you just say?"
He takes the xenonite harmonica-esque instrument hanging from his neck and raises it to sharply play something labeled as the "perfect disappointed/mad teacher noise," which makes Rocky shudder and flinch strongly. End ID]
Accidentally refreshed my dash before I could reblog the post I wanted to reblog, but it's legitimately funny how many "walkable cities bad" talking points are just 1) assuming that "walkable" means "CARS ARE BANNED FOREVER AND EVER NOBODY IS ALLOWED TO EVER USE A CAR" and 2) then going "and how do you plan to deal with [problem that only exists due to infrastructure that prioritizes cars] without cars????"
Like "and when you go grocery shopping how do you plan to carry 8 bags full of groceries home without using a car?". Well turns out that "going to the store every 2 weeks to buy 8 bags full of groceries which you have to carry home in one trip" is not like. a universal feature of grocery shopping. The act of grocery shopping doesn't usually take that form unless you live in a place where the nearest grocery store is a 45-minute drive away.
I don't even live in a particularly walkable city but I have a couple grocery stores close enough that my grocery shopping mostly takes the form of "popping in to buy a handful of things on my way home a couple times a week"
questioning aro culture is asking your friend with a partner they clearly love how romantic love feels to them and responding “ok but i feel that way about my friends/i would do that for a friend if we were close enough that they’d let me” to almost every answer they have and responding to the rest with “ok i feel/want that because i know im not asexual” (we were both drunk at the time)
one of the worst kinds of people you can be cursed to share a fandom with is not haters of things you love or lovers of things you hate but people whose takes you broadly agree with, except that they're framed and communicated so obnoxiously it ends up driving other people AWAY from the correct opinions you share. this has exactly the same practical effect as someone making persuasive, compelling arguments for takes you can't stand, but it feels much more insulting somehow
You should be able to criticize gender as a construct without criticizing trans people in the same way that should be able to criticize nation states as a construct without criticizing immigrants. Unfortunately, TERFs like to use "gender critical" as a euphemism.
open tumblr, see something that pisses me off, write a snarky post, delete it, write a slightly more earnest post, edit it for 5 minutes, delete it, close tumblr
Seriously, folks, make sure your seatbelt is secured over your pelvis and hips, not your gut. You want your skeleton to take that impact in a crash, not your squishy internal organs.
Sincerely, a tumblr user who was in a significant car crash yesterday but didn’t have to deal with internal bleeding because of seatbelt trauma. Tumblr post saved my life.
That’s Althea Crome’s work. You’ve seen her work before if you’ve ever seen the movie Coraline because she did the teeny tiny star sweater and gloves for the stop motion puppets to wear.
