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all i need is a sweet treat. and six thousand dollars

eva stratt makes me so fucking unwell because. imagine months of making hard call after hard call because you gotta, because someone's gotta, and this time it has to be you. and she keeps strong despite it, she keeps going. then the fucking pit in her stomach she must have felt, when she realized that Grace was her only option left. the horror of that realization. having to steel herself for the task. only to have him beg and plead and cry. her friend. how did she not throw up. how did she manage it. eva stratt the woman ever, how many people out there would have the sheer force of will, to be able to pull the trigger on their friend to save all humanity. and she didn't even know if it would work. she didn't know. for years. she didn't know if murdering her friend was worth the gamble. she just had to believe in him. fucking hell.

shadowbrightshine

I will never hate her. She went in knowing she was the scapegoat. She went in knowing this would all be blame on her. She would never been seen as a hero.

And she did it anyways. Honestly I bet she did throw up. Alone, away from everyone who could see her.

electric-skillet

One project hail mary character dynamic from the book that I love is Grace moping around like ough I'm just Stratt's little lapdog, her pet scientist that she drags around everywhere, this sucks so bad

Meanwhile everyone else is apparently like waow. There he goes. Mr. Number Two of the hail mary project. Stratt's right hand man. And also her lover.

bayofalgecirascranes

prev tags: #everyone: you're eva stratt right hand arm. man. you're eva stratt everything. her confident. her silly rabbit#grace: her ✨️what✨️

Everyone: her silly rabbit

Grace: Does she call me that?

Everyone: no

cowardsexual

the eva stratt in my mind is a conglomeration of movie stratt and book stratt because god fucking bless sandra huller put her entire pussy into that performance, but while weir is bad at character writing (women especially) he IS disconcertingly good at coming up with plots that generate interesting character concepts through circumstances... which due to story cuts the movie sadly missed out on.

it's really interesting looking back at both iterations of the story and how stratt and grace's rapport hinges on unrequitedness. there's obviously the karaoke scene in the movie acting as grace's bid for human connection vs stratt's necessary refusal in order to do her job. the book rarely if ever interrogates stratt's interpersonal relationships in the project and how her sense of duty and utilitarianism extends to them (well, aside from grace. more on that in a sec). She's a History major and an administrator and She Loves Humanity, but it's a characteristic that when analyzed deeper rings pretty hollow (possibly because the author thinks social analysis/critique in science fiction is stupid and thus doesn't exactly have much to say about People like someone in the humanities would. SAD!) so that's an addition to her character from the movie that i'm deeply pleased about. what i don't like as much is that the bid for connection starts from grace.

because book stratt and grace? the one sidedness of their rapport is the driving emotional conflict of the entire pre-launch plotline—and of grace's character development throughout the whole book.

like most scientists on the team, grace was brought onto the project by force, but he's the only one who fulfilled his purpose, was allowed to return to his own life, and then came back of his own volition, out of a sense of personal duty and responsibility. which is the reason stratt takes him back on! and why she begins to rely on him more and more, as an administrator, as a mediator, as a scientist, as an advisor. she has all the more reason to do that when she discovers he's coma resistant, but she was already doing all that baby!

grace spends the rest of their relationship half-assing that sense of responsibility. one thing i adore about book phm is how merciless it is with grace's "modesty" "insecurity" and "social anxiety". children are easy to dote on. they're not stupid, obviously, but on an interpersonal level they're not your equal, they have no way to actually demand accountability from you and call your ass out. he doesn't actually think he's a failure, he's not blind he should know damn well he's not like the other scientists. "science lapdog", "ooo i'm just a little guy cmonnnn i'm just a middle school teacher", he downplays his own importance because if he genuinely grappled with the level of responsibility she holds him to towards the people in the project he'd run like a fucking dog.

he is a good man AND he is a coward. stratt's relationship with him verges on the tension between those coexisting truths. he is both someone she wants to respect but can't, someone she can rely on but has to act behind his back least he realizes. she WANTS them to be equals, she WANTS him to understand. on the day the hail mary is scheduled for launch she paces HIS prison cell like SHE'S the caged animal, trying to get through to the glimpse of the man she saw that day, the one who barged into an FBI guarded facility, looked atlas in the eye and told her scoot over, i'm carrying this with you. she cares about him. she wouldn't feel so betrayed if she didn't. please understand why i'm doing this to you. please understand why i need you to be that fundamentally good man. i am tied to the tracks right next to you. and as far as she is concerned, ryland grace dies on earth saying "no".

jelicatessen

so i've been in a bunch of fandoms where a major character conflict is the choice between a character's most important person and the world, and one of my favourite things about project hail mary is that Eva Stratt actually chooses the world and then has to live with it, and isn't that so fucking delicious

midnightmindcave

why am i crying in the shower you ask? oh, because eva stratt had to make the one single difficult decision she faced during the whole Project timeline and it was the best thing that ever happened to grace and rocky and to both planets and the worst thing that ever happened to her. so no reason.

rae-conteur

Eva Stratt didn't start out a trolley operator.

The first decisions were probably easy. Obvious. Earth versus egos, Earth versus tradition, Earth versus capitalism.

But she's spent years doing this by the time we meet her. Every choice is just a hair less obvious than the last. Needs a couple more caveats. She's the frog slowly boiling as the heat rises around her. Each choice is worse, but it's not that much worse than the last one, right?

Her regret and hesitation is sanded off her, bit by bit. And she's so close to the end, so close to being free, when the explosion happens and she has to make the last choice. Earth versus her eternal soul, versus her friend, versus the single unquestionably unforgivable sin.

She was so close to getting out of it with her soul.

merryfinches

Somewhere, far away from here…

Eva Stratt, they could never make me hate you 💔

the-tardis-is-blue

hilarious how grace is wandering around that aircraft carrier thinking i'm just a guy. meanwhile his security clearance is technically on the same level as the actual eva stratt herself

manyblinkinglights

#phm#in the book he's like#'my office is technically a storage closet. they're gonna kick me out of here when we resupply. i'm about as important as toilet paper.'#man you live on a boat. how many other people on the boat have an office at all.#you're the guy who looks at the paperwork and signs shit that's not worth bothering stratt over#which you can choose to interpret as either not very important or VERY IMPORTANT INDEED.#you're the guy who says 'yeah i think this plan is scientifically feasible'#to which stratt says 'okay my pet scientist says it'll work‚ let's go ahead and pave the sahara.'

cheeseanonioncrisps

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I actually think I like the film Betrayal Scene better.

Like don't get me wrong, the book one is good (the idea of Grace having to spend multiple days locked up stewing about how he's gonna die before they even knock him out is deliciously angsty, as is Stratt's last attempt to beg him to understand why she has to do this) but fuck.

He like literally starts climbing the walls.

Like he came in there relatively composed. He had a rationalisation for what he was going to do, he probably rehearsed his little speech. He's putting the walls up because he knows he's not doing The Right Thing, but he doesn't want to let on that he knows that. He's probably pretending to himself as much as Stratt. He's doing it For The Kids.

And then the switch to just pure, animal terror when the doctor comes in. Like there's a degree of comedy to it. Grace is always slightly goofy, slightly immature (probably why his students like him so much) and now he's climbing and running like a kid playing tag. Except its not a game and it's not working.

Eva's tone when she tells him to “sit down, we'll do it different”. Like I know I'm murdering you, I know that you're not capable of seeing this any other way, but please at least see sense and spare yourself the trauma of having to be literally dragged kicking and screaming. Please.

The resignation when she says “he's running.” Like, she doesn't have to say who's running, or why. She knew this was a possibility. She knew this was a likely possibility but why couldn't he just fucking be the guy she needs him to be? Doesn't he know how hard this is??

The realisation that, if Carl is by the fence, then it's probably because they were concerned that Grace might actually outrun the guards and would need to be ambushed. The possibility that Carl specifically is there because, in that scenario, Grace would be more easy to catch if he trusted his pursuer.

Like I think one reason I'm attached to Ryland Grace is that I honestly couldn't tell you that I wouldn't behave like that in that scenario. Like sure, we all like to say we'd bravely sacrifice ourselves for humanity, but like it's not like I'm currently chaining myself to rainforest trees or throwing soup at paintings in museums or kidnapping oil execs or whatever it is I'm supposed to do. I don't even really attend protests.

There are significantly more things that I could be doing right now to make the world a better place that I don't do because they would involve upending my life and putting myself at more personal risk than I am comfortable with. I have no room to judge Ryland Grace.

I mean, just look at how scared he is.

astriiformes

I know the choice to change Stratt from Dutch to German in the film was largely a result of casting Sandra Hüller (who was perfect in the role, so like, I get it) but honestly the more I roll it around in my head the more the politics of it compel me.

Thinking about Stratt--who has such a unique blend of optimism and cynicism, willing to place Earth's hopes in an interstellar mission but approaching making it happen in such a ruthlessly pragmatic way--growing up as a kid in East Germany and living through die Wende and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc is just really politically fascinating. Partly because Stratt herself is so politically fascinating, but there's also something else there, something that speaks to growing up watching protests and upheaval on one side of the Iron Curtain, only to end up working for the extremely international European Space Agency as an adult (and then transition into leading the even more international Petrova Taskforce). In that context, movie!Stratt has seen both human conflict and human cooperation in spades, and I could see it hugely informing her perspective on the Hail Mary mission.

In any case. I'm still chewing on the implications of all this, but like I said, it does really compel me.

buggachat

the best female characters are the ones that online discourse calls annoying and cannot stand. this is a fact sorry. the more hated she is by the online sphere the better her character is sorry

#trinity santos my beloved