Flew Too Close To The Sun

Sometimes I talk about ancient greek stories. Sometimes I write things.

[dogtooth-kyonodontes]

My homosexual audacity is telling me to start learning to weave on a weighted loom ancient greek style

[messymoonmad]

rarely ever send in asks to anyone but needed to say, I recently was scrolling through Itch and found your VN and want to let you know you single handedly sparked a Epic the Musical fixation once more—

And holyyy??? It’s so well done and so pretty to look at and the little mini games make it feel so alive just omg

and also hope you’ve been doing well

Omg thank you 😭😭😭 i really appreciate it !! Im trying my best to work on the next update !

@anachronic-cobra creditting you for writting everything

[dogtooth-kyonodontes]

I'm having emotions about Odysseus and Penelope again. How many times do you think I can write their reunion without getting repetitive, I've already done it multiple times

[dogtooth-kyonodontes]

It's kind of nice to know that even a year and a half later Epic still makes me sob like a baby. Consistently. The Underworld and WYFILWMA are an instant waterfall

[bigidiotenergytm]

I would like to recommend some spicy✨ fics since my writing is- not great.

Hunger is so heavy by HexxBunny and A Feast Fit for a God by Dogtooth_Sunday

The gist?

Thanks to Zeus, Ody’s (remaining) crew fucks him silly.

That is basically the summary of both

ive read these i think (you have fans @dogtooth-kyonodontes XD) tho i also think there should be a version of that where it's post-mutiny and they all find out ody has a cunt but i'm also a freak, so,

[dogtooth-kyonodontes]

Incredible timing as I begin sliding back into an Epic / Odyssey hyperfixation.

And also a prompt relevant to my interests. Gonna put a pin in that

Fun fact, "Feast Fit for a God" was actually my first ever attempt at writing smut, and it was directly inspired by Hunger Is So Heavy

[dogtooth-kyonodontes]

Oh hey my ADHD seems to have circled back to Epic the Musical and the original Odyssey

I'm never getting over none of the suitors questioning why it was taking three years for Penelope to weave a shroud. 108 dumbasses all sitting around like "well that doesn't sound right but idk enough about weaving to dispute it"

[bookie-the-reading-junkie]

– Directors' Commentary, Project Hail Mary (edited slightly)

[somepomegranatetea]

she's platonic about it but in my opinion, stratt 100% treats grace as her dead wife. she keeps a tacky fox trinket in her coat pocket. there's a framed photo of him in her study . he's grinning goofily in it (bc he's a dork). new guy like: is that her husband? / no, dumbass, it's dr. ryland grace, 1/3 of the hail mary mission. / oh, fuck. were they... ? / yeah, it's unclear. black-and-white montages of grace messing around in high-level meetings play every time stratt contemplates committing more environmental crimes. she looks up at the night sky and vaguely wonders if he's enjoying his space ramen. that's her dead wife. she killed him.

[somepomegranatetea]

glad to see we're all on the same page

[pineappical]

cuteness aggression

[foralittlewile]

It is actually nuts how much Grace is canonically liked and likeable in PHM. Obviously there's all the hints about how much the crew like him, but even outside of that, we can see that in his pre-project life, when he wasn't 'important,' people wanted him around! His fellow teachers were asking him to hang out, and he had more friends than just Marissa! Who, by the way, hung out with him every Thursday night (insane amount of consistency for adult friendship tbh) for YEARS. Don't even get me started on how Marissa met him because he was the roommate of a guy she BROKE UP WITH. Imagine staying friends with your college ex-boyfriend's roommate for almost two decades??? To the point that you tell him about a world-changing problem before it's even public, just because it's him.

And even with all of that, he sees himself as alone.

[cowardsexual]

#phm#‘i like to keep a wall up in my relationships’ well other people would like you not to. so how about that.#admittedly i do think we’re supposed to read movie!grace as much more of a loner#(there’s a bunch of little moments like his lonely polaroid and his awkwardness in the karaoke scene that imo are meant to reinforce this)#and that’s the characterisation i prefer to lean on in fics because it suits my purposes#plus if you're writing in first person it's in character for him to *say* he doesn't have a lot of friends#but i also see posts that imply that he’s like. bursting with love and ready to reach out and make friends and form meaningful connections#and that nobody ever met him with that same energy in return before rocky?#and that’s just straight up not true?#other people clearly like grace and want him around and make an effort to reach out to him#it’s just that he only wants to let people in a certain amount and no further.#he likes his boundaries! he likes his clearly defined and fairly superficial relationships!#he describes himself as ‘not a people person’#the distance that exists between him and other people and the reason why he feels alone is largely his doing i'm afraid!#because he is. say it with me guys. a coward.#he's risk averse and scared of getting hurt or being vulnerable and that extends to his interpersonal relationships <3#he reaches out as much as he's comfortable and then scares himself off and retreats!

(tags by @grimark)

[manyblinkinglights]

#I LOOOVE this little moment so much. just as much of a characterisation bombshell as the suicide method talk one#people reach out to him for connection. he shuts them down and assumes they want him around for purely pragmatic reasons#cause that's safe. that's less scary#hashtag mycoward#phm#ryland grace#meta#📖#🎬

[manyblinkinglights]

#like for real. as a guy who has semi frequent spirals about being lonely. and who has also been meaning to message back#their best friend for. checks dates. over a week.#sometimes the problem is you!!!#my hottest phm take is rocky is absolutely not the first person grace has met who he Clicked with#rocky is the first person grace clicked with that he has been forced into inescapable close proximity with#like yes they do have one thing in common that is entirely unique to the two of them#but earth is not hurting for mean sarcastic autistics. grace did a STEM DEGREE.#and then also like. if we contrast rocky and stratt.....#stratt is also holding grace at arm's length. it's mutual#it's not good for either of them. and again it's partly circumstance#they can't be close the whole world is at stake. what a lovely convenient excuse#whereas rocky and grace can't not be close

don’t mind me just archiving. nicking these as well. Yeah he totally clicked with, like, Carl! For one! but the Hail Mary is an extremely fun like uhhhh dubcon middle school pressure vessel proximity device. What if the choice to withdraw and choose yourself was taken away because you were always doing stuff with your friend. Welcome to being besties. Like BEST friends best friends. You can’t not choose them. You’d choose them of course you would but it isn’t a choice and thus isn’t a burden. You’re in a situation and you don’t have to choose your friend. You can’t choose yourself, and you don’t have to choose your friend! They’re just there, and of course you’re friends with them. No effort and no options. Just the reliable constant of being with your best friend…

[dogtooth-kyonodontes]

And on the other end of things, Ryland Grace was loved, on Stratt's Vat. People wanted to spend time with him, they were comfortable with him, they called him their friend.

He makes friends so easily! People enjoy his company! But he only manages to make friends when he isn't thinking about it

But when someone points out that he's close to someone? He has no idea what anyone is talking about. He puts up the wall.

It's also worth noting that in the book, it was Grace's decision to come back to the project after the initial discovery that the Astrophage were water-based. He chose to come back to give his students the best chance of living through adulthood. He wasn't drafted into it. But when someone points out that he's important to Stratt, suddenly it's "I was forced into this just like everyone else".

He's so loved, and he just can't let himself be loved. Because that's scary.

And in the end, being loved wasn't enough to keep them from sending him to his death. So why wouldn't he keep up that wall?

Spending years in close quarters was the only hope he and Rocky had of being truly close

And then, when it comes down to HIM making the "save your friend or save the world" question, he chooses Rocky. He can't know the Earth will be saved with the instructions he leaves, he doesn't expect to ever know. He plans to die of starvation on Erid, with Rocky safe. When he has to make the choice his friends on Earth made, he chooses differently.

[dogtooth-kyonodontes]

Do you think the Eridians even knew the light spectrum existed before Grace

Like, Erid is pitch dark because its atmosphere is too dense to allow light through to the surface, or any other type of radiation for that matter (thus why they didn't know to shield against ionizing radiation on the Blip-A). Nothing on the planet even evolved to have eyes as far as we know.

I'm just imagining it going like

Rocky, brandishing his texture "camera": I invented this to hear the wavelengths of electromagnetic energy Friend Grace can hear with the sensory orbs in his upper carapace

Eridian scientists: ...the WHAT Savior Grace can hear with WHAT

Rocky: also we need to invent something that emits electromagnetic energy of certain wavelengths or he won't be able to navigate his biodome. His "hearing" isn't the same as our hearing, he has several extra senses.

Eridian Scientists: ...tell us EVERYTHING

[dogtooth-kyonodontes]

Actually this is extra funny because Eridians and humans have practically no senses in common. TECHNICALLY hearing, but only because they have different processes for recognizing sound waves that happen to result in the same information gained (in the same range of frequencies).

Eridians do not have senses of sight, taste, or smell, and their sense of touch is limited through their carapace (though presumably they feel touch beneath it and in their internal systems considering they can feel pain). Humans do not sense magnetic fields to navigate.

Scientists: what do you MEAN they have several extra senses

Rocky: okay so I had to invent a lot of new words so you're going to have to bear with me for a bit here

[dogtooth-kyonodontes]

Health has me a bit flat again but I AM still working on Hawthorn and Rye chapter 1

[desire-mona]

seriously one of my fav rocky fanart tendencies is when he just looks like this

[stressed-depressed-cat-obsessed]

I was a phm movie fan first and I thought the aroace grace headcanon was because of how the movie is so much about friendship and unlike so many other pieces of media doesn't put a focus on romantic relationships and shows that you don't need that to be a complete person, but I just finished the book and, without spoilers, I gotta say, wow, there's so much more to this theory because grace really is just Like That

[shrugsinchinese]

Spite, the great motivator

[puppetmaster55]

suddenly thinking about the courtroom scene, of Stratt being accused of pirating literally everything, and Grace later having everything in the various computers aboard his ship that he gave a copy to Rocky without issue, and the beetles having such a massive memory capacity and...

Stratt was a historian. She wasn't just pirating for the sake of entertainment for the astronauts, she was doing a full historical backup of the planet. Who knows how much knowledge and communications ability, how much art and culture and history, how much niche knowledge of how to make specific pieces of modern technology or modern medicines, was lost as the wars for resources isolated everyone, as the death tolls led to the deaths of specialized trade workers and scientists, as the power grids failing across the planet (or cut off, potentially) led to all the cloud servers going dark. Stratt was facing methods of combating extinction and she did her best to ensure that if/when the Hail Mary worked, it would send back not just the hope of the future in the solution to the astrophage, but the restoration of history and culture and knowledge.

Just.... she pirated everything, and put it all on the Hail Mary.

[dogtooth-kyonodontes]

This is going to be a very serious, long, slowburn multi-chapter fic and it's not going to be easy for anyone onboard the Hail Mary

Some themes and character arcs that I want to include in my Iron Lung/PHM fic "Hawthorn and Rye":

Cosmic body dysmorphia

Former child soldier Simon

Coping with relative freedom after growing up in a cult and being imprisoned for half your life

Coping with miraculously escaping your former situation only to be trapped in an entirely new way where there's no one to blame for the lack of escape

Shaken belief systems and faith

Rocky's trauma after 46 years alone in space

Rocky and Grace codependency

Gray-ace Grace struggling to understand relationships of any kind, platonic or otherwise

Queerplatonic Grace/Simon

Queerplatonic Grace/Rocky

Both of these queerplatonic relationships will differ wildly

Trust issues

Problems revolving around being trapped on a spaceship with someone you don't trust

Simon with trauma-induced psychosis

Grace's impending starvation and how Simon's presence on the ship affects that already precarious situation

Grace's imposter syndrome and poor self-esteem

Grace coping with the ways humanity has failed him in life

Hope and healing in spite of it all

So much more I have been putting way too much thought into it