Everyone get excited for aroace touch averse Ryland Grace! And the many misunderstandings that come from that!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Summary:
While researching human needs Rocky learns about touch starvation and the importance of touching for humans. Worried for Grace's well-being, Rocky plans several different ways to provide Grace with the touching intimacy he needs to be healthy. Rocky expects to be praised for his initiative and ingenuity, but instead Grace's reaction is…concerning.
I realize that as I’ve been imagining a human hug, I’ve actually stressed myself out a little. I can’t help but frown and slightly grimace at the thought. This can’t be normal. Humans enjoy touching! Imagining a hug should be pleasant. It should reduce stress.
I'm already planning out the PHM fic I'm going to write after my current one and I'm so excited to have it set in micro gravity. I'm doing the trip back to Erid, but using the nerdy headcanon that they have to do a thrust phase (acceleration), coast phase, thrust phase (deceleration) due to limited fuel.
So far I'm just joyfully compiling a list of resources about how deeply bad for health long-term exposure to micro gravity is. Everyone in the notes of my post explaining the Hail Mary thrust config were like "Well I'll just assume it's zero G for the trip to Erid because that's easier." Hahahaha ABSOLUTELY NOT. Easier??
With years of micro gravity Grace has to worry about muscle atrophy, bone demineralization, possible degraded vision, impaired cardiovascular function, and re-distribution of fluids to the upper parts of his body. Source
So excited to give Grace a stuffy nose for several full years.
The only good way to stave off the worst of those effects is to do intense daily exercise (like 2 full hours lifting and cardio). Grace has none of the specialized equipment to do that in micro gravity! So Rocky's definitely going to have to build him a stationary bike and some weird resistance exercise set up.
Just some Things(tm) that occurred to me, knowing that Grace taught in Middle School (as someone who works with middle schoolers):
The students ABSOLUTELY gave him a nickname. If you are a well-liked teacher in a middle school, the students are giving you a dumb fucking nickname (I would come up with some examples, but the nicknames are 1. Never logical and 2. Almost never that related to your actual name. So I could say they called him Professor Tuna and yall would just have to believe me on this one)
Additionally: if PHM takes place in the semi-present, a student DEFINITELY made one of those pink flags with Grace's face on it.
I am absolutely sure Grace would be the kind of teacher who had classroom memes--ones that only the students in his class would know, and would confuse the other teachers in the building and annoy the students who hadn't had him in class yet
Have you seen those tiktoks where teachers share how they ragebait their students with their lame jokes? That's Dr. Ryland Grace to a T
However I can also see Grace being the kind of teacher who demands to be in on the gossip whenever he overhears it, and gives the kids sappy advice to get them to make up with their friends
As a young, single, childless teacher, he definitely got volun-told to chaperone all of the dances and events throughout the year. I am sure he would come dressed in something (appropriate, gotta keep that job) but also a little silly to make the kids cringe on purpose
He probably had a line form at the end of every school year of students waiting to have him sign their yearbook. It probably only ever became a line because he would write a personalized message to each kid.
Grace was probably the kind of teacher who made sitting through staff meetings bearable OR the one who always made the staff meetings go over time with all of his questions
I fully believe Grace did a Transition to Teaching program after being laughed out of academia for his dissertation, so I can just imagine him as a first year teacher being like "....a 5-0-what? What is a TOR?" (cut to frantically making flash cards to keep track of all the new terms)
Just cuz I want to make myself sad: I bet, after being out in space for a while and getting some of his memories back, Grace remembers his last group of 8th graders, and realizing how much time has passed, makes himself cry thinking about the fact that they have probably graduated high school by now. He can't help but wonder what colleges they are applying to, and if they still have the same dreams for the future that they did when he knew them. He wonders if he can save the earth in time for them to see those futures.
If you want to blog about phm you should be required to make at least 5 Rocky posts a day. You can’t be a phm blogger and just post about Grace. Drop and give me 15 things you love about Rocky and they MUST be genuine. I can tell.
okay so imagine after a couple years on erid, eridian scientists start trying to make fabric that grace can safely wear. some of his clothes are getting worn out at this point, his weight fluctuations mean that not everything from the hail mary fits him, and in general they just want to make sure he's comfortable. they know that the visual appearance of clothing is quite important to humans (he comments on the mottled color of rocky's clothing in the book) so they use a camera gun like rocky's to make sure they're keeping the colors consistent and to grace's tastes.
cue the leader of the human-safe textiles team showing up to the biodome to gift grace new outfits. he's all excited to see what eridian fabric will feel like and to get to try on some new clothes and... huh.
"thank you! wow! these are so great." he coughs awkwardly. "um, but they're all... translucent?"
the team leader jazz-hands happily. "yes, made them to fit savior grace's preferences! you wanted clear materials for your biodome, so we tried to replicate that. we couldn't make them completely see-through, my apologies."
"no, yeah, it's just..." grace side-eyes rocky, hoping for support, but rocky remains silent. "it's nothing. i love them. um, maybe some non-translucent options could be good, though. just... for variety."
"understood! i'll bring some next time." the team leader taps their claws, then says, "aren't you going to try them on?"
another glance at rocky, this one more desperate. rocky is doing the eridian equivalent of a smug little smirk, the asshole.
grace knows that, logically, this shouldn't bother him — the eridians can already hear through his clothes (and his skin, and his muscles) at all times anyways — but there's still blush creeping across his cheeks as he changes into a set of gauzy clothes. they're made of multiple layers of thin fabric, no doubt because they couldn't achieve the see-through look on something thicker, that drape over him in a deceptively delicate way. jesus, they've even made him fucking see-through underwear.
when he goes back out to do a little walk and twirl for the team leader, rocky wolf-whistles.
the thing with aroace grace headcanons is like. i can totally see it. it’s not what i’m most interested in because my hobby happens to be writing romantic drama and pornography, but i can see it. it’s my runner-up headcanon for sure. but. he doesn’t identify that way. he instinctively flinches away from anything that even implies hes anything other than a perfectly normal heterosexual man who has all his shit completely figured out. he doesn’t identify using that phrase, and if someone explained it to him, i don’t think he’d identify with the concept, either. he’d be like “that sounds awesome! that’s not me though, i fulfilled the Normal Girlfriend Experience shortly after college. didn’t work out but i’ll probably find someone i mean a woman specifically who i click with one of these days, and then we’ll have sex and get married or whatever it is you’re supposed to do.” and then he’d just blithely go on not thinking about it. he’s a school teacher in san francisco in the 2020s, he’s on the front lines of the culture wars whether he likes it or not, he knows what pronouns are, he may very plausibly know the words “aromantic” and “asexual” but it has never in his life occurred to him to apply those to himself. and it quite possibly never will. he’s not particularly introspective and he absolutely does not have the level of self-insight required to understand why he’s only had one long-term relationship in his life, and why it ended so fucking badly. not solely due to his orientation you understand, but also due to his various flaws as a person. where was i going with this. oh yeah. i need everyone to make this guy more repressed right now immediately.
rocky should be naked: an anthropological treatise
something maybe controversial that has been driving me BONKERS since the project hail mary book first came out that i finally just had to dig into my anthropology MA to bitch about:
it's fucking batshit that andy weir wrote the eridians as wearing clothes. there is no reason that eridians would ever develop something akin to human clothing.
like. do you know how long humans (not just hairy early hominin relatives of our, but straight-up anatomically modern homo sapiens) were rocking nothing but our birthday suits? LIKE NINETY THOUSAND FUCKING YEARS. HUMANS HAVE BEEN NAKED ALMOST THE WHOLE TIME WE'VE BEEN HUMANS, and we're famously leaky hairless apes, not hard-carapaced crab spiders with piston joints who live in boiling ammonia.
listen to me. the first hairless hominin was homo erectus, about 1.6mya. naked. anatomically modern humans like us evolved 350-270,000 years ago. also naked. when do we first have solid evidence for consistent human use of clothing (bc it's when the clothing lice genome evolves to diverge from the head lice genome lol)? only 170,000-83,000 years ago. before that? BUCKASS NAKED. and even when we did start using clothing? well, as we know from excellent textile archeologists such as elizabeth wayland barber, a LOT of early human clothing was likely more decorative than functional – i.e. the string skirts that you see on some of the 'venus figures' from the upper paleolithic, which were solely decorative but would NOT do anything for warmth.
now consider eridians, whose bodies are functionally impenetrable unless they're actively eating (which is a private activity anyhow), who are carnivores (thus having no need to cultivate plants – aka the source of most textiles – like humans do), who live on a planet with no sun exposure (so probably nothing like earth plants anyways) and no fucking seasons (no need for rain/snow protection!), who evolved to exist ONLY in very specific & stable temperature ranges (like most life on erid, per andy weir), who have five fucking hands to hold things, are famously so good at multitasking that doing just one activity sucks for them, and CANNOT FUCKING SEE!!!
so where the FUCK is eridians' evolutionary or social impetus to develop ANYTHING akin to clothing supposedly coming from? N O W H E R E. you heard me.
decoration like the celebration jewelry, absolutely – though notice that was clearly designed for its auditory qualities and ability to show up on sonar, not anything approaching the level of coverage that human clothing has. rocky's engineering lederhosen (leather! bc again, carnivores!) as a (evolutionarily speaking) modern development to help hold tools, yeah, totally. carapace carvings, 100%.
BUT THERE IS NO FUCKING REASON FOR THAT ROCK TO WEAR A SHIRT. in fact, it's way the fuck weirder that he DOES wear a shirt in the book! the movie was completely right to have a buckass naked rocky, there is no goddamn reason eridians would ever develop clothing, and the idea of a five-legged spider rock trying to put on a sleeved shirt makes me want to have a stroke. thank you for coming to my ted talk.
As much as I like the headcanon that Rocky, specifically, has been running around naked because he kind of went crazy after being alone on a spaceship for decades, didn't bother putting a shirt on for first contact, and then had to double down on it, you are correct.
With the addition that I think their echolocation can just go through clothing anyway? And that if their clothing was a material that blocked or scattered sound enough to not be effectively transparent to other eridians, isn't their sense of hearing distributed across their whole body surface so they'd be effectively "blindfolding" themselves?
Got to talk with my friend about the PHM commission and am soooo psyched. I really want something spacey and aesthetic, but my friend specializes in portraiture. So she was asking if I want a landscape-style piece featuring planet Adrian or something focused on Grace&Rocky. I was like...hmmm. Maybe two pieces that hang next to each other and compliment?
That's what we are going with! It's going to be pricey because the physical art needs to be shipped halfway across the world, but so worth it. Ugh! I can't wait to see the initial sketches!!
You can't have a character with significant scarring and not give them the non visual aspects ot scarring (numbness, chronic pain, mobility issues, itching, temperature disregulation, etc.), thats just disability erasure
Do you think poems on Erid are recited multiple lines at once and their version of "rhyming" is picking words that make nice chords/rhythm while being spoken concurrently?
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