he/she/they. adult. main lichenbitch. 18+ recommended to follow
my fic [active WIP, E] fic/writing extras
organizational tags
#PHM art • #gifs • #my gifs • #PHM faves • #PHM laughs • #PHM costumes • #sci fi art • #PHM thoughts • [#PHM rockland and #gracerocky] • [#PHM rocklandrian and #rocklandrian and #grace/rocky/adrian]
^ [# ship tags] to filter if you don't like!
[#my fave gosling] = hockey liveblogging tag (GO PWHL VICTOIRE!! I <3 Nicole Gosling!)
More below the cut about some of my specific interests and other fandoms
I've been into Grace/Rocky(/Adrian) since 2023 after reading the book. I sincerely respect ALL headcanons and ideas and interpretations and other ships and fellow fans! Please do the same.
Other sci-fi I like...
Movies - Contact (1997; my childhood favorite and intro to science and sci-fi), Arrival, Alien franchise, Star Wars, War of the Worlds, Nope
TV - The X Files, Firefly, Doctor Who (classic, 9, 10, & 13 especially)
Books - A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet; The Left Hand of Darkness (reading more Le Guin next)
"Women are warm and nurturing and they have powerful intuitions!" is benevolent sexism. Benevolent sexism upholds misogyny by praising women for things women are "supposed" to be good at and romanticizing roles women are "supposed" to play under a patriarchal system.
Also, like, benevolent sexist stereotypes are definitely used to make those who don't fit them feel like failures as women (especially queer women/trans women/woc/neurodivergent women/etc).
And on the flip side, they're also used to deny women who are skilled at those things credit for their accomplishments. It's easy for people to dismiss an excellent childcare worker when her "~magical gender intuition makes her naturally good at it~".
“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”
When Grace starts the "WHO AM I?" board, he writes "Carl... (foggy)", but when we come back to it at the end (before he's started erasing it to plan out going back to Rocky) it says "Carl... (fog )".
I think there's a pretty obvious gap, and nothing surrounding it has been rubbed off. The last two letters of "foggy" have been intentionally erased.
The marine layer (fog) that hangs over the San Francisco Bay Area is named Karl. Seriously, a significant portion of Bay Area residents (especially millenial or younger) call the fog "Karl" in casual conversation. All the time. I've heard it. It is very confusing at first.
I don't think Grace ever remembered Carl well enough to be certain he existed. He erased the "-gy" in "foggy" because he thought maybe he was just thinking of the fog. He likes the fog. He still doesn't remember having one single true friend on Earth. He likes the fog.
Grace and Rocky, giving a tour of the Hail Mary to fascinated Eridian scientists and diplomats.
Pointing at things and explaining what they are and how the ship works, lots of awed and appreciative noises are made.
Until one of the visiting Eridians points out a specific item. “And that?”
It’s a strange, circular thing, a xenonite disk mounted upright on some sort of pivot so it can spin freely, but around the edges it has… spokes? Pegs? Sticking out of it, that hit against a stiff flap that would slow down the spinning.
It is also separated into sections decorated with crude etchings of a human and an Eridian.
“Ah,” Grace says.
“That,” Rocky says.
“That’s. Um.” Grace seems somewhat embarrassed. “That’s the sacrifice wheel.”
The Eridian visitors clearly do not know what to make of that. “We think we misunderstood Savior Grace’s word,” they say, apparently hoping this is a vocabulary mix-up. “Explain (question, polite)?”
“Didn’t misunderstand,” says Rocky, sounding very sheepish. “That is sacrifice wheel.”
“So. While we were on our way to Erid, we might have gotten… anxious about each other’s well-being,” Grace says, which everyone is already very aware is a wild understatement. “And, well, you heard what happened at Tau Ceti, and after. There were a lot of unexpected dangers for the whole trip that required a lot of, at least, attempted self-sacrifice to solve. We ended up almost dying for each other several times. And we had an argument about what we’d do if another crisis like that came up. And we couldn't agree.”
“Grace argued that Grace already was unlikely to survive long-term on Erid, so he should be the one to do any potential deadly but necessary maneuvers to make sure I was able to bring taumoeba back,” Rocky says.
“Which made sense.”
“Did not make sense! Grace already sacrificed so much for me and for Erid, wouldn’t be fair to make you do it again—“ Rocky cuts himself off with a huff. They have obviously had this conversation before. “So sacrifice wheel was compromise.”
“Yeah,” Grace says. He spins it to demonstrate; it whirls around in a blur and a rattle of the flap hitting the pegs, then eventually slows down, and stops—pointing at the segment depicting a very bad but very clear image of an Eridian. “Rocky made the wheel, I spin the wheel, and whoever it lands on, that’s who gets to sacrifice themself to save the other and the other person does not get to argue. This way, we wouldn’t waste time debating who does the self-sacrifice and who survives, it’s just a plain fifty-fifty chance. Or, eighteen-eighteen chance in base six. But the point is it could be either of us and we would have to accept the outcome.”
Rocky started fidgeting while Grace was explaining. When Grace finishes, proud of the equitable solution they came up with to allow them to die for each other fairly, Rocky says, “Now that we are back and we don’t need sacrifice wheel anymore… I have confession to make. About the wheel.”
“What about the wheel?”
Rocky doesn’t answer. Grace frowns, first confused, then suspicious, and spins the wheel again.
It lands on Rocky again.
He spins the wheel again, and again, and again, and it lands on Rocky every single time.
“Rocky!”
“I weighted the wheel,” Rocky admits.
“Rocky the whole point was that it was equal, that was why we even made it—“
“Never was necessary so doesn’t matter anymore!”
“But you WOULD have!”
“And you never noticed because you were hungry and cranky and distracted and so would have done bad job on heroic self-sacrifice anyway!”
“I would not! I would have done fine!”
(The Eridian scientists and diplomats are still here watching this btw. Slowly dawning on them that 1) these two are extremely not normal about each other 2) if Erid ever does another space mission they NEED to send a therapist aboard because this is what happens when they don’t)
i wanna see more of rocky calling grace pet names that grace doesn't understand and nobody can call rocky on it cause there's no other eridians on the hail mary. and then once they touch down on erid someone overhears rocky calling grace the eridian version of "baby", freaks the fuck out, and starts spreading rumors. and suddenly all manner of eridians are asking grace about his and rocky's big intergalactic love story, meanwhile grace has been pining from - well, not afar, pretty up close actually - for the better part of five years. and you're telling him him and rocky have apparently been romantically involved this whole time?!
*takes a bite of my cigarette*...... heh. the character...... *walks into a small puddle but it swallows me up like the ocean* *i am found dead years later in maine*
Concept: Grace makes a paper "thank-you card" for Stratt that and sends it on an autonomous craft from Erid not long after landing there, along with scientific information and gifts and stuff from the people of Erid. It says:
Stratt,
Thanks for stealing my life from me.
Found a pretty decent new one, if you were wondering.
x Grace
And it has several Polaroids in it (Ilyukhina brought a Polaroid camera, obviously, she is a cutesy millennial) of his friends and his biodome on Erid.
One of them is a shirtless selfie with Adrian and Rocky and it's like. It's just vague enough she can't tell why. Maybe it's super super hot, even in his biodome?? Maybe all his shirts are torn already? But it also looks sorta... not very platonic? So she'll have to wonder, for the rest of her life: is Grace up there, 16 light-years away, orbiting 40-Eridani, having sex with aliens? Making a whole lotta different kinds of First Contact? And she will never get an answer :)
Legitimately forgot the Polaroid thing was never actually in my fic until I said "Ilyukhina's Polaroid camera" in chapter 14 😅 so let's just say this post is canon as of chapter 13
Contemplating forcing elderly movie!Carl and book!Stratt to discuss Dr. Capt. Ryland "Alienfucker(?)" Grace. because of the aforementioned shirtless selfie.
After the beetle probes come back (honestly, probably even before), plenty of things get (re)named after Ryland Grace - Grover Cleveland Middle School becomes Ryland Grace Middle School, obviously, and astronomy/astrobiology buildings on college campuses and STEM scholarships in his name. Astrophage almost certainly gets the scientific name Astrophagus gracei.
Eva Stratt, meanwhile, gets the Eva Stratt Memorial Library (tagline: "she's not dead we just like remembering her") which is not, in fact, a library, it's the predominant hub for internet media piracy. The creators think they're hilarious.
