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.
things in phm that really tickled me as a marine biologist:
the concept of star-eating microbes causing a crisis and the solution being the introduction of space wolves to space yellowstone to control the space elk population. i love a good trophic cascade
dr ryland grace immediately pitching "turn the spaceship into a giant centrifuge to generate gravity" and then not balancing his actual centrifuge later on
the entire "life is reason" scene really
grace forgetting to open the mystery alien container in a fume hood AND immediately sticking his nose in it. if we did this in chemistry lab we were executed on the spot
academia drama being one of the cornerstones of grace's character
grace switching through every spectrum setting on the microscope to try to see into the astrophages and not being able to (relatable)
also: the astrophage dying and grace going "ohhh it died..." (very relatable)
grace having his not-scientist buddy Carl to give him frank solutions when he's overthinking. yes, often the solution is just to put the box in another box
copious duct tape usage
just sticking a filter into the path of the petrova line to collect astrophage goop
eva going "so it's alive" when grace tells them the astrophage are moving, and him being like "WELL ok that could be for a lot of reasons" in the tone of someone who doesn't even know where to start explaining why that's a hasty assumption
grace referring to the first new astrophage as his and carl's baby multiple times (HIGHLY relatable)
humanity's greatest hope being a teacher. humanity being saved by grace's ability to find novel ways to communicate well with others -- something that made him excellent as an educator, and enabled him to bond with rocky
See the thing about Stratt putting all media ever in the Hail Mary is that it isnāt just for lolz or to keep the crew entertained, it always struck me as something deeply sad.
Because even if all the crew survived, there was no way they could consume all possible media ever, language barriers alone would present a problem. And even then, they had a job to do and focus on first (which could have theoretically taken decades of work to figure out) so they wouldnāt have much use for The Great Gatsby or a weekās worth of poorly written amateur Guatemalan experimental opera. Let us remember that Stratt is practical and true utilitarian
Instead, I think it was another part of the Hail Mary. If the scientists failed, if the Earth died, then what? Everything would have been completely lost. Art, music, film, history. Destroyed. Without a single living soul to remember it by. It would be as if all of humanity had never existed.
But if it survived? If other alien civilizations discovered traces of humanity? Then the memory of mankind could live on and be remembered.
What better way to do that than to send everything (literally everything, the art, the music, the science, the history) out as far as humanly possible so that it might connect with someone else in the universe? It would be a long shot, a Hail Mary, but it was the best chance that humanity had to be remembered
What's it like for Qifrey to feel the Silverwood curse?
We first learn about him when he tells Coco. He explains that "secrets are a heavy burden, and nothing brings more relief than letting them go"
But he didn't always know what he was. Yet he could feel something was wrong. Something different twisted inside him. If we focus on his experiences and facial expressions as he learns about it, we can learn a lot.
Here's the first time. He was drowning. Literally, obviously, but also metaphorically. He's got no friends, no memories, nothing. Olruggio saves him. Olruggio holds him tight. He lets out a sigh. He feels safe. And there's the tree.
This next one I broke up into a few key points. I see people dwell on the hand reaching memory flashback, and they interpret this as a wholly terrifying experience, but I disagree.
Beldaruit is playful, kind, and praising Qifrey. There's no tree motif of telltale krrrk sound, but Qifrey says it happened again. He recognizes the feeling.
And then he smiles. He brings his hand up to where beldaruit touched him, and he smiles. He says it wasn't upsetting AT ALL.
Next, he tries to describe it to Olruggio. When people are nice to him, it makes him feel uncomfortable. There's the tree in the background but he doesn't look scared.
And here, no one is touching him, praising him, etc. Olruggio is there, but mostly just listening. This is Qifrey. Saying he's never even thought about the future. Thinking he never thought he'd get the chance to consider what comes next. He could settle down, in a place like this, under the stars, with Olruggio by his side. And there's the feeling.
This one is abstract, because we are between flashbacks here. Qifrey is remembering Olruggio, the only person who doesn't care about his past, who sees him for who he is now. Olruggio, bright eyes and smiling, promising to always be his best friend. He is narrating how he got too entangled with Olruggio. He views Olruggio as the best thing in his life, and with the benefit of hindsight, he views himself as the worst thing for Olruggio.
We see Qifrey's outstretched hand, covered in tree growth. I believe this to be metaphorically. Because it's adult Qifrey's hand, but when we fully transition back to the present day, he has his hand clenched on his lap. No tree growth that we can see. He wants to reach out to Olruggio. Olruggio is sleeping beside him, but Qifrey has to keep him so far away.
The memory has affected him. It creeps through his body, emerging from his scars and threatening to take over. He has to take action. He tries one of his coping skills, physical discomfort. He wades into the cold lake, letting the water he hates surround him.
And then he moves on to mental anguish. It isn't enough to feel uncomfortable. He tortures himself to recall what happened that day. At the tower. The day he found out who he was. The day he ruined Olruggio's life.
It has just occurred to me that most people don't have a super solid grasp of how languages work, especially when compared to one another, and that this means most people aren't aware of why Rocky's speech patterns are the way they are in PHM. To those who've only watched the film, it should be noted that the linguistics are more detailed in the book, but even still, it's highly likely that most readers of the book don't know enough about linguistics to fill in the gaps left by Weir. And that's why I'm here! Let your local linguistics enthusiast fill the gaps for you.
Break for the Dashā¢
I've seen people assume that the way Rocky speaks is a quirk of Eridian just being a simple language. While yes, that could be true to an extent, both the film and especially the book make it very clear that Rocky only speaks in stilted, broken sentences because of the language barrier. By the end, he speaks perfectly clearly in complete sentences with humour and sarcasm and natural sounding exclamations. Grace is at that point fluent and understands all the nuances.
This leads to the first hurdle of Rocky's in communicating with Grace in the beginning: Grace is stupid. He's not but to someone from a species that has the auditory equivalent of photographic memory (I don't think this is mentioned in the film but it is in the book), Grace's lack of such makes it difficult to share a language quickly. Grace needs spreadsheets, audio synthesis software, coding, text-to-speech in the film because he can only "hear" (read: see) in one direction at a time. He's functionally disabled to Rocky. Rocky therefore accomodates him which is very sweet. Here's a list of ways in which Rocky is most likely altering his language use for Grace's benefit:
He speaks clearly.
It's mentioned in the book that at one point Grace's translation software (which he programmed himself for all the only-film fans) fails to translate a sentence of Rocky's. Grace is confused and confirms that the software is fully functioning. He realises that the issue is the pitch. Rocky's voice dropped an octave. When he shifts it back into the range the software recognises, it's perfectly translated. This means Rocky must constantly be keeping his inflection and pitch extremely steady and repetitive so that Grace's computer can keep up.
There's an argument to be made that Eridian might just be like that, but knowing what we know about it (pitch change for emotion, it being a highly auditorily complex language made of musical chords, most likely created from at least five sets of whatever equivalent of vocal chords Eridians have, etc.), I find it highly unlikely that Eridian would be so even.
It's much more likely that super genius Rocky, despite never having seen a computer before, quickly realised that it couldn't keep up with those variations without serious programming that Grace isn't good enough at coding to do or manually entering every variation of a word. It's simpler to just speak evenly. And clearly, any mumbling would be a nightmare for the computer to pick apart.
He uses words he knows Grace knows.
Obviously he sometimes needs to use words Grace is unfamiliar with and then they're added to the translator, but have you ever tried to speak your native language to a novice speaker and limit your language to the words they know? It's way harder than it sounds. You naturally fall into expressions and phrases and words etc. that you use with other native speakers, and you often have to repeat yourself with altered versions of the original sentences because you accidentally used words the novice speaker didn't know.
And Grace has a serious ear for language, like, the speed at which he picks up "Eridian" (I'll get to that) in the book is startling. But he's also human and learning an alien language based on nothing but gestures and their simple shared vocabulary. Rocky must be spending a lot of energy keeping himself from simply speaking Eridian as he usually does so that the computer can keep up and Grace too.
His infallible memory definitely helps him remember what words Grace knows, but language is habit, it's a muscle and you don't think about the individual words when you speak. You just have a thought and it turns into words automatically. Eridians either don't have this automisation of repeated tasks in the way humans do, or Rocky is working overtime to keep his speech in check.
He speaks in English in Eridian.
This is the big one. Most users on the English speaking internet are native English speakers and, knowing English speaking countries, most likely don't speak more than one language fluently (not an insult, just a statistic, that's just how it is when the entire world speaks your native language). It's therefore completely understandable that this part of Rocky's accommodation of Grace's slower learning went over most fans on this part of the internet's heads. And as someone from a part of the world where speaking two to three languages is standard, I still imagine it went over most of the people in my area's heads too because most people don't think about linguistics all the time like me.
Anyway, to put it simply, translation is fucking hard. It seems simple, especially if you don't speak more than one, but it's not. Even highly related languages can end up nigh in comprehensible if you translate them directly into one another. The less related the languages are, the worse it gets. A lot of things cannot be translated directly because those types of words simply don't exist in the other language.
Take Japanese. In a super simple basic beginner level Japanese sentence like "watashi no namae wa jon desu", you'd still struggle to translate it. And this is, like, almost comically expansive for how Japanese people actually speak in their daily lives. A causal, fluent Japanese sentence would be nonsense in English. Even this simple basic sentense would translate directly as something like "I my name about John is".
The reason it's so weird is because Japanese uses particles to denote the roles of words in sentences, a lingustic concept that English doesn't have. Here "no" is possessive and indicates that the subject in front of it is the owner of what follows. English doesn't have anything even close to that type of structure and it can be really difficult for an English speaker to wrap their head around the sentence structure of Japanese when learning to speak it, not because they don't understand, but because constructing a sentence like that is so foreign. It takes a lot of mental effort to rewire your brain like that.
Now imagine speaking English with Japanese sentence structure. Imagine doing that and never slipping into real English sentence structure because then your poor Japanese novice English speaker friend won't understand a word. It's not "my name is John", it's "I name John is" and that's giving you the benefit of not having to find replacements for the particles. That would be impossible.
Now imagine you've met a literal alien species and have to start speaking English with alien language sentence structure. I cannot even begin to explain how wildly different Eridian and English likely are in every single way. Hell, they're so different that they're literally unpronouncable to the non-native speaker. And Rocky speaks Eridian with English sentence structure. It's explicitly pointed out in the book. And he does this flawlessly. Never slips up in any scene we get to see. I cannot begin to communicate the mental effort that would take for a human to do. Either all Eridians are crazy good at language or Rocky is just a turbo mega genius at it. Which is honestly not at all out of the realm of possibility.
All of this is to say that Rocky doesn't speak the way he does because that's just Eridian, that would be highly unlikely. He speaks the way he does because the language barrier is THICK and he's putting his entire rocky ass into making it thinner. It's less clear in the film, untouched as far as I remember, but in the book his speech becomes more nuanced as the story progresses. He uses more articles, more pronouns, more conjunctions, constructs more complex sentences, etc. As Grace learns more words and more about how Eridian as a language works, Rocky is fittingly upping the complexity of his speech.
It's never touched on but I have no doubt they spent many an evening (I know, I know, space, let me have this) talking about how Eridian expresses common English phrases and how to say this and that etc. etc. I'm probably the only person who'd find a long ass fic of just them discussing Eridian linguistic concepts and constructs interesting but hey, that's the nerd in me. I am the one writing this post, no one is suprised.
SO, anyway, to summarise, Rocky does a LOT of work to make his speech understandable to Grace. Grace starts to learn Eridian while they're still at Tau Ceti (not made clear in the film but is in the book) but he learns Rocky's frankensteined Eridienglish rather than real Eridian. I bet a lot of the trip to Erid was spent fixing Grace's understanding of Eridian so that he'd understand real Eridian.
By the time we pick back up with them in the biodome 16 years after arrival on Erid, Grace is fully fluent, meaning he must've already done all the hard work to learn proper Eridian which is unsurprising. He's a scientist, there's no way he'd accept just learning Eridienglish and never understanding any other Eridians than Rocky. Gotta be able to catch all the juicy gossip (what new science is being done and how to convince Rocky to convince the science Eridians to let him be part of it).
Anyway, that's my long ramble about why Rocky is a damn trooper and deserves so many accolades for how hard he worked to help bridge the language gap. Rocky is canonically super smart and I need people to see how that also applies to his language use. I love this rock <3
Not my fandom, not my monkeys, but this is fascinating to me because I have never understood and do not like tone indicators like "/hj" but even having never seen the movie or read the book, just based on dash osmosis, I naturally started using "question?" and "statement" at the end of sentences in places I thought needed more clarity, and I knew none of this. I thought they understood each other through movie magic or something. The fact one of them is actively compensating for a linguistic void never even occurred to me.
It's very cool! The film does handwave a lot of the linguistics and it bothers me somewhat, but because I've read the book where the linguistics are significantly more thorough, I can live with it. I watched the film first though and cringed a little at how quickly they gloss over it because I just KNEW most people wouldn't have the linguistics knowledge to understand and fill in those gaps and such. OH AND YES, I actually forgot to mention! Rocky's use of endings like "question" is theorised by Grace in the book to be his Eridian bleeding through, much like how Japanese appends "ka" to statements to turn them into questions. It's never clarified whether Grace is right or if this is another clarity measure taken by Rocky independently to make sure Grace can read his tone, but it's fascinating nonetheless. Glad I could add to your knowledge about this wonderful story! :D
That was sort of my assumption, that it was Rocky's "accent," for lack of a better word. But, well, as I said on Discord and legitimately want to ask theshitpostcalligrapher to do sometime:
And that said, I was literally on Rednote yesterday explaining the difference between Chinese tones and English tones, so....I feel you.
āyou need to get a better pet and some better gearā
For your information, this pet is an important character in the fanfiction Iāll probably never share with anyone, and the gear I have on fits my characterās aesthetic
hearing anything about the nolan odyssey is so funny. it's like "they cut the extremely important and infamous nobody scene" "the cyclops is a giant puppet that they put in an actual historical cave + gave circe animatronics for her pig transformation instead of cgi" "they dumped plastic skeletons in an environmentally protected location they were not supposed to be in" "they recreated ancient greek instruments in order to have an accurate score" "all of odysseus's agency is basically gone" "anne hathaway actually learned how to weave ancient looms" "the women in this movie are treated like shit" "they actually buried actors alive to get those underworld shots" "did you see what the fuck zendaya was fucking wearing holy shit you can't DO THAT, MA'AM" "what do you mean there was a legitimate epic the musical reference" "NOT A SINGLE FUCKING GREEK WAS CAST IN THIS MOVIE"
like did nolan have two guys standing at his side at all times whispering ideas in his ear and one told the truth and the other told lies and they didnt tell him which was which until they wrapped production cause
Obsessed with Qifrey because what we see of him is 50% him being the best most kindest teacher and 40% a suspicious and desperate wildcard. But very rarely, just 10% of the time, we get to see him when heās not being a teacher or being around his friends and family and not being a witch at the scene of a disaster, and heās like, the most bitchy and hateful creature. Guy who is sick of being in a space. Acting in a way that makes you go āah, that small withdrawn child grew up into a withdrawn adult who is just barely better at hiding itā. Obssessed. Guy of all time.
Even after Caine is dead and the goofy child-friendly censors are gone, Jax recreates them inside her mind. It's comforting, familiar, a confirmation that she's just a cartoon character in a cartoon world and nothing she says or does or is matters.
