Fandom stuff, mostly! Including fic & comic recommendations and some of my own rambling. Pretty eclectic at the moment! Includes but is not limited to: Gravity Falls, Good Omens, Hollow Knight, Critical Role, the Magnus Archives, The Penumbra Podcast, TAZ, Undertale, Discworld, AtLA, Homestuck, Steven Universe, MP100, Star Trek, BNHA, etc. My main blog can be found at grumpyoldsnake.tumblr.com.
already kicking the hornet’s nest by criticizing Tolkien today so I may as well praise Steven Universe lmao. I listened to a few of the better songs last night and man that show really grappled with a level of interpersonal emotional complexity that even adult shows rarely handle. at the time all valid criticisms of the show really got lost in the deluge of arguments that boiled down to “it’s bad to depict toxic dynamics between humanized characters who care about each other” which lol.
obviously it was groundbreaking for depicting lesbian relationships and genderfluid characters but it was really quite a nuanced depiction of like. the parentified child forced to bear the burden of emotional intelligence because no one else will or can. Rose as a benevolent antagonist who’s avoidant and inconsiderate to the point of profound cruelty and the frustration of not really being able to have the catharsis of properly hating your mother. everthing going on with pearl lmao. genuinely a very ambitious exploration of what it means to hurt and be hurt by the people you love and the kind of toxic baggage literally everyone carries into their relationships without intending to. didn’t always hit the mark of course but imho it was usually a smarter show than tumblr gives it credit for.
I was a really soft-hearted little kid who cried a lot and liked to play games about making big families and nurturing things, which, since I was a boy, meant I got the shit kicked out of me a lot by other boys for being girly. Boys were supposed to be tough and fight and compete and try to be the best, you see, that's how our imagination games were supposed to go. And that's what media aimed at boys when I was a kid focused on - heroes who beat the shit out of people and are tough and don't cry et cetera et cetera.
And I learned to like that and see the appeal in that, sure. There are lots of stories that were made for an audience of little boys that I ended up liking. But I always wanted something that told me boys like me, who didn't want to be violent or competitive, who liked nurturing things and making friends, who avoided fights whenever allowed, were valid.
So I was really happy when Steven Universe came around and was exactly that - the kind of show a sensitive little boy like I used to be would have killed to see. And very shortly after that I was crushed when the growing criticism of the show repeated the refrain that it was bad mainly because Steven was a pacifist who cried and didn't want to be violent and liked nurturing things and making friends instead of killing people. I wasn't surprised, no, it made perfect sense people would hate it for being that, but I was crushed all the same.
Our society only accepts a very narrow definition of masculinity, and kindness isn't allowed to play a very big role in it. That's one of the reasons I quit it.
Anyway, I'm a daycare teacher now, and one of the kids in my class is a really sensitive little boy with big feelings and a bigger heart, who acts very nurturing to his little 3-D printed dragons, and gets very upset at how mean and rude the other little boys can be when they're trying to prove they're mature and tough. Recently he's been talking to me about a show he found and has fallen in love with called Steven Universe, and I've been delighted to hear him regale me about how much he loves it. I bet it's doing him some real good to see that it's ok for a little boy like him to have a big heart and to want to make friends instead of fight all the time. He's making up his own crystal gem OC too, isn't that nice?
watching s1/2/3 of farscape: oh i get it, while scorpius' torture of john only extends to what we saw on screen with the aurora chair, the violation of his mind and memories is a sci-fi plot device standing in for 'violation' as a concept, and can be applied in a number of ways to represent kinds of violation other than mind-reading, such as sexual assault (which is why the text so often references sexual violence in an oblique way in relation to it). john's jokes about scorpius 'screwing him' or telling him to 'find another girlfriend' show us that he is sometimes processing that violation through a sexual lens, likely related to real-world ideas of power and masculinity and his difficulty confronting his own victimhood. the show links scorpius to the idea of sexual violence to give a sense of real-world threat to his otherwise more abstract sci-fi violation of john's memories.
s4 of farscape: wrong. not a metaphor. here's john getting unambiguously drugged and raped by a woman on screen and saying at least it was better than what scorpius did to him. and a dozen other heavy handed scenes implying scorpius was a straightforward literal rapist in case that wasnt clear enough.
cultural footprint fools you into thinking its silly/quirky/absurd and then you watch it and its very explicitly about sexual violence. seriously why dont people talk about the sexual violence more the central character is a rape victim ik some parts of it are silly but why is this not the main takeaway
Reigen’s whole involvement in the season 1 Claw arc is extremely funny on its own but I’ve decided it’s funniest of all from Teru’s POV.
This man shows up to the cell you’re being detained and Kageyama addresses him as master. Kageyama is already the person Teru holds in highest regard of anyone he’s ever met, and now that boy’s master has walked in the door.
What’s more, Kageyama’s master has entirely fooled the 7th Division of Claw into thinking he is Claw’s boss. Was this high level mind control? Or is Kageyama’s master just an unmatched genius?
This man then scolds Kageyama for using his powers against people (and that’s part of the philosophy that changed Teru’s life! Echoed right back at them.) But! The circumstances were dire! They NEEDED to fight to survive.
And Kageyama’s master seems to understand this. He apologizes to Mob. He then turns on the Claw upper echelon members and scolds them, and fells two of them without even using his powers, which is also in line with the philosophy even if the drop-kick seemed a little violent…
But unfortunately, they don’t listen to reason. They escalate with their psychic powers and the fight is ON.
Sure, Kageyama’s master keeps insisting the kids NOT fight, but Teru is pragmatic! Claw won’t listen! The kids need to fight! KAGEYAMA needs to fight!
But his master keeps refusing. He tells Kageyama to run away. And at that moment one of the Claw members slices Kageyama’s master in half.
And this is bad, this is bad, surely—except, wait. Kageyama’s master stands right back up. He’s fine. He’s more than fine—he’s ANNOYED.
And, one can only assume this is because the master has decided to get serious. Because without breaking a sweat. Without lifting a finger. Without even showing a hint of aggression, he disarms every single Claw terrorist.
And WHILE he’s doing this? He’s yelling at them to grow up! Get a job! Stop being delusional idiots!! One Claw member asks if the master is telling them to go back to being commoners and the master says “No you idiot, you’ve been commoners this entire time. I’M A COMMONER, and I’m more powerful than you, so fucking tell me what that makes you.”
And all the while he’s wielding godlike power like it’s nothing. And Teru is listening to the origin of Mob’s “Our powers don’t make us special. We’re all commoners actually.” philosophy that altered Teru’s life. Right from the source. The master I s yelling about it passionately while disarming elite terrorists with his pinky finger.
So OF COURSE, NATURALLY, this is the man worthy of being Kageyama’s master. Teru understands entirely! This genius of infinite power who could fell nations but instead lives humbly and respectfully as a common man, because even the most elite psychics are not better than anyone else.
I think Teru went home with a new idol crafted in his eyes and Reigen went home going “what the fuck was all that? Well anyway I don’t have Mob’s powers anymore so it doesn’t matter. Why can I see this ghost.”
And this is actually all very unfortunate if Mob, Ritsu, and Teru all hang out. Because Mob will be like “Oh Master Reigen did something really cool today” *proceeds to describe something really lame* and Teru will be nodding and agreeing and hanging on with rapt attention and thinking “Well that all sounds really lame actually but I understand Kageyama is humbly downplaying the accomplishments of his great master.” and Ritsu will be mentally stabbing himself with a spoon.
Also the next time Teru hears anything about this man is when Reigen is being brutally canceled on Twitter for being a fake psychic.
And like. Teru definitely saw Reigen obliterate black holes with the sweep of his hand. That is a thing Reigen did that Teru witnessed. Among other things. Which weren't fake because you Do Not defeat the Claw 7th Division by faking your power.
And yet rather than prove his infinite powers, which exist because Teru saw them, Reigen is choosing to just sit there like 😒 in front of all the microphones while getting executed at the altar of public opinion over livestream and this has to be... like a plan of some kind... Kageyama's Great Master must have some great vision... for getting canceled on Twitter.
Whenever I see people going "teehee Hornet is doing things so much like PK" I have to sit on my hands and desperately, furiously stop myself from writing a thousand word rebuttal about how half the traits of Hornet choosing to live in the world and choose hope and connection instead of rejecting it are actually things that she either learned from her various mothers or from her fucking sibling who the entire last game was about
like fucking. I fucking. I fucking CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH that PK chose the OPPOSITE OF CONNECTION. HE WANTED IT AND WAS DESPERATE FOR IT AND HE NEVER EVER EVER MANAGED TO MAKE IT HAPPEN IN ANY SIGNIFICANT CAPACITY BECAUSE HE COULDN'T MAKE UP HIS DAMN MIND AND HE THOUGHT THE DUTY OF BEING KING WAS TO SUFFER ALONE IN A STUPID BOX!!
HE DIED ALONE IN HIS STUPID SELF-INFLICTED BOX DESPITE BEING SURROUNDED BY PEOPLE WHO WOULD HAVE HELPED HIM IF HE ASKED
I'm trying really hard not to jump people's asses and shout DOES THE KNIGHT FORCING HORNET TO SELF-REFLECT AND CARE MEAN NOTHING TO YOU CAN YOU STOP ATTRIBUTING EVERYTHING TO THE FUCKING PALE KING FUCKING STOP IT but people are really really really making this difficult for me
Thinking about the first time Grace & Rocky inevitably get into a big argument on the journey to Erid. Because, like, they are obviously inseparable queerplatonic besties, but Grace is slowly getting more and more irritable as he, you know, dies of starvation, and Rocky started this trip with decades worth of survivor's guilt and PTSD and is now adding a hefty dose of caretaker fatigue on top of that.
It probably starts as a misunderstanding--they still don't even perfectly speak each others' languages, and there's plenty of room for cultural differences to get in the way, too. They're both on-edge and living in extremely close quarters and for whatever reason it explodes.
And neither of them know what to do with that.
Rocky ends up feeling hurt and guilty all at the same time, frustrated with Grace but also with himself, because he knows his friend is going through a hard time, it's just also terrible to have to watch and he doesn't know how to fix that. Grace probably finds a corner to cry in, convinced he's doomed himself by making Rocky angry because how is he going to convince everyone else on Erid to care about saving his life if he can't even stay on good terms with his friend?
Eventually they get over it. They talk about what happened and get to a less shaky place. It's still a scary couple of hours for both of them, and they know it could happen again. But they still care about each other so, so much, and that makes it worth it.
So maybe I haven't been able to stop turning this over in my head and wrote this today instead of my job applications. 4400 words, be warned :')
---
Since being sent to space, I’ve done a lot of human firsts: first human interstellar traveler, first human to visit an exoplanet, first human contact with an intelligent alien species, first human to eat a different alien species (unless Dmitri and Ilyukhina were serious about doing astrophage shots. I don’t think they were. But they might have been).
I think I might also be the first human to tell my best friend that I wished he and his whole species were dead because I can’t have cake anymore.
I’m a lot less proud of that one.
I think I’m a bad friend.
It’s embarrassing to be upset about little things, because it makes you feel stupid, and feeling stupid makes you feel more upset, and feeling upset about that makes you feel more stupid, in a spiral of feeling bad about everything. Being upset that I was going to die in space? That was normal. Anyone would be upset about that. But about two years into the journey to Erid I realized I had eaten the last of the freeze-dried meals with the chocolate cake yesterday and now I was never going to have chocolate or cake ever again, and I hadn’t even appreciated it.
I stood at the food storage compartments, staring stupidly at them, trying not to either cry or throw something. I was in the third week of my new meal regimen: coma slurry for breakfast, taumoeba slime for lunch, and then real food for dinner, to end on a high note. Intercutting real food with taumoeba was my idea, and I was mad at myself for doing it. I had enough real food to last until Erid, but it was dwindling scarily fast. Rocky was insistent that Eridian scientists would drop everything and figure out how to make food that would keep me alive as their first priority, but… well, I’d come from an Earth that was having the same problems. I didn’t think they’d want to drop everything they were doing to save their own planet to invent a whole new technological infrastructure to keep one alien alive. So I wanted to make sure what I had would stretch out long enough for them to figure out something I could eat that wouldn’t kill me. But what that meant was slime for breakfast and slime for lunch, every day, and the lunch slime was filling but it wasn’t energizing. By dinner time I was always cranky. And this was going to be how every day was going to go for at least the next two years and probably the next rest of my life. And all I wanted was something with chocolate in it and there wasn’t any and never would be again.
I slumped down on the floor.
“Grace?” Rocky called from the other room.
“Just deciding on dinner,” I said.
“From the floor, question?”
“Yeah.”
Ilyukhina had wanted chocolate cake.
The memories still keep filtering up, though by now they feel more like remembering things normally that I just hadn’t been thinking about before. Ilyukhina’s 39th birthday was a few months before launch, and she was making the most of it.
“Cake, champagne, and zakuski should have eggplant, I like the eggplant,” she said, counting off on her fingers the things she wanted for her big birthday bash. Stratt listened with the kind of patience she rarely had time for anymore, but Ilyukhina was good at making you want to listen to her. “Smoked salmon on rye bread. Music, dancing. Flowers. Everyone brings me a little card that says nice things about how much you all love me and how much you all will miss me. Also I want bouncy castle from American movies.”
That actually earned a brief but real smile from Stratt. “We are not importing a… bouncy castle… onto the ship.”
“Will be my last birthday party ever,” Ilyukhina said. “And I have never seen a bouncy castle in real life.”
Stratt held firm on nixing the bouncy castle, but Ilyukhina did get her party with music, dancing, lots of champagne and vodka, eggplant, smoked salmon, and everybody on the ship making toasts about how great she was. There was also a chocolate cake.
My last birthday ever was a month later and was mostly DuBois and Shapiro ambushing me as I left the lab with leftover champagne from Ilyukhina’s party and cookies stolen from the mess hall. If I’d known it would be my last birthday party ever, maybe I would have tried to do something more special. There wasn’t even cake.
Rocky rolled up in his xenonite ball. He was working on a more articulated suit, but hadn’t come up with a design that worked well yet. The suit would help him interact with me and the oxygenated side of the Hail Mary better, and I was torn between feeling like it was really sweet that he would put in all that effort for something that he didn’t really need to do in order to make things easier on me and feeling weird that soon he wouldn’t even need me for the one thing I could do that he couldn’t. But for now he was still in the ball and he still needed me to interact with most things on my side of the barrier.
He nudged me with the ball. “Something is wrong with the food, question?”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “It’s just that I’m out of the one that I wanted.”
“Other ones are not good, question?”
“You don’t taste flavors, or, I don’t know, maybe you do, but sometimes humans want specific things,” I said. Rocky still didn’t love talking about eating, so I wasn’t entirely positive if Eridians had any equivalent to sense of taste or not, but I’d definitely gotten that there was a lot less variety of things Eridians ate than humans did. “And right now the thing I want is chocolate cake.”
“Don’t know that word.”
“It’s a type of food. It’s a dessert. We eat it at parties. It tastes really good and… I mean, it’s really meant for sharing. It’s kind of sad to eat cake alone.”
Rocky made a sound that was kind of like a laugh and kind of like a disbelieving snort. “Human social eating. Strange strange strange. Humans are weird perverts.”
It wasn’t anything new, it was a running joke, but it was not what I wanted to hear right then. “I can’t help it if eating food together is the basic unit of human socializing, okay? Eridians are the weird perverts for getting weird about it! It’s important to me even if you think it’s stupid! I’m allowed to miss it!”
I didn’t mean to snap that forcefully, but I just wasn’t in the mood to be patient. Rocky was quiet, then when he responded, his tone was clipped. “I know. All you want to talk about is food anymore. I sit with Grace while eat because it makes you sad not to. You think I don’t know this.”
“All I want to talk about is food anymore because I’m afraid of starving, Rock. Even Eridians have to worry about that!”
“I know!” The whistle in his tone was frustrated. He made a noise kind of like “ugh” then said, “Was trying to make joke. Was not trying to insult.”
I had the presence of mind not to say “well, you did,” but what I did say was more like, “Mmh.” I got up and rifled through the food packets again. I paused over the babaganoush. That was eggplant, right? We’d has something like that at Ilyukhina’s party, back when I was on Earth and worrying about food was something abstract for me. Something I knew was a real problem in the world, but not one I’d ever faced.
Maybe even if I was still on Earth, I’d be worrying about having enough food. But at least everyone else would be, too, and they’d be willing to commiserate.
That wasn’t fair. I knew Rocky was worried about me. He spent a lot of time fretting over my health and my safety and if I was sleeping enough and if I had enough food and if I was feeling restless or bored and he freaked out a lot the first time I threw up the taumoeba slime because he was afraid his suggestion had killed me. I had to reassure him that I was fine and I wasn’t dying even as I had no idea if that was true or not.
“My turn to choose the movie tonight,” I said, as I mixed water into the babaganoush to rehydrate it. “The Great British Bake-Off.”
“Don’t know two of those words,” said Rocky.
“It’s relaxing. Humans like watching it because it’s calming. And I still miss cake.”
It was not relaxing or calming to Rocky. I could tell he was on edge the whole time. “Grace didn’t say it was food show,” he said accusingly.
“Like I said. Eating food together is the basic unit of human socializing.”
Rocky bunched up his arms around his carapace in a way I could tell was an expression of discomfort, and as much as it made me feel like a total jerk, it was also kind of satisfying. I was feeling like crap, watching this show while eating rehydrated chemical-infused babaganoush was making me feel like crap, and maybe I had decided to do that because I wanted Rocky to join me in feeling like crap. Also, babaganoush is a slime, which I hadn’t consciously remembered until I chose it. Three square meals of slime today. It didn’t even really leave me feeling full, and after I finished it, I couldn’t just heat up another one, because I had a ration schedule. I could eat more taumoeba, but eating taumoeba while watching polite and friendly British bakers in their cute sunny kitchens and green grassy lawns make cake I couldn’t eat would probably have pushed me over the edge.
“Grace feeling relaxed and calm now, question?” Rocky asked.
“I’m still hungry,” I grumbled. It wasn’t Rocky’s fault that he had 220 years’ worth of food and I had three, but it was hard to believe that when my stomach was grumbling and I had only eaten slime all day.
“Can eat taumoeba—”
“I don’t want taumoeba!” I was acting like a child and I didn’t care. I think I was also crying. “I want to go home.”
Rocky rolled his ball closer to me. “What can I do that would make Grace feel more like home?”
“You can’t,” I said. “That’s the problem. You can’t. The Hail Mary isn’t home and neither of us know what’s going to happen on Erid, if I’ll just die or what—”
“Erid will be Grace’s home! Grace won’t die!”
“It won’t be, and you don’t know that!” And now I was yelling, which Rocky didn’t deserve, but—“Nobody there knows me, nobody there will know or care what humans do, even you—you don’t really get it, and nobody ever will again and I’m going to feel like this forever—”
“I have been TRYING!” Rocky’s pitch shot up almost past the point I could hear him, and he had to bristle and compose himself to drop his voice back into the range my weak stupid human ears could pick up. “Trying everything that I can to make you comfortable and tolerate your stupid food rules because everything is about food always and you get sad when you eat alone and get sad when you eat taumoeba and get sad when you eat coma slurry and I watch your human movies where everybody is eating together all the time and you talk about how much you want to eat the food they are eating and it doesn’t matter that I try to make the Hail Mary comfortable for you and change my voice to talk to you and make xenonite suit so I can do outside hull tasks so you don’t have to do them all, because I can’t make more food for you! Don’t know what else I can do!”
“You can’t!” I said. “And I didn’t ask you to do any of that! You can’t fix what’s actually wrong!”
“I know!” Rocky hissed steam out of his vents, then said, in a tone so measured it was almost insulting, “Rocky can’t fix what is actually wrong. So I try to fix what I can. But Grace needs to tell me what can be fixed or else I have to guess and then make Grace angry that I try.” His words were choppy again, like he needed to use small words to get the point across.
The screen still showed happy humans being nice to each other on a sunny, happy Earth that probably didn’t even exist anymore and it was making me feel awful about everything. “I want to go home,” I said. “That’s what’s wrong. And that can’t be fixed, because I’m gonna be eating taumoeba soup alone on Erid forever and that was the stupid choice I made. I wish I’d never turned around.”
Rocky was quiet at that.
I should have apologized. I should have said I didn’t mean it. The problem was, right then, I did.
Stratt once told me I was a good man. She’s not wrong often but I think she was wrong on that one.
Then Rocky rolled forward and bumped his xenonite ball against me roughly. “Grace is being stupid. Grace sleep now.”
“I’m not tired.” I tried to shove his ball. Obviously it didn’t move because he weighs about three hundred pounds.
“Don’t care. Humans can choose when sleep. So Grace sleep now. Statement.”
It wasn’t like I had anything better to do. Neither could I come up with anything to say to Rocky that would make what I’d just said not horrible.
So I acquiesced, and I went to sleep.
Or I tried to. I mean, I brushed my teeth (I was running low on toothpaste, too) and flopped into my bed and pressed my face into the pillow and pointedly kept it there.
When Rocky was confident I was actually in bed, I heard his xenonite ball roll away. I looked up from sulking into my pillow in shock, sure that he hadn’t actually just left while I was sleeping. But he had.
It hurt way, way more than I expected.
“Screw you,” I mumbled into the pillow. And then felt bad.
Down the hall in Rocky’s half of the ship, I heard the muffled rush of escaping air I’d only heard a few times before when Rocky was very, very worked up, a sound that meant he was in the other room screaming in frustration.
Me too, buddy. We both got to be mad and miserable, I guess.
Unfortunately Rocky was right that lying down in my bed was making me feel… if not better, at least more tired. It was like the anger that had been pent up inside me that had been giving me energy was gone and now I was just tired. Tired, and stupid.
Was this it? Was this really my whole future? I couldn’t even avoid pissing off and getting pissed off by Rocky, who was easily the best friend I had ever had. He was still so sure that all of Erid was going to love me and dedicate round-the-clock care to making sure I could thrive in his crushing boiling ammonia world, when I wasn’t even convinced he would still love me by the time we got there. Definitely not if I was going to act like this.
It wasn’t his fault that he was going home and I wasn’t. It wasn’t his fault we both messed up the taumoeba breeding because neither of us could have predicted that taumoeba would adapt to escape xenonite, any more than it was anyone’s fault that his crew had all died and Yao and Ilyukhina had also both died and the two of us were the ones who survived due to pure stupid luck.
It wasn’t anybody’s fault, which made it feel really bad to get mad about.
I sniffled into the pillow. It brought back memories of grad school, getting comments back from my committee on my dissertation chapters; my advisor was helpful but thorough with her commentary, rewriting so many sentences and correcting my commas and n-dashes every single time, and I had a pure Reviewer 2 type who would add comments like “What? That’s not correct” and “this sentence is incoherent” and “this isn’t the original source for this theory, you should be citing Whoever, Date.” And it would make me feel like crap every time and I’d punch my bed and sulk and feel sorry for myself, and then take a nap because I didn’t want to deal with that right then. And when I woke up from my nap I would be ready to face the files again and make the changes.
It had never occurred to me before how lucky humans are that if we don’t feel like dealing with our feelings right away we can instead cry and take a nap. Eridians can’t do either thing.
I was doing a lot of napping on the Hail Mary on my way back to Erid, ostensibly to conserve my energy and stretch out my food supply, but mostly because there were long stretches where I had nothing else to do.
When Rocky was alone on the Blip-A, before I’d come to Tau Ceti and after the taumoeba had escaped and eaten all his astrophage fuel, he couldn’t even do that.
Yeah, telling him I wished I had left him like that was a really shitty thing to do.
This was what I was supposed to be going to sleep to avoid thinking about.
Rocky still wasn’t back. I fell asleep feeling bad and also very alone.
—
He was back when I woke up.
“Oh,” I said. “How long have you been there?”
“Hours. Grace feeling less stupid, question?”
“A little.” I was actually still feeling extremely stupid, but close enough.
Rocky fidgeted with something or other in his hands. I didn’t know if it was an actual project or just something to fidget with. He hummed a little, a low sound that didn’t mean anything. I guess he didn’t know what to say any more than I did.
“Uh,” I said.
Smooth.
A few years ago, I’d had to sit a student down and have a talk about why it was inappropriate to tell your classmate you hope they die. What would I say to me if I were a seventh grader having a fight with my friend?
“I’m sorry I said that to you,” I said, finally. I couldn’t truthfully say I didn’t mean it, because yesterday, when I said it, I did. But I felt gross at yesterday-me for feeling that way. And I had to say something. “I don’t mean it. I don’t actually wish I’d made a different choice. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t leave you like that.”
“I know.”
“I’m not actually mad at you,” I went on, because Rocky was being unnervingly quiet. “I’m trying to be hopeful about going to Erid. I really am. I’m just…” I didn’t even know what I was trying to say.
“Erid is not your home,” Rocky said.
“Yeah.”
He kept fidgeting. Then he said, “When taumoeba escaped, I thought I would die on the ship and never go home, never save Erid. Then Grace came back. Gave up everything for me. But now there is nothing I can do for you even close to what you did for me. Never will be, no matter how much I try. Because I am going home and Grace is not and there is no way to change that.”
“I wouldn’t have even had the possibility of going back to Earth in the first place if it wasn’t for you,” I said. “So it’s a net zero change, really.” I wasn’t sure I really believed that. But it was better to believe than anything else.
Rocky made a sound that indicated he didn’t really believe I believed that either.
“If it helps,” I said, “there’s no way I would have ever been happy on Earth again if I’d left you stranded in space.” That was true. When I’d been facing down the choice to keep going to Earth or turn around for Rocky, even when I’d been trying to find a way to convince myself that Rocky would be okay and I could go home… I knew deep down that I wouldn’t know how to live with myself after, if I’d just left him there to die.
Rocky slumped a little. “Going home, or tired and hungry and restless always. No way for Grace to be happy then.”
I knew he’d been stressing about this, but I don’t think I’d realized how much he’d been stressing about this. I mean, I’d been stressing about this, but that was because I was going to have to live it. “I’m trying,” I said. “I really am.”
“I’m trying too.”
“I know.”
I think sleeping did make me feel better, at least a little bit. I didn’t feel as hopeless about the future as I did last night. “And hey,” I said, “If I had to be trapped in a tiny spaceship for four years on the way to a brand new planet with anybody, I’m glad it’s you.”
That earned a little laugh equivalent from Rocky. “We save stars together. We can do anything.”
“Yeah. I believe in us.” I thought about it, and then added, “Although, just so you know, when I’m feeling sad about missing Earth and hungry for Earth food, that’s not a good time to make fun of human eating habits, okay?”
“Understand. Sorry sorry sorry. Didn’t mean to hurt. Wouldn’t hurt on purpose.” Rocky clicked his fingers against the bottom of the ball. Then he said, sounding cautious, “Also. When human movie has eating scene that will be long or gross, please tell Rocky that will happen. So many movies have them, and is uncomfortable when not expecting. Regent of the Western Kingdom was disturbing.”
“Regent—oh. Yeah. The Denethor scene is supposed to be disturbing, even to humans.”
“It worked.”
“I can do that, yeah. Springing Bake-Off on you last night was mean.”
“It was. I was trying to help and felt like you were punishing me.”
“I kind of was. I was being a jerk.” I sighed. “I think… I don’t know. It feels stupid to say it isn’t fair. But. I think that’s it, isn’t it? It isn’t fair.”
“Isn’t fair,” Rocky agreed.
“And if it can’t be fixed, it just… feels better to know that you know it isn’t fair and can’t be fixed, you know? Rather than try to fix it.”
“Not really.”
“Well. It does.”
“Will try. Well. Try to not fix unless you want.”
“Thanks.”
I sat cross-legged on my bed in silence for a couple seconds. Then, because sitting in silence has never been a thing I’ve been particularly good at, I asked, “Are you mad at me?”
“Not mad now,” Rocky said. “Frustrated. But mostly frustrated because it isn’t fair and can’t be fixed and don’t know what to do.”
“Yeah. Same here.”
I didn’t really know what to go from there, because I was already exhausted from trying to talk about my feelings and my next thought was “I’m hungry” which probably would not be a welcome topic of conversation right now. (It was coma slurry time. Wonderful.)
“Grace wants to see body suit progress, question?” Rocky asked.
“Oh,” I said. “Sure, yeah.” Rocky showing me the stuff he was making was much more comfortable territory.
Rocky rolled away. I stretched and got up. I could sulk about it, but this was going to be my future, and I didn’t want to spend it resenting Rocky.
I had changed into new clothes and was brushing my teeth by the time Rocky came back. He stepped stiffly and awkwardly, the form-fitting xenonite suit still clearly bulkier than was comfortable.
I spit into the sink, which earned a disapproving chitter from Rocky, then rinsed my mouth out and jogged back over to the “bedroom” area. “Hey! That’s impressive.”
“Still needs work on usage flexibility and use-length,” Rocky said. “More flexibility means less air inside, which means harder temperature regulation, so can only wear it safely for 36 minutes. Not good for spacewalks yet.”
“It’s cool that you can walk around in it, though,” I said. “And you can operate the controls on my side of Mary. That’s gotta be useful.” I was selfishly glad it wasn’t great yet, though, so Rocky would still need me to do some things on my side of the ship. I was trying to be optimistic but I wasn’t ready to be wholly useless yet.
“Can also do this,” Rocky said. “Get down.”
“What?”
“Get down. On floor.”
“Um, okay,” I said, and sat down on the floor in front of Rocky.
Rocky took a minute shuffling back and forth next to me in the awkward suit. Then, once satisfied, he braced three of his legs and reached out the other two to wrap around me.
“What—oh!”
“Can give Grace hug like this.”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly blinking back tears. “Oh. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, you can.”
“Is this good?”
I shifted position so I could hug him back. The xenonite was gently warm. “Yeah. It is.”
“Sorry upset Grace.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m the one who was an ass.”
“Don’t know word.”
“It’s an English swearword. It means jerk, except ruder. It refers to the human backside.”
Rocky yipped in delight. It’s not like he hasn’t picked up words from movies, but I don’t usually define them.
“Okay to tease about leaking?” Rocky asked.
I sniffed. “Yeah. That’s fine.”
“Grace is leaking all over fancy new suit.”
“You’re bringing me home with you, buddy, you have to get used to it.”
“Think I will,” Rocky said. I really, really hoped so. Even with the stiffness of the suit, it still felt completely different from hugging the hamster ball.
“Feeling hug over yet?”
“Nope.”
Rocky made a fond-exasperated noise but let the hug keep going. After a few moments, he said, “I want Grace to be happy on Erid.”
There is a quality of books (or movies or shows) that I can best describe as “stickiness,” which is separate from being good or even enjoyable: a sticky book is one I just keep thinking about. Sometimes it’s because a book is very good (e.g. The Locked Tomb), and sometimes it’s because a book is very bad (e.g. ACOTAR), but there are also very good and very bad books that are slippery, such that when I’m done reading them they slip from my thoughts like water from a hydrophobic surface.
The Silt Verses, The Hunger Games, and Project Hail Mary are all commentaries on amatonormativity, about what it means for your life to be worth saving and who is more or less deserving of sympathy, empathy, a happy ending, based on having or not having a romantic partner. And of those three only one and half of them know it
It's DONE. The damn Silksong journal is FINISHED. You can buy it for $2! Enjoy my chicken scratch writing in which I talk 172 pages worth of the game as I was playing it for the first time.
*itch.io: https://goodshipskypirate.itch.io/silksongjournal
*Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/s/7289476a5c
And if I said Megamind through its three subversions of Superman shows a deeper understanding that the point of Superman is that he was loved and taught to love by good, present parents, and because of that he is able to return that love to a world even if it doesn't always accept it, and he is not corrupted by his power, than many other films either subverting or playing the superman story straight.
Megamind has three Superman subversions. One is obviously Megamind himself. He was not raised loved by the world, but rather was loved by those hated by the world. Because he was still raised with love, he does care about other people, hence his character development. But because he didn't receive wider love growing up, his own is misplaced at first.
Metro Man was not loved growing up in a way that mattered. His adopted father was clearly very absent, and while we don't know much about his family, their relationship seems superficial. Because of this, his sense of duty to the world is also superficial, hence his boredom.
Hal wasn't raised with power. He gained it and was shown how to use it by a 'space dad' who only taught him power and not love. Hence, he sees it only as a grasping means to an end.
All three of these subversions, in their negative space, create the silhouette of the superhero that they are parodying. That silhouette is of a space child that came to earth and was cared for very deeply by the world, and taught love through his experience of love, and because of that holds fast to his duty to the world. Which is Superman.
(the most excellent stuart and herb belong to @furiouskettle --go give their comic a read if you want to see these guys having the worst day of their lives)
aaaand one more that was too shitty for the main body
Rocky on the trip back to Erid registering that Grace has defaulted to using he/him for him for sexism reasons and that they don't actually have to go by he/him. xe does some research on the human computer and spends several weeks cycling through different pronoun sets. starts switching so frequently Grace becomes convinced sie has started being difficult on purpose. after a while Grace is like omg will you just pick one and stick with it. Rocky is like okay i have decided. rock/rocks. rockself. Grace like well i can't argue with that.
#see the hill that I will die on is that if Andy weir was cooler rockey would use either they them or xe xir#you’re telling me cool middle school teacher Ryland grace is unfamiliar with the concept of fun new genders#absolutely not. his students have taught him about singular they them and neopronouns
Grace trying to explain to Rocky that they can be whatever they want to be and presenting a whole list of different pronoun options and Rocky (who has no concept of gender) being like 'why would I care about any of this'
Grace several years into their voyage, finally getting good enough at understanding Eridian to clock when Rocky has switched back to using the Neutral Tone for him, thereby implying that they are no longer friends: HEY??
I’m not going to tag any of the original PHM posts I’ve seen across various platforms with this take bc (1) they seem to be mainly informed by a movie-only perspective, and (2) I don’t respect Andy Weir enough as an author to insist that reading his work is vital to understanding this story. But I’ve seen various posts going around to the effect that “Ryland Grace loved his life and loved Earth so much, and this is why being forced onto the mission was such a Great Tragedy (TM)” when that’s…not really???? True???? At ALL??? Of Ryland Grace????
The ENTIRE POINT of Grace’s arc is that he is a Coward, with a capital C. He is a coward not only in his refusal of the Hail Mary mission, but in the way he lives his life before the Petrova Line was ever discovered. Grace has no close friends or coworkers, no pets or hobbies, no partners (short or long term), no family that we know of. His two main drives in life are (1) being a Cool Teacher to his students, and (2) nursing a grudge over getting kicked out of academia for proposing wild theories about life forms not based on water. As Stratt ACCURATELY points out, both of these things have large self-serving components. Grace genuinely loves his students and is good at teaching, but it’s at least partially because his classroom allows him to demand respect and attention without returning emotional vulnerability in the same way a peer relationship would. His academic theories were also largely motivated by a desire to be The Specialest Boy - and while Grace DOES prove himself very smart and capable, his pet theory wasn’t supported by his work with astrophage. Grace doesn’t jump at the chance to work with Stratt when she first approaches him, and he isn’t out there Living LIfe to the Fullest every day. He ADMITS to himself and to Stratt that he IS a coward, both for the way he’s lived up to PHM and for refusing to go on the mission when the timeline made it clear that there wasn’t enough time to bring another candidate up to speed and have the same odds of success. He straight up tells Stratt that he’ll sabotage Project Hail Mary if she tries to force him, DESPITE HIM KNOWING that Earth is headed for a literal apocalyptic Ice Age, and that everyone on the planet - including his beloved students!- has a pretty good chance of DYING if the mission doesn’t succeed! Stratt has to give him a coma cocktail that induces mild amnesia, and bet on him being at least good Enough (TM) not to kill the whole planet because he hated her for doing this to him.
(Also no hate for Eva Stratt, I love her and I will SUPPORT THIS WOMAN’S WRONGS until my dying day, she committed so many crimes and I cheered the whole way)
Despite Ryan Gosling’s very pretty Sad Boi eyes and sweaters, Ryland Grace is NOT a manic pixie dream scientist in love with Earth and its life and cultures. He just ISN’T. And if he WERE, then. Well. He certainly didn’t love Earth enough to fully embrace it while he was here, OR to volunteer to save it when he had the chance. This IS one of those situations where the distinction between “I love life” and “I don’t want to die” is a meaningful one. Does this make Grace a Cancelled Villain of All Time? No - it makes him a coward, but that doesn’t mean he inherently deserved to die. Does it ethically or morally justify forcing him onto a suicide mission while he fought and pleaded not to go? No! It makes Grace ORDINARY. Just some average fucking guy, not evil but not valiant, either. It’s like trying to claim Laika was the top search and rescue dog in the city when she got put into the pod. You don’t NEED to give Ryland Grace all these Tender Tragic Qualities of “loving Earth/Life” to have empathy for this poor dude who got launched into space.
In fact, Grace’s arc DEPENDS on him STARTING from that place of “I don’t really have a reason to be here” to “I have EVERY reason to turn my back on survival and do this act!” Grace wakes up on the Hail Mary, and has no context for why he’s on the ship but assumes that he was a Heroic Volunteer, like Yao and Ilyukhina. He sees their personal effects and Reasons Why They Volunteered, and keeps searching for his own Reason Why until he remembers that he didn’t HAVE a “reason why.” He was never a heroic volunteer. He comes to terms with the fact that he’s going to die, and IS. IN FACT. AS STRATT PREDICTED. A GOOD ENOUGH man to want to save the earth anyway rather than die alone without even trying to figure out the Petrova Problem out of spite. And he can do some pretty neat science along the way, which has always been one of his life motivations! At least he can do that before he dies, in the absence of anything else!
But the thing that Grace ACTUALLY loves enough to die for is ROCKY. The one in a million friend! Who saved his life and opened up his entire view of the universe! Grace’s core trait was NEVER “loving the Earth,” or “loving life.” The WHOLE FUCKING EARTH wasn’t enough to get Grace willingly onboard the Hail Mary! What made him turn the ship around was his GOTDAM SINGING ROCK FRIEND. The whole point is the change! Humanity’s capacity for massive apathetic cowardice and also astonishing bravery and hopefulness in connection. Andy Weir has his head in his ass about politics in his work, but you see?!?! You see, right!?!?!?!
And hey. If you really want protagonists who loved the Earth and life? Yao. Ilyukhina. Dubois. The original crew of Project Hail Mary. THEY loved the Earth. THEIR sacrifice was tragic in the specific narrow way that the “Grace loved life” posts want Grace’s to be. Dubois, who started a relationship with Annie even though he knew one or both of them was sure to die because why waste any time? Why not enjoy what they had in this moment? Ilyukhina, who had the absolute darkest sense of humor and packed a giant bag of vodka, who asked to go out via the most pleasurable cocktail of drugs imaginable bc why not enjoy herself after living such a straight edged life? Yao, who volunteered to go last after both Dubois and Ilyukhina were gone, just so he could make sure they didn’t suffer, who carried a picture of his family and never lost courage. THEY were the ones full of love for Earth and life, while the whole point of Grace is that he never really was, and he found it in space when he’d already left Earth behind.
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