being a teenager is basically just half a decade of "ugh I hate myself I hate my life I hate my parents nothing is fair everyone is mean the world is cruel I'm tired of it!! but idk i guess every teenager has this phase and I'll probably grow out of it and understand when I'm older" and getting older and realizing you should have been even angrier and more violent. And then people forget this as soon as they have kids
My toxic fandom take is that I think that it's awful how much we can talk to creators and get answers from them word of god style. We should be out here in a godless place rooting for scraps of lore in the media like truffle pigs out in the fields
this post is inspired in part by this one by @cheshirepirouette and sponsored in part by convos w @asteriis and @indouscurse here’s to y’all!! this post also goes out to my brothers, who are pale as hell for reasons unbeknownst to all of us (this is a joke).
like any good headcanon, this started as a joke because i thought to myself: Ryland sounds like the type of name that somebody’s Black child would have and only use on church sundays. nobody actually has ever called him that in his whole entire life, except maybe his mama SOMETIMES and that’s why he doesn’t remember it right away. i feel like every Black person knows somebody who is called literally anything except their god given name. people call him lil r, lil grace, gracie, ry, ryry, riri, RG, lando, mr. grace, dr. grace, but nobody calls him Ryland, which is part of why he Can’t Remember for so long.
so of course i went back to the source material to see if he ever actually mentioned being white anywhere and unfortunately it is very much at the beginning of the book. so THEN i started to think about how i could get around that while remaining at least largely canon compliant (as a little treat for myself). what i came up with is what i have affectionately dubbed my “litebrite baby” headcanon.
grace was not particularly dark skinned to begin with, and then spent years in a coma with literally no sunlight. he is downright vampiric by the time that he wakes up, and upon seeing his white ass skin, assumes that he is in his own words, a Caucasian male.
unfortunately for him, this fits in really well with his theme of lack of identity and lack of connection. i think for most Black people it would be extremely hard to forget that we’re Black regardless of how light or dark our skin tone is. but throughout the book, even when Grace is thinking about his old, slowly resurfacing memories, he never thinks about family, he never thinks about friends. except for his students and Project Hail Mary, he is completely unmoored.
i’ve seen a few different headcanons for why this might be: he was an only child whose single parent died young, he was cut off by his parents for some reason or another, he just isn’t ever triggered to remember. but no matter the reason, grace is disconnected from crucial aspects of himself. i think that by making him Black, and his Blackness something he can’t remember, it add an extra heartbreaking layer to his characterization. Blackness is such a communal experience, and when it’s not, it leaves behind an ache. growing up Black in White Suburbia i know well both the experience of clinging to one’s own in a hostile world AND the hurt that comes with being severed from one’s community. grace loses so much of himself with the amnesia, unable to recall who he is at the deepest of levels, and i think if he could remember to grieve it, it would devastate him.
i do think he would remember eventually, either when his hair starts growing out (because in the book Armando shaves him iirc), or when he can finally catch a glimpse of his reflection clearly, or when he has a memory of someone in his family. my personal belief is he has a memory beamed directly into his brain of asking “Mama, am I white?” and his poor, long-suffering mom saying, “Now who the hell told you that?”
and then it still never becomes relevant because he has negative desire to explain the nuances of human racial categories to an alien who quite literally cannot see color.
I think I’m literally never gonna be sick of this masterpiece. I think watching it on a loop for eight hours could fix me. Dancing’s what clears my soul. Dancing’s what makes me whole.
I just love that this very video is an accumulation of thousands of years worth of art made by people who have never met each other. The concept of this video was so completely unfathomable to every single artist who made the sculptures and yet they’ve all put something toward the creation of it.
Can you imagine what living at the edge is like just casually?
You wake up, and already Fishlegs is off in a cave somewhere, almost dying, Snoutlout has accidentally taken Astrid's axe, and she's presently hunting him down across the entire base with a vengeance upon realising he broke it. The twins are either cheering her on or have managed to coat half the base in monstrous Nightmare gel, which is, in fact, not helping the situation at all. Heather is trying to establish any semblance of normalcy by stopping Astrid from killing Snotlout, and finally, Hiccup crashlands in after testing his latest version of the flight suit, smacks a map down on the table like "I KNOW WHERE VIGGO IS, LET'S GET HIM!"
The raw, unmatched power of a bunch of unsupervised 18-20-year-olds without jobs should be feared and admired.
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