Focus on the Narrative

A story is true a story is untrue ⚔Judith (she/her) ⚔ American ⚔ Jewish ⚔ Ace ⚔ Black Sails, Percy Jackson, Shakespeare, Writing, History Major ™

[jaybee2000]

This animator is so talented, and this is beautifully done

please give it a watch!

I love space and musical theatre. So this got me okay

[sespursongles-deactivated201906]

And speaking of Sophia Tolstoy, her diaries are just so depressing. 

“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“

She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.

A few years later, when she was 25 or so:

“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“

During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry.  And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”

A few years before her husband’s death, she published a cycle of prose poems titled “Groans”, under the pseudonym “A Tired Woman”.

[julienbakerfavormp3-deactivated]

the most depressing quote from her diaries:

“I have served a genius for almost forty years. Hundreds of times I have felt my intellectual energy stir within me and all sorts of desires - a longing for education, a love of music and the arts… And time and again I have crushed and smothered these longings… Everyone asks, “But why should a worthless woman like you need an intellectual or artistic life?” To this question I can only reply: “I don’t know, but eternally suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune.”

[ziyuanyuan1113]

Alicent advising Rhaenyra, ngl I have a lot of gripes with how many extreme changes they've made to the source material but I still love their relationship so...

Twitter

Bsky

[voidsweirdthoughts]

More excited about seeing Kermit, the Count and the Cookie Monster than any other musician in the World Cup

[asteronomical]

OK but what if Erid culture and story telling leaned hard towards the romantic. Finding your partner is so important when you live such long lives. They love telling stories about love and when they hear that their saviour met his second lover among the stars, the journey they had together that cemented their love...it goes through Erid pop culture like a bull through a China shop "what do you MEAN they were literally brought together by the whims of the universe I am UNWELL." It's the most romantic thing and the art scene goes crazy with it.

oh this is so peak... gracerocky inspiring a whole renaissance is crazy... they've introduced the concept of soulmates to eridian society and the romance scene will never be the same.

your eridian situationship can't text you back, but savior grace kept tracking the location of savior rocky's ship long after they parted and it's the only reason they managed to find each other again in the big nothing... okay...

god i hope eridian bards will sing odes to their love story for generations to come

[caljordan]

and now Lamine Yamal must participate in an UNICEF's photoshoot with a baby that will defeat him in 19 years

[fancycake]

Rocky and Grace are yelling at each other. Rocky stops mid argument to demand that Grace put on his angry eyebrows. Grace immediately stomps to the whiteboard, stomps back over with the dry erase marker, draws angry eyebrows on the xenonite ball. the argument continues

[wolfythewitch]

​metaphorically undressing myself via truth nuke

[cloudabserk]

baby photos

[chokedqwerty]

okay the odyssey has been out for a day im readyto start discourse

[decemberwinter]

[psychedelicmoonpie]

My favourite Adrian headcanon is that they're a biologist/zoologist who has seen so much shit, they're completely unphased by any and every alien habit of Grace's.

I mean full-on khaki-shorts-wearing, traversing-wilderness-with-nothin'-but-a-machete Adrian who yoinks snakes outta trees and pets swamp puppies and will unflinchingly dig around in elephant faeces for signs of a rare parasitic tapeworm if needed.

Oh, humans eat socially? No problem, Adrian has observed many many animals eat. Did you know that an obscure species of small underground dirt creature from the north side of Erid also eats socially? Adrian can give you a not-so-short presentation on them.

Oh, the human has no external carapace and so its internal sounds are absurdly loud, wet and off-putting? No problem, Adrian was just conducting an expedition last month researching the incredible eridian animal, the Wet Loud Worm from the south-east region of Wet Loud Wormland. They're desensitised, it's fine.

Oh, Grace leaks often from many orifices and it can be a bit of a learning curve to get used to? No problem for Adrian, see Wet Loud Worm paragraph again!

Meanwhile, Rocky is bewildered as to how he's managed to third-wheel both of his relationships, because both Adrian and Grace are nerds who nerd out about things, and Adrian is shaking in their carapace with enthusiasm to learn more about human culture and biology, not to mention everything about earth animals. And yeah, sure, Grace might be a molecular biologist, but he'll be damned if he'll pass up an opportunity to learn about alien fauna from a fellow scientist, and yes, Adrian, he'd love to hear about the small underground dirt creature from the north side of Erid, and he's so excited to learn more about the Wet Loud Worm, do go on.

[the-grey-hunt]

#zoologist adrian would be absolutely captivated by the concept of Plants. erid doesn't have those#you mean your atmosphere is so clear your entire planet has ground level sunlight and there's an entire subsection of life#defined by their ability to turn it into energy... because the rest of it DOESN'T? sure you synthetize vitamin d out of it#but that's nothing#saviour grace why don't you photosynthesize question? skill issue question?

[muaddibstyleguide]

This is currently doing numbers on the hell site.

[queerkeitcoven]

Ephraim Moses (Moshe) Lilien, 1874-1925

even as a lifelong fan of “golden age” illustration and art nouveau, it took way too long for me to come across the work of E. M. Lilien! we’ve reblogged two pieces here before (one is our mobile blog header!), but there’s a lot to appreciate.

above is some of his more folkloric/magical/mythical Jewish art, including the gorgeous “Shabbat Queen” (the Shechinah?), two versions of the Leviathan, the priestly blessing, a dybbuk, and a (probably metaphorical) demon! 

also, for bonus points, his work is apparently popular with queer men.

[images from multiple sources, but most from Jewish Myth, Magic & Mysticism]

[goffelmeansspork]

something i think isn't explored enough in the hail mary fandom is that while yes, humans are biologically a weird mess consisting of good enoughts that's just not efficient at all, the reason we're like is because of mutations that all happened because of a bunch of random environmental factors and our biology trying really hard to keep us alive in those situations.

and since that's kinda the natural way for biological things to form it wouldn't be weird if eridians also evolved like that. which means they're most likely also weirdly inefficient in a lot of things.

so i imagine after getting to erid, after hearing about how "stupid leaky space blobs badly designed" grace finds out eridians are in fact also, stupid pointy badly designed space rocks.

[lutheban]

#I have SO many headcanons in the works#I believe some eridans would have eating problems - difficulty opening or closing their ventral seal could be deadly without intervention#methinks egg fusion is a holdover from parasitic egg laying practices. Have your egg steal some other animals egg nutrients.#until there came a time when host eggs grew too powerful and only eggs that were laid with another eridian survived anymore#thusly Eridian eggs are technically immune to each other. And modern Eridians are born with certain nutrient deficiencies that used to be#handled by said ancient parasitism. Newborns need to play a lot of catch up (which helped contribute to social development.#our collective babies are HUNGRY and they are hungry for this extremely specific thing we now need urgently! We can only pull this off#if we work together! With the power of friendship!!)#I believe Eridians are not immune to concussion. Gotta be careful not to literally break your brain! It could cut up your insides!#Some Eridian worker cells origanate from COMPLETELY unrelated animals. ancient cross contamination becomes modern body plan.#so there are a few cells and interior structures that are literally useless and belong to different creatures entirely#and they still have to feed it or the intrusive cells will starve out the rest. Cant remove them either or an essential system will break!#gotta love billions of years of randomized trial and error!

dont hide this in the tags!! also im adopting all of it @treesarealsogreen also fun fact from the eridian docx the ammonia in their atmosphere is technically poisonous to them and kills their cells is they keep their mouth/seam open for too long, think about how we get sunburn/skin cancer if we stay in the sun too much lmao

[zetzhao]

Imagine Luke Arnold as Long John Silver in Treasure Island

(With reference to the 1952 film adaptation of Treasure Island.)

I love that moment: "Give me a hand up!"

[goldenaltar]

concept: no astrophage au where eridians and humans still make first contact but like, properly. a whole diplomatic mission meeting in the middle of space to save travel time. stratt is humanity's greatest representation. the eridian equivalent is equally as scary and secretly soft. it's all very star trek.

but rocky and grace put the whole diplomacy thing in jeopardy by being too best buddy with it. like they're both really low level members of the mission. some engineer necessary for ship maintenance, and an obligatory molecular biologist they brought along in case they found more alien cells out in space. and these two guys like, somehow keep ending up hanging out essentially "at the back of the classroom." consistently left out of the actually important negotiations, and well, they're bored!

grace steals some laptops and starts jury-rigging his own personal translator for rocky, despite the fact that the official translation software is way quicker to learn and much more nuanced. rocky starts learning english, simplifies his eridian, and immediately starts mocking grace for needing the software. they start blabbing to each other about all the weird quirks of their respective cultures and advanced science their planets can do. the whole time they are ribbing each other about culture stuff. grace eats in front of rocky. rocky forces grace to sleep in a corridor somewhere so he can keep watch.

then stratt and the eridian leader find out and it's like

stratt: you. you've been meeting in private with a member of the eridian deligation?

grace: ... yyyes.

stratt: and you shared with them classified scientific documents?

grace: i... maybe gave him. a laptop. he's so smart! what was i supposed to do?

stratt: HIM? you've assigned male pronouns to a genderless species?

grace: he said he likes to match!

stratt: do you even know the name of this eridian?!

grace: i call him rocky :)

stratt: 😰

then on rocky's side of things it's like

eridian leader: sorry did you say you called the human after one of its digestive noises?

rocky: yeah :)

eridian leader: and. you've been telling it about how to make xenonite. one of our most vital trading resources.

rocky: yes yes, grace is very ignorant about basic chemistry 🙄

eridian leader: right. and you watch it sleep. despite the fact that all the human beings we have spoken to have described this as a cultural violation?

rocky: well he didn't like it at first but he came around!!

anyway both sides of the delegation are sweating profusely (metaphorically speaking) until they see rocky and grace in action and are like ohh! they're both freaks. we are not to blame for this. these two are just really bad at navigating cultural norms.

cut to grace curled up with rocky while he sleeps like a baby.