{ it/its + he/him~ 21+} Art by Nakakabaliw on tumblr! I'll tag specifics if mutual asks (unreality + flashing lights). Save tags [#My Love, #lemmy speaks, # [[less than three ❤️ ]], #blorbo from my OCs].
Okay but imagine being the team of Eridian scientists tasked with keeping Erid's Only Human alive for as long as possible while the whole planet's environment is literally trying to kill him. And then Rocky shows up and is like:
“Grace says he would like half of dome to be water.”
“Oh, is necessary for humans to have large amounts of water question?”
Small Eridian equivalent of a sigh. “No. Not needed for life. In fact Grace will die if he falls in water and does not get out.”
“Tell him we give him water in containers that won't kill him. Lots lots lots of water on Erid for Grace to drink.”
“No. Grace say he want water on ground. Also want it with excess sodium chloride compound so it will be unhealthy for drink.”
To celebrate Erid getting their sun back on track, Grace asks for some alcohol. There's a small amount left from the Hail Mary and Rocky offers to take it to the science Eridians to see if they can synthesise more.
“Grace want this liquid for celebration.”
“Of course.” They scan it. “You have wrong liquid. This contain compounds which are poisonous for humans.”
“Yes yes yes. Grace say humans like feeling of being slightly poisoned.”
to me, the cruelest thing that eva stratt does is not the kidnappig itself. it's that she tells grace that he does not even have a dog. dr ryland grace, a man who dedicated his life to the greater good, first to science and then to teaching, does indeed not have a dog. and because of this, he has to spend his last precious moments on his home planet with the full knowledge that while he might be smart enough to save the world, he is not loved enough by anyone on it to be worth saving
james ortiz provided some of his own personal rocky backstory on the sag aftra podcast, transcribed by me because we all have to be miserable about it together.
link to the podcast, this section below is from timestamp 24.35
“andy weir provided a packet to the creature shop that was like a packet of eridian biology and stuff but there wasn’t much about eridian culture or eridian sociology and i made a bunch of choices going in because i just needed to have like a ‘who am i?’ right?
[…] and i made a decision that rocky’s species, that eridians are really social animals that in fact are like a beehive or a pod of dolphins - it’s a unique and really integrated ecosystem of everybody doing their [specific] part. and the fact that rocky had to fly that ship for about 45 years - longer than grace has been alive, i wanna point that out - he’s been alone on that ship, having to run that by himself and- ryan and i would talk about that, one day we sat down and he was like “so what’s the movie from rocky’s perspective?” and i was like “oh it’s like ‘alien’, […] like he’s in a ‘contagion’ movie by himself and he has no idea what’s going on.”
he’s basically in castaway by himself which of course ryan is too but like, one reason why we never cut to the past of rocky is like, i think it was really horrifying! i don’t think rocky has slept in however many years and so a thing i was really struggling with is this idea of like “rocky must watch sleep” because how do you make that a need as opposed to like, a cute idea? and i just had to make the decision that […] he has a lot of unprocessed trauma around the things that he doesn’t understand and how much he is blaming himself because he’s the guy who fixes, he’s the guy who fixes and there was something really freeing about deciding that rocky was a deeply emotional, deeply anxious, deeply horrified person - being - that is trying to move through that in some way and how that affects the early scenes with him until there’s a point in the story where you can see we’ve physically softened rocky’s behaviour, because he’s finally feeling more safe and ok but all of that lore, all of that information [was essential].
i also decided, this is just a small nerdy thing, that there was actually some of his family, was on that ship too.”
Rocky not understanding the concept of nightmares.
Grace has nightmares every night, including the first time he sleeps in the tunnel under Rocky's watch. He tosses and turns in his sleep, he mumbles, he cries, he begs; his brain doesn't remember his last conscious moments on Earth, but his body does.
He doesn't remember having the nightmares. He knows he wakes up feeling like shit, but that's about it; not a big deal.
When in the morning Rocky asks him why he is so noisy, he assumes that he was snoring. "It's a human thing, we can be pretty loud when we sleep. It's not very polite to point it out."
Rocky accepts it; why wouldn't he? It's a human thing!
(Later, when Rocky gets aquainted with human noises enough to recognise Grace's sounds as distress, he concludes that sleeping must suck for humans. This explains why Grace always tries to stay up as long as possible and needs to be reminded to go to bed, actually. Such weird species; they really should watch each other better if this is the norm for them!)
...It's only when they start their journey to Erid, when Grace feels safe again sleeping under Rocky's watch after those couple of months of separation, when he is more or less at peace with the memories and the past, when he is filled with joy of saving Erid and Earth and his friend, when he starts to believe that he'll actually get to live — it's only then Rocky sees him sleeping peacefully through the whole night for the first time.
Rocky freaks out.
He waits for Grace to enter the loud stage of his sleep, and Grace just. doesn't. He doesn't move, his breathing is slow, his heartbeat is steady. Looks peaceful, but this is Wrong, right?? Is he dying? He is dying, isn't he???
He ends up waking Grace up, utterly terrified. After a lot of confusion Grace realizes the misunderstanding and feels Bad about it.
Rocky feels worse. He was supposed to watch over him! He was supposed to protect! And he missed this!! At least let Rocky know how to prevent this in the future. You slept peacefully just now, what changed. Rocky fix and make sure the nightmares don't happen again. Explain Right Now.
Grace, who fell asleep on the floor curled up around Rocky's ball and is not yet ready to admit out loud that the peacefulness was probably due to the close proximity to someone who cares about him: "uhhhh your ball is pretty warm? humans tend to have more nightmares when we are cold, so it's probably that".
He is never allowed to sleep on his own ever again.
My mom likes to tell me about how when I was a little kid riding public transport with her I'd always smile and giggle and chat with weird old ladies who smelled like cat pee and homeless folks and strangers dressed in bizarre outfits but any time a tidy and respectable businessman in a suit and tie waved at me I'd immediately clam up, and she takes a great deal of pride in my supposed inherentability to clock personalities but the truth is I do vaguely remember those bus rides, and it was never about the clothes or the hair or the smell, but more because everyone "strange" asked interesting questions and listened to what I had to say and seemed to think about what I said while the neat and tidy and rigid folks only ever acted like they were going through the motions, which was boring as hell and also pretty annoying
every so often i see rocky angst/whump on my dash and i love it but it just reminds me - are movie only fans aware of exactly why earth's atmosphere is deadly to rocky?
because like yeah sure neither grace nor rocky can breathe in the other's atmosphere, but that's fairly far down the list of problems on either side. for humans the problem is that erid is hot enough and the atmosphere thick enough that we'd be walking into a pressure cooker that's twice as hot as a normal pressure cooker and 15 times as strong! and while rocky can handle the lower pressure in our atmosphere relatively well, a lot of his internal biology happens to be made of somewhat flammable materials? and in trying to save grace he gets to discover first hand what happens if you take a system that produces temperatures up to 400°C as part of their natural cycle and immune response, and then try to breathe oxygen into it
and yes he does still have a lot of residual trauma over that!
(from when they were breeding the taumoeba to be nitrogen resistant, which grace mostly didn't start in the book until after rocky was awake)
Eridians who hunt by disguising themselves amongst the rocks to ambush prey getting countered by an alien who can see through it because 9 times out of 10 they’re a different color than the rocks they’re blending in with entirely
The jingly celebration outfit that Rocky wore was probably Extremely Slutty by Eridian culture (going by what I know of them from the book I’ve yet to read)
I for one, fully subscribe to the idea that Rocky went a bit crazy in his decades of solitude and became a nudist as a result. He fully set himself free from the buttoned up collar modesty of Eridian society, eating included.
Because Eridians all normally wearing clothing makes total sense for echolocation rock folk. The texture and shape of the fabric ‘blurs’ the 3d image others hear. Even more so if the fabric is thick and sound absorbing. So him wearing a sweater in the books makes sense.
Now, for a eridian to dress up and want be the center of attention, they would want to wear something that is literally loud. Crinkly fabrics, lots of jewelry. A chain mail dress to them would be a sequin dress to us. But to wear such outfits ‘respectably’ is wear them while still wearing underwear. Be cause if you let the decoration bounce against your core, the metal colliding with the stone body will echo and show everyone your hole by sound alone.
And to wear Only the loudest jewelry ever while totally naked?? That’s down right public indecency. The kinda stunt pulled by streakers running across a public sports field for the attention.
The truth comes out about this aspect of Eridian culture over half way to Erid. When it fully hits Rocky that he’s going home and gonna be surrounded by Eridians again. So he should probably start wearing cloths again.
Rocky does not say anything to Grace about it at first, just starts slowly wearing more and more cloths again. Until the day that Grace asks Rocky if he made himself these little outfits to emulate human culture. Something Grace thinks is a really sweet gesture of friendship between species.
“Rocky ask Grace hold onto feelings of friendship when Grace hears what Rocky must confess…”
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