I think Iron Lung deserves to be Oscar nominated for the makeup and I'm completely serious. Tiny splashes of blood he didn't know to clean off because he doesn't have a mirror slowly turn into burns and then holes in Simon's head and you don't notice at all until it's too late. You think, oh, that must have been a burn all along, I guess, that's why it was still there. The bandages get bloodied, and then bloodier from the inside. Keeping makeup like that consistent at all is already a nightmare and they made it an arching plot point. The only makeup job I didn't care for was at the very, very end, and it's for the usual "building on top of because you can't take away from the surface" reasons, it's completely fine from this size production.
Big fan of college party animal Ryland “it’s been a long time since I took a pill from a stranger without knowing what it was” Grace who is a notorious menace.
Big fan of high academia Dr Ryland “will call you a staggering waste of carbon” Grace who is a short tempered, egotistical, and kind of a jerk.
Big fan of how Ryland Grace can be both these things but while still having his same fundamental personality as a good person and wet cat.
Big fan of how it’s generally agreed that teaching burned the evil out of him and let his whimsy shine.
Big fan of how it took arguably the most difficult and deranged demographic of the human population (thirteen year olds) to turn that man into the best version of himself.
honestly one of my favorite things about fanfic is when you can see the canon influences come out in really subtle ways. like a canon line thats mentioned once as a throwaway is suddenly the entire premise for a fic or it influences the characterization or something. its just so cool to see how people weave their ideas around a source material, especially if its not a detail i'd thought about before
rocky should be naked: an anthropological treatise
something maybe controversial that has been driving me BONKERS since the project hail mary book first came out that i finally just had to dig into my anthropology MA to bitch about:
it's fucking batshit that andy weir wrote the eridians as wearing clothes. there is no reason that eridians would ever develop something akin to human clothing.
like. do you know how long humans (not just hairy early hominin relatives of our, but straight-up anatomically modern homo sapiens) were rocking nothing but our birthday suits? LIKE NINETY THOUSAND FUCKING YEARS. HUMANS HAVE BEEN NAKED ALMOST THE WHOLE TIME WE'VE BEEN HUMANS, and we're famously leaky hairless apes, not hard-carapaced crab spiders with piston joints who live in boiling ammonia.
listen to me. the first hairless hominin was homo erectus, about 1.6mya. naked. anatomically modern humans like us evolved 350-270,000 years ago. also naked. when do we first have solid evidence for consistent human use of clothing (bc it's when the clothing lice genome evolves to diverge from the head lice genome lol)? only 170,000-83,000 years ago. before that? BUCKASS NAKED. and even when we did start using clothing? well, as we know from excellent textile archeologists such as elizabeth wayland barber, a LOT of early human clothing was likely more decorative than functional – i.e. the string skirts that you see on some of the 'venus figures' from the upper paleolithic, which were solely decorative but would NOT do anything for warmth.
now consider eridians, whose bodies are functionally impenetrable unless they're actively eating (which is a private activity anyhow), who are carnivores (thus having no need to cultivate plants – aka the source of most textiles – like humans do), who live on a planet with no sun exposure (so probably nothing like earth plants anyways) and no fucking seasons (no need for rain/snow protection!), who evolved to exist ONLY in very specific & stable temperature ranges (like most life on erid, per andy weir), who have five fucking hands to hold things, are famously so good at multitasking that doing just one activity sucks for them, and CANNOT FUCKING SEE!!!
so where the FUCK is eridians' evolutionary or social impetus to develop ANYTHING akin to clothing supposedly coming from? N O W H E R E. you heard me.
decoration like the celebration jewelry, absolutely – though notice that was clearly designed for its auditory qualities and ability to show up on sonar, not anything approaching the level of coverage that human clothing has. rocky's engineering lederhosen (leather! bc again, carnivores!) as a (evolutionarily speaking) modern development to help hold tools, yeah, totally. carapace carvings, 100%.
BUT THERE IS NO FUCKING REASON FOR THAT ROCK TO WEAR A SHIRT. in fact, it's way the fuck weirder that he DOES wear a shirt in the book! the movie was completely right to have a buckass naked rocky, there is no goddamn reason eridians would ever develop clothing, and the idea of a five-legged spider rock trying to put on a sleeved shirt makes me want to have a stroke. thank you for coming to my ted talk.
As much as I like the headcanon that Rocky, specifically, has been running around naked because he kind of went crazy after being alone on a spaceship for decades, didn't bother putting a shirt on for first contact, and then had to double down on it, you are correct.
With the addition that I think their echolocation can just go through clothing anyway? And that if their clothing was a material that blocked or scattered sound enough to not be effectively transparent to other eridians, isn't their sense of hearing distributed across their whole body surface so they'd be effectively "blindfolding" themselves?
"There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one."
phm is decently popular in japan and i mostly see this when i check twitter and see accounts posting pictures of handmade rocky plushies that are so fucking round looking it brings a tear to my eye
I love how the entire aroace community latched onto Ryland Grace with no hesitation and have used his character as an outlet for frustrations regarding real-world politics surrounding our identities.
Dr. Ryland Grace was arguably the perfect backup candidate for his mission. Stratt got that right. He had no children, no life partner, no family, not even a dog. All he had was his students and that was enough for him, but that made him replaceable.
Right?
Not only were Grace’s wishes completely ignored, his life and his value as a person was undermined. Simply because he had no one but his students to care for his wellbeing, because he wouldn’t have someone at home waiting for him to come back.
Aroace people deal with similar treatment simply because romance and sex are seen as essential to the human experience, completely disregarding any and all other types of connection. One’s inherent value as a person is not lost when they choose to live life without romantic or sexual relationships. One’s value is simply in existing.
Aroace people know this well, which is why so many have become so attached to Ryland as a character. Many of us see his way of life as the end goal for ourselves, so any one of us would have been seen as just as dispensable, by Stratt and by society as a whole.
Aroace people love Dr. Ryland Grace because his life mattered just as much as everyone else’s, and so do ours.
I've been plagued with the idea of starting my own Iron Lung wiki based off of my master reference, the things I've discovered via this blog (like the terminal motherboard being the Acer 710!), using a cross-reference and edit-protection system for user submissions, etc. I'd have a page for every character, all the locations, the SM-13, items, etc. with reference images.
Extrapolations would have their own section, clearly indicated to prevent confusion between canon and not.
Instead of having to crawl through a Google Drive, I could make the entries look much nicer and easier to navigate!
I wrote the entire transcript by hand and beat-for-beat know every line and scene.
I have taken over a thousand screenshots of Iron Lung and have watched it 20+ times to reliably answer hundreds of fan questions.
I was trained to separate my opinions from fact.
It will utilize a submission and cross reference system so we don't get losers doing shit like this to our work:
It is also a screenshot, dialogue, lore entry, and behind-the-scenes repository.
It will have a separate section containing a writer's resource for fanfiction writers, with clear indication on all pages that it is extrapolation backed with evidence, to use as a quick-reference guide.
There won't be ads, there won't be clutter or headcanons snuck into text, just straight information, with speculation appropriately separated and highlighted.
I'm not some hick from the ass crack of the internet making a shitty website. I'm the hick from the ass crack of the internet making the only website.
Iron Lung does not have a standalone wiki.
This is how we keep a fandom going long-term. Catering to the fans. Keeping information available and easy to find will push more people to make content about Iron Lung, which is beneficial to the media and its community in every way.
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