~○ my power does not ebb ○~

mara/aphelion • he/they • genderfluid and aromantic • 19 • eng/fil 🇵🇭 • personal and multifandom • i am not spoiler free ‼️ • kinda dead sideblog @aphelio-mara

[loudestlibrarianongodsgreenearth]

like, i’m sorry, this does NOT sound like a guy who’s gotten over it

[mara-phelion]

your yearly reminder that tary was the one who made percy's glasses and it has tary's name engraved into it <3

[mara-phelion]

u gay-er?

context: asker here asked if i'm gay and i forgot to answer so they have now returned to ask if i am even gayer than before

the answer: they call me the gayer

[sunny-sourzii]

Had an idea. Have a gracerocky edit

[convocation-conduit]

Grace watch.

[mara-phelion]

just saying, I'd love to see you unpack the jonah and the whale thing, as someone who wasn't raised religious and finds the allusions difficult to parse

took a bit for me to get back to this but hi! this is going to be a long one so uhhhh. buckle up

(would also like to preface this by saying i don't think andy weir deliberately thought of jonah and the whale when writing phm especially at this scale, but it's a fun coincidence! and i like to analyze things)

for the actual unboxing: jonah and the whale is a biblical story about one of god's prophets choosing to run away from responsibility

jonah, the prophet in question, was essentially tasked to go do his ✨️prophetly duties✨️ in nineveh, a city that had posed a long history of violence and danger, and so he tried to "flee"

sound familiar yet?

jonah took a boat going somewhere else and god sent a fuckass storm to the point that his crew members threw him offboard (albeit, unwillingly at first! until they realized they had no options!) where a whale swallowed him and kept him there until jonah relented

i could easily stop there because the allegory is clear (especially with the allusions of grace literally being alone in a ship in the sea of stars) but immediately after jonah did his part in nineveh (and the ninevites chose salvation), he didn't feel like a hero because a part of him was still cowardly and angry

there's more to the story that isn't usually talked about and it's about jonah leaving nineveh and camping out of the city because he's still Mad about the ninevites being saved from Eternal Damnation

god sees jonah bumming out and he gives him a tree for shade and shelter and just when jonah became complacent, he creates a heat wave that wilts the tree instantly

jonah, on the brink of dying, is spoken to by god in which god asks "do you have the right to be angry about the tree dying?"

now, jonah says "yes, and i am so angry that i'd rather you just kill me now" (which is also less about his anger about the tree but the leftover resentment he has for nineveh too)

and what's interesting is that this part isn't even about grace being a reflection of jonah anymore because we know grace wanted to save earth even after he realized he wasn't supposed to go, but it's a reflection of how phm deals with the idea of sacrifice and bravery

god says in response to jonah, "why should you be angry about the tree when you have done nothing to make it grow?" and it's him showing jonah the holes in his judgement: he can't be angry that god chose to offer nineveh salvation because even if it was a place that god had done nothing to do with shaping, it is still his, and that is enough to care

the tree could represent a lot of things either separately or at once: earth, erid, humanity, rocky—but the reality is that no matter what it is, even if earth and humanity did nothing for ryland grace and erid and rocky were only known for such a brief time in his life, grace chose to care about all of them

the book and film did really well in showing that we are allowed to feel disoriented, angry, and even resentful toward the responsibility we bear, but that doesn't erase the mortal instinct of Giving A Shit

[mara-phelion]

faded by alan walker but it's grace trying to find rocky once he realizes that rocky will die out there if he stays in the blip-a

[mara-phelion]

phm is very blatant in its biblical references but there are two that really strike me

one has to be stratt being named after eve—the first woman and the first sinner—the scapegoat of humanity, whose first sin was merely pure belief (more on stratt being a believer in this post i made)

and second is the rainbow, which is less obvious, but just as shattering to me

the origin of the rainbow in the bible is that it served as a promise after the great flood (noah's ark), wherein god doomed humanity to be destroyed with noah and the people closest to him being the sole survivors, that he would never do it again

the fact that we see the rainbow when grace was being taken (which i think also kinda reflects jonah and the whale but let's unpack that for another day) and that's what triggers the memory for him represents two things

the more blatant fate of a doomed humanity and a concept developed by protestantanism: common grace (literal grace!!!), which reflects the very promise that god made with the rainbow that all of humanity will be saved, no matter who they are

[emziess]

Etched in the surface Project Hail Mary (2026) dir. Phil Lord, Chris Miller

[mara-phelion]

thinking about grace finally meeting other eridians and coming to the realization that his best friend, his buddy, his companion for 5+ years, is the equivalent of a frat boy back on earth

[missus-n]

Where the fuck are the "due to alien cultural differences and miscommunication, we are now technically married" Grocky fics.

[ghost-of-fire-and-sea]

Grace getting increasingly confused as Eridians keep telling him he deserves better

[sparkvamp]

I have an ACG store

Shop Detail

[mara-phelion]

a lot of people villainize stratt because of what she did to grace but as much as i agree that what she did to him was horrible...i just can't see her as this Cold Evil Woman that others make her out to be

eva stratt was one of the BEST of humanity. she wasn't doing it for fame, she was ready to be the world's 'whipping boy' if they ever found out what she did to grace. her motivation was clear from the start and it was always humanity, in fact she might've been more selfless than grace himself

she knew what would happen to the world especially toward the last legs of survival. she knew that as much as she could hope that they would work together until the end, everyone would fight over rations, maybe even turn on each other in the name of survival

and if it was anyone else that sent grace down, they might have not cared enough to give him whatever pieces of himself that she knew. the drawings from his students, the silly t-shirts because she always saw him wearing them, just anything to remind him of the man she saw in him

even if it could be seen as meaningless and desperate words to calm grace down, when she said she believed in him, she meant it. because she believed in humanity more than anybody else, and even grace saw it in the end when he admitted that she was right about him

staring at the end of the world in the eyes, eva stratt was exactly what humanity needed to survive: a believer

[mara-phelion]

i was ahead of my time

[smoothoperatorleclerc]

rb to have a super gay 2023

[non-binary-lil-star]

rb to have a super gay 2024

[magicmumu2]

rb to have a super gay 2025

[transcendental-dustpan]

rb to have a super gay 2026

[yanos3r]

A collection of drawings I made around February this year.

[writer-and-thrasher]

Monty and Maxwell's ending is everything to me.

Maxwell admitting that he liked the books and read them but just didn't believe in the magic? And then Monty was such a huge part in that magic coming back into his life??

Monty being so frustrated by Gotch's tone issues and his criticisms, understanding that Maxwell saw him and respected him? And then giving Max the first draft of his book?? And the note!!

It just amazes me how wonderfully different their characters can be while able to find their way to each other.