Thoughts on the “you don’t even have a dog” line that seems to be making its way around the phm fandom?
Many!! Which you may or may not agree with lol
It's a brutal line. Like yeah. Of course it is. I won't pretend it's not cruel and devastating. That's the point!! Stratt will say absolutely anything necessary to get Grace on the Hail Mary in that moment. If he'd had a partner and children and other 'traditional' attachments, she would have used that as motivation instead. That's the TLDR, my ramblings below will probably be kind of talking in circles
look I'm not going to take away from people who read that in a more malicious way and who connect it with their own experiences of having their life devalued because of a lack of traditional romantic and familial relationships. especially given the widespread aroace reading of Grace, I completely understand reading it that way and am genuinely happy for whatever comfort it brings people!!
that said, I do like to take it a step further and really like. see it through Stratt's eyes? she also has given up everything for this project. she also seemingly has no attachments outside of work. she also is sacrificing unfathomable amounts for this project and for the world. she doesn't have any family, she doesn't have any friends, she doesn't even have a dog. actually, she's being forced to kill the closest thing to a friend she has. everything she says to him she can easily hold up in a mirror to herself
I personally, seeing as I love the secret third thing between them, also really like the reading where they ARE friends and they do have something deeply strange and intimate between them and Grace really does feel betrayed by this choice. It's not just being asked to die by his boss, it's being asked to die by the person he's closest to, one of the only people he's allowed himself to be vulnerable to in who knows how long... and she's asking him to die. Not only asking him to die, but hitting him in all the places she knows will hurt him the most. It's awful. It's part of the tragedy.
I like to also read it as her doing whatever she can to put some distance between them. She says the cruelest thing she can think of (and, as I recall, goes back to calling him 'Dr. Grace' instead of just Grace in the book, even more distance) as a way of severing the tie between them. She does it for her sake, to try to make it easier to watch him go and know she's sent him to die, but I think in her own way, she also thinks she's helping him. Like maybe if the last thing she does is say these awful things and hurt him, it'll be easier for him to move past whatever they had and be okay on his own and maybe he'll even think that the problem is her and not him, because I think she really put in so. much. effort. into making him see that he's not fundamentally flawed or wrong or broken. and here she comes doing something that she KNOWS will make him feel like he's worthless (even though in her eyes!!!! he could not be worth more!!! he is the man capable of saving the planet!!! there is no one more important to her than him!! but she knows him and she knows how he'll hear it and she knows he'll interpret it as being unloved and expendable)
it is a really hurtful line and it is pretty cruel. but beyond the fact that she would have said anything in that moment, I also think the cruelty was the point. I think, to her, it seemed like it would be a mercy to be this easily hated monster in this eyes. and really doesn't that just make the whole thing so much worse?
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