nighttime papillon

skittering tarantula, creepy but also resplendently fuzzy

[nighttime-papillon]

Literally just made this blog to yap about my fanfiction. And hopefully one day original fiction. Once I get the courage to post it

What you need to know about me is that I live alone on a distant enclosed heaven exiled from the rest of humanity, where I watch only from my spyglass. In an encounter with me you'll generally want to stare at a wall and politely ignore me.

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Genuinely keep making myself feel actually sick to my stomach thinking about the next chapters

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Can he play with you guys

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POV you won't stop pointing your weird gross human light-sensing orbs at him, you weirdo

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....can you nerd out abt the eridian anger thingy please please please please im so curious im so fascinated by itt :3 its okay if not thou no pressureee

Yees of course :3 !!!!

Longwinded nerd rambling under cut

Okay so in my mind emotions are analyzable as instincts; innate inclinations toward complex behavior that exist before (but can absolutely be modified by) social learning/culture/complex thought. They're evolutionary solutions to problems. Pain and fear would be among the most basic. They drive you to avoid noxious or damaging stimuli, which is pretty essential to an organism living long enough to reproduce.

Eridians (and reminder this is My Eridians, and I like to ignore canon at my whim, because I'm special <3) and humans both have emotions, and a lot of them solve the same drives, and are experienced in at least outwardly similar, broadly interoperable ways- like, Eridians are social creatures just like humans and have the drive to be close with and bond with others. Though they're not exactly the same; phenomenologically they're probably experienced very differently. And there are emotions humans have that Eridians would not recognize at all and vice versa.

For example: Sexuality! Eridians reproduce without sexual intercourse and have no real equivalent. They certainly have a drive to reproduction, but it's not experienced even remotely the same to what humans deal with.

(Fun fact: I had a scene in an early version of Chapter 5 where this Came Up as a topic of discussion/source of a brief, quickly corrected but uncomfortable misunderstanding, but then I decided it was a little too much to get into given the teen rating of the fic- nothing remotely explicit happened to be clear though :P)

And there are emotions that may essentially solve the same or similar function, but are not at all experienced in a similar way. Humans feel anger, Eridians feel... we'll call it Not Anger (I'm as good at naming things as Grace is lol).

Anger in humans is I think analyzable as a protective instinct. Either for yourself or for others you're bonded with. Eridians have a similar drive to protect but it's not experienced at all in a similar way. It's hard to describe it. Anger is a very strong and sharp emotion that easily instigates a lack of control but Not Anger isn't like that.

I think many humans might find it cold and creepily calculating. The Eridian is driven to restrain or neutralize the threat (if it is immediate) through reflex motion (ideally, harmlessly- harm is not the impulse, its restraint, but harm may nonetheless occur); after the threat is restrained or if the threat is not immediate they analyze what has happened, their mind running down the situation again and again in waves of thought almost compulsively, seeking to create a complex mental understanding that can help them then Solve the Problem. It works in strong tandem with their conscious thought and intelligence every step of the way. You might think this is an overly cerebral thing for an instinct that needs to activate in the heat of an intense, possibly life-or-death moment but the quickness of their strong reflexes and the hardness of their exteriors buy them a little time and let them get away with it.

For humans a lot of anger signals come from trying to make oneself look bigger/stronger to scare off a threat. This isn't how Eridian evolution handled things, but they still may produce a buzzing sound that in a distant past may have served to disorient and confuse a threat. The buzz is not really so intense in modern Eridians and in the modern day it's more like crying in that its purpose is more of a social signal than a practical one. (Note: I feel like I describe a lot of Eridian subsonic vocalizations as buzzes and I want to be clear that doesn't mean they're all Not Angry all the time lol. It's a specific type of buzz. Sometimes my dudes just buzz nonspecifically). They also may be unusually (unsettlingly, from a human perspective) silent and unresponsive to speech, but this is usually in very intense moments of Not Anger; Not Anger in a way can give "tunnel vision" like human anger, sometimes to the point of the Eridian literally being unable to perceive or think about anything outside of the Situation until it is Solved as their mental resources are allotted to it, making them functionally mute in some cases.

This emotion factors into Eridian morality. They don't have a criminal justice system as humans would recognize it. They view occurrences where someone was harmed much like a problem to be solved. This may seem detached, but it definitely doesn't feel that way to them; it's very much richly emotional, just in emotions humans don't really relate to. They do not have any word in any language that would map onto the human concept of justice, as humans would understand it. The closest thing might be halfway translatable as "solution"; puzzle pieces coming together, rebalancing, equilibrium, a settling of a storm. When the problem is solved, there is nothing more to do, and everything is alright and healing again. Critically, unlike justice, it carries no inherent notion of any harm coming to a perpetrator at all, and they'd think humans were weird for expecting that.

Indeed they would find human impulses to harm and attack when angry alien and strange. Eridians will certainly harm in self-defense, but its a secondary, conscious impulse, not a primary, instinctive one (incidentally they may cause impulsive harm in seeking to restrain/neutralize a threat but they don't have a drive to Harm- it's to Solve, and on a conscious intelligent level they will generally very much try to solve without violence when they can; unlike humans they pretty much always keep their heads on even in the intensity of the moment, in fact that is kind of Entirely the thing about the emotion, preserving and hyper-accentuating thought processes to a point it can be unbearable and all-consuming).

So Eridians don't feel hate, though interpersonal distaste and discomfort is a thing. This means that when Rocky says Earth is a harmful planet for Grace, he doesn't actually feel any malice towards Earth or humans as might be expected if a human were saying that. He was just driven to Solve The Problem and protect him.

Actually now that I think deeper about it it just accentuates how much Rocky could not have just let Grace say goodbye... it would've been acutely unbearable for him, maybe even moreso than it would be for a human, to have this Problem and then to have to just... let it go, allowing the person he cares for deeply and is so driven to protect to come to harm.

:(

[nighttime-papillon]

Probably not the Intended reaction but I’ve been thinking about your Rocky so much…like objectively he’s kind of a piece of shit. Selfish and unable to admit it, going as far as to justify kidnapping just to protect his own interests. Yet, he’s still not…outwardly horrible. I don’t know how to word it. He means well. He really does love Grace. He…kind of not really…wants the best for him! Worst of all he knows what he did is wrong, there’s a way for him to fix it, but he just can’t make that leap. I think that’s a really admirable character flaw (not to have, but to write.) He knows how to fix what he’s done, his whole schtick is fixing shit, but he won’t do it because it’ll jeopardize his life and put him in worse-off position. Damn. How he must feel ruining his life and his “best friend”’s for what…for shiggles…

I can TASTE the pressure of his guilt and he just has to live with that forever Oh goodness. Maybe not forever since I’m sure he’s going to get found out in either the next chapter or another…but in the meantime Ow. I don’t wanna say poor Rocky because hey…fuck you man…but poor Rocky.

I don’t know if this matches The Vibes but I’ve been thinking about your version of him to Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect by The Decemberists. Falling short in his good-natured affections every time… euuughh… Feel free to ignore me if I’m just spouting bullshit and this is not how you intended him to be interpreted (because I hate when people do that to me LOL I get it) but Oh I love (kind of) your Rocky so dearly

Oh no the intended reaction is definitely Thinking About It

Rocky truly wants the very best for Grace and basically every action he's done has been has been intended to benefit him. He is thoroughly an altruistic and benevolent character (albeit not selfless)

Obviously what he did caused so much more harm than good, to be very clear Kidnapping The Alien Against Its Will and Ruining Its Life is, you know, Bad (that's kind of the Point, obviously)- but he did it truly believing it would be the kindest action.

In Rocky's mind Grace is the most beautiful thing his species has ever come across, incredibly deserving of preservation and protection- and that Grace's homeworld would only hurt him. He thought because Earth seemed so violent and cruel and horrible, and Grace evidently (to an Eridian perspective) insanely traumatized, that Grace would've been truly happier being loved by Erid. Or if not happier, at least safer. You know. Less dead :P

Though yes, Rocky is selfish. He believed he was smarter and understood more about what was good for Grace than Grace himself. And his clinginess is probably driven in no small part from the trauma of being isolated on a spaceship with the weight of his dying planet on his mind for literal decades, and his need to not be alone without his best friend. Even after years of regretting what he'd done he still avoids telling the truth and risking being apart from Grace.

Though his avoidance of disclosing the truth is less self-preservation and more of a desperation for Erid to see Grace as Rocky sees him, to not have to know him from this broken form. The "museum object" theme; Rocky attempted to preserve him forever like a specimen under plexiglass, in full benevolence and admiration and love, only to watch him deteriorate and die without any way to stop it. And yes it's absolute AGONY for him. He's forced to just watch what he tried so hard to protect crumble under his hands in perpetuity. And now there's no avoiding two entire worlds seeing how badly he's ruined something so beautiful.

In short: Shit's fucked up

[nighttime-papillon]

heeeey pal!! your fic is so haunting and fucked up and amazingly written its been very much eating my brain af of late ^^

question: since eridians have perfect memory, can Rutile be able to retroactivally translate what grace was saying in chapter 6? Because oh BOY im sure they would feel bad about it

Hi!!!! Yay thank you so much :D !!

Hmmm that's a good question. I'm still thinking over my headcanons wrt Eridians and their memory, I know Andy Weir has said their memory is perfect but generally I'm making my Eridians Different(TM) and ignoring canon when I want to, because... I'm special :3

And I don't find a truly perfect memory as fun to play with as a near-perfect but still-flawed-in-some-ways one. I think they have really incredible-to-us information storage (facts, like what a word means) but autobiographical/event memory is a little less perfect; it would get overwhelming for an organism to have to recall every little thing; more salient stimuli gets prioritized. It's still very much better than human memory, I think, though

For humans, one's brain literally cannot perceive the speech sounds of another language correctly at first; every language has a distinct phonemic inventory, which may include speech sounds that just don't exist in the language(s) you speak. For an alien language this is obviously way more the case because EVERYTHING is different, from the entire way it's produced on up; I've basically skipped over all the "learning how to distinguish the sounds" stage of it with the new humans learning Eridian but it was probably at least a bit of a rough learning curve lol

It might be different with beings as sound-based as the Eridians, though; they'll probably be able to discriminate sounds better from the start, though their attention and perception will still be different than a human's.

So assuming Rutile has completely stored Grace's utterances they'd probably be able to guess the shape of at least a few words while remembering back but maybe not the full picture

They WOULD feel terrible though, jeez lol. I think at the least as they adapt to watching the new humans they might be able to eventually think back and go "wait a minute... I don't think that was joy our guy was expressing..." lol.

But by then... the truth may already be out lol.

I'm so sorry I used your ask as an excuse to be a nerd but also I'm not sorry at all. In fact I demand more people offer me more excuses to yap extensively about my increasingly insane Eridian headcanons. I've been reading animal ethology and neurology books and papers about it okay. I'm so into it

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Also!!! Would love a timeline after your fic is done that'd be so cool to see

(Sorry forgor to reply to this for a bit!)

I do have a timeline I'm using as reference!! I can share it now, maybe I'll include it in the fic itself for easy reference once it's done. Uh sorry if I got anything wrong or mixed up. If I did it's because I'm a failure idk what to tell you. Anyway:

2023 - Hail Mary is launched; Grace is 29

2035 - Hail Mary arrives in Tau Ceti, Grace is 33 (experienced only 4 years)

2047 - Beetles return to Earth

2048 - Hail Mary and Blip-A arrives on Erid, Grace is 36

2049 - Sol returns to full luminance, Earth recovering, Amirah is recruited

2052 – Phaethon III departs Earth

2069 – Phaethon III arrives at Erid, Grace is 54

2087 - Earliest expected return date for Phaethon III

(I omitted some lore things like World War III from that, because they're not directly important to you the reader)

Also, Amirah was born in 2023. She's 34, 29 on departure, same age as Grace was. I realized only after I wrote it that doesn't really make sense with how Grace briefly freaks out over the possibility of her being one of his students, because that's definitely not even remotely possible, she would've been a big fat 0 years old when he left. But also like it's so easy to just chalk this up to him both not knowing how old she is exactly and also having an insanely scrambled sense of time. That guy has no idea what's going on man sometimes he sincerely thinks it's been like 2 billion years since he left Earth

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Okay no wait I have had a Thought and I must make it your problem because--

Grace ends up interacting with a Fellow Human Being for the first time in AGES because he internalized the Eridian Cultural Norm of "people must be watched while sleeping".

2 seconds after he's not panicking about interacting with a Fellow Human Being the very HUMAN cultural norm of "want food?" Kicks in. (In a delightfully twisted "wanna eat me?" Way but thats not the point here).

And its like. He's spent so long among the aliens. But the only cultural norms hes adopted are the ones ROCKY has chosen to observe with him. ROCKY got so used to having to basically force Grace to eat during the trip to Erid food is NBD anymore. But ROCKY says sleep must be watched.

I just. *incoherent flailing*. ITS GOOD DETAIL.

Yes!!!

First contact has gotten so weird for everyone involved here. Both Grace and Rocky are a strange mixture of their respective source cultures and their own mini-culture that's arisen from their relationship and situation. (I haven't really touched on it but Rocky is also definitely weird for his species now lol).

But Grace has never had the opportunity to really become Eridian, or truly integrate any Eridian cultural traits; everything he's adapted to is downstream of only Rocky, and specifically Rocky's expectations and desires of him- and Rocky quite likes him being alien and fascinating and strange, he admires all his human (alien) qualities, but under that gaze Grace feels (pardon the pun) alienated from them.

He doesn't feel human, he doesn't feel Eridian, he is Alien. Both to the Eridians and then to the humans.

Amirah sees through it, though. Her contact brought him back in touch with himself as a human; the opposite of the fascinated alien gaze, she insisted on seeing him and responding to him as just another human dude. If she'd recoiled from his weirdness then it never would've gotten to come out. If it was anyone else it probably wouldn't have happened, they'd have been too starstruck and then too horrified.

And ough there's just so much to it... thinking obsessively

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Haunted Grace's self-concept doodles

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I can't stop thinking about the fucking wrench. About Grace missing his opportunity to attempt a plan to escape because he couldn't bring himself to risk hurting his friend. About the motif of human hands and tools and agency. About how the plan probably wouldn't have worked anyway. About [redacted because it's in a later chapter but OH BOY]. About helplessness and anger and the choices Grace has in fact made since his abduction and why he made them.

This fic won't leave my head and I'm going insane

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Okay so I'm gonna need you to write a character with a form of intense "madness"/psychological aberrance that you find personally unrelatable and then I'm gonna need you to really sink into that character and get inside their mind and not push away any of their feelings and thoughts and desires as too alien or inscrutable to be human or to be intimately understandable to you once you figure them out, and then I need you to come out of that process realizing you actually find them intensely, extremely relatable after all, perhaps more relatable than any other character you've written, and then I'm gonna need you to just exist with that forever

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Okay listen listen how Grace draws himself drives me wild like it's so haunting im gonna throw up

Hell yeah!

I love writing characters that feel disconnected from their face/physical form/humanity etc like he does, and I love drawing how that comes out in his art :3 Grace doesn't really dwell on it in his internal narration, but like, in the same way a fish doesn't really dwell on how they're wet, you know lol. It's such a constant for him it's the air he breathes.

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Also wip lol

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hbomberguy should have been on the Phaethon III. Imagine the video essay we could have gotten,

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The Phaethon III coming back to Earth and its first communication is GRACE_ROCKY_SAVE_STARS.mp4, a 4 hour long video essay meticulously documenting and breaking down Rocky's lies piece by piece. It's Amirah's chosen method of breaking the news that everyone's favorite space guy was kidnapped instead of anything normal

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hbomberguy should have been on the Phaethon III. Imagine the video essay we could have gotten,

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Sorry for yapping about myself and tooting my own horn (I mean, this is what this blog is here for loll so), but I'm honestly very proud of myself, I feel like I've improved a lot with writing in the past year or so

I used to struggle very hard with it. I've got several weirdbrain conditions going on that make me struggle with expressive language at the best of times. For reference I can't even order food on my own without a concentrated and exhausting effort. I got into so many knock-out brawls with the English language and I lost most of them. But my desperation to get across what's inside my head has motivated me to keep coming back again and again until I started beating its ass. I've sort of bent it into my shape and it's coming a lot easier. It's a REALLY good feeling, like language is like an epic beast destined to kill me that I've tamed because I'm just that powerful, :3

I think my weirdbrain-ness has become an asset rather than a disadvantage, when it comes to my writing and storytelling style. I want to embrace that even more. I want to get even weirder with it and show people what I can really do. Because I feel like I can do so much. Every time I write a good line I feel like I could kill god. It's awesome. Everyone should get into writing, seriously. Would highly recommend