|| nic || 25 y.o. || they/them queer || rb my art & i'll love you forever || #obrození || currently fixated on: naruto & traditional art || header by @normcdf
Thinking about book!Stratt and her impassioned attempt to make Grace understand when he says no, and thinking of Sandra Hüller's amazing acting during the chase scene and how she shows her sense of disappointment and betrayal in these beautiful, minute expressions. Thinking of the ways in which Grace betrayed her in so many ways despite the ways in which Grace had time and space to comprehend his unique skills and integrality to the running of the whole project. Thinking of the ways in which Grace's cowardice includes the refusal to face facts and think through not just what came next, but what came After the launch-- thinking through how badly Grace betrayed Eva Stratt, and not the reverse;
Eva Stratt, who took on an impossible burden, willing to go into it all on her own because no one else was willing to shoulder the skies
Eva Stratt, who sought out every possible scientist and engineer and resource able to think big about potential alien life and everything else they would need to combat the threat
Eva Stratt, who makes sure well in advance that she has permission and resources for world-saving work
Eva Stratt, whose selection of a fringe microbiologist with a genius for explaining dense terminology to lay people yields quicker, more productive decisions and avenues for research than any hidebound academic
Eva Stratt, whose microbiologist-teacher-translator understands how to administer too many projects and too many demands on his time and still carves out time to do more because that's what teachers do
Eva Stratt, whose right-hand man has answered, advised, and absolved her as they made horrible decisions that were the most likely to succeed toward the largest and best end of them all
Eva Stratt, who shared almost all of her plans and projects with her fringe microbiologist, teacher, second in command, project partner, her friend
Eva Stratt, who could trust her friend to make sound, difficult, scientifically valid, potential-maximizing decisions on the world's behalf because he loved it as much as she does
Eva Stratt (movie), who cannot be seen to falter or yield if any of this is going to work, takes a long moment of softness to try to offer some kind of assurance, camaraderie that they are all in their separate tasks still all in it together
Eva Stratt, who finds out at the last minute, on the precipice of deadly delay or potentially world-saving success, that her friend is a naive fool and a coward who never understood her or the mission and what was at stake after all
Eva Stratt, who'd hoped she wasn't alone in the willingness to do anything to save as much as they could
Eva Stratt, who found herself alone in making the world's hardest decisions, whose once-co-lead refused to help her make the awful, desperate, necessary decision together
Eva Stratt, whose friend betrayed her by never thinking all of it through. Betrayed by her right-hand, trusted project co-lead, translator of science bullshit, radical innovator and methodical scientist, who refused to follow the facts all the way to the proof he should have seen long before. Betrayed by her once-friend, now just Crew Member Number Three.
Eva Stratt, who loves the world enough to give up someone who has made her life and her work bearable, even as her once-friend proves his love is not the awful, all encompassing love that both she and the world need
Eva Stratt, who shoots her once-friend and still brilliant and innovative scientist into space anyway, because she has no other choice and now neither does he
Eva Stratt, who stands alone after the launch, and who'd hoped (in the quiet of her carefully cordoned off heart) that Grace would be by her side-- shouldering the heavens, pushing that boulder, stealing fire over and over until the sun brightened again or they'd wrung out every last gasp
Eva Stratt, who was right in thinking she'd stand alone at the end
I need a thousand fics from the in-canon Eva Stratt Was Right fanclub posthaste.
#LITERALLY. LITERALLY.#grace stood by her side and yes-anded the plan to send the astronauts one way to save the world#and he was the one who betrayed her by refusing to do the same. you are her right-hand man you told her it was a viable plan you had your#hand in every design for the ship and the beetles and the amount of astrophage. you saw the shortlist of astronauts & you agreed to them#and you BETRAYED her. you COULDN'T do the same thing that you sentenced the two science officers you taught for months to do#she made the decision with you and you said No.#eva stratt#project hail mary
I think the core difference between the book and movie versions of ryland grace is that, while both are desperately afraid of taking action, book!grace's fear stems from the fact that he doesn't want to be hurt, whereas as for movie!grace it's that he genuinely thinks he's incapable of doing anything meaningful.
compare how they react to remembering they were forced onto the ship:
in the book, he stands around in numb ashamed shock at his cowardice for a minute before deciding, against rocky's better judgement, that they should voluntarily subject the hail mary to a six g force again to get the lab equipment up and running instead of just waiting eleven days to get back to the blip-A, and it hurts him a lot and he ends up passing out from it. he locates the problem in his memory as being that he was too caught up in concern for his own wellbeing, so he tries to counterbalance it by opting to do something bizarrely personally risky so they can get back to work more quickly. his refrain in his memories is "I don't want to die."
in the film, he remembers it all and then he's back to his old self when saying his farewells to rocky. his emotional vulnerability is gone, his walls are back up, he tries to leave without saying a real goodbye before rocky continues the conversation, and he rejects being called "brave." all his weeks of learning to do the scary thing so he can care for someone and be cared about are just gone. he locates the problem in his memory as being that he as a person is simply not brave; he lacks the gene for it and isn't capable of real accomplishment; he'd thought he could grow and change and he was wrong. his refrain in his memories is "I can't do it."
i love this and i'd like to share some related thoughts on movie!grace specifically (mostly because i'm much more familiar with him than with book!grace)
it did seem to me like the movie!grace we see who's so so unsure of himself must be pretty different from the him further in the past, a guy we know called out prominent scientists in his field by name to insult them and even declared one a staggering waste of carbon—at a conference, so presumbaly face-to-face, and in front of a crowd. i've been of the belief that the fallout from all that, combined with his already being in a bad place mentally when it happened, ended up just totally shattering his self-esteem/self-confidence.
he says at the meeting after the explosion: "some people are failures," and he was surely thinking about how his stance on non-water-based life forms (and his actions in defense of it) led to his disgraced exit from academia AND seemed to be proven wrong by astrophage, which had seemed to have all the makings of a lifeform that would finally prove him right.
but what i think is extra interesting (especially in relation to this post) is his next line: "some people don't rise to the challenge." i do wonder if he's still thinking a bit about his life in academia there, sitting underneath the obvious and current challenge of giving up his life.
in the book, stratt berates grace for always fleeing from risk, like leaving academia when he was met with backlash and opting instead to be the "cool teacher" who's adored by his young students. if things in the past went that way for movie!grace, then i think it adds an interesting layer to him in that he's already aware and ashamed of his risk aversion, and that shameful aversion cyclically feeds into and is fed by his belief that he isn't a capable person.
aw yeah now you're speaking my language. I said a few things about book!grace's response to being ousted from academia in another addition I made to this post, but to expand, I think the subtly altered dialogue in the two versions of his first scene with stratt convey that the two iterations of the character took slightly different things away from the same experience. the in-person "staggering waste of carbon" incident is a movie-only inclusion, and you're right, that's not a very "unsure of himself" thing to do, and whatsmore it's a super mean thing to say (which doesn't seem all that like him) and also simply an innovatively stupid move. like, if he wanted to precisely calculate the best way to explode his career, that would be it. in the book, he says of that paper that he "had enough of the research world and that was sort of a ‘kiss-my-butt’ goodbye," meaning it was knowingly incendiary, but we don't get a similar line in the film.
movie!grace has a few moments were we see him express anger externally: something crosses a line and ticks him off and he screams and hits inanimate objects about it. important to note, I think, that he's never screaming at anyone, the objects he smacks around are mostly his own, and that the one time he does it in front of other people and in someone else's space that he keeps the physical stuff confined to a trash bin and cools down a little before taking to anyone and apologizes afterwards, broadly showing that he's not trying to be aggressive and genuinely does just have a short fuse. combined with the lack of any "I was on my way out of the field and wanted to leave with a bang" lines, it reads to me like he just lost his temper in a really bad way in a public professional setting. he wasn't looking for an opportunity to get out, he had a visible acute breakdown and lost his job. and he remembers that whole episode as "I was fired for standing by what I wrote" instead of something like "I was fired for making a scene at a conference and severing all my professional connections," locating the problem as being that he stood up for himself in the first place.
what I think is particularly interesting is that his conclusion of "I'm a failure, I can't rise to the challenge" looks completely rational from his pov. he cussed out the leading scholar in his field in front of an audience and got fired about it (yeah that'll happen if you do that) and then his big bold idea got roundly disproven (so maybe they were all right to treat him like he didn't matter regardless of how much he believed in the work). "I can't handle the pressure, I'm not skilled enough, I'm wrong about my strongest convictions and I'll suffer pointlessly if I actually try to give it my all" is a reasonable takeaway to have from that sequence of events. he conducted himself poorly and was legitimately wrong, the narrative doesn't validate that he was secretly right to do any of that, it just says that he shouldn't have let it ruin his self-image.
grace lands on calling rocky "he" because he has a split second of panic in one of their first interactions and thinks "uhhh he or she or oh gosh this species might have a dozen sexes and use pronouns I don't even have words for um uh okay I'll just use 'he' because using 'it' for a sapient creature feels wrong. why does no one talk about how to use pronouns in first contact." personally I find this hilarious because it characterizes grace as being just about Gender Aware enough to conceive of and be cool with the idea of sex and gender existing outside of the socially constructed binary and is probably even down to use neopronouns for people, but also a) he still opts for "he" over "they" and b) is completely unaware that zillions of people are absolutely having fifth dimensional discussions about pronouns and first contact.
grace never refers to adrian by pronouns.
grace thinks of adrian as rocky's spouse specifically, not husband or wife.
there's a tiny bit at the end where grace says if he shined a light out of the clear xenonite of his dome then he could "see an eridian going about his business," meaning he's probably just using "he" as the pronoun for all eridians.
bonus round that doesn't actually come up in the text but is a metatextual thing I think some people are probably missing: "adrian" as a name on its own has a masculine connotation but grace 100% picked it because rocky balboa's girlfriend/wife in the rocky movies is called adriana "adrian" pennino. this genderless rock whom grace probably thinks of as being a he/him married to another genderless he/him is named after a female character who goes by a masculine nickname.
like, do I think andy "I don't do politics" "socially liberal fiscally conservative" weir was knowingly and deliberately doing queer gender things with eridians? no, and it would feel especially absurd to say that when the contemporary scifi novel scene is so full of authors who are doing queer gender things on purpose. I think what's happening here is that weir is competent enough to make his characters gnc agender intersex gay men by accident as a result of being committed to worldbuilding an alien species that feels genuinely alien in its social and physical norms, which is the opposite tack to the "how do I create a scifi allegorical representation of an already existing human queer experience" approach that a lot of other authors take. and I can't say I don't enjoy the idea of a gay little he/they genderless rock spouse with a tomboy name who according to the movie apparently works in aquatic habitat maintenance.
thinking about it really normally but your post about stratt learning about high profile high stress businessmen hiring a dominatrix to take the reins and thinking of herself as a high profile high stress businessman that just happens to be a woman is maybe one of the hottest things ive ever read and i think god bless her soul she'd be so fucking bad at being dommed. she is so tense it's not even that she doesn't want to sub she's just got so much on her mind. getting her to stop thinking about work for long enough to put on the dog collar is its own billion dollar research project
she enters a scene willingly and with total informed consent of what's meant to happen and the other person tries to start with a basic "get on your knees" and she's just like "? ummm no. why would I do that." on god she wants to join the game and chill out but the wires to the "chill out" button in her brain have been disconnected for about two maybe three years. they eventually finagle her into a blindfold but internally she's just thinking "great, now without external stimulus I can better visualize that budget sheet I'm working on." someone tries to give her a back massage and they flinch the second they touch her because they think she's secretly wearing some kind of hard shell exoskeleton jacket.
Am reading PHM after seeing and loving the film and I'm realizing that it is an academic's fantasy of getting kidnapped into your dream job with, oh no, all the resources and funding and exciting important space adventures! It's like fifty shades for asexual researchers
the thing about "eridian worldbuilding" is that you need to make 3 in-depth, separate cultures MINIMUM. then you need to give them all separate reasons to think the other is ridiculous. this is necessary so you can triangulate how most people on erid felt about first contact being established by someone like rocky, the same way i look at grace's white americanisms and want to bash my head against a wall
#do the eridians even know the rest of planet earth is not That into burgers... #actually tags cancelled i just made myself cough-laugh imagining myself in grace's position #trying to get the eridians to use my cloned lab meat to recreate the humble bunnings sausage sizzle. #okay more seriously how much interplanetary diplomatic awkwardness was caused #by grace and rocky both confidently going 'humans are like this' and 'eridians are like this' #and they both just mean their respective cultures. theres nuance.
(tags via @grimark)
first of all lmfao, second of all YEAH!!! Hang on I need to yap about this, I have so many opinions.
To make an example: one of the details in the book I keep returning to is Rocky's attitude around eating. Weir mentioned in various interviews that the idea came to him as a subversion of how aggressively social the act of eating is for humans compared to other biological needs. Which is a fair enough place to start with, but this kind of social taboo is usually tied to reasons like sanitation and avoiding risk of infection. Which fits, since as monostomes the process of nutrition and waste disposal are inextricably tied for an Eridian (not to mention the whole Making An Open Wound Per Meal deal).
Thing is, that wouldn't necessarily extend to the preparation of food, but Rocky is still uncomfortable and asks Grace not to comment while preparing his meal. Meat on Erid requires butchering to separate the viable parts from the nonviable. The Eridians doc describes the act of manually tearing food to pieces as pleasurable, "similar to chewing good food for humans"... except butchering larger prey is something that would require collaboration, and (shared) pleasure is just as much of a biological incentive towards social behaviour as fear.
I think it would be interesting if this was a peculiarity of Rocky's specific culture! Or if there was another Eridian clan who, due to climatic or migratory reasons, had to deal with recurring food scarcity and was used to curing and preserving large quantities of food to stock up as a consequence. This would decouple food preparation from the (gross) act of eating itself, making it more positive and commensal.
Imagine Grace striking up conversation with the nutrition technician that organises his taste tests like, "hey thank you for all you're doing, I know dealing with food is super gross for Eridians. just want you to know i appreciate it a lot" and the technician is like "??? huh? oh—OH. saviour grace misunderstands. preserving food and making it edible very fun where I'm from."
"Seriously? Rocky always said it was embarrassing"
In the end Grace gets invited to join the seasonal butchering (ie spectate from his xenonite enclosure and try to pay back the cultural exchange by badly recounting how to prepare a thanksgiving turkey). Rocky also insists on being there (he's jealous) except he just lurks near the periphery while visibly uncomfortable and not talking to anyone LMAOO
so hard not to become the most annoying person on earth if you're a little excitable and just learned a little about a topic literally no one around you has any interest in
It's important to have at least two blorbos that fit into specific roles in your life
The blorbo you can look to in hard times, and ask yourself what they would do in a situation, and draw motivation from them on how to be better and stronger!
The blorbo you can look to in hard times, and remind yourself that no matter what happens, you probably aren't going to fuck your shit up as much as they did even if you actively tried
americans see their government bombing other nations and all they can talk about is me me me oh my god the world war is here what'll happen to me? unfunny jokes about world war genz dark humour with no regard whatsoever for people losing their lives, in constant state of danger because what about me? me? me???
dailybridgerton
yousharknotpass
titsay
ellievsbear
