pleaseeee share more of your thoughts about rocky and his abandonment trauma 🙏🙏🙏
[rips open my shirt to reveal another shirt that says "I <3 TORTURING THAT ROCK"] okay :) yay :) well mostly i think that people tend to take rocky's overt confidence and self-aggrandising behaviour at face value and don't really try to read into it too much, which leads to a lot of (what i interpret as) mischaracterisation where he's extremely self-assured and "low-effort" compared to grace in ways that call to mind stereotypes of masculinity and patriarchal dominance. i'll blame some of that on the fact that he is canonically gendered as male and written from that perspective despite being a genderless rock spider, and i'll grant that i haven't seen many instances of rocky being forced to inhabit an aggressively macho role that is fundamentally nothing like him (although i do see that more when he's given a human form, which is... well, it's a lot of things and none of them very flattering to the people who make those creative decisions). but i do think that a lot of people don't give him enough credit for how sensitive and, well... fragile - and i don't mean that as an insult - he really is. which isn't to say that i think his confidence is only a facade and that he isn't aware of how brilliant he is, but rather that a lot of his behaviour also reads to me as desperate. and i think he's very aware of this - his confidence is real, but he's also overcompensating with everything he's got to avoid acknowledging or revealing the weight of the trauma he's carrying for having watched all the people he knew die horrifically and been left alone for 46 years that lies beneath it. because he feels that he's guilty, and he's ashamed for needing anything at all when he, one of erid's best, still wasn't enough to save them all. he doesn't need help, he just has to do better. he has to be better. he has to, or more will die. grace will die. erid will die. the universe itself may be condemned to an eternity of cold lifelessness if rocky doesn't - if rocky can't - fix it.
additionally, and i don't condemn it - i've participated in a few instances myself for the sake of humor - but i do kind of take issue with rocky being sincerely interpreted as this aggressively dominant and "freaky" sex maniac. while i do understand the impulse to assume that grace couldn't top his way out of a wet paper bag, it's really doing a disservice to their characters to pigeonhole them into specific roles based mostly on shallow stereotyping, even if it is simply for the sake of getting your rocks off (pun very much intended). and if we are going to characterise rocky as hypersexual - because it is a common, and often misrepresented, long-term side effect of trauma - and considered something of a pervert by his peers, then why don't we actually dig into that and consider how it would affect him? let's ask ourselves how rocky would really feel about being so "needy" and wanting so much from other people; how he would struggle to adapt and conform to the expectations of a society he's spent decades outside of. what it would be like for him to be seen by other eridians as a gaping open wound, shameful and barely recognisable as one of them anymore; more like the indecently, inescapably wet and exposed alien that he brought back with him because he couldn't just close himself up tight and stop being so hungry for something that nobody can give him. that nobody should have to. i mean, really, it's just obscene, and hideously selfish, that they should be obliged to tolerate and accommodate for such unreasonable behaviour all because one bad thing happened to him that he can blame the entire rest of his shitty life on, isn't it? it doesn't feel right, that someone like that should be their saviour. that someone like that should be anything at all.
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