this has been on my mind for a while, since i watched/read project hail mary, but i think its really interesting how humans treat themselves when in the context of another life form being present
in the case of phm, we have rocky whos the assertive one in the duo, hes the more bossy/sassy one that treats grace ‘worse’, put in parenthesis because he doesnt treat him actually worse, its just an aspect of their relationship, like friendly bullying, and i find that really interesting a lot of humans like to hype themselves up, we see it with the ‘humans are space orcs’ thing, and while i cant really think of many other examples of this, i have noticed that in a few pieces of media humans are often treated as the punching bag
but i also brought up phm for another reason, and thats to talk about the aliens persepctive. the way i see it, a lot of people, maybe even weir himself, may not take rockys situation into consideration when writing him. and by that i mean, hes been isolated a lot longer than grace has and his species is dependent on not being alone- which he is. this is mostly speculation, but the way id see rocky treating grace is with a lot of gentleness, which we do get at times, both in the movie/book but moreso in the fandom, though i feel like the way im imagining it isnt the same as its written. i dont think rocky would be scared grace would leave him (considering he cant really do that) but i do think its a somewhat lingering fear,
but also i wanna bring up hiccup and toothless quickly, because i see this a bit with them too. its not the same dynamic 1:1 as rocky and grace, far from it, but it has a similar thing where the alien creature (toothless in this case) is the one thats ‘bullying’ the human thats fine with the situation (not saying thats a bad thing),
and while i havent watched a lot of alien movies or things, i feel like its really common where the alien is just Better than the human, more powerful, stronger, smarter, just better in every single way, regardless of its a horror film or not, humans are very often in the lower position
my point is.
what if other species saw themselves similarly to how humans do? in the case of eridians, what if they also saw themselves as 'below’ otherwordly species? if that was the case, and it was told from rockys perspective, would we have grave bullying him more? if dragons saw themselves as equals or lesser than humans, would hiccup do things to inconvience toothless the way he does in the movies?
idk, i just find it really interesting how so many people like to put humans above everything all the time, yet when it comes to otherworldly beings they put themself in the lower position of the dynamic idk if this is even anything but its somewhat of a trope thing ive noticed that i think is interesting in the context of how humans interact with beings we arent familiar with in fantastical settings