i wretch lay wrestling with (my god!) my god

every sonnet feels like it's written about my bank account

[pluubyy]

human sickness very leaky very disgust

[cloudabserk]

james ortiz says he decided to characterize rocky as really anxious and neurotic and the directors said that’s a big part of why they chose him. ryan gosling decided to play grace as scared and avoidant towards everything (alien ship, alien message, working on the task force, talking to stratt at all).

taking these (fairly) calm and cool book characters and making them extremely nervous is one of the things that really makes the relationship & entire movie work. and the fact that both actors decided to do this independently before ever meeting is very funny to me.

[alienatedartt]

atlas

[goldenaltar]

concept: no astrophage au where eridians and humans still make first contact but like, properly. a whole diplomatic mission meeting in the middle of space to save travel time. stratt is humanity's greatest representation. the eridian equivalent is equally as scary and secretly soft. it's all very star trek.

but rocky and grace put the whole diplomacy thing in jeopardy by being too best buddy with it. like they're both really low level members of the mission. some engineer necessary for ship maintenance, and an obligatory molecular biologist they brought along in case they found more alien cells out in space. and these two guys like, somehow keep ending up hanging out essentially "at the back of the classroom." consistently left out of the actually important negotiations, and well, they're bored!

grace steals some laptops and starts jury-rigging his own personal translator for rocky, despite the fact that the official translation software is way quicker to learn and much more nuanced. rocky starts learning english, simplifies his eridian, and immediately starts mocking grace for needing the software. they start blabbing to each other about all the weird quirks of their respective cultures and advanced science their planets can do. the whole time they are ribbing each other about culture stuff. grace eats in front of rocky. rocky forces grace to sleep in a corridor somewhere so he can keep watch.

then stratt and the eridian leader find out and it's like

stratt: you. you've been meeting in private with a member of the eridian deligation?

grace: ... yyyes.

stratt: and you shared with them classified scientific documents?

grace: i... maybe gave him. a laptop. he's so smart! what was i supposed to do?

stratt: HIM? you've assigned male pronouns to a genderless species?

grace: he said he likes to match!

stratt: do you even know the name of this eridian?!

grace: i call him rocky :)

stratt: 😰

then on rocky's side of things it's like

eridian leader: sorry did you say you called the human after one of its digestive noises?

rocky: yeah :)

eridian leader: and. you've been telling it about how to make xenonite. one of our most vital trading resources.

rocky: yes yes, grace is very ignorant about basic chemistry 🙄

eridian leader: right. and you watch it sleep. despite the fact that all the human beings we have spoken to have described this as a cultural violation?

rocky: well he didn't like it at first but he came around!!

anyway both sides of the delegation are sweating profusely (metaphorically speaking) until they see rocky and grace in action and are like ohh! they're both freaks. we are not to blame for this. these two are just really bad at navigating cultural norms.

cut to grace curled up with rocky while he sleeps like a baby.

[bulkhummus]

someone sent me an anon ask about rocky meeting eva and i tried to post it not once but twice and tumblr ate it both times so now im just regular posting it here

i think ryland would grow to understand stratt’s choice with time, and even thank her logic of it because it led to his meeting of rocky, but i dont think he’d ever really forgive her for what she did to him

(Ryland had to prep rocky before they touched down to meet Stratt so he wouldnt charge her at first sight)

thank you for the request :o)

[howmanyholesinswisscheese]

What doesn’t get talked about enough is that, all those 40-something years, Rocky had all the supplies he needed to go back home. He had the fuel, he had the food. But he didn’t. He tried and tried and tried. He kept going. He took measurements, gathered data, built new Astrophage samplers but could never get it right. He maintained the Blip-A, a ship that was built in a hurry and just kept breaking, for over FORTY YEARS. When Grace found him, Rocky wasn’t just sitting idle in orbit. He was still working, still trying, he hadn’t given up. He was tracking the stars, probably to watch for a potential second mission from Erid, when he spotted the Hail Mary in reverse-thrust. Rocky calls Grace brave. Truly, Grace is. But I’d compare Rocky more to Stratt. How much of yourself would you be willing to sacrifice to save your planet? Rocky was willing to stay at Tau Ceti for the rest of his life until he either found a solution, or died.

[rockets]

Hello tumblr. I’m reviving my old blog from the dead with some of my PHM fanarts.

This movie/book has gripped my soul a little too hard 😭

———

Edit: For those who asked. I have a small/large foil print of this available on my store! ❤️

[frawgs]

apparently vic’s vapor rub goes exitinct ? i’ve been using the same vapor rub for years and apparenlty it went bad in the 2010s ..

[frawgs]

expired .

[morganicapples]

[sockiepuppetry]

Ok

[sam-sometimes-wise]

I worked laughably hard on this

[tlirsgender]

As I am "severely the target audience for project hail mary" I have to point out. The thing about Grace's theories the scientific community hated so so so much re: life not necessarily having to be water/carbon based............ In Real Life Astrobiology this has already been pretty extensively discussed and largely discounted. So. Watching the scene where he's talking about like "the only original idea I ever had" I was kinda chewing on my lips like oooooh it's worse actually LMAO

Like. I need you all to understand. He's not getting laughed out of the room because it's this outlandish new idea, it's that in the theoretical biochemistry world this is *already outdated* and he's just like "NO LISTEN IT COULD STILL HAPPEN" & the scientific community is like can you shut the fuck up

[tlirsgender]

To be fair I would like to stress that it's *largely* discounted not Entirely 100% ruled out. There are some ongoing arguments about this afaik. But it really adds something to my enjoyment of this movie like oh buddy. It's so much worse than it sounds. Fully not a new idea he's pulling kind of a "here's how bernie can still win"

[tlirsgender]

Can somebody draw Grace kind of frantically pointing at a board that says "here's how silicon based life can still exist" please. For me

[mockingjay-sings]

The mockingbird, the jabberjay and the mockingjay 🕊️ inspired by this post by @fromevertonow

[gravityjunior]

Starting a collection

[pineappical]

as for Rocky? well, someone has to watch over his best friend in return

companion sketch to this drawing

[molabuddy]

its kind of fun to uninstall programs you arent using to free up space and see them all beg for their lives

[jkags-doodles]

You know I sometimes think of the Jackal-Zeke fued and sometimes imagine what would happen if Zeke really DID get the upper hand on Jackal during a fight while he was in his right mind. Because I’m 95% sure that, threats to kill him or not, Kanin would behead Zeke if he thought that Jackal was actually about to die. He might not even make a conscious decision. He’s just watching things unfold and then Zeke is dead. Whoops.

And that would be fun for the whole family!

[j-marlowe]

And the worst part is Jackal would never think Kanin would defend him like that. He feels a Zeke holding a stake to his chest and is fully prepared to die.

Jackal is laying on the ground looking at Zeke's head laying next to him. He doesn't really believe what happened until Allie starts screening about Zeke.

Knowing Kanin he is not about to explain himself other then asking if Jackal is alright before he switches to trying to help Allie cope.

[jkags-doodles]

Kanin not wanting to acknowledge Jackal in this moment and instead pivoting to Allie is SO accurate. I also think that after the shock wore off, Kanin would have to acknowledge that this isn't even surprising to him. If he'd had the time to think about it, he might have hated himself more for it, but he probably would have made the same choice.

And poor Allie. Because she loves Zeke, he was her first real love, but I also feel like she'd be so angry with him because she's made it clear that, at least in some ways, she values Jackal and doesn't want them to fight. And Jackal respected that enough not to attack Zeke. She's been warning Zeke that picking a fight will get him killed and he didn't listen, and now she's dead and nothing can fix that, and the last emotion she'll ever feel at him while he was alive is anger.

And you're so right she'll never see Kanin the same way again. She's seen him angry, she's seen him in a fight, but she still sees him as a more controlled, less violent person compared to her. He's her steadying force, except he's not anymore. He acted on a snap decision and murdered someone she loved and looks so guilty about it, but will not, can not apologize.

She can't even ask him to apologize. She knows deep in her chest that if someone was about to kill her, he'd intervene. Why would a son be different than a daughter? How can she expect anything different?

Meanwhile, Jackal is too busy reeling over the fact that A) Allison did not intervene to keep her boyfriend from killing him, and B) Kanin killed someone on his behalf. His worldview has been tipped on his head and he's going to need a few minutes.

[valeriapryanikova]

hope has blood on her hands