I think a lot of people don't realize how confined Grace would be during the trip to Erid. This is important to me because I want Grace to be inconvenienced. Nothing should be easy for this guy!
When the Hail Mary is in thrust configuration:
The gravity is 1.5 g, just enough to make moving around the ship a bit more tiring than usual
The ship is basically a giant tower! Grace has to climb VERY tall ladders to go up to the next room. Climbing those in 1.5 g sounds exhausting. I'm sure he'd build up some good endurance doing that, but anyone who lives in a townhome can tell you how annoying it is to walk down three flights of stairs and then realize you forgot your phone upstairs. I imagine he would probably not wander around the ship a ton when he has to climb ladders to do it.
Related to the ladders, if Grace is in the dormitory and wants to go watch TV in the Don't Go Crazy room, he has to climb up 3 rooms of long ladders to get there
The usable floor space is pretty limited! All the rooms were designed to be used in centrifugal gravity, so in all the rooms the centrifugal floor is now a very, very tall wall. What would be the shorter centrifugal wall is now a tiny floor in thrust config (I'll put pictures at the end to illustrate)
Basically zero lab access! At the very beginning of the movie you can see Grace look up the wall at the lab equipment. It is all at least 10 ft up, totally out of reach and bolted sideways to the wall. The only real things he can use in lab are the white board, some screens, and the chair 4ft off the floor (that says "Not for use in thrust configuration" lol). The lab just straight up is NOT meant to be used AT ALL in thrust config. That's the whole point of having the centrifuge!
This is purely based on the movie, the book mentions Grace being able to tidy the lab when he is flying back towards Earth. But I am enchanted by the idea that the trip to Erid is boring and inconvenient for Grace, but he still doesn't regret anything because he's getting to spend time with Rocky.
Definitely don't fault anyone for forgetting this! You only see the ladders at the beginning of the movie. I only realized when I went to get screenshots that the ladders retract in centrifuge mode! Very smart. Those would be a real trip hazard.
Ship room order: Dormitory -> Server (?) room -> Lab -> Beetle storage room -> Don't Go Crazy Room -> EVA room & airlock -> Cockpit
Dormitory thrust
Very, very tall ladder! At least the floor is padded here in case you fall off. Makes sense considering this is where you wake up from your coma and have poor coordination
Dormitory centrifuge
Long floor plan, short walls. These two screenshots are from the same angle!! Tall wall is now long floor. You can see where the ladder has retracted!
Lab thrust
Grace is in the foreground pointing WAY up at the equipment bolted to the very tall wall
Grace sitting in the one accessible lab chair that says "NOT FOR USE IN THRUST CONFIGURATION" on the side. He's sitting on what is supposed to be the backrest
Lab centrifuge
Very large floorplan! This is the main room on the ship. They probably expected the crew to spend the most time here.
DGC room thrust
Grace is still able to stand in here! There is just a ladder going up the side of the room
DGC room centrifuge
After the ladder retracts, the metal panel it was on is now the floor!
also personally if i was adrian. yeesh. imagine your husband leaves for a half a century on this noble quest and might be dead. turns out he's not! genuinely the best day of your life! but when he returns it's with a weird alien he's now really reliant on and feels codependent and PSTD feelings about and has probably had sex with. and the creature doesn't even have the fucking self-respect to have a decent exoskeleton and leaks all the time and needs its own specialised environment all this nonsense. your husband very probably had sex with something that lacks an EXOSKELETON how fucking cringe. anyway you complain to your friends so much that they're like "divorce himmm" and they send you links to space lawyers and you're like 14 seconds away from divorcing him even though you kind of feel bad due to the ongoing PTSD because you're really tired of the creature rubbing its anal gland all over your new carpets when your husband's like "by the way it only lives for eighty years and it's already forty". ohhhh eighty years? it's already halfway through? lmao? okay yeah we're fine actually. keep your weird creature it'll be dead next Thursday. that's cool. i'll sit over here. it's cool i'll wait :) no rush :)
also your friends all really unsubtly have a second group chat without you in it that they sometimes allude to and they ask you in low voices like, "oh is your husband sleeping around the alien again?" and you go yeah. but it's fine it'll be dead next Thursday and they're all like ohhh i see that makes sense but you literally hear the group chat notification sound and your own space phone doesn't go off.
the alien is doing all these classes for children or whatever and your husband is fucking glowing with joy about it. and you're like seething about it, just getting angrjer and angrier about the whole situation, so you tell your husband you want to meet his affair partner (who has an endoskeleton! embarrassing!) and he's really hopeful you and the alien will fall in love???
so you go to the alien's fuckass biome you helped build and you tell your husband to go away (he doesn't but really you didn't expect any better) and you're expecting the alien to be, like, snivelling. it's not although it still lacks an exosekeleton and after youve introduced itself it just goes, "yeah your husband is kind of dumb. i'll be dead next Thursday btw" and it's like finally. jesus. someone who fucking gets it. also stop leaking on my carpet already
Do you think Stratt arrangedin advance to give Grace an appendectomy just in case, like how they do to people who go to Arctic
idk why i keep getting asks about the project hail mary characters like i know them personally, but i have several answers for this one:
realistic but boring: grace was already appendix-free before stratt recruited him, because appendicitis just seems like the kind of thing that would happen to him
also realistic but more compelling, especially if you're a certain kind of sicko: yeah she yoinked that thang
sobbing my eyes out over how terrifying meeting grace must have been for rocky. obviously there’s the horror of what grace “looks” like to him, but the fact that rocky feels responsible for killing everyone and now there’s this fragile, squishy thing that rocky can kill with one wrong move. what if he messed up the oxygen in the tunnel? or it wasn’t enclosed all the way? and then he was alone, again.
yeah you get it. that's what fucks rocky up so much about—eridians have a crystalline brain. rocky remembers every single thing that he perceives in perfect detail. he's one of the best engineers erid has ever seen, so it's logical that he double checks his work not just to screen for oversights, but to see if anything new can be added. typically this is done in a thrum, allowing for ideas to bounce off one another.
but rocky was alone at tau ceti for almost 50 years. there was no thrum—not for lack of trying to get his crewmates to respond—so rocky does it himself.
so rocky gets stuck in loops. his brain rereads the same information over and over again, expecting to be passed onto another one of his species. when it isn't, there's no sense of completion and the loop starts back over. not having another eridian translates to stress on an instinctual level so his brain thinks there's an error in the loop or in his work. he completes a ritual or task to satisfy the anxiety. the cycle repeats itself regardless because eridians are not meant to be alone.
he has to check on grace's breathing. he needs to check the taumoeba. he needs to make sure he isn't dying of radiation sickness. he needs to force feed his friend as he wastes away. there's so much rocky can't fix and so much that he could have if his crew was still alive (if he didn't kill them). it starts to become more irrational—tapping in sets of five on the xenonite barrier to make sure it's stable. saying words over and over that don't really make sense with eridiani sentence structure. if he doesn't click and shake his carapace, his brain will make him relive the fat of grace's arm liquefying and coagulating in his hold.
inside his body, his worker cells are exhausted from constantly going to repair a sickness that doesn't exist. his cells are the sickness, driving themselves to ruin in a never-ending death spiral.
he's so, so tired, but he can't go to sleep because he has to check.
i love those old space propaganda posters and i've been craving something like that for project hail mary so i decided to experiment a bit with ps, it isn't very accurate but i really liked the final result
also, yes, i used the xenonite model of the hail mary because i love the patterns it has
OP: This is why. Jiuzhaigou’s shuttle service runs super smoothly. We’ve got 300 to over 400 eco-friendly sightseeing shuttles inside the park. During busy hours, buses leave every 2 minutes, and the average wait time is under 5 minutes — buses wait for guests, not the other way around. (cr九寨沟景区官方)
This is how Jiuzhaigou looks like(only part of it):
Am I allowed to sexualize the puppet from project hail mary or do I have to wack it to Ryan Gosling because I will if I have to but frankly I'd rather have that alien skittering all over me like a sexy bug. Fuuuck they call him rocky because he make my rock hard
oooh, thanks for bringing up the whole lying-in-a-thrum thing. underutilized concept so far in the fandom. i keep thinking about it related to Yao's gun.
it’s really interesting to think about because the book doesn’t go into a huge amount of detail about what the thrum is or how it works, so we’re free to speculate wildly! to what extent is it voluntary which information you share in the thrum? how much access do others have to your subconscious thoughts? would they be able to tell that you’re concealing something or shying away from certain topics, but not able to ascertain what the underlying truth was? or does rocky have to avoid thrumming with other eridians altogether, because as soon as they start, everyone will immediately know he’s a neurotic basket-case who wants to fuck an alien?
i’m really curious what yao’s gun has to do with it, though! do you mind expanding a bit more on that?
What if human astronauts visit Erid one day and are doing diplomatic things and whatnot and they learn Ryland Grace is sstill alive and is in a terrarium. One of the astronauts jokingly says “you’re not experimenting on him are you” and the Eridians freeze cause yeah, they totally are. They experiment on him all the time. They’re experimenting on him right now in fact. They read about deep sea diving and are now testing the effects of replacing certain gases in Graces atmosphere. Right now they’re testing helium.
They send someone to stop the experiment but Grace refuses cause they’re so far in already and well that would just ruin the data.
The new humans think this is hilarious and insist on joining the experiment as Grace excitedly yaps about all the cool stuff he’s learned about aliens but he’s still got that high pitched helium voice.
Literary criticism terms I use on this blog despite making them up myself, much to the chagrin of anyone who does not have my back catalog memorized:
are we the baddies: SFF subgenre focused on agents of an imperial power realizing that and grappling with what to do next, in contrast to stories focusing on the scrappy rebels resisting said imperial power
I could fix him (the empire): SFF subgenre where the colonized subject being nice and/or sexy enough Ends Colonialism, frequently tied to the John President of Racism problem
librarian bait: books centered on the transformative life-changing power of books and libraries, cousin to books focused on the transformative life-changing power of storytelling and narrative in general
college brochure fiction: stories where the protagonist has an artfully arranged group of diverse friends who are as flat as paper and whose cultural backgrounds never come up meaningfully
the Dave Strider: character the fandom fixates on to the detriment of everything else, until the weight of that attention warps fanon and sometimes even canon around them. almost always male. it's happening to Gurathin from Murderbot right now
#OP tell us more about the John President of Racism problem!
It hails from an immortal tumblr post by penultimate-step, except not immortal apparently because I get 'not found' when I try to go back to the original. So here's the text:
It's always disappointing when a series makes a big deal about societal and structural problems in it's setting, making readers think it has interesting things to say about the subject, only to then resolve the problems by fighting The CEO of Racism, John Racist, so that all of society's problems would then get better because they promoted a new CEO.
seivarden "weird coping mechanisms" vendaai is like "i'm having trouble processing my emotions right now so i'm going to engage in service roleplay for the person (ship?) i'm in love with, while the ship (person?) that i'm a lieutenant on board steers me around and speaks through me like a puppet. i find this soothing and reassuring for normal reasons don't worry about it."
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