ZhenyaZebra

[rtfics]

I'm glad I never saw this promo before I saw the film.

Because it would have ruined it. The promo makes it seem it's a stupid, goofy buddy space sitcom. It is buddies in space. But in a very different way.

[vontotchuvak]

because it's very smart goofy buddy comedy😁

[centipeedl3]

Comic based on a post I liked a lot

Rocky bless your heart never change

[vontotchuvak]

Rocky if he learnt that smb calls him "stone dog without a face":

[agender-ryland-grace]

adrian doodles!

[vontotchuvak]

"YoU heAdcaNon GraCe aS aUtisTic + arOacE beCAuse yOu caN't reLaTe tO a chaRActer iF you cAn't seLf-inSerT!!!111"

Umm...

No.

I am an allosexual neurotypical woman. I'd like to think that he is aroace and autistic, because it's funny and it fits his character.

And I don't think it fits every character. (Your character vision doesn't have to fit canon, but it's for another conversation.)

For example, I think that Steve Rogers is definitely neurotypical. Of course, with some oddities (not every person would consent to experiments on people) and with PTSD, but I don't see neurodivergence in him. And in my head he is allosexual straight/bisexual depending on my current favorite stucky dynamics.

I even think that Sheldon Cooper is neurotypical (it's funny, I wrote a post about it, if you're interested) and totally heterosexual (not gay). And demisexual because he hated the idea of sex in the beginning of the show but by the end he is married and having sex.

I can continue. I have a lot of favorite characters whome I can't headcanon as autistic or aroace.

So after this little entry about me, let's talk about Ryland Grace.

Ryland Grace mentioned sex once.

Here.

And you can object that it's Andy Weir, he writes hard science-fiction without love drama and so on. But I also read The Martian. Mark Watney calls his teammate "hot chick" and wants to give her a wedgie. He wants to teach beautiful Queen of Mars about lovemaking and thinks that women's attention is motivation to stay alive. And it happens 3-4 years after leaving Earth.

Ryland Grace after 26 years without any human contact thinks about changes in day and night, food, and arthritis. Of course you can call it just "low libido". But you can also call it "asexual". Why not?

The autistic part is more debatable. I think it's funny if the only person who can be studied by alien scientists would be neurodivergent. And it takes several years and statements from 4+ people for him to understand that he is number two in the Hail Mary Project. He definitely isn't good at understanding social interactions.

Actually, I agree that people on this site are very sensitive (sometimes too much), but in this case we can do more than just headcanon the character as autistic and aroace. We can justify it.

P. S.: You can also headcanon Grace as neurotypical and allosexual straight/gay/bi/pan. I think you can headcanon whatever you want and ignore killjoys in ANY case. (If you don't interfere with other people's fantasies.)

[stairswarning]

I finished reading Project Hail Mary today and I've been crying on and off about Ryland goddamn Grace only finding true companionship in an alien species, in the middle of a foreign solar system, struggling to fight for the survival of his planet.

In all of the flashbacks we see, he struggles to connect with the people around him. He was ostracized by the scientific community for his controversial paper. He had such strong imposter syndrome that he felt isolated from the other workers on the PHM team, both the mechanics and scientists, as well as the astronauts and think tank/project managers. He finds solace in the army guards by the doors of his miscellaneous labs, but he doesn't know them-- he almost anthropomorphises them. He teaches the astronauts planning on sacrificing their lives everything he knows about molecular biology, but they aren't 'friends', per se. We don't get a clear answer on the age difference between the different characters, but the astronauts seem to treat Grace like a superior, with respect but distance as well.

Whereas Rocky?

He is IMMEDIATELY perceived as a friend. Before Grace even knew that there was intelligent alien life on the ship across from him in Tau Ceti orbit, he felt that Rocky's ship mimicking his ship's movements was friendly and inviting. They wave at each other excitedly, geeking out at the other's methods of measurement, of time. They get a working language going, and fall into science head-first. However, as the months go on, their communication expands to include jokes and sarcasm, cultural exchanges of intimate importance, and stories of their personal lives. They respect and trust each other, but still make time to tell jokes and make the other laugh.

On Earth, Grace felt like an outsider with very little pertinent knowledge. In Tau Ceti's orbit, though, he is both student and teacher! He gets to both teach an enraptured audience, as well as learn uniquely challenging new processes. He never seems to feel belittled by Rocky's knowledge, only proud and impressed. Grace works hard to be an academic equal to Rocky, not due to imposter syndrome, but instead to further Rocky's ideas and challenge them into new directions. Grace and Rocky are collaborators, truly working together to solve the astrophage problem. During the flashbacks of Earth, Grace acts as sort of a passive observer of the events unfolding. On the Hail Mary, he and Rocky are firmly in control.

It took thirteen light-years for Ryland Grace to feel seen.

It took a handful of months to understand the importance of that, and probably less than an hour to decide that that feeling was more important than any celebrations on Earth could be.

[littlemisspipebomb]

We all making jokes about Zuko working at the tea shop as firelord, and how humble he is towards his servants. But what if a diplomat from the earth kingdom shows up one day and catches Zuko in a more casual outfit while being ushered through the palace. The diplomat mentions something about how Lee must be very good at making tea if he was sent all the way to the fire nation and asks to be served during the meeting. Not one to turn down an offer Zuko obliges and disappears off into the kitchen. The diplomat sits down at the meeting table, awaiting the arrival of the firelord when his tea arrives. He pours a cup for everyone sat around the table including the firelord. The diplomat inquiries when the firelord will be joining, to which Zuko responds by sitting in the throne at the head of the table.

[sophiewooloo]

YOU CAN'T HIDE THIS IN THE TAGS

[zorostan]

diplomat, fearing be punished: I pray to the blue spirit protect me right now

zuko, taking something of under the table: well-

[vontotchuvak]

Zuko will NEVER be the manager.

He will call Uncle Iroh.

[vontotchuvak]

"Ryland Grace calls Eridians after movie heroes" is cool.

But "Ryland Grace calls his Eridian students after his Earth students" is cuter.

He asks their names, writes them in a translate program so he can just tap the button to call somebody but it's uncomfortable. That's why he calls them like his Earth students.

"I knew someone who was such noisy as you. You will be Anthony." And now 🎶🎵🎵 is Anthony.

Children are delighted. Their alien teacher gave them alien names!

Imagine that he called someone Isadora or smth like that but this name is second common name on Erid.

He tries not to spread two sex ideology on hermaphrodite species so come up with unisex abbreviations or different sex version and uses both. Lavinia -> Laviny or kind of.

Imagine that he looks to the program and sees "Rocky". "Mmm. No. Your name is Robert now."

Imagine being so annoying that your teacher calls annoying aliens after you. Or being so curious. Or being so small. Or...

I think his Earth students should know that.

[llamasocks-lou]

Twice, Ryland Grace is faced with the same pivotal decision: to save himself, or to save an entire planet.

The first time:

He is surrounded by white (bravery) and is wearing yellow (cowardice)

The world is telling him to be brave, but he can’t, not yet, because he is a coward.

He has lost his identity and autonomy

The decision is already made (he must die)

He is all alone (he doesn’t have the bravery gene)

The second time:

He is surrounded by yellow (cowardice) and is wearing white (bravery)

He is in the middle of his namesake: a field of rye. The field is the yellow of cowardice; that is who he was, but he can’t be that, not anymore, because he is brave.

You know who you are. You’ll do great.

The decision is already made (Rocky must live)

Rocky’s ball is beside him (he has found someone to be brave for)

[sorbusaucuparia]

the fact that he's surrounded by rye, his namesake, ryland, when ryland was never brave, was always a coward, and grace, the man he became, the one born on the hail mary, is brave.... UGH

[vontotchuvak]

I LOVE PHM COLOR THEORY.

[couldbeglorious]

OH MY GOOOOOOOOOD

The quilt!!! The Good Luck quilt !!!! just there on instagram with 60 likes on it!!!!!!!!! oh man i was looking SO HARD. i've started to do a guide to all the good luck symbols that were on it but my quest is basically over!! The edges of it aren't clear, but this is basically everything we DON'T see in the film! oh man, I feel lightheaded.

[ninahufflepuff]

Claim your ticket guys:D

[vontotchuvak]

Our society is so rotten that when we think about 30yo man who likes kids we imagine a pervert, not a schoolteacher😔

It's my favorite joke from phm!

[kira-sucks-lawlipops]

Okay so I've been thinking about this post by @graceamazerocky non-stop for the past 48 hours and it has not gotten any less hilarious. So now it's headcanon time.

...

Imagine this: You are Mark 'The Martian' Watney, the first human being to ever be alone on a planet, technically the coloniser of Mars, space pirate. After your incredible/harrowing space adventure, you've returned to Earth, taken a job training future astronauts. You are still one of the most famous people to have ever lived, so dating can be a bit tricky.

But one day you meet an amazing woman, a scientist, and the two of you fall in love. As part of the 'getting to know each other' stage of dating, she tells you about one of her ex-boyfriends. They met in grad school and dated for a few years, but it didn't work out and they had kind of a messy break up, after which he apparently crashed out hard, ending his career in science by writing a paper that gave a giant middle-finger to his entire field. She thinks he's a teacher now, but they're no longer in touch. Other than it being an interesting anecdote, you don't think much of this.

Then, the Petrova crisis. The Sun dimming. Humanity facing extinction. You aren't directly involved in the global response, but you and your girlfriend are both scientists, and this is basically all anyone is talking about, so you are following the development of the situation with keen interest.

When the Hail Mary mission is announced, your first thought is to volunteer (surely you would have to be one of the best-suited people for a long-haul high-stakes space mission like this?) but your second thought is that you really don't want to face dying in space again. You talk it over with your girlfriend. You have an argument that turns into a fight, that ends when you both get tested for the coma-resistance gene and both receive negative results. She finds you sobbing in the middle of the night from a complicated mix of relief and regret and holds you until you calm down. A week later, you propose.

The names of the crew and backup crew are announced. You know at least some of them, by reputation if not personally (astronauts being a pretty small community). You reach out, and offer a mix of congratulations, condolences and advice. You are one of the only people on Earth who truly understand what it is they are facing. You wish them luck.

Two of them die in an explosion. The news is devastating, not just to you, but for everyone on Earth. Despair gives way to hope with another announcement: Dr Ryland Grace has volunteered to join the mission.

‘Holy shit,’ says your fiancé. ‘That’s my ex.’

‘I thought he was a teacher?’ you say.

‘So did I,’ she says.

In your mind, you re-categorise your fiancé’s ex from ‘crashout-failed-scientist-turned-teacher’ to ‘space-hero’, and joke that she must have a type. She laughs, but her eyes are wet. You hold her hand and watch the rest of the broadcast in silence.

You try to reach out again, but are told that Dr Grace is not available. You are quietly relieved, since that conversation would almost certainly have gotten awkward. You invite your old crew and their families over to your place to watch the launch of the Hail Mary. Not all of them can make it, but you share a few drinks with those that do. When the ship successfully leaves Earth’s atmosphere, you give a toast to Yao Li-Jie, Olesya Ilyukhina and Ryland Grace, followed by a minute’s silence.

Life on Earth gets colder and harder than it has been in living memory, but you know how to survive on an inhospitable planet (even when it seems hopeless, you just keep solving the problems in front of you). You make it through starvation, conflict and a thousand other tragedies. Many nations band together and share resources. Scientists pour years into finding new ways to keep the environment as stable as possible, to maximise food production and prevent natural disasters. You get married.

At long last, the solution arrives (along with a whole host of new discoveries that will fuel scientific research for decades, such as the fact that ALIENS ARE REAL). The space program has languished, but not died, and when a mission to Venus is planned, you are called in to train the crew. As part of your work preparing for that mission, you are given access to the video logs that Grace sent back to Earth along with the planet-saving taumoeba.

So you, Mark 'The Martian' Watney, the first human being ever to be left to die in space, gets to witness the second human being ever to be left to die in space mention you by name to an alien, not for any reason to do with your aforementioned incredible/harrowing space adventure, but because this crashout-failed-scientist-turned-teacher-turned-space-hero is still so upset that you got together with his ex (your wife) that he needs to vent about it to the alien (his friend).

And that’s how The Martian ends up becoming the first human being ever to be personally hated by an alien.

[autisticlittleguy]

"Grace Ryland is Rocky's dog" is such a funny fucking dynamic when you think about it

Eridians are further behind than humans technologically right? They dont have computers, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. In fact, Eridians probably dont even know about the Big Bang because their atmosphere would filter out most of the cosmic microwave background radiation we use to detect it. On a human timeline, theyre anywhere between like early-mid 20th century. Rocky's basically a cosmonaut.

So the human civilization is pretty advanced from Rocky's perspective. Rationally he understands this. On a conceptual level he knows this to be true.

But at the same time... imagine youre one of the first ever cosmonauts to make it into space. Then you meet a 10 year old alien dog who cant do 2+2 without pulling out its calculator. It forgets everything constantly and has to keep notes everywhere, like it basically lives in Memento (2000). Also if it doesnt nap constantly it gets even stupider. And you somehow has to reconcile this with the fact that this dog has a better understanding of physics than your entire civilization does. Like the dog knows how the universe started.

[lordofmelons-blog]

They are behind Humans, in specifically fields like Physics.

They don't have computers because they don't really need them to do the calculations we humans needed early computers for, if you don't need a technology then you won't develop that technology... At least on purpose. If they need more brain power, they can basically connect with another Eridian's nervous system.

Them having Xenonite proves they have superior material science and chemistry knowledge than humans at least in some ways, and their psychology makes them almost natural engineers and architects because they are just natural mathematicians with perfect, "photographic" memory.

It's not that the Eridians are "behind" or Humans are "ahead" or even vise versa; Humans have better this, Eridians have better that. Humans needed Fire and Computers so when we developed them they were adopted, Eridians didn't need either so if they did they didn't. Human cultures do that all the time, despite having invented the Wheel, the Incas never really used it the way Europeans did and instead mostly used wheels in toys and similar trinkets but they did have extremely sophisticated Gold and Copper smithing and some completely unique metal alloys they used in jewelry and in household stuffs. Despite their limitations by not using the wheel to carry stuff, they were a really advanced civilization in other ways making stuff like gigantic terraced farms and cities and a road network through one of the most mountainous and rugged regions of the planet, something that some European countries at the time barely had with vastly more advantageous geography. European Metallurgy focused on making strong armor and good weapons, but many Native American Peoples didn't really need that because of the overabundance of materials like Flint and Obsidian which make far sharper blades (but as I said, some did have incredible Metallurgical knowledge especially for their time and with the metals they did work with). Some Copper and Bronze Age civilizations had fairly complex indoor plumbing systems that were only really rivaled by the Romans and Chinese centuries later and would be mostly gone until the late 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st Centuries after those civilizations collapsed. The peoples of Arabia found a myriad of ways to passively cool buildings thousands of years before Air Conditioning, and the Ottomans were vaccinating their people against Smallpox while many Europeans still thought that disease was caused by bad smells.

Andy Weir did intend for the Eridians to be roughly equal to humans in most ways, but to have each species slightly specialized in complimentary but very different directions because of our vastly different biologies. Technology is not a linear thing it's huge, tangled bramble kinda like a tumbleweed, and I think that is a theme of Project Hail Mary that is very easy to miss because so many people are used to the very Western concept of technological progress. Sometimes a lack of progress in one field slows or stalls that in another, sometimes it's unnecessary to develop one field... Or sometimes a discovery in one field helps revolutionize multiple others. Some of the first scientists to accept Plate Tectonics were actually Biologists, not Geologists because continental drift helped explain the distribution of various fossils better than existing explanations in their field for example.

Rocky is admiring that humans could do such a thing, yes. But it's not in a "Wow you are better than us" way it's more of the autistic nerd reaction of when they see a really cool new train of "Whoa, that's awesome, very interesting how it works" way. If you broke down how the Internet works for Eridians, you would basically be describing what they call a Thrumming (I think that's right, iirc) because their nervous system is literally a sort of crystalline nano-scale laminate hunk of rock kind of like a CPU but using light for logic instead of electricity and a bunch of fiber optic cables going everywhere in the body to carry the signal.

Also; I dunno they are both pretty dog-like...

[vontotchuvak]

Honestly, I try to avoid Grace/Rocky fanfiction because I see them only as best-friends-platonic-soulmates and I headcanon Grace as aroace (he mentioned sex only once when he said that the sauce is better - he can be).

But it's only my opinion.

(And I also like something one-sided and not quite romantic enough.)

What if Rocky has a size kink?

We all decided that Adrian is much bigger than Rocky (wedding tattoos and comments that Rocky is a short guy). Then why not? I really don't know how it is expressed in Eridian culture but let it be.

Imagine Adrian seeing that their freak mate went to space and came back with a giant alien who is three-four times taller than their mate. And now this alien will live in their planet. And their mate wants to visit this alien every time they want. Because OF COURSE they're best friends now.

Imagine how much Adrian's eye would twitch if they were human.

And Rocky be like "Honey! It's totally platonic!!!". Yeah. Adrian totally believes in it. But Rocky doesn't lie. He gets horny in very platonic sense.

[crossthread]

One thing i keep unconsciously coming back to about project hail mary is how... shockingly unconventional yet happy that ending is. Like. Andy Weir could 100% essentially made the pivotal point of the book being Grace, the coward who wouldn't sacrifice his life for the entire Earth, find bravery within him to sacrifice himself for that one person, in this case Rocky, and essentially have him die in space in sacrifice or whatever. But no. Grace fucking lives. And the best bit here that I keep coming back to is that after all of this, after Grace finds that one person to be brave for, they dont have the usual 'we still go our separate ways' thing. Like the impossible just happens. The found family stays. Grace goes with Rocky to Erid, and he lives there. Eridians make this entire massive enclosure for him and he goes back to teaching. With Rocky right by his side!!!! Like thats the most unconventional, and I dare say unconventionally satisfying happy ending ever. Like remember how we had Hiccup and Toothless, the most best of friends and platonic soulmates ever just go off on their own seperately cause the world wasn't hospitable to their coexistence? Like. Andy Weir actually fucking went there and he fucking did it. Insane. Absolute madman.

[applejaymi]

touch starved

[applejaymi]

im sorry everyone i made them hug