Wandering Merry @wanderingmerry - Tumblr Blog

Welcome!

I'm Merry!

A disenfranchised US millennial looking to escape the horrors for a little bit. When I'm not writing "fix-its" or playing in my imaginary world, you can find me wrangling small children and doing freelance instructional design work.

Even though I've been a fanfiction reader for a long time, I only recently started writing stories myself.

And evidently I have a weird niche of writing fix-its about overburdened women in challenging leadership roles and their soppy male wet cats that they betray for the greater good.

I swear this is a new thing for me. (But I wonder if my husband should be worried?)

My stories:

Foundation (Apple TV show): Perfect Opening Line (Completed!): A Gaal/Dawn centric Season 3 re-write starting after Where Tyrants Spend Eternity.

Project Hail Mary: Excessive Centrifugal Force (WIP): Eva Stratt joins Grace on the Hail Mary mission. Angst, comfort, space adventures, fluff, and love ensue.

Foundation and Project Hail Mary are my main obsessions, but I'm also happy to chat anytime about my all time favorites:

Star Trek (my oldest son's name is from here)

The Expanse (my youngest son's name is from here lol)

Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit/Rings of Power (I dressed as Galadriel for my wedding)

Avatar the Last Airbender

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Soooo many other sci-fi/fantasy books and movies that I'm forgetting right now

Star Wars (my husband dressed as Darth Vader for our wedding - have mentioned yet that we are big nerds???)

Feel free to ask me questions or yap with me anytime. I don't have many nerd friends in IRL.

Excessive Centrifugal Force on AO3: Chapter 16 STRATTLAND IN SPACE

Excessive Centrifugal Force: The dangerously high outward pull a moving object experiences when forced to travel in a curved path at too high a speed or radius.

A disruptive, outward-pulling dynamic that flings two people apart. It represents an imbalance where the velocity of external stressors, individual differences, or diverging life goals overcomes the bond holding the couple together, ultimately threatening to break the relationship entirely.

#strattland #project hail mary #eva stratt #ryland grace #grace x stratt #phm fanfic #phm movie #ao3 fanfic #ugh this one almost broke me

eva-strapp

Love how the movie frames Stratt’s office like a prison cell when Grace makes a run for it. She’s standing there knowing that out of all the difficult choices she’s had to make, this will be the one that she will carry the guilt of for the rest of her life. The camera centers Stratt in the center of the frame with the camera situated at the entrance, making the space that she’s in feel small.

The blinds along the window are framed like the bars to a cell, it’s through them that she watches Grace run past in his escape attempt. This is reinforced in the next shot where she looks out through them.

Her resigned expression tells us that she is upset that she had to do this but does not regret it. Her position and responsibility placed her in that office, forcing her to make the decision she made. She is never shown leaving this office, because she will not be free from the guilt that comes with it until she knows the project is a success. She prepares to serve her life sentence.

wanderingmerry

And then the next time we see her, she is watching Grace on video. She is finally free from her metaphorical prison (her guilt) and her literal prison because it was all worth it and now it's time to save the world.

#eva stratt #project hail mary #project hail mary movie #I love this so much

WE FOUND HIM, ON EARTH!!!

Spotted on the bottom floor of a mixed use office building.

What do you think Rocky is making in there? Is Grace there too?

#project hail mary #project hail mary movie #phm movie #rocky the eridian #ryland grace

everythingitmeans2b

Eva "cry later, mission first" Stratt when it is time to cry later right now

#I totally believe this #eva stratt #project hail mary #our girl needs to let it out sometimes #but after the work is done

threadworn

I gen can’t tell if I just have like. Distinctly Different morals than the rest of the project hail mary fandom or if people are just doing the whole “throw the most conveniently available woman under the bus to fuel pity hours for the male character” thing with Eva because. I don’t think she did anything wrong. I don’t think she was even cruel. Like At All.

Okay so like firstly I haven’t gotten through the book yet. So we aren’t talking about all the nuking Antarctica stuff bc I don’t have the Full Picture there. I’m solely talking about the decision she made with Grace. I think firstly it’s important to address that I very firmly believe that you do not need to villainize one party in order for the other person’s hurt to be validated. What happened to Grace WAS fucked up and whatever feelings he may have about that are reasonable.

BUT!!! You do NOTTT need to be throwing a woman under the bus in order to sympathize with Grace. I couldn’t even rightfully call Eva’s choice to send Ryland to space morally grey, honestly, if you actually consider the options that were presented to her in that moment. Would it not have been more morally grey to choose one guy at the cost of millions of lives? She couldn’t even confirm that he would get to live if he stayed, given the whole DYING SUN THING. Like I feel like in order for someone to be truly morally grey there has to be a morally Better option to choose from. Like- if you put the kindest and most morally virtuous person in all of existence in Eva’s position they would have ALSO had to pick between dooming the earth or dooming one guy. This isn’t about Eva’s morals at all. She was literally just a scapegoat.

FURTHERMORE. I think letting Ryland stay would have been more cruel than sending him to space. Obviously he was scared, enough so that he couldn’t bring himself to make the “selfless” decision when he was given very little time to decide or process what he was being asked to do. But I think it was fairly evident that saying no was tearing him apart internally. He WANTED to be brave. He didn’t want to be the type of person who would choose himself over a world that wouldn’t slowly starve out and kill his students. He did care. But he was terrified and he had three hours at most to come to terms with the prospect of something genuinely horrifying to someone who has never even considered going to space. The people who volunteered had way more time to come to terms with that. It made complete sense that he couldn’t bring himself to agree.

But imagine a world where he was actually allowed to stay and they could not find anyone else to send up. Imagine Ryland Grace, a genuinely kind man at heart who loved his students. Having to watch them realize that they might not even get to grow old. That they were all living on a dying planet where they’d never be given the chance to have children of their own, even if they wanted to. And he would have to live the rest of his life knowing he could’ve changed that y’all the guilt would have killed him in a way that would have been INCOMPREHENSIBLY more agonizing than dying in space. His survival instincts were going to create a personal hell for him that he’d never be able to escape, and it was going to take the rest of the world down with him.

“This might seem like me betraying you, but this is actually me believing in you.” I think this line is so important to Eva’s character. She was not cruel or heartless. She knew that everyone deserved to have a choice and she really wanted to be able to give that to Grace. Unfortunately Eva doesn’t really have a choice either, and the illusion of choice is the closest thing she can offer him. She really really wanted to be able to let Grace choose on his own but she couldn’t. The rest of the world wouldn’t get to choose whether they got to live or die once their sun burnt out. And it is obvious that having to do what she did was hard for her but if she doesn’t make the hard choices that everyone else refuses to make they will ALL die. Ultimately nobody in this film is having to sacrifice as much as Eva Stratt does because the fate of the entire god forsaken planet is fully on her shoulders and no matter what she does she will be demonized for it. Either she fails to save the world and she’s blamed for dooming everyone or she keeps the earth alive and every vital decision she made to do so gets picked apart by the very people who are only still BREATHING because of HER!!!

Eva Stratt had to give up so much and she will never be a hero for it. When she tells Ryland that he will be remembered as a hero she is offering him something that she will never have. What happened to Ryland wasn’t fair but the true visceral horror of the situation my beautiful angel Eva Stratt was forced into is consistently ignored in favor of feeling bad for Ryland and it makes me CRAZY.

I will defend Eva until I DIE MARK MY WORDS!!!!!

#eva stratt #you are perfect

Excessive Centrifugal Force on AO3: Chapter 15, STRATTLAND IN SPACE

Chapter Summary: Eva, Grace, and Rocky go fishing. Grace catches something unexpected.

Featuring: There is literally nothing I can tell you without giving the chapter away, hehe. Sorry!

#strattland #project hail mary #eva stratt #phm movie #phm fanfic #ryland grace #ao3 fanfic #Maybe everything will be fine?

mrghostietoastie

These guys have had me in tears the past few days so I figured I'd give my own a try!

@justcakethanks

wanderingmerry

I was reading several of these EWC comics to my 7 year old yesterday (the ones that weren’t adult themed 😅) and then he drew this today in honor of his favorite one. 💜

#eridianwelcomingcommittee #ewc #project hail mary

byjove

I love asking people how their parents met. You always get an interesting reply. My best friend’s parents met on the relatively new internet in 1999. My other friend’s parents met at Burger King when one was the manager and the other was a regular customer. My parents met at the beach because they were neighbors in their rental houses, mom was on a church trip and dad was getting blackout drunk every night with his friends next door.

Tell me how your parents met in the tags.

#my mom and dad worked at the same company #which isn’t very interesting except that she was married at the time #then years later she left my dad for my band teacher

arthdoesart

I have been hyperfixating so much about this specific tweet on strattland twt

#other people’s amazing art #the tattoo!#the fox sweater as pillow!#strattland

Excessive Centrifugal Force on AO3: Chapter 14 STRATTLAND IN SPACE

Summary: Our crew discovers that life is the reason, Eva and Grace get new hope, but Eva remembers that hope often has consequences.

Featuring: LOTS of movie scenes, and an overall sense of foreboding inspired from the look on her face at the beginning of this scene that I didn't notice before I started writing this story....