I Like Art ^_^ @wickers-going-goblin-mode - Tumblr Blog

Welcome!

art sideblog: @wicker-draws

print shop!!

hi friends, we do all sorts of fandoms here, including ones im not in sometimes. i try to tag stuff, but if you need something specific tagged, lemme know and ill try and bear it in mind.

pleasure to meet you! have a good day!

#updating this cause it was real old lol

masktrel

I love this guy you guys have no idea

#slay the spire #cool art #q

bulkhummus

Project Hail Mary is in part about cowardice and inexorability and the philosophical quandary of whether or not the ends justify the means. In order to understand this, we have to understand both the character Eva Stratt and Ryland Grace, as well as their relationship. In embarking on this question, we must also account for the perspective in which the book is written.

The book is written from Ryland's perspective, and that shapes the narrative by disregarding fundamental truths that lie outside of Ryland's opinion and personal reality. By his account, Ryland is a normal middle school science teacher, albeit with a doctorate in molecular biology he rarely uses.

While this is true, Ryland is also set up to be an extraordinary individual. He is a leading expert in his field. He becomes the lead researcher on humanity's most important project after making the ultimate discovery. He becomes so woven into the very fiber of the project that he can no longer be removed.

When the story arrives at the big, sacrificial ask, which is typically the point in most stories where the unwitting hero would accept his fate for the good of the people, Ryland says no. What normal, sane person would want to strap themselves to a rocket and be shot into space, with little to no training, and a conclusion of death by their hand or some other tragedy? We empathize. We understand. And yet.

Ryland was never normal. By his own standards, sure, but not to anyone else in the book, least of all Stratt.

Let’s look at his counterpart. Eva Stratt is a ruthless, effective leader with a morally dubious code only defined by preventing humankind from extinction. She was placed in this position by the powers that be, due to her ability to get results. She is, by all definitions, not a coward. She does not fear the choices she knows she has to make and does not avert her gaze. She goes to court. She paves the Sahara. She watches as a nuclear bomb blows up the arctic shelf. The debate of whether or not these choices were 'correct' aside, they were choices she made because no one else would. No one wanted to shoulder the responsibility or the blame.

This is a story told through Ryland's perspective. It is all the more satisfying when who Ryland believes himself to be is at odds with who everyone else believes him to be. Ryland is scared. His trust is betrayed. He has been put in an impossible situation and everyone is confused and disappointed that he is not willing to rise to the occasion. Ryland has told the audience, with unwavering certainty, throughout every flashback that he is replaceable and worthless only to be utterly confused by why people don't agree with him.

Ryland relies on the safe guard, the guise, of being a regular, normal man only when it suits him. He leans into normalcy to protect himself. He downplays his own importance throughout the entirety of the book in the hopes that it will be enough to save him from amounting to anything great that could be knocked down in the future by failure. When Eva Stratt lays bare all his truths as she has come to know them, it is cruel but true. Eva never flinches and she never lies.

The story is asking us to consider the cowardly person a hero and the person who does not flinch in the face of difficult, horrific choices as a villain. Typically the reverse is true. To what extent is inexorability favorable? To what extent is cowardice necessary? Cowardice is an integral part to the story and ensures that the emotional beats of it work. Without Ryland's tendency to flinch and flee, we would not feel the impact of Eva's choices. He is quick to pass judgement on her character, often describing it in ways that alienate her own humanity, as are we, because the book is his inner monologue.

When she sends Ryland to his cell where he is to remain until the ship's launch, she avoids him for four days. She looks away. That is not a person unaffected by their choices. Ryland even comments on that being the longest time they've been apart since the start of the project. She was hoping he'd rise to the occasion so he would not have to be at the receiving end of a choice she did not want to have to make, but he does not. To her, she sees a man who is fundamentally good and capable of the job. A man that she hoped would help her shoulder the enormity of her responsibility after standing by her side for years. Being forced to go on this mission against his will was horrific, and there is no excuse for doing that to another human being. We empathize. We understand.

And yet.

Eva saw who he was before he did. What defined him as a person? Who was he willing to die for? To fight for? Even as the external audience, it seemed he did not know the answer to those questions even before his memory and life were taken from him. Eva made that choice for him. In fact, it was made by the person that made the same kinds of choices in some form or another over and over throughout the entirety of the book. The logical choice, the choice supported by all evidence presented to her, was that Ryland was the best candidate for the job. The difference is that this choice is up close and personal. It is because of our empathy we do not want Ryland to be sent to his death, but Eva Stratt cannot afford to act on empathy.

Without cowardice haunting his own thoughts, we as the audience would not feel the impact of his own choices further down the line. Ryland's heroic moments stagger throughout the present day story, but are cemented by the end of the book. Ryland's 'hero moment', the moment, comes when he chooses to save Rocky. It is more impactful than the prior, similar choice, because we have seen this relationship develop in a meaningful way, and we have seen who Ryland is and the choices he makes when he is unburdened by past failures of who he once was.

A good man, as Eva Stratt knowingly said. She was never a liar.

Liking a character and empathizing with their situation does not suddenly absolve them of all the ways other characters in the book, including Ryland himself, view him. Nor does it disregard the context provided in the book that outlines how fear and low expectations have guided his choices throughout his life. He was a coward. Anyone in his situation would be a coward. The beauty of the story is that the importance of the life Ryland builds after he is disgraced from the academic community (the life he refuses to return to) is the life that ends up saving him.

To deny Ryland cowardice and to ignore Eva's burden is to flatten both of their characters, allowing no room for complex exploration of what it means to be a human struggling to do what is necessary in the face of right and wrong. To explore identity when juxtaposed by navigating a nonconsensual situation.

The story ignores the idea that bravery is the only foil to cowardice. It ignores the idea that bravery is fundamentally good and right, and cowardice is weak and wrong. Ryland Grace being a coward allows the narrative to extend grace toward him. He is rewarded for his meaningful and well built bravery with a long life, and a relationship that defines his very existence. Eva Stratt saves the world, despite the irreparable damage she does to it, and all the judgment the world passes on to her in the process. These characters only work because they operate in contrast to one another, and draw attention to the way cowardice and bravery bleed into one another throughout the entirety of the story.

#project hail mary #fave

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)

#project hail mary #cool art

mahawavy

#fight club #cool art

mahawavy

#project hail mary #cool art

mmmmmmrmn

#deltarune #cool art #q

schrodingers-anarchist

Thinking about how Grace casually gave Rocky a computer with basically All Human Knowledge.

How did the people of Erid feel when they got that? I mean, here's this thinking machine they apparently had no concept of, containing all this advanced knowledge of things they had no idea about like radiation and relativity...

My headcanon is that they're gonna feel like total assholes for not sending something similar back, so they end up using the laptop and Grace to make a human-compatible primer of Eridian science including the recipe for xenonite and their spaceship, then launch it towards Earth.

But the laptop didn't have just science texts; it had fiction and music and games. So they add a bunch of Eridian cultural stuff too.

So now there's this ocassional information exchange between planets lightyears away from each other that use astrophage to send probes full of the latest knowledge and news. By the time the civilizations advance enough to travel and contact, Earth and Erid are like old friends.

#project hail mary

autisticlittleguy

Apparently Eva Stratt at the end of the movie on the ship had a prison tattoo on her neck that meant something along the lines of "life without parole." So, parallel to Grace and Rocky's adventure, there was a whole subplot where Eva Stratt

- Was eventually trialed by governments of the world as a scapegoat and sent to prison

- She somehow BROKE out of said prison and currently commandeers a rogue paramilitary faction of Project Hail Mary loyalists who believe in her over world governments, who presumably are still hunting her down

- She currently is on the run and staying mobile on an ice breaker ship like some kind of james bond villain base (but you know, good) while STILL working on project hail mary the whole time

- Her rogue loyalist faction controlled enough resources they could go to space and collect the beetles Grace had sent. Alternatively, it was the world government that collected the beetles, and Stratt had a whole ass heist movie to steal them, which is why she had the little xenonite figure at the end of the movie. Either ways she was running circles around them.

Absolutely insane. Never piss off a history major

#eva stratt my goat <333 #project hail mary

yexerrr

a bunch of eridian! grace and a little bit of rocktiz.

#cool art #project hail mary #q

shrugsinchinese

Post-launch

#project hail mary #cool art #q

shrugsinchinese

Remembered that I can draw whatever I want

#based #project hail mary #star trek #cool art #q

mayasaura

Deeply irritating to me tho that in a book about "the world coming together" and making sacrifices and all that where one of the worst sacrifices was paving the sahara desert, there are. no African characters. At all. The guy in charge of the sahara desert thing is kiwi. Pākehā even.

mayasaura

And like, I'm not saying the narrative needs to shake its head so we all know it doesn't condone the destruction of Africa's ecology. It's not about morality, or moral framing, or whatever.

I just wish the loss of the Sahara had been treated as a tragedy and a sacrifice, the way nuking Antarctica was, and that the sacrifice was Africa's to make.

The scenes with LeClerc are fantastic scenes, but why does the French climatologist who pulled the trigger on the penguins get to be tragic and conflicted, while the African governments who collectively sacrificed their own continent to fuel the Hail Mary are written off as easily managed short-sighted opportunists, and never have a representative appear on page?

#project hail mary

purpleguysimp

Why does it feel like everyone forgets Carl exists

Like. Carl also has grief over the funny blonde guy he had an alien baby with and a shopping spree with. He felt grief when he watched grace be apprehended too. He had to watch as grace was sent to his death too.

Grace and Carl were friends and I'm sad that I don't really see it acknowledged as much as Grace and Stratt's dynamic are.

Carl lost the only joy he had during the entire process, the only friend he could goof off with in a department store throwing 500 rolls of duct tape into a cart (no like there were so many rolls of tape tf) and dance around with like a dumb fuck. He lost the only friend that'd call the boss of the whole mission and announce a breakthrough in science with "we had a baby." Carl surely lost a part of himself, seeing the hail mary fly into the atmosphere like a firework of hope. He was surely elated when the beatles were retrieved and found that Grace, even if he wasn't coming home, had found himself somewhere that'd treat him better than this hell ever had, because he'd want his friends to do better for themselves. I like to imagine he got one of the xenonite sculptures in the Beatles too, maybe a space ship or something, sitting on a display shelf at home because it's too big for his desk.

Idk im rambling

#project hail mary