every so often i see rocky angst/whump on my dash and i love it but it just reminds me - are movie only fans aware of exactly why earth's atmosphere is deadly to rocky?
because like yeah sure neither grace nor rocky can breathe in the other's atmosphere, but that's fairly far down the list of problems on either side. for humans the problem is that erid is hot enough and the atmosphere thick enough that we'd be walking into a pressure cooker that's twice as hot as a normal pressure cooker and 15 times as strong! and while rocky can handle the lower pressure in our atmosphere relatively well, a lot of his internal biology happens to be made of somewhat flammable materials? and in trying to save grace he gets to discover first hand what happens if you take a system that produces temperatures up to 400°C as part of their natural cycle and immune response, and then try to breathe oxygen into it
and yes he does still have a lot of residual trauma over that!
(from when they were breeding the taumoeba to be nitrogen resistant, which grace mostly didn't start in the book until after rocky was awake)




















