Mischief And Debauchery

Grace and Rocky are living in like this whimsical space adventure. Meanwhile, back on Earth, Eva Stratt just ordered her fifth assassination this week trying to stop WW3. The other day she replaced Jeff Bezos with a homonculus clone grown in a lab so she can repurpose Amazon into a humanitarian aid distribution network. She had a team of lawyers trick a demon into extending her lifespan by 30 years just so she can live to see through Project Hail Mary.

stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation with the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.

everyone is a bumbling reactionary idiot except me. and my mutuals. and presumably my followers because they follow me and adhere to my strictures.

imagine forcibly sending your second in command to space and erasing his memory and having made peace with it for 26 years but then you finally get the back the information that will save the world and you find out that he woke up all alone because the other two died on the way and he didn't know what was going on and he was so scared but he manages to make first contact and he figures it all out anyway AND he might be able to go home with the astrophysics the alien gives him and you feel a part of your heart that hasn't felt alive in decades start to beat again because he might come back in just a few months if what he's saying is right and then you watch the last log and it turns out he needs to go back to save an alien species and he is going to starve to death and you feel the grief all over again.

the irony of the betrayal scene is that grace has actually managed to have about half of his character arc by that point and the very fact that he's saying "no" demonstrates that he's getting closer to being the brave person stratt needs on her side, just not quite close enough. he's being firm to say he's not just gonna do whatever people ask of him and he's exhibiting vulnerability and trust in a personal relationship by believing that stratt will hear and respect his answer. let us not forget that this is the man who did Try to resist getting put in the argon death cube but ultimately rolled his eyes and went "ugh kinda bossy but whatever this is okay I guess" about it. his experiences on the petrova taskforce have made him an iota stronger, and I think that's part of what makes stratt so frustrated in that scene. the book "I don't want to die" and movie "you just can’t talk me into it" lines, representing taking ownership of his desires and an unwillingness to be passive to others' wants, are both breakthroughs for him and things he would have been too cowardly to say earlier in the timeline, and she definitely knows him well enough to be able to see that. I think there's a part of her that's thinking "if you'd only done this faster and been the person who learned how to say no two years ago then maybe by now you'd be the person who's learned how to say yes."