My Fandom Brain

cause here's the thing, even if movie!stratt didn't exist you couldn't pay me to hate book!stratt. maybe andy weir wrote her to be this cold, heartless character but still you can't make me hate her. she was a woman with the weight of the world on her shoulders and the leader to a seemingly impossible mission so i genuinely do not care if she's mean. in fact i hope she gets meaner and more ruthless. did you guys know she carried a taser with her.

I like how Grace takes such a moral high ground on why Stratt shouldn’t be sexist and makes a point to mention that the most qualified professionals should be able to keep it in their pants just for DuBois and Shapiro to immediately start fucking

Stratt is dedicated to one thing: saving humanity. She thinks what action will bring me closest to my goal? and whatever the answer is to that question, she takes that action. Whether it's kind or cruel... if it brings her closer to her goal, she will do it. Harmful to one or helpful to another--there is no morality in it, not in the compassion and not in the harshness. She simply does what is necessary, void of any intent to help or harm any individual. Eva Stratt sacrifices her humanity for the sake of humanity and becomes, if you will, a force of nature. Nature has no morality, it only exists; a storm cannot be cruel, a soft breeze cannot be kind, it only exists until completion, until the circumstances formulating its existence disappear. And so shall Eva Stratt exist as long as astrophage does, warm when warmth is needed, steely when steel is needed, a friend when a companionship is needed, a traitor when a betrayal is needed. And perhaps that's why it's so impossible to hold it against her, it's not out of a desire to cause harm, it's not personal... It is only a desire to do what's necessary to give humanity its best shot at survival. How can you hate her for loving humanity enough to change her nature? How can you know her and not understand why you're no exception? How can you truly be her friend and not understand that Eva Stratt is fueled by two mugs of coffee and more love than most people will know in their lifetime? How can you feel bitter? How could you possibly resent her for doing the right thing, even if it hurt you

Something I really struggle to get people to understand is that like. Sometimes there was no intentional homoerotic subtext, the author was just extremely misogynistic. Sometimes the author wasn't "secretly shipping" those two men, the author literally just hates women so much that they see them as being literally incapable of relationships with depth. Like this is kind of a big thing with misogyny actually. A lot of extremely misogynistic people truly believe that a man can only have meaningful and complex relationships with other men because they literally just think women are so inferior they only exist to birth children and clean the house. It's like when people say along the lines of "no one worships exclusively men quite like straight men do". It's just that phenomenon actually. That happens to be manifesting in a raging misogynist's writing. Writing a man character who literally only puts effort into his friendships with other men while completely ignoring his literal girlfriend or wife is actually an extremely straight thing to write. And that doesn't mean you can't ship those men or that there are no stories with actual intentional homoerotic subtext. I just think it's important to be able to recognize extreme misogyny in writing and acknowledge it without brushing it off and assuming good intentions when literally all evidence is screaming that this was a misogynistic writing choice and not a representing gay men choice.

And it's ALWAYS worth the reader honestly taking a minute to examine whether or not there's a perfectly fine female character existing there in the shadow of the reader's own previously unexamined gender biases.

I really did like the ending of the Backrooms 2026, actually. The twist that the Backrooms is a space that you can physically exit but a part of you mentally will always be trapped in is a great subversion and really effectively inverts the concept. The main scientist character looks directly into the camera and reveals he is still caught in the same nostalgia trap that Clark was, stuck in a repetitive motion and going nowhere. Mary got out but she's still in there. You can leave but you can never escape

#getting a piece of equipment set up to go deliver to the alien and you can tell from its biodome data that it's awake and active #only to be told by your planet's saviour “no grace is experiencing a subjective 'one ey em' right now #and would feel frightened if you approached his living space soon. you have to wait about thirty thousand seconds.“ #you're like. “is it doing something private?” “no. judging by energy use I think he's observing audiovisual entertainment.” #“then why can't I communicate with it” “because” <- peer review passed