Edit: After a little digging I believe that this species of starfish has a mutation that sometimes occurs, here's a different photo and "biscuit starfish" individual:

graces earth amigurumi/stress ball, good luck quilt, and fox cardigan which is a slightly altered version of an actual vintage mary maxim knitting pattern! it gives grace this very strong visual tie to humanity by having him seen in/with items that are so distinctly human created, even in space or on erid. it also serves as a nice little love letter to fibre crafts at the same time to see them kept and treasured to the end of the film

rockys little finger knitting instruments for his xenonite! in the book they are just two liquids that get mixed together (part a and part b) but this little knitting-esque contraption is such a nice detail to add, and it ties in with graces handcrafted items as a similarity across the species that is recognisable, kind of like mirrors of each other!

i love a fox motif i love a fox motif i love a fox motif

the first meeting on ship where this room full of people are staring at grace and the hangar doors are open behind them, it gives this really eerie feeling of being stared at which is made worse by grace standing in front of the projector screen. i dont think the doors are open in the book.

grace opening the crew members belongings and Seeing them as people through the photos before sending them out to space. in the book he doesnt open them until later and there arent many details about what is in the photos so it feels more emotional when he sends them out (and he sends them out together and not one then the other!)

carl. he adds a lot to the earth sequences (especially a lot of fun!), and the “you know who you are” is just. yeah. hes a small introduction when a lot of characters from the book are lost in the movie, but hes impactful and i love him.

james ortiz kind of in general. im glad they went with puppetry as much as they could because it looks beautiful and i love puppetry. i know they chose to go with having rocky have a tts kind of setup to avoid having subtitles throughout most of the movie, but james adds a lot vocally to the character! kind of boggles my mind that he was doing like 45 min long improvs SO in character WHILST puppeteering when he wasnt even meant to be the voice of rocky and was just line reading for ryan. im glad they didnt have someone else do the voice acting. of course also his appearance as the news anchor at the very beginning and the tts option they go with being called “James” are also super nice

grace and rocky and the shared pain of picking a tts voice that works also MERYL STREEP

the costuming storytelling. obviously it wasnt really in the book because its much more of a visual medium but the colder and colder clothes progressively on earth, stratt closed off in her turtleneck and grace in the squeaky yellow raincoat thats so jarring when she tells him shes putting him in the hail mary against his will, the stupid science shirts, and the fibre arts pieces all add so much.

the inclusion of the projector/led screens and the beach motif

the video logs! its a good way to tackle graces internal monologue (kind of like how carl is in the early earth days), but it gives grace a feeling of being able to say goodbye to earth above being able to send the taumoeba. i wish in the book that grace had told earth that he was choosing to turn back and save rocky/erid even though he would starve shortly after, as it would have asserted to earth that he wasnt a coward

speaking of, the removal of the coward talk that both stratt and grace do when grace doesnt want to go. book stratt doesnt actually believe that grace is truly a coward otherwise she wouldnt have sent him. she knows that when he wakes up and doesnt know who he is, he will still be grace and he will do everything that is needed to help. the film was probably going to lose the nuance of this bit where they had to compress everything so im glad they removed it. i like the addition of grace running and being tackled instead

kind of along the same line, rocky not having shame about eating in front of grace!

entirely for visual purposes, having grace be able to see the petrova line whilst hes in it because its beautiful and i love beautiful shots in movies okay

also the big window on the hail mary. solves like two chapters worth of grace working out hes in space by dropping random objects and looks cool whilst doing it

armando. dont know why we needed an additional robot on board but i cant imagine not having him now.

incorrect response: write the rest of the story to be as twisty, shocking and counter to expectations as possible, regardless of whether this is a logical or satisfying way for the plot to go

correct response:

(you’re not stupid. I posted this thinking it would amuse a handful of mutuals who all knew the context and that would be about it, so I didn’t think about providing any other explanation. I had no idea it would spread this far.)

I’ll start from the very beginning just to be thorough. so this is Alex Hirsch, creator and head writer of Gravity Falls, a show which had a big focus on mystery, conspiracies, codes and ciphers, etc. the whole plot is kicked off by one of the main characters finding a mysterious old journal in the woods, which detailed all kinds of weird and supernatural things, but then ended abruptly with the author saying they had to hide the journal because they were being watched. the central driving mystery of the show, therefore, was the question of who wrote the journal and what happened to them.

now, the thing about Gravity Falls is that, while it must be said that the writers weren’t always quite as sure of their plans as we tend to like to think they are, it is very much a fair play mystery, with legitimate clues to what was going on. but the writers were caught off guard by how quickly the show attracted a dedicated audience, including a lot of people outside the primary presumed demographic, who started solving the clues faster than expected. so some of the fans were able to correctly guess who the author was before it was revealed in the show, and the theory started spreading. this put the writers in something of a panic, because this was THE mystery that the whole story revolved around, with ¾ of the show building up to the dramatic reveal in the middle of season 2. they wanted it to be a mystery that could be figured out, sure, but they weren’t prepared for people to solve it so far in advance of when it was planned to be revealed, which would have really taken away from the big moment. they weren’t going to change the main story itself, but having been caught unaware by how much attention the fans were paying, they wanted to up the ante and make the mystery more complex to solve going forward–but first they needed to buy some time and throw the fandom off the scent for a little longer.

hence, Alex’s plan as described above. they whipped up a fake shot that appears to give away the identity of the author as being another character in the show, put it on a screen in the studio as if it was a real animation frame, took a picture of it, and ‘leaked’ it online. it was initially decided to be a hoax (albeit, I think, presumed to be a hoax originating from outside the production team), until Alex posted this tweet:

…before quickly deleting it (though not so quickly that it didn’t get seen, of course).

it worked well enough to distract most people for a while, and wasn’t revealed as a hoax until a year later, when an episode aired that definitively proved that the supposed screenshot could never have happened, at which point Alex owned up to the whole thing as seen in the tweet above. by then the episode with the real reveal wasn’t far off, and while people did still work it out ahead of time, it was more of an “OH MY GOD I KNEW IT!” moment than a “booooooring, we’ve known that for ages” moment, which of course was what the writers wanted all along.

personally I find this a fascinating approach to dealing with the problem of spoilers, because it doesn’t affect the story itself at all; if you watch Gravity Falls today–or if you were watching it when it aired without any significant contact with the fandom–you’d never know about it. ultimately, the problem the writers were facing wasn’t that some people might guess the answer to the mystery–they never wanted to make it completely impossible to predict–so much as it was that they hadn’t designed the story to stand up to so many people working on the puzzle together, which resulted in a sort of total output of puzzle-solving ability that far outstripped the capability of any one solo human being. so their solution is something that’s very much targeted toward delaying that group problem-solving, without actually affecting the experience of any individual person watching the show.

plus, it’s very in keeping with the overall tone of the show.

don’t:

change the ending

do:

BUT I really dislike how all the fics always frame it as "Grace needs another human", or even that Rocky isn't enough. As soon as a fic does that, it makes me so upset. Further exploration into it makes me realise how much I dislike the idea that Simon would be more important to Grace than Rocky because their relationship is romantic or because they're the same species. Both of those things just feels completely disregarding of aro/ace experiences to me more than shipping Grace. Like, at the end of the day that's a headcanon and qe can do whatever. Minimising Rocky and Grace's relationship for romance though? That's het shit. Like, it's a gay ship but it's a het mindset.

They wear suits, but they don't even know basic etiquette.