lots o thoughts

junicorn

day 11

‘pigecorn’

So, I get why people's responses to Rocky are very "awwww, so cute!" because not only yes is Rocky and the way he moves and acts pretty cute, but also his excitement and enthusiasim about meeting an alien/not being alone and the simplified vocabulary he has to work with makes him seem very young on the surface.

But people (mostly not on tumblr so far thankfully but I don't really go into fandom tags or anything so maybe it's here too idk) actually coming away from the movie going "he's so sweet and innocent!" or "he's such a baby!!" (in a way where they actually think of him like a little kid, not the way we call grown-ass adults baby on tumblr bc we love them) or acting like he's a pet or something... I just don't understand.

Like. We KNOW why his vocabulary is limited. It's because he and Grace set up enough vocabulary for them to communicate, but they needed to be focused on dealing with the astrophage, not building an extensive lingustic base and library of words when the smallish one they have works fine 99% of the time (and they can work out the words they need if they don't have them in that 1% of the rest of the time).

And we KNOW he's both highly intelligent and highly capable as a being and an engineer/mechanic, both because we see it in action and because he's here at all - the Eridians sent only 23 individuals to try to solve the problem of their sun dying. Rocky wasn't one of the scientists, but he was there to support them and keep the ship running and design and fabricate anything the scientists needed that they didn't already have. We can assume he's probably one of the very best on Erid at what he does, because he's there at all.

So like, we have an extremely qualified, extremely intelligent, fully adult with a spouse/partner/mate of over 100 years, grown-ass space rock, and people are acting and talking about him like he's a child because... his species hasn't discovered shit like radiation so he couldn't determine what killed the rest of his crew? because the translator from Eridian to English is very bare-bones? because he's a little hyperactive/excited to learn things about his new alien friend and not be lonely anymore?

Like, the reason he says stuff like "Rocky glad not alone" instead of "I'm really glad I'm not alone anymore." is not because "OH HE'S SO INNOCENT!!!", it's because the translation program Grace set up/is working with just translates what Rocky says, word by word, with none of the automatic filling in the gaps or grammatical translation that things like Google Translate (or human translators of human languages) do. There are a lot of human languages that would sound similarly simplistic in English if they were translated just word by word in the order the words were said.

Like... okay uh, in Japanese, the way for me to ask "Where is Kiki?" is (pardon my Romaji) Kiki-tan* wa doko desu ka? It's not childish it's literally just saying "Where is Kiki?". But if you actually just translate the specific words in the order they're used, it comes out to (essentially) "Kiki where is, question?" Kiki-tan wa koko dewa arimasen is "Kiki isn't here" but it's also "Kiki here is not". (also don't judge my japanese I had like one semester total and I've forgotten most of it.) Does this sound a little familiar? (rhetorical)

*admittedly "Kiki-tan" is a very childish or cutesy/kawaii way of saying "Kiki-chan", but considering the Kiki-tan in question is my cuddlebug chihuahua who is Baby™️, I think I'm allowed to give him a cutesy nickname while also making my point.

IDK man this is mostly just me being annoyed at youtube comments, just. It's giving vibes akin to the very ableist "treating people who use AAC devices to communicate like they're children and/or unintelligent" and the very racist/xenophobic "treating people who don't speak much English like they're childish/unintelligent" if I'm being honest and I am super not here for it. I don't think most folks have been doing it intentionally, just... I will be side-eyeing people who talk like that about Rocky for all time, because you're literally infantilizing a character because their ability to communicate in a way you understand is limited and therefore is superficially similar to a child learning to speak.