Refuse Dystopia. Survive

How long ‘till i forget you?

is this anything? I’m not great at poetry, so it may be something that sounded cooler in my head :’)

I kinda like the art style though. Not too time consuming, but looks decent.

Pointing at things and explaining what they are and how the ship works, lots of awed and appreciative noises are made.

Until one of the visiting Eridians points out a specific item. “And that?”

It’s a strange, circular thing, a xenonite disk mounted upright on some sort of pivot so it can spin freely, but around the edges it has… spokes? Pegs? Sticking out of it, that hit against a stiff flap that would slow down the spinning.

It is also separated into sections decorated with crude etchings of a human and an Eridian.

“Ah,” Grace says.

“That,” Rocky says.

“That’s. Um.” Grace seems somewhat embarrassed. “That’s the sacrifice wheel.”

i cosplayed rocky this weekend!

If the world wasn't ending, they never would have met. She was an admin at the ESA in Paris and he was a middle school teacher in California. Those professions have literally zero over-lap.

But the world is ending, and Eva Stratt is going to save it so in her mission she finds Ryland Grace. And she finds more then just a scientist to help with saving the planet, she finds a friend.

She keeps herself purposefully aloof, purposefully cold, purposefully distant from everyone else on the project. Makes sense, she needs to stay impartial to everyone else as her only goal can be saving Earth. But in spite of all of that, Grace somehow manages to wiggle past every wall she has up, and somehow becomes her friend. I don't think she ever let him know it explicitly, but it's very clear she is, at the very minimum, fond of him. It shows in the movie, with the occasional softened gazes, the small smiles and the "You don't bother me". The scene of them during the demonstration, with him turning to her and wiggling his brows while she grins back at him. The entire karaoke scene, where she's looking directly at him while she sings, and him looking back with a fond smile. Cutting off the song early because she's already shown too much of her heart as it is. Eva Stratt clearly holds a warm spot in her heart where Ryland Grace is perfectly nestled, even if he doesn't fully know it.

Eva Stratt was starting to let down the wall. You could see it in the way her smiles were wider, her posture looser, the way she responds to Grace's silly bow to her. They're about to launch, the mission is almost done. Even if the Earth was condemned to freeze, even if she's condemned to be the planets "whipping boy", maybe she could allow herself one thing. Maybe she could keep her friendship with Ryland Grace, even if she would lose everything else.

But then the explosion happens. In the movie, they jump from the explosion straight to the scene of them having the meeting announcing Grace is the back-up. But in the book, there is a moment where Grace is overcome with grief for the dead scientists but Stratt panics. Grace doesn't understand her reaction as panic, he thinks she's being cold about Dubois and Shapiro being dead. But she's not. She's panicking. For a moment, her emotion is over riding her logic. In the book, her instant reaction is "Cry later! Mission first! We need a new science specialist, and we need them now!" She knows, logically, who her third option is. She's always known this. She has everything planned down to every possible scenario. She has redundancies for the redundancies. He has always been the third option. But in that moment, she still has the knee-jerk reaction of "No please not him. Anyone but him." But he is still her third option. Her last option, now.

And Eva Stratt has to take that last option. Even if it means ripping Ryland Grace out of that warm little spot in her heart. Even if it means ripping out a piece of her heart with him. She doesn't want to kill her friend. You see it in her face. "Please, sit down and we do this differently". You see her steel herself, and shakily nod to herself. Even if it's killing her to kill him, it's his life against the entirety of the human race.

That strange, unnameable feeling of never quite fitting in anywhere. Never quite acting 'just right' when he needs to.

Maybe, he reckoned, thats why he always felt such a connection to foxes.

"Fox among a pack of dogs" was a term his grandmother used to use when he was young, to describe a person out of their depths. Even past the old-timey metaphor and it's meaning, Grace always clung to the phrase. It just felt right.

Besides, he'd always felt more of kinship there, in the wild, than he ever did with other humans. He found a better kinship with the Earth, and it's creatures, and it's science, than he did with people. Hell, even being in space -against his will- he still found more comfort in the distant stars and vast, blank nothingness.

We watch him through his angsty teen years learning the little things that make him himself -- he likes cilantro, he has muscles, he has a sciencey brain -- but none of that gives him a purpose. He goes into depressed undergrad party mode, in a silly hat, soaked in vodka, asking himself what the point of it all is.

But then he sees the ship's golden wall carved with the mission, the memory of the people before him who worked to get him this far, the children coming after him who are depending on him, and something shifts. His shoulders straighten. He takes a deep breath and tosses the little Earth-ball into the air. He understands very little yet, like a young adult just trying to join the flow of community and history. But Grace has found his adulthood.