nothing but fandoms here

(project hail mary spoilers) ENOUGH with the "found family disbands at the end of the story" trope. I'm coming back to your alien planet with you and living in a biosphere your mate designed for me and teaching a bunch of baby rock crabs about relativity.

the first time eva stratt hears somebody say "schrödingers ryland grace", after his logs from the Hail Mary were released, she sobbed and actually so did carl. they will Never know what happend to him. they wont know he found himself out there oh myyy....

Thinking about "You're have no immediate family. You dont even have a dog." And like duh thats devestating, but theres also the fact that the people telling him this are people hes been working with for 4 years at this point. Theres this quiet implication thats not just "you have no family no pets and no partners therefore you have no one to leave behind" its also "we, your coworkers who you might have called friends and who have been at your side while we all save the world for close to half a decade, are not close enough to you to even be mentioned in Stratts little speech. We will not stop this, we wont even protest or apologize. You have no friends at you side in your final moments." And i think thats even more heartbreaking honestly.

Stratt being a history major is sooo important to me because it explains so much about her. Shes not going to let herself think about what it means to force ryland onto the hail mary because she needs to look at the bigger picture or else she wont be able to save earth and shes good at that. She knows how the governments of the world will react because shes seen how governments have reacted. She knows what the history books will say about her and she has made her peace with it but she will do everything in her power to make sure that there are people to write those history books for.

God it’s so fucking funny that the copyright trial scene exists in the book. Literally the one scene where Grace isn’t present or narrating and it’s entirely so Stratt can have a “fuck you I’m doing what I need to save the goddamn world” moment. Andy Weir straight up broke his entire framing device solely so he could give Stratt this moment.

another phm book thing it would've been so funny to see in the film is stratt trying to brute-force her way into a new zealand max-security prison and getting pissed that she has to have a pat-down first bc that's slowing down her world-saving mission, making grace have a very teachery moment of "uh uh! you can't always use 'i'm saving the world' as an excuse to be a jerk!" to which functional world dictator stratt actually admits "yeah ok you might have a point" (and then recruits an embezzler convicted of manslaughter to pave the sahara desert into an astrophage breeder farm bc this book is fucking wild) i can't stress enough that NOBODY is doing it like these two. dynamic of all time

Just finished rereading Project Hail Mary again and it’s really interesting that Stratt is not a scientist. She’s an administrator, a politician, a leader. Not a scientist. She’s surrounded by some of the smartest people in the world, and they’re speaking in very science-y terms, and she has no idea what is going on. So what does she do? She turns to Grace and asks him to explain it to her. And he does, he explains the very complicated stuff in a way she, a non-scientist, can understand, because he’s a teacher. That’s what he does. It works very well from a narrative perspective because you, the reader, also don’t know what all this stuff means, so Grace explaining it to Stratt also explains it to you. But I also think maybe this is part of the reason Grace became so important to Project Hail Mary, why Stratt dragged him around everywhere- and she really does take him everywhere with her- not in spite of the fact that he’s a junior high school teacher, but because of it.