rambling librarian

eva stratt's internalised misogyny. she frames it as radical pragmatism, and she's not entirely wrong, but she's not entirely right either. she holds herself to a standard of absolute reliability that she never once imposes on grace. she permits him an extraordinary amount of bullshit (unreliability, self-deception, evasion) that she would never tolerate in herself. and, critically, never has. she reads grace as fundamentally unreliable and works around it rather than demanding better; she doesn't experience this as a gendered assumption but as realism. as a way of bending the world to her favour. she allows him the farce of saying his decisions are in fact her decisions. she enables his willing obliviousness, and the obliviousness serves her in the end; she asked only one thing of him and she had to hunt and sedate him to get him to do even that

stratt gets to her monthly scheduled half-hour for "feeling things" and lets herself descend into cheeky little bitter envious frenzy over not having the coma resistance gene markers. oh, to not have to face the rest of her life on earth and be locked away helpless while everyone starves, and instead just wake up, work for a single month more, eat the best food available, fix everything with her own two hands, die in satisfied peace, and be remembered with reverence. she's just getting into a proper spiral about how grace has this opportunity but can't even seem to comprehend why this would the most beautiful thing and why, why doesn't he? does he not care? about the world, about me, about himself? what's wrong with him? he has the capacity to care, I've seen it, it's there, but he refuses it. why won't he do this for all of us? if I could just reach into his brain and fix-- and then her alarm goes off and she has to go to her next meeting.

*administering retroactive amnesia drug so he forgets core elements of his personality like his survival instincts, insecurities, and anger at the project* eva fix :)

my personal pet peeve vis a vis grace atticwife posting isn't actually anything to do with the posts or au itself, that's all fine, it's just that the way fandom currently uses the term "atticwife" appears to have mostly divorced itself from what The Wife In The Attic actually represents in jane eyre and that Personally ticks me off in a gothic nerd way. I think fandom currently uses it as a shorthand to basically mean "a beloved imprisoned in a gilded cage," while in jane eyre it's more "living reminder of something horrific the hero has done and is still doing that he's trying to hide from the heroine." I hear "ryland grace atticwife au" and imagine adrian as the jane eyre in the situation, cautiously asking their spouse "...by the way, what, uh. happened. to that alien you brought back home? it was a big deal at the time but it's been years and I haven't heard anything more about it" and rocky saying "oh, well humans have such short life spans and high medical needs, it's basically just on palliative care for the time being, don't worry. also the banging on the biodome is the air vents, pay it no mind." or I imagine stratt hiring a new young staff member as an assistant when the beetles come back to earth and them realizing that there are weird cuts in the video logs sometimes, and their boss keeps redirecting conversation when they try to bring up the circumstances of the original launch around other people, and no matter how hard they try they can't find copies of ryland grace's informed consent paperwork when everything else related to project hail mary is so meticulously and publicly archived. but, alas, this is not what other people mean.

one of my favorite types of content is people who analyse low brow media with the same seriousness with which one generally uses to analyse artsy/prestige media. not cynicism, no mockery, no acting like they're above it, even if they think its bad. everything has themes even when not intended to be there, everything says something about the context in which it was made even if its not trying to, and sometimes the lack of depth betrays a different type of depth in what the media does not realize that its saying much more than the little that its saying on purpose. even if the craft is bad.

stratt gets to her monthly scheduled half-hour for "feeling things" and lets herself descend into cheeky little bitter envious frenzy over not having the coma resistance gene markers. oh, to not have to face the rest of her life on earth and be locked away helpless while everyone starves, and instead just wake up, work for a single month more, eat the best food available, fix everything with her own two hands, die in satisfied peace, and be remembered with reverence. she's just getting into a proper spiral about how grace has this opportunity but can't even seem to comprehend why this would the most beautiful thing and why, why doesn't he? does he not care? about the world, about me, about himself? what's wrong with him? he has the capacity to care, I've seen it, it's there, but he refuses it. why won't he do this for all of us? if I could just reach into his brain and fix-- and then her alarm goes off and she has to go to her next meeting.