a lot of phm fandom sadism tends to be focused on grace and, like, i get it, he's got a lot in common with one of those stress toys with the eyes that pop out of its skull in a way that's kind of cute and kind of viciously satisfying when you squeeze it, but the amount of times i see rocky being overlooked or even being the one to lead the efforts to violate his hard-won and precarious safety - with the best of intentions, but at the end of the day, well, he's an alien with alien cultural norms and values that might affect his judgement [pause while i roll my eyes] - it does honestly make me wonder if we watched the same movie. especially the scene where rocky tears down the only thing protecting him from dying in prolonged and hideous agony with his bare hands to save grace from suffocating in adrian's gravity. yeah, he has unimaginably horrific (try to conceive of being alone, truly isolated in the most literal sense of the word, for 46 years. you can't.) abandonment trauma and outwardly lacks much sympathy for grace's boundaries (which are themselves the product of a lifetime of experiences more nuanced and not necessarily beneficial to him or anyone else than uncomplicatedly right), but he values grace; values his life and everything that entails - his comfort and safety and happiness, his desires and needs and opinions - while he values himself very little by comparison. so many of his efforts to connect with grace cost him just as much, if not more, of his comfort and safety, but he does it anyway because he loves him beyond rationality and because he would rather die than be alone again, and that isn't hyperbole. rocky would delay his return home by years if it meant that grace could make it back alive, even if he'll never be able to see it. rocky would do anything in his power to fix a problem, including die trying. grace understands that rocky isn't responsible for the deaths of 23 people, we as the audience understand because grace explains it to us, and any reasonable person would also understand if the same facts were presented to them, but rocky doesn't have that kind of faith in himself. rocky will make sure that if it has to be even one more, it won't be grace, or adrian, or any other eridian or human he could have saved if he was only good enough to fix it. because if he can't, then what's the point of him having survived, just to be left alone again when everyone else is gone?
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