c()xxx[]:::::::::::::::::::::::>

…okay so what if the problem with the taomeba never happened on the way back home. What if the radiation never got onto the Blip-A. What if Rocky ended up back on Erid, and Grace made it back to Earth. What if they missed each other desperately forever.

As both a science and English nerd, I love the idea that since Eridians are cosexual (am I using that term right? Let me know), they don’t have pronouns indicative of sex or gender but rather state of relation. Like how Rocky says, “friend Grace”, he is stating the relation of the subject to him. And taking it further, pronouns of possession, like Rocky talking to another Eridian would refer to Adrian as, “my Adrian”, and the other Eridian would refer to Adrian as “your Adrian” throughout the conversation. Because the state of relation is that Adrian and Rocky are mates. And that shifts based on who’s in the conversation when the state of relation to who is present changes. Say Rocky isn’t there. Same Eridian, who works with Adrian, talking to another Eridian who works with Adrian. Now it’s, “coworker Adrian” or “<job> Adrian”. Same Eridian talking to another Eridian who doesn’t know Adrian at all, and now it’s dependent on the context of the conversation. It could be, “Rocky’s Adrian” or “coworker Adrian”. If two states share the individual equally, you get “our Rocky” for Adrian speaking to Grace.

what I mean: "sexual intercourse" is as much a social construct as "romantic courtship," and you discover this very quickly as a queer person if you try to talk to able bodied straight cis people who literally think the only thing that counts as Actual Sex is penis-in-vagina penetration, like they call oral "foreplay" it's so dire. various people have a lot of vested interest in cleanly defining "sex" vs "not sex" for a whole slew of reasons (ex. censorship dodging and enforcing, conferring the social clout of virginity and prowess, finding and closing loopholes about premarital sex, deciding what relationships "count" as serious partnerships, ligating what is general assault vs sexual assault vs Something That's Definitely Probably Fine And Not Sexual At All, Actually, etc.), and it's really not something you can just fall back on as obvious common sense that people are dumb for questioning.

and then I did