adventure to quicken the heart of the bold

"I'm really sorry that lockdown and the ongoing pandemic interrupted pivotal educational and social/emotional development moments for you. You have an uphill battle towards adjusting to a lot of community based efforts because you experienced a mass trauma during an incredibly important time in your life where you should have physically been around your peers learning to engage in shared community. There is no "but" here, I'm genuinely really sorry. Something many of us consider key points in our interpersonal growth as youths was taken from you, not without reason but without care for its impact on you. I hope you know we are eternally allies in our struggles and if that is something you struggle to know I hope you can learn it someday."

Because so many of the angriest, most disenfranchised people I see on this website are under 24 and I often try to put younger people's behavior in the context of where they might have been 2020. I've seen the impact on my siblings and their peers+friends first hand, all ages 18-24. We've talked about how its impacted them, the isolation, the attachment to the internet, the anxieties and phobias and fears it developed in them due to the pandemic, the political unrest, and the responses to both that we've seen since. I know they're not the only ones and I know how much being marginalized also influences that impact too.

he should not have.

rocky realizing grace has a baseline risk for spontaneously developing both benign and fatal illnesses, that he has this constant ambient threat hanging over him, and rocky spends all his free time trying to learn more about it. at first he can excuse the fixation as needing to understand human health so he can explain it to eridian doctors. he suspected it would be a simple bit of research he could master while grace is asleep that night.

he cannot.

pages upon pages upon endless scrolling pages of wikipedia and medical textbooks detailing every single way the human body can go wrong without outside interference, let alone the risk of injury, the risk of pathogen, the risk of exposure to gases and heavy metals that are commonplace on erid.

he used to think of the human body as a well oiled (is joke! because human plural so wet!) machine. disturbing and revolting and alien but beautiful in its complexity and harmony. how strong it can be despite how fragile it seems, how tough despite its softness, how tightly packed despite how it jiggles and wiggles and twists. a marvel of evolutionary engineering, something he finds himself studying constantly, fascinating and disgusting in equal measures.

now it looks like nothing more than the first pieces of wire stuck together by a pebble. the resilience masking how every moment is a cellular gamble, how every bit of strenuous activity risks delicate blood vessels and tendons and bone. how all that revolting moisture is the human body's first line of defense, how the drippingsloshingleaking reveals to rocky how constantly under siege grace really is.

grace is far too blasé about it all for rocky's liking. telling him to log off, that he's just freaking himself out. reminding rocky that he's a biologist, he's well aware of everything rocky's desperately screeching at him, that he understands it far better than rocky does, and that he needs to trust him when he says it's fine.

but it's not fine. it's bad bad bad bad bad. how do humans live like this? how will this human live like this? how can the doctors of erid possibly keep up this fight?

every time fear strikes him rocky scans grace's body, looking for any changes, anything amiss. any blood where it's not supposed to be, anything shaped differently from yesterday, any masses moving around in odd places. he stops ordering grace around, or, rather, he starts ordering him around in new ways. yelling at him when he lifts wrong, telling him to get things to stand on, demanding he use the pulley system he's made, insisting he expand armando's field of reach not only in case something goes wrong but so that it can do the grunt work for him. panicking like he's never panicked before when he realizes exercise damages grace's muscle tissue.

after weeks of this grace has to sit him down and try to screw his vents on straight because there's only so much over-barring nannying from a stir crazy alien he can take.

"So for me - while I know a lot of fans are grieving, a lot of fans are upset at this announcement - for me, this is currently the best case scenario for Doctor Who. I don't want the Bad Wolf creative team to be involved in the show anymore. I think Russell T Davies and the Bad Wolf Enterprise over the past couple of years have done active harm to the brand"

-

Eva Stratt:

Hanmerhead shark 🩷