LoonyLudy

i'm still working on synthesising my thoughts into coherency, but i think it comes down to fundamentally what i find compelling about project hail mary (and to be clear there is a lot i love about project hail mary that isn't explicitly to do with the relationship grace and rocky develop, but that's not what this post is about) and how various takes work with or against the cultural romantic norms i'm used to seeing, and how all of that ties into my own messy aroace-spectrums-adjacent identity.

some things i believe in my heart to be true:

romance is a culturally constructed category, with no clear or consistent parameters (even between human cultures) (even between humans within the same cultures!)

sexuality is (to varying degrees, depending on the person) fluid and biological and contextual and malleable

applying rigid definitions or predetermined parameters of either of these is often faulty and inconsistent, even in human-human allo-allo relationships. every relationship is its own unique thing. how it gets described can vary wildly depending on the people inside of it, and the biases and experiences of whoever is describing it

ryland grace is aroace to me. which functionally means, he does not have a "normal" relationship to attraction or relationships. he has at least one ex (so do i), but he never seems bothered by his lack of a partner. he loves his life. he is loved. he is never the one to assert that his lack of a partner makes him more disposable.

the version of grace/rocky i find compelling, is the one where their relationship is explicitly both a departure from and a merging of human and eridian relationship structures. i don't picture grace ever going "finally, i have found romance, turns out im not aromantic my type is just aliens". what i find compelling is that without the barriers of human cultural expectations (or at least the ones grace and i have been subjected to), he is finally able to access a level of intimacy and closeness that has always been locked behind the wall of allonormativity. their relationship can't be built on cultural assumptions; their cultures are literally alien to each other. they don't have to be anything other than what they are; they meet each other where they are at. they use the scaffolding of their cultures to help describe what their relationship already is. also my headcanon is that rocky (and eridians in general) would be utterly perplexed by the human habit of deprioritising friendships to hold the monogamous nuclear family above all else.

listen to me. the first hairless hominin was homo erectus, about 1.6mya. naked. anatomically modern humans like us evolved 350-270,000 years ago. also naked. when do we first have solid evidence for consistent human use of clothing (bc it's when the clothing lice genome evolves to diverge from the head lice genome lol)? only 170,000-83,000 years ago. before that? BUCKASS NAKED. and even when we did start using clothing? well, as we know from excellent textile archeologists such as elizabeth wayland barber, a LOT of early human clothing was likely more decorative than functional – i.e. the string skirts that you see on some of the 'venus figures' from the upper paleolithic, which were solely decorative but would NOT do anything for warmth.

now consider eridians, whose bodies are functionally impenetrable unless they're actively eating (which is a private activity anyhow), who are carnivores (thus having no need to cultivate plants – aka the source of most textiles – like humans do), who live on a planet with no sun exposure (so probably nothing like earth plants anyways) and no fucking seasons (no need for rain/snow protection!), who evolved to exist ONLY in very specific & stable temperature ranges (like most life on erid, per andy weir), who have five fucking hands to hold things, are famously so good at multitasking that doing just one activity sucks for them, and CANNOT FUCKING SEE!!!

so where the FUCK is eridians' evolutionary or social impetus to develop ANYTHING akin to clothing supposedly coming from? N O W H E R E. you heard me.

decoration like the celebration jewelry, absolutely – though notice that was clearly designed for its auditory qualities and ability to show up on sonar, not anything approaching the level of coverage that human clothing has. rocky's engineering lederhosen (leather! bc again, carnivores!) as a (evolutionarily speaking) modern development to help hold tools, yeah, totally. carapace carvings, 100%.