Maikanto

Yáo Li-Jie & Olesya Ilyukhina

It is actually nuts how much Grace is canonically liked and likeable in PHM. Obviously there's all the hints about how much the crew like him, but even outside of that, we can see that in his pre-project life, when he wasn't 'important,' people wanted him around! His fellow teachers were asking him to hang out, and he had more friends than just Marissa! Who, by the way, hung out with him every Thursday night (insane amount of consistency for adult friendship tbh) for YEARS. Don't even get me started on how Marissa met him because he was the roommate of a guy she BROKE UP WITH. Imagine staying friends with your college ex-boyfriend's roommate for almost two decades??? To the point that you tell him about a world-changing problem before it's even public, just because it's him.

I don't think I've ever come across this variant in the wild.

Is this some weird fantasy all directors have of pinning Ryan Gosling to the floor on his front by other men?

Bonus love:

And I’ve seen lots of posts about how she pulls out the “I can do what I want” paper, but I wanted to highlight some other things about the scene that I found absolutely hilarious:

She’s actively working on something else on her tablet as the trial is beginning.

She doesn’t have a lawyer or anything. It’s just her alone at the defense table

She immediately and continuously requests to end the trial so she can leave (and interrupts both the Plaintiff and the Judge to do so)

After being denied a few times, she just gets up and leaves anyway. When they try to stop her she’s just like “I literally have the entire US army under my command, you have no way to make me stay here.”

everyone gets onto eva stratt for the "think about it long time" vs. "you have three hours" thing but

operating on book canon a little bit: if grace couldn't do it-- if he said no*-- the alternative was to scramble and fly in the next most qualified volunteer, who had 0 training, 0 knowledge of astrophage, and was not an astronaut. three hours could have been three hours of training for that replacement. three hours could have been three hours of preparation for grace, if he said yes

eva stratt gave grace three hours. not to decide, necessarily, because the decision was going to be made the way it was no matter what. but three hours to come to terms with it, to grieve, to mentally prepare himself. three hours that could have been spent giving humanity a better chance to survive

she borrowed three hours that she didn't have to give grace space to process. to get himself together and come to her, teary-eyed but resolved, and say yes.