Enjoy Your Stay

You come back the next day and he's not there. You have a substitute again.

And the next day.

And the next.

And the next.

You ask the principal, the vice principal, and the other teachers what's going on. Where's Mr. Grace? Is he okay? None of them can tell you. None of them know. One of them spotted him tearing out of the parking lot at light speed the other day, but they don't know anything else. Your favorite science teacher has simply vanished.

Days pass. Weeks. The substitutes are finally replaced by a new, not-fun science teacher. Not a bad teacher, but... not Mr. Grace. The new teacher begins taking down all of the cool stuff in the room. The Jacob's Ladder. The specimen jars. The solar system. You watch, silently, as your favorite teacher's mark is erased from the room. You find your new teacher at the end of the day and ask if you can keep the solar system. They apologize and say it's already in the dumpster.

You ask the adults again about Mr. Grace and get largely the same answers. No one has seen him. Not his family, not his friends. The principal went to his apartment a few weeks ago to check on him, but he wasn't there, nor was his car. His apartment showed no signs of life.

You hear whispers. Rumors. The stress got to him. He missed studying at the universities. He couldn't stand being tied down to a bunch of unruly kids. He crashed. He flew off the bridge.

You block it out, along with the growing talk of the sun dying.

Time goes by, and you slowly grow accustomed to your new science teacher. Your classmates seem to have moved on with no problem. Almost no one mentions his name anymore. His picture is gone from the staff line-up. His nameplates are nowhere to be found. You yourself struggle to think of him, to daily hold him in memory when everyone else seems to not care. But every so often, you'll catch a classmate's eye, and you'll see the same question there: What happened to Mr. Grace? And every so often, you'll overhear a few teachers whispering to each other in the halls. About what they thought they saw. Government vehicles. A woman in black. I heard he was drafted or something...

You and your classmates come up with your own theories. His parents got deathly sick and he rushed home to take care of them. He forgot something at his apartment but was driving so badly he got lost and is now on the other side of the country, still trying to find his way back home. He had an ex-girlfriend who was about to get on a plane for Nicaragua and he suddenly realized how much he still loved her and had to go tell her before she left, and they've run off somewhere together.

Anything is better than believing that he's gone.

One day, your parents sit you down in front of the TV and make you watch the President's special 4th address in the past 18 months. It's about the sun dying, and the astrophage, and the plan to stop it. They call it Project Hail Mary. They're going to send a rocket ship to a nearby star that isn't dying and study it to find out why it isn't dying, and hopefully use that information to save the sun. The mission plans to launch within the next two years. There will be a crew of three. They won't be able to return home because there won't be enough fuel.

Studying stars and distant planets. Leaving and never coming back. You think of your favorite teacher, and the world feels too big and too scary.

Time passes. You graduate 8th grade and officially enter high school, leaving behind the place where Mr. Grace taught you. Only a handful of your former classmates end up at the same high school as you. Every so often, NASA gives an update regarding Project Hail Mary. The past is slowly fading, and the astrophage-riddled future is slowly approaching.

Things begin to change. You hear about strange weather all over the world. Your social studies teacher halts mid-lesson to show you a video of the Sahara Desert covered in black rectangles. The news is filled with rumors of countries stockpiling crops and supplies in preparation for the coming apocalypse. The number of sidewalk preachers significantly spikes. One day the internet explodes with news that an ice cap in Antarctica has exploded and fallen into the sea. None of it feels real. Nothing feels right ever since your favorite teacher disappeared.

There's other stuff, too. The Hail Mary is slowly being assembled in orbit above Earth. The crew and back-up crew have been selected. The prime and back-up scientists are both American. You feel a jolt of hope, but--no, neither of them is Mr. Grace; that's not what happened to him. And then you feel relieved, because those people are going to die in space anyway.

Launch day is impending. It's only a few months away--three days before you graduate 9th grade and start summer break before becoming a sophomore. A new start for everyone. This year is hard enough already. But in the back of your head, you hear the voice of your favorite teacher telling you that it's going to get worse, and it's going to get worse faster than you think.

You ignore it, and feel awful for doing so.

It's less than a week until the Hail Mary launches from Earth into the depths of the galaxy. You feel nervous, but you can't say why. The weird weather has continued, but otherwise life is the same. The catastrophic effects haven't begun yet. You make yourself look forward to summer break and smile. You're almost there. You've made good grades all year, especially in science. Mr. Grace would be proud. Wherever he is.

You meet up with some of your old classmates after school and kick around downtown, doing your best not to feel the apprehension that still hangs around you like a cloud. Everything is fine. Everything's going to be okay. Earth's finest are going on a mission to save the sun. They're going to succeed. Everything's going to be okay.

One of your friends gets a notification on their phone and stares at it for longer than a minute, looking horrified. You all crowd around the phone and gape at the announcement from NASA. There was an explosion at the Russian research facility, and both of the Hail Mary's science specialists were killed. They are trying to find a replacement. They have good candidates. There will be an update shortly.

A shiver runs down your spine. But you squash the fear to comfort your friends, to remind them that NASA has a plan and the mission will still launch. It has to. Everything's going to be okay.

At long last, it's Launch Day.

You have heard no updates about Project Hail Mary other than the scientist position has been filled and the launch is proceeding as scheduled. You tell yourself the nerves are what everyone is feeling. The fate of the world rests in this ship and its crew.

They'll succeed. Everything's going to be okay. Summer is coming. Even if it might be your last real summer.

The launch is being covered all day on all channels, but all the teachers still require you to put your phones away and do school. As if history isn't being made. Finally, in science, your teacher pulls out the projector. No more studying. The Hail Mary is launching in the next two hours, and you should all get to watch.

You stare at the screen in amazement. The Hail Mary is shown in orbit above the Earth, big and strange and beautiful with its tiny crew compartment and giant fuel storage. Down on Earth, NASA is preparing a small craft to fly up to the Hail Mary. The crew will transfer over, get strapped in, and the Hail Mary will launch itself. The crew will be in comas for the whole trip. That way they won't go insane.

The reporters shift topics. The crew is coming out. You sit up in your chair, eager to see the saviors of Earth... before they fly off into space and are never seen again by the rest of humanity.

Commander Yao Li-jie. The pilot. He salutes, and you feel the urge to salute back. Or bow.

Olesya Ilyukhina. The engineer. She waves vigorously and throws up double peace signs. You almost smile. She doesn't seem to be thinking about how she's going to die.

And the scientist. The reporters apologize, the Hail Mary's science specialist is already aboard the craft, already unconscious by request, to minimize panic. He was brought in so late, didn't have much time to get accustomed to space travel. But we salute him all the same for stepping up and filling the spot after that tragic accident.

An image appears to fill the screen, with text underneath. Your heart stops.

You are thirteen years old again. You are sitting in your desk all ready for Rock Sorting. One of your classmates asks a question. It was the last normal moment of your life.

The reporters are talking, but you barely hear it. No one else in the room seems to be feeling the world fall apart the way you are. You look across the room at one of your classmates. She's the one who asked the question. You see it in her eyes. The same disbelief. The same shock. You're not dreaming. You look back up at the front of the classroom.

After all this time, there he is--right there in front of you. Your favorite teacher in the whole wide world, who taught you to be curious, who taught you to never stop learning, who told you that life was about to get very hard, but it didn't sound so scary when he was right there telling you about it. Dr. Ryland Grace, Microbiologist. About to be sent off to space to die.

His picture and name blur in your vision, and the ache you've been burying since 8th grade opens up to swallow your stomach.

I had to turn this off, but it's something that allows Windows and anyone using your device to generate text/images.

behold my cunty snake oc that i haven’t named yet

I made him just to think about a potential monster of the week adventure for sonic where he and his friends are in a desert town. They stay the night cuz they’re on their way to someplace for like a convention or something and the next morning sonic wakes up in jail convicted of a crime he doesn’t even remember committing despite the many witnesses, including his friends. They obviously know that he wouldn’t just do something like that and that there was obviously something fishy going on but they think it’s be for the best if he, ya know, stayed in jail for now until they figure this out

This being Sonic, he’s obviously not gonna do that. So he has break out of jail and has to work to clear his name with the help of a mysterious snake who offers his services to assist him all while his friends and the sheriff try to arrest him ‘for his own good’

During the day Sonic and his new companion investigate and every night the moment sonic closes his eyes he wakes back up in the holding cell he was in the previous day with zero memories of his crimes that night.

This continues for a week and, though the prospect of this adventure was entertaining at first, he got bored of the novelty the third time he woke up to wooden ceiling of his cell sheriff’s office, and by the fifth time he starts actually getting pissed off and just wanting it to end already

Kai the Chimaera!

like. how did you get the impression that you're supposed to kill anything that gets in your way. did we play the same game

i'm so so glad they're just completely removing the player's ability to damage and kill creatures in subnautica 2 in favor of more interesting nonviolent methods (outside of the previously mentioned things) but i fear people who completely miss the point and view the game as something it most definitely is not will be very annoying about it

Part 255 of  “A Tale of Two Rulers” (May 3, 2026)

I live! I'm so sorry for being away for so long. It's been one family emergency after another (and some overlapping) for months and months. random life lessons that i've learned through this i wish to pass forward: Please please please get power of attorney over your old people so when they go nuts you can help them. Also if your dog starts to try to barf but nothing comes up and he won't eat even his favorite things and he has a bloated belly, for the love of God, take them strait to the emergency vet because they may be dead by morning if nothing is done. It's called GDV and it's a nightmare. Also please get pet insurance if you can. Luckily my dog survived!

In other good news, baby is healthy and is now FAST

Comic realted:

-Please contact me via dm on patreon if you're still waiting on a patreon reward. I know I've missed sending people what they're owed. I want to make it right.

★ Webtoon-  https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/a-tale-of-two-rulers/list?title_no=292453 ★ - I’m still building up this archive.

★Patreon- https://www.patreon.com/LorIllustration ★

★Store - www.etsy.com/shop/FigmentForms

Here’s the result from tonight’s stream! Thanks to everyone who came by!

In my AU, Aurora eventually becomes a pop star. I like to envision that she's not only able to utilize her talents in dancing and singing, but uses her photokinesis to make her own light shows and illusions so she's her own backup dancers! 🤩

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve. 

Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.

If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.

Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.

just got this email from support:

PLEASE PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT ON THE POST THROUGH THIS LINK!! it links directly to @changes reblog of the original post so hopefully they'll hear us out!!

if you need a template feel free to copy/paste this or any other alternation circulating on tumblr!

Please stop the new notes rollout. It's gonna kill fandoms. Original creators and artists will stop posting if we don't get the credit we deserve and instead goes to rebloggers. There is a reason why we are here and not on Twitter. We are already struggling to reach people and this is just gonna make it worse. Fandoms are already starving for engagement and this rollout will drown smaller accounts. I urge you to reconsider.

Anakin is supposed to be simultaneously in a coming-of-age-gone-wrong story of sorts, where he's a teenager on the cusp of adulthood, still clinging to some of his childish behaviors while also chafing against authority and aching for independence from his guardians, as well as in an epic romance with a woman who is written as the coolest most competent most badass and morally upright woman in the world.

And those two things simply do not work together very well.

The coming-of-age-gone-wrong story is one where Anakin is intentionally written as a whiny teenager whose relationship with Obi-Wan is starting to get difficult because Anakin wants his independence and Obi-Wan is understandably a little worried about giving it to him and then Obi-Wan is forced to allow it and he learns that it's good to let your children have the space to make mistakes of their own as a part of growing up except that Anakin then secretly goes off and murders a bunch of people and now we the audience know that Obi-Wan was right all along and the horror is that he doesn't even know it. This is honestly an extremely compelling story, because it takes the coming-of-age concept and really turns it on its head with your two characters going in almost completely opposite directions instead of actually meeting in the middle. Anakin being a whiny teenager is essential to this story working because you WANT to see that he's still in that limbo between childhood and adulthood, you want to understand that that confusion about who he is and who he's been and who he wants to become is central to the decisions he makes by the end.

The epic romance is a fairly bog standard forbidden romance storyline, although it is also a little turned on its head by the fact that you as the audience are intended to understand that the two lovers actually SHOULDN'T get together even if you believe the love is genuine. You SHOULD be able to watch this romance and fully believe that Anakin and Padme truly love each other and would be good for each other if only they weren't in their respective jobs and that the things that compel them about each other is exactly what should be keeping them apart in the first place. We should believe that their desire to do good and help others as much as they can with the power that they have is what brings them together but it also is what has brought them to their positions that require them to choose between their work and their love for each other. But doing this requires the audience to BUY THE LOVE, you have to buy that these two people do genuinely care about each other and love each other SO MUCH that they're willing to throw away what they've worked for to try to have it despite all the reasons they know they shouldn't. And this can also be a compelling narrative on its own! On paper, the forbidden romance storyline should be extremely compelling, especially if you get the right actors with good chemistry able to really pull it off.

The problem is that the whiny teenager simply doesn't fit into the epic romance narrative. He just doesn't. Not when your female lead is written as the coolest most competent most badass and morally upright woman in the world. I can believe that she'd FEEL for the whiny teenager, that she'd sympathize with his plight as he struggles to become an adult, that she'd want to help him, sure. But I don't for a MOMENT truly buy that she'd actually fall for the whiny teenager who throws stupid temper tantrums and murders children, certainly not enough to buy that she'd throw away all of her morals and everything she's ever worked for just to be in a relationship with him.

ROTS Anakin fits better into the epic romance, as someone who's already figured out how to be an adult and has more of his shit together, and his awkwardness tends to come off as more endearingly sweet than cringy and juvenile and even creepy the way it does in AOTC. But AOTC Anakin fits better into the coming-of-age-gone-wrong narrative. And they're trying to somehow do both of them at once in the same film, and unfortunately it just DOESN'T WORK. The coming-of-age-gone-wrong narrative gets set to the side to focus on the epic romance but the epic romance doesn't work with the whiny teenager from the coming-of-age-gone-wrong, so both of them end up falling flat. And it's truly too bad because they could both easily be incredibly compelling stories on their own, but they're extremely incompatible with each other.

And this has led to some interesting fan reactions to the epic romance plot in particular as people desperately try to figure out how to make some of it make sense. The coming-of-age-gone-wrong comes off better for the most part, but the epic romance struggles a LOT as people try to figure out how the coolest most competent most badass and morally upstanding woman in the world would be willing to set aside mass child murder for a whiny teenager who can't respect a "no" when he hears it and claims to be down for dictatorship.

Some people just choose to buy what the narrative tells you and ignore the ways in which it makes very little sense. They just choose to believe there's genuine affection there between them because the story doesn't work if you don't think they genuinely love each other. So what if Padme's characterization makes no sense? So what if this means the woman who saw through so many people's bullshit is suddenly falling for Anakin's bullshit hook line and sinker? It's what the story is telling you is true, so you just have to take it at its word and enjoy it for what it is or not.

And, you know, fair enough I suppose. I think that gets pretty hard for a lot of people who recognize all of the insanely bad writing in the epic romance and how little explanation there really is for what Padme sees in Anakin that would cause her to feel the way the film says she does, but it's a valid choice to just decide to take the story you're being told at face value.

But for those of us who can't buy into it, there seem to be a few other options, usually regarding different interpretations of Padme herself.

Some people choose to interpret Padme as just perhaps less morally upstanding than the film might want you to believe she is. Maybe she THINKS she's super morally upstanding, maybe a lot of people around her think she's super morally upstanding, but she's actually kind-of selfish and racist and doesn't care about sentient rights anywhere near as much as she might seem to. Maybe she's always been this way and it was just less obvious when she was younger and focused on Naboo, or maybe she's become this way over the last 10 years, jaded by the invasion of Naboo and her time as a Senator in a corrupt Republic. This is a harder interpretation to support, since I don't think it falls in line with what the narrative really wants to say about Padme as a character, but I can understand how some people might get here.

Some people choose to believe that Anakin is, intentionally or not, using the Force to mind control Padme into believing she loves him over the course of the film. Each time she says no, he exerts a little more control over her, causing her to make decisions she would not normally make, until she's declaring her undying love for him and agreeing to marry him only a week after meeting him as an adult for the first time. This is obviously completely in line with a lot of the themes about Anakin as a character, and it's an extremely easy fix for the problems with Padme's characterization, but it also tends to take away a lot of complexity Padme could have as a character and reduces most of her agency to being an object in Anakin's narrative as opposed to a complicated person making her own complicated choices.

You might personally find this relationship more compelling, but I don't think that means it makes more sense or would've fixed anything. It just creates a different problem. Neither Obi-Wan nor Padme are the main character of this trilogy, Anakin is. Obi-Wan ending up in a romance that has no real impact on the original trilogy's narrative is just kind-of a meaningless diversion. Anakin and Padme's romance not only ends up being the catalyst for Anakin's whole betrayal and the rise of the Empire, but also leads directly to Luke and Leia's existence.

You have to think about this film as the middle part of a trilogy, not as a stand-alone. This film is supposed to be about getting Anakin from the kind scared little boy to the Jedi Knight that betrays everybody. What steps does he take that allow him to go from one version of himself to the next? Obi-Wan's storyline in the film as is looks more at the Republic and the war and what helps lead the REPUBLIC to its destruction (which is of course a parallel to Anakin's own downfall as they are both being consumed by their own fear and manipulated by the same person into becoming the worst versions of themselves). How would Obi-Wan having an illicit romance with Padme help either Anakin's story or the story of the Republic that parallels Anakin?

Instead of there being no contact between them, there has been some sporadic communication, but this is the first time they've met in person since the events of PM, now that Padme and Anakin are both old enough for their respective crushes to see them as adults and peers.

And there is some mutual attraction between Padme and Obi-Wan, but they are both too ethical and duty oriented to ever be anything but friends. But then Anakin and Padme are spending all this time alone, and it seems like there might be a mutual attraction there, too--except that while Obi-Wan would never give in to the temptation, Anakin would.

And it would tie in to a complexity of Padme's character, where she's perfectly moral and incorruptible in her professional life, but maybe not so much in her personal life--as we might see in a scene with her parents, where we find that she's been lying to them about the danger she's in, and she insists it's because she doesn't want them to worry, but they say they already know enough to worry, and she just doesn't want to have to deal with them being worried.

We therefore twist the romance the same way we twist the coming of age: from the beginning, there's this question hanging over them about whether Padme, even subconsciously, is using Anakin as a substitute for Obi-Wan. And in RotS, that nagging jealousy and insecurity become as much a part of Anakin's fall as his fear that Padme will die.

So Obi-Wan's role in the tragic romance mirrors his role in the galactic events: He did everything right, but through the actions of others, and no small amount of Palpatine's deliberate manipulation, he keeps being at the center of everything that goes wrong.

Of course, her being cool with his arguably genocidal child murder is still a problem--which is why, love triangle or not, Anakin shouldn't have confessed to Padme.

He should have confessed to his step father.

Cleigg Lars tells Anakin that of course he killed the children. Even the ones too young to participate in Shmi's kidnapping and torture would have grown up to do the same to some other farmer, because that's what the Sand People do.

And that makes Anakin pretty uncomfortable, but then in comes Padme. Cleigg tells her that Anakin might need some support about what he had to do, but in the kind of gruff, manly way where he avoids specifics, so Padme ends up thinking that the issue was Anakin killing the people actually involved in the torture out of rage rather than a dispassionate sense of justice, and has no idea that he killed people who weren't involved.

Padme tells Anakin that Jedi ideals are ideals, and that falling short of them doesn't mean that you're evil, just that you're human, and we get the dramatic irony of only the audience knowing how much she doesn't know, and that she would probably be less forgiving if she knew the whole story.

And then in RotS, Anakin can begin to realize that she doesn't know the full truth, and so the theme of possession vs love comes in as he makes the choice to knowingly deceive her rather than risk losing her...