~Collector's edition~

male audiences will happily watch a dozen superhero shows, but then something like Agent Carter or Supergirl turn up and they’re panned from the first trailer and have to struggle for ratings. male audiences will watch countless installments of a franchise as long as it’s about men doing man things but the second a character like Rey or Furiosa or god forbid four entire female Ghostbusters steps up and takes a position of prominence it’s “pandering sjw bullshit”.

this isn’t like… an opinion I’m pulling out of my ass here? this starts where earlier than tv shows and hollywood blockbusters, when all the kids in a class are reading Harry Potter or Percy Jackson or Eragon o Lord of the Rings or Maze Runner or whatever the hip book is right now. the books like that, the ones that become popular reading, are overwhelmingly about male leads, because male is still considered the default. 

there’s a split in YA literature, between books that are “for everyone” and “for girls”, and that’s honestly the entire issue in a tiny little box right there. stories about men are supposed to be accessible for everyone, but stories about girls are seen as 1.) inherently for women and 2.) something that only women will care about.

men grow up in a society that doesn’t make them go out of their way to get into the heads of women and empathize with then. historically it’s been very easy for men to not engage with female-led media if they don’t want to, whereas (like someone else commented on this post) girls and women have had very little choice in the past because everything was about men. we didn’t even question it.

and now the women are arriving in mainstream media in ways that say they’re important and they matter and

small (or sometimes not so small) but loud-enough-to-be-acknowledged groups of men lose. their. shit.

because they think there’s something inherently Not For Them about a woman’s story, and they never learned how to deal with it.

I noticed that Grace was looking at golden plaques with inscription and realized they look like something made based off the Voyager Golden Record, made by Astrophysicist and Cornell University professor Carl Sagan and singer John Lennon. It was sent out in the probes Voyager 1 and 2, I believe. It has a message etched on it which says, "To the makers of music, all worlds, all times."

For reference, pictures below show the Voyager Golden Record.

People keep talking about the science in PHM like yeah, obviously. Math saves the world, equations translate the universe, whatever.

But what gets me is how hard the story leans into something else: Music!!!!

Like the whole movie quietly argues that sure, math is universal because it is precise. It lets completely different species understand each other.

But music is what lets them feel each other.

When we first see Grace's old memories, the first one shown was him teaching the kids about soundwaves being affected by frequency. This is probably a foreshadowing that it will mean so much in the next few parts of the plot. Specifically Rocky.

Rocky’s language is not framed like cold data, even if it technically is. It is patterned, tonal, almost harmonic. Grace does not just decode it, he recognizes it. There is a difference. Even in the book, he always mentions how Rocky drops an octave when he expresses sadness and grief.

And that is why it hits that even someone like Eva Stratt, who reduces everything to outcomes, to sacrifice, to necessity, can still be pulled into something as unnecessary as music.

The movie soundtrack uses songs in many different languages, and it quietly circles back to the voyager golden record. That record was created in case any life beyond earth ever finds it, to teach them what humanity is. In the same way, the music in the film becomes a kind of message too. It represents human diversity, culture, and emotion, everything that exists beyond just Grace and his perspective, showing what it means to be human to someone who is not human at all.

There are 27 songs from all around the world put in the Golden Record btw. <3

Science lets different life forms understand each other, yes. But something like music exists on a smaller, quieter level. It does not need translation in the same way. It just needs recognition.

And maybe that is the point, that even at the edge of everything, when all you have left is survival and logic and numbers, the thing that still reaches across the gap is not just understanding. It is resonance.

In order to be considered for the title of Mother of/Father [scientific field], you have to be the first to make significant contribution in that field. You're setting the groundwork in a way nobody else has. This can obviously cause a lot of debate in the end about who gets the title! That said, I think given the leaps and bounds that Grace makes in several fields of science that take them from the more theoretical to the practical gives him some notable options with strong arguments. So we've got options like: Father of Astrobiology (the discovery and study of Astrophage, Taumoeba, several other forms of life on Adrian, and the study of and first interactions with the Eridians; disproving the Goldilocks zone as the only area viable for life; making significant strides in proving the panspermia hypothesis), Father of Xenolinguistics (first person to create working translator and archive of an alien language), and Father of Interstellar Travel (this would be a title held alongside Dr. Dmitri Komorov, likely with Komorov being listed first, and there would be significant debate on if Grace should hold the title at all. I like to think Dmitri would want to share it though).

All workable cases, all real options. Buuuuut I think my very favorite option though would be the one that is the least open to debate and is the one that I honestly think Grace himself would like best: Father of First Contact.

Because on the one hand, yeah, that's a lot he was mostly doing. First contact with Astrophage, with the Taumoeba, with other life on Adrian, and most of all with the Eridians. The first ever intelligent form of life outside of Earth, he made First Contact with. He found ways to communicate, to establish common ground, to work alongside an alien being. He did something no one else on Earth had ever done before and changed the world with it. He made First Contact and saved the world.

Jousting at the festival to impress your lady love!!!

Captions cover the spot on the screen you put the information I need

The dialogue is captioned but not the song you have playing that the dialogue is responding to

You only captioned the person on the screen, not the person off screen who is also talking

No captioning of critical sound effects (alarms, bells, dogs barking, etc)

Speakers are not labelled at moments where it is not clear on the screen who is talking.

Captions cover the spot on the screen that you put the information I need!

Other d/Deaf people welcome to add.