stone aries

It's the Royal Academy of Art Young Artist's Summer Show. One of my favourite exhibitions of the year. Like. Not only are the older kids insanely talented, the younger ones' artist statements will just punch you right in the face.

Jeffrey is my cat and he feels like my heart

Uh no. A movie like this with a male, human protagonist who forms a friendship with an extremely non-humanoid alien who was basically assigned male by the narrative would not.... would not likely end in a romance between the two. Lol. Lmfao. If it DID end with a romance between the two, my mind would have been actually blown in the theater. And I guarantee that most people leaving said theater would have been weirded out by it. Because human characters forming romances with non-humanoid characters in fiction is usually used as an indicator that either the human character is a weirdo, that the relationship is unnatural and strange, or that we're supposed to laugh at the relationship. There are definitely exceptions, but by and large that's how that trope appears in fiction ime.

So grace and rocky's relationship ending at a deep friendship is vey literally the expected outcome. I'm not saying that as a bad thing, I love their friendship and how important they are to one another and I love this story, but a human and a non-humanoid aliens relationship staying within the bounds of 'friendship' isn't somehow more subversive and progressive than if it had included romance.

To be clear, I'm all for aro/ace headcanons for grace, and I totally get why this story in particular attracts those headcanons, but acting as though people who ship grocky (specifically eridian!rocky and human!grace) aren't in their own way participating in something subversive feels a little disingenuous.

And this is reflected in the numbers! On ao3, Grace & Rocky as a platonic relationship outnumbers Grace/Rocky by about three times. And even MORE telling, Grace/Simon (from Iron Lung) is over double the number of Grace/Rocky fics. If grace and rocky's relationship is so beautiful because of the absence of romance, then why does that not extend to the ship with two human dudes that doesn't involve the alien?

I'm 100% sure that tons of people who love aro/ace grace and platonic grocky are earnestly engaging with the fact that their friendship is framed as the most important relationship in, at least, grace's life, especially because the movie seems to pointedly subvert any romance between grace and stratt, which I would argue is the much more expected place for a romance to happen.

Putting aside transneutral/transfem readings of Grace or the issue of Grace gendering that rock spider in a way that would make it Kinda Gay, stories where a romance arises between a typically attractive human male and a distinctly Other/“ugly” romantic partner are few and far between.

I have been Thinking a lot about Beauty and the Beast/Eros and Psyche for not wholly unrelated reasons, and one of the things that stood out is how often women are told that it’s necessary and noble to learn to love someone who is “ugly,” who is rude, who hurts them, confines and controls them. How the noble heart of a maiden can see past the exterior to the prince within.

While on the other hand, when men are shown falling in love with a nonhuman character, it’s often either Conventionally Attractive Woman but With Horns Now OR it’s passed off as a joke in some way. He’s a freak. Going against the 100% natural inclination of men to fall only for the physical, and only for the narrow band of thin abled cishet white (enough) femininity that obviously all NORMAL guys prefer. If she’s dangerous, it’s presented as something to tame, or as more like a kitten hissing and spitting. She can’t control him! That would be ludicrous.