King Of Squids

Do you think he commended them to the stars like Grace?

Or do you think he preserved them on the Blip-A to carry them back to Erid?

My personal hc is that Eridians have incredibly strong cultural practices for their dead, that families have graveyards where generations of their genealogical ancestors rest, that not being able to lay a member of their family in their graveyard is a profound tragedy for them

I think Rocky preserved his crew mates to take back to their families, lived with them for 46 years, and, when he and Grace parted ways, I think Rocky felt a deep relief for being able to finally, finally, take his friends home

And then the taumoeba leaked, and the Blip-A died, and Rocky probably thought he was going to be entombed with his crew mates in space forever, that they would never get to return to their homes, to the graveyards meant for them, that Erid would slowly die, that generations upon generations would lose the honor of resting with their ancestors, and the entire crew of the Blip-A wouldn't even get to be enshrined with the rest of their species, with their planet

It was set to Full Speed Ahead from EPIC: The Musical, and the genius of it has me gagged

"Ithaca's waiting" with a shot of the Hail Mary project leaders

"My kingdom is waiting" with a shot of Graces middle schoolers on earth

"Penelope's waiting" with a shot of Rocky

It's a perfect edit to describe the situation Grace was in after he turned the Hail Mary around to get back to Rocky

All of Earth, his children, were waiting for the beetles, not knowing if they would ever come, and Rocky was waiting for something, anything, that could help him get back to his planet safely, without knowing or expecting that anything would come to help

Once when Stratt told him he was going be on the Hail Mary, twice when he remembered that the Hail Mary was a suicide mission, and the third time when he turned around to get to Rocky

He had to know/believe that he was going to die three different times

How do you come to terms with that? How do you get through to the other side of that? How much does it change you every time it happens?

"That's her dead wife. She killed him."

Because while it's funny, it's also heartbreakingly true

Grace is someone Stratt overtly cared about, she didn't want to send him, she liked him, she didn't want his blood on her hands, but it was him or millions-potentially billions-of others, so she killed her wife

There's something about that

The dead wife trope is a major motivation for a lot of characters in a lot of stories, but in this one the dead wife isn't a cause for the plot, he's a symptom, he's "killed" near the end of the story (when he's drugged and put in the Hail Mary)

And at the same time, he's dead from the start of the story, but we don't know he's a dead wife analogue until near the end, up until his recovery of the memory, we, and he, think he's a noble hero who stepped past his fear, and gaining the information that he was murdered, that he didn't want to go or die recontextualizes the entire story

There's something so very special to me about Stratt being 100% sure of who she is and what she needs to do while Grace does not even realize how important he is

He does not know the weight he carries, the power he holds, the monumental gravity of everything he has done (pre-space kidnapping)

She is all too aware of herself, of what lengths she must go to, of exactly how grave her situation is, she knows the consequences of potential failure and that has killed all qualms she may have had

"You don't bother me"

Going feral methinks, Stratt herself says camaraderie doesn't suit her, but Grace doesn't bother her

SHE LOVED HIM IN WHATEVER WAY SHE COULD, BUT SHE LOVED THE WORLD MORE AND SHE REGRETS THAT IT WAS HIM BUT NOT THAT SHE DID IT

Grace ends up in a place he likes at the end of the story, he's happy, he's safe, he loves the people around him, and it's an obviously better ending than he initially expected to get when he woke up on the Hail Mary, but that doesn't erase everything he lost

It doesn't change that he had a life stolen from him, that he was, in a very real way, murdered when Stratt put him on the Hail Mary

I cannot remember who said it, but they were on the money when they said Ryland died on earth and Grace was born on the Hail Mary

There have been several people in my life recently who have told me they do not believe in my lived experience as an aroace person. They've said I'll "meet the right person" and my mind will change about being happy and fulfilled with close platonic relationships.

I'm sure this isn't a unique experience for many aroace people, but the sheer audacity and disrespect of the people who said these things to my face has me fuming.

Even if you genuinely do not believe a person can be aroace, you have no fucking right to tell them they're wrong about their own lived experience. You cannot know what a person feels, and you cannot presume you know more about them than they know about themselves.

Being presumptuous enough to assume you have the authority to decide whether or not a person will or will not enter a romantic or sexual relationship at any point in their life is disrespectful, arrogant, disingenuous, disgustingly rude, and an all around asshole move.

And maybe one day I'll meet someone that I'll want to start a romantic or sexual relationship with. That DOES NOT invalidate my feelings towards the idea right now.

There is no such thing as a truly static identity, humans are ever changing and if someone goes from identifying as aroace to participating in a romantic or sexual relationship, that's no one's business but their own.

I mean, he was slammed (tackled) into the hull (ground) on his stomach by a large piece of equipment (several people) in an extremely high stress situation

He didn't want to be involved with the Petrova taskforce at the beginning, straight up avoided it and got kidnapped to the lab, and then he didn't have to push to be given the three astrophage Stratt left with him

People have been saying the red string of fate (the Petrova line) tied Grace and Rocky together, but that fucking line of fate was a noose around his neck from the moment Irina Petrova discovered it

Stratt chose him because he had unpopular opinions, so it was always going to be him that saw the astrophage first, and then he was always going to choose to demand the astropage from Stratt to keep studying for the sake of his students, and he was always going to do his best and become the worlds expert on astrophage, he was always going to keep pursuing the science of it, learning more and more and more and that was always going to be the reason he was sent

Stratt was lucky he agreed to help with the astrophage when she found him in his classroom

She was lucky he wasn't killed in the explosion with Dubois and Shapiro

She was lucky he was (physically) fit for the mission

And Rocky was so, so fucking lucky that he found Grace in the Tau Ceti system