CAPTAIN!!!! HIT HIM WITH THE MELANIN BEAM!!!!!!!

ohoho why yes i do!!! @cheshirepirouette and i have been ILL abt grace and carl in a Black grace context because it really adds so much…

poor carl absolutely got done dirty re: complicit in state violence BUT it also makes him a deeply compelling character in the same way as stratt to ME. i saw a really good post about it the other day. bc like stratt, carl has a reason for the violence he takes part in. the sun’s dying. they’re dying. i think specifically through a Blackness lens you could do a lot with the way disasters disproportionately impact Black people, the way in so many cases our health and our lives and our bodies are seen as expendable. (hurricane relief. AI data centers. drinkable water. over and over and over.) when the sun’s dimming starts causing deaths, some people will have priority and some people won’t. maybe part of what carl is fighting for is a fair chance for more of his community to survive.

and so he loves grace, they’re silly together, they brainstorm together, they’re friends. there’s an understanding between them. but stratt doesn’t think he’s worth more than the world, and carl doesn’t think he’s worth more than their whole community. because the sun’s dying, and they’re dying.

as for poor dubois we barely get to know him… which really makes a case for the expendability of Black bodies, one replaced by another without time to even mourn. dubois is there for a job but we never really get to see him outside of it (except for a book scene about his sex life. yes, really.) and then he never even gets to do it. i like the idea of grace feeling both relieved and intimidated by him. bc grace doesn’t have to fill the niche of “the smart Black,” but since he doesn’t, how much time does he have before someone decides he’s no longer needed? before he’s extra baggage?

@mold-girl

Grace blinked up at the girl in front of her.

Tenenbaum being at the center of the ADAM project means that she knows all the gory details of how gatherers/protectors are made and what the process does to a person’s body. At the same time though, the horror of what she’s done by allowing her research into the hands of people like Ryan, Fontaine, and Lamb (as well as her own self-loathing for being the source of all that suffering) don’t fully dawn on her until it’s too late to do much besides mitigate the damage already done. And then in Bioshock 2, when she returns to Rapture hoping to develop a cure for ADAM sickness and rescue the little sisters from Lamb, there’s a whole decade of new research she has only limited knowledge of. She needs the thinker’s computational abilities to aid her research because as intelligent as she is, solving this problem (of her own invention) wouldn’t be possible for her to do alone before she died. She knows so much and yet due to the nature of the society she lived in and the miracle she discovered, there will always be something new she doesn’t know.

And then there’s Grace. She had no part to play in creating the Little Sisters or Big Daddies, so she doesn’t fully know why their existence is such a tragedy, but if her misguided hatred of Delta for Eleanor becoming a little sister is anything to go off of, she knows something. She knows on some level how wrong it is, but because of her faith in Lamb she’s still willing to accept that the little sisters wandering around rapture are children of the family. That even if he turns them human again, subject delta is stealing these girls from their rightful family, and she remains ignorant of the truth until it quite literally comes looking for her. If she lives, she survives with the knowledge that Lamb was wrong about this, so what else might she be wrong about? And her last words in canon are her saying she needs answers from Lamb about what the truth really is. Grace doesn’t know the exact science of how ADAM works, but somewhere deep in her heart she knows more of the awful truth than Lamb wants her to know, and that knowledge is what drives a wedge between her and the family