#melanization beam

I saw ur Black Ryland Grace headcanons and art on my dash again and I am Excitedly Observing. It adds so much depth to him 🤌 is there any additional detail or fun fact or tangent abt ur headcanon that u would like to share?

absolutely!! the best thing abt the Afrophage tag is it gives me the chance to talk abt the rest of the cast. rest in knowing i will get all of them with my melanin beam eventually. today we’re talking about Eva Stratt!

because the world’s scapegoat couldn’t be anyone but a woman. this much is obvious and it’s critical to her character that she is. but ☝🏾what if she was also a Black woman? the world on a Black woman’s shoulders, because everyone knows when you’re in trouble you find a Black woman to fix it. doesn’t matter how it impacts her or what she has to lose.

and she has so much more to lose. she faces the world’s abuse. she makes the decisions no one else could. she fixes it, and when it’s all over, she’ll bear the punishment and the blame. and it would be so easy to villainize the Black woman the world put up to bear their sins. it happens every day, all over the world.

but Stratt does it anyway, she steps up because she’s a historian. she knows what will happen, knows how the world will turn on itself, she knows who will be the most expendable and the first to die. (she knows what will happen to her in the end.)

“but she’s Dutch and/or German,” i anticipate someone saying. because lord knows they love to.

i’m a big fan of @sharonz-arty-corner03 ’s Aruban Stratt headcanon for this very reason! she very easily could be both Black and her canon nationality.

and i think this would add a whole lot to her relationship with Afrophage!Grace, especially if Stratt is dark-skinned. because unlike her, he’s not going to face the world’s torment. he’s not going to be held responsible. he gets to be the presentable, palatable face of the project and she has to be the hardass and the bitch who’s going to actually get things done. and no matter what, in the end it’s supposed to kill them both. Stratt is supposed to go to prison forever, Grace is supposed to die in space. there’s no real way to game the system, no real way to be Black well enough to dodge the oppression. you can only break out and find your own path forward.