As hard and as ruthless as a rose petal

* well then.

* ain't nothing you can do about it.

* well how about that then.

* you brought that upon yourself dude.

* it is what it is.

* that was completely to be expected.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

Is and continues to be my favorite dance video. Dude’s so unexpectedly fluid.

> High score! What happened? Did i break it?

> You don’t see too many YouTube videos from 2005..

Like, he felt like he put too much work in to just leave/quit, but at the same time, that's what he really wanted to do. And Grace is clearly someone who hates making decisions and choices for himself. He just wants someone to tell him what to do -- or in this case, that he's not allowed to do it anymore. So he got a postdoc but just started sort of quiet-quitting the whole thing, and everyone was really frustrated with him and his performance already. So when some controversy came along at the conference? It was a neat and tidy excuse to get rid of him.

Ohh interesting! And something I can also see. The whole thing makes a lot more sense—and also feels a lot more resonant to his character and his emotional arc—if he is kind of lying to himself about what actually went down and what everybody else thinks about him.

@bicherrim wrote something along somewhat similar lines in the comments of the post too:

I don’t remember where I read it, but I like the concept that Grace wasn’t actually ousted/blackballed from academia at all, it just feels better to him to frame it that way – in reality, he couldn’t handle the criticism his paper received, lost his shit, and then afterwards was so embarrassed that he dropped out of the field entirely so he wouldn’t have to face anyone about it.

And both of these options feel way more believable—that “I was kicked out because they couldn’t handle my UNCONVENTIONAL IDEAS” is an ego-soothing narrative he built up around what happened to avoid acknowledging that leaving was his choice. Ending up as a middle school science teacher was clearly making him much happier than academia was—is it because this is something that feels more genuinely fulfilling and meaningful than the relentless pressure cooker gristmill that is academia? Is it because children can never meaningfully be peers and can’t criticize him, and among 13-year-olds he’ll always be unquestionably the smartest person in the room? Little of column A, little of column B, probably. And he can do that while also clinging to this fantasy of being Astrobiology’s Alfred Wegener and Someday Everyone Will See I Was Right And They Were So Unfair To Me, and crucial to the fantasy is that it’s incumbent on everyone else to change their minds about him, not him to do anything.

And I like how the movie does allude to this interpretation that there’s some willful mental rewriting of what actually happened on Grace’s part:

STRATT: Do you stand by what you wrote?

GRACE: I was fired for standing by what I wrote.

STRATT: You were fired for calling the leading scholar in your field a “staggering waste of carbon” at the UNESCO conference in Denmark.

GRACE: You… you heard about that, huh?

Stratt like. You weren’t disliked for your ideas, idiot, you were disliked for your behavior. The problem wasn’t that you defended an unpopular idea, the problem was getting assholish and unprofessional about it. Luckily for you the world is ending and I don’t have the time to worry about your attitude!

canon is what happens in the text. e.g. merlin tries to poison morgana

a headcanon is a fact that you have personally made up as an elaboration of canon. it is your invention. e.g. i think morgana and gwen had a teenage lesbian situationship before the events of canon. or, i think modern morgana would love evanesence.

an interpretation is how one reads the existing text. it is not an invented fact nor is it a headcanon, it is a reading. e.g. i think merlin tries to poison morgana out of misplaced self-hatred. or, i think that one line was delivered with suppressed malice and shows a nuanced relationship.

fanon is the general fandom’s accepted headcanons and interpretations that elaborate or recontextualize canon. e.g. merlin is a badass waif and morgana is a bitch.

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