and can be.

fantasy readers: this is fucking awesome. this rocks. youre so good at this man

nonwhite fantasy authors: so the knight is a black woman, and there are no orcs,

"immortality sucks because you forget who you are" we always forget who we are. do you remember who you were at four years of age? who you were at fourteen? "who i am" is a shadow cast on the wall.

hyper beam

anon are you joking, iron lung is based off a video game, therefore it falls within my domain of Arc Has Approximate Knowledge Of All Video Games. of course I know about bloodymary.

I still haven't watched Iron Lung (I KNOW, i will soon, i am just really waiting for student loans to be be dispersed) but I have a friend who I won't name who is baffled by it and I believe lowkey annoyed by it.

Which makes this a lil awkward bc I feel like I absolutely understand it and why it's a thing, and am profounded amused by the phenomenon.

Like, off the dome, the similarities:

Both are stories about the same basic thing: something is endangering the future of the galaxy at large, a concrete something that is such a profound existential threat to the future of humanity, a powerful authority has decided that sending the protagonist on a suicide mission in the hopes of maybe finding information that can challenge the existential threat is morally and ethically justifiable. Both protagonists encounter an important alien and are doomed to never return to the place they came from, which may arguably be a happier ending for the protagonist than actual return.

Both are adaptations of another piece of media that provides further clarity and Lore on the universe that people may utilize or ignore as needed.

While one is a very small indie movie with a shoestring budget and the other is The Summer Blockbuster of 2026, both are the passion project of the lead actor/executive producer. There is emphasis on creating a tactile feeling of reality rather than relying on CGI. Both films built obscenely technical rigs in the name of accomplishing specific sequences as practically as possible.

Setting As Character, both movies put tremendous effort into ensuring the primary location of the story feels as much like a real place as possible (mostly by building them as real places).

grace's slutty little glasses are the equivalent of that BDSM tiddy top that simon wears. these things rhyme.

Now, that's a lot about the crossover appeal. Why i think it's become a wellspring of fan creativity?

PHM ends at the perfect moment to dovetail into Iron Lung. It almost feels like a sequel adventure. Grace and Rocky have reunited and are soulmates and totally Weird about each other in a way that we've gotten to see in dazzling detail. Hurling a traumatized angrysadman from an arguably even worse apocalypse at them feels like a fun sequel. How will Rocky handle meeting another human who is Quite Different from his human? I kinda want to know!

Erid becoming an old dogs shelter for humans who were essentially sentenced to death by their own people is inherently funny.

I don't yet know the details on how Iron Lung wraps up but I know the source material enough to guess it's probably a Rough ending involving (checks sources) a Fuckton Of Blood. For people who are attached to Simon, giving him a gentler epilogue where he's gonna be SO fucking confused about EVERYTHING but at least gets out of that blood ocean-- bitches love to take an ultra-traumatized guy and put them in a new mason jar and shake it a lot. We are all bitches.

Taking the Cosmic Horror elements of Iron Lung and introducing them to the Cosmic Hope elements of PHM is rife with potential.