ThatDamQueer

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.

The owner of this particular plantation had it built by slaves for 3 years. Every brick was handmade. Over 120,000 bricks on 2,000+ acres of land (this place was huge.) The clay used for the bricks came from the Mississippi River. The majority of the slaves are buried under the Levees and water. Some are buried with their Masters. Not allowed to live with them but could be dead with them.

Before you enter the house, there’s a list of slaves who lived here including their age and how much they were purchased for. 124 total. Some slaves were worth as little as $25. As young as 5 years old.

On this particular plantation, the owner was big on punishment…he used noise making neck restraints. Imagine three 4lb balls around your neck with bells inside. Children were restrained by ankle locks that connected between their ankles.

This was a sugar cane plantation, one the worst practices to involve slaves because of its danger. A lot of slaves were decapitated, amputees and killed from the fields and machinery. A lot of kids lost their lives creating sugar. Speaking of children, a child stood in the living room and operated the fan with a string while guests ate dinner. As young as 3 years old.

Here’s what shook me even further: Before the Civil War, a lot of slave owners were going in debt and could not afford their properties and were not producing enough cotton and sugar to maintain their lifestyles. Slaves were used as HUMAN CREDIT CARDS. Slaves were a guaranteed line of credit. You could get HALF of your property’s value depending on how many healthy and able slaves you owned.

My people were human credit cards and lines of credit to BANKS. We were property. We were labeled as equipment and nothing more.

There is no such thing as a good slave owner. They owned my PEOPLE and used them as checks and balances. This cycle continues with prison and brutality. I do not want to hear shit about “Why can only Black people say this or that?” I don’t want to hear shit about “we’re all human.”

SOME of the enslaved names, ages, race and purchase price.

The living room.

Interior.

The dining room. That piece hanging above the table is ORIGINAL to the house. That’s the fan that a slave as young as 3 years old had to operate manually with a string.

The view from the balcony in the main hallway. This is how they looked over the slaves while they worked in the yard.

*sigh* Names of the enslaved that occupied the shacks. Children included. Their names are written inside one of the shacks. I’m not sure if there are other names inside other shacks because I could only handle 2. After I saw the punishment equipment, I left.

Slave Shacks. These are NOT the original shacks. These were built to imitate them.

Slaves for Sale Ads.

The landscape of Slavery throughout the United States in 1860. JUST 1860. Let that sink in.

Note: The last time the home was OWNED by a Louisiana citizen was 1972. This is her original bedroom, her lipstick is STILL on the dresser. This is why the house has been updated since slavery times because it was occupied up until 1972. Regardless, this used to be where house slaves slept.

My dad was sat next to me and his eyes got big as saucers. He was so quiet when he replied solemnly, "I didn't even think about that... jesus christ, that's dark..." and I had to tell him I had friends who were probably gonna end up in that situation with their conservative parents. He was so removed from the notion of using that device for cruelty that he didn't even CONSIDER it! That's how easily people can be bought in by inventions/legislation advertised under the guise of "keeping the kids safe". My own father, who is a beautiful and gentle man with a good head on his shoulders, was ready to advocate for a tracking device, because it was sold as a device to "protect children".

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.