Fandom deplores a vacuum

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who are not punished by the narrative by the end of the story.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who win.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who make evil look fun and cool.

😈 You are allowed to make your fun, cool evil character the protagonist.

😈 You are allowed to glorify, romanticize and eroticize evil characters and villainous acts.

Me the second half of the backrooms:

I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They've shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.

I get why people keep saying this (and other versions of it like "Use Adobe alternatives" and "Use Google product alternatives."). But here's the problem: I do not create in isolation. Even my own 100% personal projects are getting sent to other people whether it's editors or printers or beta readers and unless every single person in that train is using the same products, things can get wonky.

Libre Office and Word handle formatting differently on the back end, which can completely break documents if you move them back and forth between the two. So if I write in Libre Office but my beta readers are still using Word, when I send them a manuscript for review there's a good chance things won't look right and my beta reader will not actually be reviewing what I sent them.

:| :| :|

They are, I am certain, intentionally programmed that way because the user is supposed to see “errors” coming up every time they write anything and conclude that they Need the AI. That they CAN’T write without the AI. “Look how many things it fixed — I made so many mistakes — I never would have caught all this without the AI.” So they keep using it, because otherwise all their documents will be full of “errors” that they or their human proofreaders all “missed”.

I do a live “fuck Grammarly” demo near the beginning of each semester, where I give it a paragraph from a published work and point out all the mistakes it claims are there, very few if any of which are genuine mistakes of any kind. It also displays that “grammarly score”, which tends to be aggressively low, especially if the text is at all interesting or original — “let’s see what it thinks of some of the stuff you were assigned in high school English as examples of Great Works… ooh, Edgar Allan Poe gets a C, he should learn how to write.”

And, of course, any time you tell it to rewrite something, it can’t come back with “this is already good actually, you don’t need a subscription to Grammarly at all” — if given a text that is already perfectly fine, it will just randomly swap out various words for synonyms. Because it always has to Do Something. If the program makes no changes, you might decide you don’t need it. But if you’re not a confident writer, if Grammarly tells you this synonym is “better”, you’re likely to believe it.

Here is my reasoning!

Rimmer is an abject coward who mostly avoids examining that particular feature of his personality except for when rule of funny calls for it. As the series develops, he slowly begins to understand his cowardice and he does several brave, selfless things - letting Nirvana go, becoming Ace, choosing to live for Lister in the film. Similarly, Grace is a coward who mostly avoids examining that particular feature of his personality. He wiggles out of doing thankless tasks, things that really genuinely require sacrifice on his part, pretty often. Yet in the end, when he finds a person he cares about, he makes a brave sacrifice for them and their people.

Basically, Rimmer has ambition but desperately avoids responsibility. I think this description also fits Grace.

But the big difference is that Rimmer's personality is openly, noticeably insufferable. He's rude, stuck-up, mean, selfish, and it's all on the surface. Meanwhile Grace, on the surface, is a very affable, laid-back, nerdy, goofy guy. If you've read the book you know that he can be insufferable in a particular white-male-academic way that unfortunately *might* just be Andy Weir's real personality bleeding through, but it's fairly well hidden within his internal narration, rather than his external interactions with people.

(Part of the reason that Strattland is such an interesting pairing is because Stratt simultaneously sees the weaselly, whiny side of him, and the potential for bravery and absolute reality of kindness within him. She wants him to live up to his potential, she wants him to be her second in command and take the reins of the project after she's been arrested ... but of course that doesn't happen, and never would have happened, because he'd've wiggled out of it. But I digress!)

Basically,

Rimmer = coward with ambition with negative charm.

Grace = coward with ambition with huge boost to charisma.