the most terrific fun

The Weight of The World

Stratt genuinely deserves so much more recognition than she gets. She's a scapegoat, she's a villain, she's a hero in all definitions of the word and I'm giving her all my money. Lets ignore how funky the Hail Mary looks. It's my first time drawing it.. 🫪

Petrova Line of Fate ft. The Ones Who Cannot Escape Its Call

Minor spoilers, but its main theme is Soulmates and the was people have many soulmates in many diffrent forms. How you can connect, and how you can fall away from people, but it doesn't diminish the connection, the relationship, you once had and how you can find connections with people through others.

It really changed the way I look at soulmate stories, its imagery really sits with me.

Its a soulmark au, but not one where all soulmarks are nessisarily perfect matches, but rather how you can find similarities in the mark that adorns your skin, with the soulmarks of a hundred different people- in their one-hundred different marks- whether its similar placement on the body, or the shape, or size or color, if you just go looking, if you just reach out.

In that same way, I very much believe Eva and Ryland are Soulmates as much as Rocky and Ryland are, and that if they ever got the chance to meet, if they had soul marks to show, Eva and Rocky would find similarities in theirs own marks.

They are two side of the same coin as much as Eva and Ryland, in so many ways that I'm sure we've all seen, but my favorite is, like, Eva can sing. She sang in a chior, a group of people singing together in harmony. and Rocky's language is SONG, and his people can sing together to point they mind meld.

Ryland CLEARLY has perfect pitch if he can learn Eridanian in a few months, he could listen to the both of them singing and apreciate every note, but Eva and Rocky could have sang together, if they'd ever had the chance.

If things were different, she might have been braver and offered him the same security that he had given her without asking. One day perhaps, she promised herself quietly, one day there might be nothing that would make her say no to this.

Chapter 1: when I am weary, I think of you

The three migraines of Eva Stratt, leading to the end of the world.

But what is an end if not a new beginning?

The finale to the Pressure Points series.

~

Alright y'all :') here we go.

eva stratt + looking at ryland grace

bonus:

Many!! Which you may or may not agree with lol

It's a brutal line. Like yeah. Of course it is. I won't pretend it's not cruel and devastating. That's the point!! Stratt will say absolutely anything necessary to get Grace on the Hail Mary in that moment. If he'd had a partner and children and other 'traditional' attachments, she would have used that as motivation instead. That's the TLDR, my ramblings below will probably be kind of talking in circles

look I'm not going to take away from people who read that in a more malicious way and who connect it with their own experiences of having their life devalued because of a lack of traditional romantic and familial relationships. especially given the widespread aroace reading of Grace, I completely understand reading it that way and am genuinely happy for whatever comfort it brings people!!

that said, I do like to take it a step further and really like. see it through Stratt's eyes? she also has given up everything for this project. she also seemingly has no attachments outside of work. she also is sacrificing unfathomable amounts for this project and for the world. she doesn't have any family, she doesn't have any friends, she doesn't even have a dog. actually, she's being forced to kill the closest thing to a friend she has. everything she says to him she can easily hold up in a mirror to herself

I personally, seeing as I love the secret third thing between them, also really like the reading where they ARE friends and they do have something deeply strange and intimate between them and Grace really does feel betrayed by this choice. It's not just being asked to die by his boss, it's being asked to die by the person he's closest to, one of the only people he's allowed himself to be vulnerable to in who knows how long... and she's asking him to die. Not only asking him to die, but hitting him in all the places she knows will hurt him the most. It's awful. It's part of the tragedy.

I like to also read it as her doing whatever she can to put some distance between them. She says the cruelest thing she can think of (and, as I recall, goes back to calling him 'Dr. Grace' instead of just Grace in the book, even more distance) as a way of severing the tie between them. She does it for her sake, to try to make it easier to watch him go and know she's sent him to die, but I think in her own way, she also thinks she's helping him. Like maybe if the last thing she does is say these awful things and hurt him, it'll be easier for him to move past whatever they had and be okay on his own and maybe he'll even think that the problem is her and not him, because I think she really put in so. much. effort. into making him see that he's not fundamentally flawed or wrong or broken. and here she comes doing something that she KNOWS will make him feel like he's worthless (even though in her eyes!!!! he could not be worth more!!! he is the man capable of saving the planet!!! there is no one more important to her than him!! but she knows him and she knows how he'll hear it and she knows he'll interpret it as being unloved and expendable)