I don't know if it's the autism but I always end up surprised that ever since I'm an adult I have a hard limit on how much food I can fit in my stomach. What do you mean I can't eat unlimited food. Hashtag betrayal

Brennan’s NPC game is always on point but he’s done such a fantastic job with Lady Aranessa.

Somehow she’s perfectly balancing the idea of “fine lady of a noble house of Fairie” with “the woman that would fall in love with war hero and known troublemaker Thjazi Fang” AND “just lost her whole family to a Games of Thrones-esque horror show betrayal ”.

Like yes she’s polite and kind, but she also bit a ghoul to free herself after watching a young man be brutally murdered five feet from her. She’s willing to jump off a cliff if a Druid meeting goes bad, but still mourns the opportunity to sleep in a big fancy bed. She can summon flower petals at will and then rubs them under her arms.

I’m obsessed with her. Thjazi Fang you were a LUCKY man.

I think about this like once a day

At some point on the journey back to Erid, Rocky gets around to asking Grace exactly why he was so mesmerised by seeing the astrophage in the Petrova line.

Grace describes it as best he can, but all he can really manage to get across to Rocky is that he was surrounded by small floating lights.

Later on, Grace is talking about the stars and how important they've been to human cultures for millennia. “What do the stars look like, question?” Rocky wants to know.

Oh, y'know, they're a bunch of small floating lights.

There's a disco ball on the Hail Mary. Grace says it's there because it “makes me happy”. “How does it make Grace happy, question?” Rocky wants to know.

Oh, it creates the illusion that he's surrounded by small floating lights.

Rocky begins to do some research.

Glitter: a substance invented by humans to make things look like they're covered in small lights.

Human jewellery: mostly involves gemstones or polished metals, designed to reflect small lights.

Christmas lights. Candles. Lanterns. Fireworks. Glowsticks. Glow in the dark paint. Rocky is beginning to notice a pattern here, statement.

It takes Grace a fucking while after getting to Erid to notice that a lot of the gifts he's receiving from grateful Eridians are either a) sparkly, b) incredibly shiny, or c) fitted with lights.

While the last one is obviously a concession for his human light sense, he's confused about the former two. Are Eridian materials usually this shiny? Is there some quality about sparkly or highly polished surfaces that makes them sound better? Or is there something about Eridian geology/metallurgy that makes their materials like this?

He asks Rocky about it.

“Simple. I tell people humans like lots of small lights. Humans are easy to make happy.”

Grace kind of wants to protest that humans are much more complicated than that.

But honestly… it fucking works. Like yeah the polished gemstones, shiny metals and glittery rocks are beautiful. Yes those Christmas lights you put up around the house did markedly improve my mental health, Rocky. Thank you, I hate it.

Grace spends a lot of time trying not to think about whether his species' urge to explore the cosmos (that saved their planet and nearly killed him several times) is tied to the same instinct that made his students like glitter gel pens.

There is something to be said about how the refusal to engage with anti-transmasculinity theory goes beyond the erasure of transmascs.

When you say "masculinity is always rewarded in patriarchal society" you not only ignore the way malgendering is a tool used to harm transmascs, but you also ignore:

1. The hypernasculinization of black women in order to justify their brutalization
2. The hypermasculinization of black men in order to sexualize them and justify their brutalization
3. The brtualization of tomboys and butch cis lesbians for their gender non conformity
4. The brutalization of cis feminists throughout history for simply trying to gain rights that were seen as inherently masculine to have.
5. The brutalization of transfems through misgendering in order to justify their brutalization (i.e. calling them predatory men, weaponizing masculinity against them with or without that being their actual presentation)
6. The misgendering and erasure Gender non-conforming or masculine transfems, noth binary and non-binary
7. Intersex people that are coerced/medically altared into being assigned female who are marginalized when they present any sign of masculinity
8. Cis and intersex and WOC (especially black women) who's testosterone levels are used to justify their exclusion from their careers and passions in sports without an alternative place to go
9. The way masculinity in mentally disabled men, especially black disabled men and boys, intersects with how a lot of mental disabilities are labelled as agressive and dangerous, further justifying these men's brutalization (see: cops killing young black autistic boys in meltdown)

Masculinity is always rewarded in people that society doesn't want to brutalize. Masculinity is a tool to justify the brutalization of people society wants to keep suppressed. To say otherwise is just factually wrong.

And this is just one phrase used to dismiss anti-transmasculinity theory. There is a lot more to intersectionality that needs to be analyzed, not just for the benefit of transmascs, but for everyone.

Rocky: *tries to sneak back into the house early in the morning*

Adrian, turning around on a spinning chair to face the door: Rocky want tell Adrian where been all night question?

Rocky: Rocky…Rocky with Grace all night.

Grace, turning around on another spinning chair: Want to try again?

Rocky:

Rocky: Well 🎵🎶🎶.

So many people never learned to live with harmless discomfort at any point in their lives and holy fuck does it show

btw "you are allowed to hate your oppressor" is about Your Personal Feelings As An Individual. that you are allowed to have whatever feelings you have about your experience being oppressed, and the fact that rage and hatred can be a powerful motivator to break away from the status quo and engage in revolutionary action against oppression, does not mean that no one is allowed to criticize an approach to liberation that is centered on rage and hatred given the very well recorded downsides to such an approach.

like "well POC are allowed to hate white people so women are allowed to hate men!" yeah and also, Malcom X himself realized he was wrong to disregard allyship with white people because coalition building between working class people of different races was actually quite important to overthrowing racial capitalism. plenty of feminists activists (particularly women of color, bisexuals, trans people, sex workers) have criticized feminism for separatism and gender essentialism and reluctance to form necessary coalitions across gender to meaningfully resist racist capitalist patriarchy.

none of this means You The Individual are not allowed to feel the emotion of hate in response of oppression, or that that emotion needs to be suppressed or stigmatized or shouldn't help motivate your resistance. but it's just naive and shortsighted to stop your revolutionary thought there.

Me: (watching Project Hail Mary) "Man, Grace and Stratt are really close. I kinda can't tell if I'm supposed to ship them or not. I wonder if they're this weirdly close in the book?"

Every shingle character in Book!Project Hail Mary: "So Grace, are you and Stratt fucking or not?"

Grace: (Balancing Stratt's 6 coffees in one hand and signing off on all her important documents with the other) "I'M JUST HER LEAD SCIENTIST, WHY DO YOU PEOPLE KEEP ASSUMING IT'S SOMETHING WEIRD?!"

my favorite adrian headcanon that's not sad: they love the eridian equivalent of those cheesy airport romance novels. except once rocky comes back and the general populace gets wind of the adrian/rocky love story, the penelope-esque lover-that-waited character is EVERYWHERE. downright inescapable. and adrian is just sitting there fucking fuming. the fun stories are all gone and now they're stuck with shitty retelling after shitty retelling of the past 60-70 years of their own fucking LIFE and rocky is absolutely laughing his ass off at his poor mate's plight.