I recently watched Project Hail Mary and it has completely revived my love of Sci-fi which I found myself falling out of love with previously.

For context, I’ve had various obsessions to do with sci-fi throughout the years. My biggest was the Portal video game series, something I couldn’t stop thinking about when I was 12/13. I can’t express just how much I loved these games. I can still remember all of the puzzle solutions from the first game, including multiple ways to skip entire test chambers, all via muscle memory. There’s a folder in the art app i’ve been using since I was around 12 entirely full of portal fan art which I used to post on my instagram (no, you won’t be able to find it, my account was private and I deleted it all) which I still look back on fondly to this day and sometimes redraw with my improved art skills. I watched all of the theory and gameplay videos I could get my hands on, played as many of the mods as I could find (don’t worry, I’ll get back to that) and convinced my dad to buy me fan-made merch off of etsy. Big shoutout to those portal stickers I bought that the artist stopped selling, you were literally my world.

I couldn’t get enough of portal to the point I also became obsessed with the various mods which created more stories based off of the source material. The biggest was Portal Stories: Mel, which focused on Olympic athlete Mel coming in for testing in the early 50s and waking up in the distant future due to the sleep pod she was put in malfunctioning. She meets personality core Virgil who helps her escape.

Virgil. I LOVED Virgil.

Much like my previous obsession with Wheatley, Virgil became what basically all of my thoughts surrounded for a month. He was all I drew and I desperately wanted to base my personality around him. Every time anybody mentioned a word from a quote of his that I’d internalised I had to fight not to make a reference to some unsuspecting person who had no idea what I was talking about. Everything to do with him and with portal as a whole made me so happy every time I thought about it, so much that it made me genuinely sad to stop thinking about it.

But in comparison to Half-Life VR but the AI Is Self-Aware (which I will be abbreviating to HLVRAI) that was nothing. How do I even begin on the chokehold Gordon Freeman (Feetman) and Benr(e)y had on me? For context, HLVRAI was a comedy machinima made during lockdown by WayneRadioTV and his group of friends, going through the Half-Life maps in G-Mod and creating a whole new story out of it. And out of it came Benry. Benry was my everything for months. He was this dickhead, nerdy alien from Xen posing as Barney Calhoun and crushing on Gordon Freeman. I loved him so much I made an entire OC who was just him in a shapeshifter body. My obsession with HLVRAI and Portal as a whole inspired the original iteration of Tales From the Cyberpunk Dystopia which was a story which contained all of my tween and early teen angst and acted as a big coping mechanism for years.

However, after my interest in HLVRAI, my interest in specifically Sci-Fi media began to fade. My interest in evil science facilities never faded, but my focus shifted much more to horror and fantasy. Hermitcraft, Generation Loss, QSMP, Yaelokre and Lacey’s Flash Games have been my biggest interests in the years since my Portal and HLVRAI phases ended. I don’t really know why this shift happened, but I think part of it was me wanting to indulge my more negative emotions more. A lot of my obsessions with media in my tweens and early teens were for escapism, and while multiple of my more recent interests did follow this trend the darker, more horror-adjacent interests were a way for me to actually look at why and in what ways I was unhappy.

But my love of fun, feel-good Sci-Fi stories never really went away. I knew before I even touched Project Hail Mary that I’d love it. I love nerdy, depressed scientists and cute aliens and life-or-death stakes which push people closer together. I feel like I’m right back where I was when I was 13, trying to base my entire personality off of a fictional character and reading fanfiction and interacting with every piece of media I can possibly connect back to this franchise in any way. I’m planning on how I can add references to Ryland Grace to my clothing and making OC’s stealing his personality and putting it into a new body with new life-or-death circumstances. I’m figuring out if I can make a replica Rocky and looking into buying patches to sew onto my favourite jacket. I didn’t think I was still capable of this level of love for a franchise. Don’t get me wrong, I never stopped loving media, but the amount of space in my brain this movie is taking up isn’t something I’ve experienced in a while now. My love of the stars has been fully revived and, even if it’s temporary, it will fuel at least a month's worth of my happiness.

In conclusion: Ryland Grace is me and I am him, Rocky is love Rocky is life and Rocky Grace save stars.