Not me figuring out a scene I won't write for like three months and getting emotional. I love this away team so much. I need to work but I just want to go home and write an away team falling in love
Except I don't really want them to fall in love, agency is involved through and through, they will love because they see the wonder in each other and the entity they meet, they will love because they choose to, and they'll make something beautiful with each other because they wanted nothing more than to do so.
Taking time to learn mycology is helping, but the cornerstone of my research has been on love, community, and mutual support and understanding. All About Love by bell hooks and Jessie Gender's video essay on The Stories Fascism Fears Most remain core inspirations in this work as much as any text on fungi.
And this isn't to say my studying fungi will lead to a particularly accurate or robust representation of fungi, this takes place in a universe with wacky silly science. But the POV character is an astromycologist so I gotta get in her mindset