thought about Maddie for a second and wanted to hug someone. this woman had the worst first marriage possible with someone she once believed she loved and thought loved her back. she fought her way out of that and met her freedom. found a friend in the gentlest man, loved him and allowed him to love her in return, so much that she proposed marriage because it was worth celebrating. she had the most heartbreaking time as a child, swallowing her own grief and trying to makeup for her parents' grief to make sure her remaining brother would survive. would feel loved. then she had to stay away from him in the worst way possible, twice even, and chose to come back. chose to let him love her bigger than postcards, listen to her stories about the brother they both shared. her heartbreak in her parents became her distrust in herself and she had a beautiful baby girl who needed to be protected and cherished. of course she deserved only the good in life but what if Maddie wasn't seeing herself as good. fought an ocean, ran across states, all so she could find the good in her reflection again and hold her baby girl with the warmth that was always theirs. helped people as a nurse, watching lives saved and lost every day for years, and didn't want to be seen that way but she found newer ways to help. protected her team. protected herself. lost herself. found herself even more. there's a brilliance to her that holds the ship steady. there's a strength to her clarity to her that lowers the anchors to get off the grief's waves and walk home to hope. there's anger and joy and fatigue and beauty - all wrapped up in every day she chooses. and she's choosing to live. with it all, for it all, she chooses to live.
sciles season 5 breakup is soooo much it got me barking in 2025. neither of them are talking to the person in front of them! scott is talking to the person he thought he trusted most, the person who knew him better than his own mother when his life turned upside down and never quite righted itself again, the person who was there for him when he feared he may have killed someone, the person who scott's just been led to believe killed in cold blood and hid it from him, and suddenly the chilling of their dynamic can make sense, because if scott doesn't believe theo's explanation, what does that leave to explain the creeping distance between them? what's left? scott is talking to this person in an attempt to give him the benefit of the doubt despite fearing he already knows all he needs to; which is that stiles didn't trust him with this, which means he either doesn't trust scott anymore, what did scott do to make stiles not trust him anymore, or it must have been Bad, or both. it means scott's one safe place to land in this world where violence has become normalized, even and often from friendly faces, even his own father, is no longer the same safe place it had remained throughout all of it, through the worst moments of his life and before, he always had stiles. even when his mom choked on what he'd become, stiles didn't. and now stiles either doesn't trust him anymore or isn't safe anymore.
and stiles does the worst possible thing and defends the supposed violence out the gate! because he's talking to the person he's put on this pedestal, this person who he's watched up close grow from his best friend to a werewolf that could kill him in his sleep to the guy who's saved not only his life but so many others, including the most important person in his life; his dad, over and over again, he's seen scott do the impossible, and then some; even the things they grew up not knowing existed now bend for scott mccall, who no longer has asthma, who's good at lacrosse, who can get shot and stabbed and walk it off while stiles can barely keep up, and the one thing stiles has never seen him do is kill someone. stiles, who checked himself into eichen because he was afraid the thing under his skin would kill someone, and then it did, right in scott's arms, when stiles knows scott had his own version of the same thing, watched him struggle with it, watched him hurt himself just to stop and still never succumbed. true alpha scott mccall. even the laws of nature and unnature know how good he is. stiles watched the same world that tried to eat his best friend whole bow before him, and he watched people who never knew scott before they knew the werewolf look at him like he was their savior, and he didn't mean to start seeing him that way too and he doesn't know when he started to, but he did. he does, and he thinks there's no way, No Way someone like that sticks with someone who looked at a teenager turned killer in their death throes and thought about twisting the knife, self defense or no.
both of them are primed to face the worst versions of the situation and what that means for them going forward; the versions this new world has threatened to warp them into despite knowing each other before they entered it. that world swallowed them down so far they don't see each other anymore! they're ready and waiting to have their worst fears confirmed and in that fear they do the exact things to confirm it to each other!
what's more is that scott forgives countless people who've killed in cold blood and otherwise throughout the show. he has allies who've killed people when they didn't have to, when they did, allies who'd killed werewolves whether they needed to or not. hell, he allies his pack with theo a season later, the guy who fucking killed him. stiles has no reason to think scott would suddenly kick him to the curb for something like this other than projecting his own feelings of condemnation onto the pinnacle of morality in his life. the issue isn't the violence, it's the idea of stiles perpetrating it. scott has plenty of people in his life he's overlooked violence for, including his very own father, he just never thought stiles would be one of them. could be. and neither did stiles! and that shift in their dynamic scares them so much they're already mourning the loss when it's not even gone, just different. changed, like everything else in their godawful lives. they were the only thing left that hadn't, and in fearing for this loss they only doomed themselves to losing more.
i don’t think we talk about the way frank utilizes costume, and specifically uniforms, enough. white pants and shirts with sharpied ø’s, the death spells striped sweaters, white standard low wage “salaryman” looks with black ties, the boiler suits, the scrubs, the hospital gown. that frank has always emphasized that he liked “bands that look like a band,” that he stated the jumpsuits were a kind of mindset, that they wore them to understand themselves as technicians, that they would go to work and work on their craft, it was a type of dedication to their artistry. that frank tends to lean towards blue collar workers, towards the unglamorous reality of everyday healthcare workers, towards the unglamorous reality of being one of their patients. that when frank wears white, there’s nothing to hide. all the dirt, all the filth, all the sweat, all the blood, his vulnerability will always be visible, apparent. i think there’s something so important there in his solo work, not only with the content of his music, but that he spent so long dressed in black, dressed in red, in colors that absorb all the filth because they needed to be bulletproof. but that frank chose white as a common thread amongst his solo work, that he would force us to confront all of it there on that canvas, all the blood in joyriding, all the confetti and cake and glitter in great party, all the filth from on stage, all the sweat and dedication, that in a way he made himself a canvas for all that passion and all the scuffs along the way.
I love when the music feels like it is hitting me with hammers
i just need to grow my hair out -> i just need to cut my hair -> i just need to grow my hair out -> j just need to cut my hair
stomach hurts from hunger. stomach hurts from eating. what the hell do yuou want from me you stupid fucking organ
anyone else relate
Awhile ago @ouidamforeman made this post:
This shot through my brain like a chain of firecrackers, so, without derailing the original post, I have some THOUGHTS to add about why this concept is not only hilarious (because it is), but also...
It. It kind of fucks. Severely.
And in a delightfully Pratchett-y way, I'd dare to suggest.
I'll explain:
As inferred above, both Crowley AND Aziraphale have canonical Biblical counterparts. Not by name, no, but by function.
Crowley, of course, is the serpent of Eden.
(note on the serpent of Eden: In Genesis 3:1-15, at least, the serpent is not identified as anything other than a serpent, albeit one that can talk. Later, it will be variously interpreted as a traitorous agent of Hell, as a demon, as a guise of Satan himself, etc. In Good Omens --as a slinky ginger who walks funny)
Lesser known, at least so far as I can tell, is the flaming sword. It, too, appears in Genesis 3, in the very last line:
"So he drove out the man; and placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." --Genesis 3:24, KJV
Thanks to translation ambiguity, there is some debate concerning the nature of the flaming sword --is it a divine weapon given unto one of the Cherubim (if so, why only one)? Or is it an independent entity, which takes the form of a sword (as other angelic beings take the form of wheels and such)? For our purposes, I don't think the distinction matters. The guard at the gate of Eden, whether an angel wielding the sword or an angel who IS the sword, is Aziraphale.
(note on the flaming sword: in some traditions --Eastern Orthodox, for example-- it is held that upon Christ's death and resurrection, the flaming sword gave up it's post and vanished from Eden for good. By these sensibilities, the removal of the sword signifies the redemption and salvation of man.
...Put a pin in that. We're coming back to it.)
So, we have our pair. The Serpent and the Sword, introduced at the beginning and the end (ha) of the very same chapter of Genesis.
But here's the important bit, the bit that's not immediately obvious, the bit that nonetheless encapsulates one of the central themes, if not THE central theme, of Good Omens:
The Sword was never intended to guard Eden while Adam and Eve were still in it.
Do you understand?
The Sword's function was never to protect them. It doesn't even appear until after they've already fallen. No... it was to usher Adam and Eve from the garden, and then keep them out. It was a threat. It was a punishment.
The flaming sword was given to be used against them.
So. Again. We have our pair. The Serpent and the Sword: the inception and the consequence of original sin, personified. They are the one-two punch that launches mankind from paradise, after Hell lures it to destruction and Heaven condemns it for being destroyed. Which is to say that despite being, supposedly, hereditary enemies on two different sides of a celestial cold war, they are actually unified by one purpose, one pivotal role to play in the Divine Plan: completely fucking humanity over.
That's how it's supposed to go. It is written.
...But, in Good Omens, they're not just the Serpent and the Sword.
They're Crowley and Aziraphale.
(author begins to go insane from emotion under the cut)
In Good Omens, humanity is handed it's salvation (pin!) scarcely half an hour after losing it. Instead of looming over God's empty garden, the sword protects a very sad, very scared and very pregnant girl. And no, not because a blameless martyr suffered and died for the privilege, either.
It was just that she'd had such a bad day. And there were vicious animals out there. And Aziraphale worried she would be cold.
...I need to impress upon you how much this is NOT just a matter of being careless with company property. With this one act of kindness, Aziraphale is undermining the whole entire POINT of the expulsion from Eden. God Herself confronts him about it, and he lies. To God.
And the Serpent--
(Crowley, that is, who wonders what's so bad about knowing the difference between good and evil anyway; who thinks that maybe he did a GOOD thing when he tempted Eve with the apple; who objects that God is over-reacting to a first offense; who knows what it is to fall but not what it is to be comforted after the fact...)
--just goes ahead and falls in love with him about it.
As for Crowley --I barely need to explain him, right? People have been making the 'didn't the serpent actually do us a solid?' argument for centuries. But if I'm going to quote one of them, it may as well be the one Neil Gaiman wrote ficlet about:
"If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization." --Robert G. Ingersoll
The first to ask questions.
Even beyond flattering literary interpretation, we know that Crowley is, so often, discreetly running damage control on the machinations of Heaven and Hell. When he can get away with it. Occasionally, when he can't (1827).
And Aziraphale loves him for it, too. Loves him back.
And so this romance plays out over millennia, where they fall in love with each other but also the world, because of each other and because of the world. But it begins in Eden. Where, instead of acting as the first Earthly example of Divine/Diabolical collusion and callousness--
(other examples --the flood; the bet with Satan; the back channels; the exchange of Holy Water and Hellfire; and on and on...)
--they refuse. Without even necessarily knowing they're doing it, they just refuse. Refuse to trivialize human life, and refuse to hate each other.
To write a story about the Serpent and the Sword falling in love is to write a story about transgression.
Not just in the sense that they are a demon and an angel, and it's ~forbidden. That's part of it, yeah, but the greater part of it is that they are THIS demon and angel, in particular. From The Real Bible's Book of Genesis, in the chapter where man falls.
It's the sort of thing you write and laugh. And then you look at it. And you think. And then you frown, and you sit up a little straighter. And you think.
And then you keep writing.
And what emerges hits you like a goddamn truck.
(...A lot of Pratchett reads that way. I believe Gaiman when he says Pratchett would have been happy with the romance, by the way. I really really do).
It's a story about transgression, about love as transgression. They break the rules by loving each other, by loving creation, and by rejecting the hatred and hypocrisy that would have triangulated them as a unified blow against humanity, before humanity had even really got started. And yeah, hell, it's a queer romance too, just to really drive the point home (oh, that!!! THAT!!!)
...I could spend a long time wildly gesturing at this and never be satisfied. Instead of watching me do that (I'll spare you), please look at this gif:
I love this shot so much.
Look at Eve and Crowley moving, at the same time in the same direction, towards their respective wielders of the flaming sword. Adam reaches out and takes her hand; Aziraphale reaches out and covers him with a wing.
You know what a shot like that establishes? Likeness. Commonality. Kinship.
"Our side" was never just Crowley and Aziraphale. Crowley says as much at the end of season 1 ("--all of us against all of them."). From the beginning, "our side" was Crowley, Aziraphale, and every single human being. Lately that's around 8 billion, but once upon a time it was just two other people. Another couple. The primeval mother and father.
But Adam and Eve die, eventually. Humanity grows without them. It's Crowley and Aziraphale who remain, and who protect it. Who...oversee it's upbringing.
Godfathers. Sort of.
ftwillz poems are so cool, frank’s honestly such a good writer. but in a unique way?? because it’s not pretty or full of metaphors like normal poetry. it’s so FRANK… both in the sense that it’s so him and so honest. he’s very straightforward and brutal and dirty in his writing, and that’s what makes it cut so deep
we DO grow old and happy. btw.