Optimisticsouldeer - Untitled

Small town culture is knowing that there are Old Folks with strange nicknames but never knowing the stories behind them.

Of course, I made the mistake of asking why everyone calls this one guy Brickaday and it turns out that he worked at a brickyard for 40 years, stealing exactly one brick every day and making no particular efforts to conceal the theft. Nobody thought anything of it until years later he was discovered to have built three houses.

His boss is said to have shrugged and made some remarks about the importance of coming up with a plan and sticking to it.

I‘m trying to arrange my face into an appropriate approximation of silent bafflement and failing miserably.

a collection

i also wanna yell about gwendoline christie’s performance as lucifer because she’s just astonishingly good. so many people approach the role emphasizing the fallen aspect of the fallen angel, and she goes out of her way to emphasize that she’s a fallen angel. the way she treats dream with the utmost hospitality coated in poison, and fucks him over as much as she can with the same hollow pleasant smile on her face. the way she can’t outdo dream’s “I am hope” because to kill hope would be to kill her own hopes of one day going home. the way she literally gasps with tears in her eyes when dream calls her on that. and when the mask finally drops, and she tells him in no uncertain terms that one day, Hell will destroy him, it’s fucking personal and that she’ll be holding the knife herself. i can’t, honestly. give her all the awards.

A lot of hardline pro-lifers really do believe their bullshit. They don’t believe a pregnant woman should want an abortion, even if the pregnancy will kill her, because they deeply believe a mother should be willing to die for their child, and they see the pregnancy as a child. That’s both a sign of how little they value women, but it’s also partly how heavily they buy into the dehumanizing mythology of The Mother.

Yes, there is a lot of horrible misogyny that goes into the prolife movement, and that can’t be understated. They believe that pregnancy is a punishment for sex, the consequence they just need to suck up and deal with.

But that’s not enough! They need to be a mother and therefore a martyr. They want her to be redeemed through sacrifice, to die trying, no matter how incompatible with life the pregnancy is.

And they want her to die with a bloody smile—and even better, as the newborn miraculously survives, a gift from God and The Mother, both of whom knew better than the arrogant, Godless, secular Doctor.

There is no logical debate or good enough reason that will get through to someone whose that hardline pro-life because they see a woman wanting to live instead of dying a martyr as a moral failing, as a sin.

Do it for the meme. http://blinkingguy.com

So, I feel like I’m losing my mind. I keep seeing metas about how Aziraphale wants Crowley to return to Heaven and be an angel again because he wants them to be on the same side/be good/change/etc., etc., etc. but I don’t see that at all. I actually see it as the very opposite.

Aziraphale loves Crowley just as he is. But there’s something more. Something huge.

Aziraphale loves Crowley and because he is an angel who is stuck in seeing things as black and white, he constantly praises Crowley for being nice. For being good. For being kind.

Aziraphale has watched Crowley on and off for 6,000 years. He watched him thwart the plans of Heaven and Hell because it was unjust. He spared the lives of innocents. He did small things that made Aziraphale happy just because (like making Hamlet successful and saving valuable books). And because Aziraphale sees things in black and white, he sees all the things Crowley has done as nice, as good, as kind.

Crowley vehemently attests he’s not nice or good or kind.

He’s not exactly wrong nor is he lying when he says this. When Crowley spares goats during a cruel bet over a righteous man and swallowing laudanum to prevent a suicide, when he prevents Armageddon by working with Aziraphale and stopping the Anti-Christ from being the Anti-Christ, he’s not doing the nice/good/kind thing.

He’s doing the right thing.

Crowley chooses to do the right thing without hesitation. He is better than all of Heaven and Hell who have callous and dispassionate view of all existence because he questions, because he makes choices. Crowley sees the world for all its messiness and he sees himself. He sees a place where he fits in. He sees the blurred edges.

And Aziraphale sees that, even if seeing the blurred edges is hard for him.

But here’s the thing that Aziraphale can’t voice.

It’s the reason why he told Crowley about being allowed to return to Heaven and become an angel again. He doesn’t want Crowley to change. He doesn’t think Crowley is flawed. Or not enough.

It’s something that is so monumental that it cannot be put into words. Because to put it into words would be more than blasphemy. It’s down right unthinkable for anyone in Heaven, Hell, or Earth to say what Aziraphale knows deep in his soul.

God was wrong to cast out Crowley.

Aziraphale believes Crowley can/should return to Heaven because he knows that Crowley should never have fallen in the first place. He wants him to be forgiven because when Crowley fell it was unjust. Aziraphale is trying to correct a mistake. He’s trying to do the right thing.

Yes, Crowley would never accept returning to Heaven. And Aziraphale was wrong to even suggest it (although that conversation is another can of worms to unpack).

Aziraphale loves Crowley. He loves him exactly as he is. He doesn’t want him to change. Aziraphale knows that Crowley the best of all of them. He wants to change Heaven because of it. Because God was wrong and Aziraphale knows it.

Aziraphale may have difficulty seeing beyond black and white, but when it comes to Crowley he sees everything crystal clear and in vivid color.

thinking about the time back when i was in middle school & we had a bomb threat at the school and after standing outside for a couple hours while the place was searched we got taken back inside around when it was my particular lunch period, and the school was like "we know you only have like 15 minutes left in the lunch period now because of that but we're not gonna give you any extra time lol we're getting back on schedule"

and the Entire block of middle schoolers in the span of like 5 minutes all quickly organized & agreed that we were NOT leaving until we had had our proper amount of lunch time and flat out all refused to get up when administrators kept trying to get us to because what were they gonna do? give like a hundred different students detention?

anyway after like 40 minutes we'd decided we'd been given our due and agreed to leave and go back to class & i think that display of collectivism & power of unity was what radicalized me

wishing everyone again a very stop misusing the term trauma bond