So my family has a Gay Pirate Plate.
Stay with me.
We do not know how the hell the Gay Pirate Plate was first acquired. This being a point of contention is actually pretty plot-relevant; the saga of the Gay Pirate Plate began with my grandmother and her sister, who, for some ungodly reason, both BADLY wanted the Gay Pirate Plate and believed it to be rightfully theirs.
I should back up, firstly, to establish: The Gay Pirate Plate is the cheapest, tackiest, ugliest plate in existence.
It is in no way a collector’s item. It is physically impossible for it to complement anyone’s decor, because the colors in it are garish. It’s just a ceramic plate with a gay pirate painted on it, and the painting is, this cannot be emphasized enough, extremely bad.
(How do we know the pirate is gay if he’s just posing on a plate? Listen. Fully 100% to stereotype, but he is. He is gay. There’s an energy. That pirate is a flaming homosexual. That pirate has sex with men and does it frequently. That pirate is fucking gay, all right, he just is.)
Anyway. The point is that this is an extremely cheap and ugly plate with a poorly-executed painting of pirate on it who is like a nine on the Kinsey scale.
My grandmother and her sister fought a blood feud over this plate for their entire lives. It would be on the wall in my grandma’s house, and then her sister would visit, and then it would be gone. She’d visit her sister and the plate would be on the wall and her sister would pretend it had always been there. She would steal it back, hang it up, and, when her sister visited, pretend it had always been there. This continued for DECADES.
When the sister died, the Gay Pirate Plate lived triumphantly in my grandmother’s house. And then my grandmother died. And my aunt, who had lived with her and been her carer throughout her life, rightfully inherited their house.
We visit my aunt after the funeral and stay with her for a week or two.
Me, my sister, and our dad. Her brother.
The three of us look at each other. We don’t say anything. We studiously avoid making eye contact with the Gay Pirate Plate mounted proud and ugly on the wall. We notice one another studiously avoiding looking at it. We notice one another noticing. We say nothing. We come to a silent consensus. We pack up to leave. We get in the van. Our aunt comes out to say goodbye. I loudly announce I need to use the restroom before we leave. She obviously stays outside to continue talking to my dad.
I take down the Gay Pirate Plate, stuff it under my oversized sweatshirt, go outside, and get in the van. She happily waves goodbye as we drive off.
Two days later my dad gets a phone call that opens with hysterical laughter and “You FUCKING ASSHOLE did you seriously STEAL THE PLATE–”
Anyway. The gay pirate plate lives in my dad’s house currently.
But he’s trying to get me and my sister out to visit him. And plate mounts are cheap.
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.
So. Mon Mothma is dealing with the fact that she was married off at 15 (something that the canon kind of just. Ignores up to this point??? the horror of????) and is dealing with a controlling abusive husband who is so jealous he weaponized their 15 year old daughter against her and convinced the daughter she wanted to 'follow tradition" and be married off to some boy who hates her but wants her power all as a ploy to keep control over the two women.
and then the daughter cries and tells her mom she doesnt want this and the mom says "you can say no" and the daughter thinks the mother is double crossing her to ruin her happiness because the father is abusive and told her she would do this so she goes through with it and Mon realizes the generational abuse of women is cyclical all while spinning the plates for the rebellion and I just
Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.
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Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:
Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.
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You can make polls in posts. Here's one now.
Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.
Very old posts (I'm talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There's no such thing as a post being "too old" to reblog
Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.
If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.
You can screenshot someone's tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called "peer review"
Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not "creepy" like it is seen as on other sites.
Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a "yes, and?" attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.
We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.
Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say "I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd" and nobody gives a shit.
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Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.
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Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don't get involved in it. Ever.
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Follower count doesn't matter much here and you don't have to make yours known if you don't want to.
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If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal
Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There's a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.
Get XKit Rewritten if you're on desktop, it's a really helpful extension
In the little drop-down menu next to the 'Post now' button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It's good for spreading stuff out over time.
You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!
Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs
Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.
Warm bouquet commish
in all timelines in all possibilities only you can show me this
I'm setting my trap, to catch the damn haiku bot. Quiet! Here it comes.
someone I follow on the bird app just announced they’re starting a very exclusive private fic server because they and a bunch of other people want to talk about how much they love the fics they’re reading, and as an author can I just say that a really great place to talk about a fic you love is in the comments for that fic
I understand that people are trying to create safe spaces, but as the number of comments that I get on my fics dwindles with each passing year, knowing these spaces exist where my fics are being discussed, places that I am excluded from, makes me want to write fic LESS
I mean I guess who cares, right, because if I stop writing, there’s 10,000 other people that will continue…but if you participate in a fic “book club” server and you say nice things there about a fic you loved, maybe copy and paste that into a comment on AO3?
the only thing fanfic writers are asking for in return for hours of hard work is attention. please don’t rob us of the one thing that we hope for when we hit “post”
Back to being too lười for everything :)
So I coloured in this gif just to see how it’d look….
📚🪴
on this site i go by shuu. she/her. if you don't agree with me, blocking me is always an option. ship and let ship.
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