I CANNOT get enough of drawings of itty bitty snek Crowley. I go absolutely rabid about them. I live for them, i breathe for them, fame and fortune and my eternal love & gratitude to all the artists who regularly bless me with sneckedy Snek demon sweetness.
He cares very much about his elemental just look at this man
He raised this bubble monster since it was a baby and worries about her getting mixed with other water things... Dad behaviour...
It's like he asks her to come out to fight.
He can't ask her that, he alredy sent her to battle. Is it either them or the quimera and he knows it damn well, that's why he looks at Marcille with something close to pity. He can't ask the undine to stop. He needs, they all need, the monster to be dead.
And then his baby droplet gets obliterated by this monster. He's not recovering up emotionally from this anytime soon. He freezes a few seconds in absolute shock.
"I even find it cute now". His baby is dead. It's gotta be something akin to adopt a stray cat since baby and then he gets run over. He starts tearing up. Look at this man's poor face, he's destroyed.
Here he's mourning the loss of his undine possibly, all sad faced. He is, at the end, the only one that lost someone there (many died but revived, and Falin doesnt count because she's alive). Either that or he managed to, somehow, save a bit of her and put it on the bottle and it's feeling sorry for his elemental or saying sorry.
I don't know how Terry managed it. There's just nothing on this earth like a Discworld book. I'll be listening to a book I've read countless times over and suddenly, a single line I've never even really noticed before will tear me open. They just reach right inside me and open my ribcage to expose my very heart.
Tonight, it was Hat Full of Sky and Granny Weatherwax saying, "The world is unfair. Be grateful you have friends." On their own, the words are unremarkable. But juxtaposed together, with the context they are operating in....they had tears flowing down my face before I knew what was happening. The world is unfair; sometimes, the wonderful happens when it shouldn't (and/or when you feel you deserve a divinely wrathful torment) because you have friends. The world is unfair. That doesn't just mean that the horrible happens when it shouldn't. It means that the beautiful does too. Be grateful you have friends. They are the hub on which that beauty spins, turning the theft into gold.
A lot of people I've introduced to these books haven't liked them — they find them too silly, or preachy, or nonsensical, or even puerile. I am never upset or really disappointed when they don't like them. To each their own. But I will never understand it. They are baked into my being in a way that few things are and I am better to myself, to other people, and to the world because of it.
Sir Terry, you were a gift nonpareil. Thank you for your words and for shaping my world.
I've seen a lot of people writing Danny as a space ancient and Dan and Dani as ghosts with moon and sun cores, being sort of parts, versions of Danny and therefore weaker. Now, consider: Dan and Dani are both powerful ghosts with really cool cores and stuff but Danny is just some guy™
Dan, who came from an alternate timeline and is kind of from the future but also not, is Clockwork's apprentice and will eventually become an ancient of time. He probably only agreed to have some lessons with Clockwork to understand better what happened to him, but he enjoys his apprenticeship now.
Dani, with her love of travelling, loves seeing all the different places the world offers to her, and that includes space and different planets and maybe even parallel universes, and she accidentally ends up being an apprentice of the space ancient. For now she's probably a baby ancient of freedom or something like that, but she might become an ancient of space in the future.
We can also have something like Dan having a core of destruction or Dani being the Speed Force if you want it to be dcxdp, or any headcanon of yours about their cool powers.
And then there's Danny. And yeah, everyone knows that he's super powerful, but also he's just some guy.
It can go different routes. Does everyone know that Danny is just Danny? Or do they think that with siblings (well, technically a clone and an alternate version, but whatever) so powerful, he must be even stronger? Is Danny actually something terrifyingly eldritch and ancient and strong, almost a god, but he just doesn't know himself? Or is he just really some guy?
Now, because it's obvious that I have a dcxdp brainrot, have a regular "JL summons/meets a powerful ghost" but its Dan and Dani, and they keep mentioning their original/brother who won a fight against them at some point. The JL is very concerned about Dan and Dani's godlike powers, and they can't imagine what Danny is like. And then they meet him (in his human form), and it's just a young adult in casual clothes, very friendly and helpful, with no evident powers. Imagine the confusion. Imagine Dan and Dani, radiating power, in their eldritch ghost forms, admitting that fighting Danny for real is the dumbest thing to do and not even they would succeed... And then there's Danny is jeans and silly t-shirt, waving shyly.
I don't know how many times we have to say this but this is because the United States of America does not have public transit in any form that a European would recognize as such outside of a few very small, highly-dense municipal locations like NYC and Chicago, and having used both those systems and the U-Bahn i can firmly assert that the U-Bahn blows American subways into smithereens. we especially do not have accessible interstate passenger train service outside of that one commuter Amtrak loop in the northeast. the country is designed to force its citizens to use cars and only cars, and the government has made it policy to incentivize car ownership since the 1940s and punish any other form of transit, including just walking around. do you understand? the vast majority of roads here do not have bike lanes. when we do have bike lanes they are not protected by a curb or divider, they are just white lines painted on the asphalt. you will regularly encounter roads and streets--inside of cities and suburbs, not just in rural areas--that do not have sidewalks
how the hell does michael sheen do it? no seriously - how does he look utterly besotted and wary at the same time, immeasurably old and inconceivably young simultaneously, learned and naive in equal force
i don't understand but i would like it bottled and i would like to buy it, but someone needs to have a word with him and tell him to give 👏 it 👏 a 👏 rest 👏 please 👏✨
thinking about how Humans Are Space Orcs stories always talk about how indestructible humans are, our endurance, our ability to withstand common poisons, etc. and thats all well and good, its really fun to read, but it gets repetitive after a while because we aren't all like that.
And that got me thinking about why this trope is so common in the first place, and the conclusion I came to is actually kind of obvious if you think about it. Not everyone is allowed to go into space. This is true now, with the number of physical restrictions placed on astronauts (including height limits), but I imagine it's just as strict in some imaginary future where humans are first coming into contact with alien species. Because in that case there will definitely be military personnel alongside any possible diplomatic parties.
And I imagine that all interactions aliens have ever had up until this point have been with trained personnel. Even basic military troops conform to this standard, to some degree. So aliens meet us and they're shocked and horrified to discover that we have no obvious weaknesses, we're all either crazy smart or crazy strong (still always a little crazy, academia and war will do that to you), and not only that but we like, literally all the same height so there's no way to tell any of us apart.
And Humans Are Death Worlders stories spread throughout the galaxy. Years or decades or centuries of interspecies suspicion and hostilities preventing any alien from setting foot/claw/limb/appendage/etc. on Earth until slowly more beings are allowed to come through. And not just diplomats who keep to government buildings, but tourists. Exchange students. Temporary visitors granted permission to go wherever they please, so they go out in search of 'real terran culture' and what do they find?
Humans with innate heart defects that prevent them from drinking caffeine. Humans with chronic pain and chronic fatigue who lack the boundless endurance humans are supposedly famous for. Humans too tall or too short or too fat to be allowed into space. Humans who are so scared of the world they need to take pills just to function. Humans with IBS who can't stand spicy foods, capsaicin really is poison to them. Lactose intolerance and celiac disease, my god all the autoimmune disorders out there, humans who struggle to function because their own bodies fight them. Humans who bruise easily and take too long to heal. Humans who sustained one too many concussions and now struggle to talk and read and write. Humans who've had strokes. Humans who were born unable to talk or hear or speak, and humans who through some accident lost that ability later.
Aliens visit Earth, and do you know what they find? Humanity, in all its wholeness.