#bc it’s such an issue of having too much in our department or other departments just giving us everything EVEN stuff meant clearly for them

[loumauve]

I snapped today at work, and by snapped I mean I politely commented on a help desk ticket by summing up an mess of an (type of) issue that's come up for at least the fourth time in the 2+ months I've been managing user accounts, and asked the person responsible to fix it (himself for once) because last time I fixed his mess-up it took me two whole days to work out the details with at least four other colleagues from different departments and I really don't want to do it again. there's other shit that needs doing, I've been working 10+ hour days for most of this week already, so I need to cut down not add on more.

(good thing tho - at least we managed to fix the issue where the dataset of a newer employee got mixed up with another one of the same name and therefore wasn't able to apply for any of the access/accounts she needed. technically not entirely my area but it does impact us not being allowed to create an account for her so I figured I might as well track that issue down. took three days and at least three other people, but hey - it should all work out now. yay for that)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Richard Dawkins

This is a slightly edited version of the essay written to accompany the transcript of the conversation between myself, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and the late, much-lamented Christopher Hitchens, recorded in Christopher's flat in Washington DC in September 2007 and published in 2019 as The Four Horsemen.

Among the many topics the ‘four horsemen’ discussed in 2007 was how religion and science compared in respect of humility and hubris. Religion, for its part, stands accused of conspicuous overconfidence and sensational lack of humility. The expanding universe, the laws of physics, the fine-tuned physical constants, the laws of chemistry, the slow grind of evolution’s mills – all were set in motion so that, in the 14-billion-year fullness of time, we should come into existence. Even the constantly reiterated insistence that we are miserable offenders, born in sin, is a kind of inverted arrogance: such vanity, to presume that our moral conduct has some sort of cosmic significance, as though the Creator of the Universe wouldn’t have better things to do than tot up our black marks and our brownie points. The universe is all concerned with me. Is that not the arrogance that passeth all understanding?

Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, makes the exculpatory point that our distant ancestors could scarcely escape such cosmic narcissism. With no roof over their heads and no artificial light, they nightly watched the stars wheeling overhead. And what was at the centre of the wheel? The exact location of the observer, of course. No wonder they thought the universe was ‘all about me’. In the other sense of ‘about’, it did indeed revolve ‘about me’. ‘I’ was the epicentre of the cosmos. But that excuse, if it is one, evaporated with Copernicus and Galileo.

Turning, then, to theologians’ overconfidence, admittedly few quite reach the heights scaled by the seventeenth-century archbishop James Ussher, who was so sure of his chronology that he gave the origin of the universe a precise date: 22 October, 4004 bc. Not 21 or 23 October but precisely on the evening of 22 October. Not September or November but definitely, with the immense authority of the Church, October. Not 4003 or 4005, not ‘somewhere around the fourth or fifth millennium bc’ but, no doubt about it, 4004 bc. Others, as I said, are not quite so precise about it, but it is characteristic of theologians that they just make stuff up. Make it up with liberal abandon and force it, with a presumed limitless authority, upon others, sometimes – at least in former times and still today in Islamic theocracies – on pain of torture and death.

Such arbitrary precision shows itself, too, in the bossy rules for living that religious leaders impose on their followers. And when it comes to control-freakery, Islam is way out ahead, in a class of its own. Here are some choice examples from the Concise Commandments of Islam handed down by Ayatollah Ozma Sayyed Mohammad Reda Musavi Golpaygani, a respected Iranian ‘scholar’. Concerning the wet-nursing of babies, alone, there are no fewer than twenty-three minutely specified rules, translated as ‘Issues’. Here’s the first of them, Issue 547. The rest are equally precise, equally bossy, and equally devoid of apparent rationale:

If a woman wet-nurses a child, in accordance to the conditions to be stated in Issue 560, the father of that child cannot marry the woman’s daughters, nor can he marry the daughters of the husband whom the milk belongs to, even his wet-nurse daughters, but it is permissible for him to marry the wet-nurse daughters of the woman . . . [and it goes on].

Here’s another example from the wet-nursing department, Issue 553:

If the wife of a man’s father wet-nurses a girl with his father’s milk, then the man cannot marry that girl.

‘Father’s milk’? What? I suppose in a culture where a woman is the property of her husband, ‘father’s milk’ is not as weird as it sounds to us.

Issue 555 is similarly puzzling, this time about ‘brother’s milk’:

A man cannot marry a girl who has been wet-nursed by his sister or his brother’s wife with his brother’s milk.

I don’t know the origin of this creepy obsession with wet-nursing, but it is not without its scriptural basis:

When the Qur’aan was first revealed, the number of breast-feedings that would make a child a relative (mahram) was ten, then this was abrogated and replaced with the number of five which is well-known.[1]

That was part of the reply from another ‘scholar’ to the following recent cri de coeur from a (pardonably) confused woman on social media:

I breastfed my brother-in-law’s son for a month, and my son was breastfed by my brother-in-law’s wife. I have a daughter and a son who are older than the child who was breastfed by my brother-in-law’s wife, and she also had two children before the child of hers whom I breastfed.  I hope that you can describe the kind of breastfeeding that makes the child a mahram and the rulings that apply to the rest of the siblings? Thank you very much.

The precision of ‘five’ breast feedings is typical of this kind of religious control-freakery. It surfaced bizarrely in a 2007 fatwa issued by Dr Izzat Atiyya, a lecturer at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, who was concerned about the prohibition against male and female colleagues being alone together and came up with an ingenious solution. The female colleague should feed her male colleague ‘directly from her breast’ at least five times. This would make them ‘relatives’ and thereby enable them to be alone together at work. Note that four times would not suffice. He apparently wasn’t joking at the time, although he did retract his fatwa after the outcry it provoked. How can people bear to live their lives bound by such insanely specific yet manifestly pointless rules?

With some relief, perhaps, we turn to science. Science is often accused of arrogantly claiming to know everything, but the barb is capaciously wide of the mark. Scientists love not knowing the answer, because it gives us something to do, something to think about. We loudly assert ignorance, in a gleeful proclamation of what needs to be done.

How did life begin? I don’t know, nobody knows, we wish we did, and we eagerly exchange hypotheses, together with suggestions for how to investigate them. What caused the apocalyptic mass extinction at the end of the Permian period, a quarter of a billion years ago? We don’t know, but we have some interesting hypotheses to think about. What did the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees look like? We don’t know, but we do know a bit about it. We know the continent on which it lived (Africa, as Darwin guessed), and molecular evidence tells us roughly when (between 6 million and 8 million years ago). What is dark matter? We don’t know, and a substantial fraction of the physics community would dearly like to.

Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up. If you are an authority figure like the Pope, you might do it by thinking privately to yourself and waiting for an answer to pop into your head – which you then proclaim as a ‘revelation’. Or you might do it by ‘interpreting’ a Bronze Age text whose author was even more ignorant than you are.

Popes can promulgate their private opinions as ‘dogma’, but only if those opinions have the backing of a substantial number of Catholics through history: long tradition of belief in a proposition is, somewhat mysteriously to a scientific mind, regarded as evidence for the truth of that proposition. In 1950, Pope Pius XII (unkindly known as ‘Hitler’s Pope’) promulgated the dogma that Jesus’ mother Mary, on her death, was bodily – i.e. not merely spiritually – lifted up into heaven. ‘Bodily’ means that if you’d looked in her grave, you’d have found it empty. The Pope’s reasoning had absolutely nothing to do with evidence. He cited 1 Corinthians 15:54: ‘then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory’. The saying makes no mention of Mary. There is not the smallest reason to suppose the author of the epistle had Mary in mind. We see again the typical theological trick of taking a text and ‘interpreting’ it in a way that just might have some vague, symbolic, hand-waving connection with something else. Presumably, too, like so many religious beliefs, Pius XII’s dogma was at least partly based on a feeling of what would be fitting for one so holy as Mary. But the Pope’s main motivation, according to Dr Kenneth Howell, director of the John Henry Cardinal Newman Institute of Catholic Thought, University of Illinois, came from a different meaning of what was fitting. The world of 1950 was recovering from the devastation of the Second World War and desperately needed the balm of a healing message. Howell quotes the Pope’s words, then gives his own interpretation:

Pius XII clearly expresses his hope that meditation on Mary’s assumption will lead the faithful to a greater awareness of our common dignity as the human family. . . . What would impel human beings to keep their eyes fixed on their supernatural end and to desire the salvation of their fellow human beings? Mary’s assumption was a reminder of, and impetus toward, greater respect for humanity because the Assumption cannot be separated from the rest of Mary’s earthly life.

It’s fascinating to see how the theological mind works: in particular, the lack of interest in – indeed, the contempt for – factual evidence. Never mind whether there’s any evidence that Mary was assumed bodily into heaven; it would be good for people to believe she was. It isn’t that theologians deliberately tell untruths. It’s as though they just don’t care about truth; aren’t interested in truth; don’t know what truth even means; demote truth to negligible status compared with other considerations, such as symbolic or mythic significance. And yet at the same time, Catholics are compelled to believe these made-up ‘truths’ – compelled in no uncertain terms. Even before Pius XII promulgated the Assumption as a dogma, the eighteenth-century Pope Benedict XIV declared the Assumption of Mary to be ‘a probable opinion which to deny were impious and blasphemous’. If to deny a ‘probable opinion’ is ‘impious and blasphemous’, you can imagine the penalty for denying an infallible dogma! Once again, note the brazen confidence with which religious leaders assert ‘facts’ which even they admit are supported by no historical evidence at all.

The Catholic Encyclopedia is a treasury of overconfident sophistry. Purgatory is a sort of celestial waiting room in which the dead are punished for their sins (‘purged’) before eventually being admitted to heaven. The Encyclopedia’s entry on purgatory has a long section on ‘Errors’, listing the mistaken views of heretics such as the Albigenses, Waldenses, Hussites and Apostolici, unsurprisingly joined by Martin Luther and John Calvin.[2]

The biblical evidence for the existence of purgatory is, shall we say, ‘creative’, again employing the common theological trick of vague, hand-waving analogy. For example, the Encyclopedia notes that ‘God forgave the incredulity of Moses and Aaron, but as punishment kept them from the “land of promise”’. That banishment is viewed as a kind of metaphor for purgatory. More gruesomely, when David had Uriah the Hittite killed so that he could marry Uriah’s beautiful wife, the Lord forgave him – but didn’t let him off scot-free: God killed the child of the marriage (2 Samuel 12:13–14). Hard on the innocent child, you might think. But apparently a useful metaphor for the partial punishment that is purgatory, and one not overlooked by the Encyclopedia’s authors.

The section of the purgatory entry called ‘Proofs’ is interesting because it purports to use a form of logic. Here’s how the argument goes. If the dead went straight to heaven, there’d be no point in our praying for their souls. And we do pray for their souls, don’t we? Therefore it must follow that they don’t go straight to heaven. Therefore there must be purgatory. QED. Are professors of theology really paid to do this kind of thing?

Enough; let’s turn again to science. Scientists know when they don’t know the answer. But they also know when they do, and they shouldn’t be coy about proclaiming it. It’s not hubristic to state known facts when the evidence is secure. Yes, yes, philosophers of science tell us a fact is no more than a hypothesis which may one day be falsified but which has so far withstood strenuous attempts to do so. Let us by all means pay lip service to that incantation, while muttering, in homage to Galileo’s muttered eppur si muove, the sensible words of Stephen Jay Gould:

In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.[3]

Facts in this sense include the following, and not one of them owes anything whatsoever to the many millions of hours devoted to theological ratiocination. The universe began between 13 billion and 14 billion years ago. The sun, and the planets orbiting it, including ours, condensed out of a rotating disk of gas, dust and debris about 4.5 billion years ago. The map of the world changes as the tens of millions of years go by. We know the approximate shape of the continents and where they were at any named time in geological history. And we can project ahead and draw the map of the world as it will change in the future. We know how different the constellations in the sky would have appeared to our ancestors and how they will appear to our descendants.

Matter in the universe is non-randomly distributed in discrete bodies, many of them rotating, each on its own axis, and many of them in elliptical orbit around other such bodies according to mathematical laws which enable us to predict, to the exact second, when notable events such as eclipses and transits will occur. These bodies – stars, planets, planetesimals, knobbly chunks of rock, etc. – are themselves clustered in galaxies, many billions of them, separated by distances orders of magnitude larger than the (already very large) spacing of (again, many billions of) stars within galaxies.

Matter is composed of atoms, and there is a finite number of types of atoms – the hundred or so elements. We know the mass of each of these elemental atoms, and we know why any one element can have more than one isotope with slightly different mass. Chemists have a huge body of knowledge about how and why the elements combine in molecules. In living cells, molecules can be extremely large, constructed of thousands of atoms in precise, and exactly known, spatial relation to one another. The methods by which the exact structures of these macromolecules are discovered are wonderfully ingenious, involving meticulous measurements on the scattering of X-rays beamed through crystals. Among the macromolecules fathomed by this method is DNA, the universal genetic molecule. The strictly digital code by which DNA influences the shape and nature of proteins – another family of macromolecules which are the elegantly honed machine-tools of life – is exactly known in every detail. The ways in which those proteins influence the behaviour of cells in developing embryos, and hence influence the form and functioning of all living things, is work in progress: a great deal is known; much challengingly remains to be learned.

For any particular gene in any individual animal, we can write down the exact sequence of DNA code letters in the gene. This means we can count, with total precision, the number of single-letter discrepancies between two individuals. This is a serviceable measure of how long ago their common ancestor lived. This works for comparisons within a species – between you and Barack Obama, for instance. And it works for comparisons of different species – between you and an aardvark, say. Again, you can count the discrepancies exactly. There are just more discrepancies the further back in time the shared ancestor lived. Such precision lifts the spirit and justifies pride in our species, Homo sapiens. For once, and without hubris, Linnaeus’s specific name seems warranted.

Hubris is unjustified pride. Pride can be justified, and science does so in spades. So does Beethoven, so do Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Christopher Wren. So do the engineers who built the giant telescopes in Hawaii and in the Canary Islands, the giant radio telescopes and very large arrays that stare sightless into the southern sky; or the Hubble orbiting telescope and the spacecraft that launched it. The engineering feats deep underground at CERN, combining monumental size with minutely accurate tolerances of measurement, literally moved me to tears when I was shown around. The engineering, the mathematics, the physics, in the Rosetta mission that successfully soft-landed a robot vehicle on the tiny target of a comet also made me proud to be human. Modified versions of the same technology may one day save our planet by enabling us to divert a dangerous comet like the one that killed the dinosaurs.

Who does not feel a swelling of human pride when they hear about the LIGO instruments which, synchronously in Louisiana and Washington State, detected gravitation waves whose amplitude would be dwarfed by a single proton? This feat of measurement, with its profound significance for cosmology, is equivalent to measuring the distance from Earth to the star Proxima Centauri to an accuracy of one human hair’s breadth.

Comparable accuracy is achieved in experimental tests of quantum theory. And here there is a revealing mismatch between our human capacity to demonstrate, with invincible conviction, the predictions of a theory experimentally and our capacity to visualize the theory itself. Our brains evolved to understand the movement of buffalo-sized objects at lion speeds in the moderately scaled spaces afforded by the African savannah. Evolution didn’t equip us to deal intuitively with what happens to objects when they move at Einsteinian speeds through Einsteinian spaces, or with the sheer weirdness of objects too small to deserve the name ‘object’ at all. Yet somehow the emergent power of our evolved brains has enabled us to develop the crystalline edifice of mathematics by which we accurately predict the behaviour of entities that lie under the radar of our intuitive comprehension. This, too, makes me proud to be human, although to my regret I am not among the mathematically gifted of my species.

Less rarefied but still proud-making is the advanced, and continually advancing, technology that surrounds us in our everyday lives. Your smartphone, your laptop computer, the satnav in your car and the satellites that feed it, your car itself, the giant airliner that can loft not just its own weight plus passengers and cargo but also the 120 tons of fuel it ekes out over a thirteen-hour journey of seven thousand miles.

Less familiar, but destined to become more so, is 3D printing. A computer ‘prints’ a solid object, say a chess bishop, by depositing a sequence of layers, a process radically and interestingly different from the biological version of ‘3D printing’ which is embryology. A 3D printer can make an exact copy of an existing object. One technique is to feed the computer a series of photographs of the object to be copied, taken from all different angles. The computer does the formidably complicated mathematics to synthesize the specification of the solid shape by integrating the angular views. There may be life forms in the universe that make their children in this body-scanning kind of way, but our own reproduction is instructively different. This, incidentally, is why almost all biology textbooks are seriously wrong when they describe DNA as a ‘blueprint’ for life. DNA may be a blueprint for protein, but it is not a blueprint for a baby. It’s more like a recipe or a computer program.

We are not arrogant, not hubristic, to celebrate the sheer bulk and detail of what we know through science. We are simply telling the honest and irrefutable truth. Also honest is the frank admission of how much we don’t yet know – how much more work remains to be done. That is the very antithesis of hubristic arrogance. Science combines a massive contribution, in volume and detail, of what we do know with humility in proclaiming what we don’t. Religion, by embarrassing contrast, has contributed literally zero to what we know, combined with huge hubristic confidence in the alleged facts it has simply made up.

But I want to suggest a further and less obvious point about the contrast of religion with atheism. I want to argue that the atheistic worldview has an unsung virtue of intellectual courage. Why is there something rather than nothing? Our physicist colleague Lawrence Krauss, in his book A Universe from Nothing,[4] controversially suggests that, for quantum-theoretic reasons, Nothing (the capital letter is deliberate) is unstable. Just as matter and antimatter annihilate each other to make Nothing, so the reverse can happen. A random quantum fluctuation causes matter and antimatter to spring spontaneously out of Nothing. Krauss’s critics largely focus on the definition of Nothing. His version may not be what everybody understands by nothing, but at least it is supremely simple – as simple it must be, if it is to satisfy us as the base of a ‘crane’ explanation (Dan Dennett’s phrase), such as cosmic inflation or evolution. It is simple compared to the world that followed from it by largely understood processes: the big bang, inflation, galaxy formation, star formation, element formation in the interior of stars, supernova explosions blasting the elements into space, condensation of element-rich dust clouds into rocky planets such as Earth, the laws of chemistry by which, on this planet at least, the first self-replicating molecule arose, then evolution by natural selection and the whole of biology which is now, at least in principle, understood.

Why did I speak of intellectual courage? Because the human mind, including my own, rebels emotionally against the idea that something as complex as life, and the rest of the expanding universe, could have ‘just happened’. It takes intellectual courage to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no other rational choice. Emotion screams: ‘No, it’s too much to believe! You are trying to tell me the entire universe, including me and the trees and the Great Barrier Reef and the Andromeda Galaxy and a tardigrade’s finger, all came about by mindless atomic collisions, no supervisor, no architect? You cannot be serious. All this complexity and glory stemmed from Nothing and a random quantum fluctuation? Give me a break.’ Reason quietly and soberly replies: ‘Yes. Most of the steps in the chain are well understood, although until recently they weren’t. In the case of the biological steps, they’ve been understood since 1859. But more important, even if we never understand all the steps, nothing can change the principle that, however improbable the entity you are trying to explain, postulating a creator god doesn’t help you, because the god would itself need exactly the same kind of explanation.’ However difficult it may be to explain the origin of simplicity, the spontaneous arising of complexity is, by definition, more improbable. And a creative intelligence capable of designing a universe would have to be supremely improbable and supremely in need of explanation in its own right. However improbable the naturalistic answer to the riddle of existence, the theistic alternative is even more so. But it needs a courageous leap of reason to accept the conclusion.

This is what I meant when I said the atheistic worldview requires intellectual courage. It requires moral courage, too. As an atheist, you abandon your imaginary friend, you forgo the comforting props of a celestial father figure to bail you out of trouble. You are going to die, and you’ll never see your dead loved ones again. There’s no holy book to tell you what to do, tell you what’s right or wrong. You are an intellectual adult. You must face up to life, to moral decisions. But there is dignity in that grown-up courage. You stand tall and face into the keen wind of reality. You have company: warm, human arms around you, and a legacy of culture which has built up not only scientific knowledge and the material comforts that applied science brings but also art, music, the rule of law, and civilized discourse on morals. Morality and standards for life can be built up by intelligent design – design by real, intelligent humans who actually exist. Atheists have the intellectual courage to accept reality for what it is: wonderfully and shockingly explicable. As an atheist, you have the moral courage to live to the full the only life you’re ever going to get: to fully inhabit reality, rejoice in it, and do your best finally to leave it better than you found it.

-

[1] https://islamqa.info/en/27280 [2] http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=9745 [3] ‘Evolution as fact and theory’. [4] For which I wrote an afterword.

[ghostly-cabbage]

you guys got another one to read/reread alex rider bc of ttb.

i binged the show and am on the third book. the thing is i distinctly remember the end of scorpia and beginning of ark angel (alex getting shot nearly through the heart and then trying to escape something? while in recovery) but that is the only thing i remember after the first book. but it has been something like over 10 years since i read these. speaking of: i did not know there were so many books now?! and apparently anthony is still writing new ones?! though really hoping the 2000’s mmm 😐 moments will fade as the books go on… especially the fatphobia around smithers, and the low key racist stereotypes and side comments. i was questioning myself if i was just looking too far into it thinking that mrs stellenbosch was a transphobic character until the line “she looked like a man in drag” and went yep. fuck she is. now i don’t think any of this was malicious or even on purpose but rereading books you enjoyed as a kid now as an adult really reminds you how it was in the 2000s.

but the show is good and doesn’t have those problems. however, did anyone else notice it’s all the women in special operations that are concerned about alex? obviously mrs jones but i do like her character in the show. but also it was the women in wolf’s crew that spoke up about torturing alex. the other man didn’t say anything. but overall i am appreciating more diversity.

i have so much more to say about the show and the books but i should stop rambling. anyway, ttb is sooooo good and i am eagerly awaiting the next chapter and all those to come. alex rider and danny phantom is such a niche crossover but it works! and the scp stuff? absolutely perfect. you don’t happen to have links to any other scp x dp stuff do you? art or fics.

ps. idk wtf tumblr’s spacing is doing. i’m hoping it evens out when i send this ask and you don’t have to see the large, awkward, uneven gaps between paragraphs

Heheheheh welcome back to the Alex Rider brain worms!! I myself never read the books as a kid and it was totally Fin's doing pspsps'ing kkachi and I into AR (More specifically into an AR fanfic series called of Madness and Mammals, which I read all of without any canon knowledge and it was fantastic dfghjkl After that I started reading the books and then we watched the show!)

As for the 2000's moments..... yeah unfortunately there are some stuff in the early books that aren't great. Though Fin does tell me that the later books do in fact get better about that sorta thing. (i'm still not completely caught up) Some character details just feel so mean spirited and ignorant. I think it's something that was more run of the mill back then but also a symptom of a greater problem as a whole in the "spy fiction" genre. (From what I hear a lot of the Bond books and earlier movies are just so racist and sexist etc, and I think AR was meant to be a "Bond but for tween boys")

As far as the show goes, I think it does a really great job in fixing a lot of the issues the books had, both with plot, tone, and yes the diversity! I think what you pointed out about the women in the Department being sympathetic to Alex is really interesting and I hadn't realized that until you pointed it out! I think that, while Jones and Snake are more vocally sympathetic, I do think the people in the department all care about Alex in... different ways. Wolf's aside with Jones after the K-unit interrogation in Ep two I think proves that he was just as uncomfortable as Snake. I think that her speaking out and reaffirming his own feelings was just the push he needed so say "fuck our orders". There's also the fact that, even if people in the department seem concerned, just like in the books, they still never do anything to actually stop what's happening. They care, but they more or less remain complicit. Never pushing the envelope enough to endanger their own positions even if they know how wrong using a child is. Simple answer for this being that if they did there wouldn't be a show/book series so like asdfghjkl but it's fun to Think about! 👀  I'm so glad that you're enjoying TTB! It's been such a labour of love from the three of us! When we watched the AR show finally we were honestly so shocked. AT that point we'd already started panning TTB and so we were thrilled that the show was tonally so close to what were aiming for. The AR straight up dips into horror at times and its sense of atmosphere is so top notch. When we were approaching this crossover it really was the fact that Canon AR and SCP mesh well together that makes it work so well. It's very much the glue for this crossover! That and we started off characterizing TTB!Danny using a lot of my hcs for SWWDF!Danny and so pushing that even further in the horror/SCP direction was easier than trying to use a base-canon Danny. I think that trying to crossover Canon AR with Canon DP without it just being a fun crackfic would be pretty difficult. bc lets be honest they both can be so cheesy and ridiculous (affectionate) As for knowing of more dp x scp stuff, sadly I do not : (( I know awhile back there was people making a bunch of dp x scp memes, but those don't really have much plot per se. However, maybe if anyone does know they can slap them in the replies of this or I can make a new post to put out some feelers!

[unfilteredrealities]

I’m alive update

Life is bleh , ups and downs as usual.

My psoriasis is currently fucking me up and the lovely (not lovely) R.A and the PsA as well. WHYYYY THE FUCK is only my ring finger from my right hand fucked with psoriasis and my pointing, middle and ring toe as well but the rest of the toes and fingers are fine????

Not speaking of the normal patches I have on my legs currently those are normal by now bcs I get them since I am 2yo so nothing new.

Oh and the psoriasis thought it’s fun to flare up on my forehead as well and my left eyelid and left under eye??? wtf bro 😭

I had to go some days ago to the work health department for my annual check if I am fit to work and the lady gave me the ok but I had to tell her about my diagnoses since last year and ugh she was asking me if I’m seeing a dermatologist for my psoriasis and my psoriatic arthritis and I was like lady I have this shit since I am 2 , let me live don’t give me advice, I don’t need any rn I am in active audhd burnout so shh just give me that damn paper and let me go 😭

In other news I’m apparently very competent at my job , that much that I got chosen along the teamleaders to do this one training and I’m scared and hope I won’t fuck up bcs my imposter syndrome is like u bet ur smart press x for doubt 🧐

Anyway so work goes well I suppose, so far no complaints by the higher ups

Besides of all that my depression is strong and I actively feel suicidal again but I’m pushing through out of spite and yeah the naive hope that it will get better or I will have again better days with less flare ups and chronic issues going on

I’m actively ignoring certain things rn (cleaning my depression room) and it is stressing me out but I’m ignoring it bcs it’s so much work and I am ashamed to ask for help or admit I need help :)) it feels like barb wire around my throat

My tooth hurts bcs I have bruxism and I grind my teeth and I had a very subconsciously exhausting week in my sleep that I ground my teeth so hard it made my jaw tense up badly and almost lock up :))

Sigh, I miss my cat so much 😭 I am still mourning him 💔 😞 fuck severe renal insufficiency and not showing symptoms until it’s too late

Positive things are that my bf has a Nintendo Switch lite and Animal Crossing new horizons and we are both playing and visiting our islands and he keeps me cute notes each time he visited my island and me too on his , that I am almost 4 years handling this job and I didn’t have a proper mental breakdown yet or a meltdown, i was social lately and went to the baptism of a former classmate/ a friend of mines child and i met other former classmates there and we talked , I got out of my comfort zone and some days later visited former classmate at her home and it was wild but it was good.

Oh I forgot to mention about how big my urge to sh is again and I fucking hate it , plus I randomly found the kinder suprise egg where my blades are inside :)) my mom thought she hid them well, well hiding them in the closet where the board games are , wasn’t too smart.

Anyway I’m still going strong on like 4 years of no sh

Another dopamine moment was me getting myself as a Christmas present the Apple Watch SE 2024!!! I found it reduced at 200 euros when normally it’s like almost 300 euros

It’s so fancy and I’m glad I can Monitore my health better now bcs my old watch the Xiaomi Mi Band 7 kinda sucked at the end and stopped working properly so it was time to move on. At this point I’m getting slowly corrupted by Apple tbh 🤣 First it was the 2nd hand iPad and the Apple pen , then the iPhone and now the Apple Watch gg

These days I am hitting my word limit faster than normal and it sucks especially if u work in customer support for a bank and u have around 60 calls a day and you have to force yourself to speak even if you start to stutter and to speak monotone and all that

I’m sorry for this huge ramble update

Hope you guys enjoy me yapping and being raw about how life is raw dogging me 😭

If you read till here I guess rate my yapping or leave me a life update from your life ❤️

Thanks for reading through this!

[bookoformon]

Parsha 6- 588-559 BC. Parsha Sa'har "The Coming Storm." 2 Nephi 5.

The Nephites separate themselves from the Lamanites, keep the law of Moses, and build a temple—Because of their unbelief, the Lamanites are cut off from the presence of the Lord, are cursed, and become a scourge unto the Nephites. About 588–559 B.C.

Laman= "needs to be yoked"

Lamanite= "sons of ignorance"

1 Behold, it came to pass that I, Nephi, did cry much unto the Lord my God, because of the aanger of my brethren.

2 But behold, their aanger did increase against me, insomuch that they did seek to take away my life.

3 Yea, they did murmur against me, saying: Our younger brother thinks to arule over us; and we have had much trial because of him; wherefore, now let us slay him, that we may not be afflicted more because of his words. For behold, we will not have him to be our ruler; for it belongs unto us, who are the elder brethren, to brule over this people.

4 Now I do not write upon these plates all the words which they murmured against me. But it sufficeth me to say, that they did seek to take away my life.

5 And it came to pass that the Lord did awarn me, that I, bNephi, should depart from them and flee into the wilderness, and all those who would go with me.

This sounds like every other sibling rivalry in the Torah- the same thing happened to Cain, Ishmael, Jacob, and Joseph. King David was also the youngest of Seven brothers, AKA the Seventh Day or the Bridegroom of Shabbat and there was trouble there, too.

All of this in spite the fact the Torah says in Genesis 25:23 the elder generation must always serve the youngest.

“Two nations are in your womb, Two separate peoples shall issue from your body; One people shall be mightier than the other, And the older shall serve the younger.”

Why is this?

The Torah says followers like Jacob and David are climbers whereas the older siblings tend to hunt or till:

The Heavenly Ladder

Up the mountain and down again, to build the self up and tear it down, these are the tasks set before us by the religion in order to accentuate the intelligence, masterfully tested by the mysteries contained in the Torah.

Jacob, for example, set out for Haran "the mountain" all alone. After an attack by Esau’s grandson, he was left penniless too.5 He rested in a field for the night, placing 12 stones around his head for protection.6

Jacob dreamed of a ladder stretching from the ground to the heavens, with angels ascending and descending. As he watched, G‑d promised him three assurances:

The land of Canaan would be given to Jacob’s descendants.

Jacob’s descendants would be widespread, numerous, and a source of blessing for the whole world.

G‑d would be with Jacob wherever he went and would guard him.

G‑d’s promise to Abraham for his children to become G‑d’s chosen nation would be fulfilled through Jacob, as well.

When Jacob awoke, the 12 stones around his head had fused into one. He took the stone, poured oil over it as an offering to G‑d, and swore to return to the same spot when he returned safely from Haran "mountain climbing", naming the spot Beth E-l, “House of G‑d.”

There is a tantra associated with Haran in the Torah:

Terah's Descendants

27 Now these are the generations of Terah. Terah fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran fathered Lot (covering). 28 Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his kindred, in Ur (flame) of the Chaldeans (the birthplace of Abraham). 

“From the Mountaineer, the Scattered Fire creates the Father of Compassion.” 

-From Noach.

As for the Ladder, it consists of the bridegrooms associated with the Seven Days; after this comes the next morning, the Eighth Day and the Birth of Israel Himself:

We are building a new kind of Ladder out of these mysterious new 24 plates which contain details on a type of Tribe called the "Nephites."

We now know they are entirely separate from something called a Lamanite called "the ignorances" and thus ends the Parsha.

[pomodoko]

I’m sorry but with the world being in its current condition, ai don’t think fictional ships are the fucking issue here. The world is turning to shit, people are being slaughtered, and our rights are being stripped from us. Lgbt and bipoc people are still suffering daily. Innocent people are being killed for not wearing their fucking hijab’s correctly. People are rioting, and the world is burning. Fictional fucking ships are not the worlds issue right now. Or at all, honestly.

I would agree with the sentiment had it not been so aggressive. In fact, good news, actually! After I received that ask, I remembered that a while back another anon approached me with a similar topic as well (but my brain has not been working too well in the memory department as of late, so I didn't remember it happening).

I also try to assume that everyone who came to my inbox with these sort of concern are doing it with good intentions. People can be strongly affected by media and I'm not going to try and debate them for the sake of the world. I understand your despair more than anything else, as I've spent countless nights crying myself to sleep over the tragedies we see everyday. It's not productive nor healthy, so I'm trying my best as an individual to live a peaceful life and do my best to help others whenever I can.

One of the things I'm trying to do is to not fall into shipping discourse debates for the sake of my mental health.

Here's the post in question with my longer answer to it.

Tldr; I am very much against Bl*nkshipping and I have that tag blocked, but I am ambivalent about the shippers themselves (mostly bc I don’t see them). There’s a whole can of worms about the relationship between morally gray topics in fiction vs people creating/consuming it that I’m not gonna spill.

[tomatotoad]

hiii ! could you write an angsty scenario with shoto todoroki, where yn and him get in a violent argument (bc of momo or for any reason idk haha) in front of everyone. and reader is not a crybaby or anything, they talk back etc. shoto says after something that shuts down y/n. and he'll try to make up with them (fluffy end?) thank you!!

hi!! yes i’d love to write this thanks for submitting it :) ALSO REMINDER THAT MY ASKS ARE OPEN

(reader is in the hero department in this scenario, so if you wanted something different please don’t hesitate to ask again!)

Explanation

Todoroki x Gender Neutral Reader

Warning(s): angst

Word Count: 1,061

(gif by drunkencaterpillars)

Seething with anger, you swing open the 1-A classroom door with Todoroki on your heels. You attempt to slam the door shut on him, but he was too quick. He reached for your arm, but you flinched away. You’d sooner face an army of villains than let the man who just made a fool of you touch you.

“Y/n are you serious right now?”

“Are you serious right now Todoroki Shoto? You literally just said I’d be the worst hero in front of the entire class!” You exclaimed as you gestured to the class, shuffling in their seats in reaction to your argument.

“I didn’t say that, I just said that you wouldn’t be able to fight on your own like everyone in the class can. There’s still a lot you can improve, but you haven’t been putting in the work.” Todoroki states calmly.

You stare at him dumbfounded, thinking of all of the times had asked him for help with training to which he declined every time. Each one of those times, he declined because he already promised Momo to help her train.

“No you’re totally right,” you say sarcastically, “I definitely haven’t been putting in the work. Yeah, I mean, all of those hours I’ve spent alone training really didn’t account for anything, huh? I guess, by that logic, you could also say that your training sessions you have with Momo are a waste of time too?”

You wait for a response from either Todoroki or Momo. Neither of them answers quick enough for your liking.

“If you say I’m the worst hero in this class, then why do you spend so much time helping Momo but not me? Actually, better question, why even train with Momo when I’m your partner!?” You scream.

“Momo is my best friend, y/n, I want her to succeed and I want you to succeed,” Todoroki explains.

“Y/n it’s really not what you think-“ Momo starts before you cut her off.

“Momo, I know you have probably have a good explanation, but I’m not mad at you as much as I am this mess of a person right now,” you say as you gesture to Todoroki.

“I just don’t understand how you have the audacity to say that I’m a bad hero when I know I’m a bad hero that's why I’m asking for your help Todoroki,” you yell while looking straight into his eyes.

You see something snap in his eyes, almost as if bringing up your self-awareness of the issue was the last spark needed to start the fire.

“Well if you know that, why don't you just give up?!” Todoroki exclaimed. The fire in his eyes extinguished with the realization of what he just said to you.

Your resolve shatters as you stand there like a deer in headlights. After a beat, you slowly gaze around the classroom, just now remembering that you with your peers. One of your biggest fears is now the entire class's knowledge and you were too shocked to fight back. Without a single word, you quickly left the room and headed for the dorms. Todoroki was left with the pieces of your shattered heart in his hands.

It’s been an hour since your argument with Todoroki when you hear a knock on the door of your dorm. Raising your head from your tear-stained pillows, you contemplate not answering until you hear,

“I’m sorry,” from Todoroki on the other side of the door.

You roll your eyes as you get up to open the door.

"What?" you say to him firmly while clenching the side of the door.

Instead of answering, Todoroki just silently hands you a box. You eye him before slowly opening the lid, revealing the hero supplies you desperately wanted. All the objects in the box were things that you mentioned to Todoroki in one way or another. You would hug him if he wasn't the absolute worst right now.

"I hope you like them," Todoroki said softly.

"Of course I like them but," you gesture for him to come inside your room, "I'm not taking this as an apology, you know that," you say closing the door.

"I know, which is why I'm going to apologize right now," Todoroki says.

You set the box on your desk and pull out a chair for him to sit on while you sit on your bed.

"I'm sorry," He says with his usual monotonous voice.

There's a long pause as you look into each other's eyes.

"Is that seriously it?" you scoff.

"No, I'm just thinking of how to continue," taking a deep breath before continuing, "I stepped out of line today. I didn't mean when I said you should give up, you should never give up, Y/n. I've been training with Momo recently is because I already promised that I'd help her for a couple months. Plus, Momo actually likes Jirou, if that had anything to do with you being upset. Actually, yesterday was the last day of our training and I already have something planned with you for our internship next week," Todoroki explains.

You raise your eyebrows as he reaches in his pocket and pulls out a letter. Handing it to you, you skim over it quickly.

"Your dad invited me to intern with him?" you say in disbelief.

"Well, I technically invited you, he just needed to sign it so the staff doesn't get skeptical since we're going to be training together without him," he says as you reread the letter, "We're basically just going on vacation together, but instead of the beach and swimming, it's just going to be at my house and training," he continues.

He puts his fingers under your chin to raise your head.

"I'm sorry, I love you so much," he says with glossy eyes.

You felt the pure truth drip from the words he just uttered.

"I forgive you and I'm sorry too," you begin, "I should have heard you out completely," you finish.

You kiss him softly on the lips before quickly pull away to whisper in his ear, "If you ever yell at me again in front of the class, I will not hesitate to slap you,"

"Completly understandable," he says with a chuckle.

You grin as he brings you into a delicate embrace, holding you like he never wants to let you go.

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

I know nothing about Canadian history, except MMIWG, although that isn't really history I guess... Would you share a tiny bit?

Canadian history is fun and complicated and as someone with a teaching degree it is layered af and the way our different provinces operate further complicates these things. We have much to improve on but there are many advancements and developments already done and being done.

That being said, Canadian history has it's share of proud and shameful moments which should be discussed more broadly because hey we're actually a pretty significant ally to some serious world powers in history.

See below the cut for my ranting.

The precursor should be stated that I haven't taught Canadian history in a few years and it's always best to find references for my hearsay lmao.

First a lot of Canadian history will start with Contact (columbus and all that) however in Canada its most Cousteau and Cabot. That being said, Canada has a vast history prior to contact including Viking settlements and of course indigenous history which we continue to uncover to this day as a way of understanding the present state of our indigenous communities and reconcilation.

Canada was mostly colonised by the French and British. These two cultures are constantly at each other. They struggled over the territory until the French lost Quebec in the Seven Years War in 1775. French Canadians were given what’s considered a lenient truce for the time as they were allowed to maintain their language and culture, however this not solve the issue of tensions and assimilation inherent to Canadian culture. French Canadians exist outside of Quebec to this day.

Fur trade was the main business for a long time in Canada (I have a book on my wishlist because I wanna fucks with this harder even though it is hugely taught in basic Canadian history). The North West Company and Huron Bay Company were the two significant traders in the company and a version of the latter now exists as a department story in Canada as the Bay. These two company’s lost much of their power when Britain made Canada a commonwealth and took control of the provinces and territories gradually.

Canada’s economy has always been significantly tied to other countries. Firstly, mercantilism was the way too go, with north american colonies selling raw goods to european powers and buying them back as actual goods, ie. furniture. Canada became a significant trade partner with Britain and later the US, moccassins were a top seller across the border in the 19th century.

Tecumseh is well known in both US and Canadian history but is a major symbol of indigenous history over here to his influence on trying to maintain indigenous independence on both sides of the border and his involvement in the War of 1812.

The War of 1812 is called a victory by whichever side is talking. The US will claim they won and Canada will say the same because we burned the White House, but also, on the border, the Brits marched a small unit of soldiers in circles and convinced the Americans they had like thousands of soldiers lmao.

Laura Secord warned the British of an American attack in this war and now there’s a chocolate boutique named after her. Yay?

Canada had a rebellion in 1837 led by Mackenzie King but it was comparatively lowkey compared to other countries and unsuccessful. The most dramatic event is arguably the burning of newspaper office (may be mistaken) but I recall they wanted to preserve the printing presses for their own uses.

The act of Canada becoming a country happened July 1, 1867 and was called Confederation and so Canada day falls on July 1 every year. It was the union of four provinces; BC, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec. Canada gained more provinces and territories and gradually gained more internal power into the twentieth century.

Indigenous, or First Nations, Metis, and Inuit communities in Canada fall under the outdated “Indian Act” which maintains their “status” and rights and is the pillar to this day only because it is necessary to continue to address these issues. It remains problematic and is continually amended. 

Canada looked to increase immigration towards the end of the 19th century, they instated highly discriminatory laws which tended to deter or exclude “eastern” and non-anglo peoples. The continual journey law said that anyone sailing from India or Asia had to travel in a single trip without stops to enter the country which was near impossible at the time. This led to the Kamagata Maru incident which left a boat full of people stranded on a boat off the Canadian coast.

WWI saw Canada define itself as a wing of the British Army (along with Australians). Canadian soldiers wore maple leaves to demarcate themselves and this is one of the reasons it’s now on our flag. We are cited as having significant effect in battle such as Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele, along with major battles like Ypres.

First Nations soldiers were involved in both wars at a significant percentage, the highest enrollment rate of any population in Canada. In WWI they were often used as snipers because of their hunting practices and experience with rifles. This... well, we’ll come back to this issue as many were not and still are not recognised.

Tommy Douglas founded universal healthcare and has since been voted the Greatest Canadian. He was a premier of Saskatchewan and found the CCF which is now the NDP, a leftist Canadian party.

WWII saw Canada have great failures at Dunkirk and Dieppe, however Canada was still significant as they provided land for training bases and participated in many campaigns including Italy, D Day, and the liberation of the Netherlands and surrounding areas.

Twofold, the Dutch continue to honour Canada to this day and send tulip bulbs as a show of thanks.

Second, the lands used for these bases were often negotiated from indigenous communities with the promise of return at the end of the conflict. This didn’t happen for many and caused land struggles well into the present which have at times led to death. See Ipperwash et.al.

Canada had segregation. Viola Desmond refused to leave a white only area of a theatre in 1946 as a challenge to this. Canada experienced much of its civil rights changes at a pace with the US. Again US and Canadian history is at time very parallel.

Residential Schools existed in Canada from the 19th century to 1996. These schools have recently received some overdue notoriety for abducting aboriginal children for the sake of assimilation, abuse, and murder. Students were taken from their families to be re-educated as a systemic effort to erase their culture and resolve the tension between them. This should be condemned entirely and is disgraceful. Canada has a lot of work to do. Also, the Catholic and Protestant churches ran these schools.

As well, First Nations veterans were barred from participating in Remembrance Day events until into the nineties despite the land and people they contributed to Canada’s war efforts and claims to fame. This is another tick in the hey that’s fucked up column.

I left out a lot and highlighted most of the things that interested me but there is so much more to know and learn about Canada. I recommend this site as a starting point.

Other topics to look at:

Louis Riel

Acadian Expulsion

Famous Five

Group of Seven

Post War US-Canada Trade

Africville, Nova Scotia

[slutsofren]

surrender the night

*this is a companion piece to my series, Danger Days, but can be read as a standalone

summary: you and joel have been together for a while, no longer worrying about fireflies or about ellie, the three of you became pretty close-knit out on the road and now in jackson but joel is usually closed off with you today until he wants to show you how much he loves you while hunkering down from the rain.

cw: no y/n, intimate/soft smut, mild bratty reader, slight angst, light humor/teasing, established relationship and life in jackson, joel being emotional AND vulnerable, SARAH MENTION that needs a whole TW i swear

word count: 3,884

a/n: congrats to pedro on this role and welcome new fans to tlou!! <spoilers> tlou2 isnt entirely canon in my version bc our man survives abby and her bullshit so we can all be happy here; but check out my series following the first tlou game with slow burn and other fun tropes here on ao3!

read on ao3 here!

Bandit attacks were on the rise again, always spiking before winter starts and at the tail end of it. You had been pulling nearly nonstop shifts at the wall and scouting nearby. Joel noticed how tired you were getting and tried to convince Tommy and Maria to give you less time on rotation. You thanked him heavily for it but if there was one thing you were good at, it was keeping those you loved safe.

The rifle was heavy in your hands, your thighs warmed by your signature dual handguns there, you were armed to the brim but it did nothing considering the visibility was poor. It was raining on and off since the two of you began your shift but as you neared the small town, it had gotten heavier as you got closer to the last stop on the scouting trail.

Beside you, Joel had been quiet nearly the entire time since the two of you left Jackson and each time you tried to ask him if he was okay, he shrugged you off. It wasn’t unusual for the man, he was a rather private person despite the many many months the two of you had been together.

The one thing that warned you something was wrong was a conversation the two of you had only last night. For the first time ever, Joel spoke of a memory between him and Sarah, the daughter he lost over twenty years ago, of how she would banter with him and keep him on his toes. He smiled while telling you a couple stories of her but fell into a tense silence afterwards that seeped well into today and you figure his silence has to do with it.

Your horses came to a stop in the garage of the safehouse as the two of you jumped down. “I’ll shut it,” you offered quietly as you lowered the garage door to keep the horses safe and warm away from the harsh chill of the winds and rain. Joel gave a grunt of confirmation and he opened the inside door to enter the house, shaking his head a bit to rid his hair of some of the dampness.

As the garage door shuttered gently to the ground, you turned to follow Joel up to the third floor of the safehouse and gave a firm pat against your horse as you walked by. Joel had already begun turning on the small lamps that were sparsely laid around the stairwell to make sure you didn’t trip. This was one of the few three story homes that were still viable despite how broken everything was inside. The walls still had some insulation but the dust and debris were stark reminders of everything that had been lost since the cordyceps virus took the world by storm. 

When you reached the landing, your stomach was in knots, Joel’s behavior wasn’t unusual per say but he was rarely like this with you on scout missions, often being more in the moment with you than his usual reserved self. Being outside of Jackson, the two of you had to communicate in order to stay alive, everybody did. It was the only means to survival but his behavior was beginning to worry you more and more.

You removed the rifle from your shoulder then leaned against the doorframe of the master bedroom, watching as Joel signed in both your names on the sheet on the desk that had been pulled in the room. He sighed heavily and turned to face you, “I don’t think we’ll make it back to Jackson anytime soon with the rain.”

“You’re probably right.” You pushed off from the doorframe and shrugged off your backpack, reaching for the long-range radio. You shifted it in your hands before clicking it on.

“Base, this is Athena’s Mark, please be advised we are hunkering down at the last checkpoint. Rain is too heavy to travel. Over.”

After a couple moments passed, you heard the tell-tale sign of a response with static then a click before Maria’s voice rang out. “Athena’s Mark, your message has been received. Notify Base if there’s any sightings out there. Stay safe you two, over and out.”

You looked up from the radio in your hands and saw Joel leaning against the desk with his arms wrapped in front of his chest. He looked at you and you gave him a soft smile before fully entering the room and setting your weapons and backpack down beside the large bed that was still in rather good condition all these years later and sitting on it.

“Y’know you never told me why your code name was Athena’s Mark,” he asked from behind you, watching as you began to unlace your boots.

You smiled as you recalled the memories. “When I was still running with the Fireflies I would sneak over to the Humanities department and steal some of the abandoned books from the offices. One of the rooms belonged to a Greek historian and I found their book on mythology,” you explained without looking up. “By the time I arrived in Jackson, I still had a few of those books in my possession. One day Maria and I got drunk and she called me Athena as a joke but the name stuck with me on missions.”

You laid the unlaced boots on the floor and laid down in the bed, listening to the rain patter against the roof and windows, drowning out all the outside noise. “She said I looked like a goddess of war when I had blood on me, fighting to protect Jackson.” You threw a hand behind your head and stared at the ceiling before continuing. “If the world hadn’t gone to shit, I’d like to think that’s what I would have done with my life. Become a historian or something.”

“I think I would have liked to see you like that,” Joel said in his gruff voice. You smiled at his words.

“What would you have done?”

“I was a carpenter, and even wanted to start my own business. Work was shit to come by but it paid the bills.”

You smiled, remembering all of his wood carvings in the spare bedroom of his house. “If bills weren’t an issue back then, what would you have wanted to do,” you prompted instead.

“I wanted to be a singer but with Sarah and all,” he trails off. You remembered him admitting this once, forever ago but now the candor feels different because he said her name.

Sarah.

You sit up from the bed and look at him, the broad strong man he is, looks like he’s a million miles away. His eyes are unfocused and his face looks conflicted. You get up and take tentative steps towards your boyfriend. “Joel?”

He looks up at you and unfurls his arms from his chest, instead opening them up at you. You walk to him a bit more confidently and walk straight into his embrace as he wraps his arms around your frame. He buries his face into the crook of your neck while you encompass him and rest one of your hands on the nape of his neck, your fingers gently dancing in his dark hair.

“I love you,” he says, his voice hoarse and thick with emotion. His arms wrap around you tighter, pulling you closer into him. “I think she would have liked you.”

You try to pull back a little to look into his eyes but his grip only tightens around you, refusing to let you budge. “I think I would have liked her too, Joel.”

For a man of few words, the ones he spoke have taken your heart by storm. The two of you have been together for a while but the intimacy between you has rarely been like this.

He stays like this for a few more minutes, composing himself. You play with his hair with one hand and the other draws random circles across his back. Silently telling him you’re there for him. After these moments pass, Joel pulls his head back from the crook of your neck to start leaving a trail of kisses there, his beard leaves a scratchy but familiar burn across your skin.

Without using words, he’s telling you how much he loves you, how much he cares, how much it pains him when you’re not together, and you bask in it. “Joel,” you whine as his kisses suddenly shift to small sucks and bites on the sensitive skin on your neck.

“Come here,” he demands slowly, finally bringing his lips to yours.

As the two of you kiss, he tangles his fingers in your hair, his other hand kneading the flesh on your ass. Joel has you melting in his hands as your worries fade. You figure today was rough on him and you’re more than happy running away from the anxiety.

The two of you do this dance with each other's lips until he pushes off the desk, advancing to his full height towering over you. He doesn’t let you break the kiss instead he presses harder into you deepening it.

The more he wordlessly asks, the more you feel like you’re drowning in him, his scent, his touch.

Joel places both of his hands on your hips as he pushes you backwards, walking you to the bed. The backs of your knees hit it and you stumble a little but his sturdy warm hands keep you from falling down. He breaks the deep kiss the two of you were sharing, both just slightly out of breath but heavily disheveled. A shuddering intake of breath and he leans his forehead on yours, his eyes closed. “Will you have me?”

“Yes,” you sigh against him. “Please.”

Just as you slightly beg, any worried thoughts you had were whisked away as he removed your denim jacket from your body. His large calloused hands worked their way back up to your head, his fingers getting tangled in your hair, gently pulling you back so your neck was exposed.

He gently laid kisses up and down your jaw, taking sweet time and care with you.

Your hands drifted up his torso, unbuttoning his soaked red and black flannel. Once the last button popped, you moved your hands across the expanse of his chest, pushing both his flannel and brown coat off him.

A deep groan rises from Joel’s throat, “Easy now.”

He takes a step back and fingers at the hem of your shirt, pulling it off your body. You rush a little and put your hands behind your back, undoing your bra. Joel watches you silently as you discard the article to the side of the bed where your shirt lay on the floor with his.

His hands return to your body, working themselves at your jeans and he pulls them down, gently easing your leg out of each pant leg. He’s being so gentle with you, being so vulnerable and soft.

You stand in front of him as he remains kneeling in front of you, still in the position he was when he removed your jeans. He leans forward and rests his head on your stomach and you feel his breath over your panties.

“May I,” he asks, fiddling with the elastic waistband.

Your fingers catch in his hair as he pulls back, looking you in the eye when you grant him permission, “Yes.”

His eyes study you as he tentatively pulls your panties down, letting them fall. He comes back against your skin, kissing from the tops of your thighs and makes his way upwards across your stomach, between the valley of your breast, your chest, and neck, before finally coming back and kissing you on the lips.

“Get on the bed for me, will you?”

“Uh-huh,” you mumble, lost in this tender moment with your lover.

Naked and kneeling on the bed, Joel fixes his stare on you, taking his time to unbutton his belt then jeans. His eyes trail over your body, watching as you begin to squirm under his watch.

He pushes forward and kneels on the bed before maneuvering himself to lean back against the headrest. He grabs your leg to swing over his thighs to make you straddle him but his hands stay at your waist, keeping you from fully sitting on his clothed cock by giving attention to your breasts, licking and biting gently as he did with your neck not moments before.

“You’re breathtaking.”

A giggle leaves you at his words aligned with feeling overstimulated by the way his mouth and beard felt on your skin. “Joel, please.”

“Settle down, you heathen,” he says between nips and kisses. You feel him smile across your skin as he pulls you down onto the sheets, coming back to your lips to kiss you more and more. His hands encompass your body, roaming up and down the valleys on your skin, completely enamored with you. 

“Make me,” you tease against his lips.

Joel takes this as a challenge and he sits up, leaving you prone against the pillows. He towers over you, his thick fingers dancing gently across your skin, making a winding trail down your body. “Please,” you begged softly.

Joel said nothing as he sank two of his rough fingers into you and laid down between your thighs to suck and lick at your clit. Your hands flew to his shaggy black hair, taking a sharp inhale at the sensations. Joel eats you out nervously, taking pride in the way you moan to the walls of the empty house. Your sharp intakes of breath get lost under the patter of rain against the roof and windows.

“I love you,” he says against your heat. “I love you so fuckin’ much.”

Your breath is already stolen away at the way he fucks you with his mouth and fingers but you’re breathless by the way he admits his love for you. The vulnerability of it makes you come against his tongue.

“That’s my girl, that’s it.”

His approval and praise send you soaring but he doesn’t slow down his efforts, instead going faster. Before you could even come down from the blissful high of an orgasm, another tidal wave is rising again. “Joel, I’m coming again,” you whine.

“Come as many times as you want,”

He leaves another trail of kisses across your stomach as he makes his way back to kiss you on your lips. You can feel your wetness on him, taste yourself on his tongue and you moan into him. 

“Lay down, let me treat you,” you say in a low voice as you try to push Joel against the bed. He leans up and puts his hands on your wrists, stopping you.

“No, tonight is about you.”

“Wha-,” he cuts you off with another opened mouth kiss on your lips, he keeps kissing you down your neck to your left  arm, not stopping until he’s kissing your hand.

“Have I ever told you how pretty you are,” he whispers against your palm. “The first time I saw you, I fell for you. You had your gun pointed right at me, coulda killed me.”

“I’m glad I didn’t.”

He huffs, hot breath hitting your hand. “I sure as hell am too.”

He drops your hand and shifts on the bed, removing the last piece of cloth covering his erect cock, “I think I woulda let you toss my ass around that first day I laid eyes on you, if I’d known then what I know now.”

“You almost didn’t let me go with you, remember,” you tease.

“Would’ve been the biggest regret of my damn life, sweetheart.” He drops his boxers to the floor, not taking his eyes off you.

“Tell me again, Joel.”

He line’s himself up with you, “I’m glad I found you.” He gently thrusts only the head of his cock into you and pulls out. “I’m glad you never put up with my bullshit.” He repeats his movements but pushes a little more into your wet cunt. “You’re so goddamn beautiful.” Finally he pushes himself all the way in, eliciting a sharp whine from you. “Fuck, I’m so lucky.”

Your lover pushes back your thighs, allowing him to fuck you deeply. His movements stir that insatiable beast inside you, constantly lingering for more and more pleasure.

He sinks harder and faster into you as his warm hands grasp your hips, his eyes trained on the way your soaked pusst takes him so deeply. He’s locked on the sight of the way the two of you are connected just as how you are mesmerized by watching him.

“Do you feel as good as I do, darlin’?”

You respond by squeezing around his cock, “You feel so good in me.”

It was like he got a second wind by the way he fucks you even harder than before. You throw your head back as you feel the familiar rumble in your abdomen and you squeeze your legs around him, not allowing him to pull out further. Joel surprises you by using two fingers to rub tight circles against your clit. 

You bite down on your lip to try and contain the coming moan but fail. He feels too good in you, on top of you. His scent invades your mind bringing you to the ultimate climax. Your head is tossed back and a throaty loud moan is released into the air by you.

“Joeljoeljoel,” you plead, coming again against him, your legs spread so far to allow him to penetrate you deeper. Your orgasm rolls through you like waves and your body lifts in response, searching for more, more, more. 

He continues to pound harshly into you, not swaying in pace. “You’re so beautiful when you come around me, feels heavenly too,” he moans above you. The hand he had tangled in your hair moves to your jaw, his thumb caressing your bottom lip as you sigh, coming down from your high.

Joel’s thrusts soon turn erratic and sloppy as he chases his own high, you hear a deep growl rise from his throat. “Fuck, shit,” he breathes, pulling out of you swiftly, pouring himself over your stomach.

You reach up and thread your fingers in his hair, pulling him up for a kiss. You praise, “Good boy.” 

Vulnerable, Joel laughs and sits up on his knees to look down at you. Basking in your afterglow with remnants of his love smeared across the expanse of your stomach that reflected in the soft glow from the lamps and setting sun. He fingers his own hair with both hands, sweeping his messy locks back. 

He gives you an indecipherable look that he hides by shifting off the bed and rummaging through his backpack insearch of a rag to clean you with. He returns and does his usual routine while you lie on the bed, feeling warm and safe.

He returns to the bed and you crawl on top of him, seeking to add his warmth to yours to fight away the rainy chill. His arms wrap around your back, holding you close. Refusing to let you move away.

Together, the both of you came down from your blissful highs, your breaths synchronizing into calm and slow inhales and exhales. You laid your head on his shoulder, dancing your fingers along his chest drawing nonsensical designs. The two of you laid like that for a while, you listened as his headbeat fluctuated from steady to rapid and back as if he was working himself up. Just before you open your mouth to ask if he was alright, he took a sharp inhale.

“I’ve been thinkin’,” he starts.

“Oh, no. Nothing good comes from you thinking,” you laugh, hoping to ease his mind.

Joel squeezes your hip and pulls you closer, “Hey now, none of that shit.” You laugh a little more at teasing him before he takes another sharp inhale as he continues. “As I was sayin’, I know this isn’t conventional, hell, none of this is conventional,” he gestures wildly in the air, “but I was wonderin’ if you’d do me some kind of honor and make me your husband.”

This knocks the breath out of you, more than the wonderful dick down he just gave you. You lean up and face him, trying to make eye contact but his stubbornness doesn’t let him take his gaze off of the ceiling.

“Joel, are you serious,” you ask.

He furrows his brow before letting go of your body and getting up from the bed. You’re about to start protesting when you see him reach for his own backpack and pull out a wooden box before he sits back on the bed and stares at it hard.

“Y’know I was married before. Back then. I never wanted to do it again, especially not in this world. But then I met you. That shit don’t compare to how much I love your ass. You’re smart, you keep this old man in check, and most of all,” he looks at you, “we don’t get to take life for granted any more. Not when every time we leave Jackson could mean we don’t make it back alive. I want to marry you in every meaningful way, even if you are a goddamn brat.”

As he says this, your eyes fill with tears and you sit up on the bed, facing him. “Is that why you’ve been so quiet today?”

He nods once, “What? You make me fuckin’ nervous.”

You smile wide and lay your hands on his, over the box. “I love you, Joel Miller, you stubborn old bastard. Now gimme the damn ring”

Joel lets out a sharp laugh at your words and lets a smile hang on his lips. He opens the box and hands it to you where you see a beautiful silver ring with a delicate floral design. A gasp leaves you as you take it in, how intricate and ornate it looks.

“Talked to the blacksmith and got it made for you especially,” he explains.

You take the ring from the box to admire it closer before Joel takes it from you and places it on your ring finger. “You had Gustavo make this for me?”

“I told him your favorite flowers and he did the rest.”

You’re too stunned to speak by his admission. He knew of your love and attachments to the old blacksmith which made this ring that much more beautiful in your eyes. You pull the elegant ring out of the box, treating it like it’s fragile before placing it on your finger.

“I’ve been wanting to marry you since you saved my damn life,” he admits. “But it wasn’t until last night when I told you about Sarah without feeling angry or sad when I knew it was time.”

His confession wells tears in your eyes again, his long since passed daughter was always a subject the two of you danced around, even his ex-wife. Him talking about this, about Sarah, it means he’s nearly ready to open up and it means the world to you.

“Does this mean I finally get to teach Ellie how to throw knives now?”

“Absolutely not, what the fuck?”

[biomic]

I've seen Kamen Rider Drive and Lupinranger VS Patranger so I wanted to know your opinions but their is something I don't really understand, can you explain the difference in why Shinnosuke (is that correct?) and Keiichiro (is that correct?) are ethically different even when the are both morally similar?

(apologies to my mutuals who are probably sick of hearing me complain about drive but they asked)

im biased on this one bc keiichiro ended up being my favorite red despite being a cop (the power of kousei yuki’s smile.), so i can’t really say my opinion on this is totally objective or anything. i would completely understand why someone wouldn’t want to engage with either of them given their roles as cop superheroes (although i have no idea how that one person on twitter came to the conclusion that keiichiro was Definitely a fascist but shinnosuke was a great rider)

but for me, it’s mainly a difference in how they and their enemies are framed, especially in regards to the franchises they’re in

(the rest under the cut to spare my followers)

from the start, i think lupat has a leg up on not being too copaganda-y because the lupinrangers are there as the dual protagonists, and really their story is the emotional core of the show. even if the series isn’t gonna address the problem with superhero cops because it isn’t built for that, we’re at least getting another side of things, you know? and their enemies, the ganglers, are pretty standard sentai bad guys. they’re interdimensional invaders whose goal is to take over the universe. dogranio and his subordinates have all the trappings of a classic mobster gang, but at the end of the day they’re still clearly Sentai Monsters. it doesn’t feel as uncomfortable when the patrangers blow them up, because that’s what every other sentai in history does

keiichiro himself starts the series as an angry hothead who’s dead set on capturing the lupinrangers and defeating the ganglers. but as the series progresses, we see that underneath the bluster, he’s a kindhearted guy who cares a lot about other people. this is most evident with his relationship to kairi, where he can see how closed off kairi is and actively wants to make a connection, but you also see it in his interactions with tsukasa, satoru, and even that girl who had a crush on him (my self insert). he’s just Good in a way that’s very genuine, not just following the classic toku hero archetype. he’ll take a laser blast or a deadly amount of poison to protect the public, sure, but he’ll also reach out to you when you’re feeling lost and alone. that does so much to elevate him as a character

and then, you have this scene

the show makes it very clear with this scene that for all the stock keiichiro puts into being a police officer, the thing he cares about most is helping people, and he’ll give up that position the moment it stops being about that. is that enough to justify another cast of toku cops? not for everyone, understandably, but i at least appreciate that lupat makes sure to firmly establish this as keiichiro’s motivation

shinnosuke, on the other hand, doesn’t have this kind of depth to me, and it makes his role as a cop all the more problematic (for lack of a better word). shinnosuke’s version of Good is much more in line with the basic toku hero archetype, and aside from some peter parker-esque lines early on in the series, drive doesn’t do much to develop him beyond that, so he doesn’t have a lot to work off of besides Cop. he doesn’t have those quieter human moments that make keiichiro shine as a person beyond his badge. shinnosuke doesn’t feel driven by an innate desire to help people, but by wanting to live up to his dead cop dad. it’s harder to latch onto in comparison

the biggest issue, however, is how the roidmudes are portrayed. the ganglers are your stock sentai baddies, but kamen rider is known for having more nuanced takes on its villains, and that’s technically true of the roidmudes. they’re not soulless conquerors, they’re robots who’ve been abused and abandoned by their creators, and want to take back humanity for themselves. the problem is nobody in the main cast seems to be put off by wasting these sentient beings anyway. giving them this sympathetic portrayal while still having them get kicked to death every week by our cop protagonists ends up feeling a LOT more iffy than what was clearly intended. no, that’s not to directly compare fictional robots to real marginalized groups (nobody in our world is crafting evil scifi schemes to get back at humanity bc of police brutality), but it just puts the usual “blow up the monster” formula of the typical tokusatsu series under a really uncomfortable lens. we see glimpses of non-evil roidmudes in the show, but this doesn’t cause any of the protagonists to question what they’re doing in the grand scheme of things. instead it just comes off like these are one-off fluke cases compared to the rest of roidmudes who need to be destroyed no matter what. the show ends with every roidmude dead, and we’re supposed to feel sad at this great tragedy, but it’s undercut by the fact that it could’ve been completely avoided had any of our heroes stopped for one second and thought, “hey, maybe we could like. capture these guys instead of killing literally all of them? you know, like cops are theoretically supposed to do?”

and then you have all these little things in drive that build up over time into something that just became impossible to ignore for me. nobody ever questioning krim despite being shady as hell and abandoning heart in a lab with fucking banno of all people, shinnosuke letting that one ex-cop who put people in danger to solve an old case off the hook despite never giving a roidmude the same opportunity, the police department putting together a roidmude HIT LIST. and on top of everything else, the series constantly shouts at the audience about how this is what Kamen Rider “really is”, because ishinomori’s anti-fascist roots totally gel with a basic ass cop show right? it all just piles onto one another into this nasty, uncomfortable mess, unintentional as it may be. nothing in lupat comes close to how bad drive got with its cop shit

tl;dr in the simplest terms, keiichiro feels like a Red Ranger who also happens to be a cop, while shinnosuke feels like a Cop who also happens to be a kamen rider, and the latter is a much harder concept to reconcile with

[gienvs3000w22]

Nature and me

My relationship with nature is deeply rooted in my early childhood experiences. My parents introduced me to various outdoor activities, such as mountain biking, trail running, hiking, paddleboarding and kayaking. They also taught me to sit and enjoy nature, we would often sit by the beach and enjoy the sounds of the waves and the scenery. My parents ultimately sparked my initial interest in nature, since then I’ve met people that I can share my love of nature with.

Me, 7 years old, and my sister, 5 years old, climbing a tree.  

As I grew up I started doing expeditions in nature with different organizations, such as sea kayaking and hut-based backcountry skiing with Outward Bound Canada. Doing these, I’ve met many people along the way that have taught me so much about the conservation of nature. For example, during my kayaking expedition in Tofino, BC a passing kayaker and I were talking about the ongoing wolf and human interaction issue that Vancouver Island was facing. We were bouncing conservation ideas off each other and it was interesting to hear a different outlook on the situation. My appreciation for nature continues to evolve and expand the more I learn about it and the more experiences I have.

Day 1 of our 21 day kayaking expedition on Vancouver Island. We found this abandoned dock in an inlet and a colony of seals came up and were checking us out. 

The audience aspect of nature interpretation resonated with me because when I worked at the Calgary Zoo as an intern in their outreach education department, I came across many interpreters that worked at the zoo. They delivered programs to visitors, such as games, theater presentations, corporate events, school trips, camps, and day programs. It was amazing to watch them run their programs because depending on their audience they would bring up different information and present their info differently for each group.

A Cross River Gorilla at the Calgary Zoo interacting with the nurture elements in her enclosure.    

They ran many corporate breakfasts that companies would come to and play a game about the various animals in the zoo, such as a scavenger hunt, then they would learn about how their company could implement practices that could help with conservation. In contrast, school groups came in and learned about the zoo and their conservation efforts in different countries, they also got a tour of the zoo’s animal hospital where the interpreter told stories about the different surgeries that occurred. In addition, they also ran an overnight program for kids where they learned about nocturnal animals and slept in sleeping bags beside various animals’ enclosures. I think being aware of your audience is very important, as it helps to schedule your programs accordingly and deliver the best possible information to your group so that they too may get inspired and enjoy nature just as much as you!

The Nature Blog, 

Giuli

[quillyfied]

Mega Good Omens Fic Rec Post 4

I LIIIIIIIVE

99 titles on this list again and once again we have an extra category, and I am pumped that I finally got this one done! Got a lot of holiday overflow but suck it up bc here it comes. As a refresher, the categories are: Jaunts through History/Canon, South Downs, Post-Apocalypse, Bus Ride/Night Before/Heaven and Hell, AU/UA, Soft, Before (exclusive to this list and List 2, meaning takes place almost exclusively Before Canon, as in The Fall/Creation/etc), Touch-Starved/Body Worship/Wings, Bonus, and H/C /Whump/BAMF. Warnings for gore and explicit material present where applicable. I don’t read smut fics but sometimes more adult material sneaks in there.

Mega GOmens Fic Rec Post MASTER

PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF A LINK IS BROKEN OR IF I MISATTRIBUTED AN AUTHOR.

JAUNTS THROUGH HISTORY/CANON

1. You are a Call to Motion – @freyjawriter24 (G, the one where Aziraphale would like to dance but doesn’t. Very sweet and soft and kinda sad, follows Aziraphale through history wanting to dance (specifically with Crowley) until he finally gets to. The pining is so good, y’all.)

2. I love you because I know no other way than this – kriswithakay (T, the one where Aziraphale and Crowley use the excuse of being spectacularly drunk to get in little touches and kisses throughout history. This one is so sad and so full of yearning, the whole time you just wish they would face each other sober. It’s so quiet and beautiful.)

3. A Simple Thing – Sir_Bedevere (T, the one where Aziraphale gives out forehead kisses and Crowley is jelly about it. Continuing with the trend of being achingly sad and tender, this fic packs a wallop in that department. Forehead kisses aren’t always given at the happiest of times, after all. Also Crowley continues his stint as a pine tree and it’s painful.)

4. The Problem with Saints – Lurlur, D20Owlbear, robynthemagpie_writes, Wyvernquill (T and G, the series where it’s Catholic but funny. This series is weird and it’s hilarious and I hope there will be more, because this series goes through some fairly niche Catholic saint stories and the retelling of them featuring the Ineffable Husbands is hysterical. I don’t even want to tell y’all too much about it, just go read them and laugh with me, because they’re beautiful.)

5. When The Things You’ve Planned Need a Helping Hand – Proskenion (T, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale run into each other in the 1920s. Flapper!Crowley being a lounge singer is the centerpiece of this one, which is delightful enough, but throw in some canon-typical friction over the Arrangement and a chance for Aziraphale to come to the rescue, it’s a lovely little romp that has just the right edge of emotional tenderness to take the sting out of said earlier friction. Or add to it. Just depends on your point of view, really.)

6. The Serpent and the Lady – @summerofspock (T, the one where Aziraphale is Lady Fair and Crowley is competing in a tournament for his favor. Has female-presenting Aziraphale still using male pronouns bc that’s just what he’s comfortable with, and definitely, definitely has that Disney animated Robin Hood flavor. This fic scratches so many of my itches—Aziraphale in a dress, Crowley being a dashing BAMF, chivalric courtship, swordplay, armor, hand-sewn tokens of favor. A delicious little diversion, very worth it a++++.)

7.  Sunlight and Water – @themoonmothwrites (M, the one where Aziraphale is a flirty drunk and Crowley has to be the sensible one. M for some racy elements but not explicit. This one is fun but then takes a direct left into Feels Town, which, when coupled with @cassieoh’s art, just makes the whole experience dreadfully unfair. A gorgeous little story, and the ending is just *chef’s kiss*.)

8. Sloth – libbyfay (T, the one where Aziraphale checks in on Crowley after the fourteenth century. This one is a delight, and includes Aziraphale recommending The Canterbury Tales, as well as a back-and-forth about depression versus Sloth and a lot of talking around feelings. Must absolutely be read in conjunction with the next rec in the list, which is something of a continuation. )

9. I have an aungel which that loveth me – HolRose (NR, the one where Crowley follows up on The Canterbury Tales recommendation from Aziraphale and it gets a bit deep. A continuation of the previous rec, and oof, y’all. This one gets hella sad, which hits pretty hard after Crowley laughing his head off about the funny bits in Canterbury Tales. There’s also Feelings, which are desperate and tender and guys they don’t even kiss but it’s still breathtaking. They love each other so much.)

10. (heaven is) a place on earth – rattatatosk (G, the one where Aziraphale nearly loses his bookshop. This takes place during the deleted scene from the 1800 opening of the bookshop, and has oodles of Aziraphale building himself a home and being devastated about nearly losing it. Not a nesting fic in the traditional sense (meaning it isn’t about building a home for himself and Crowley, it’s definitely just for him), but for fans of happy Aziraphale being fluffy and content in his bookshop, here you go.)

11. No other news to report – @argentconflagration (T, the one where Aziraphale is torn up about an assignment. Y’all want Crowley interfering in angelic plans? Y’all want tenderness and holding? Y’all want Aziraphale letting himself be bested? Then stay a while, because this one is a heart-wrecker. Featuring a very sick and very devout child, and female-presenting Crowley.)

12. These Things Were Here – @MajorEnglishEsquire (T, the one where Crowley resorts to snake form to deal with his feelings. This one is long and it’s emotional; Crowley reverts down to being a snake whenever he gets especially bad assignments from Hell, and it’s about him and Aziraphale finding balance and harmony between themselves when Crowley is like this. Very sweet and very tender and very sad.)

13. Crossing Paths – @amuseoffyre (G, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale meet every few years. This is your typical “through the ages” fic but it’s Fyre writing it, and that means it has so much humor and heart and history in it it’s practically like reading deleted scenes of the show. The boys are so in-character and their love is subtle and slow-boiling but there. Highly recommended, absolutely.)

14. apples (per the author’s intention) – @lwtis (T, the one where apples is a recurring theme in their friendship. This one is hilarious and it’s heartfelt and I quite enjoyed it; the bits where Aziraphale is absolutely convinced this is a temptation of some kind are particularly juicy (not unlike Crowley’s backside in a certain pair of trousers). Crowley absolutely knows how to beat a joke to death and he does it with style.)

SOUTH DOWNS

15. up in our bedroom, after the war – @rufeepeach (T, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale need to get away to process things. In this one, they more vacation to the South Downs rather than move there, but them working through the awkwardness of Armageddon’s fighting and gently taking their relationship to its natural conclusion is beautiful and good. It isn’t urgent or desperate, just quiet and understated and organic. A lovely piece.)

16. Somewhere Alive and Green – @thetunewillcome (T, the one where they make a necessary move. This one is quiet and reflective, as a good South Downs fic should be, and though it’s short I think it’s wonderfully healing. Very good.)

POST-APOCALYPSE

17. England’s pleasant pastures seen – @squidsticks (T, the one where Aziraphale has an appointment with a book collector and Crowley offers to drive. Y’all it’s so sweet and, dare I say, uplifting, how much they love each other. Someone drops the “husband” word at some point and someone else has a joyful fit over it and I bet you can tell who does what. There’s also a lot of teasing and the kind of easy banter that comes with knowing someone for so long. V. good.)

18. you have built nests from all my bark – @mutalune (T, the one where Crowley is nesting as an aggressive courting maneuver. This fic is so much fun. Highlights include Michael thinking Aziraphale must have a special connection with the Almighty and trying to emulate his lifestyle in order to have one herself, Crowley getting irrationally jealous over it all and constructing the finest nest known to reality (including cupholders, which I now also want in all my pillow piles), Dagon looking for a very similar thing from Crowley that Michael wants from Aziraphale, and lots of delicious humor and unexpected character interactions. I highly recommend this one if you’re having a bad day.)

19. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – @divisionten (T, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale find out how to get around Heaven and Hell and it’s through summons. More of an anthology than a solid story, and it’s such a fascinating universe, liberally layered with overcoming trust issues and adjusting to being in a loving relationship, and it’s Good Food y’all, trust me on this.)

20. That’s Not Funny – cyankelpie (G, the one where they’re exceptionally drunk and Crowley says I Love You and Aziraphale thinks he’s joking. This one is sharper than expected but it makes the moment where they finally have everything out in the open so much sweeter. Lots of protective Crowley and very confused Aziraphale.)

21. Stars – @lyricwritesprose (G, the series that’s a spinoff of Tales of the Them that’s about Crowley and the stars, ostensibly. It’s a spinoff bc it deals with Aziraphale’s point of view, too, and their careful navigation of a complicated subject in Crowley’s history. Very soft and bittersweet.)

22. In Action How Like an Angel – PinkPenguinParade (T/NR/M, the series where Aziraphale stumbles into making some useful wards and then Crowley gets taken. Rated high for safety but the violence is truly not that bad and the sex jokes are very mild. Come for cool worldbuilding, stay for BAMF!Aziraphale, and have some extra bits of Anathema and Newt being very good and helpful friends on top!)

23. Let’s share a drink! – @nohaijiachi (G, the one where Aziraphale gets horribly discorporated and gets his body back fairly quickly thanks to quick thinking and Gabriel being easy to gross out. This one is a bit gross, fair warning, but it’s not too graphic, and it’s hilarious besides. Peak Bastard Aziraphale Hours, this one is. If you like reading about Gabriel getting messed with, welcome to the party.)

24. Metastable – MrsCaufield (Not Rated, the one where Aziraphale is having an existential crisis post-Armageddon. Featuring lots of miscommunication, some mild jealousy, and Aziraphale figuring himself out, which is always lovely to read about. Misunderstandings and two supernatural beings being grossly in love, can’t get better than this!)

25. Taking Steps – @joyandotherstories (G, the one where Aziraphale decides he wants to take salsa dancing lessons and Crowley agrees. Oh, y’all. You like pining? You like awkward touching? Do you perhaps like…faked relationships turning into real relationships? You’d best have a seat and dive into this one, because the payoff is many-layered and just phenomenal. The pride in these idiots not only learning to dance but learning to be open about how much they love each other is so good.)

BUS RIDE/NIGHT BEFORE/HEAVEN AND HELL

26. Introspection and Starlight – d20owlbear (T, the one where Aziraphale has a breakdown and is hold. I seem to have a special taste for Aziraphale breaking down, and this one is Hecking Delicious—it’s a slow break but it’s so achingly tender and emotional, especially once sleepy Crowley gets on the scene. Apologies are made and two very tired beings just hold each other at the end of it all and it’s so good.)

27. The Longest Night – @charlottemadison42 (T, the series where Crowley and Aziraphale are taking slow and important steps. Three fics in the series so far, and each one captures their hilarious and effortless dynamic so well while still paying homage to their quiet love. There are so many cool details to explore, ESPECIALLY in the bodyswap fics, and overall they are a really fun and thoughtful look at how the Night the World Didn’t End could’ve gone. OH AND A FOURTH ONE HAS GONE UP WHILE I WAS WORKING ON THIS LIST and you guyssss so much good content about Crowley’s (Presumably) Foot Thing and Shoes, omg. A treasure.)

28. Last Confessions and Hopeless Loves – @girlwholovesherwords (G, the one where they very neatly and annoyingly slot into their new dynamic. This one is so matter-of-fact and tongue-in-cheek I about died laughing, which is amazing given that it’s less than 3k words. A very good little egg.)

29. Choose Your Faces Wisely – @cheeseandonioncrisps (G, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale set the record straight on how they portrayed each other. This is a fun one based on the very good meta bits floating around (which have been bolstered by Neil Gaiman’s commentary in the DVDs I will have you know) that their performances in each other’s skins is how they see each other and how different that is from how they see themselves and guys it’s so good, I wanted this conversation to last forever and ever.)

30. and I just want to love you, to love you, to love you well – BrinneyFriday (T, the one where apologies are made and kisses are had. Guys it’s so soft. Oh my gosh you guys the tenderness is unreal. There’s Crowley falling asleep in Aziraphale’s lap and there’s deciding they’re stronger together and guys pls it’s so good just read it pleASE—)

AU/UA

31. A Curious Case of Miracles on Marlborough Street – @nihilnovisubsole (M, the one where there might be such a thing as too much of a good thing. M for sexual humor and situations but nothing all that graphic. Y’all it’s the “angels accidentally cast miracles when they orgasm” crack given the serious treatment it deserves, and this fic also wins awards for its brilliant OC angel Sabrael, Keeper of Miracles. The icing on the cake? Beautiful artistic accompaniment to go along with the brilliant writing. Just delightful, a whole entire treat. An afternoon delight indeed.)

32. Too Much of a Good Thing – @yamisnuffles (G, T, the series where Crowley and Aziraphale are both angels and things are a bit different. It’s not fair that yamisnuffles is a distinctive and wonderful artist, they have to be a good writer, too, and be terribly talented at telling a good story. Crowley’s character arc and emotional growth as a disgraced angel cursed to live as a snake for a while is fabulous, and it’s only ramping up, so jump on the train now! It’s a good train!)

33. Measures of Freedom – KazLangston (T, the one where Crowley is an acquisition made by one Mr. AZ Fell. This is one of those “turn left” AUs where they’re still an angel and a demon, they just didn’t meet in Eden. Instead, they meet because Crowley gets himself captured and Aziraphale doesn’t think it’s safe to let a real, dangerous demon loose. Their relationship is very combative and antagonistic but it softens; the emotional journey they go on from clear enemies to clear friends is fantastic.)

34. Somewhere Down Below – jane_with_a_j (T, the series where Aziraphale is captured as an incentive for Crowley to jump masters in Hell. There’s lots of hurt!Aziraphale in this one, as tends to happen to an angel captive in Hell, and an excruciating amount of pining that doesn’t so much counterbalance the angst so much as spice it up enormously. There’s intrigue, there’s a daring escape, it’s radical, folks.)

35. How it Happens – @captainqueernerd (T, the one that’s based on a comic and both are DELIGHTFUL. The fic here is an extension of the comic and so sweet, oh my goodness how sweet it is. The best bits aren’t even when they cover the comic’s events—it’s AFTER that is the real treat. I’ll hand out brownie points to anyone who can find the sentence that made me put down my laptop before I accidentally chucked it while laughing too hard.)

36. mors certissima – @northerntrash (T, the Hades and Persephone AU where Aziraphale is Hades and Crowley is Persephone and they’re all doing their best. This is a super fun one, beautifully written and lovely original lore that has Aziraphale really coming into his own as a god of death and what that means for the wider pantheon and the world. And IT’S ABOUT TO GO DOWN where the fic is at the moment, I’m pumped for the conclusion!)

37. It’s All Greek to Me (that is, Ineffable) – @ulspi (UR, the series where Crowley and Aziraphale are cast in different mythological roles in each fic. This one’s gorgeous, you guys, haunting and romantic and each fic has a distinct flavor that is impossibly good. A beautiful way to spend a rainy afternoon, in my opinion.)

38. The Princess and the Serpent – @longforgottenhymn (G, the one where Aziraphale takes Crowley to King Arthur’s court to get a nobleman off his back and oh no, fake dating becomes real dating, oh no. You think you’re ready for this fic? FOOL. This fic is going to carve you up from the inside out and you won’t even be READY for it even if you know it’s coming. This fic is going to promise intimacy and deliver in terrible, terrible tenderness. I am being melodramatic but THIS FIC. THIS FIC IS SO GOOD. This fic is not what I was expecting and it hits HARD because of that.)

39. Wicked dance – pirripipi (T, the one that’s a royal AU with incredible depth and complexity. Listen, what this fic might lack in polish it more than makes up for in flat-out interesting worldbuilding. The characterization is on point and the nonlinear storytelling is very well-handled. And that ending! So triumphant, so utterly joyful. What a joy this fic is! Just wait until you see the Garden of Eden, it’s SPECTACULAR.)

40. The sun doesn’t set on the shoreline – VinWrit (G, the one that’s a selkie and siren AU. This one feels more like it’s being told in microfiction installments and that’s certainly interesting on its own, but it reads like a horror story and it’s chock full of worldbuilding, and the characterization of Crowley especially just breaks my heart right in two. What a great little story.)

41. An Angel’s Hope – @braver-stronger-smarter (M, the one that’s a crossover with the Kiesha’ra book series by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes and it’s delicious AF. Not sure why it’s rated M, but it does deal with a war and the fallout of dealing with constant violence and death. Explains things well enough that you don’t need to have read the Kiesha’ra to understand what’s going on (or, like, if it’s been well over a decade since you last read it…), and the integration of Crowley and Aziraphale into the main plot of these shapeshifter snake and bird cultures is effortless. Can’t wait to see where this one goes (bc even if it just follows the plot of Hawksong, it’s sure to be an exciting ride). (Side note, read the Kiesha’ra, it’s a good series.))

42. By Grace – @seaskystone (G, the one that’s the little soulmate AU that could. Not very long but still highly impactful in my opinion, featuring Crowley and Aziraphale meeting in heaven and knowing right away they’re meant for each other, but canon still happens as it does. Short and bittersweet and pretty.)

43. The Ones Who Walk Away from Nevaeh – @soft-october-night (T, the one that’s the “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” AU none of us ever even knew we needed but heck if we didn’t get it anyway. If you aren’t familiar, “Omelas” is a short story by Ursula K LeGuin that I absolutely believe you must read in order to get the full impact of this and what the author does with the story with regard to our two boys, it’s earth-shattering. Soft-october-night does it again, just goes and makes outstanding AUs that own my entire soul like it ain’t no thing. Completely unfair.)

44. Take the Fall (What’s a Second Time) – @triffidsandcuckoos (T, the one where Crawly does what it says on the tin. This one includes a nice helping of Crowley suffering from chronic pain as a consequence of taking the blame for the apple business, and some sweet care from Aziraphale, who is well aware it’s his fault. An interesting take and a heartwarming story (even if suffering from chronic pain is the pits and there’s no way around that).)

45. forgotten (but not gone) – @writeonclara (T, the one where their memories are taken and Crowley and Aziraphale still manage to stay away from each other for about .04 seconds. This one has some hard edges and it is a harrowing story about accepting others and yourself, and having faith in yourself and your loved one, but the way they can’t keep their hands to themselves when all the stops are pulled out is frankly hilarious and I commend this story whole-heartedly for committing to that.)

46. It’s Not the Years, it’s the Mileage – @moveslikebucky (T, the one that’s an Indiana Jones AU based on @yamisnuffles’ art. You want Aziraphale doing his best in an Indy role while still being an angel? You want Crowley owning a bar and it DOESN’T suck? You want pining and heartache and hilarity? Park it, then, folks, you don’t even need to know the Indiana Jones films to enjoy it (I certainly don’t and I am aware of this failing, thank you).)

47. or the look or the words – @taizi (T, the one where they just keep getting married and it doesn’t stop from happening. Guys they are literally married HUNDREDS OF TIMES throughout history STARTING AT THE ARK. They are literally so soft and so in love and I am beside myself right now, please love yourself and practice some self-care by reading this fic.)

48. Give me a title, I’ll give you my heart – @nohaijiachi (T, the one that’s a human AU based on fanart and it’s great. Single dad Aziraphale with a cautious past, determined son Adam who is gonna get his dad a date if it’s the last thing he does, utterly besotted Crowley who is excellent at being gentle and also a great beta reader…a surprisingly emotional and fun piece, very good.)

49. what if you fall? oh, but my darling, what if i fly? – Doggoos (T, the one where they loved in Heaven and outside interference tore them apart. I LOST THIS FIC AND SPENT FOREVER TRYING TO FIND IT AGAIN. The one detail that kept me going? Crowley (as Raphael) and Aziraphale exchange jewelry before Gabriel sticks his stupid nose in it and the jewelry is visually stunning and emotionally gorgeous. It’s emotional and it’s fraught and there’s erased memories to contend with but holy COW, y’all. They’re so in love.)

50. Snakes and Stones (the Crowley/Aziraphale Human AU) – @deerstalkerdeathfrisbee (G, the series where it’s exactly what it says it is. The opening fic for this series is where literally everyone in Aziraphale’s dorm thinks his boyfriend is made up and Aziraphale has the enormous pleasure of proving them all wrong. It has great Newt characterization and, surprisingly, Gabriel being likeable, though he has to work for it. It’s fun and a little silly and I adore it.)

51. in the arms of the ocean (so sweet and so cold) – robynthemagpie_writes, agent_of_mischief (T, the one where Aziraphale becomes a lighthouse keeper and Crowley is probably a sea monster. This is a horror story and it’s a love story and while reading it kept me awake at night, thinking about it also kept me very much awake at night. I am the world’s biggest chicken and the spoop is real, friends, but more than that, it’s the horrors lurking in Aziraphale’s past (and probably Crowley’s, I have some theories) that are the heartbreaking bit. Not for the faint-hearted, it goes hard and I have a feeling it’s only going to go harder.)

52. i’ve found a way (a way to make you smile) – @fremulon (T, the one that’s an AU of The Office. Requires no knowledge of The Office but I’m sure it helps. This is one I kept putting off and deeply regret doing so (though, on the other hand, waiting so long to read it meant that I caught up the night before the last chapter went up, so HA). Y’all, it’s so funny and so relatable as an adult stuck in a dead-end job I don’t like, and the romance between Aziraphale and Crowley is so simple and so sweet. I just love it and I love this fic and I want you to read it immediately right now.)

53. I Know Places We Won’t Be Found – FangsScalesSkin (T, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale run away together from the Garden of Eden. I have been waiting for someone to write this forever and it’s finally happening. And it’s got such fun worldbuilding, and their interactions are so cute, and I just love them and want them to be okay and to be married forever and ever.)

54. an imitation of the garden of eden – @dyslexiccrowley (T, the one that’s a D&D-inspired AU. Speaking of AUs that come out of hecking nowhere, here’s one! This one is a really fun adventure, and if you thought me turning the Bentley into a horse in several of my fics was fun, this one beats me out by a country mile and I couldn’t be more gleeful about it because THE BENTLEY IS A DRAGON. I could deffo see the dnd elements throughout but the flavor of it is so unique, I thoroughly enjoyed the adventure and the character moments.)

55. Hell is Just a Sauna – @anthonyjcrowiey (T, the one that’s a “Ten Things I Hate About You” AU. I haven’t seen the film (though I have read Taming of the Shrew and I have been on Tumblr long enough to absorb several gifsets), but this fic was still so good and managed to hook me right in regardless of that fact. I can’t wait for it to finish up, we’re on the emotional crux of the plot and it’s tearing me up how it’s been left!)

56. be mine tonight (be mine forever) – @qorktrees (T, the one that’s a literal “fake dating becomes real dating” AU. Human AU, and these idiots I SWEAR. Aziraphale needs a date for the office Christmas party, Crowley is available and bribable, and of course it ends in their ruse becoming the real deal, this is fanfiction for crying out loud. It happens so sweetly, though, you’ve gotta see this.)

57. Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes – @gigglesnortbangdead (T, the one where Heaven and Hell turn enemies into children instead of smiting. Oh, goodness gracious y’all are not ready for this one. You aren’t ready for the way being turned into a child affects an angel or a demon. You aren’t ready for the myriad ways bb!Crowley is gonna tug at your heartstrings. You aren’t ready for the way Aziraphale is when it finally happens to him. You AREN’T READY. This is precisely why you should go read it right now immediately, to see just how unready you really are. You should take care of that at this exact moment.)

58. Ineffably Yours – SecondHandNews (M, the series where Crowley and Aziraphale choose each other and keep choosing each other. Listen to me: this series is the length of several novels. I have only read the first one, after stumbling on a side-story that was really good and not realizing it was a side-story of a bigger series until I’d finished it. I am planning on reading the rest of the series, which is still updating. I am a little terrified at this titan who has managed to write over 360K words since June in this one series alone. The first one absolutely had me biting my nails and rocking back and forth in an anxious haze, and it’s so tender and so beautiful and SO NERVE-WRACKING. Crowley and Aziraphale learn the Rapture is coming and they just…kinda snap, really. Stop avoiding each other, start choosing each other, and all the twists and turns that comes with it. Just. Really outstanding work, I am an anxious mess but it’s good XD)

JUST SOFT

59. Where to Start – @freyjawriter24 (T, the one where Crowley nearly kisses Aziraphale throughout history like A LOT. Guys you wanna feel the pine crushing into your soul? You want to feel that deep ache of wanting to touch so badly but holding back out of sheer desperate force of will? Read this, prepare to have your knees appropriately weakened from the longing.)

60. A Softer Fall – @themoonmothwrites (T, the one that’s the wall shoving but soft. Bury me in this one, boys, my corpse will rest well for eternity, because holy COW the longing and the fear and the reassurances…my heart is a marshmallow now and it’s this fic’s fault.)

61. for the dancing and the dreaming – @une-danse-macabre (G, the one where Aziraphale proposes. Listen I know this entire section of the post is for Soft Fic but this is Softe Fic and I am not joking even a little bit. Crowley desperately deflecting using humor bc he is so overwhelmed? It’s more likely than you think. Read this, it’s a beautiful little shot of humor and romance.)

62. in candlelight, we dance – SaerM (T, the one where they take a shower together. I have a deep and abiding weakness for bathing fic, and even better, it’s not a sex fic! Just two ineffable partners being tender and washing each other and being together. So sweet and good.)

63. A Pile of Pillows – @waffleironbiddingwar (T, the one where Aziraphale seems to have built a nest during a weekend apart. There’s a few cute nesting fics in this here post but this is one of my very favorites; even has some wing grooming, and lots of teasing and kissing. Very cute!)

64. When the Wind Changes – Star_less (G, the one where Crowley makes faces at babies. Listen. LISTEN. You don’t have to personally like kids to go all gooey over how much Crowley seems to like kids, entirely without meaning to. It’s too cute. Someone call the Cute Police.)

65. with adorations, with fertile tears – waywarder (T, the one where there’s an emotional meltdown while watching a high school production of Twelfth Night. So sweet and unsure and awkward, this one; it’s canon-verse, Aziraphale just drags Crowley to a high school production and then proceeds to very nearly have an angelic aneurysm over trying to hold his hand. If you’ve a soft spot for the Ineffable Husbands quoting Shakespeare at each other, welcome to the party, you’ve arrived.)

66. Sleeping Angel – @whatawriterwields (G, the one where Aziraphale is asleep on Crowley’s chest. It should be noted that this writer wields tenderness like a weapon, stiletto right between the ribs to knock all that breath right out of you, which is a much more gruesome descriptor than I probably should’ve used but YOU GUYS CROWLEY TALKS TO AZIRAPHALE IN HIS SLEEP AND IT’S SO SWEET AND I CAN’T BREATHE.)

67. in so many words – @asideofourown (G, the one where Aziraphale has trouble saying “I love you.” This one made me laugh and “aww” in equal measure, but to get you to click on the link and read as fast as I did, Aziraphale says “thank you” the first time Crowley says “I love you” and I DIED.)

68. A First Christmas, Once Again – lalaland666 (G, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale get to celebrate Christmas together. This one has a fun twist on why Aziraphale dislikes the holidays and a really cute Crowley getting excited for them, and I think it’s well worth reading whether or not you find the December holiday season celebratory or not.)

69. (i love you) as you are – @asideofourown (T, the one where Crowley tries to change to be more like Aziraphale in order to keep him and it’s heartbreaking. Listen, this writer is great and more often than not draws me in bc the dialogue is so good, but this one just crushed my heart into pieces, because Crowley is trying SO HARD and he doesn’t have to but doesn’t realize that he doesn’t have to and AUGH.)

70. the commendation – @forineffablereasons (G, the one where Aziraphale’s ring is itself a commendation from Heaven. This one is short and sweet but it GUTS me every time, just over Aziraphale and how much Heaven screwed him over and failed him by making him feel like the failure. Something this short should not hurt me so much AND YET. Crowley makes it better. Obviously.)

71. the other way round – @forineffablereasons (G, the one where Aziraphale lays in Crowley’s lap instead. Listen we all love it when Crowley puts his head in Aziraphale’s lap but this writer has the right of it, we don’t see it nearly enough the other way round and HHHHGK. The tenderness. The softness. It BURNS.)

72. Every Song in Every Key – @impishtubist (T, the one with the seriously misleading summary. I mean this in the best possible way. Crowley being the one to enjoy the holidays is fun enough, but the true meat of this fic came out of nowhere and it hit me square in the squishy bits. One of the tags is “kid fic” for a little bit of a hint but I shan’t spoil it for you, just go read about Crowley being soft.)

73. shed a sweet light – @areyougonnabe (T, the one that’s not anti-holiday so much as a non-holiday holiday fic. That was probably confusing for you BUT IN ESSENCE: Aziraphale has been around too long to get too attached to any particular holiday (plus time passes so differently when you’re immortal), and attracts the ire of holiday influencers. It gets surprisingly dire, and then delightfully Jewish. Has the exact heart that every holiday story hopes for: quiet, enduring love amidst the chaos. A beautiful little thing.)

BEFORE

74. Unexpected Variables – @seaskystone (T, the one where God keeps having to reset the universe. Hands-down the most hilarious fic on the list just by virtue of God’s impending migraine in dealing with Crowley and Aziraphale, who are so incompetent and I love them so much.)

75. Astralphysiastrics – @wortlby2 (T, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale finally talk about Before. This one’s “Before” elements take place in flashbacks but given that they’re a pretty significant portion of the fic, I put it in this category anyway. Guys this one HURTS, but there’s healing in it, too, which is a beautiful balance. Ends nice and fluffy, which is a good landing after the flashbacks are done tossing you about.)

TOUCH-STARVED/BODY WORSHIP/WINGS

76. To Preen a Songbird – @tiger-in-the-flightdeck (T, the one that’s just some good old-fashioned preening, y’all. Prepare for these idiots being silly and bantering and teasing, because the back-and-forth is so good. SO good. So very, very good.)

77. Life Hurts (But Not With You) – Spider_Lilly (T, the series that’s about Aziraphale letting Crowley preen him. This one takes a pretty serious turn and talks about what happens to angels with slightly more realistic-type wings who don’t have help preening. Fair warning, there’s a bit of grossness with impacted preen glands (which are oil glands) and if you are squeamish I would tread carefully, bc it can get a bit disturbing when Crowley has to help deal with them, but if you like realistic wing care, this is the series for you. Also love. Also pining. Also they’re kind of the same story from different perspectives and the one from Aziraphale’s perspective is SO MUCH WORSE EMOTIONALLY. A good bit of catharsis fic, for sure.)

78. Descent Suspension – @onheil-ferguson (M, the one where Crowley could use some tying up. M for shibari but it’s nonsexual. Book!verse. I apparently have a thing for nonsexual BDSM and bondage, because this fic absolutely took my breath away. It’s very calm and understated and dignified, just feels quiet. A beautiful piece, for sure.)

79. The End (of the Beginning) or A Not-So-Nice or Accurate Guide to Sex on a Stick, By Anthony J. Crowley, Demon. – @fantasticallyobscure (T, the one where Crowley has been trying sex with all the wrong people. Not explicit at all, just has a lot of discussions about sex, which can be off-putting but now you know going in (if the title didn’t give it away). Basically Crowley keeps trying sex with people who have his same physical build and loses his appetite for it, until he and Aziraphale finally get their heads on straight and Aziraphale wants to try it. Some hilarious metaphors and a lot of adorable Aziraphale being jealous, which is a trip. A wonderful little romp, for sure!)

80. You Are Unbreaking (Though Quaking) – @lesbianscrowleys (T, the one where Aziraphale works through his knee-jerk reactions to being touched. A very good little snapshot of healing and working through things while communicating with your partner, and there’s a fun side-story about accepting who you are that underscores the main theme rather well. Crowley is so good and patient and Aziraphale is trying so hard.)

81. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affectations – forthegreatergood (T, the one where there are discussions of religious ecstasy versus regular ecstasy. This one involves more or less orgasming via manipulation of miraculous brain chemistry, and it’s a little bit funky, but you get in the vibe of the fic pretty quickly, I think, the writer is good about setting the tone. And it’s adversarial as all heck, this is a legitimate disagreement Crowley and Aziraphale are having and you feel every weighty second of it. It’s sensual, I think, but not necessarily erotic, and that’s a hard needle to thread and they do it very well.)

82. 451°F – @purple-suits (G, the one after the church bombing where Aziraphale wants so badly it hurts. Guys, oh you guys, the pure need in this one isn’t even really sexual but it HURTS, it is so physical and raw and achey. It absolutely put about five more aches under my skin just from secondhand need. Oh, y’all. Oh beans.)

BONUS

83. Chaos Theory – @themoonmothwrites (T, the series that’s about Adam hitting on Warlock in a bar and then reintroducing him to his old nanny and gardener. This one is 1. prime Adam/Warlock material, and 2. PRIME Warlock/facing his feelings and confronting his past and figuring out his future material. I have the weakest spot possible for Warlock Dowling and this one hits that spot like a LOT.)

84. Through the branches there’s a son that’s always shone – @jessicafish (G, the one with a contented Warlock. This one is a Halloween fic that has the softest Warlock and Crowley interaction of all time, it’s so short but it hits so hard and I must thank it for my life, really.)

85. Love, And Its Interference With The Nature of Reality – @souljellied (M, the one where Adam has a big ole crush and reality is warping for Warlock. M for some saucy makeouts at the start but it’s pretty tame. Guys if the fact that at one point the headlines in a news stand all read “TOP TEN REASONS TO DATE ADAM YOUNG” before Warlock blinks and they all change back to normal isn’t a good enough reason to read this fic then I don’t know what to tell you, it’s so delightfully tongue-in-cheek about Adam’s effect on reality and so funny and so sweet, even if it does end on a note that makes me howl for wanting a continuation.)

86. Slumber Party Summons and Aftereffects – @joyandotherstories (G, the series where Crowley gets summoned by a party of teenage girls and has a very heartfelt, productive evening with them. I dragged my feet on this story for incomprehensible reasons so DON’T YOU MAKE MY MISTAKES. The teenage girls who summon Crowley are so sweet and loveable, each and every one of them, and guys they ship Crowley and Aziraphale so hard when they finally pry Crowley’s life story out of him, with help from some memory projection witchery. It’s so good, y’all, so cute and so fresh. Just the best.)

87. Christmas Delivery – Daegaer (G, the one where Gabriel sends obnoxious Christmas cards and they are the highlight of Heaven’s holiday (to make merciless fun of). It should be noted that these Christmas cards all feature artistic renderings of Gabriel himself. I about died laughing and it’s canon now in my heart. I should not be endeared to the Archangels but here we are.)

88. and i don’t care if you don’t want me (i’m yours anyhow) – shaekspeares (T, the one where Warlock is figuring himself out at uni. This one is complex and deadpan and has such a good representation of Warlock and what he could grow to be, plus that excellent Warlock/Adam content I am always here for and Warlock having a complete meltdown over the idea that his former nanny and gardener were sent by his parents to spy on him, but not that they’re an angel and a demon. This kid has his priorities in order. Well, no, he doesn’t, but it’s fun to watch him get there. And he and Adam have the best dynamic ever, it’s full of friction and no small amount of adversarial energy turning sweet over time. This fic is physically healing to read and we aren’t even done yet. A fantastic addition to the fandom, if just for what Warlock does to the British equivalent of the Young Republican student body.)

89. Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma: An Integrative Approach – Nnm (T, the one where Crowley gets a therapist. I know most of you should know this, or at least have heard of it, but pipe down bc I finally got around to reading it and it’s AMAZING. If you’re a human who’s gone to a good therapist or who needs to, this story’s protagonist is phenomenal. And she’s not static in her own journey, either, she grows and heals along with Crowley, and it’s not linear or clean or simple. Like real life, it has dips and turns and bad patches, but the healing is palpable. A masterwork, truly, just real dadgum good, y’all.)

H/C /WHUMP/BAMF

90. I Don’t Want the World to See Me – @coulson-is-an-avenger (T, the one where they navigate an unexpected boundary concerning Crowley’s glasses. People who flinch every time they read about Aziraphale taking off Crowley’s glasses without permission rejoice: we have a fix-it fic for you. It’s tender in every sense of the word, and shows great boundary communication (y’know after the immediate scare is over), and all around is incredibly worth the read.)

91. Still Waking Up – @sleepymccoy (T, the one that’s trauma recovery with lots of bed-sharing and pining. Friendos if you want to feel every inch of that slow burn, you’ve arrived. This fic is careful and it’s emotionally ragged-edged and it’s just so dang pretty as Crowley and Aziraphale work through their separate issues and come to terms with what it means to them to be together with each other.)

92. Borrowed Scars – dreamsofspike (M, the one where Aziraphale finds out what Crowley goes through when he’s in Hell. M for implied/referenced rape and onscreen torture (and like some heavy petting that gets interrupted by feels). This one’s heavy, y’all, heavier than my usual fare, bc Aziraphale is in Hell wearing Crowley’s body when he finds this out so it’s pretty firsthand. Most of the bad bits are told in flashbacks but there’s also the healing part where Crowley finds out and he and Aziraphale have to have a heart-to-heart about what happened and how it’s never going to happen again. Drags you through the mud but then sets you back on your feet, a very good little number, I thought.)

93. Surviving Hell – @whatawriterwields (T, the series where Crowley’s coping mechanism is to shut down and then that coping mechanism becomes maladaptive in the new world. If you’re like me, you’re used to this writer writing the fluffiest creations known to man, so this foray into deeper territory socks like a cannonball right in the gut. Crowley’s healing process is long and it’s slow, with so much aching tender care from Aziraphale it is physically painful in a way. Can’t wait for it to update, I am INVESTED.)

94. Easier than Air – @a-candle-for-sherlock (G, the one where Aziraphale finally deals with stuff. This is a collection of panic attacks, as a warning; Aziraphale’s entire six-thousand-year life is catching up to him, living under Heaven’s eye and knowing he doesn’t measure up, still trying to be with Crowley even though knowing the danger…it’s a lot on a person, and it all kinda comes crashing down after Armageddon’t. Crowley takes care of him, talks and holds him through it all, and it’s so sweet, so freeing to vicariously fall apart through Aziraphale and be held through it by Crowley. Just. Augh.)

95. So Still I Wait – HotCrossPigeon (T, the one where Heaven locks Aziraphale in a void, basically, for three months, and then dump him back on earth for Crowley to pick up the pieces. Guys this one is part of a “hurt Aziraphale” series and it delivers. Aziraphale is his usual soft, silly self all throughout and that makes it hurt worse when he’s suffering, and downright agonizing when he’s trying to recover. Heaven is horrible to him throughout, and Crowley is so gentle and scared, and honestly I don’t know how I didn’t just keel over while reading it. This takes touch-starved to an extreme that booted it from the Touch-Starved category and into this one, because WOW. WOW.)

96. Flaming Like Anything – @thepoetoftime (NR, the one where any weapon Aziraphale holds flames. This one isn’t silly, exactly, but it is hilarious watching Aziraphale flame things like a stick and an umbrella and then absolutely CREAM his foes with them. Never stood a chance, poor souls. A wonderful read, with a surprising twist near the end I highly recommend savoring, it’s too good a mental image.)

97. Love Seeketh Not Itself to Please – @dietraumerei (T, the one where Aziraphale is hurt by a summoning and Crowley takes him to Heaven for healing. This one hurts on so many levels I don’t know where to begin. There’s the physical hurt—obviously—but then there’s the tension of our favorite reprobates being back in Heaven, and a moment where the rug is pulled that is disorienting and just…hateful, absolutely hateful, but in the weirdest, most relieving way. I cannot explain this to you, you must read it. And then sweet, sweet aftercare, because of course. I wouldn’t recommend it to you if there wasn’t any comfort in it, and this writer in particular has historically done excellently with the comfort aspect; this is certainly no different. It absolutely tickled my fancy.)

98. Cry for Absolution – forthegreatergood (T, the one where a miscommunication causes six thousand years of touch avoidance. Guys. GUYS. Crowley thinks his touch hurts Aziraphale and you know what it actually does? It actually hurts ME, personally, watching Crowley misread Aziraphale’s little gasps and flinches as pain rather than shock. Then they fight about it, and things resolve, but HHHNG. THAT PINING. THAT TOUCH-STARVED LONGING.)

99. White Walls and Dead Air – BabyHoldMyFlower (G, the one where Crowley has to physically take Aziraphale away from the plague. This one lands in this category rather than in the Body Worship/Touch-Starved/Wings category is the sheer (DESERVED) emotional vitriol Aziraphale has bottled up in him, the anger at God and Heaven, and how ragged he is from trying to stay ahead of the plague but just not being able to. Crowley helps, because of course he does, but this fic is the emotional equivalent of being put through a wringer. It’s exhausting and it’s beautiful.)

[baoshan-sanren]

You know how in once upon a time in lingjian mountain they make jokes about seventh elder's race? I found it super uncomfortable. I know the show pushes the boundaries but calling him a monkey, saying he laid out like burnt charcoal, having the others laugh when they saw his skin and compare it to their own, and having Wang Lu yell out Mr. Black. I know China has a racism problem as much as the US (or maybe even more, because that kind of thing wouldn't be allowed in the US as a joke).

Idk how that can be called pushing boundaries, but I get where you’re coming from. That particular scene was def uncomfortable for me too, although what I got from it was that WangLu’s words were intended to piss LiXian off, so she would tell him the truth. I’m not sure how much of that deviates from the novel either, since I’ve only read bits and pieces of it, but I know in the novel Wang Lu refers to Ao Guanhai as Black Martial Uncle. Not sure if that’s what he calls him in the drama - Netflix tends to translate every formal/semi-formal title into Mr. and Mrs. regardless of how wrong it sounds/is + I didn’t listen that closely to ascertain if Netflix did a shit job translating (as far as I can tell, everyone else refers to him as the Seventh Elder). Doing a bit of research, I can’t find anyone complaining about the way Ao Guanhai’s character is treated in general (which isn’t indicative of anything really, just a lack of easily found opinions on that particular subject) but I did find it fascinating that there are a lot complaints about Sandrine Pinna being cast as Wang Wu because her French/Taiwanese features were “too jarring and unfit for a wuxia/xianxia drama.” I def would have liked to know what the actor thinks, but no amount of googling is providing me with any interviews of the cast in minor/side roles.

Anyway, it’s not on me to comment on racism in China because I don’t know enough about it to have an opinion. This particular scene, joke or not, might not fly with a lot of viewers in U.S., but I’d also like to point out that this happened today.

A place where a twelve-year old black boy can be shot by an officer of the law for holding a toy gun, and where the justice department makes a decision to not prosecute the murderer, doesn’t have a lot of room for argument (not to mention that police in U.S. shot and killed 164 black people just in the first 8 months of 2020). For me, personally, it’s very much a matter of “first cast out the beam out of thine own eye,” and all that. Making sure that racist jokes aren’t allowed on tv is really... a U.S.-centric way of draping a pretty horrifying racism issue in some shiny performative cloak of political correctness and then calling it a day (which is incidentally what happens in a lot of arguments on tumblr too, where a certain group of u.s./american fans are involved). The fact that saying racist shit out loud or on tv is unacceptable (and that’s debatable too bc fox news is right there) has... not made U.S. any less racist, but it has made sure that most racists know what vocabulary to use/not use in order to spread their agenda so... yeah, I’ll leave it to others to decide if that’s somehow better. 

But yes, I was uncomfortable with that particular scene, and this scene as well, and a few others too

All I can say is, this is what it means to consume media critically. Everything you watch, regardless of where it’s created, or where it aired, or who is consuming it, is going to have issues. Viewing these issues in full context is a pretty integral component of the critical thinking process. 

Why is this the only wuxia/xianxia cdrama I’ve ever watched with a black character? Are there more, and I’m just not aware of them? Is there a historical reason for this lack? Is the way this black character is treated a problem? Why is it a problem? Is it a worse problem than (what I consider to be) blatant sexism in a lot of wuxia/xianxia cdramas? Why or why not? Does my own cultural understanding of racism/sexism have anything to do with that? Am I sure the translation is conveying what is actually being said? Are things I consider derogatory considered the same by the drama creators/viewers? Why or why not? What does the drama’s intended audience think? Are our opinions different? Why are they different? How are they different? How does the media in my country deal with racism? Is it different from media in other countries? Does its influence differ? How? Do I think that instances of western indirect racism are better/worse than instances of direct racism in some other parts of the world? Why do I think that?

Of course, none of that is necessary either. You can just feel the issue is large enough where you don’t want to give the drama any of your time, and that’s perfectly valid too. But I’m a big proponent of consuming things that make you uncomfortable (as long as it does not adversely affect your mental health and if you can distinguish between the two) because only then, do you have the opportunity to think about all those questions, and possibly have them answered.  

[rudjedet]

somecunttookmyurl replied to your post

“amazing. hit the t-minus 4 weeks mark until i’d have to go back to...”

"#you can come out of IVF with PTSD and it is NOT talked about enough" this does not really surprise me it doesn't seem like a pleasant process, on the whole. but medical ptsd in general is something nobody ever talks about bc doctors don't want to admit they're causing psychological harm to their patients amirite i am i'm right

you sure ain’t fucking wrong dude.

IVF is like... it can literally go wrong at ANY step of the way. literally.

You jab yourself with needles for at least 2 weeks in hopes of ripening follicles with eggs for the retrieval. This can go wrong and nothing can ripe, or too much can ripe and you end up with ovarian overstimulation syndrome, which means you have to wait anywhere between 6 weeks to several months before you can continue. We got lucky: 10 follicles bang on time. Still stressful as fuck.

Then the eggs get retrieved. Ever had a transvaginal ultrasound? It’s that, but now the ultrasound wand has a giant fuck off needle that punches through your uterus, into the follicles, to hopefully suck any eggs out. They don’t know if there are eggs in the follicles until they check in the IVF lab. This is generally considered horrible and painful as fuck, so they drug you to hell. I got lucky: it barely hurt because I’m a freak of nature. Still stressful as fuck beforehand.

Your hubbie/partner brings the eggs to the IVF lab while you sleep off having holes punched in your uterus like it’s a time card. This can go wrong, not only because he can technically have an accident on the way there, but also because there’s a non-zero chance there were no (usable) eggs extracted from the follicles. We got extremely lucky: I had 17 good-looking eggs (from 10 follicles!) Still stressful as fuck.

Extra stress: because I had so many double yolks, I was now at risk for ovarian overstimulation syndrome, see above. I got lucky: it didn’t happen. Still stressful as fuck.

Partner, if appliccable, jacks into a cup. This can go wrong because it can turn out because of the stress that the sperm isn’t of sufficient quality. Stressful, not so much for me.

You go home while the IVF technicians attempt to fertilise the eggs with sperm. You get an appointment for the third day after the retrieval, but until the morning of the transfer you will not know if any fertilisation occurred. So this can still go wrong after all of the above stress. Stressful as fuck. We got lucky: we had at least one fertilisation (they don’t tell you how many eggs were fertilised until you get there, just that you get the go ahead).

You go to the IVF lab for the transfer. Before the first, fresh transfer, they tell you how many of the eggs were fertilised. This can go wrong because the fertilised eggs might not even be of sufficient quality. They told me to sit down first so I freaked the fuck out. We got extremely lucky: we had 14(!) fertilised eggs that looked good to excellent. Fucking stressful bullshit.

After the transfer you may get a bunch of progesterone suppositories that you have to shove up there three times a day. And then literally all you can do is wait for 11-14 days before you can test. While you know there’s a blastocyst in your endometrial lining that may or may not implant. This is where it gets even more fucking stressful. We didn’t get lucky with that first transfer. Cue renewed heartbreak when you stare at the nth negative pregnancy test.

In the meanwhile, if you had more than one succesful fertilisation, they will attempt to cryofreeze the ones that weren’t transferred that day (over here, if you’re younger than 37 they’ll only transfer one egg at a time; over 37 and they’ll transfer two). This can go wrong. The eggs may not survive this process. We got lucky: the next week we received a letter that 12 of the remaining 13 eggs were succesfully frozen. If you’re like me, you’ll feel bad about the one that was lost because you consider the fertilised eggs your babies already. Highly stressful on top of the already stressful business of waiting and hyperfocusing on ANY sign of implantation/pregnancy.

If, like us, you were unlucky in the getting-pregnant department but lucky enough to have extra eggs, you get to try again the next month or month after that. I had to be on HRT for two weeks prior because they’d previously knocked my cycle out because of the endometriosis. About 11 days into your medicated cycle they’ll check the thickness of your endometrial lining. If it’s thick enough, you get the go ahead. In case of an unmedicated cycle, you have to do ovulation tests until you get a positive, in which case you get the go ahead. You get an appointment at the lab, but now you have to wait until the morning of the day of to hear whether or not one of the eggs successfully thawed because guess what: that can still go wrong. We got lucky: all four cryo transfers thawed without issues.

Repeat steps 6-7. Get to do the stressing all over again! Eventually we got lucky: on our 3rd transfer, we had a positive pregnancy test.

You call in the result, everybody is happy and congratulates you. Then you get to wait another 4-6 weeks before the term ultrasound. The first time this happens, this is kind of exciting! But it can still go wrong, because 25% of pregnancies naturally abort before 7 weeks. Stressful, and the days seem to stretch like thick jelly. We didn’t get lucky: miscarried our first baby at 8 weeks, on the very morning of the ultrasound. The most heartbreaking thing to ever have happened. I saw our baby that day, but I didn’t want it to be on a piece of toilet paper, lifeless.

Repeat steps 6-9, or, in our case, 6-11, but this time miscarry at 6 weeks, on your first wedding anniversary just to add insult to injury.

Optional: Get your fucking endometrial cysts removed because now your gynaecologists suspects you either have some serious fucking bad luck, or the cysts are actively working against a lasting pregnancy. Stressful and painful as fuck.

Repeat steps 6-10. We got lucky: another positive test. Apparently my body figured out how to do the whole getting pregnant thing at that point, because I was pregnant three times in a row. Now the waiting begins again. You’re at this point so traumatised and so convinced your body is incapable of carrying to term, you’re having a hard time being happy and/or bonding with the little bean inside you. You go to the term ultrasound. Your heart is in your throat. But then you see baby’s heart beat on the monitor, and your amazingly awesome beautiful gynaecologist says there’s now a 97% chance you’ll carry to term. We got lucky. So lucky.

Be pregnant. Try not to freak. You’ll freak anyway. You shit bricks every time you go to the bathroom, expecting to see the blood of a beginning miscarriage any day now. You can’t enjoy the pregnancy. Pregnancy sucks anyway, fuck that shit with a rusty cactus. Every time you buy something for the baby, or tell a new person of your pregnancy, you think that’s the moment you’ll miscarry, because it was never meant to be for you. If you’re like me, you end up on sick leave from work because your first miscarriage started there and the site of your job and miscarriages are now forever linked. Every ultrasound appointment is the most stressful thing you’ve ever done, convinced as you are your baby will die before birth. You call your obstetrician every week just to get another check done because you’re so worried. We got so lucky: our baby was in perfect health every time.

Give birth. Feel like you’re the fucking luckiest people on the goddamn planet because that little bean you just pushed out of your vagina spent almost a year as an icicle and what the fuck? is that kind of miracle? Thank the Lord and all that is holy for modern medicine.

Remain traumatised and deadly afraid you’ll lose your baby to SIDS any day now, to the point you actively tried not to bond just to make the heartbreak you just know is coming less. Bond with your baby anyway because she’s adorable, amazing, so soft, and the cutest, sweetest, most beautiful thing you ever laid eyes on. 

Realise very acutely that there are many, many people who have to go through all of the above without ever coming out of it at the other end with a baby. Cry. 

But yeah let’s not talk about how traumatising all of that shit is. You’ll get support at the hospital, sure, but if you’re lucky enough to even get pregnant it’s often crap because “we don’t do trauma help during pregnancy”. And yeah okay that makes sense, that kind of stress won’t be good for the baby. But the other kind of stress you’re dealing with isn’t, either.

[notnctu]

Hey how are you today ? :) I have a question but don't take it as a critic or anything, but, what is (are) the reason for your departure? Why do you want to log out forever from your blog ? Does your blog reminds you of negative moments who makes you uncomfortable? You don't have to answer tho, I totally respect your decisions! ♡

hello im good today ty for asking!!

let me put a disclaimer that there is nothing that makes me feel uncomfortable about being on here or that its something super serious or that i have issues with writing ff

im also gonna put it under the cut bc its super long and i overshare

reasons why i am leaving was that this blog has always been a temporary thing during quarantine, except I did not predict how big this blog would blow up to be, even surpassing the follower count on my main blog. i had left writing three years ago when i entered college because it was something that takes a lot a lot of my personal time. i only started it back up because we were all stuck at home and me and author xuxi got into nct together, started reading ff and reminisced about the 'old days' of when we would write on our separate accounts. and then we took it farther to actually just drabbling here and there out of boredom and wanted to share it with people. i fell back in love with writing after three years!!

but as you know, the world has slowly started opening back up again and some schools are reopening back to in person instruction, my school being one, and i already know that i would have no time to write. i could barely find time to write when it was online instruction lmaoo along with that, writing has become more of a chore than it being something light and fun, where i could write out my ideas for everyone to read. so i feel pressured to finish projects i promised, making it so its not something that i want to do anymore. like i always have it in the back of my mind, "fuck i need to finish ___" or "i need to write ___" :/ and so i feel like it holds me back from just living my life ig

for the reason why i want to log out and delete the app on my phone is because i chose to leave my blog up so my stories can remain. but i dont want to be on this blog or check it. as long as the app remains on my phone, i would want to click on it to check it routinely on a daily basis. i went on hiatus from feb - april? but i still checked notifications daily in the small moments i had (like lounging around, when i went on my phone before bed, when i checked my notifs when i wake, in the silences during car rides) like checking stats for this blog is so obsessive, im proud of where it has become but i guess im always checking to see if a reader left me kind words on my fic or if i received an ask from one of my anons, i just want to know all the statuses that go on lol and i feel like it distracts me because i can't let go of it. me logging out and deleting the app is my form of letting go, it's my own deactivation of the relationship i have with the blog. i just want to stop dedicating so much of my focus into it? if that makes sense

a small part of me too wants to put writing in the past... i love writing, i say that its a hobby of mine, but like seriously i love writing, it's my way of art expression bc i cant draw or paint for shit lmao i have been writing ff since i was in the 6th grade!! all throughout middle school and high school, and now some parts of college. and i just feel like i love it, but i dont want to pursue it anything more than a hobby and i also dont want to write original characters. i havent really explored writing og and i wouldnt really care to tbh and i feel adrenaline when im writing a passion piece, but i would never write if it wasn't for purpose of publishing it and esp fanfiction, i just want to conclude this part of me.

i know this was super lengthy, but ive kept my reasons of departing to myself, not because its anything incredibly personal, but because my thinking process is long when it came to this decision. i chose the date sep 12 because its the start of training for my club, which requires 100% of my time and so i found that it was just a good marker of when i should take my leave.

i appreciate and i wholehearted love every aspect of this blog; my followers, my works, my mutuals, everyone's feedback, everyone's sweet and kind messages, all the interactions, the aesthetic, all of it is something i thoroughly enjoyed and actually made me so incredibly happy. this blog was my safe haven, which is the reason why i can't deactivate it. there are so many parts of this blog that i come back to just to smile (my birthday wishes, my mutuals' support, feedback on stories i worked my ass off for, stories that i am genuinely so proud of, my own shit posts sometimes lmao) this blog is a time capsule of a moment in my life where life was paused and i could literally pass every day as if they were all the same and i could write with no other distractions. and i want to come back to it someday, although it would be long forgotten and untouched, but just to look back and reminisce (again) about the 'old days'.

[himbo-buckley]

what are your thoughts on what maddie says about her and buck's parents, that they were "good people, bad parents"? bc idk if it's just me but I can't get my head around that lmao, I can't understand how they can still be good people if they're bad parents, the two just can't go together for me, so another perspective would be interesting!

Hello friend 🥰

Oh, that is quite a question, isn’t it? Damn I just got out of work but you’re making me think deep thoughts here…

I think that is actually a question were we cannot find a unifying answer to - because like you said for you being a good person and a bad parent aren’t compatible, but for me they are. And I think we’d first have to define what everyone thinks constituents a good person and what constitutes bad parents!

For me a good example of that is Shannon Diaz who, in my opinion, is a good person. She means well and she tries hard but she is quite frankly an awful mother. Yes, she was put in horrible situation after horrible situation and she broke on that - which is something human and cannot be begrudged - but she left her child for several years and while she did try to reconnect and she was learning, she wouldn’t haven contacted Eddie on her own. She came back because the opportunity arose not because she tried to get back to them. (She could have become a good mother but she never got the chance.)

In the same vain I think Bobby pulled a lot of shit back in Minnesota but he still seemed to be a loving and kind father - so my question to you, friend, would be: do you consider Bobby a good person (the Bobby prior to Season 1 mostly)? Despite being the type of person who went to work drunk and / or high and by this endangering others and himself? Because I don’t think so yet the show frames him as a good person despite his downfalls (and I am not saying being an addict makes someone a bad person but I am saying knowingly endangering others does) - and if you think someone cannot be a good person but a bad parent, can someone who is a bad person also not be a good person?

See, one thing I learned working with children is that some people just aren’t made to be parents, and I am not talking about my time with child services, i am talking as a kindergarten teacher. Some people are very nice and they try hard but damn, parenting does not come natural to them and I worry how this will develop in the future. Like one of my mom’s is severely depressed and she might have Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy which doesn’t make her a bad person - but a bad parent at times.

And now, this is were I make you regret asking me specifically about this topic (or maybe not, who knows what your interests are) because I do have a bit of an expertise in what constitutes good / bad parenting and I will talk about it at random whether I am asked or not (and hopefully my language won’t fail me as most of my theoretical knowledge is in german, so please excuse any mistakes in technical terminology because I have to find the english equivalents and you know all those untranslatable german words? Yeah. Someone finally figure out how to translate the difference between Erziehung and Bildung please because both cannot be education and also it doesn’t really fit either):

So let’s get into it, shall we?

What makes good parents?

First up: parental relationship and parenting capabilities: several years ago the german department of family, seniors, women and youth (BmFSFJ) released a paper on what skills parents need to become good parents. There a four main skills (and I hope I translated everything correctly):

child-corresponding skills (ability to respond to the individual needs and features of the child, be it in terms of recognising potential or setting boundaries or sth else)

context-corresponding skills (ability to recognise developmental opportunities but also hinderances for the child and acting accordingly)

self-corresponding skills (being able to reflect their own behaviour as well as being willing to learn new things; also ability to regulate one’s emotions)

action-corresponding skills (trust in ones own ability and effectiveness; being consistent, both in their own actions as well as in response to others actions)

You might have heard of Kurt Levin or Diana Baumrind or someone else doing research into parenting styles. Generally there are four main ones, which, if we use Baumrind, differentiate on the aspects of control and demand 

(here is a graph from wikipedia on this)

(I consider this fairly self explanatory but I will get into it in a bit a little more, soooo)

Now of course parenting isn’t just about the parents and what they do - children also have needs (and yes there is a lot of overlap but I am doing this right, okay?)

To quote my government again (because the paper was actually quite good, okay?) children want autonomy (a chance to do things themselves), expertise (a chance to develop their own skills) and relatedness (that one was very hard to translate but this came the closest; the idea is children strive for social connections, a sense of trust in themselves and reliability)

Also Urs Fuhrer defined 5 basic needs children have which are:

feeling of shelteredness and reliable love (I won’t explain this further except: google Harry Harlow and try not to cry like I do every time I am reminded of this monster of a man)

physical security and intactness (self explanatory, right?)

individual and developmentally suitable experiences (yes, children need to be socialised but it needs to be based on the individual child and how it learns best and all that)

boundaries and structure (CHILDREN WANT BOUNDARIES!!!! ALWAYS!!! CHILDREN WANT YOU TO TELL THEM YES OR NO, they need adults to help them navigate the world! Part of feeling secure is having someone who will tell you no and don’t do this; boundaries protect from danger, they represent support and orientation, they protect someone’s dignity (both the child’s and the parent’s), they give something to chafe against on our way to adulthood (because listen, Erikson wasn’t wrong, a lot of development happens in adversity, we find out who we are in contrast to other people)

a secure attachment (most people have heard about Bowlby and his theory of attachment, right? There are several types, though we are born with certain abilities for attachment and then learn how to attach from our parents, we model relationships on this, attachment determines our feeling of security and our thrive for exploration as children)

And I’ll leave the theoretical at this and go on to talk about the Buckley’s now, okay?

(and try to figure out if any of this has an actual point, uuups)

As for the specific situation of Mr and Mrs Buckley, let’s first see what we know of them, okay? (It’s barely anything) (half of it is assumed)

they are both alive

they are (probably) still married

they warned Maddie about Doug (meaning they somewhat cared)

they weren’t physically abusive and most likely also not emotionally

they probably live on the east coast in Pennsylvania

Buck may still be in contact with them

Maddie considers them good people but bad parents

they accepted losing contact with at least one of their children

Maddie doesn’t want them to know about Doug

That’s it!

Now, I personally think they might be very conservative, possibly unsupportive of their children. They might have had plans for their children’s life Maddie and Buck didn’t agree with, they might have been the types to not listen to their children, maybe they worked a lot. Probably fairly impatient, possibly disinterested in their children. Not good at the parenting capabilities.

Based on their children’s issues I’d say authoritarian or neglectful parenting style (though not abusive because it would be a redcon of Maddie’s background), meaning most definitely unresponsive though I cannot make up my mind whether they were demanding or undemanding, as both these styles - even when not so bad they are abusive and / or endangering to the child - make insecure, dependent and unhappy adults (like the children turn into those once they grow up), which does kinda fit with Buck specifically, right?

Though tbh I don’t think the Buckley parents were that horrible. I know fandom has taken the idea and run with it, mainly because after three seasons we know virtually nothing about them aside from some throwaway lines and all the issues we see in their children.

Now, why do I say this?

One, Maddie is a fairly capable adult despite everything that happened to her and even being as resilient as she is, she still has too few issues for how horrible fandom thinks the Buckley parents are

Two, while Buck has a lot of issues, being cocky and having problems with intimacy and being a bit directionless and still needing a parental figure in your mid-20s doesn’t seem that uncommon to me? Like the only really deep issue I’d say he has (that have to be caused by something deeper) are his abandonment issues (and connected to that intimacy). And it’s been implied they are caused by Maddie leaving to go to College which does paint the picture that he doesn’t have a good relationship with his parents but honestly, that sometimes happens, right?

(Also, and this is where my professional background comes in, I don’t like how everyone jumps to the worst possible conclusions about them, simply because I feel it sends the idea that only if the worst things happened to you, you have certain issues which is wrong. Sometimes small things will trigger something way larger in us and that should not be invalidated.)

And okay, I am getting off topic again (but again, my profession lies here) but what I am trying to say is this:

I do think Mr and Mrs Buckley were bad at parenting because they demanded too much but gave too little (emotionally) and I don’t think Buck is really in contact with them but I also don’t think that makes them necessarily bad people. (just bad parents)

I think Maddie and Buck weren’t as close back when they were children as they are now (at least not after Maddie moved to College) because the Buck we know would not accept a sister he is very close to simply no longer having contact with him for three years without trying to figure out why.

I do think they can’t have been that bad mainly because of how good Maddie and Buck are. Listen, I believe in resilience and already being born with a certain personality and traits which shapes how our environment reacts to us, but which is also influenced and changed by our environment ! (Nature vs. nurture, ya’ll) Now I know I said we find and develop ourselves in adversity but not just. We also need someone to foster and support and reward certain traits or we lose them and this is especially true for being kind and heroic!

Buck especially has shown way to little anger or capability for violence for how the fandom likes to write his parents, which considering his general character and also the way he looks - just doesn’t work! (Because generally especially boys raised in abusive families emulate this behaviour and Buck just - doesn’t! Which considering how “fuck toxic masculinity” Buck is most of the time doesn’t make sense because being tall and buff would make the opposite easier for him and would make it the better strategy for survival, so this would be the behaviour he would have learned)

(unless our writers say fuck being realistic and fuck psychology)

His parents had to have done something right, because Maddie will have left for College by the time he was 12 / 13 probably and we know they consider this her abandoning him meaning they probably weren’t really in contact then and while the first years of your life ARE VERY important for who you become later (urgh, yes, I’ll admit it, Sigmund Freud, the most overrated theorist did get SOME things right) they aren’t everything and you develop for longer and also a young girl like Maddie would have been would have not been self-reliant and stable enough to raise her literal baby brother in a way that made him resilient enough to become the person Buck has become despite her leaving him twice

Not to mention: considering the person we know Maddie is - if their parents really were that horrible she wouldn’t have left Buck with them, she would have taken him with her!

 ANYWAYS!

Okay, tbh, I have no idea if any of that answered your question, but I did spend nearly two hours on it so enjoy?

I really don’t have a good answer to your question because we really don’t know enough and what we know doesn’t fully gel with each other and urgh, I don’t know friend despite this being the one thing I actually have some knowledge on!

I’m not even sure any of this makes sense and I am so sorry about that! I was trying, friend, but sadly an answer eludes me

Guess I should have just ended after saying: we cannot find a unifying answer to this because we each have individual definitions of good and bad in regards to people?

(Now, for everyone who read all of this? I love you and thank you and sorry! Please have a great day while I go cry in the shower now because I this ask drained me and also Harry Harlow)

EDIT: I wrote attachment issues when I wanted to say abandonment issues, shit!