#go meta meta

[tallerthantale]

What Does Aziraphale Actually Believe Part 10: Returning to Heaven

If you are currently avoiding Good Omens content right now because of the allegations against Neil Gaimen, (which I personally find both credible and damning) consider jumping to the end note rather than skipping this post.

This is a series of my takes on what Aziraphale believes through the timeline of the show. It is all my personal interpretation, and I am happy to hear others. You don’t need to read them all in order, but know that I am coming from a perspective on Aziraphale’s machinations that can be difficult for people without a psychology background to follow without the first two as a primer. The quick version is that Aziraphale has a set of beliefs that exist in some form or another within his mind. However, at any given moment, only some of them exist ‘with awareness.’ The context of the moment will determine what lives on the surface and what stays buried outside of Aziraphale's experience of consciousness, whatever arrangement best prevents a threat to Aziraphale’s sense of self and makes whatever he is inclined to do feel right.

Season Two Begins

Aziraphale is still not really acting like someone who rebelled against heaven. He's imagining himself as having a polite dispute with his colleagues, they just don’t send him on missions anymore and don't want his reports. As far as he sees it, the library is still an embassy (independent), and he is still a representative of God (independent). He is trying to maintain a semblance of the habits and routines he had when he was avowed by heaven, the familiarity is comforting, but there are limits to how much of it he can recreate. Some of what he’s missing he gets from Crowley, giving him reports instead. 

The sword of Damocles dropped, and Aziraphale remains ethereal. In many ways both he and Crowley are free to give up their tendencies to live double lives, but old habits die hard. During the lockdown, Aziraphale doesn’t want Crowley moving in, it doesn’t feel right yet. Crowley still feels a theoretical obligation to perform acts of demonic influence, even though he doesn’t actually want to. They have over 6000 years of earthly lived experience pushing themselves to go through the motions, and 4 years of something like freedom. They spent almost three times the time raising the wrong antichrist to write rude words on a description of a dinosaur. 

Aziraphale has the tools he needs to create a belief that he and Crowley can carve out a life together, but he is still sorting out the details. We start to see it in ‘our car’ and the implied ‘our shop.’ The ‘our car’ was presumptuous, and Aziraphale does take Crowley’s willingness to cave for granted in ways that are concerning, but there are some points of context that add depth to it. 1) Crowley actively enjoys complaining about things he isn't really bothered by and they both know it. 2) Bentley is sentient, and clearly considers Aziraphale a co-parent. 3) Aziraphale claiming Bentley as a joint asset seems to have prevented demons from entering uninvited.

I do think The Ball was Aziraphale's version of a confession, hoping they would dance, and talk things through as they danced. It’s not the best plan, because there are a ton of built up conversations they need to have with each other that are going to be hard to do with a room full of people as a backdrop. Even so, it could have been starting point for those conversations. He really is trying to make something happen, and he’s going at the preparations full steam while Crowley is still in ‘it’s not like that’ mode. I read Crowley's confusion as him personally being veeery asexual, and assuming all along that Aziraphale was the same. IMO, he was completely oblivious to possibility that Aziraphale could be comparatively allo, though there are many open interpretations.

The big jumps forward with Aziraphale’s understanding of his relationship to Crowley, the universe, humanity, and the world do not erase his older beliefs. They add to his options. As we get to the end of Season 2, he’s got a lot of options. As I went into at the start of this rambling mess, in a way Aziraphale still believes everything he has ever believed, no matter how self contradictory that gets. Some things are just deeper in storage than others. That said, I think we can talk about what his recently active beliefs are through the modern events of Season 2. In my opinion, this is where things stand in the mind of Aziraphale:

Angels are aligned with good in the abstract, demons with evil in the abstract, and they imperatively should act in accordance with that, even if often they descriptively don’t. 

This follows metaphysical (ethereal / occult ) categories, not professional roles, and therefore still applies to both Aziraphale and Crowley.

Crowley would be better off free of the obligation to be up to no good, and no longer being professionally a demon hasn’t done the trick.

God felled Crowley as a deliberate injustice in service of a bigger picture plan.

God plays games, but in the service of a greater good, and heaven ought to be aligned with Her purpose. Heaven is currently failing in that obligation.

Aziraphale still thinks he can intuit God’s will and is mostly aligned with it. 

Heaven is being run by angels that are out of line with God’s will, but they retain their angelic nature because they are too ignorant to be responsible for their failings.

He was able to successfully convince Gabriel and Beelzebub to cancel the war.

The institution of heaven is powerful enough to crush them both if diplomacy fails.

The bookshop and car are mutually owned by him and Crowley. Their earthly existence is for them both to share, and they mutually committed to defending it.

Aziraphale and Crowley’s life on earth is unprotected under heaven’s current leadership.

Aziraphale and Crowley are the only celestials with actual knowledge of good and evil.

Having that knowledge incurs a heavy moral responsibility to choose good.

Crowley chooses good more reliably than Aziraphale does.

All of these play into the Final Fifteen.

Angelic Status

I believe for most of their time on earth, Aziraphale has stopped just short of pursuing a proper courtship with Crowley because of their professional and existential positions on ‘opposite sides.’ By the end of the botched executions, the professional role wasn’t an excuse anymore, but in the lockdown special he still wouldn’t let Crowley move in. The existential ‘sides’ still mattered. By the Start of modern Season 2, I think he finally let that go. He was finally ready to fully not care that Crowley was a demon. That doesn’t mean they were actually on the same page about it conceptually though.

Aziraphale has pretty consistently struggled to understand Crowley’s demonic status the way Crowley would see it. While to Crowley it is his assumed identity, and his former angel self is like a deadname, (or my favorite term for it, his ‘cis-sona’) Aziraphale understands Crowley to be suffering unjustly under the temporary state of being currently classified as a demon. Yes, there are many ways this is enormously dismissive of Crowley and insensitive to Crowley. But that isn’t all that it is. Aziraphale doesn’t think the fall was right, and he never did. Sure, that's like, a baseline expectation for having compassion for Crowley, but the implications for how Aziraphale sees things are huge. 

There are a few options for how Aziraphale can process this opinion that he can roll through. I think sometimes he blames himself. Sometimes he just avoids thinking about it. Sometimes he thinks Crowley will just spontaneously go back to being an angel again, like it was a clerical error. Most of the time though, I think it’s about God playing games putting together the Ineffable Plan. Aziraphale has been no stranger to God allowing injustices, he considers the greater good, the end game. 

If God is playing a game unfairly casting Crowley out, perhaps it’s to prove a point by bringing him back. Aziraphale thinks Crowley is the better of the two of them, and he knows he hasn’t fallen. Heaven sentenced him to death, and it didn’t stop him from being an angel. And yet Crowely, his better half, is a demon. Crowley has parallels to Jesus that are probably not lost on Aziraphale. Crowley coming back as an angel and being put in authority over nearly every other angel in existence the way Aziraphale imagines it would be a vindication of Crowley as the ultimate martyr, and a fuck you to all the angels who looked down on him. See end note.

The issue remains that it isn’t the framing Crowley would give himself, and it is alarming that Aziraphale fails to be aware of that. Aziraphale has spent 6000 years in a sort of solipsism, where his intuition is what he looks through for understanding everything in the world. Sometimes he understands that other people will see things differently, and sometimes that slips. Divining his sense of self through intuition has benefit as a tool to free him from heaven’s brainwashing, but it also carries a risk of arrogant superiority and blind spots. Aziraphale still isn’t fully at peace when it comes to accepting that Crowley’s demonic status is an avowed identity, not a transient trial. And as I said in post 3, when you try to run on intuition in an area where you aren’t at peace with yourself, that will fuck your shit up harder than a sideways pineapple. 

The Final Fifteen: Return of the Mindfuckery

Aziraphale enters the conversation with The Metatron believing he wants to stay on earth, and that the leadership of heaven is not aligned with God's ineffable will. When The Metatron offers Aziraphale the position of supreme archangel, his belief that God is good and heaven ought to be aligned with God's will gets pulled to the surface, along with his conviction that he can intuit God's will, and confidence in his ability to make a difference, already inflated from setting in motion Ineffable Bureaucracy. That on its own isn’t enough. Aziraphale doesn’t want to leave his life on earth with Crowley behind, he has just started to be at peace building a life in Shades of Grey.

When The Metatron offers angelic status, it gives Aziraphale the option to believe The Metatron is endorsing Crowley as a vindicated martyr. It lets Aziraphale believe that the Metatron is on team Ineffable, and Aziraphale really will be given enough actual power to genuinely reform heaven. But it isn’t the only option it gives Aziraphale. There is a fork, and not just in the road. 

When The Metatron offers to sanction his relationship with Crowley, he goes out of his way to bring attention to how unsanctioned it used to be, how long it was like that, and how serious it still is. By bringing up Crowley and Aziraphale’s full history, The Metatron is reminding him of all the thousands of years of fear of discovery and instability. They could have been executed for it, they nearly were, they could order executions again, and they might work this time. He didn’t need to point out how long running their collaboration was, and he didn’t need to refer to it as a de facto partnership either. Offering to let Aziraphale take Crowley with him could have just been about the fact that they are clearly working together now. The way The Metatron highlighted their history provoked Aziraphale’s fear. 

Aziraphale may refuse to believe The Metatron really speaks for God, but he is afraid enough of him to get mindfucked about it given an attractive enough looking alternative. It is particularly telling of the level of mindfuckery at play that The Metatron describes Aziraphale as someone who is honest, and doesn’t just tell people what they want to hear, and Aziraphale accepts that. It would have taken work for Aziraphale to keep that red flag out of his awareness.

Where Aziraphale has resisted the mindfuckery of danger from The Institution of Heaven before, the alternative has been horrifying. Lie to thwart the archangels, or allow the murder of children. Defy The Institution, or participate in the destruction of the universe. He had no way forward that preserved his sense of self, and he took the least horrible of the options he had. Going back to heaven may not look like an ideal option, he doesn’t really want to leave the bookshop, but as the Metatron initially presents it, it's not conflicting with Aziraphale’s sense of self. Framed as an opportunity to reform heaven into his own ideal, it would conflict with Aziraphale’s sense of self to turn the offer down. 

Aziraphale sees this as an opportunity to make the universe right. I don’t think he believes it will be simple, easy, or guaranteed to work, I think he feels obligated to do everything he can to try. If there is even a chance, no matter how small, he has to try. He remembers Crowley being happy as an angel, but not that it was God that took the smile away. He remembers Crowley looking for ways to avoid his evil missions and be kind under hell's nose, but not that God tasked hell's minions with doing evil in the first place. He remembers that Crowley often chooses to do good, but not that to Crowley, the choices he was making were choosing to oppose the system, not aligning with God. Aziraphale has been able to think of Crowley as aligned with God’s Ineffable will. He has been thinking it more and more into the modern era. He concluded long ago that God would forgive Crowley. 

He forgot to consider that it is Crowley who would need to forgive God.

The Final Fifteen: Schrodinger's Threat

The Metatron has appeared before Aziraphale wearing dark colors, offering an oatmilk late, talking about experiencing the earthly world. This sets him apart from the other angels, it is a signal that he has also eaten the metaphorical apple, he is not naive to good and evil the way the other celestials are. Aziraphale's only points of reference for worldly celestials are himself and Crowley. He associates the knowledge and mixed black and white with the pursuit of nuanced ethics. He has no frame of reference for an entity that fully understands the nuances of ethics but chooses to impose dogmatic authoritarianism anyway.

The part of Aziraphale’s mind that lives outside of conscious awareness gets to decide between two realities. 1) The Metatron cannot be trusted, he is threatening him, plotting to destroy Crowley, nowhere is safe, there are no good options, Crowley won’t play along, ect… or, 2) The Metatron is actually aligned with God’s ineffable will just like he and Crowley are, and he and Crowley can fix heaven together and live happily and safely ever after. If your priority is picking the reality that is most palatable, that isn’t a hard choice. 

Remember, it isn’t a conscious choice. Aziraphale is not arguing in an internal monologue with himself that he is better off deciding to believe the naive thing, the parts of Aziraphale's mind that are outside of his awareness are preventing his conscious mind from seeing anything other than the naive thing. Every reason he has to not trust The Metatron didn’t load into his conscious awareness and instead fucked off to the Bermuda Triangle. The evidence The Metatron cannot be trusted wasn’t rejected or discounted, it functionally does not exist. Every reason he had to know Crowley would never go along with the plan did the same thing. 

Even his own memories of his own time in heaven fucked off. When Aziraphale said it would be “like the old times, only even nicer,” a lot of us had an initial reaction along the lines of, maybe it was nice for you, but not for Crowley. The thing is, that's backwards. The Star Queen was having a blast making the universe while Aziraphale was skittish and terrified. The good old times weren’t ever real for Aziraphale, they were what he had to imagine into existence to cope with existence. Aziraphale wants to put himself in a miserable position of responsibility that he will hate, in order to remake heaven into a place Crowley can be happy again.

Much of the theorizing I have seen around Aziraphale's behavior in the Final Fifteen assumes a dichotomy. As most people see it, the story must be one of two things, either Aziraphale sincerely believes The Metatron's offer, and sincerely wants Crowley to come back to heaven with him and be angels together doing good, and sincerely thought Crowley would go for it and be happy about it, OR he was so scared shitless by The Metatron that everything he is doing and saying is put on for their safety.

The horrifying truth of how our minds work is that there is no dichotomy. 

Aziraphale sincerely believed in the plan, sincerely believed Crowley would happily go for it, and sincerely remembered being in heaven as nice, BECAUSE he was scared shitless by The Metatron and had to buy into it for their safety. He had to genuinely believe those things to feel safe, so he did. I don't think The Metatron made any explicit threats or coercions. He didn't need to. Aziraphale's existential terror did all the work on its own, and it did the work without leaving a trail for Aziraphale’s conscious mind to see.

The Final Fifteen: An Uninformed Decision

Aziraphale had not been told about the plans for Armageddon 2.0, or why Gabriel lost his memory, or that he was risking getting stashed in a heavenly closet after being mind wiped for refusing to go along with The Institution. I have been frustrated with Crowley for not bringing this up. While my frustration with both of their poor communication skills continues, I noticed that Crowley probably thinks that he did bring it up.

In the bandstand argument, Crowley twice tries to make sarcastic logical incisions to get through to Aziraphale. “You should kill him yourself then, holierly.” “ Unforgivable, that's what I am.” He is saying these things to deconstruct what Aziraphale said before, not as face value statements. Aziraphale ignores the argument inside them both, treating them as face value non sequiturs and offering his own. 

In the Final Fifteen Crowley makes another sarcastic logical incision by saying “when heaven ends all life on earth, it will be just as dead as if hell had ended it.” Aziraphale picked a hell of a day to stop taking Crowley’s sarcastic incisions at face value, because as much as this is a sarcastic logical incision still, it is actually also face value this time. Crowley is telling Aziraphale that heaven is planning on ending all life on earth. Like, NOW. And given the way Aziraphale has interpreted him in the recent past, Crowley would reasonably expect him to follow along with that. 

Aziraphale thinks if he is in charge, he can put in place the plan he expressed in S1E4, celestials keep the earth running so humans can keep having free will. Aziraphale is not happy about it when The Metatron mentions the second coming. But he still doesn’t know that he is queuing himself up for the same fate as Gabriel, since Crowley skipped that point in his understandable frantic distress. I really do think it would have made a big difference in how the scene went down if it had come up.

In this series I have described Aziraphale's choice as a mistake, but I want to clarify what I think the mistake was, because it wasn't deciding to go back, not really. The mistake was how he brought the situation to Crowley.

Had Aziraphale refused to go, both of them could have been rapidly removed from existence. There is a very compelling case to be made that returning to heaven and trying to dismantle the system from the inside while playing along on the surface is their best option. The end of the universe ends everywhere, they are attached to the earth, and even with the combo miracles Aziraphale wouldn't have it in him to wage full on war against heaven with a diplomatic offer on the table. It's possible Crowley could have been moved by that argument, or it could have prompted Crowley into sharing about the memory wipes.

Realistically the situation was probably moving too fast to put a real strategy in place, and I don't think Crowley would take the elevator up either way, but the most hurtful part of the conversation is how long Aziraphale goes still presenting a return to heaven as unambiguously positive news, seemingly oblivious to how Crowley would take it, and how Crowley does take it standing in front of him. As strong an argument as there is for them to suffer the hardship in order to strategically dismantle the system from inside as the least bad option of what's available, Aziraphale does not make that argument. Crowley can't strategize with the version of Aziraphale who thinks The Metatron is on his side. I still fault Crowley for leaving the conversation when he did, as much as I understand why he felt he needed to.

I’m not going to go through the whole argument line by line, but I’m going to do a brief review of my impressions of Aziraphale’s more ambiguous statements. 

“You can be my second in command” They’re authorising me to be in charge, I will raise you as high as I can on paper, no one will be controlling you. 

“Nothing lasts forever” I’m willing to let go of my attachment to this bookshop if it will secure us a safe future together.

“I don’t think you understand what I’m offering you” We can fully restructure the institution of heaven to be what we want it to be, for us and for the world we took responsibility for. You can have creative control over the reformation. We can be safe and together like we have wanted for 6000 years.

“Then there’s nothing more to say.” I respect your decision not to come with me. 

“I forgive you” for leaving me with the responsibility to fix heaven on my own. (But it was almost ‘I love you.’)

The Final Fifteen: The Aftermath

After Crowley leaves, what Aziraphale can load into his mind shifts again. He can see his fear, and that The Metatron is the source of it. All the reasons he has to not trust The Metatron come back, as do all the reasons why Crowley would obviously say no. The cascade of expressions Aziraphale runs through between Crowley leaving and the Metatron arriving are us witnessing the beliefs, opinions, judgements, and memories that are present in Aziraphale’s experience of consciousness being reformed into a different set. 

When the Metatron comes back, Aziraphale is functionally a different person, and this one doesn’t want to go. He tries very hard to soft no The Metatron. He really, really tries. It is the hardest part of the ending for me to watch by far. I don't think any instance of him was ever really ok with a version of events where he went back on his own. But I also think he fully expects to be smote on the spot if he actually says no, with Crowley smote soon after, and I don't think he is wrong.

For all the heartbreak of the ending, there are some optimistic points from across the span of my character study I want to highlight that I think are often overlooked. 

Aziraphale ideologically split himself off from The Institution of Heaven before Crowley got involved. 

He had a sense something wasn’t right even while the Star Queen was naive. 

He found his own way to form opinions for himself in the midst of an all powerful, rigid, oppressive system. 

He has played Crowley’s role performing political subterfuge temptation missions from hell who knows how many times. 

His perception that Crowley might want to be an angel again, while willfully ignorant and galling, didn’t come from nowhere. 

His tolerance and forgiveness of the other angels comes from infantilizing them, not respecting them. 

He was noticeably upset when The Metatron mentioned the Second Coming. 

Just as Aziraphale’s increasing stack of things he can believe doesn’t undo the imprint of his years of indoctrinated beliefs, The Metatron manipulating him into a disastrous mistake doesn’t undo the growth he has had, the tools he has developed, or the perspective he has gained. The last smile just as he steps into the lift is not sincere, and his stare inside at the end is a declaration of a kind of soft power war. We remember "but rescuing me makes him so happy," but the full line when Nina asks "Why don't you make your own plans?" starts with "Oh, I am."

Part 10/10

End note:

Due to a series of unfortunate events (or two), there was a considerable delay between the bulk of my "What does Aziraphale Actually Believe" series and the last instalment. While I initially felt very negatively about that, it also presented a particular opportunity, as I found myself reviewing the final draft details of The Metatron's manipulation tactics and how they messed with Aziraphale's mind at the same time as I was following the allegations against Neil Gaimen.

As things currently stand I find the allegations against Neil Gaimen very credible and very damning. Information is still coming out, but the odds of something being reviled that would change the gist of my opinion are very unlikely. I don't consider that to be cause to stop engaging with the fandom and analyzing the story. A lot of people who take that position frame it as separating the art from the artist. That is not the framing I use.

Typically I try to keep considerable distance between myself and anything that looks like psychoanalysing public figures. This because of a psychology ethics rule that I take on a broad interpretation of. The gist of it is to not form professional opinions about the psychology of specific people based on their public statements / works. Because what follows is skirting the edges of the spirit of those rules, I want to emphasise that it is my personal opinion, and I am coming at it more from literary analysis than any kind of Sherlockian attempt at deductive reasoning about the workings of a particular person's mind.

The narrative arc of Aziraphale's religious trauma, the way it plays out, the way his opinions bend and reform, the way he gaslights himself in the presence of The Metatron, the way The Metatron wields his power imbalance with a friendly disposition, the way the threats that are never framed as a threat mess with Aziraphale's mind, the way he convinces himself to be happy about what he is being forced into, the way his mind flips back and fourth based on the pressures of the people around him, the particular ways he is vulnerable to being subtly manipulated into appearing complicit in his own exploitation, the detail in how that plays out, these things were all written very well.

Or I should say, they were written very accurately.

The motivation I had to write the "What does Aziraphale Actually Believe" series was that a lot of the ways those features of exploitation were accurately depicted weren't picked up on by the general audience. Because they rang so true to life to me, but were not followed by so many, I sought to explain my understanding of Aziraphale's behaviour to people who weren't sure what to make of it. These mechanisms are often very counter intuitive, not understanding them is pretty normal, and the Final 15 stood out to me as having been written with a very unusually high level of understanding of how exploitative power dynamics operate in real life.

Which is to say…

If the author of Aziraphale's Season 2 narrative arc came to me, and told me that he just didn't realize how power disparities impact people, that he was trying his best and he just didn't understand, I would tell him to go fuck himself with a rake. I can get behind wanting more to be investigated, wanting more information to be corroborated, wanting to see the actual screenshots and emails. I have respect for people who still want more documentation. What I want to push back against is arguments from people who believe the conduct happened, but either think that it wasn't a big deal, that Gaimen could not have been expected to know better, or that he made an unfortunate mistake. Someone that oblivious would not have been able to write the story of Season 2. Someone getting called out for their abuse of power absolutely would claim they didn't know any better as an excuse, it's the most obvious excuse to make.

People who abuse power knowingly are often still able to create a pocket fantasy universe, conjuring sections of time during which they can believe their own lies. They can sit better with themselves and their own actions that way. That isn't the same as not knowing better, it is the most willful of all willful ignorance, and it can flip on and off like a switch. I haven't read Sandman, but the people who have may be able to say if it seems like the work was written by a person who understands that people can create their own pocket realities to live in, and jump into and out of.

One of the common things expressed by those coming forward is that they want people to know that they are absolutely confident Gaimen understood what he was doing. There was a moment in the "Am I Broken" podcast where the survivor made that point, and the host either didn't process what they were being told or dismissed it at the speed of light, pivoting to hoping this would be a learning opportunity for other clumsy people in power who are probably making the same mistakes. It was a very frustrating moment.

I understand it is confusing that the people who engage in serial predatory behavior can rationalize themselves into their fantasy narrative of events while simultaneously engaging in an intentional strategy. But it is what people do. Getting to believe they aren't doing the very thing they planed to do is part of the strategy, and part of how they are able to gaslight people so effectively. The answer to "do serial predators believe they are innocent or do they do it as a honed deliberate tactic?" is yes. Knowing that is key to spotting these patterns in real life.

[rollercoasterwords]

pet peeve is when a fellow hater conducts their haterism such that they leave the hater community vulnerable to attack. “i think characterizing Character A in x way is boring and annoying” = beautiful, flawless, unimpeachable haterism. no one can tell u that u aren’t allowed to find a certain characterization boring. “it is morally/objectively wrong to characterize Character A in x way” = sloppy, reactionary, overcommitting. you have left our eastern flank open to attack girl what the hell….now my dedicated hater troops are taking fire from YOUR enemies fuckkkkk

[stompandhollar]

like. imagine seeing your sibling at 18. and then not seeing them again until you’re 28. and then not seeing them again until you’re both 58. but you’re identical twins so every time you look in the mirror you wonder if this is what they would’ve looked like.

imagine never needing glasses but your brother did, and then in your adulthood your eyes get worse and you suddenly need glasses and you pick out the same frames your brother wore.

imagine always protecting your brother growing up cause he was different and kids picked on him. but you always protected him. and then you have a falling out and neither of you speak for years, and then finding out that in those years you didn’t speak, he was being isolated and tortured by a monster and didn’t think you’d come if he called. but then he calls and you go. and his house has blood on the floor in every room and writing on the walls and his journal devolves into paranoid ramblings. and you can’t protect him because you showed up and he got ripped away. and you can’t even ask him what the writing or the blood or the state of the house means because he’s gone. and you don’t have a penny to your name so you have to clean the blood up yourself and fix the house and live there. so you board up his room.

[gossippool]

*steeples hands under my chin like i'm sherlock* so you see,

[gammija]

nothing personal but this kind of comment rlly exemplifies to me a disconnect between canon and popular fanon jmart characterization because they almost literally had this conversation in canon - except, their lines are swapped!

jon, for all his scared grouchiness, is a secret romantic, while martin, for all his forced optimism, is at his core a pragmatist

[artbyblastweave]

I'm not the first to mention this, but one bit that I thought was really clever in Steven Universe is the ways in which the show subtly justifies the cartoonism of the principle cast always wearing the same outfit for ease-of-animation purposes. The gems are a gimme in that they're all hardlight-projections, and even before that's solidified as a plot point they're otherworldly and superheroic enough that you don't really think to question it. But Steven canonically just owns hundreds and hundreds of those star shirts, which are leftover merchandise from his father's fizzled-out career as a rock star. Into which you can read a whole bunch of other stuff if you really want to, right? And I do want to. It's reflective of Greg's misplaced optimism that he got hundreds of those made in the first place, and it's a benign but visible example of how Steven's life is shaped by the knock-on effects of decisions his parents made before he was even alive. He's got his mother's superpowers and he's wearing his father's shirts.

[o-wild-west-wind]

While I’m still a bit bummed that they didn’t go with a more book-aligned POC Fiyero for the Wicked movie, I’ve been thinking (heheh) about how his being white highlights the really interesting foil relationship between him and Glinda (and, in many ways, the audience yourself).

At its core, Wicked is a cautionary tale about propaganda, (literal) scapegoating, and what it means to uphold the status quo. The audience is watching through Glinda’s eyes—it is through her, arguably the most beautifully tragic character of the show, that we learn how lonely life becomes when you forfeit your values in favor of systemic power and likability (“No One Mourns the Wicked” is, in many ways, about HER).

Now, this is where Fiyero’s whiteness can get interesting—if you consider him and Glinda to share roughly equal footing at the beginning in terms of privilege/how much they have to lose (applying our real-world lens of race and power here, where whiteness is the apex), his storyline essentially represents what could have happened if Glinda had made the brave (and arguably wise and loving, if you’re picking up what I’m putting down 👀) choice to go with Elphaba and fight the good fight (this is also why I feel like a queer reading of G&E’s relationship is almost implicit to the story, but I digress).

As the POC/marginalized allegory, Elphaba has much less of a real choice in her curtain-pulled-back turning point. But Fiyero and Glinda—both representing privilege—get to choose. So in Act II, we see the consequences of both the choice to stay (Glinda) and to go (Fiyero). In Fiyero’s case, his ultimate rejection of his own power, privilege, and even beauty leads to immense physical loss—including his own body—but that is then compared to the loss of love, community, and identity that we see Glinda left with by the end. And this brings us to the question that the audience is left grappling with: in an unjust system where loss is inevitable (a.k.a. our own world, as the Wizard himself represents), which of these things are YOU more willing to give up?

It’s important that Glinda is an empathetic character because, in reality, most people are going to be Glindas (obvi this is nuanced among us Elphabas of marginalized identities, but I’d still argue that there’s some level of Glinda in us all)—and it’s important to be rattled by the end of the show when you realize that she is the one who has the sad ending. But it’s also so important that Fiyero is empathetic (which I’m SO glad this movie leaned into)—because he’s ultimately who Glinda—and thus we, as the audience—should have been.

And especially given the state of US politics right now…this is just all more relevant than ever.

[willgrahamscock]

crowley must have known that aziraphale was also in love with him, he tidied the bookshop, he was planning on taking him to the Ritz after his confession, he had their song queued in the car these are not acts of someone who wasn't sure what the outcome will be.

which makes it so much more painful that he still confessed his love for aziraphale with tears in his eyes and on the verge of a full blown panic attack, he left saying "don't bother" but he still waited by his car til the elevator doors closed. all because

[what-is-love-babey-dont-hurt-me]

He would not go there.

[most-normal-eccles-cake-ignorer]

The products of trying to recreate what was going on outside the frame during the kiss. (for ENTIRELY SCIENTIFIC purposes)

@actual-changeling altered my whole outlook on life with this post about Aziraphale's left hand (I'd only been looking at his right hand) and I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I painted the rest of the fucking owl (and his bf).

so normal about this

[akanemnon]

We don't talk about the scar

[angel-fruitcake]

"I kinda wish there had been a different, uh, [...] wrap up to the show. Um, and I know that that's kind of controversial to say, and it'll look like it's egotistical 'cause I wasn't in the end of the show. Uh, which it is. I'm certainly partly fueled by that. But I think that, in a way, maybe it's a good thing, um, that the show, in my- to me, uh, I felt like the end of the show left- left me wanting more, and different- and it felt like it left- it left things unanswered. And it left storylines unresolved, and maybe open for future mining. So I'm gonna take that as a good thing, and like, maybe- maybe there is an opportunity to reboot or- or revisit, uh, the end of Supernatural in some way, at some point down the road. I think it would be so fun to- to dip our toes back into that, not maybe for another 15 seasons... but, you know, certainly 11 or 12."

~ Misha Collins, SPNNASH 2024

[gossippool]

one of the funniest parts of the honda odyssey scene is right after logan pulls the car over because he's so obviously burning with rage over wade lying to him, but then wade says he made an "educated wish" and that bewilders logan so much he goes from being mad to just blinking and staring at him like this

and then wade goes on that long spiel about how he needs to save his family and at the end of all that logan just says "did you say you made an educated fucking wish?" his baffled ass was NOT listening 😭

[snek-eyes]

The fact that Aziraphale emerges from this flashback

Makes this face

and then with a ginormous gap on the right side of the screen, proceeds to be like "I must call Crowley right now immediately."

[essayofthoughts]

Genuinely, I think one of the most fun and crunchy things about any character is

How far they will go for things they want

What they will do to get things they want

Things they won't do, no matter how much they want what they'd get in exchange

Because these things tell you some very important things about the character, namely their limits, their price, and their absolute No's. (And it lets you create some really REALLY crunchy conflict)

[parisoonic]

its not my fault i keep playing against Daniel Day-Lewis mfs