#love both physical and emotional

[mymelodyisme]

Just gonna blabber

[thebrainrotsreal]

Random musings about an episode where Spectra disguised herself as a student, rather than a counselor to sow misery within the high school! Spreading gossip, being outright malicious, shattering friendships, and all that jazz! Plus, using that fact she looks like a teen against Danny, since unless cornering her, he couldn't fight her without looking like he's attacking a random student.

[tremendously-crazy]

Relationship envy except I envy the bond between iconic fictional characters Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson

[twelvemartha]

Oh god, they'll never know. I... I'll just have disappeared. And they'll always be waiting. Call them.

[forestshadow-wolf]

Ghost sees himself as a terrible person so he lies to convince himself that his actions were necessary/makes him less of a bad person (he doesn't need to tho). No no he had to do that or his team would have been in danger.

Vs

Soap sees himself as a terrible person, but instead of trying to rationalize his actions to make himself seem better, he lies to make himself seem even worse than he is. He wasn't even thinking about his team then, it was just lucky that he didn't kill them all.

They know eachother inside and out. They know exactly how the other thinks.

Soap knows just how to remind ghost that he's good. That he's not this terrible unforgivable /thing/. That sure maybe some of the things he's done are, objectively, terrible, but that that does not make him a bad person.

Ghost knows how to refute soap perfectly without invalidating his feelings. Knows that soap doesn't actually want people to think he's a bad person, but thinks he deserves it. He knows how to explain from an objective but gentle standpoint how what he did/didn't do may not have been good persay, but it's nowhere near as bad as he twists it to be

[galaxicnerd]

fears of inadequacy

[princessranboo]

after everything

[cometrose]

queen of tears pisses me off because haein and hyunwoo know each other so well but don't know each other at all like

"she doesn't like it when people touch her hair" "he doesn't drink coffee on an empty stomach" "she doesn't like the bathroom floor wet" "she's not a lightweight so how did you get her drunk"

And the phone password...

they make me sick!!!!

[sharkdays]

"That despite having experienced inhuman suffering, she has nonetheless been able to gain the strength to face life."

[flintsilvers]

btw i think armand probably thought he could save louis some other way and lestat just beat him to it. like theres absolutely no reason to believe armand wanted louis dead/would choose the coven over him. ultimately it doesnt really matter tho bc he wanted claudia dead and he got that, he wanted to leave the coven with louis and he got that too

[chaos-bringer-13]

Jazz's little. Her parents are super cool. They're ghost hunters! It sounds like something from a movie about future and scientists and supernatural beings and cool-looking tech. They have cool-looking tech at home. It's even cooler than tech in the movies.

Jazz also has a little brother. He's stupid but he's hers, and she will protect him from anything. Her brother is very small, he needs someone to protect him and teach him about the world.

She knows about the world. She understands their parents much better than him, and she can tell her brother when they shouldn't be distracted. She knows when they're upset and irritable, and she knows when they're too excited and being near them is dangerous because of all the inventions.

Jazz does a very good job keeping her little brother safe.

---

Jazz goes to school. Her teachers say that she's very smart, the best student in class, and very mature. Her parents are proud of her - when she manages to distract them from ghosts. Her brother is still kinda stupid and doesn't know how to properly fight food, but she's always there to protect him, because that's what older sisters do.

Her classmates seem to think that she's weird though. Some of them say mean things and call her a teacher's pet and a show-off. Jazz isn't sure why they think so because she's always trying to be friendly but maybe she's doing something wrong. She goes to the school library and finds a book about people and their communication.

It's a very interesting book.

---

Jazz is almost a teen. She's gotten better at communicating with people. The school library ran out of psychology books, and Jazz now has to go to the city library but that's fine. Human brain fascinates her.

She's been feeling like something is wrong about her though. She even thought that she was going crazy for a little bit. That probably wasn't true because she didn't match any symptoms but she was still worried.

Someone told her that being so good at lying and faking face expressions is not okay. That's probably not true, Jazz is pretty sure almost everyone can do that. Or maybe she's just being a prodigy again. It's a very good thing to be able to do after all. She can hide her emotions from her family when she's feeling sad. She wouldn't want to worry them, would she?

She'll have to research it.

---

Jazz is a teen. She now knows that her parents aren't actually that good. It's something that was really hard to accept but it did explain everything. Her parents are kinda bad at being parents, and they also don't really listen when she tries to explain it to them.

It's okay. She's almost an adult and Danny has her. She can take care of herself and her brother.

She learns everything she can about being a parent and a therapist and tries to use her knowledge. It's hard, but she's a Fenton, which means that she's very smart and determined. She pushes through, and trains on her classmates and herself.

In the evening she writes about her feelings in a journal. It's very important to be aware of her feelings because that's the first step to dealing with them.

She's experiencing sadness. And anger, actually, even though she doesn't like to admit that.

She writes "this family is a fucking mess" in her journal and then covers the paper with ink until the sentence is absolutely unreadable.

---

Jazz is sixteen, and her stupid parents opened the stupid portal, which means that they're even worse than usual. It's pretty much okay when they're just stuck in their stupid lab, making some stupid weapons. It's not that okay when they're out of the stupid lab, because they get their stupid inventions all over the stupid house, and stupid food comes to life, and she has to protect Danny from both their stupid weapons and stupid hotdogs, and oh god everything is so stupid.

She's experiencing anger.

She's also acting perfectly calm and almost cheerfully.

Jazz hates how perfect her fake smile is in the mirror.

---

Jazz is seventeen. She wants to put her headphones on and listen to some loud music. Jazz can't do that, because she gets anxious if she can't hear what's happening around her. She needs to be fully aware of her surroundings because she needs to be able to protect herself and her brother if weapons against ghosts become weapons against children again.

She thinks that it's not okay.

The house smells of ectoplasm, so she'll be extra careful when opening the fridge.

She thinks that she shouldn't know how ectoplasm smells.

Jazz should probably also warn Danny: her little brother's gotten better at fighting food but doesn't notice the smell of ectoplasm. Funny, considering his ghost sense.

Funny, considering that her brother is a half-ghost.

That her brother died.

That she failed at protecting him after all.

Jazz stops breathing to prevent herself from crying, and doesn't need oxygen for a few minutes too long.

Maybe she failed at protecting herself too.

---

Jazz is turning eighteen next month. Her parents are all of a sudden more attentive and caring, as if that can change their almost-absence during her whole life. She doesn't like their attention because she doesn't know how to deal with it. She doesn't even really think of them as parents anymore.

She thinks of them as a threat.

Once she's eighteen, she's gonna try to move out, and she's going to take Danny with her because it's not safe to leave him here. Maybe after she gets a good job and saves some money, she'll even get into therapy.

Jazz thinks that she needs therapy.

She's been having Bad Thoughts lately, and she doesn't write them down in her journal. Jazz stopped writing anything in there ever since she found out that Danny is a ghost. She just couldn't risk anyone finding that journal.

Jazz isn't sure if she should call those Bad Thoughts intrusive. They scare her, and they're Bad, but it could be just her normal thought process.

It's still definitely not normal.

---

Jazz is eighteen. Her parents are very excited, whispering to each other about how they found a perfect present for her, some surprise that she's gonna love.

She doesn't care.

Her little brother is late from school, and it's weird, because he was also super excited about giving her his present.

She's worried.

Her parents brush off her concern, say that Danny probably just got distracted talking with his friends. They don't listen when she says that Danny wouldn't get distracted like that on her birthday because he's not them, he actually cares about her, he doesn't forget her birthdays, and something has to be wrong for him to be that late.

They don't listen to her at all.

She's angry.

Her parents are excited and talk loudly about how they wanted to find a perfect gift for their favourite daughter, and how they managed to do it because they love her so much. She hates when they're excited. It only leads to problems.

They bring her to the lab because of course they do, why would they make a gift that is normal and isn't kept in the lab, right? They usher her in, so obviously proud of themselves.

She hates them.

And she hates them much, much more the next second, because the gift is her little brother in his ghost form, strapped to a table, unconscious and injured, and the smell of ectoplasm is strong in the lab because of his green blood dripping on the floor.

There's a cold part of her that analyses her feelings and tells her what emotions she's experiencing, and that part is very aware of thick black smoke of wrath twirling and twisting under her skin. It's suffocating, and she stops breathing as it invisibly fills her lungs, scared of letting it out.

There's a perfectly fake part of her that keeps the smile on her face as her parents gush about how hard it was to catch the ecto-scum, and what they can do to it - together with Jazz because they wanted to share this with their amazing daughter.

Jazz is black smoke of rage under perfect glass of calmness when she grabs Fenton anti-creep stick. The smile she learned to fake under any circumstances doesn't falter when Jazz brings the baseball bat down on her father's head. It grows a little bit wider when she hits her mother, because Jazz learned to smile brighter when she's hurt or sad or scared or angry - experiencing any "bad" emotion actually.

Jazz is angry when she grabs her weapon.

Jazz is furious when she kills her parents.

Jazz is worried when she checks her brother's wounds.

Jazz feels nothing when she rigs the portal to blow, walks out of the house and presses the button.

She is her parents' genius daughter after all, and she did listen when they were telling her about their inventions. Maybe it would have taken longer to do, but she had Bad Thoughts, and they probably weren't just intrusive after all, because she did what they told her and made it very easy to make a bomb out of a portal. Just in case. Her parents were a threat, and Jazz was smart enough to prepare to dealing with threats, and she was smart enough to make it look like the threats dealt with themselves.

She really hoped she wouldn't have to use that button though.

---

Jazz is nineteen. Her sort-of-friends at uni offer to go to a restaurant, and she tells them that she doesn't celebrate her birthdays. There's a noise of all of them saying that maybe she should try, noise that she really should have expected, because humans are always so excited about any holidays, it's hard for them to understand that someone might not like them. It's not hard to stop that noise though. They shut up very quickly when Jazz says that she had "a very traumatic event" on her birthday.

Good. She doesn't like loud people.

Jazz goes home to her little brother. He's sad because his parents died in an awful explosion a year ago. He's still trying to smile because it's also her birthday, and Jazz is very happy that he's bad at faking a smile.

It means that he won't end up like her.

Jazz hugs her little brother, and he gives her a little present that she adores, and then they sit in silence and eat some takeout. It's very nice.

She never tells Danny that their parents died before the explosion, and that the explosion wasn't an accident, and that their ghosts did form after that because of all the ecto-contamination they had, but she made sure this wouldn't become a problem. She never tells him what she's done, because that would hurt her little brother, and she would never let anything hurt him.

Jazz will protect her little brother from anything.

[nasthepotprincess]

i think one of the hottest fucking parts of kings rising is when they sword fight for the first fucking time MARY JESUS AND JOSEPH

cus not only do i picture it so fucking vividly but like IT’S THE FIRST FUCKING TIME LAURENT GIVES IN AND SHOWS SOME REAL EMOTION WITH DAMEN. he just gets so fucking desperate to prove himself, to show how he could have avenged his brother but fucking damen is BETTER and for the first time he’s outdid by someone other than his uncle and he can’t get over that. he starts doing shit that’s childish and dishonorable in a fight but he doesn’t care because HERE’S THIS STUPID FUCKING BOY WHO HE THOUGHT HE KNEW BUT DIDN’T AT ALL AND IN THE MIDST OF TRYING TO SAVE HIS KINGDOM HERE HE COMES WITH HIS DIMPLES AND HIS LOYALTY AND ALL HIS FUCKING EMOTIONS AND LIKE HE SHOULDVE JUST KILLED HIM BECAUSE THEN MAYBE HE WOULDNT BE IN LOVE BUT ITS TOO LATE NOW AND HERE HE IS THROWING SAND AT HIS FUCKING EYES BECAUSE HE DOESNT KNOW HOW TO SAY I LOVE YOU

all while laurent is flushing and damen is sweating and they’re thrashing each other around like WHAT

[jjsanguine]

People who said "everything in episode 6 really happened but the dreamlike quality was because the recollection of events was distorted by the trauma of the accident" how does it feel to have the biggest brain

[sunnyspot]

Someone might have pointed this out already but in the first scene of season 2, when Crowley is creating the universe, he’s using a hand-crank to set it into motion. We get a good glimpse of it as the camera pulls into his character, and another when Aziraphale holds the map for him:

When he’s done spinning the crank, Aziraphale asks: “Is that it?”

To which Crowley replies: “Oh, no. That’s just priming the engine.”

Priming the engine. It’s an interesting turn of phrase, since cars won’t be invented for another ~6,000 years, but it’s congruous with the humorous anachronisms in the world of Good Omens. I don’t know much about old cars, so I had to do some reading for this, but essentially hand-cranks were used to quite literally wind an engine up by hand. What I find interesting is that the show has chosen to have a character, who we know will later have an emotional connection to his car, equate the universe to a car.

The Bentley is Crowley’s equivalent to a physical home. The show reinforces, time and again, that he is living out of his car in season 2; that the Bentley is to Crowley what the bookshop is to Aziraphale (Adam restoring the Bentley and bookshop to new after Armagedidn’t, “The Bentley is my car.” “Well, yes, technically. Just as that bookshop is technically my shop…”); that he can feel when Aziraphale turned it yellow. In the book, Hastur even uses the Bentley to explain how Crowley has “gone native” to Earth: 

Crowley’s car represents his connection to humanity. He has chosen a home for himself outside of heaven and hell, within the freedom afforded by Earth and, by extension, his car. So it’s only fitting that he uses a car part to crank the universe into existence. 

But this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Crowley with a hand-crank! Flashback to this scene from the season 1 finale: 

Sure enough, he’s using the Bentley’s hand crank to fight against heaven and hell! As @fuckyeahgoodomens points out in this post, he originally used a tire iron in the book, but it changes to a hand crank in the series.

Major kudos to Neil Gaiman and the directing/props team, because it’s a beautiful parallel to have Crowley defending the Earth with the same technology he used to create it. It’s Crowley saying, “My weapon of choice is the very humanity you’ve tried to squash out of me.” It’s him saying, “Remember, I was there when this infinite, beautiful, messy universe Began.” It’s him saying, “I once used the tools of heaven to create this planet, and I will use the same tools to protect it, whether heaven likes it or not.” 

[anetherealpoetess]

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; from ‘The Company of Wolves’

[astarlightmonbebe]

episode 5 has left me considering the different - and similar - ways taeyoung and kwonsook think about themselves, and how they respond to pain/violence.

kwonsook calls herself a monster, someone who goes crazy in the boxing ring. that monster, she says, was created by her father, and her father used abuse, violence, and emotional manipulation to create that monster. he didn’t treat her like human, so it’s no surprise that the way she talks about herself when she boxes is as if she’s discussing an animal: she gets cornered, gets scared for her life, and lashes out to kill. she calls herself a monster with resignation; it’s not what she wanted to be, but she knows it’s what she was. she ran away to escape that monstrosity, to live as a human, doing good things, but that part of her never really died.

taeyoung, too, calls himself a monster. he’s a SOB, he does thing no one with an ounce of humanity would do. he seemingly has no qualms about what he does, perhaps because he can always justify it to himself, always has an exit prepared for when things really get bad (until, i’m sure, he doesn’t). like kwonsook, taeyoung accepts the label of monster, accepts his own inhumanity, even if they are inhuman in very different ways. whereas kwonsook wants to break away from that monstrous part of her - she’s only returned so she can free herself from that part of herself permanently (and if she finds a way to box without a monster, then...) - taeyoung embraces it. it’s through being a monster that he’s found success, how he secures futures for his athletes, and how he’s able to ‘solve’ their (and his) issues. monstrosity was not imposed on taeyoung, but (due to what we know so far) is something he chose for himself (although the factors surrounding this part of his past are decidedly murky).

in this episode, taeyoung and kwonsook also demonstrate similar responses to violence and (emotional) pain. when taeyoung upsets kwonsook by working with her father behind her back, he offers her an outlet for her anger by punching him. later on, after ahreum has already slapped kwonsook, instead of lashing out, kwonsook offers to let ahreum hit her again if it will make her feel better. in parallel responses, both ahreum and kwonsook debate taking that opportunity to hurt, but decide not to (kwonsook because she’s taking a chance on taeyoung, or moreso giving him another one, and ahreum because she decides that she doesn’t owe kwonsook that, that kwonsook is beneath her in terms of boxing, no longer on her level). 

kwonsook learned to respond to pain at a young age. in boxing, you can’t flinch from the hit - you have to learn how to take the pain, absorb it, and get back up to hit again. outside of the rink, kwonsook absorbs the pain, but she doesn’t hit again. she’s experienced firsthand what her hits can do to people, and that terrified her. after all, she only boxed so that she could protect her mother. so when confronted with violence and pain, she takes the hit, because pain is what she knows and understands. it’s the emotions behind it that are hard for her. pain is easy for kwonsook, because she’s used to living through it, surviving it; beneath it, she’s always empty. she’s never really cared about boxing; it was what she had to do. the lee kwonsook that was a boxing genius was a monster she ran from, after all. but in order to break away from that monster, she has to come to understand the emotional investment of her fellow female boxers. before, they were just her opponents, never her friends, but now she has to face their own feelings about the sport, the passion they have for boxing that she never felt. like ara said, she didn’t feel happiness about winning, and kwonsook has never lost, so she’s never had to live with that humiliation, either. how her feelings will change in relation to boxing will likely be a reckoning for her.

taeyoung, on the other hand, is confronting his fair share of non-boxing sanctioned boxing. even though kwonsook is the boxer, it’s taeyoung who’s been touched by ‘true’ violence in this present timeline. his life is quite literally on the line, which has been shown again and again. he’s been ambushed by her father, threatened, blackmailed, and beaten up by chairman nam’s guys. he lives on the edge, anxious at every shadow, which is chewing him alive. to him, kwonsook’s anger is much easier to deal with. he knows she might hurt him, but his potential to hurt her is so much more (and if he does, in that case he’d find her anger justified, and probably let her beat him to death or something if what we’ve seen of his feelings for her is an indication of anything), and she might hurt him, but she’d never hurt him as much as other people in his life at the moment would (i.e. by killing him, or hurting the people he cares about). taeyoung is used to weathering the storm of other people’s dislike; he’s the scumbag, and he does bad things, deserves other people’s anger when it’s directed at him. 

both taeyoung and kwonsook want to resolve things through violence. i think it’s telling that despite being two emotionally aware people, they both consider other people’s feelings to be so easily taken care of. they want the quick, instant pain, and then they want to get it over with. because the violence is what they’re used to, and to a degree it’s what they both think they deserve. however, what lies beneath that, what doesn’t go away with a single hit, is much harder for them to confront and understand.