#qftxt

[queerfables]

I could use some softness in these hard times so have five gentle Good Omens headcanons:

1. Crowley taught Aziraphale poker, with the vague thought in the back of his head that maybe one day they could play strip poker. Except Aziraphale turned out to be so charmingly and stubbornly bad at poker that Crowley couldn't bring himself to suggest it, it didn't seem fair. Aziraphale's entire face is a tell and watching him try unsuccessfully to pretend he's got rubbish cards while holding a royal flush is one of the true joys in Crowley's life, so they play for cupcakes instead and Crowley does his best to lose.

2. Aziraphale and Crowley have been writing letters to each other pretty much since the invention of mail. At first this sometimes involved bemused Roman couriers wondering how the heck they'd ended up in the jungle and why the guy with dark tinted glass over his eyes looked so pleased to see them, but eventually international postage rates dropped. They never talk about their correspondence, except to occasionally pick up the thread of an ongoing theological argument, but they both still have every letter they ever received.

3. Crowley has a secret soft spot for cats. Every few months, Aziraphale insists on going to a cat cafe for lunch so Crowley can get in some quality kitty time without admitting he wants to. Crowley is so invested in pretending he has no interest in cuddles that the grumpiest cats always make a beeline for him, settle smuggly in his lap and refuse to budge. As it turns out, Crowley's poker face is worse than Aziraphale's.

4. When they're apart and Crowley misses Aziraphale, he goes to the local market and buys whatever makes him think of Aziraphale. He buys empty mason jars, cheese knives with carved wooden handles, maps of the local area. He holds onto them until he sees Aziraphale again, and then passes it off as something he was given second hand, or left by accident and never reclaimed.

When Aziraphale misses Crowley, he goes out and causes mischief in Crowley's name. Crowley asks him about it later, and he pretends he has no idea what Crowley's talking about, and ignores the way Crowley's face lights up over his bad behaviour.

5. Eventually Aziraphale gets tired of waiting for Crowley to suggest it, eats all of the cupcakes earlier in the night and proposes they bet on something else. That night when they play poker, they both win.

[steelyankee]

#TheCat is the cartoon superhero we all need now. #PandemicPurring #PandemicParadise #Chico #FridayFeline #catsofinstagram #catsagram #cat #cats (at Mahopac, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CBDcp-qFtxT/?igshid=1ia086babsjwc

[jtuohey]

NASA sending spacecraft straight into sun’s glittering crown

http://dlvr.it/QfTxTS

[queerfables]

A lot has been said about the That Cold Open in Good Omens, and yet here I am, a year on and still SUPER FUCKING EMOTIONAL about it. Because here’s the thing: from a storytelling perspective, it was a fucking STUPID way to structure the narrative. You don't just create an elaborate fantasy world with a two page character list and stakes as high as the end of the world and then come to the middle of the narrative, the very core of your story, and say, "Okay, for the next half an hour, we're taking just these two characters and we’re going to watch a slow interpersonal drama play out over a timespan of six. thousand. years." It makes no fucking sense. 

And it's riveting.

The first time I watched it, "You go to fast for me" left me absolutely reeling. Here's the meta that got me thinking about this, and I agree with it entirely. In the book, Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship was nominally a matter of convenience. The tv series ups the stakes on that relationship by showing it as just about the most inconvenient choice they could make - it’s dangerous, they can’t name it, and it could ruin them both, but they choose it over and over again anyway. 

What I'd add to that meta is that the script's stupid fucking choice to spend a full half of it's central episode on introspective character driven backstory exposition, without breaking that up with other characters or plot threads, without snapping forward to the present timeline, means that by the time you reach the end of that sprawling flashback, you are so acutely immersed in this relationship that you feel every second of their history like you lived it.

The flashback is a terrible structural decision, but here are some things it captured really well:

An immersive sense of time and place, and a devastatingly slow forward momentum

The tenderness, warmth and humour between these two characters. Their shared values, against a landscape of hostility and rejection of those values.

The risks and the stakes - the weight of the consequences Crowley and Aziraphale would face for their relationship.

The gap between what they're saying and what they're doing. "This is for my job," they say, as they defy the most basic tenant of that job.

One of my very favourite narrative structuring devices is Dan Harmon's Story Circle. You can read about it here if you're not familiar with it. It pulls from a lot of related analyses of myths and storytelling. Anyway, if Good Omens is analysed against this structure, the last scene of That Cold Open Flashback, the one where Aziraphale gives Crowley holy water and tells him, you go to fast for me, falls right at the bottom of the circle. One name for this point is Meeting With the Goddess, and that’s such a poetic and utterly appropriate way to describe this moment between Aziraphale and Crowley that it kills me a bit. 

According to the story circle, what happens at this point of the narrative is that the protagonist finds what they've been searching and fighting for - and then they have to figure out what to do with it. And if you're doing your job as a storyteller right, the moment should feel weightless. Harmon says this point can be good or bad, and a lot of times is both. Actually, I'm just going to quote a bunch of what Harmon says this moment can be, because it's all so beautiful and relevant:

This is a great time for sex or making out with the hot chick, especially if your protagonist has been kung-fuing everybody he meets for the past half hour. But the goddess doesn't have to be a femme fatale or an angelic damsel ... the "goddess" could be a character's confession that they lost their job. The goddess can be a gesture, an idea, a gun, a diamond, a destination, or just a moment's freedom from that monster that won't stop chasing you.

If sitting together in the Bentley that night is Crowley and Aziraphale’s Meeting With the Goddess, the point where they both get what they’re searching for, then what they’re searching for is each other. This moment between them becomes almost every single thing a Meeting With the Goddess could be: intimacy, a confession, a weapon, a reward, and safety, just for a moment. That weightless, breathless moment where they can say what they mean without fear. A half hour long flashback in the very middle of your story makes no fucking sense, and yet it’s also the perfect way - the only way - to tell this story that’s about love and humanity and the end of the world, and two immortals who’d risk everything for a few more nights getting wine drunk on a couch together.

Look, it's fucking 5am and I can't keep waxing lyrical about this but the point is that Good Omens basically stopped the entire fucking show in a way that contravenes all rules of storytelling to say "Look at this, this is important, feel this. Live it with them, the way that they lived it. That feeling, that culmination of 6000 years worth of unspoken and unspeakable truths, that moment when everything else fell away and it was just the two of them coming as close to the edge as they've ever been? That's the heart of the story. It lives here, at the centre, because it's everything they want and it's what's going to drive the rest of the story forward. Everything they've been working for, and everything they do from here on out is because of this."

And ps, it does it so fucking effortlessly that you don't even know it's happening until it's over, and then you're left reeling with the revelation.

[queerfables]

My wife and I watched Hannibal for the first time, like, a month ago. We’ve now seen it four times, every time we finish we just turn around and watch it again, this is what happens when two neuroatypicals hyperfixate on the same thing, please send help we’ve lost control of our lives. 

[queerfables]

The reason it’s so difficult to place Will and Hannibal in a Good Omens AU is in part that their dichotomy is so different to Crowley and Aziraphale’s (for a start, the thing that keeps them apart is not a cold war between two basically identical sides, it’s their own choices around morality and self-expression). But mostly the reason it’s hard to place them in the realm of angels and demons is that they define the very things that Crowley and Aziraphale are not. The whole point of Good Omens is that humanity is capable of acts of cruelty and forgiveness that far exceed what Heaven and Hell could ever imagine. That is what Hannibal and Will stand for. They’re not an angel and a demon looking for a quiet life on earth, they’re two humans building a legacy out of unimaginable horror and destruction, and then finding something like redemption in the force of their love for each other. 

If Will and Hannibal were placed in the world of Good Omens, I think it has to be as humans. So maybe rather than Crowley and Aziraphale, they’re Newt and Anathema. Hannibal is an agent of the occult, who knows far more about the past and the future than he really should, and Will is the witchfinder sent to stop him, who ends up falling into his bed instead. Or under it, or whatever. (I’m fond of the witch/witchfinder dynamic matching up along these lines, but I do think it’s Will who is “a little bit psychic”).

[queerfables]

Will Graham saying, "Everyone has thought about killing someone, one way or another," has the same energy as when you come out to someone and they're like "I mean, everyone thinks about that kind of thing sometimes." Like, no, Will, I don't think that's true, MAYBE YOU'RE JUST GAY.

[queerfables]

Will: Couldn't you have picked a different metaphor for my burgeoning queer awakening? 

Hannibal: *thoughtfully swallows a thumb*