#rogue things

[mwagneto]

aint no WAYYY THEY JUST TRIED TO SAY THAT. not even "the doctor's" but doctor who's in general 💀💀 so now that they have a disney contract every single gay thing (which they've had for fucking decades) is gonna be a huge big huge first gay thing ever!!1!1!1!! event??? like yeah there's a very specific significance to it i get it but what the fuck do you mean😭 jamie pull up the files

[hansoeii]

the doctor on their way to steal your heart

[bacchuschucklefuck]

no more fan-ta-sizing about it! everything's already changed~

[loveexpelrevolt]

It does not take a priest to see you and Rogue's souls touch in every gaze.

GAMBIT & ROGUE | X-Men ‘97 1.05 “Remember It"

[ikiprian]

Mr. Fenton is a competent teacher. Almost too competent.

If Mr. Daniel Fenton had any more than a BS (with a minor in education), Tim would’ve flagged his profile as a potential Rogue. That’s the way of most charismatic academics, at least in Gotham. (Got a PhD? Instant watchlist.) Instead, he’s Gotham Academy’s newest celebrity, as a young, passionate, out-of-towner substitute while the chemistry teacher’s on maternity leave.

Tim gets the hype. Fenton seems to genuinely love teaching, and is invested in the welfare of the student body. He hands out bananas during exam week, hosts a “study habits seminar” each month to coach effective learning strategies, and the third time Tim falls asleep in his class, he even pulls Tim aside to ask if he’s doing okay. With all the late work he accepts and the protein bars he sneaks Tim, he’s every teen vigilante’s dream teacher. He could’ve been Tim’s favorite.

In fact, Mr. Fenton was Tim’s favorite. Up until Tim walks into Mr. Fenton’s chemistry classroom for a forgotten textbook, an hour after the final bell.

On the board where tallied scores for today’s review game had been kept, “THE CHEMISTRY BEHIND DR. CRANE’S FEAR GAS: ANXIOGENICS, NERI’S, & YOU,” is now scrawled. A detailed diagram of the human endocrine system projects in front of a small crowd of adoring and attentive students.

Fenton is wrist-deep in the skull cavity of an anatomical model. A short tug, and out pops the brain.

It’s plastic. It’s fake.

Tim identifies the nearest emergency exit.

Fenton turns to the door, and in the dark classroom with the projector illuminating half his face, his eyes almost seem to flash red. “What’s up, Tim?” he asks. His friendly grin is too big for his face. “I didn’t know you wanted to join the Just Science League!”

[OR: Danny’s a science teacher at Tim’s school. Gotham’s a pretty wild place, even for someone who grew up a superhero in a ghost-infested town, so he takes it upon himself to start a club teaching kids how to manage themselves in the event of a crisis. These Gothamites are pretty hardy, but a little extra training never hurt anybody! And he suspects one of his students might be a teen vigilante, like he’d been, back in the day. As a senior super, it's Danny’s duty look out for him! Surely, this is the subtlest and most appropriate way to give the kid pointers.]

[Tim immediately assumes supervillain.]

[abisalli]

*grabs you by the neck like a kitten*

[kaidatheghostdragon]

Crack prompt: Danny has declared war on the curses in Gotham. He is armed with a water balloon gun, but the balloons are full of medical-grade ectoplasm. He targets any location, ghost, or liminal being tainted by curses and/or corrupted ecto - absolutely drenching them before yeeting off again.

This includes the Bats. Danny is smart about it, though. He lived in Gotham for several months before acting, so he could get the lay of the land. He also waits for patrol to be finished before hitting the Bats - he doesn't want to interrupt their Quest to Better Gotham (or be labeled an invader to their haunt).

One night, Danny happens upon Batman patrolling alone and waits for him to finish cleaning up a crime scene before hitting they guy with a half-clip of balloons. Batman gives chase, like he always does, and Danny runs, like he always does. He knows by now that, for whatever reason, Crime Alley is off limits to Batman. The whole alley just gives off "no (other) bats allowed" vibes.

Red hood is just more territorial. Whatever.

At any rate, Danny is enjoying the chase, using just enough ghost powers to stay ahead of batman, almost-but-not-quite taunting him. Crime Alley isn't too far, so instead of turning invisible around a corner like he usually does, he makes his way to the Alley to see if the no-trasspassing rule is enough to stop Batman mid-chase. He leaps across rooftops and weaves through fire escapes, ecto-balloon-gun bouncing by its strap against his back, until finally he's at the border, slightly tapping into flight to make the jump across a slightly wider road into the alley proper.

He turns around immediately, spotting Batman skulking on the rooftop on the other side of the road, stopping the chase and suit half-covered in healing ectoplasm.

"Sanctuary!" Danny yells, pumping his fists in the air from getting caught up in the exciting rush of adrenaline, "I claim sanctuary!"

"Who the fuck is claiming sanctuary in my territory?" Red Hood booms from almost directly behind Danny. He would have yeeted out of his own skin from surprise if he hadn't spent years honing his ghost-fighting instincts. As it was, Danny instead whirled around and emptied the clip of balloons into Hood, purely out of reflex.

Hood stood there, drenched in ecto like his fellow Bat one rooftop over, glaring murder at Danny with glowing eyes. But his haunt betrayed Hood's true emotions.

Surprise, concern, impressed, you-little-brat.

Danny booked it to the fire escape and turned invisible the second he was out of sight.

[inhonoredglory]

Aziraphale’s Choice, the Job Connection, and Michael Sheen’s Morality

Update: Michael Sheen liked this post on Twitter, so I'm fairly certain there is a lot of validity to it.

I’ve had time to process Aziraphale’s choice at the end of Season 2. And I think only blaming the religious trauma misses something important in Aziraphale’s character. I think what happened was also Aziraphale’s own conscious choice––as a growth from his trauma, in fact. Hear me out.

Since November 2022 I’ve been haunted by something Michael Sheen said at the MCM London Comic Con. At the Q&A, someone asked him about which fantasy creature he enjoyed playing most and Michael (bless him, truly) veered on a tangent about angels and goodness and how, specifically,

We as a society tend to sort of undervalue goodness. It’s sort of seen as sort of somehow weak and a bit nimby and “oh it’s nice.” And I think to be good takes enormous reserves of courage and stamina. I mean, you have to look the dark in the face to be truly good and to be truly of the light…. The idea that goodness is somehow lesser and less interesting and not as kind of muscular and as passionate and as fierce as evil somehow and darkness, I think is nonsense. The idea of being able to portray an angel, a being of love. I love seeing the things people have put online about angels being ferocious creatures, and I love that. I think that’s a really good representation of what goodness can be, what it should be, I suppose.

I was looking forward to BAMF!Aziraphale all season long, and I think that’s what we got in the end. Remember Neil said that the Job minisode was important for Aziraphale’s story. Remember how Aziraphale sat on that rock and reconciled to himself that he MUST go to Hell, because he lied and thwarted the will of God. He believed that––truly, honestly, with the faith of a child, but the bravery of a soldier.

Aziraphale, a being of love with more goodness than all of Heaven combined, believed he needed to walk through the Gates of Hell because it was the Right Thing to do. (Like Job, he didn’t understand his sin but believed he needed to sacrifice his happiness to do the Right Thing.)

That’s why we saw Aziraphale as a soldier this season: the bookshop battle, the halo. But yes, the ending as well.

Because Aziraphale never wanted to go to Heaven, and he never wanted to go there without Crowley.

But it was Crowley who taught him that he could, even SHOULD, act when his moral heart told him something was wrong. While Crowley was willing to run away and let the world burn, it was Aziraphale (in that bandstand at the end of the world) who stood his ground and said No. We can make a difference. We can save everyone.

And Aziraphale knew he could not give up the ace up his sleeve (his position as an angel) to talk to God and make them see the truth in his heart.

I was messed up by Ineffable Bureaucracy (Boxfly) getting their happy ending when our Ineffable Husbands didn’t, but I see now that them running away served to prove something to Aziraphale. (And I am fully convinced that Gabriel and Beelzebub saw the example of the Ineffables at the Not-pocalypse and took inspiration from them for choosing to ditch their respective sides)

But my point is that Aziraphale saw them, and in some ways, they looked like him and Crowley. And he saw how Gabriel, the biggest bully in Heaven, was also like him in a way (a being capable of love) and also just a child when he wasn’t influenced by the poison of Heaven. Muriel, too, wasn’t a bad person. The Metatron also seemed to have grown more flexible with his morality (from Aziraphale's perspective). Like Earth, Heaven was shades of (light?) gray.

Aziraphale is too good an angel not to believe in hope. Or forgiveness (something he’s very good at it).

Aziraphale has been scarred by Heaven all his life. But with the cracks in Heaven’s armor (cracks he and Crowley helped create), Aziraphale is seeing something else. A chance to change them. They did terrible things to him, but he is better than them, and because of Crowley, he feels ready to face them.

(Will it work? Can Heaven change, institutionally? Probably not, but I can't blame Aziraphale for trying.)

At the cafe, the Metatron said something big was coming in the Great Plan. Aziraphale knows how trapped he had felt when he didn’t have God’s ear the first time something huge happened in the Big Plan. He can’t take a chance again to risk the world by not having a foot in the door of Heaven. That’s why we saw individual human deaths (or the threat of death) so much more this season: Elspeth, Wee Morag, Job’s children, the 1940s magician. Aziraphale almost killed a child when he couldn’t get through to God, and he’s not going through that again.

“We could make a difference.” We could save everyone.

Remember what Michael Sheen said about courage and doing good––and having to “look the dark in the face to be truly good.” That’s what happened when Aziraphale was willing to go to Hell for his actions. That’s what happened when he decided he had to go to Heaven, where he had been abused and belittled and made to feel small. He decided to willingly go into the Lion’s Den, to face his abusers and his anxiety, to make them better so that they would not try to destroy the world again.

Him, just one angel. He needed Crowley to be there with him, to help him be brave, to ask the questions that Heaven needed to hear, to tell them God was wrong. Crowley is the inspiration that drives Aziraphale’s change, Crowley is the engine that fuels Aziraphale’s courage.

But then Crowley tells him that going to Heaven is stupid. That they don’t need Heaven. And he’s right. Aziraphale knows he’s right.

Aziraphale doesn’t need Heaven; Heaven needs him. They just don’t know how much they need him, or how much humanity needs him there, too. (If everyone who ran for office was corrupt, how can the system change?)

Terry Pratchett (in the Discworld book, Small Gods) is scathing of God, organized religion, and the corrupt people religion empowers, but he is sympathetic to the individual who has real, pure faith and a good heart. In fact, the everyman protagonist of Small Gods is a better person than the god he serves, and in the end, he ends up changing the church to be better, more open-minded, and more humanist than god could ever do alone.

Aziraphale is willing to go to the darkest places to do the Right Thing, and Heaven is no exception. When Crowley says that Heaven is toxic, that’s exactly why Aziraphale knows he needs to go there. “You’re exactly is different from my exactly.”

____

In the aftermath of Trump's election in the US, Brexit happened in 2018. Michael Sheen felt compelled to figure out what was going on in his country after this shock. But he was living in Los Angeles with Sarah Silverman at the time, and she also wanted to become more politically active in the US.

Sheen: “I felt a responsibility to do something, but it [meant] coming back [to Britain] – which was difficult for us, because we were very important to each other. But we both acknowledge that each of us had to do what we needed to do.” In the end, they split up and Michael moved back to the UK.

Sometimes doing the Right Thing means sacrificing your own happiness. Sometimes it means going to Hell. Sometimes it means going to Heaven. Sometimes it means losing a relationship.

And that’s why what happened in the end was so difficult for Aziraphale. Because he loves Crowley desperately. He wants to be together. He wanted that kiss for thousands of years. He knows that taking command of Heaven means they would never again have to bow to the demands of a God they couldn’t understand, or run from a Hell who still came after them. They could change the rules of the game.

And he’s still going to do that. But it hurts him that he has to do that alone.

[artofthero]

when ur sister is rude

[lucabyte]

siffrin starts the game with oddly empty pockets for a rogue who has a habit of stashing away every little trinket that isn't nailed down

and a hardy pocketwatch is an indispensable tool for oceanic navigation

[sykloni]

Dannymay 2023

15. Full Hazmat AU & 23. Rogue Gallery

[riverwithoutbanks]

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 314

Danny has discovered something absolutely amazing. While he can’t cook for shit, he can? Actually bake? Really well? Must be those bonding sessions in Long Now with Clockwork making all those cookies and cakes and everything else. 

But? This means he can A, actually make himself food, and B, has somehow befriended several more ghosts, including his rogues. Apparently he gave off bedraggled cat vibes when covered in flour. Or they just enjoyed the cupcakes he’d made to look like them in a sleep deprived ferver. 

But hey, he even has a decent job while he’s in (online due to medical issues, officially) college at one of the local bakery-cafes. Which means he also gets free coffee, so that’s nice too. Just erm, he might’ve gotten in the habit of handing cookies or other baked goods to anyone trying to attack him.

Look, it’s how he befriended his rogues (Apparently Fright Knight, being the ghost of Autumn, enjoys pumpkin spice cookies, who knew?) and they even continue to visit too. 

So really, it’s not his fault that there’s several goonion (honestly Sam will be pleased to learn they’ve got a union) members who are now constantly coming to the bakery. And- okay is that another undead person? Have a cupcake. 

[bacchuschucklefuck]

class swap design masterpost for convenience (from top to bottom: bard!riz, cleric!gorgug, sorcerer!kristen, barbarian!fig, artificer!adaine, and rogue!fabian)

[noxcheshire]

I know Danny is canonically 5’5”

BUT

I like the idea of Danny being even shorter than that. A Danny whose just SO tiny that most people clock him as being either very weak, which doesn’t help with his ghost-bird bones, or being very adorable due to tinniness.

Regardless, he’s been viewed as an innocent figure. In reality though, he is absolutely “violence is always the option” type of short guy. Like he embodies the stereotype of being so short that he has privileges in hell energy.

That type of short guy.

So just imagine this tiny little creature-teenager-child staring up and up at this person, neck craned back just to look them in the face. Danny is frowning at them, this insufferable person whose immediate reaction was to patronize him because Danny was deceptively tiny.

And Danny just goes, “You shall never know peace again,” before picking them up like they weigh nothing but a handful of grapes and YEETS THEM.

[sunsetuniverse]

"There's a power in seeing yourself in another, in resemblance..."