#tbh i think my family is way closer to newt's than it is to anathema's

[thegoodomensdumpster]

You might be tempted to think that Newt and his family would have to be the boring ones, while with the Devices being witches and professionnal descendants of Agnes Nutter life would be constantly thrilling. Nope. It’s the exact opposite.  The Devices have been following Agnes’ predictions for centuries. There is no place for anything random in their lives, they have only two sets of minds: absolute blind certainty and “no”.

Look, Anathema panicks completely when she loses Agnes’ book, a book her and her family have been studying so thoroughly that they have an exhaustive set of recapitulative cards. She has known she was to be involved in preventing the end of the world since she was a kid. She has probably studied and memorized all the predictions she thought to be linked to Armageddon. She has her cards. She knows her stuff. She is competent. And yet, when Anathema loses her book - and if we disregard the emotionnal attachement that, imo, shouldn’t be kicking in this much when you have a fucking end of the world hours away -, when she loses her book, her emotions get the best of her. Because it was not part of the course she was supposed to take, and that had never happened to her before.  Now, let’s take a look at Newt. That guy has been blowing up computers unwillingly since forever, even though he has a passion for all things electronic. He didn’t stop living because he had obstacles to overcome. Heck, he probably learned coding and manually wrote scripts that would work if entered in a computer by anyone other than him. He gets job after job, and doesn’t stop searching for something to do even when he feels discouraged. He signs for the fucking Witchfinder Army when he doesn’t think witches are a thing and when Shadwell, of all people, is the one doing the recruiting. Why not ? One more weird thing in his life, at least he might make some money out of it. And there, in the chaos of Shadwell’s appartement, he manages to understand all on his own that something is up in Tadfield. He also, when presented with enough proof, wholeheartidly admits that witches are real, and so are demons and angels and other things, and he doesn’t panic nearly as much as one should when confronted with a real UFO -ok, he might have been a bit stunned, but still.  “Yep, my girlfriend is a witch. Yep, the antichrist is our neighbour. Yep, I helped prevent Armageddon last week. Oh by the way, should I go buy more toilet paper?”

Newt has been so used to adapting to chaos, he can actually make sense of it. And my personal take on this is that it’s also the case for his family. They’re all chaotic. They all have incredibly bad luck ( as a possible result of a curse, courtesy of Agnes Nutter ). 

So here are Newt and Anathema, at a Pulsifer family meeting. Anathema thinking “oh its gonna be lovely meeting Newt’s family, something quiet and normal after all this Armageddon thing”.  Anathema. Oh. Anathema. Sweet summer child. She doesn’t know that all Pulsifer family meetings end up either in the emergency, or locked out of the house, or running after some kind of wild animal that managed to steal Uncle Patrick’s casefiles that he absolutely needs because he’s been at war with his neighbour for basically thirty years because he could never gather all the files when he needed them and he finally had them all and that fucking boar barged into the garden as he was walking by and somehow got all tangled with the casefiles and now all the Pulsifer have to stop aunt Meredith from showing off her wrestling techniques because dammit woman, you’re nearly 80 years old, stop strying to wrestle a boar, and then when they’re all back home covered in mud and, of course, without the files, they have to try out cousin Dean’s horrible new culinary experiment and someone always ends up having diarrhea after trying out Dean’s cooking so everyone starts betting who it might be this time, and now they’re talking about how every Pulsifer around the age of twelve has avoided an anvil falling out of the sky because yes, that is a thing that happens to every member of this family and every kid knows that they’ll have to avoid an anvil some day, but wait didn’t a Pulsifer die because of that whole anvil thingie back in 1923, and now some people are arguing because it might have been 1935, and oh, that reminds Newt’s mom of that time her great-uncle Patrick (there are several Patrick Pulsifer of course, the last one is 2 years old, it can get very confusing) woke up and had a toad in his slipper, so of course when he tried to put them on he couldn’t and he fell over, and she doesn’t remember exactly how that whole thing happened but one thing led to another and at the end of the day great-uncle Patrick was in a hang-glider he couldn’t control and had somehow lost his trousers while the town’s priest was running after him, and there was a plate of lasagna that were too hot involved somewhere and oh, she can’t remember but it was hilarious.  “And” Anathema asks, “why did that argument remind you of this story?” “Oh” says Mrs Pulsifer. “I don’t know. It just did.” There is ZERO logic to that whole conversation.  Anathema, who has never had any surprise in her life before losing Agnes’ book, looks desperately at Newt. “I thought your family was normal.” “But... We are normal????” Anathema thinks about arguing something back, but she is interrupted by aunt Hortense who decides that now is the perfect time to explain how she nearly died yesterday after going into a scientology building without realizing where she was stepping into. Anathema doesn’t say anything in the end. She’s already too exhausted for that.