kryptaria: thesaltofcarthage: forineffablereasons: forineffablereasons: crowley saves aziraphale...

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kryptaria:

thesaltofcarthage:

forineffablereasons:

forineffablereasons:

crowley saves aziraphale from a prison and from a church and if that isn’t a fucking queer mood 

hang on i gotta expand on this because i can’t stop thinking about it: 

the prison scene is the only scene where crowley suggests aziraphale change something about himself - his appearance, his clothes, his presentation - and it’s for his own safety. it’s so that he can exist safely out in the world, where it might be punishable to be who aziraphale is - not an aristo, but flamboyant, in his way. this is essentially about staying closeted for personal safety. it’s okay!! you don’t owe anyone your coming out, for any reason but especially where personal safety is concerned. this relates back to aziraphale’s relationship with the homophobic-coded heaven, and aziraphale’s struggle to come to terms with his own thoughts and feelings as they are contrary to heaven’s “the way you should think and feel” codes. crowley understands what it is that aziraphale has to lose - he’s shown repeatedly regretting and struggling with his own fall, and only comes to terms with it in the last few moments of the apocalypse. crowley’s patience for aziraphale throughout the show is based in this: he gets it. he understands what it is to be cast out. he understands what aziraphale is going through whenever aziraphale goes against heaven.

this leads us exactly into the church scene. although this is happening in a church, there’s nothing holy or sacred or divine going on. it’s just a bunch of nazis sitting on an altar plotting to rob and murder a queer person. there were certainly nazis up to that kind of business in the 1940s, and there are certainly nazis up to that same kind of business now today. this isn’t subtle!! this is right-wing religious fanatic fascism in a nutshell!! so then crowley shows up and importantly, crowley doesn’t actually save aziraphale. crowley gives aziraphale the opportunity to save them both. aziraphale has to save himself. aziraphale is the only one with the power to save himself, and in doing so, he saves them both. 

this is the core of the whole show’s arc: aziraphale (the queer person), struggling to be what heaven (the traditional, homophobic family) wants him to be, even though he can see and feel that heaven is wrong. crowley (the out & cast out queer person), patiently standing by and helping aziraphale where he needs it, but ultimately leaving the decisions to aziraphale as to how or when to move forward, right up until crowley thinks they’ve run out of time and have to either run or be destroyed or separated; when he tries to force a decision on aziraphale, their relationship falls apart. it’s only restored when aziraphale finally, on his own, comes to terms with the idea that heaven’s way isn’t the way he wants to live. he doesn’t want to fight. he doesn’t believe in it. he believes in something else now, and he’s finally ready to make that choice. he ultimately turns heaven’s own logic in on itself to stop armageddon and uses love to help adam defeat the devil (aziraphale and crowley offering their love, their support, and their hands to adam, who in turn defeats the devil by denying him power where he has not done the same). 

then at the bus stop, crowley offers aziraphale to stay at his place. aziraphale’s gut reaction is to fall back in heaven’s line, and crowley say, we have to choose our faces wisely. this isn’t about body swapping to save themselves!! this is about rewriting paris 1793! this is about choosing, finally, now that they are on their own side, now that they have chosen their own rules, to be who they really are. aziraphale has rejected heaven, but he needs that last little boost to reject heaven’s rules. rejecting heaven and rejecting a lifetime of ingrained habit and expectation are two different things. rejecting heaven and rejecting shame and fear are two different things. when crowley says, we have to choose our faces wisely, he is saying, we have to choose whether to hide, or whether to be who we are. and aziraphale gets on the bus with him, and sits next to him, and goes home with him. that’s aziraphale’s coming out. that’s aziraphale, quite quietly and quite bravely, finding the strength to be who he is - who heaven didn’t want him to be. to choose crowley over everything he has held onto that made him hesitate to choose crowley. to choose himself over everything other people told him to be. 

and then aziraphale goes to hell for crowley and faces the fear he held onto for so long: what would happen if i fell? and here they are: weak, cowardly, pathetic. aziraphale is stronger than hell in every sense of the word. and at the same time, crowley goes back and faces the family who cast him out, the family he has wondered about for so long - did he really deserve it? and he finds after all this time that they are cruel, cold, unloving. he doesn’t want them. he has freedom: he has love. 

it’s a fucking queer mood babey! 

>>and then aziraphale goes to hell for crowley and faces the fear he held onto for so long: what would happen if i fell? and here they are: weak, cowardly, pathetic. aziraphale is stronger than hell in every sense of the word. and at the same time, crowley goes back and faces the family who cast him out, the family he has wondered about for so long - did he really deserve it? and he finds after all this time that they are cruel, cold, unloving. he doesn’t want them. he has freedom: he has love. 

OH MY STARS AND GARTERS, THIS IS IT, THIS IS ABSOLUTELY IT, YOU ARE SO RIGHT, THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT

This is so brilliant, I suddenly find myself experiencing the one time in my life when this statement fits perfectly, so allow me a moment to savor it.

HOLY HELL.

oh performative social media

Am feeling slightly guilty, as I scroll through Instagram and see everyone's tribute posts to their fathers. I don't have a particularly troubled relationship with my dad; he's got mildly offensive political opinions he only trots out for funsies occasionally, he volunteers his time for apolitical but good causes, he's kind to people in real life, and he was an excellent father to me growing up; in hindsight, it might be because all of us were daughters, and so we didn't realize he is somewhat sexist in his outlooks on the world, but since there were no boys to be treated differently, he unwittingly instilled in us a strong sense of gender equality.
Anyhow.
He does not participate in any social media, and so if I did do a sappy tribute to him online, he would not know. He also was busy yesterday, so I did not so much as text him a greeting; he was occupied, on and off of several planes returning home from a lovely vacation with my mother, so he wouldn't have had time to get a message.

Anyhow, it first guilted me and then tempted me to make a grouchy post about how meaningless these holidays are, and how insipid and performative most people's tribute posts are, but I managed to restrain myself. People get to post about what they want to, and it's no more harmful a meme than the other fashions of what to post that go around and everyone gets swept up into. Chill out, B.

My heart does go out, as it does at other compulsory-family-Hallmark-sponsored holidays, to people for whom these holidays are painful-- those whose intended Special Person is dead, or absent, or with whom they had a fraught relationship, or those who are whatever that intended Special Person is supposed to be but for whom the experience never properly worked out. That sucks. My feelings are complicated enough even when the relationships aren't; I'm sure it's horribly thorny if you throw in that sort of complication.

But it does get old. I'm glad so many of y'all on Instagram have derived so much apparent pleasures in thanking the fathers of your various babies for being great. Some of the posts have even been cute. Most have not.

I'm not sure why I've been so horridly cranky about it. I'm glad I can come here and vent about it. If any of y'all here reading this did make sappy "My Dad Is The Best" posts on Instagram and I follow you, apologies in advance; it is not about any specific thing, but more the weight of the hundred-or-two accounts I follow mostly doing the exact same thing. I suppose that's the message, really; things done individually are one thing, but when viewed in collective, become something else, something more, or possibly something less, and I don't have the braincells to devote to it currently.
(If my dad followed my instagram, I probably would have posted something. If my dad were deceased, I still might have. even if just my mom followed my insta, i'd know she'd show it to him, i might have. it's complicated. i'm not immune. but given my individual circumstances at the moment, and my not anyone else's, it struck me as crankifying.)

Also crankifying: I have a sort of pulled or strained muscle under one of my shoulderblades somehow and it is a mystery.

In other news entirely, I made very little progress on the Solarpunk Cyborgs novel despite thinking about it endlessly, and I am sad about that, and also I watched the rest of the Good Omens miniseries and have Human Feelings about it and how queer it is (and as has been so wonderfully expressed elsewhere, it's that it's queer on a meta level, with the entire story boiling down to how loving something you're not "supposed" to is what saves the world, and I had said to myself that I didn't need to write any fic about it because I'm over using other people's canons and what do I possibly have to say that other people haven't, in all these years of such a good and prolific fandom.
But, the Discourse over how it's not Gay enough (but it's super Queer) sort of hits me where I live, as an ace-spec type. And so maybe I do have something to say about it.
We'll see.

Tamron 45mm f/1.8: Photo Post

So I borrowed a lens from work to take pictures to enter into a photo contest run by the lens manufacturer every year.
I mostly just needed an excuse to make me use my camera; I hadn't, really, in months. Actually I'd forgotten my camera bag in the yurt on my last trip home, so it was just sitting in there, unused.

So, I just put that lens on the camera and wandered around and documented things, as I used to in my early days on the farm.

Most of the photos aren't any great shakes. This one shows my car parked next to the yurt, and the beds in the garden devoted to flowers, and the bright green square closest to the car is my flax patch.



Some are nice, though, like this one, posed, of my sister and her daughter.


Oh, mild tw for the photos behind the cut: I took a few of them during chicken processing, and while there's no gory subjects, there might be gore or meat or something uncomfortable to the uninitiated that didn't particularly register with me, so-- mostly it's farm scenery but a bunch of it is indoors because we were slaughtering, so take care if that squicks you. Descriptions are above photos, so you can look at those before you scroll down. I did take gory photos but opted not to even put any up in the photostream; I generally don't. It always seems like a good idea at the time, and then as I'm editing, I'm like, nope, nobody needs to see that! But, meat doesn't register as gore to me, and background blood I just don't even really see, so-- do take care.

( more photos. i should whittle it down and ask which ones to use for the contest! )

(no subject)

Oh I forgot to post this one. i was up in the barn attic for something and took this shot, handheld, no adjustment of settings, and was rather pleased with how it came out.