dragonlady7

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so I’ve started from scratch to rewrite the latest original novel. it’s going… well, it’s going, is the thing, and I’m at like 14,000 words, but instead of streamlining the opening, i made it more elaborate and in-depth. so i definitely. uh. i need an editor. but. moving right along, i think i’ve got better characterizations and it’s overall a stronger foundation to hang the plot off of. 

do i have the plot? not really, but i’m closer.

i’m very slightly burnt-out though, I wasn’t able to add much over the weekend and then I wrote a bunch today and now I’m just sort of tired, so I went and was letting myself look at the doc I’d had open with all my Good Omens notes in it. I had a really id-tastic idea, see, for something nice and angsty and slightly kinky. 

I almost wrote it up as a someone else please take this plotbunny idea, because I know I can’t actually do it. I try to do Miscommunication Angst, and it gets smoothed out into fluff. I can’t do it.

But I want to. I’ve already gone slightly off the rails, in that it ought to be a straight-to-porn-out-the-gate kind of story and I wasn’t able to make it so in the first scene, so it’s now taken me several thousand words and a few centuries before there’s even a chance of fucking. But! But. 

Maybe? Maybe there’s the start of a good story here? Maybe not. Here’s a snippet, in case anyone else is interested.

oh ha ha the crossposter removed it! Fantastic.

____
“But sex is holy,” Aziraphale said.

“It isn’t,” Crowley said, scornful. “It isn’t at all! No more so than eating, or, or sleeping. It’s just a thing humans can do.”

“If you think so then why are you out here tempting people into it?” Aziraphale asked.

“I’m not,” Crowley said.

“Yes you are!” Aziraphale said. “I’ve caught you at it!”

Crowley’s eyebrows did some further heavy lifting. “I’m not, angel,” he said. “This is just the neighborhood I stay in. I’m literally just walking home.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said. He wasn’t convinced, however, and looked around suspiciously. “You’re up to something, surely.”

“Demons don’t fuck,” Crowley said. “That’s a human thing.”

Aziraphale looked sharply back at him. “Demons don’t– what nonsense, Crowley! Do you take me for a fool?”

Crowley looked convincingly taken aback. “We don’t!” he protested, defensive. “Or– what demons have you been fucking?”

“We’re of the same stock,” Aziraphale said, angry enough not to be embarrassed. “I know what you’re capable of. We’ve got more or less human bodies, Crowley, we can do whatever humans do. Drink, eat, sleep, dance, fuck– all the equipment is available and functions just fine.”

Crowley stared at him. “I– well all right, eating, fine, but–”

“You can’t tell me you haven’t made the experiment,” Aziraphale said. “Don’t play stupid! It insults us both.”

Crowley closed his mouth and looked thoughtful, which was infuriating and only strengthened Aziraphale’s conviction that the demon was messing about somehow.

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sunshinesanctuaryforsickdragons:

I think one of the reasons Good Omens speaks so intensely to so many people is how it handles abusive relationship dynamics and, of course, the deeply hopeful resolution that is so incredibly rare when this topic is explored.

Good Omens just handles and illustrates the concept of emotional trauma so well. Particularly as it relates to toxic relationships, and childhood emotional and psychological abuse.

A lot of the stories and allegories we get in modern media are about physical abuse. Here though, we see the fallout of controlling relationships. How subtle and deceptive and insidious they are. How, unless you’ve gotten lucky enough to gain some outside perspective, you can’t even see it for what it is.

Good Omens perfectly illustrates two different sides of the victims of abusive family relationships:

Aziraphale is the compliant one. He really tries to see the good in everyone and he’s unintentionally an apologist because, through no fault of his own, he’s been completely brainwashed. Because he’s a good being, his priority isn’t himself, but others. Extending grace to everyone but himself is so intrinsic to who he is that he expects no reciprocity. Even though he can’t shake the feeling that something is off, he’s been taught not to trust himself and therefore continues to brush it off or to simply choose not to think about it. 

Aziraphale is NOT however, completely unrebellious. His priority, though, whether he’s aware of it or not, is self-preservation, as is invariably the outcome in a family situation like this one. He is very good at perceived compliance but ultimately motivated by other things. The first example we see of this is in giving his sword away in the garden. He follows this up with many small, mostly ignored acts of non compliance - his association with Crowley, his love affair with humanity, indulging his hedonistic tendencies etc. - without endangering his position, firmly on the side of the angels. Yet, like anyone who has ever been in this type of family dynamic, he is very motivated by fear. He fears consequences because he knows they will not be merciful. He mentions this quite a few times throughout the story, worried both for himself and for Crowley. 

Crowley is the proverbial black sheep. He questions authority. If something feels wrong, he’s not going to let it go. Crowley has a very strong sense of right and wrong but where it differs from that of Aziraphale’s is that it is intrinsic. It relies on free will, on choice. Something can’t be purely right unless it is free from outside controlling influences. Force is never right, manipulation is never right. Crowley doesn’t believe in artificially imposed “morals” and he cannot reconcile the incongruence of heaven beating everyone over the head with “goodness” and forcing them to comply with it, especially when things like infantcide and crucifiction are involved and everyone is just supposed to be ok with that.

So he questions. He probably did so respectfully. “Respect your elders and betters” is definitely something you are browbeaten with in a dynamic like this. That, however, is a transgression that is not easily forgiven unless you drop it immediately and never bring it up again. Clearly, this is not what happened. And the consequence was being kicked out of heaven and punished. And he never really gets over it. He was betrayed by his family and that’s not something that ever heals right.

He “hung around the wrong people” because, under the circumstances they were the only others around. Crowley gives the distinct impression of a kid thrown out of his abusive family and inadvertently ended up in a gang of anarchists because self-preservation is something you learn early in a situation like that.

Heaven is very much an “ends justify the means” crowd. Of course, the “end” in this case isn’t particularly great either and in fact the only goal involved is the elimination of the other side, the perceived “evil” to Heaven’s “good”. Heaven perceives “good” as submission to the rules and they the enforcers of it. Hell perceives “evil” as the opposite of that but really it just boils down to choice.  

Hell’s manifesto then, as it were, is really just “do the opposite of what Heaven wants”. But Crowley takes that a step further because he believes in the value of choice. It’s what he’s been pushing Aziraphale towards since they met.

What makes this story so delightful and so satisfying is that Aziraphale ultimately chooses to say no to his family. He chooses, well, to have a choice, and defend others rights to choice. He leaves the abusive dynamic and he chooses Crowley and himself and humanity. He learns boundaries and stops allowing himself to be controlled. And we get such a good representation of how hard that is to do. But we also get to see that he’s not going to have to do it alone. Crowley is never going to leave him on his own, not even when he says he is. And that’s what eventually drives Aziraphale to make the choice; Heaven’s controlling superiority or Crowley’s unrelenting support.  

Crowley’s arc is that he’s caught in the middle. He’s not ruthless enough for Heaven or for Hell and he’s unable to deny his personal convictions enough to convincingly fake it. He didn’t want to fall. He didn’t want to be evil. He just didn’t want to be whatever it is Heaven is. 

So he’s out there, alone, doing his best to survive and blend in until he runs into Aziraphale and finds a kindred spirit. And Crowley can’t help but to be drawn to Aziraphale because he’s different. He’s kind. Because, even though the angel doesn’t know it yet, Aziraphale is like Crowley and they’re destined, someday, to be on their own side.

Angst with a happy ending, indeed.

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Basking, 14k, in which Crowley messily sorts through feelings and turns repeatedly into a snake. 

“I’m attracted to you, dear,” Aziraphale said. “I don’t much care what shape you are.“

Notes:

No, there is no actual snake sex in this. 

Also I sort of planned on this being more about demisexuality than it turned out to be, textually anyway. So I’m not entirely sure what it’s about. I’ll have to read it and figure it out like everyone else.

THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE FOOTNOTES DEBATE: I was going to make this have footnotes, in the Proper Pratchett Style, but then I decided that I hate the fucking things so I won’t. I’d already written all the footnotes as parenthetical asides, and I realized I could just… stop there.

If footnotes are your specific jam of torment, just imagine all the parenthetical asides in this story put into fancy HTML footnote style that always mean you’ve just lost track of what you were reading and lost your place in the story you’re trying to read. I’ve faith in your imagination to get the job done.

(Personally, I always just read the footnotes after I’ve finished the story and think "huh this was probably very witty but is completely nonsense now.” You can feel free to do that with the parenthetical asides but it’d probably be more challenging. Still, no one is grading us, so do what you like. I just figured I’d cut out the part where I spend three days crying over HTML, and let the reader do as they like.)

(One could also make it more like the experience of reading a footnote on a printed page and just stick a random asterisk-decorated aside under an undefined chunk of text but I thought, you know, we’ve already got parentheses, for that exact purpose, so I’m also not going to bother to do that. Humanity is a font of infinite creativity, go us!)

(If you’re a writer who used any of the above creative techniques, then good for you, and I probably liked your story too! This is not a subtweet, I just don’t have three days to cry over HTML.)

(No but if you did the fancy hyperlinked footnotes though I definitely did read them all at once as a Dadaist coda to the piece, though. The clicky links don’t ever work properly for me, or they do but I fuck them up, so I don’t click them. Sorry. It was confusing. I still left kudos.)

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thunderheadfred:

Portrait of Madame C, 1884

I love this on a bunch of levels; I’ve long been a fan of John Singer Sargent, who has numerous works exhibited in an art gallery my mom used to take me to when I was a kid. This one’s in the Met and I’ve seen it a bunch, and i was so fascinated I read up on it, but the main detail is that

in the original, Sargent painted her strap fallen, like in the version above, and it was deemed too scandalous, so he moved the jeweled strap without changing the position of the dress. The strap’s now hooked up over the top of her shoulder, but the dress is still obviously sagged down as though the strap had fallen, and it looks a little awkward; it’s obviously a change he did skillfully but resentfully.

This version has the strap where it belongs, and for some reason that detail delights me endlessly.

(also this artist has done a fantastic job on the whole thing and the resemblance is fantastic.)

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My deepest sympathies, first of all, to anyone who was not in the Good Omens fandom before and wasn’t ready for this; just from the possibly-un-representative sampling of my follow list on Tumblr, all sorts of people who have never before shown any particular interest in the book are suddenly surfacing like the Kraken and submerging the entire world under sudden waves of new Good Omens content. 

Listen, all the Problematic shit, well most of the Problematic shit, makes more sense in the original 1990 context, and my sympathies if you weren’t braced for that.

I have, of course, followed with some anxiousness the varying Discourse. They made the love story more explicitly a love story in TV show, of course, but they still left it ambiguous as to whether it’s platonic, asexual, or gay, or something else entirely– because, of course, the angel and demon aren’t human and so don’t have human sexualities or genders, and so really their love is a celestial one, and so of course it can be and is intended to be taken as representation of all sorts of queer things, which is fantastic. But equally, it is not explicit representation of anything, and so while the exultation from the ace community on the first hand is absolutely understandable, the bitter cynicism of the gays is also understandable! It sucks, we had to watch a stupid shoehorned-in hetero love scene in a fucking tornado, and while in the book it kind of lampshaded how ridiculous it was a little better (eh, that is debatable, I admit, but really, they were meant to be ridiculous, you can’t argue that), it’s still sort of gross that they made the hetero bullshit all very obvious and explicitly-stated, and the queer stuff is *airy wave* whatever you want it to be*~* sparkle. 

As a “whatever” myself, I did find it lovely, and I would not have enjoyed anything else as much, likely, given my fondness for the original book, but still. I mean, they’re not queerbaiting, and it’s infinitely preferable to that– it’s a different “no we genuinely mean that they’re in love but you can interpret that however you like in terms of concrete shit” than the normal “Oh ha ha whatever you see there, of course, we edited the trailer to make it look gayer than it really was so you’d watch and then we made sure to give him a flashback girlfriend to no homo it a bit for the rest, but you do you, you wacky little fangirls”– it’s a subtle distinction and fairly faint compensation. I get it. If we had a bunch more firm canon rep everywhere else, this would be less ambivalent and meh than it is. I get it. I’m like, a moderate fan of Gaiman, and I find some of his stuff great but some sort of leaves me cold, and I absolutely get how this is brilliant to some and shitty to others. And honestly? I’m kind of on both sides. 

This is the kind of issue I do genuinely feel like you can be a centrist on, you know? I get that it’s a dirty word politically, as it should be– expecting people to be civil with people who are actively working to murder them is pretty fucking stupid– but in terms of fandom stuff, sometimes it’s okay for things to just not… work for you. Like, that’s a nice thought, and I can see why you thought it, but it doesn’t help me and also just doesn’t work for me. Fine! 

(Also, as a component of this kind of viewpoint, you have to accept that other people are not going to feel this way, and so are going to remain on their side, and that’s fine. If you hated GO, then I’ll try to tag consistently so you don’t have to see it! If you loved it, let’s squee, but there are probably some things about it you loved that didn’t actually work for me, so I might not interact with all your content! Fair enough! I don’t plan on making a fuss, but I understand the people who do and so I’ll skim or skip things that rain on my parade without expecting there never to be rain. It’s fine.)

Anyway. All of that is a wordy way to say I’ve accidentally been dipping my toe into fanfiction mostly because I wanted to have that exact argument out, in there. Are they ace? Are they gay? Are they fluid-gender queers? Well, I’m asking them. Or, they’re asking each other.

I don’t know that it’ll wind up a story worth telling, but listen, as an ace-spec who, myself, has a lot of sex nowadays, I’m going to #ownvoices the shit out of this and it’s going to be a dithery muddle, and maybe nobody’s going to like it but oh well.

Shit, this got long. I’m going to put the snippet in another post. 

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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.