"we need less sanitized queer stories" yall keep saying fucking she-ra romanticizes abuse. you couldnt possibly handle less sanitized queer stories

Saw the boy and the heron recently and i couldn’t get this composition idea out of my head :D

Riding home. hurts me each time to read Camilla get hurt... and OH MY GOD it's such a well written scene, I loved it so much.

chu~

Sasha James!!!!!

Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Art by my irl friend Vin who isn’t on tumblr

The first time I watched Good Omens, I knew it was coming for all my repressed trauma when Crowley said "You're so clever! How can somebody as clever as you be so stupid?" and with no warning I was suddenly choking back a sob.

Because when you're an indoctrinated fundie teenager people say things like that to you A LOT, and when you're looking back at your younger self after deconstructing you say it to yourself even more.

And when I first got involved in this fandom, the tendency of many fans to snarkily quote that exact line when venting their frustrations about Aziraphale was. Really hard for me to cope with, tbh.

Can I just say how much I adore Good Omens’ portrayals of falling? I especially appreciate Gabriel’s weird abrupt turn in s2, because sometimes it really is like that.

My own loss of faith took years. It also took about 10 minutes.

If you had asked me that afternoon how I felt about [pick any controversial topic], I would have been 100% on the party line. And that wasn’t a performance or a mask, that was what I genuinely believed. Ask me about those same topics the next morning, and my positions on ALL OF THEM had completely changed.

Because: beliefs are related to each other! They support each other! You can’t always change one belief without changing dozens of others that are connected to it. So that final switch was turning a hundred different switches on the switchboard. In the years leading up to it, I was collecting those switches. I was installing the switches. But they stayed firmly in the Off position. These were things other people believed. They could only flip (becoming things I believed) once they had ALL been installed, because they ALL had to flip at the same time.

To people who haven’t experienced that (or who lost their faith in a different order / for different reasons), a gradual, piece-by-piece process probably looks more realistic. It’s way, way more common in fiction. But I personally find those portrayals to be so alienating. It often feels like storytellers can’t put themselves in a believer’s shoes at all. Like they’re writing a character that never really believed any of that stuff, deep down. So it’s very easy for that character to shed bits and pieces of those beliefs over time, because they were never actually integrated into their concept of reality.

Compared to that, Gabriel feels so much more real.

Because there won’t always be a nice, gradual Questioning Phase in between “archangel fucking Gabriel” and “what about no armageddon”. Sometimes it’s a long, invisible process of data gathering — all while 100% on heaven’s team — punctuated by a very very sudden freestyle dive.

Aziraphale’s religious trauma

I’m sure others have discussed this in a lot of depth, but I can’t help throwing my hat in the ring. Aziraphale has major religious trauma after spending his entire very long existence as a member of a cult. If you’ve never experienced what it’s like to be indoctrinated into a religion, then it might be very hard to understand why he behaves the way he does, so I’ll try to lay it out for you.

Anyone who was raised from early childhood to believe that an all-powerful being is watching them as though they’re in a panopticon (a jail where prisoners are watched by authorities at random moments) and will severely punish them and/or their loved ones if anyone steps out of line (or just on a whim or based on a bet with Satan) either has experienced religious trauma or has somehow avoided it, perhaps through repression or retreating into themselves and managing to ignore what the adults were telling them. Another way to avoid the trauma is to continue to believe that the cult is ‘good’ and that those outside it are ‘bad’ and should seek redemption, forgiveness and salvation.

Not only does Aziraphale have this trauma, but it’s also based on reality in the GO universe. I was able to live with mine by realising that there is no empirical evidence for religious beliefs, by studying philosophy, by having therapy, and by reflecting on it for years. The trauma can still be triggered in me, leading to panic that God might be watching and judging me, and that an afterlife might exist, but luckily I’m now able to move through the panic relatively quickly. Aziraphale can’t do any of this because the beliefs of his cult are all too real. There really is a massively powerful (hopefully not all-powerful, but he believes she is) being who watches and judges him and everyone else at random moments. She has either directly ordered her angels to slaughter babies and children or has stood by and watched them do it. She has severely punished someone Aziraphale cares about, Crowley, who from that moment has been in a situation where he continues to be tortured by his fellow demons with no intervention from God and who simultaneously risks being destroyed by demons, by angels, by humans wielding sacred weapons (e.g. holy water) or by his own hand.

And so Aziraphale suffers from both religious trauma and the trauma of living under a real authoritarian dictatorship. This dictatorship is seemingly unbeatable and eternal, and it possesses weapons more powerful than the biggest nuclear weapons, more powerful than the sun, really more powerful than anything we humans can imagine.

Thousands of years ago, Crowley was kicked out in an extremely painful way, and he suffers his own trauma from that. He clearly doesn’t want Aziraphale to go through all of that, yet he wants Aziraphale to join him on ‘their own side’. At the end of the previous season, I thought Aziraphale was all in. I was happy to leave it at that … even though it isn’t a realistic depiction of someone dealing with the particular types of trauma that Aziraphale has experienced and continues to experience.

Aziraphale and Crowley are still in constant grave danger, and they’re still living in God’s panopticon. That can’t just be hand-waved away. As we’ve seen this season, at any moment their fragile peace can be disrupted by a situation that puts them in danger of being harmed to the extent of being wiped from existence. They can’t actually just go to Alpha Centauri and it will all be cool. (And what would they do there for eternity anyway …?) But yeah there is no way to escape from God, nowhere in the universe that God isn’t capable of supervising – that’s real, not something Aziraphale merely has faith in, as humans understand belief in God. Aziraphale isn’t the equivalent of a human priest or a theologian or a cult member: he is a supernatural being created by a much more powerful supernatural being.

Perhaps there are only two ways for Aziraphale to deal with his trauma: 1) He realises that God and the Heavenly Host can be defeated. 2) He realises that they can be permanently altered in a positive way. 

At the end of season two, Aziraphale seems to believe he is being given the opportunity to bring about option 2. We don’t know if he has a plan or a vision for this, but for the first time he thinks he has a chance. Perhaps best of all, he has the opportunity to protect Crowley – permanently! Imagine how anxious Aziraphale must have been, for thousands of years, that Crowley would be destroyed. It could have happened at any time, near or far from Aziraphale. Crowley faces dangers on all sides and also does foolish (from Aziraphale’s perspective) things like good deeds under the influence of laudanum and a heist so he can handle holy water. Crowley breaks and bends rules in ways that could kill him: Aziraphale isn’t catastrophising. This isn’t the same as a religious loved one telling you that you’re going to hell for sinning. Crowley has already been tortured in hell, and he could be tortured there forever, or he could be turned into an oily black puddle, or removed from the book of life etc etc. 

What Aziraphale doesn’t understand yet is that Crowley can’t be an angel again and still be the Crowley that Aziraphale loves. He also doesn’t see Crowley as an equal. If they’re going to take on heaven and bring down God’s dictatorship, they are going to have to do it as Aziraphale and Crowley, working in partnership, wielding the immense power of their love.

Good Omens is literally the most healing show to watch if you were raised evangelical/christian (or have trauma from some other religion). Seeing it change up the ideas people have thought about the Bible for years truly helped sooo much with my deconstruction. It also let me get past my fear of hell a little bit, with how it portrays both heaven and hell as less mythical places and more soulless corporate assholes. Putting a silly face on the things I’ve been raised to fear has been essential in deconstructing.

Not to mention how it completely rejects the idea that heaven has a problem with queer people, and the idea that celestial beings would even subscribe to a gender binary. God being voiced by a woman and God being referred to with she/they pronouns is so important to me, since my church always emphasized how necessary it is that God be treated as male in order to seem more “dominant.”

Crowley and Aziraphale are also excellent characters to see yourself in, to figure out which one you’re most like in terms of how they’ve reacted to their religious trauma. Processing everything has been made so much easier since I realized both of them are so similar to me in so many ways.

Also I think it’s endlessly hilarious that a bunch of evangelical conservatives tried to keep it from being made, but sent a complaint letter to Netflix instead of Amazon.

Aziraphale’s panicked “I’m a fallen angel. I lied…to thwart the will of God” line gives such strong “I’m not a real Christian, I’m a sinner, I’m going to hell” vibes

I saw a comment somewhere that basically said aziraphale and crowley are like two different reactions you can have to religious trauma.

so crowley is the self proclaimed “sinner”, has accepted that he’s “going to hell”, and hates the church/cult he left. for him going back means going back to that box of repression.

but aziraphale’s trauma seems to be much harder for people to understand, he’s the person who was slowly cast out because of the cracks showing in their facade, they want to be loved by the church/cult still. they crave belonging and want to be welcomed back.

I’m definitely more of a crowley but I like to talk more about aziraphale because I also relate to him in certain ways, plus people misunderstand him a lot.

every so often i’ll see a post that’s like “ugh the characters in gideon the ninth seem way older than they are, they were obviously aged down to appeal to the YA market”

and i’m like

HUH

their youth is the point!! the fact that they are teens and young adults and the oldest among them are ~30 illustrates just how deeply cruel this world is!! that children are holding up entire houses, dying in wars, obsessed with being the greatest of their generations!!

mercymorn’s running bit about harrow being so young is not just her being condescending—she is genuinely horrified by how young harrow and ianthe are. especially compared to her ten thousand-ish years. they are infants!!

and don’t even get me started on the kids in nona the ninth, which is even more blatantly about how war permeates every aspect of life, even for kids, and makes them grow up too fast

anyway. tlt is not YA and even if it was, arguments about kids in dystopian novels “seeming too old” will never be convincing to me because 99% of the time…that’s. the. point

I don’t think people give enough weight to the fact that Nona is chronically-to-terminally ill in NtN, either—the reason she needs help taking care of herself, by the end of the book, is because her soul is eating her body and her body is dying. Every time she has a “tantrum”, or accesses Alecto, she uses up Harrow’s body in huge gulps—that’s why she gets sick or passes out after them. She spends most of her time in the early book thinking wistfully about how lucky she is to just have what she has and how much she wants to be useful and it’s a meditation on her awareness of her own death. Like.

Yeah, of course she needs other people to help her take care of herself. She’s disabled and actively dying.

I think it's a sign of good media when you have to reread or rewatch it to get the full experience. First time is for getting your brain blasted by the story and being confused second time is for knowing who's who and what's what and willingly getting your brain blasted again.

The book you wish you had. 👁👄👁🖤💀

I love love love the moment in Gideon the Ninth where the Third challenges the Sixth in a clearly unfair move, and Gideon, half-on-instinct, still faking a vow of silence, simply unsheathes her sword, at which Harrow doesn't miss a beat and says her "The Ninth House will represent the Sixth House" line, while Gideon just smiles.

In Gideon's head this is "I am not standing for this shit anymore. For the love of God, Harrow, please understand what I'm doing and back me up here. Oh thank fuck you've got it. I'm so happy I could kiss you."

In Harrow's head this appears to be "For fuck's sakes, Nav, what do you think you're doing. Ok, think. Can't give anything away. Have to project unity, but fuck you, Griddle, for making me do this."

But for everyone else this is the legendary, mysterious, terrifying, bone magicians of the Ninth House, with no warning, stepping between the Sixth and the Third. The skull-faced cavalier who hasn't said a single word simply drawing her sword. The shockingly powerful and inscrutable necromancer matter-of-factly declaring an alliance that no-one, even the supposed allies, knew about. The sinister smirk on the cavalier's face. And the line from Harrowhark: "Death first to vultures and scavengers."

I love it so much and I love additionally the moment that this sets up in the climax, which is essentially the same emotional beat, the key changes being 1) both Harrow and Gideon have become open and vocal with each other; 2) both Harrow and Gideon are working together consciously as well as instinctively; 3) their opponents don't back down so they follow through. "Nav, show them what the Ninth House does." "We do bones, motherfucker."