Prompt 177
Now Dan is no coward. He’s not.
But this stupid child body does have an effect on his reactions to things and honestly it’s a horrible thing that’s too small and too weak for him to use all his abilities. He could barely manage a fireball if he concentrated, yet everything caught fire with a mere outburst! His control was utterly gone, and a tantrum resulted in having to wear a stupid child leash backpack.
It wasn’t like he was really a child, and it wasn’t like he’d get lost or some stupid shit that Danny would insist. Ugh, this isn’t even fair, technically he was older than him yet was stuck in a smaller body that he kept tripping over!
Urgh, he’s even insisting on rewarding ‘good behavior’ and shit- must have talked to Jazz or something- because… Oh. No he wants the constellation bear, give! His star bear now, no takes back and, urgh, stupid baby body!
Well, on the other hand, it’s utterly hilarious how much Danny sputters whenever he calls him Mom, not to mention strangers’ utter befuddlement. He ignores how Danny seems to be trying his best to live up ro the title.
But! As he was saying, he’s no coward! He’s also not an idiot though, and having no control over his powers isn’t exactly a good thing. It’s really not a good thing when there’s a murderous-looking hero that he thinks he might have maimed in the future- which they apparently remember- staring down at him. So, he has to call in the big guns to fix this.
“Mom, there’s a creepy fruitloop staring at me!”
“There’s WHAT?!”
Hah. Take that hero he doesn’t remember the name of.
(Behold the Grumpiest of Babies)
1K notes
·
View notes
My best friend and I had a call recently---she’s back with her family for a bit helping out with some hometown stuff. As part of the stuff, she’s been going through a (deceased) relative’s scrapbook, compiled in the American Midwest circa 1870-1900 and featuring mostly cut-out figures from the ads of the day.
She talked about how painstaking this relative’s work was. (Apparently the relative was careful to cut out every finger, every cowlick; this was by no means carelessly or hastily assembled.) But she also she talked about how---the baby on the baking soda ad is ugly, it is so ugly, why anyone would clip this heinously ugly illustrated baby and paste it into a scrapbook? Why would you save the (terribly told, boring) ghost story that came with your box of soap?
(Why include these things in the first place? we asked each other. ”There’s a kind of anti-capitalism to it,” she mused.)
And we discussed that for a bit---how most of the images, stories, artists, and ads were local, not national; they’re pulled from [Midwestern state] companies’ advertisements in [Midwestern state] papers, magazines, and products. As a consequence, you’re not looking at Leyendecker or Norman Rockwell illustrations, but Johann Spatz-Smith from down the road, who took a drawing class at college.
(College is the state college, and he came home on weekends and in the summer to help with the farm or earn some money at the plant.)
But it also inspired a really interesting conversation about how---we have access to so much more art, better and more professional art, than any time in history. As my bff said, all you have to do to find a great, technically proficient and lovely representational image of a baby, is to google the right keywords. But for a girl living in rural [Midwestern state] of the late 1800s, it was the baking soda ad, or literal actual babies. There was no in-between, no heading out to the nearby art museum to study oil paintings of mother and child, no studying photographs and film---such new technologies hadn’t diffused to local newspapers and circulars yet, and were far beyond the average person’s means. But cheap, semi-amateur artists? Those were definitely around, scattered between towns and nearby smallish cities.
It was a good conversation, and made me think about a couple things---the weird entitlement that “professional” and expensive art instills in viewers, how it artificially depresses the appetite for messy unprofessional art, including your own; the way that this makes your tastes narrower, less interesting, less open.
By that I mean---maybe the baby isn’t ugly! Maybe you’ve just seen too many photorealistic babies. Maybe you haven’t really stopped to contemplate that your drawing of a baby (however crude, ugly, or limited) is the best drawing of a baby you can make, and the act of drawing that lumpen, ugly baby is more sacred and profoundly human than even looking at a Mary Cassatt painting.
And even if that isn’t the case....there was this girl in [American Midwestern state] for whom it was very, very important that she capture every finger, curl, and bit of shading for that ugly soap ad baby. And some one hundred years later, her great-something-or-other took pains to preserve her work---because how terribly human it is, to seek out all the art we can find that resonates with us, preserve it, adore it.
It might be the most human impulse we have.
3K notes
·
View notes
AU where Lucifer went down to New Orleans sometime between 1900 and 1910, right in the middle of Mardi Gras. Charlie was about 100ish at this time, and while Lucifer and Lilith were still together, there was a growing emotional distance between them that had been going on for a few decades at this point. Lucifer's just trying to have some fun and forget his worries for a little while, and he does. And he meets a nice lady. A very nice Creole woman who makes a mean pot of jambalaya with a kick right out of hell. They hit it off and spend the majority of the celebration together.
They get drunk. Very drunk. Lucifer doesn't remember most of that night. The woman, Nicaise, is pregnant.
By some quirk of genetics, the child comes out indistinguishable from a normal human, if significantly paler than his dark-skinned mother. Growing up, Nicaise always tells her son that his daddy was an angel, but all the boy sees is that his father abandoned him and his mother in a world that doesn't look kindly on black women or single mothers. He watches his mother struggle, he watches her suffer, and he grows up resenting and hating the men who make her life hell. Especially his father.
173 notes
·
View notes