pendragonlord-at-camelot:

kalki-preta:

I want everyone to remember that even though Arthur liked to play big boy and surround himself with men who can wield a sword, Merlin was the bravest man he’d ever met. Merlin did not fit the stereotypical definition of brave, but still managed to absolutely demolish everyone else in Arthur’s mind.

Thank you for your time.

(op tags:) #I will hit you with a book if you tell me that Arthur thought of Merlin as less than capable#Arthur had his pick of the finest knights but he thought Merlin was the bravest so stfu

ileolai:

Today I’m having a lot of feelings about. ok. Aziraphale knew there was a demon causing a big ruckus in the Garden. and the very FIRST thing he does is. give his only means of self defense away!!! like

all he knows about demons at that point is what Heaven has told him. and he’s quite certain they’re irredeemably Evil and possibly out to settle a score from the War. and he. he’s not just being nice to the humans. he’s potentially risking his own life for them. he just. does that. immediately

and then said demon waltzes up to him and starts blabbering on about the moon and acting precious about getting damp idkgjfg

like i imagine if Crowley hadn’t shut him up his next words to Anathema would have been like. ‘’…and technically I was supposed to plunge a flaming sword into his head. but well, anyway. he was yammering some nonsense about meta-ethics and the moon and he hates it when his toes get wet, it’s adorable. we’re married now.’’ they’re so absurd 

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@tabbystardustreply: And also when the demon asks about his sword he just tells him he gave it away instead of lying like he LIED TO GOD what a disaster angel gotta love him

@ileolaireply: lmao right and like. no wonder crowley immediately splashed his pants over it. first day on the job and this angel is off his chain. he’s fucking mental. he lets humans raid the no-no tree and gives them free weapons for their trouble. immediately blurts out what he did to the Enemy but lies to the boss’s face about it. That’s more Nonsense than Crowley managed to cause in five minutes and causing Nonsense is his job

theniceandaccurategoodomensblog:

Soft or BAMF?

Alright here’s my two cents in the is Aziraphale soft or BAMF question: he’s both. He’s fully both and he’s always been both because, in spite of what we get told, there’s a certain kind of BAMFness that comes from softness. They aren’t actually opposites. Softness (compassion, kindness etc) is not weakness. It requires great strength and it generates strength.

There are two kinds of BAMF. There’s the one we usually see: the hot-headed, competitive, let’s take on the world and win, aggressive, ambitious kind of BAMF. That’s all bravado and hot anger. You know, the kind of anger that calls you to destroy, to conquer? And then after you may well regret your actions?

But there’s the other kind too: a protective, ruthlessly determined, aggressive yes, but in a defensive way kind of BAMF. It is a whole different thing. It isn’t a hot anger at all, but a cold one. It never calls you to seek out and destroy but it is the certainty that you must do what you must do to protect what needs protecting. And when it is moved it is absolutely ruthless. Actions taken are not regretted. They are, after all, simply what had to be done. This is the BAMFness that grows out of softness (compassion, kindness) because part of all of that softness is ruthlessly and fiercely protecting what you love, those you are compassionate towards. It is a kind of righteous anger (appropriately enough!) motivated not by ego but by correcting wrongs.

Think of a mama bear. From the cub’s perspective she’s all love and kindness. All softness. If all’s well she’s happy fussing about with her cave, her world, her cubs. She’s not interested in ego-related aggression like expanding her territory. Far better to make peace, to forge the kind of alliances that allow for a peaceful world in which her cubs can grow. But if you step into her cave and threaten her cubs you’ll see a very different side to all of that softness because she will kill you without hesitation. Not because she’s aggressive in a hot-headed way but out of compassion and love for her cubs. You simply must be eliminated and that’s that.

That is the BAMFness of Aziraphale. It isn’t in opposition to his softness. It grows out of it. His is a righteous BAMFness. He will do everything he can to forge the kind of peace his cubs (Crowley, humanity) need. He’s had no ambitions on anyone else’s territory. But if you step into his cave (the world) and threaten his cubs he will do whatever he thinks is needed to eliminate that threat (break his alliance to Heaven, possess a human, kill a child, argue with the highest authority in Heaven).

And that, for me, is a key lesson Aziraphale gives us: softness is not weakness. That is a lie. There is a kind of ruthless and righteous strength that grows out of softest parts of ourselves. Aziraphale is a soft BAMF.

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@aethelflaedladyofmerciareply: I absolutely agree.

I think in the series, we see Aziraphale trying to reject and deny his BAMF side a bit, just really fall into being the soft cuddly sofa person, “the nice one.” I think he loses sight, at times, of the fact that he can be both, that he is both, that denying one side or the other is denying himself.

Somewhere between “I’m not fighting in any war” and taking care of the soldier, he rediscovers his BAMF side. Not all at once, not at one specific moment, but action after action shows he is pushing away from his soft side because the world (and Crowley) needs the BAMF angel.

But then he goes too far. He forgets his soft side, and now he’s all-in on killing a child. The BAMF side is where he keeps his strength, but the soft is where his compassion is. He tried to put that side of himself away, and it was nearly a disaster.

But.

Then he finds the balance point. BAMF enough to debate theology with the Archangel fucking Gabriel, soft enough to comfort a scared 11-year-old and help him find the courage to save them.

And…that’s who Aziraphale really is. In that moment, he’s found his best self - the self that is as strong as those around him need him to be, and soft enough to know how to wield that strength.

It might take him some time to get comfortable with the way the two halves occupy his self, but the hardest bit - accepting they are both him, knowing he needs to lean on both sides, seeing them as his inner yin and yang not some dichotomy he has to choose between - that has come, and he has survived it.

@theniceandaccurategoodomensblogreply: No, no — I disagree with this. My whole point is they are NOT separate sides. His is the kind of BAMFness that grows out of softness. His willingness to kill Adam—in that absolutely extreme situation in which he honestly believes it is the only way to save the world—is an act of compassion—for the world and everyone in it—it is the fierce and protective side of compassion. Think: mama bear killing to protect her cubs. He isn’t balancing two sides. It is all one thing. But it is a kind of BAMFness that is rarely portrayed or talked about and so we find it hard to recognise.

@aethelflaedladyofmerciareply: Hmm, I think I didn’t articulate very well and now we’re talking past each other. Let me try again.

Agree:

• Aziraphale’s strength comes from his protective instincts and compassion
• There is a strength in softness
• Soft doesn’t equal weak
• They aren’t two sides that need to be chosen between

However:

• Heaven’s strength is generally very aggressive, as is Hell’s. This is the lens through which characters see and understand “strength”
• This includes Aziraphale - he doesn’t know his own strength, he thinks he’s weak BECAUSE he doesn’t show that kind of strength (I’m soft!) - he thinks he has to play by Heaven’s rules, be one or the other.
• And as a result, he feels the need to be less compassionate while saving the world - he is still being protective of the world as a whole, but he THINKS his natural compassion and desire to protect those in front of him is a weakness
• This leads to him almost shooting Adam, when a more measured assessment of the situation would have made him realize that he should be trying to help the child.
• Then, while watching the Them beat the Horsepeople, he realizes his mistake. He recognizes their strength, and his own, and is able to embrace the balanced strength that comes natural to him

(What I’m reminded of is how in martial arts, people think of being calm and being active as two separate states - you’re calm/at rest/patient, or you’re active/emotional/strong. However, practitioners know you get the best strength from that calm state - they aren’t opposites, you use calm to fuel activity. Acknowledging this and finding your strength in the calmness is an important early step.

(The kind of strength Heaven shows is an opposite of compassion; Aziraphale’s flows from compassion. When he accepts his own strength, he rejects Heaven’s and becomes the better version of himself. It feels like balancing two sides when you do it, but it’s not - it’s rejecting the part you don’t need and learning to draw your strength from the right source.)

I hope that makes more sense…this is very hard to put into words!

@angel-and-serpentreply: He’s a level-headed BAMF. He believes in sacrificing one for the sake of many, if that’s what it takes. He wishes it wouldn’t come to actual violence, though. Destroying the Antichrist isn’t a nice job, but somebody has to do it and Crowley is too busy crying over his car, really darling I could use some help here!

Once he sees that Adam isn’t the unholy threat that they both imagined, but a child - a human child, no different than the other humans he’s been charged to protect - his priorities change then and there.

@theniceandaccurategoodomensblogreply: Yes. While he honestly believes—a totally reasonable belief at the time too—that the only way to save the world is to kill Adam, it is a morally reasonable step to take. It isn’t a failure of softness, it is motivated by compassion. If, when faced with the same scenario, he refused to kill Adam he would have had to live with the death of literally every other child on the planet.

A Farm in Africa

(Isak Dinensen hangin’ with Marilyn Monroe and Carson McCullers)

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I read Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa for the first time, but after that initial encounter, I kept coming back to it. Sometimes I just open to a page and read a passage, like some people read the Bible.

I also read Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women around the same time, and to me, they were all books about women who were readers and writers. They were also books about women who were not at home in their homes: they wanted something else. For a restless teenager in suburban California, this was an appealing concept.

I have lost the copy I read when I was younger, and I am sorry about this. The copy I read now is from 1965: a Vintage Books edition with yellowed pages and a graphic cover in green, yellow, and black. I bought it for 48 cents at Labyrinth Books in New York City, which used to be my local bookstore. I have carried this book with me to countless places. Beaches and mountains. Cafes in foreign cities. One summer day, I read sections of it to my friend’s baby on a blanket at a public pool.

At different times over the years, I’ve marked passages with parentheses and made check marks and stars in the margins. In some cases, I don’t remember why I marked certain things. In others, I do.

It’s a direct and honest book – lyric like a wide, clear sky. But wasn’t until college that I began to understand the first line. I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. I had understood this to be a statement of ownership. But then, as I reread it over the years, I realized that this line is about loss, nostalgia, and the limits of material ownership. She owned the farm for a period of time, acquiring it by way of a financial transaction, but to own is not the same as to have. She says that she had it because having is something greater than owning, and having is also temporary. You may have something, but you may lose it, too. And she did.

Dinesen also says that she had the farm because she was writing from a later point in her life, when she could see something different than what she saw “high up, near the sun” in Africa. She could see the inevitable encroachment of the past tense. When she leaves Kenya by train at the end of the book, she writes, “The outline of the mountain was slowly smoothed and levelled out by the hand of distance.” The book is levelled out by the hand of distance, too.

When I have moved to new places, I have tried to imagine that I am her, unpacking my boxes. Setting up a life for myself. And when I have had to leave places, I have imagined that I am her, and that one day I will be able to look back on my own lost places with something approaching her understanding.

The opening line inextricably connects her identity to her farm. It is also about Dinesen’s own colonial position, which I did not understand when I was younger and have tried to think though as an adult. She was, in many ways, a product of her time and privilege. Africa was a land of promise for white European colonials, and this is a vision I do not like. But there is more to her story. She was also capable of growth and change, capable of fellowship and friendship with people she was taught to subject. She did not see the world quite like the colonials amongst whom she moved.

The book is really about her relationships with the people on her farm: servants, managers, and guests. Many guests. The film is far more conventional than the book because it foregrounds a romance. Although intoxicatingly beautiful, the film is also flawed, for it can’t imagine a social world that does not structure itself around the relationship between a man and a woman.

Dinesen could imagine far more than the film could. She saw a future for herself away from her family’s Danish estate Rungstedlund, to which she would return. And then, later, she looked at her past with such precision, as if examining the growth of a field of coffee.

A memoir is not about what happened, but about what a writer remembers. It’s a way of reckoning with memory and with what it means to write about your life. And for Dinesen, writing was like dreaming. In dreams, “Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which [the dreamer] has never seen or heard of.” I think she saw herself as created by place. Place was character.

And she had character. She was brave. Dinesen saw herself as a storyteller, which was a way of claiming narrative authority: there may not have been many professional female authors, but women told stories. She had several pen names. She both was, and was not, herself. I didn’t read Simone de Beauvoir until college, during which period I also returned to Out of Africa a number of times. Both writers helped me to figure out my own character.

The word Dinesen comes back to again and again is freedom. She sees the artist as free – as “free of will.” She sees the African night as free. At some moments in her life, she sees herself as free, but it’s a freedom that is circumscribed. It’s a freedom that can’t be sustained. It’s a freedom bound up in a continent that’s being carved up and claimed by the British Empire.

I had a farm in Africa. It is no more.

I’m an English professor at Wake Forest University, where I specialize in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature. My non-academic writing focuses on the intersections between place, objects, and memory. My essays have appeared in Nowhere, Skirt!, 5x5, Artvehicle, Cocktailians,Smoke: A London Peculiar, Airplane Reading, and Open Letters Monthly. My online travel diary Born on a Train, which narrates a long-haul Amtrak trip I undertook in full 1950s dress – complete with hats and vintage luggage – is about nostalgia for old-school train travel.

Clark Gable and a tiger.

In the vein of congratulating friends when they practice self-care, I think we should also show more than just assurance when anxious friends cancel plans. It could leave a strong impression to receive gratitude for trusting you enough to risk disappointment, and it takes a lot of bravery to show trust.

A veces tengo la necesidad de sentarme a rimar, para exteriorizar todo lo que siento.

“La cobardía de ir a buscarte,
la valentía de aún esperarte.

Mi ángel salvador,
mi demonio destructor.”

©Camm, 2021

“Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think”

— A. A. Milne

what if we blow up a lab together to spite a mega corporation trying to monetize a lethal disease (and we’re both lesbians )