sorry we dont have money for covid relief or health care or any other useful thing we dumped it all into the defense budget which we will then not even use to defend our capitol when its invaded by fascist terrorists
*Wakes up at 3am*: Okay but Good Omens is literally all about transcending loyalties, tradition and expectations. It’s about good and bad, about friendship and love across enemies lines. Human, antichrist, angel or demon they’re all united in loving something or someone they shouldn’t ITS LITERALLY ALL ABOUT transcendental love and honestly how are people suprised the queers love it I mean Neil and Terry basically said love wins for 109,185 words
I read this and blinked. It hadn’t occurred to me that people might have read the book and not noticed this. But it’s reassuring to see it put so straightforwardly.
Tumblr post: GOOD OMENS IS FOR EVERYONE BUT MOST OF ALL IT’S FOR THE QUEERS
I’m talking about Book!Eowyn. This is important to remember because she’s so very different from Movie!Eowyn.
When I first read Lord of the Rings I was 11, which looking back was way too young to fully understand them. Rereading them when a was as a mature, wise eighteen-year-old (yes, that counts as an adult) I find myself looking at Eowyn differently.
As a kid, I felt like she was a good example of how to not write a female character. She was going to commit suicide just because a random guy didn’t like her, and she ends the story marrying a random dude and deciding to stay in the kitchen. Like a lot of people, I thought her entire character was pretty sexist. Of course, I loved Movie!Eowyn. She was my idea of a good female character: a spunky warrior who smashed the patriarchy.
Between 11 and 18 I’ve struggled with depression a lot. My experiences with that and other mental illnesses put Lord of the Rings in a completely different light. Its funny no one mentions exactly how much it’s about conquering depression. That’s practically the main theme of the book. Every character suffers from depression at one point, every character gives up all hope at least once, and it’s the constant, unseen enemy. The Nazguls personify despair, but we see less blatant examples too. Eowyn’s journey is possibly my favorite.
Eowyn’s situation when we first meet her is pretty terrible. Her cousin has recently died, her brother is banished and on a suicide mission, and there’s a creepy guy constantly trying to make moves on her. Her kingdom is about to be overrun and her people are being killed, and there’s nothing she can do about it. What’s worst, her uncle, who’s practically a father to her, is being manipulated and weakened. She watched him grow weaker every day and there’s no way she can help him. She’s royalty, born for greatness, but she’s stuck helplessly watching everything around her crumble and rot.
That sort of depression, the kind when you fear your own helplessness and inability more than anything when you are unable to fight back, doesn’t have a name. But those who have faced it know how draining and debilitating it is, especially when you feel that you have to stay strong for those around you.
Then Gandalf and co come in and save the day, Eowyn sees a way out. She sees Aragorn and becomes obsessed with him. Not because she’s actually in love with him, but because she sees him as a great king who will give her a chance to fight, a chance to be great, a chance of freedom.
But then he leaves on what seems like a suicide mission, and she knows her uncle and brother are on their way to a battle they probably won’t return from. She, however, is stuck once more, left behind to watch her world fall apart while she can do nothing.
Her soul has been worn away by the endless waiting. She has no hope left that the power of Mordor can be defeated because she has watched it invade her very home while she could do nothing. In many ways, she’s similar to Denethor, who was destroyed by doing nothing but watching the enemy creep closer. But Denethor’s paralysis was by choice. Eowyn has no choice, she rarely does. She has no control over anything. And the one person she thought could save her and her kingdom is leaving on what seems like a hopeless journey.
Eowyn is no longer afraid of dying. She’s reached rock bottom at this point. All she wants is a chance to make a difference, to make a choice for once in her life. So she disguises herself as a soldier and marches off to battle she doesn’t plan to come back from.
And of course, she takes Merry, who might not be as desperate but also feels pretty helpless.
We all know what happens next. That scene is so famous, it’s probably one of the best moments of the books. It’s way better in the book the movie: Eowyn laughs before her “I am no man,” line. But looking further into it the scene is about as heartbreaking as it is awesome. Eowyn’s laughing because at last, she’s doing something. At last, she’s able to at least try to make a choice. A choice at how she will die, heroically, defending her king and father-figure to the last. The Nazgul, whose weapon is soul-crushing despair, has no effect on her because she’s faced it day after day. And that despair had no face and no form and she couldn’t fight it. And now, finally, in her last moments, she has a chance to fight it.
And she does.
But instead of dying, she’s wounded, and yet when Aragorn heals her she finds that not much has changed. She still believes that their defeat at the hands of Mordor is inevitable, and she’s still determined to die in the best way she can. If she can’t control her life, she might as well control her death.
But she can’t even control that. Aragorn and the others insist that she stays behind to heal while they once again head off to a hopeless last stand. Yet again she’s trapped, helpless, waiting for Mordor to win and overrun everything.
She killed a Ringwraith, but nothing much changed.
Then she meets Faramir. He’s the first person she lets see her as anything but strong. She allows herself to cry before him, and later on, draws close to him when she thinks the armies of Mordor are coming. This is a sharp contrast to the way she treated Aragorn, constantly trying to prove her strength to him. She lets Faramir see her pain and her fear. Faramir knows quite a bit about despair himself, and he’s watched at least one loved one (his father) be destroyed by it already. He wants to save Eowyn from her own hopelessness. The two grow close, and Eowyn allows herself to melt a little.
Finally, after Mordor falls, Faramir asks her if she loves him, or Aragorn. Like many love triangles, this one is symbolic. Aragorn offered what she thought she needed: a chance to have control of her life, to be great queen, to have control over her world. But he was never going to love her back, and great deeds were never going to heal her.
Faramir offered a simple life. He wasn’t a king, her place as second in line to Rohan was much higher than his. But he loves her, and she loves him. He gave her a chance to be a healer, a mother, and a wife. She was never going to heal chasing the impossible, striving for a last heroic stand. She had to stop fighting and let herself heal.
Ironically enough, killing the personification of despair didn’t conquer Eowyn’s depression, finally accepting someone else’s love and letting herself a chance to heal did.
Eowyn’s story is not about a battle against evil hordes or even the patriarchy, but of a battle against depression. She is so much more than a spunky heroine or a tragic lover. Her character is complex and her despair feels very real because many of us have felt it.
Many people, including me at first, felt like Eowyn’s ending was sexist. But Tolkien never saw battle as heroic or good. We naturally see it sexist that our heroine retires to become a healer and wife because we’ve been taught that those things aren’t ‘heroic’ or ‘cool’. But Tolkien’s heroes rarely are skilled in battle, and over and over again we are given the message that true strength is not what it seems.
The great ones: Denethor, Boromir, Theoden, and Saruman are easily corrupted. The small, unimportant hobbits who like to cook and garden (fairly traditionally feminine activities) are the strongest of all. Even Aragorn is recognized as a king due to being a healer, not a warrior.
Eowyn’s story is another one in which Tolkien shows us that true strength isn’t killing a terrifying demon but letting yourself hope again.
I was putting together a list of active or recently active Good Omens blogs for a friend, and thought I might as well post it here in case anyone else is interested.
This is not an exhaustive list. If I missed your active most-or-all-Good Omens blog or another you know about, please reblog and/or comment and let me know so I can add it to the list!
The few here that haven’t updated very recently or that that contain significant other content, either seem like they stand a good chance of reviving when Season 2 drops, or are owned by artists whose work IMO is just too good to leave out.
Links in the notes as usual, because Tumblr throws a rod when you try to post them normally.
I was putting together a list of active or recently active Good Omens blogs for a friend, and thought I might as well post it here in case anyone else is interested.
This is not an exhaustive list. If I missed your active most-or-all-Good Omens blog or another you know about, please reblog and/or comment and let me know so I can add it to the list!
The few here that haven’t updated very recently or that that contain significant other content, either seem like they stand a good chance of reviving when Season 2 drops, or are owned by artists whose work IMO is just too good to leave out.
Links in the notes as usual, because Tumblr throws a rod when you try to post them normally.
I don’t know who needs to hear this but you don’t need to expose every single facet of yourself online. There is no inherent requirement for you to be 100% transparent about your personal life and yourself in your online presence. Your online persona is a curtain, and it can be as thin or as thick as you’re comfortable with. You can share your chosen name and leave it at that, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Don’t let people bully you into thinking you need to share all your intimate details, wants, needs, diagnoses, because you don’t. There is no bare minimum, you can share nothing and that is completely acceptable.
This is your internet stage show and you’re in charge of the curtain. Both the material it’s made of, and how far up it goes. Remember that.
I just wondered. Do we know what Aziraphale’s problem with Sound of Music is? Overexposure because it’s the only thing Heaven has watched since it came out? He can’t really object to the anti-Nazi parts…
I would have to dig up through a mountain of posts but I distinctly remember a meta saying that probably Maria reminds Aziraphale of himself. Not fitting in with a religious order, being the weird one out, and finding love in an unexpected place.
How do you fix a problem like Aziraphale? By stranding him on Earth and emotionally abusing him, apparently.
Another possible reason is that Heaven ruined it for him by… not really getting it. I can imagine Gabriel only having the most superficial understanding of the musical. Do you think he realises how the von Trapps risked their lives to be free and true to their ideals? I suspect angels just repeat the lyrics like a bunch of sycophants just because God likes it, there’s nothing deeper going there.
Now imagine Aziraphale, who is intelligent and literature savvy, being forced to listen to it over and over again from people who lack both the passion and the understanding for it and yeah no. Anything but that. All the Nazi punching in the world wouldn’t quell the nausea
Edit: ok I couldn’t find the meta analysis because I am dumb and I didn’t tag stuff properly
The Sound of Music is based on the real-life von Trapp Family Singers. After their arrival in America (and around the time of the death of her husband, Georg), Maria wrote a book telling their story. She sold the rights to a German company, which made two movie adaptations, then in turn sold the rights to an American company which developed the musical — without input from Maria and the family, and without paying them any royalties. Though Maria was ultimately given a script preview as a courtesy, all of her major suggestions were ignored.
Now, I think it’s entirely possible Aziraphale would have met the von Trapp family while they were touring Europe, attending a concert then sneaking back stage. He would have been fascinated by their story of escaping Austria, and likely by the real Maria’s story (an orphan raised in an atheist household, converted after accidentally attending a mass that she’d thought was a Bach concert, began nun training and later sent to tutor a sick child, fell in love with the children and ultimately chose to marry their father and become their mother — and later, over time, falling in love with him, too), and I think he would have approved of their music, a mix of classical and folk.
So when The Sound of Music arrived, I think Aziraphale would have had the same opinion as the von Trapp family: the music wasn’t representative of what they sang, the story was drastically oversimplified and Disney-fied, and Maria and Georg’s personalities were severely altered. A nice story, perhaps, but a bad representation of his friends. (It seems they were all most upset about Georg’s character, as he was a kind, friendly, loving father in real life and a distant hardass in the musical; also he, not Maria, had taught most of the children to sing.)
So now imagine that this “nice story” becomes the #1 hit in Heaven, and all the other angels blatantly do not get it. They don’t understand the themes, they don’t understand the story, they sing the music way off-key, and they neither know nor care that it’s based on the story of a real family.
I think we can all see why Aziraphale would NOT be a fan, and less so every time he had to hear Sandalphon butcher the yodeling song.
every day i look at the sink and i’m like seriously? honest to god i have used dishes once again?
this post is not for people frustrated by ppl putting dishes in their communal sink bc “oh i would NEVER leave a dish in the sink.” fuck off you already have your life together you don’t need this post. this is for the slimes and losers whose sinks are filled with the dishes of their own creation. this is for the lazy women, the useless men, the pathetic enbies. get out of here you sparkling clean dished heathens
These other assholes: Oh I hate leaving a mess. Cleaning up actually helps me unwind!
My ADHD executive-dysfunctional fuckin goblin self: I have to perform a TASK? But I just performed a task YESTERDAY!
Some people simply do not understand the profoundly Sisyphean torment that is cleaning things.
Dishes.
Clothes.
House.
Self.
IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW OFTEN YOU DO IT, YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO DO IT AGAIN. DOPAMINE PAYOFF IS ZERO, THE TASK IS NEVER COMPLETED AND YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO STOP DOING IT EVER IN YOUR WHOLE LIFE.
Why is salt good for exorcism and banishing and all that jazz?
Well you see, way back in the day people knew jack-all about germs and microbes and for all they knew it was evil spirits that got into their food and made it go a-spoil.
They Noticed and Observed that when you soaked food in a Lot of Salt, food stayed good longer. So that meant that the salt was keeping the bad spirits out.
Now, tossing around salt and making salt circles makes for dramatic rituals, sure. But I think we all know that some entities are just powerful bastards and need some extra oomph to get them out of the damn house.
You know what is more potent than salt at killing bacteria and germs?
Bleach.
You know what’s really good for just killing all kinds of stuff very dead?
Medical autoclaves.
Now I understand that not all of you have access to autoclaves, but I understand that a good pressure cooker can also do for sterilization. So therefore, I propose that if you have yourself a haunted doll or something that isn’t reponding to the usual methods, a wash with chlorine might be in order; and if that doesn’t to the job, a visit to the Insta-Pot might teach the bastard who’s boss around here.
(Of course there might not be much of a doll left but it wasn’t like you needed to keep it around, anyway.)
✨✨Naughty Haunted Dolls✨✨
Go Into
The Autoclave
If you have none of the above handy (or another go-to like holy water, sage, etc.) then hydrogen peroxide would be worth a try!
The fantastic @inhonoredglory has done me the very great honor of creating an animation based on my Book Omens fic, Be Ye Therefore Merciful.
Links to the animation and the story on AO3 (rated T, both SFW) will be in the notes/comments, as this hellsite likes to barf when you feed it an external link in a top-level post.
[Fic]Be Ye Therefore MercifulbyAmberDiceless - 9515 words, Rated T, H/C, pre-A/C. Crowley does something unexpected, and Aziraphale must face an opponent who cannot be thwarted.
The fantastic @inhonoredglory has done me the very great honor of creating an animation based on my Book Omens fic, Be Ye Therefore Merciful.
Links to the animation and the story on AO3 (rated T, both SFW) will be in the notes/comments, as this hellsite likes to barf when you feed it an external link in a top-level post.
