crowley doesn’t have pets, he has plants, because for an immortal animals just grow too fast ok. trees are cool, they can hang around a little bit.
aziraphale, who moves even slower in time, feels that anything living is too fast. books are cool though. books don’t die on you after a mere 80 years.
this post made me want to swerve for a second from my current project to talk about two things that ofmd does that drive me wild: first, that they blow past using characters as 1:1 parallels and instead have a stringboard/giant wheel of fortune spinner they use to weave parallels between a bunch of characters over the course of the show. and second: the way the bar scene with stede and izzy telling ed he’s piiiiiiiiiining over his boyfriend draw the three of them into this wild narrative loop that fucking kills me.
when i was writing my bar meta, i kept thinking to myself: it’s fucking wild how i could be writing about izzy, if i strip the details and keep the emotions and motivations. then i kept thinking: well, fuck. it kinda fits for ed, too!
call it the idiot ball of PAIN.
so: when we start out the scene with stede and the guys, izzy and stede sit in firm parallel. stede wants to win the social game; izzy wants ed to stay in the sad world they built together and hurt each other until they die, because he’s been told the only version of love men like him are allowed to have is dealt out first and foremost through pain.
(and so has stede, and so has ed, in their very different ways: just… what do we mean when we say violence, you know?)
and then when the men in the bar first turn on stede, they trade the parallel hats around. like ed with izzy, he realizes: play the game, or they won’t love you.
izzy then takes on the quiet part loud for the men in the bar: stede fuckin bonnet, if you won’t feed us the man you love to gain our approval for one useless second, we don’t even want you to exist.
(and he shares their quiet part kept quiet: if you tell me i’m wrong and you refuse to back down, i might have to consider everything i built my life and self-concept on was harmful to myself and others. i have made many, many mistakes, and i have a lot to make up for.
so shut the fuck up or we will SHUT YOU UP. you are RUINING THIS FOR US.
and then, even quieter: stay here. let’s hurt each other in different ways, in our silence and our violence, all the time forever. this is what it means to love; one above, and one below. the ones god loves most are no longer loved most if there is no one around god loves less than them.
we demand you define yourselves against us and we have the levers of power, this beat in the narrative says. it confesses for these men, for izzy and for everyone out there hurting and upholding the system: the ugly thing we can’t admit is that we only do that because we have no fucking idea who we are, if we aren’t defining ourselves against you.
that’s the part so quiet it’s an earthquake when you realize it, and then say it out loud: motherfucker, i don’t need you to know who i am. but you certainly seem to need me.)
then stede swaps back to joining up with izzy, for his split second of not remembering why none of this matters. izzy holds a picture of a bloodthirsty killer, born of the devil in ed’s face and says this is who you are; stede verbalizes it.
then they split up again, as stede wins and realizes: i fucking hate these people, this doesn’t feel like winning and i am somehow in more pain than i was when i lost.
and that aligns him with ed again, only when he goes home to mary she tries to murder him and sets him on the path to enlightenment, while ed… shoves lucius over the side in his moment to find similar catharsis, oops.
(because let’s be real: lucius would have said something like ‘that sad little man? you’re going to make a lot of major and, sorry to say, DEEPLY stupid life choices because a man who sold you out told you he thinks you’re already making bad choices and he had a hissy fit about it? we don’t take life advice from men who can’t even look at a dick pic without having three major identity crises and coronaries at the same TIME, this one is not something i should explain’ and allowed ed space to process if izzy is actually right about this or not.
and that’s probably part of why ed was like, yeah. can’t be having that! it’s spiral time, baby. where’s my fuckin mascara and kitchen scissors for my bangs.)
then we hop over to the toe scene, where the narrative hat goes flying around at lightning speed once again, only stede is the one just sort of… lingering there, in the subtext, forever.
ed is stede, when they start: he’s been reminded these are the rules of his actual life, according to the world, and he better start trying to win again. but he’s also playing the role of those men in the bar for izzy! because izzy doesn’t want to find out about life outside the cave, he’s comfortable and all his fuckin stuff is here so he’s trying to force ed to keep playing this role for him.
similarly, izzy is stede in his own head but standing in for the bar assholes from ed’s angle of the storyline; then, once the toe eating hits, things go extra wild.
basically at that point, everybody is wearing the same fucking hat at once, a little bit.
ed is feeding izzy his own violent notions of love, but that means he’s echoing the terms he’s set; that’s what stede does in the bar, when they hand him ‘ed’s bloodthirsty’ and he repeats it back.
there’s this cool handoff here on the violence hat, too; stede and the assholes stay in the realm of verbal and subtext violence, while ed and izzy add physical violence to the mix while maintaining the kinds of violence that runs through the scene at the bar, as well.
and then izzy wins by losing/being penetrated via The Weird Vore which calls back to the duel and keeps up the thread of izzy being the personification of Area Man Fucks Around, Finds Out; if he’d listened to ed and backed off, no duel. if he’d listened to ed and backed off instead of pushing everything to the limit, no toe eating!
there’s SO MUCH MORE HERE but i should like. save it for later.
godDAMN this show.
this meta has made me realize that these three men all hate themselves, and in episode ten they each, one after the other, make that self-hatred someone else’s problem.
stede hates himself and who he has become in coming back ad realizing that all his changes have only made him more alone and solitary so he makes that mary’s problem by attacking her socially and doug physically.
izzy hates himself and he makes that ed’s problem by attacking ed emotionally for daring to grow and change and become more than he was in a way that threatens izzy’s fragile self image as a man’s man.
and ed hates himself and hates that being himself drives the people he cares about away from him (stede, who he has to assume abandoned him because ed wasn’t worth it, izzy, who has directly told ed that he isn’t just unworthy of being around but unworthy of living), so he takes that out on lucius and then the crew, separating and hurting them as a way of hurting himself and stede through indirect physical violence
the most recent episode of the podcast You’re Dead to Me (which places an historian and a comedian discussing History) is about Frederick and the comedian is Stephen Fry.
You might not want to hear this but people with anger issues and/or violent impulses need social accommodations. And no by accommodation I don’t mean walking on eggshells around them, actual accommodations for people with these issues comes down to giving them a space away from what’s triggering them to process their emotions and calm themselves down same as what kind of accommodations people who get sensory overload or just any kind of overwhelmed. There is no moral value to having anger issues or violent impulses, people with them are deserving of accommodation the same as everyone else.
I had severe anger issues growing up, and the only way I was ever taught to deal with them was deep breathing. For some reason, deep breathing just triggers me to get angrier. But it’s the only coping skill I ever got taught for it. Here’s a few better ones.
Go and exercise. Get all of that energy out and away from the people you love.
Get a hang of when you’re winding up to a rage and learn to tell people that you need to step away. I will warn you that the first time that someone refuses to let you go once you learn this skill will spook the hell out of you if you don’t have a backup skill, so figure out ahead of time what you’re gonna do if they won’t let you leave.
Learn to set boundaries. One of the best things I ever did for my anger issues was tell people that I can’t deal with people stealing food off my plate. Second best was when I’m mad, telling people not to touch me. I spook easily when I’m already angry.
Get a pack of pencils and if nothing is working, break one. Sometimes you really do need to break something in order to feel better, and pencils are cheap.
Don’t cook with a knife when you’re mad. If you get too much adrenaline, the knife can slip and hurt you.
If you have anger issues that pop up without any seeming reason and frighten you, I would strongly recommend going over the situation and over your mental health. If there’s anything consistent with a mental health condition or with something particular happening to trigger it, seek to eliminate the trigger or treat the issue. Depression, anxiety, trauma, you name it, it can probably present as anger issues under the right circumstances.
Some quick notes for people without anger issues that want to help someone who has anger issues:
Fear transmutes into anger really, really well if someone’s fear response is “fight”. One of my guesses for why so many men have anger issues is that we’re told we’re not men if we have any other response to fear. However, this issue is far from exclusive to men.
Don’t box people in when you’re arguing with them or soothing them. If someone is backed up against a wall and upset, then getting closer to them without permission is a bad call for your safety and for their soothing, because that removes the ability to get away from you. Ask before getting close. This goes double if someone is injured or otherwise vulnerable.
Teaching angry people that are distressed about being angry the pencil trick on the spot is really easy and works more often than you can think.
Respect people’s requests and boundaries. A lot of people think that some of the boundaries I set up are silly or that once we’re pals, they can ignore them. No, because a lot of my boundaries are related to trauma, and crossing them will trigger me and bring up my anger.
All of this goes for children with anger issues as well. I was a child with anger issues, and a lot of disrespect for my boundaries and needs was because my anger was dismissed because I was a child. Respect children’s anger.
Walking on eggshells is not and will never be a good way to treat anger issues. Recognizing that people with anger issues deserve to have their boundaries respected and to be treated like human beings is.
An end note: Anger issues are not the same thing as being abusive, because emotions are not abusive. Someone with anger issues can become abusive if they take them out on people, but so can someone with suicidal thoughts who takes them out on people. The issue is targeting another person in order to feel better, not having a mental health issue.
An end note for people with anger issues: It really can get better. You can find coping skills and perhaps meds that help cool you down and settle you. You can find people that will accept that doing that one weird thing spooks the fuck out of you, and will let you leave if you’re scaring yourself. You can gain control of yourself without shutting down emotionally. It’s achievable.
Every time I see people bash Abuela from Encanto or Mei’s mom from Turning Red I just wonder why they can’t just direct their hatred towards the REAL enemy:
