I have, for YEARS, genuineYEARS, never understood why one of Crowley and Zira’s ship names was Air Conditioning. And then I saw TODAY, JUNE 12 IN THE YEAR 2 0 1 9 the tag “a/c” AND I HAD THE BIGGEST “ARE YOU SEEEERIOUS” MOMENT ITS BEEN Y E A R S AND I ONLY NOW GOT IT HRHDBDKSJWOBDIBOWBFIDHDKEHFIL-
Also, what’s that line from Dogma?
“No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater… than central air.”
OK, but there must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of angels (of all shapes, ranks and sizes) in Heaven
So
Where’s the fic in which a couple (or maybe just the one, a young and impressionable little fledgling angel whose wings have barely started molting for the first time) listens to Gabriel briefing everybody on the Official Reason The Apocalypse Is Cancelled and thinks to themselves this is a load of bullcrap
(Bc you know. You just know Gabriel would say all the wrong things. Like, what do you mean ‘unforeseen circumstances’? We’re Heaven, our job is to foresee. Circumstances. And how could it be that an angel as wicked and evil as Aziraphale is still, you know. An angel? And hasn’t fallen? Something does not add up here).
And so the young fledgling starts to wonder
And they’re not alone
Soon, there are clusters of angels everywhere, heads bent together and talking furiously in low voices.
… gave away his sword …
… what? why? …
… thought they might need it …
… I don’t understand …
… love for humans …
… and demons from what I hear …
… but why …
… saving the world …
… more important …
… ineffability …
… good guys? …
… are we? …
… is he? …
… Fucking Gabriel that’s for sure …
And as the whispers spread (especially that last one), the young fledgling decides to delve into the Earth Observation Files to go see for themselves what Aziraphale has been up to in the past six millennia.
And there’s no time in Heaven, but if there was, it would take them a lot of it before they came out again, looking very thoughtful.
They spends some more not-time in a quiet corner (somewhere the harp music isn’t too obnoxious), a deep frown on their angelic face and eyes red-rimmed and shining. There’s a sniffle, occasionally.
And then, finally, they seek out the nearest Whispering Angel Cluster and tells them what they’ve seen. And the conclusion they’ve come to.
(One or two angels in the cluster gasp, unbelieving. They decide to take the matter to Gabriel, despite the fledgling’s protests and ask is it true? About Aziraphale and his demon, is it true that they saved humanity? Is it true that they saved humans? Not just from the Apocalypse, but many many many times before? Is it true?
And again, Gabriel scoffs and laughs and says exactly the wrong thing (’Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that naughty angel, sweet child. He and that wily serpent of his won’t bother us any longer.’) and that’s all the proof the young angels need that Something Is Not Right.
They return to Fledgling #1, wings drooping and head bowed. There are more whispers (… can we? … Gabriel would murder … Hellfire, they said… Should we?) and eventually, after eons of deliberation, a decision is made.
And so it happens that on a bright, sunny Saturday morning in SoHo, the door to a bookshop tingles open and half a dozen remarkably bland looking humans walk in. And after Aziraphale has called Crowley back to heel and has wrested the nice, leather bound and heavy first edition of the Principia Mathematica out of his demon’s hands, and after the angels have been persuaded to come down from the top of the bookshelves…
He asks them why they’re here. The answer leaves him confused and makes Crowley laugh so hard he almost cracks a rib:
Teach us
Teach us compassion
Teach us to be kind
Teach us about humans
Teach us about what we’re meant to protect
Teach us how to protect
Teach us how to be the Good Guys, like, for real
And Aziraphale is confused and touched (mostly confused), but he agrees. Under one condition: they will have to listen to the demon too, because Aziraphale knows he would be nowhere near the angel he is today if it hadn’t been for Crowley.
(Crowley goes oddly quiet at that for a moment, before he realises Aziraphale is basically giving him shared command of a mini Host. Then he starts howling with laughter again).
Then the rest of the fic is basically just Aziraphale, Crowley and their mini Host of fledglings getting into various kinds of (food and non food related) shenagigans.
(‘Angel, when they said teach us, I’m pretty sure they did not mean teach us about the best place to get Vietnamese Pho!’ ‘Shut up, Crowley. Also, don’t think I didn’t hear how you told Amriel about how you were aboard the RMS Carpathia in 1912. And let me just say, I knew it.’ ‘Shut up, angel.’)
At a certain moment, Gabriel and the others get wind of aforementioned shenanigans. But by then, it’s too late as the Mini Host has communicated all their efforts and findings back to the various other MIni Hosts that are still in Heaven and now everybody is thoroughly convinced Gabriel’s a fucking prick who Should Not Be In Charge. It’s not a second Rebellion, per se. It certainly involves a lot less sulphur and brimstone and screaming. But when all’s said and all’s done, Gabriel finds himself permanently retired, along with Michael, Sandolphon and Uriel, as a New Policy is put in place:
To Be The Good Guys, We Have To Be The Good Guys
‘Eloquently put,’ Crowley sniggers. Aziraphale tries not to laugh before he tsks and shakes his head. ‘They’re learning, dear. Give them time.’
Anita Sarkeesian (previously)
is a brilliant media theorist and critic whose Feminist
Frequency/Tropes vs. Women in Video Games projects revolutionized the
way we talk about gender and games – and also made her a target for a
virulent misogynist hate-machine of harassing manbabies who threatened
her life, doxed her, and did everything they could to intimidate her
into silence.
Polygon’s 9,000 word profile of Sarkeesian contains a lot of color about
her personality and approach (which is great stuff – Sarkeesian is a
fun and interesting person in real life as well as on-screen), but where
it gets really good is in describing how Sarkeesian led a massive
change in the way that games companies approach games, with “great women
characters” appearing in “The Last of Us, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey,
Dragon Age: Inquisition,The Walking Dead, Battlefield 5, Dishonored 2,
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Overwatch”
Sarkeesian’s academic training is a combination of feminist theory and
media studies, which made her the perfect person to bridge between the
insidery, jargon-heavy world of gender studies and a popular, easily
digested way of thinking through these issues for games practicioners;
Polygon’s Colin Campbell calls it “a toolkit that developers could use,
to lever themselves out of the box they’d made for themselves.”
This was literally and figuratively “game changing” – Sarkeesian wields
“criticism so sharp that it cut the past from the future,” making a new
world of games, at real personal cost.
That cost is also an important part of the story: Sarkeesian’s harassers
were unspeakably vile and vicious, and throughout, Sarkeesian made a
point of never showing how it affected her, though it did (as it would
anyone who was subjected to it). But as Sarkeesian threw her energy into
guiding and comforting other women who’d been targeted for speaking
out, she learned that her stoicism had an unanticipated and unwelcome
side effect: “it hurt other women who were suffering because they might
be feeling like they needed to live up to the example I was putting out
there. So now when I talk about these issues, I think that there’s value
in being transparent and honest about the reality of who I am and where
I’m at.”
Sarkeesian has stopped doing YouTube videos – she still has an excellent podcast called Feminist Frequency Radio
– and she discusses how she feels YouTube’s moment has passed: “When I
go and speak at schools and colleges, students tell me they want to do
what I do. But you can’t do it on YouTube anymore…Digital video is a
really difficult place to navigate right now. I don’t think it has a
shelf life, as it stands.”
I’ve only seen these images; I never realized this was a full comic. This speaks to me so deeply. I adore this. I wish I could get the feeling of this tattood somehow.
It’s actually even worse than Terry Pratchett predicted. All of the peer-reviewed scholarship is locked behind paywalls whilst the lies and propaganda are freely available to everyone.
“Pratchett was someone who really understood human nature. Gates is an optimist, and an idealist – Pratchett was a realist, if not necessarily a cynic. He was absolutely bang-on.”
@thebibliosphere@only-in-movies@intentandinvention ONE OF YOU reblogged a post a long while ago that was a lesbian retelling of the princess who never smiles. Do you remember this and where it’s from? I find myself suddenly in need of it.
That sounds remarkably familiar. Unfortunately my tagging is useless for finding stuff again. Has anyone who’s more organised remember reblogging it from me?
When director Douglas Mackinnon asked Peter Anderson and his studio to design the opening titles for Good Omens, the Amazon Prime TV series based on the book by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, he had only one major stipulation.
“He said,” recounts Anderson, “‘I want you to promise me that you send us emails that start with, ‘This might sound absolutely mad, but our idea is dot dot dot’. That set the tone for the creative process, which was wonderful.”
It’s fair to say the London-based Peter Anderson Studio came through with flying colors on that brief, Anderson himself describing Good Omens’ animated titles as “a totally bonkers mishmash of all animation styles in a way where they feel as if they belong together.”
The titles certainly feel like something inspired, at least in part, by Terry Jones’ famous animated cut-out vignettes in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The twist is that Good Omens’ opener employs illustration, physical props, character animation, 3D and even live-action footage to foretell the show’s story about the clash of Heaven and Hell and the coming apocalypse.
“Our titles really mimic the drama,” says Anderson, “because in the show, for instance, you’ve got a classic English countryside and then suddenly a spacecraft that’s been drawn by a child and re-made in 3D comes flying down and aliens come out that have duck heads. We had to work in that same totally bonkers spirit.”
In the opening titles, a myriad characters from Good Omens are in procession — often via escalators up (and down) — to the end of the world. From concepts and storyboards, Peter Anderson Studio launched into a major exploratory process of generating imagery that directly referenced the show’s cast of people and creatures. Ultimately, all the characters seen in the titles actually began as “real,” live-action people.
“It’s me as many characters,” says Anderson. “And then there are different members of our studio wearing the costumes from the actual show, sometimes filmed on a green screen walking on a travelator. Then what we did is we cut them out and we made real people look like strange animations by tracking two-dimensional heads onto them.”
This is where things become even more surreal. Each one of the two-dimensional heads, reveals Anderson, are actually “in-disguise” representations of the show’s two lead actors, Michael Sheen and David Tennant, who play the angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley, respectively.
“The reason we did that,” states Anderson, “is that Neil said that he felt there was good and bad in everybody, and the angels and the demons represented the good and bad that exists within the world. So we’d take Michael and David’s faces and adapt them by, say, adding a mohawk or sunglasses, for example.”
That’s not the only detail to look out for in Good Omens’ opening titles, which warrant multiple viewings to catch several Easter eggs. Anderson says look out for a cactus wilting as a demon walks by, or even one moment where a someone realizes they are on a downward escalator path to Hell, only to start running up the people-mover the wrong way.
“Whether you interpret the titles as the characters choosing their sides to go to war, or as something where we all approach the end of the world and we’re going to go one way or the other, it’s up to you,” concludes Anderson. “I hope there are lots of double meanings in the storytelling.”
First of all, “…they were surrounded on all sides by echoes and images of themselves, in a world where image and object had not yet torn themselves apart” is one of the most poetic phrasings I’ve ever heard.
Third, the original opens with: “Every so often, I get the urge to drag someone into a cave, and show them something unspeakable.”
I had another point, but it got lost in the artful prose of this article.
I feel like “every so often, I get the urge to drag someone into a cave and show them something unspeakable” is something that’s okay for a paleolithic cave art expert to say, but like, absolutely no one else
ALRIGHT i’m an ancient crone and good omens was one of my earliest online fandoms, so for those of you new or newer to this delightful shitshow than about 2008, to get you started or tide you over til the new wave of fanwork starts rolling in, please enjoy a selection of some of my favorites from back in the day. (i also wrote…like, two fics and did some art, including a stupid-ambitious like 8-page comic about the angelic/demonic origins of kissing under the mistletoe, but sadly it’s been lost to time and the LJ exodus.)
i’m particularly light on artists so if anybody else remembers some please let me know!! we had good artists in the fandom, i just have the worst brain. ENJOY!!!
