weirdrussians
It’s illegal to sell liquor after 10 pm in Russia. This is how some stores outsmart the system.
dwgif
good-omens-fanart
temptation accomplished!
dduane
rembrandtswife
Okay so you know how everyone (myself included) is making jokes about how Crowley and Aziraphale didn’t actually do anything? I love those posts because they’re a) funny and b) emphasize the thematic importance of humans—particularly the next generation of humans—being the ones to enact change. BUT I don’t actually agree with those posts.
Aziraphale and Crowley did something very, very important. For a brief moment they were truly excellent dads to Adam.
Hear me out. At the start of the story they set out to be godfathers of the antichrist, hoping to provide enough saving and damning between them that it all cancels out. Things obviously go pear shaped, but it’s during that moment when Crowley stops time that they’re finally able to focus on the right child. Except now, instead of trying to influence Adam they accept him. Fully. Aziraphale and Crowley act as parents should by:
- Treating Adam as an individual worthy of respect. It would have been super easy to try and control him and to justify that control with, “Well we’re celestial beings thousands of years old and you’re a mortal child.” Anyone who reads my RWBY metas know that I do think there’s something to be said for age and experience, but in this case it’s more a matter of acknowledging that kids have a voice that deserves to be heard. “We’ll need to think of something else,” Crowley says. “Being a kid isn’t a bad thing to be,” Aziraphale tells him.
- They accept who Adam is. Aziraphale admits that he’d hoped Adam would be heaven incarnate, but he’s not and the implication is Aziraphale was wrong to expect that in the first place. Insert literally any situation where parents have rigid ideas about how their kids should turn out here. Our Ineffable Husbands bypass that in the final hour, realizing that being Adam—human incarnate—is far better than anything they could have imagined for him. He’s his own person, not a construct based on their expectations.
- They accept whoever Adam might be in the future. Aziraphale then follows that up with, “Whatever happens, for good or for evil, we’re here beside you.” Do people realize what kind of rare as fuck support that is?? The angel will stand by him even if he’s bad. The demon will stand by him even if he’s good. They tell him plain as day that no matter what he decides or what the outcome of that decision is, they’re going to support him, full stop. That’s huge.
And that’s what gives Adam the strength to stand up to Satan. Before this he’s questioning himself—“I’m just a kid”—but with both of them beside him (taking his hands as a further gesture of support) he’s confident enough to not only face Satan, but change reality itself. And of course, Adam summons Mr. Young, another dad who has done right by him throughout the story.
Good Omens is a love story. It’s a love story on multiple levels: queer love, platonic love, love for a deity, love of humanity… parental love. I adore the “lol you could remove these two dorks from the story and nothing would change” posts as much as the next fan, but at a fundamental level I think they miss something crucial. Crowley and Aziraphale manage what neither God (who condemned questioning angels) nor Satan (currently condemning a disobedient Adam) were able to accomplish: accepting your child exactly as they are. They set out to do something Epic over an eleven year span. Then ended up doing something seemingly simple in just a few, stolen seconds. It’s up to the audience to realize that the latter is just as important as the former. Perhaps even more-so.
Their unconditional love literally helps save the world.
Yep.
crackyfanfic
kittyknowsthings
Adam Young, to his horror and occasional bleak amusement, had turned out to be extremely good at politics.
When he spoke at public meetings, people came up to him afterwards to shake his hand; when he sent out press releases, people not only read them, but wrote letters to variegated editors with his name bracketed by phrases like ‘integrity’ and ‘bright future in the party.’ He was single-handedly skewing voter turnout for South East England. Labour had done some assessment polling for a run at MP, and Adam had reduced the poor analyst to tears when he told her he wasn’t interested in being anything more than Councillor, sorry. He’d had to sit there for twenty minutes, awkwardly patting her shoulder as she blew her nose on her spreadsheets and sobbed about response rates.
“It’s your hair,” Brian decided. “Makes you look like an RAF pilot in one of those old movies. People look at someone with hair like that and think, ‘Gosh, I bet he knows what he’s doing.’”
After a period of vague muddling, Brian had somehow found his way to medicine and shocked everyone who knew him by doing rather well at it. He was onto his Foundation training now, though Adam suspected that a steady diet of black coffees and biscuits swiped from the blood donor centre had driven him insane.
“I don’t know what I’m doing, though!” Adam said. “Or at least, only very rarely.”
“Well, of course we know that,” Pepper said with an indulgent smile. Pepper had gone into safeguarding, and while it had not made her insane, it had made her slightly insufferable.
“Maybe you could shave it all off,” Brian said. He was squinting at Adam’s head as though proposing a particularly risky cranial surgery. “Nobody’s bald in films.”
“Bruce Willis is bald,” Pepper said. “And Sean Connery.”
Brian rolled his eyes and sighed. “All right, fine, John McClane and James Bond are bald. But Adam’s not exactly an action hero, is he? If you’re going to bald, you have to carry a gun. Adam, do you honestly want to carry a gun?”
“I really don’t think it’s my hair,” Adam said morosely.*
Pepper would later claim that she had written Wensleydale to see if had an opinion on Adam’s hair, and received a very rambling response in which Wensleydale traced the etymological origins of ‘hair’ and opined at length about the cultural meaning of braids, without ever weighing in on the matter. However, while this definitely sounded like Wensleydale, who was holed up doing research in some archive in Seville, Adam strongly suspected it had actually been a love letter to Pepper. Mostly because she refused to show it to him, and went blushing and defensive whenever he asked.
(Pepper had expanded upon her general knowledge of violence with krav maga training and jujitsu classes and probably other arcane martial arts; none of the Them would try it, honestly.)
Despite Adam’s hair and the wild civic adoration it apparently inspired, Adam did not particularly enjoy politics. He had, after all, been offered all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; once you’d decided against that, being MP of Milton Keynes South lost some its attraction. He probably would have given up the whole charade and gone deep-sea diving or maybe written a novel, if it weren’t for two things:
First, that the boy who had loved Lower Tadfield into a gold-green summer afternoon in the English countryside had never really gone, just grown up; and second, that Adam Young had once been sentenced to a whole summer assisting Mr. R.P. Tyler, Chairman of the Lower Tadfield’s Residents’ Association, and had accidentally fallen in love.
…not, it should be said, with Mr. Tyler.**
Still, Adam Young had spent a whole summer filing camping permits, examining rummage sale forms, deciding whether to approve Ms. Shaddlebrook’s application to build a shed down by her garden, and referencing and re-reading bylaws. He had, as a consequence and quite inexplicably, fallen in love with the complicated, esoteric game of it all. It wasn’t as though the rules were secret or sacred. You didn’t have to always follow them. But if you wanted to play (if you wanted to win) you had to care, very much, about knowing them. To shape the world the way you wanted meant knowing how it was; you couldn’t break, bend or snap what you didn’t understand. And by the end of that dry, hot, sixteen-year-old summer, even Mr. Tyler had seemed somewhat grudgingly impressed. There weren’t many teenage boys who could quote section, chapter and verse, when questioned about why their loitering outside the corner store was actually an expression of freedom of assembly under the Human Rights Act and by incorporation, the Lower Tadfield Charter. So there.
When he passed, Mr. Tyler had left Adam his annotated copy of the Residents’ Association bylaws, with an inscription: To Mr. Young, a Fiend ‘til the end.
Adam had been deeply touched.
Anyhow, what it meant was: that all these years later, MK Councillor Young was good at administration. He liked spreadsheets, comparative studies, charts, references, citations, and ultimately was very good at what he did. He hosted meetings! There were coffee and doughnuts! He talked about statistics and the lack of interest didn’t bother him, since it was hard to imagine anyone getting particularly excited about an Antichrist who enjoyed maintaining the highways register.*** It was better, that way.
Unfortunately, it also meant that by the time the news reached him, it was very likely too late. After all, who would have thought that some third-rate politico, a local councilor notable for being young-ish, left-ish, generally fine if nothing more exciting, would care about the End of Days?
* It was probably being the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness. That sort of thing generally came with the charisma built in.
** He would be horrified by the mere implication.
*** Not that roadworks were necessarily good—Adam knew what Crowley had got up to with the M25. But when people did bad things with transit construction, it generally fell into the category of ordinary, mundane evil that any human could do if they put their mind to it. Adam found this immensely comforting.
neil-gaiman
wilwheaton
The next time they tell you Americans are “happy” with their employer provided health insurance remember that that “happiness” is fueled by willful ignorance of what the alternatives are really like and fear of losing what little crappy health care they currently have.
Having experienced several other countries’ health care I am amazed and amused when Americans tell me that theirs is the best in the world…
petermorwood
naughtypiggy
I need a road trip!
I’m hoping the VW has adjustable suspension, because without proper ground clearance the first pothole or speed bump would do nasty things.
The interior shot is of a different vehicle - those window shapes are an Airstream caravan / trailer, rather like this one (door’s in the right place too)…
…with double windows at the sink like this one.
kaelio
silverstrike
Playing around with a new cartoon style while watching DS9. #startrek #ds9 #captain #sisko #captainsisko #federation
fishyfishyfishtimes
