Writing Dionysus As This Guy With Bleached Hair Who Owns One Pair Of Socks, Emotionally Unloads At A

Beautifully Detailed Tomb Of Jam Nizamuddin II (1439–1509 CE) In Makli Necropolis, Sindh, Pakistan.

(Source)

usa what are you doing :|

This is from the book, while Crowley is trying to talk Aziraphale into helping him stop armageddon, and does his drunken ramble about eternity. Apparently God enjoys The Sound of Music.

“You’ll enjoy it. You really will. You won’t have a choice.”

I feel like this line gets overlooked a lot. It’s an important line, for sheer horror potential.

Whatever the control mechanism is, clearly it isn’t running on every angel at all times, because if that was the case, a rebellion never would have happened. Aziraphale wouldn’t have six thousand years of doubts piling up to critical capacity. Gabriel wouldn’t have been able to escape.

But it’s also clearly very easily turned on, since they both accept that it would be used for something as petty as enjoying a movie. This lack of will can be rolled over angels at any time, for any reason.

Aziraphale clearly has some dread of this. *Crowley* knows it, and used it to convince Aziraphale to help him stop armageddon. But Aziraphale is very good at letting one part of his brain know something while another part of his brain denies it, so it’s not clear how much *Aziraphale* knows he dreads it, even as that dread shapes his character.

He’s never really broken free of Heaven. Even when he was being called a traitor, he wasn’t fallen, and so he was expecting to be called home eventually. And he’d be happy, of course. He won’t have a choice.

Aziraphale’s been trying to walk away from Heaven for at least six thousand years. He walked away from guard duty. He gave away his sword. He lied straight to God’s face about it. He lied to the archangels, and then straight up told Crowley he was ready to go to Hell. Several millennia of trouble-making and demon-fraternizing later, he stood in the middle of Heaven, declared he wasn’t going to fight in any war, then escaped via the demonic act of human possession. He is ready to GO.

And still his wings are snowy white. He’s just as angelic as when he first worried the pretty starmaker might get in trouble, and tried to protect him with a warning.

But he can’t escape. Heaven isn’t letting anyone else go. And he knows what his future holds. Eventually, no matter how many times they put it off, eventually he will be called back to Heaven.

And so, what promises can he make Crowley?

To stay with him always? Of course not. To love him? Can he even promise to love him? No. He’ll eventually be dragged back to Heaven, and he’ll be happy to go, and he won’t even miss him. *He won’t have a choice.*

And perhaps that’s the problem. He loves Crowley too much to make promises he can’t keep.

There would be no S3 without Rhianna and Rob ❤

“Men at Arms is a direct attack on the idea of monarchy and aristocracy that so much “high fantasy” is based on; Jingo is a fantasy war story that denies the reader the “fun” of seeing a war break out and ends up attacking the concept of war; the character of Rincewind is a subversion of the whole idea of heroism. Monstrous Regiment is a meditation on feminism, Cherry Littlebottom and other female dwarfs a commentary on gender identity and trans people, Thud! a statement against ethnic hatred. But all this deconstruction and subversion didn’t come across as having to eat your vegetables, the way literary fiction often does. And it didn’t come across as a bitter, guilty pleasure either, the way people geek out about the horrifying viciousness of “low fantasy” worlds like A Song of Ice and Fire’s Westeros. Pratchett somehow made his progressive, subversive work as tasty a snack as any of the high fantasy he was subverting. Much of that candy coating was humor–the ability to laugh, as he once argued, being our brain’s way of extracting pleasure from the otherwise painful process of recognizing uncomfortable truths.”

—

Arthur Chu breaks down the importance of Discworld in his farewell tribute to Sir Terry Pratchett, A Guide to Escape from Escapism (via landunderwave)

Part of why it worked was because Pratchett didn’t sneer at heroism or idealism, he showed how good intentions go bad and over the course of centuries things fossilise and need to be replaced, and most importantly, he showed the heroism of the small.  Yes, he showed the other side of the coin, the darker side of the heroic and epic, but he didn’t use that as an excuse to go Martin’s way of “this is what it’s really like: murder, rape and treachery under all the fine words”.

People like Vimes who stuck to duty even in his worst hours, when he was sunk in self-loathing and alcoholism, a dangerous man who sabotaged himself half-intentionally, because it was in his bones and because (as we got to know in “Night Watch”) he also had his own ideals and idealism that he doggedly held on to, even when half-ashamed of that.

He permits honour to exist in his world, even if it’s not kings and knights in shining armour.

It may be low fantasy, but it’s never vile.  Even when he’s showing us what real evil looks like.

(via tartapplesauce)

Hey it’s ace week and you’re local ace has something to say! I’ve been out as ace for 3 years now and it’s still a big part of my identity that I’m proud of so here’s a lil something for those who need it!

can u guys rb this n add how you crack your eggs in the tags? i thought cracking them in the sinks’s edge is universal until i saw my friend cracking an egg on the counter instead and it was so pervese and diabolical

playing his dress up games

As someone who took latin for many years I one hundred percent agree with the demon summoning allegations. That's probably the reason we barely had any speech components in my course lol

So if my students finish a quiz/test early, I ask them to draw me stuff on the back (partly so those who need more time are less self-conscious about still having the test out, partly because fuck yeah, pictures), and it may be the single best decision of my career.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve told these kids that (a) the Romans believed there were demons in their public toilets and (b) the word for “janitor” comes from “ianitor”, which means “(door) guard”.

So now I’m getting drawings of superhero janitors taking on toilet demons, and it’s so beautiful.

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