Sara. She/her. My humble house with my humble fandom fixations that you are subjected to when you come here. Enjoy! Fandoms include Our Flag Means Death, WWDITS, Good Omens, Hannibal, The X-Files, BTVS, and more.
"it would be so good if it was good" will haunt you but "it's extremely good, except for the one or two parts which are so bad it's genuinely kind of insulting" will straight up drive you insane
one has you making posts like "okay but if the author UNDERSTOOD the POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS of the story they were telling, and leaned into it, it would actually be a really interesting exploration of..."
the other has you pacing your bedroom at one in the morning going "why. why would you ever in a million years do it like that. genuinely what possible thought process was involved. was the writer possessed by a fucking ghost or something."
you solve the mystery of what to have for dinner one night and you think "hell yeah case closed forever" WRONG there is a dinner mystery the next night too
My S3 fix-it canon-compliant fic is now complete. 11k words that start right after S2 ended and diverges from the S3 movie the moment the Metatron is ripped from the Book of Life. If you’re interested in a fix-it that acknowledges what we got and takes it an entirely new direction in a Choose Your Own Ending type way, check it out!
World Without End
Excerpt below the cut:
Saraqael located Michael at once on their tracking device. “They’re upstairs.”
“We’re all upstairs,” Sandalphon huffed.
“Up-upstairs,” Saraqael said. They pointed toward the ceiling. “Metatron level.”
“That’s impossible,” Uriel said. “No one is allowed up there except the Metatron. Obviously.”
“Who has just been attacked,” Aziraphale cut in before the two archangels could exchange further barbs. For goodness’ sake, it was like corralling children sometimes with those two. “Perhaps Michael saw the culprits and is right now trying to keep the Metatron safe. Angels—with me!”
“But we’re not authorized,” Uriel began.
Aziraphale waved off her words. “I authorize this. Emergency circumstances. I will take full responsibility if I’m mistaken.” He stopped by the lift and turned to point a finger at Sandalphon. “Except for you. Stay here and find your charge. Find him, or I will have no choice but to demote you.”
“But—” Sandalphon began.
The ding of the lift cut him off, and Aziraphale hurried the others inside. He pressed the button to the top floor, fingers shaking. A moment later, they were on the way up, up, up.
Aziraphale was braced for potential battle when the lift disgorged them. He didn’t have his sword any longer, but he would fight if need be. He was not prepared to find the room empty of anyone except Michael, shaking and moaning in a crumpled heap, one hand clutched in agony around a page from the Book of Life. Flames licked the edges of the paper, soot and smoke staining Michael’s fingers.
A shiver of instinctual terror washed through Aziraphale, and he was moving before he knew what he planned to do. Something deep inside him told him that if that page burned through entirely, everything would be lost. The entirety of existence would break. Reality would be unmade.
*****
The movie Clue is one of my all-time favorites. If you’re not familiar with it, it comes with three endings. There are cue cards that flip between the different endings. The first says: “That’s how it could have happened. // But how about this?”
This is literally the first thing that came to my mind when my brain unscrambled enough from watching the finale. A story can end many ways. It can end many ways without changing the substantive content of what came before. The Book of Life / butterfly effect / reality catching up “logic” of S3 gave me the perfect opportunity to write a canon-compliant alternate S3 that I preferred to what we got.
Note: this is not a full S3 fic. I’ve written numerous S3 fics in the last three years – my pinned post has links out to them – and I didn’t feel the urge to create another. I only wanted to write a bridge story, one that starts with the way the IRL S3 began and then diverges as soon as the BoL plot opens itself up to an “everything can be canon” type situation, leaving “what happens next” up to everyone’s individual imaginations.
It has been a good experience, writing this. I’ve used lines from the movie, and so scenes I’ve written have started to transplant themselves over the ones we got. I’ve started to feel warm, fuzzy feelings about S3 because I can “remember” the proper communication and the sweet kiss and the way Az and Crow work together to fix the Book of Life. It also helped me to sort out all my thoughts about the finale, good and bad, and land squarely on a quote from another of my favorite movies, The Hours: “I don’t accept this. I don’t accept what you say.” And happily, because of the way the movie was written, I don’t have to accept it. So I won’t, and I will move on. 💕
literally there’s so much joy to be found in being earnest. so much happiness in being sincere. anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to get company for their misery.
My memory of The Birdcage (1996) is always that it's more dated and more difficult to watch than it actually is. You hear "drag-themed comedy from the 90s based on a musical from the 80s based on a play from the 70s" and you brace yourself just a little, right? But the film has a strong gay perspective, so the fruity fag jokes mostly come off as warmly affectionate. There is a surprising amount of poignancy in Robin Williams' portrayal of Armand, grudgingly agreeing to his beloved son's request that he go back into the closet for an evening ("do me a favor and don't talk to me for a while"). The drag club's staff attempting to redecorate the apartment with stuff straight people might like (a taxidermy moose head, an enormous crucifix, and Playboy magazine) is extremely funny. Albert's histrionics are a point of tension because he does often come off as a stereotypically pathetic/comic figure, but towards the end of the movie he makes it very clear that he's aware of how people see him, and asserts that trying to copy a stoic masculinity he doesn't possess for the sake of social approval would be more pathetic. In the 1983 musical adaptation, they give "Albert" (Albin) the only good song in the whole show, "I Am What I Am", which Gloria Gaynor covered to the delight of gays everywhere. Apparently Nathan Lane wasn't (publicly) out yet in 1996, which is amazing because it means that at one point in this movie you're watching a gay man playing a straight man playing a gay man playing a straight man, in a movie about how it's important to be yourself, an absurdity that does seem to encapsulate the state of gay America in the 90s.
I'm seeing a couple of posts circulating about the gay 90s and this movie. The above is a very good summary, and I think it's worth adding a few other points.
This movie got made because Robin Williams said yes to it (and it's important that Gene Hackman did as well). Williams in the 90s was a mega-star of a type that's not present in the current media environment (maybe Tom Cruise, but I personally think that's echo from his salad days). Even his flops made money on the back end in the video rental market, which also doesn't exist anymore (streaming is different). Hackman was on the other side of his A-list career but still Hollywood nobility if not full royalty.
Playing gay was considered career suicide in the 90s. There had been a number of actors who put lie to that belief stretching back decades, but this was Williams and Hackman (yes, being on screen next to a gay character was enough to get you blacklisted) saying "screw that" and doing it anyway.
Being gay and out was career suicide in the 90s.
Nathan Lane had a really nice gig going for himself. The Lion King put him into the Disney rep company with people like Williams, Bette Midler, and Whoopie Goldberg (check their IMBD list from the 90s--they were making bank at Disney).
Lane didn't come out until several years later (nice summary: https://deadline.com/2024/06/nathan-lane-robin-williams-advice-coming-out-birdcage-1235975010/).
I don't want to imply that this was a Sorkinized moment where everything changed because of one thing, but this was a very important movie that caused real movement in the needle on queer acceptance.
It also proved that there was a market for films with gay characters, which had the knock-on effect of gay filmmakers being able to find distributors of their gay-themed films. Which meant that more people than ever (queer and non-queer) got to see representation on-screen.
