I just keep thinking about how - while I'm sure it's different for everyone - in my own experiences with grief, if you have warning, you do some of the grieving in advance. Not that you don't hope for a better alternative or fight for one, but you start to brace yourself, to mentally adjust. And it's so clear that Jayce was not doing any of that. No part of him was accepting Viktor's diagnosis or preparing for the reality of its outcome. Because if he had been bracing himself, then maybe he would have been able to hold that cooling body in his arms and cry his eyes out and still think, in some quiet place beyond the shattering heartbreak of it, that this was a mercy. To die with painless, unexpected abruptness. To never know it was happening. An almost kind alternative to months of worsening pain and weakness, to fading gradually away, to suffocating slowly, choking on blood. A mercy compared to the idea of choosing between agony and painkillers that would see Viktor's final days lived with that brilliant mind fogged and blurry.
And part of it all was Jayce taking his cue from Viktor: Viktor wanted to fight and to live, so Jayce refused to internalize any other possibility but him succeeding. Them succeeding. And part of it was probably Jayce having trauma around loss and near-loss. That memory of snow and helplessness, cold and terror. Magic saved him then, saved his mother.
People talk about Jayce violating Viktor's DNR, but it's not quite that. Viktor wanted to live. Even the suicide attempt was more him thinking he should be punished than wanting to die. What Jayce violated was Viktor's renunciation of the Hexcore. But it's sort of a moot point, since there was no method of resuscitation that would not violate that renunciation.
And as much as I like to bully Jayce for being the slightly naive golden boy who suddenly pivots to full on Frankenstein-ing in his lab, I do get it. Imagine. You've just survived a terrorist attack. You've seen the crushed bodies of multiple people you knew, and at least two you cared about. One of those is your best friend of almost a decade who you might be in love with even though you haven't realized it yet. And you're in shock and panicking and you don't know his spinal column snapped and you're so scared you can't even tell if the fingers you press to his throat are feeling his pulse or your own pounding one echoing back and all the medics rushed to the councillors because of course they did and now the sentient fidget toy that your best friend has been barely-metaphorically fucking is screaming at you, shrieking that it can save him, LET ME SAVE HIM! And last time you almost lost someone you loved, magic saved them, magic saved them.
anyway my sympathies to Jayce Talis, you absolute fucking disaster you
take pictures of the things you touch daily, your tv remote, your headphones, your favorite cup, your computer mouse, your keys, your shoes, your microwave, the packaging for the snack you eat in the afternoon. In 30 years they'll be so gone, they won't even make them like that anymore, and when you look at those pictures, the sense memory will be electric
i love everything about Aziraphale’s interactions with Muriel. he’s so gentle every time he tells her she’s getting something wrong by just suggesting the right thing. there’s no stomping on her enthusiasm because he can clearly see they’re enamored with earth and humanity. and Michael Sheen’s little ‘concerned/exasperated/seeing himself in Muriel’ expressions during the teacup struggle bus moment are honestly everything to me.
Why There’ll Never Be Another Good Omens 2 Experience
The strangest thing happened after a few days post my watching of S2. I got a wave of real, bittersweet sadness.
Not due to the obvious – I was dealing with that too, but with more excitement than anything – but because I realized something, as a writer and consumer of media. I realized that it’s unlikely I’ll ever get a media experience close to what I experienced at the end of Good Omens 2. Because really, its setup was absolutely unparalleled – in general, and for myself personally.
I am currently writing my third romance, and what I’ve learned primarily about the genre, the way for it to really work, is that there needs to be something keeping the couple apart initially. The more things keeping the couple apart, the stronger the romance hits. The more the couple clashes with each other, the better it is. Societal norms, class issues, initial dislike, literal danger—all these aspects are what make a romance a story. It’s that conflict that creates the compelling narrative. No romance was ever popular because things worked out well from the beginning – it’s that “look at what we were, and look at us now” aspect that gives readers/watchers that satisfaction. It’s the “I can’t believe this happened” effect. The “I would never have foreseen this” effect. The “they’ll never be together” effect. It’s why forbidden romances are so incredibly popular.
Another aspect that makes a romance story really work well is the amount of time it takes for the romance to develop. A couple that gets together after a few days? Eh, it’s tricky. You better make it really dramatic somehow. A great example is Titanic – class differences, betrothal, and a huge amount of danger threatens this couple, so them being in love after only a few days works. But what really sells this one is because we can see how this romance has survived beyond those few days. We see it 80 years in the future, still there, in the memory of Rose. That is why it hits so hard. Romances that span over long periods of time (especially ones that are bittersweet/tragic) hit so much more than ones spanning a short period.
But wait! There’s more!
You can up this effect by not only having the romance take time in story…but having it take time in real life, for the viewer/reader.
This is why romances in TV shows that take years to finally work out are so compelling. It’s that “Pam and Jim” effect, that will-they-won’t-they deal. We are waiting right along with them, and we’re feeling that same relief when all those things keeping them apart finally fall away. This is harder to pull off, because there’s never that guarantee that the story will make it that far. TV shows get cancelled, creators lose interest or die, etc. So it’s not just “Will They, Won’t They,” it’s “Will They, Won’t They, Can They Even Try?”
This is also compounded by that fear that it won’t happen in-story after all, and while in romances you’re pretty positive that things work out (they kinda have to, for it to be labeled a “romance”) in other media, there’s always that possibility. Look at Community – there’s a forbidden/conflict-ridden romance that didn’t end up working out, even though it was “Will They, Won’t They”d for six entire seasons. You also then have shows and ships where fans are almost sure it won’t happen, but still hold out hope. (See: Supernatural, Sherlock, etc.)
Now. Now look at Good Omens. Look at that absolutely unparalleled, unbelievable set up. It’s unbelievable because it takes almost every single thing that makes a romance compelling, and not only uses all of them, but dials them up to 11.
Why are they at odds? Why are they forbidden from being together?
Because they are literally the most opposing forces you can imagine in Western Canon. They are the Angel Guarding The Gate and The Serpent of Eden. The literal only way you could’ve made this a bigger deal would’ve been to make it God and Satan, and even that would’ve not hit as hard, because it’d be like two CEOs getting together – there’s no fear of a higher power adding that delicious conflict. And to add to all this, in real life, the couple is portrayed as two men, which adds that second meta level of conflict.
And what fear/danger is keeping this couple apart?
Not just familial disappointment—but disappointment from God and Heaven and Hell. Not just moral guilt, but the guilt of potentially dooming the entire Earth. And finally, on top of that, the very real danger of being killed. Not only that, but making it as though you never even existed.
And in real life, they face all those roadblocks that queer couples in media have been battling for years and years, but I'll talk about that more in a second.
Okay, then Time. How long have they been kept apart?
For…all of it.
All of the time that ever existed.
They, quite literally, could not have been kept apart longer.
And this leads into those final two points, the ones that actually really sell it. Because I can sit down right now and write a story about an angel and a demon falling for each other at the beginning of time against all odds…but what I can’t do is to have already written it thirty-three years ago.
That’s how long this story has existed. Thirty. Three. Years.
I’m not even counting how this is using characters that have existed as opposing forces for thousands of years. I’m not even saying that, even though that’s also a part of it. But besides that, this story, this exact story started thirty-three years ago, and is still being continued by the author to this day.
Do you know how uncommon that is?
Yes, we have canon that has lasted for many, many years. Hundreds. We get new versions of beloved older stories ever year. But it’s so very rare that they are by the same creator. We get new Sherlock Holmes content, but it is not written by Arthur Conan Doyle. This, on the other hand, is actual canon content, written by the author of the original. That is unbelievably rare.
That means we’ve got a fandom where some people have grown up with these characters. People who read it at twenty are fifty-three. People who read it at fifty are eighty-three. Kids who saw their parents reading the book now have children of their own. It is a cult classic that has been in the hearts of so many people for generations. Me, personally, I fell in love with it ten years ago, at age twenty, at the very beginning of my own writing journey. This story means so much to people, because it’s stood that test of time.
And yet, this story was never explicitly romantic. So many saw it that way, but it was never something confirmed. Because this was a book from the 90s, at a time where this kind of romance just wasn’t in popular media if it wasn’t played as a joke. It was, back then, the same kind of “forbidden” as a romance between angel and demon. So people imagined, but they never expected anything more. And they’ve continued not expecting more, because even in the 2019 first season, there was never any true confirmation of anything, and people accepted it. You have a 33-year-old story here – it’s possible that this major change/confirmation could happen, but all things considered, it was unlikely. You would never blame the creator for not making major developments to a story they wrote with their late friend a lifetime ago. And no one in production was saying a word to confirm or deny, but we’ve seen all this before. It was a Will-They-Won’t-They…Probably-Not situation.
And then you have the end of S2.
And that's where that bittersweet sadness comes in for me, personally. Not at a huge level, not to the point where I'd have it any other way, but it's there regardless. Because I realized that this was a unique situation that could never be replicated, for me, and likely for many, especially readers of the book pre-show. In all likelihood, I would never again experience a romantic payoff like this one. Because it was the most forbidden of forbidden romances, the couple of which have been kept apart by the worst of all dangers and highest level of guilt for the longest amount of time literally possible, written over a real-life span of time where this kind of romance went from “completely taboo even in real life” to “finally acceptable in popular media,” written by the same creator, and not confirmed as canon until the story reached the age of Jesus Christ himself.
And the real kicker is, even after everything these two literally star-crossed lovers have gone through…they’re still being kept apart. They’ve still not taken down those final, seemingly insurmountable barriers between them. It wasn’t a “here you go 😊” move to make long-time fans happy – it’s being used as a perfect, painful plot point. After 33 years, we’re still having to wait longer.
Chef's kiss. Couldn’t have been a better set up if it was mathematically calculated. And yet, the best part is that it happened organically.
hate how almost every portrayal of a lesbian on mainstream tv is like literally just a straight woman who dates women. the writers clearly don’t care to take Any considerations into lesbian/lgbt culture or what our lives/dating is rly like. like even apart from them all being pretty feminine conventionally attractive white women in their thirties, they are literally always the straightest women you could possibly imagine. what’s the opposite of dykery. The utter dykelessness of these women
I think one of the best things ofmd did was start episode 10 with mary’s pov. It was so important to see how trapped she also was in the marriage and how she was flourishing on her own and that she is truly her own story’s protagonist and if we hadn’t just spent nine episodes following stede we would absolutely be cheering for her to murder her deadbeat husband who had the audacity to abandon her and then try to take it back like it was nothing. She’s such a cool character and I’m so glad she was given the same complexities as stede especially since media is often so quick to vilify female characters in her position and I’m so glad and that we were able to see this glimpse into her mind
I spent ten years building up a following on Tumblr. I had 30k+ followers, great engagement, it helped my career thrive like nothing else. I could quit my day job and live off the fan base I’d accrued.
Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.
This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.
So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.
The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.
People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.
I don’t want to make “content,” I want to make comics, I want to make art, and I want to do it in a space that is mine. I’m not sure there’s a place for that anymore.
Loving all these white gays erasing the history of queerness because they think it’s edgy.
Drag queens are not ‘kind of camp’ - drag queens invented camp. Drag queens are camp. Camp is how gay men (and women! lesbians and wlw can also be camp!) expressed themselves and learned to love themselves in the late 1800s and early 1900s when the crackdowns on homosexuality made those things dangerous.
Camp is meant to be queer, subversive.
“Camp is, or should be, by its very nature, political subversive, and revolutionary.”
Camp is not your tackyness. Camp is not for you to denegrate. Camp is where the drag balls in Harlem originated, Camp is where gay men learn to love themselves for being completely out of the norms of what traditional heteronormativity wants from them. Camp is where we try on and take off genders like they’re fashion trends we don’t have time for.
Camp is also about drawing attention to the demanding categories of identity that we are expected to perform, and that we often accept without question. What is high art, and why are some things “tacky”? To whom are they tacky? What do we gain by seeing aesthetics through a gaze other than our own?
Drag specifically is not really about impersonating females, but about impersonating The Female— exploring and performing the very height of this stylized, ritualized womanhood. Or, in the case of drag kings, doing the same with stylized ideas of what it is to be A Man. The campness is in the head-on refusal to take as given any definition of what is acceptable.
This Doonesbury abortion cartoon was originally written by Gary Trudeau in 2012, in response to a Texas law requiring women to have an ultrasound before an abortion. It was banned from many major newspapers, and they ran syndicated cartoons in its place.
Now seems like an appropriate time to bring these cartoons back, with the passing of Texas’ new law requiring the burial or cremation of miscarried or aborted fetal remains. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if Trudeau decides to write the sequel.
Did you know that modern C sections were invented by African women— centuries before they were standard elsewhere?
Midwives and surgeons living around Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria perfected the procedure hundreds of years ago. When a baby couldn’t be delivered vaginally, these healers sedated the laboring mother using large amounts of banana wine. They tied the mother to the bed for safety, sterilized a knife using heat, and made the incision, acting quickly as a team to prevent excessive blood loss or the accidental cutting of other organs. The combination of sterile, sharp equipment and sedation made the procedure surprisingly calm and comfortable for the mother.
After the baby was delivered, antiseptic tinctures and salves were used to clean the area and stitches were applied. Women rarely developed infections, shock, or excessive blood loss after a cesarean section and the most common problem reported was that it took longer for the mother’s milk to come in (an issue that was solved with friends and relatives who would nurse the baby instead).
In Uganda, C sections were normally performed by a team of male healers, but in Tanzania and DRC, they were typically done by female midwives.
The majority of women and babies survived this, and when questioned about it by European colonists in the mid-1800s, many people in Uganda and Tanzania indicated that the procedure had been performed routinely since time immemorial.
This was at a time when Europeans had only barely started to figure out that they should wash their hands before performing surgery, when nearly half of European and US women died in childbirth, and when nearly 100% of European women died if a C section was performed.
Detailed explanations of Ugandan C-sections were published globally in scholarly journals by the 1880s and helped the rest of the world learn how to save mothers and babies with minimal complications.
So if you’re one of the people who wouldn’t be alive today without a C-section, you have Ugandan surgeons and Tanzanian and Congolese midwives to thank for their contributions to medical science.
