But Then There Was a Star Danced

"But then there was a star danced, and under that was I born." -Beatrice, Much Ado About Nothing. 39, she/her, bi & ace. I love, in no particular order: science, space, engineering, writing, knitting, reading, baseball, social justice, music, Shakespeare, and many (MANY) nerdy fandoms, including Sherlock Holmes, Star Wars, Dragon Age, Good Omens, Leverage. My fanfiction can be found on AO3 under the username Ginipig.

[ef-1]

"Friend" is an AI wearable device designed to provide "companionship + emotional support"— i.e replace human friendships. Its literally an AI chatbot that you wear around your neck. "Friend" just paid for the largest ad campaign in NYC subway history

And Every. Single. Poster was vandalised, it literally looks like some of the most beautiful art you have ever seen

[mwagneto]

you're genuinely trying to fucking tell me that crowley, who repeatedly begged aziraphale over and over and over to run away with him so they could be safe, and each time when aziraphale turned him down just chose to stay and die on earth instead (because there's no point to anything if aziraphale is gone), crowley who completely broke down when aziraphale was discorporated even though it was only his physical body, crowley who spent thousands of years showing up to save aziraphale in the strange little 5d chess of damsel and knight they'd been playing, would be alright with damning aziraphale to nonexistence. himself is one thing but you're fucking telling me that when offered a choice between the continuation of an imperfect world, or killing every single person in the universe, including aziraphale, he'd choose the latter? are you actually fucking serious?

[gallusrostromegalus]

I was raised agnostic and tend to remain ambiguous on theological matters.

-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a

~*Spiritual Experience*~

I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.

Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.

He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only BARELY enough space for the fireworks and certainly none for his truck.

So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand. This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.

He begins, and this is crucial to what happens next, by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it unsecured on his lawn.

Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.

His process for unloading the fireworks is to 1. Climb up through the gate into the bed of his pickup truck (a feat made unusually difficult due to the slope of his driveway, and this man's fascinating decision to wear the world's Siffest and least Flexible Denim Overalls. 2. Once in the pickup bed, he selects ONE (1) box from the pile He is apparently from a niche religious institution that doesn't believe in stacking things. 3. Carries it awkwardly around the palette that barely fits in the truck bed 4. His wife yells "Be careful!" when he nearly falls out of the pickup. 5. He Yells "SHADDUP!" back at her. 6. The Large German Shepherd barks from inside the house. 7. He yells "SHADDUP!" back at her too. 8. He sets the (1) box down on the gate 9. Slowly and awkwardly climbs out of the pickup bed 10. picks the box back up, and carries it into the garage.

Question: Aren't you going to help this poor man? Answer: Absolutely Not.

There's four military veterans, MANY dogs, and several people with dementia in this neighborhood, all of whom are terrified by this chicanery every year and many neighbors have repeatedly asked him to maybe do the fireworks somewhere else. (This is the Eighth Year Running he's held a major demolition event in his driveway, and for those of you who can do math, you may be able to guess the precipitating incident to this little ritual) Additionally, I live in Colorado, a state marginally less prone to spontaneous and catastrophic conflagrations than a rotting grain silo, but only marginally. Our recreational explosives laws are written accordingly.

I am in fact calling the Non Emergency line to report Fireworks violations, and reading off the brand labels to someone named Dorothy, who is gleefully totaling up a SPECTACULAR fine for my oblivious neighbor.

However, while I'm on the phone with Dorothy, I notice the wind begin to pick up. and by "Notice" I mean "The Industrial Saran Wrap he left on his Lawn earlier is suddenly swept up about 100 feet into the air by an updraft intense enough to make my ears pop" And by "Pick Up" I mean "I look up to see the sky has turned a fun and exciting shade of glass green, and the bottoms of the clouds are bumpy and rounded, and the overall effect is not unlike looking up through the bottom of the cup at God's Matcha Boba Tea."

For those of you who do not live in places with Inclement Weather, these conditions mean "You have about 30 seconds before a Major Meteorological Event Occurs."

I move under the eaves. "Hang on Dorothy." I say, nose filling with Petrichor. "The show is about to be cancelled." "Oh, that doesn't matter!" Dorothy cheerfully informs me. "It's illegal for him just to possess those, no matter if he actually gets to set them off or not." "Terrific, because he's gotten maybe five boxes out of a hundred inside."

Sometimes, the weather gods are Merciful and give you a verbal warning, typically in the kind of thunderclap that makes your ears ring.

The Gods were not merciful today.

It's not often that I am in the time, place, correct angle or in a properly observational frame of mind to see this, But I got to see it today. Huh. I thought. I've never seen a cloud just DIVE for the ground before. Oh. I realized as it got closer. That's RAIN.

Sometimes, a thunderstorm will form in such a way that the rain that would normally be distributed over an area of say, five to tent square miles, is instead concentrated into an area of say, my neighborhood exactly.

So today, I was granted the rare privilege of being able to actually see the literal wall of water descend from On High and DIRECTLY onto my porch, my street, and my neighbor's truck, and his pile of unwrapped fireworks.

The sheer impact force of the downpour immediately scatters the teetering pile of fireworks boxes in the back of the truck, like the wrath of God striking down the tower of Babel. Boxes tumble, then are washed out of the bed of the truck by the deluge. Smaller Boxes are carried down the road in a little line by the stream forming in the gutter, like little impotent explosive ducklings.

My neighbor was definitely yelling something, but I could not hear what over the DEAFENING noise several million gallons of water makes upon high-speed contact with the earth's surface, but there was a lot of arm-waving and faces turning red as he went looking for the saran wrap that had probably blown to Nebraska by now, while his wife started disassembling the complex three-dimensional puzzle of interlocking material goods in search of a tarp. They do not have a tarp. They have one of those wretched Thin Blue Line flags though, and my neighbor jogs out in a futile effort to cover what's left in the truck.

Which is when the hail begins.

"HELLO?" Yelled Dorothy. "HI!" I shouted. "WE'RE HAVING SOME WEATHER!" "OH GOOD!" she shouts back. "WE NEED THE MOISTURE!"

I watch for a minute longer, but the loss was immediate and catastrophic- the hail is the size of marbles and dense and cares not for your pitiful cardboard and cellophane, ripping the boxes asunder and punching holes in the few things covered in plastic. The colors on the Thin Blue Line Flag are seeping all over the remains of that it was supposed to protect in a particularly apt visual metaphor. Not even the few boxes that made it into the garage are spared, as the German Shepherd escapes from indoors, and in an attempt to assist her humans, jumps directly into the small stack of not-yet-ruined boxes, scattering them into the driveway and deluge. She even picks one up so her humans will chase her around the yard, before dropping it in the gutter to be swept away.

So. I was raised Agnostic -but even I can recognize when God slaps someone upside the head and shouts "NO!" at them.

---

(If you laughed, please consider supporting my Ko-fi or preordering my book of Strange Stories on Patreon)

[bbrothertedd]

[neilnevins-deactivated20240617]

That smile and bright eyes looks like something out of a Peanuts strip I love it I love you I would die for this possum

[twistcmyk]

[shinraalpha]

i bought the new Lego Tower of Babel set but the instructions stop making sense about halfway through the little booklet thingy.

[kooldewd123]

four chapters into the murderbot diaries and so far every single time someone has tried to talk to murderbot its response has been either "i was spacing out and didn't realize they were talking to me" or "thank god i wasn't spacing out that time and actually managed to respond." yeah i think i can see why tumblr latched onto this character so hard

[brawlite]

honestly sometimes there's no better feeling than rereading a fic you've written and coming out of it going, "yeah that actually this DOES slap. exactly what i wanted to read. fucking nailed it."

[premium-quality-entertainment]

ART as a character is great because it's an answer to the age-old question of "what if you encountered what's essentially a man-made eldritch horror and it was so fucking annoying about it"

[ezra-didntreallyfall]

Fuck neil gaiman so much for using Terry Pratchett's legacy to form a fanbase of vulnerable young people he could interact with online and manipulate while claiming he was fulfilling his co-author's wishes

[yule-tides]

rot in piss neil gaiman

[alwaystiredshark]

For more of my art @alwaystiredshark

[fairytaleasoldastime]

Ineffable Husbands + Greek Types of Love

[inhonoredglory]

So about free will, oppressive systems, and the ending of Good Omens 3...

OK let's talk thematics.

Because one of the reasons Good Omens resonated with so many of us is that Crowley and Aziraphale were like us, people who've been traumatized by oppressive systems that forced us into corners and destroyed our sense of self, ability to love, our free will, everything about us.

Good Omens taught us that we can find healing and bravery to overcome that trauma by bonding with other traumatized souls and DEFYING those systems of oppression.

Adam in GO1 wanted to destroy the world to remake it better, but that's not an option for us, is it? We can't eliminate homophobia or transphobia, we can't eliminate the abusers in our lives, we can't eliminate corporations that pollute our environment and we can't eliminate religious institutions or political corruption or fascism or racism and every other awful thing out there.

But we CAN take their power away from controlling us, by banding together and declaring NO. YOU will not define me. That is what Aziraphale and Crowley represent.

As angels and demons, they represent revolting against the systems that birthed them and telling those systems that they REJECT the identity foisted upon them.

That is why Good Omens 3 doesn't make sense thematically. Because it takes this metaphor and says instead that the only solution is to eliminate the entire system and start again. Something that is virtually impossible to do without mass destruction on a global scale (for example, an extinction event that takes us back to before civilization and the patriarchy began). This is exactly what Adam thought:

Adam: “We'll get rid of everything stupid and start all over again.”

But Good Omens 1 tells us that this thinking is wrong. It is wrong to nuke the world to forge a better one, because individual lives matter and we can try to fix it.

Brian: “You're going to burn all this away. Why? Because some adults mucked things up? That's a reason to fix it, not destroy it.”

Good Omens was always optimistic about how, despite the fact that humans can destroy the world, we can also make it better.

Everyone in Good Omens 1 made choices, created their own free will, by defying god. Not eliminating god. Defying god. Adam, by rejecting his birth and parentage. Anathema, by rejecting her inherited role. Crowley and Aziraphale, by choosing to love one another (and what a queer metaphor that is, to choose to love as your form of rebellion 🏳️‍🌈).

This works beautifully as a metaphor because we in the real world can also choose to make our own free will, despite the oppressive systems we live under. Even if it's difficult, even if maybe we need therapy and support to do so, we can choose to reject the abusive systems in our lives and forge our own identities outside of them.

So when Good Omens 3 comes along saying the only solution is to remake the world entirely because apparently there is no hope under ANY oppressive system?? It's basically a pessimistic outlook. It's saying, no matter how much support and love we find, we will never have freedom from those abusive systems. (and maybe that's true on a social level, but on an individual level?)

Saying the only solution is to remake the world entirely removes the power WE have to do something within the broken systems we live under.

I get how Good Omens 3 works (sorta) from an atheistic perspective, and I fully believe it's the ending Terry would have wanted, but it just does not work from a Good Omens (or a realistic) perspective.

About the atheistic POV, just to say briefly: Does removing god actually fix all the problems in the world? Well, Good Omens already told us that humans are the primary drivers of evil. So god wasn't even responsible for that. And plus, it is humans who created god, and what we imagine god wants, and why we fight religious wars.

It's not god's existence that ruins society, it's the idea of god, and that's all humanity's creation.

So, no, eliminating god does not create a perfect world.

But!! Having free will to defy the oppressive systems that will invariably plague humanity is how you find freedom. Not a perfect world but free will, and the ability to act on it, is still how you define Who you are, that is how you defeat everything society wants you to be, how you CHOOSE who YOU want to be.

That is why Good Omens is so inspiring, because it speaks to all of us who feel oppressed and traumatized. It tells us there is hope despite what happened (and is happening) to us.

Good Omens 3 does not share that theme though, and that to me is the primary reason I can't get behind the ending.

[thavron]

This this this. I have a lot to say on GO3, but to add to the subject of lost themes.

Season 2 was very much about memory loss. It tackled the issue of what makes a person a person. We meet Jim, a wiped-clean version of Gabriel. A version without the memories, trauma and personal growth that went with 6000 years working under the Heavenly regime. Arguably, he was a better person for it, but was he still Gabriel? No. As the show went to great lengths to remind us, he was Jim, short for James. Not Gabriel.

So how are we supposed to accept Asa and Anthony (who I am sure are just as lovely as Jim), who wear our beloved Ineffables faces but have none of the memories of who they were? This isn't a happy ending for Aziraphale and Crowley, because they aren't Aziraphale and Crowley. To accept them as such would be to unlearn the lesson of series 2.

This brings me back to OP's original point. Aziraphale and Crowley's love was an act of rebellion. It was a symbol of hope. At the end of series 2, it is broken, but with a promise, "we could have been us." But the promise of resolution is never met. They don't resolve the conflict. Crowley doesn't get to speak his truth, Aziraphale doesn't get to listen. Crowley is not heard, and so he enters into the final scene still heartbroken and unable to imagine a world that isn't broken. This is the character who held a burning car together on sheer force of imagination. It makes his request not a grand sacrifice for humanity because he has nothing to lose. It's a submission. He waved the white flag and gave up.

It makes it all feel so hopeless.

[soleilpirate]

This is my new favorite pic of Anthony J. Crowley

[periodicallypurple]

Thought this might help others who struggle when writing. I know I get in my head too much.

[nyancrimew]

y'all remember this game? just pure goonbait it's crazy i was allowed to play it at all bro 😭

[msmaev]

Once you know all the logic tricks to play minesweeper, you end up in a state of exercised mastery. The goal is not to solve individuals puzzles but to tease out more and more from her while denying her every chance to explode, every chance to deny you your total dominance over her.

In short, mastery over minesweeper is mastery over edging the program.

[masterspider5]

We have GOT to get regular porn back on this website.

[nyancrimew]

what do you think this is

[iforgiveyouprime]

I know a lot of us have chosen to treat only the book and Season 1 as canon, and I completely understand why. As for me, I've decided to keep the book, Season 1, and about 60% of Season 2 as my personal canon.

But you can't deny that this scene was executed incredibly well.

Michael is an absolute genius of an actor. It genuinely made me want to cry for Aziraphale. His shock, his fear, his pain, the way it feels like absolutely everything and everyone is pressing down on him from every direction, the sheer weight of what he's carrying. Those eyes, full of tears that never quite fall. That broken voice. His heavy breathing. The way his fingers tremble as he brings his hand to his lips, which are trembling just as much. The way he's holding himself back, pressing his lips together, clenching his jaw. There are so many emotions raging inside him, from the pain of wanting to stay with the love of his life to his frustration with Crowley: his recklessness, his failure to grasp the full situation, his assumption that Aziraphale is some naïve fool when he never was, and even, to some extent, the way he uses the kiss as a form of manipulation.

(Yes, I know Crowley had his own reasons, and I understand them. But if we're being objective, they both made mistakes here, Crowley included. I don't think it's fair to ignore that fact. Crowley calls Aziraphale an idiot and makes it clear that he sees him as someone naïve who still believes in Heaven and its goodness. But Aziraphale stopped believing that a long time ago, and Crowley, damn it, should have understood that, especially after everything they went through in Season 1. And it's very likely that it was Aziraphale who came up with the body-swap plan in the first place, because he knew they would come for them and exactly why they would.)

This scene is perfect. It's such a shame we never got a second kiss in a completely different context, with completely different emotions. But I can't deny that this kiss, and everything following it, is a masterpiece with enormous potential for further development.

A development that, sadly, it never received.