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Monterey Bay Aquarium
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Sweet Seals For You, Always
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Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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JBB: An Artblog!
Three Goblin Art
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Kaledo Art
Cosmic Funnies
Peter Solarz
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@wrenkt7oz
As someone who got partly spoiled for S2 because people didn't tag their spoilers after the release... TAG YOUR SPOILERS. Not everyone can watch the show right away. I can't watch until Thursday at the soonest, so I'm going to be locking down all tags.
Also I'm proposing we have a unified spoiler tag so it's harder to miss filtering a tag.
How about "GO S3 spoilers"?
GOOD OMENS 2.05
As these clips make clear - Aziraphale is such a flirt!
GOOD OMENS 2.05
Tumblr Top Ships Bracket - Quarterfinals
Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens) vs Suletta Mercury/Miorine Rembran (Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury)
Aziraphale/Crowley
Suletta/Miorine
This poll is a celebration of fandom and fandom history; we're aware that there are certain issues with many of the listed pairings and sources, but they are a part of that history. Please do not take this as an endorsement, and refrain from harassment.
Absolutely stunning! @chalktwins
Credit: Chalk Twins on Xitter
thinking about Good Omens 2. and stories, and the shape of them, and Terry Pratchett and his themes. and something clicked.
Aziraphale is cackling.
it's not just the ball. he spends the entire season trying to force the story into a shape it's not, and everyone suffers for it.
i've seen some less than charitable takes on Crowley's actions and they all ignore how much Crowley did try to talk to Aziraphale, did try to ask Aziraphale questions, did try to help, only to be ignored or brushed off. because his questions, his offers, they didn’t fit with the story Aziraphale was telling himself.
quiet, gentle, and romantic. it was, if you're our favorite Angel - right up until the end, at least. because he decided that's the story he was in. from the very beginning, he's off in la-la land, living out this romcom with a cute little mystery wrapped up in it, completely ignoring what's actually going on around him. i'll set Nina and Maggie up! (completely ignoring that Nina tells him she has a partner, and at that point, he has no reason to think she's anything less than happy.) i'll take ~our~ car to go do investigate this silly little mystery (he's not taking it even a little bit seriously!) while you stay here and run the bookshop and it will be so quaint and domestic! soon we'll dance and confess our feelings that we obviously share because we're already so clearly a couple we just need to finally say it!
Crowley knows the entire time that they're in a horror story but Aziraphale ignores every attempt he makes to point that out because it doesn't fit the story he decided he's in the middle of.
he brushes off Crowley's concerns and questions - his QUESTIONS! - like they're nothing. he doesn't want to see it, so he doesn't. and Crowley should have told him more?
why would he?
when you are CLEARLY in distress and it's being BLATANTLY AND WILLFULLY IGNORED, what the fuck are you supposed to do? "Crowley didn't comminicate" well okay if I were having a panic attack about something and my husband completely ignored it, chattering on about our dinner plans or whatever, that wouldn’t exactly make me want to open up about what was wrong! that would send the very fucking clear signal that he didn't want to know!
words aren't the only way we communicate and Crowley's body language, the entire season, is that of someone who is living in a horror story, knows he's living in a horror story, and is fucking terrified. if Aziraphale were paying any attention to Crowley instead of focusing all his energy trying to set things up just so for the big climax of his love story, he would know something major was wrong.
why would Crowley have told him how cruel Gabriel was about the execution when Aziraphale's already so thoroughly convinced that heaven is pure and good and has shown over and over through the millennia that he's not really open to considering that it can be cruel!
just look at them at the dance. Crowley freaking out because there's a horde of demons out there and Aziraphale giggling as they go to dance. that's the whole season!
you know who Crowley reminds me of this season?
he's watching helplessly and with increasing levels of distress as Aziraphale shoves every plot point into the romcom hole even though it's obviously not remotely romcom shaped! and i'm sick of people saying he was abusive because he raises his voice about it a few times!
Might be the most relatable thing I've read about S2 since it screened.
Abolish for-profit health care insurance.
...are you certain that they're wrestling?💭
it must be said: I'm so so PROUD of crowley for going through with the confession despite knowing that it wouldn't make much of a difference, despite having his whole existence misunderstood by his angel just a few moments ago, despite being interrupted when he specifically said he needed to go first because there was something immensely important. s1 crowley would not not have gone through with it and I'm so proud and happy that he did.
Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th
No guys you don’t understand.
The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.
So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.
This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.
That’s not sad, that’s awesome.
*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing
This is humanity
Happy Birthday, Curiousity.
Happy birthday, Curiosity.
This 14th century door at Exeter Cathedral, UK, is thought to be the oldest existing cat flap.
A cat was paid a penny each week, to keep down the rats and mice in the north tower, and a cat flap was cut into the door below the astronomical clock to allow the cat to carry out its duties.
Records of payments were entered in the Cathedral archives from 1305 to 1467, the penny a week being enough to buy food to supplement a heavy diet of rodents.
See More: https://artifactsmuseumhistory.blogspot.com
Isaac Newton is often credited as the inventor of the cat flap to the outside world. He was also credited with having made a smaller cat flap next to it for the kittens.
Don't know if anyone else has posted this. I haven't seen it anywhere and it's great. BBC radio interview with David and Michael. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa4-pq86Hi8
Paul McGann smiling. Paul McGann smiling. Paul McGann smiling. Paul McGann smiling. Paul McGann smiling. Paul McGann smiling. Paul McGann smiling. Paul McGann smiling. Paul McGann smiling. Paul McGann smiling. Paul McGann smiling. Paul McGann smiling.
Paul McGann smiling...
to me its also the fact that when he laughs in the audios you can hear that he smiles through his laugh every time 😭
Never mind the 8th Doctor. For pure joy, find a copy of Give Us a Break.
Paul simply glows on the screen in a very early role. Doesn't hurt that it's got Robert Lindsay and Shirin Taylor of course.
Cycle of Abuse
The statistics all tell us that those who are abused are likely to go on to become abusers. And tonight, sadly, I'm kind of thinking that applies to Aziraphale. I mean, there's no question that his relationship with Heaven (or at least the agents thereof) is an abusive one. They bully, belittle and gaslight him at every turn. But the problem, for me, in S2, is that I see that in the way that he interacts with Crowley. For instance, while Gabriel, in need of a refuge, is immediately offered the sanctuary of the bookshop, Crowley is living in his car. Worse, Aziraphale ignores all of Crowley's totally valid concerns about both Aziraphale's safety and his own, with Gabriel on the premises. He doesn't even try to reassure him. He just says "this is what I'm going to do, if you don't like it, you can leave". Worse even than that, Aziraphale totally gaslights him with the "I thought it was something we carved out for OURselves" line. He takes all of Crowley's hopes for a life for them together, which he (Aziraphale) is putting at risk by prioritising Gabriel's well-being over Crowley's, and makes it seem like it's Crowley who's turning his back on those hopes, on the relationship.
But when you look at the whole series from the beginning, this behaviour pattern keeps being repeated. In the "before the beginning" part, he can't just keep his mouth shut. He sees Crowley's joy, his excitement, and can't just let him have that moment. He immediately has to show off his own superior knowledge by informing him that the whole thing isn't going to last long enough for this wonderful "star factory" to even get fully into gear before it will all be brought to an end. In Uz, he can't just look at the bleating crows and know what he knows, he has to demonstrate to Crowley that he knows it, that Crowley isn't clever enough to fool him. He decides, on a whim and for no discernible reason that he's going to take Crowley's beloved car to Edinburgh and that's the end of the story. Crowley gets no say in it. Despite the fact that it is, at that moment, Crowley's only home. Aziraphale wants to play detective and what Crowley might want simply doesn't register on his radar. He doesn't even listen to Crowley's plan to get Nina and Maggie together, he's too absorbed in his own plans and schemes to give any time or thought to Crowley's. When he gets back from Edinburgh and Crowley confesses that his plan failed, Aziraphale doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. He certainly doesn't offer any sympathy over the failure. He just immediately focuses on his own cotillion ball plan. And won't even share that plan with Crowley. All the way through S2 (except for brief moments in the past, in the minisodes) Aziraphale is giddy with his own plans, his own cleverness, and treats Crowley as just a resource that he has every right to expect will be there for him without question and without reserve. He shows absolutely no regard at any point for what Crowley's own needs or hopes or plans might be. This abusive behaviour. I'm sorry to even think that. But it is. And that's before we even get to the end. When yet again Aziraphale doesn't listen to or pay any attention to anything Crowley is saying or feeling. He wants what he wants and if Crowley doesn't like it, too bad. It's "my way or the highway" all the way through S2. And I hate, hate, hate thinking of Aziraphale (who I love to bits) that way. But it is. I'm not saying Aziraphale is conscious of any of this. I'm saying that the abuse he has suffered has led him to mirror many of those abusive behaviours because he doesn't know any better. And it's making me terribly terribly sad tonight. I'm hoping that tomorrow I will see all this completely differently.
Aziraphale’s Choice, the Job Connection, and Michael Sheen’s Morality
I’ve had time to process Aziraphale’s choice at the end of Season 2. And I think only blaming the religious trauma misses something important in Aziraphale’s character. I think what happened was also Aziraphale’s own conscious choice––as a growth from his trauma, in fact. Hear me out.
Since November 2022 I’ve been haunted by something Michael Sheen said at the MCM London Comic Con. At the Q&A, someone asked him about which fantasy creature he enjoyed playing most and Michael (bless him, truly) veered on a tangent about angels and goodness and how, specifically,
We as a society tend to sort of undervalue goodness. It’s sort of seen as sort of somehow weak and a bit nimby and “oh it’s nice.” And I think to be good takes enormous reserves of courage and stamina. I mean, you have to look the dark in the face to be truly good and to be truly of the light…. The idea that goodness is somehow lesser and less interesting and not as kind of muscular and as passionate and as fierce as evil somehow and darkness, I think is nonsense. The idea of being able to portray an angel, a being of love. I love seeing the things people have put online about angels being ferocious creatures, and I love that. I think that’s a really good representation of what goodness can be, what it should be, I suppose.
I was looking forward to BAMF!Aziraphale all season long, and I think that’s what we got in the end. Remember Neil said that the Job minisode was important for Aziraphale’s story. Remember how Aziraphale sat on that rock and reconciled to himself that he MUST go to Hell, because he lied and thwarted the will of God. He believed that––truly, honestly, with the faith of a child, but the bravery of a soldier.
Aziraphale, a being of love with more goodness than all of Heaven combined, believed he needed to walk through the Gates of Hell because it was the Right Thing to do. (Like Job, he didn’t understand his sin but believed he needed to sacrifice his happiness to do the Right Thing.)
That’s why we saw Aziraphale as a soldier this season: the bookshop battle, the halo. But yes, the ending as well.
Because Aziraphale never wanted to go to Heaven, and he never wanted to go there without Crowley.
But it was Crowley who taught him that he could, even SHOULD, act when his moral heart told him something was wrong. While Crowley was willing to run away and let the world burn, it was Aziraphale (in that bandstand at the end of the world) who stood his ground and said No. We can make a difference. We can save everyone.
And Aziraphale knew he could not give up the ace up his sleeve (his position as an angel) to talk to God and make them see the truth in his heart.
I was messed up by Ineffable Bureaucracy (Boxfly) getting their happy ending when our Ineffable Husbands didn’t, but I see now that them running away served to prove something to Aziraphale. (And I am fully convinced that Gabriel and Beelzebub saw the example of the Ineffables at the Not-pocalypse and took inspiration from them for choosing to ditch their respective sides)
But my point is that Aziraphale saw them, and in some ways, they looked like him and Crowley. And he saw how Gabriel, the biggest bully in Heaven, was also like him in a way (a being capable of love) and also just a child when he wasn’t influenced by the poison of Heaven. Muriel, too, wasn’t a bad person. The Metatron also seemed to have grown more flexible with his morality (from Aziraphale's perspective). Like Earth, Heaven was shades of (light?) gray.
Aziraphale is too good an angel not to believe in hope. Or forgiveness (something he’s very good at it).
Aziraphale has been scarred by Heaven all his life. But with the cracks in Heaven’s armor (cracks he and Crowley helped create), Aziraphale is seeing something else. A chance to change them. They did terrible things to him, but he is better than them, and because of Crowley, he feels ready to face them.
(Will it work? Can Heaven change, institutionally? Probably not, but I can't blame Aziraphale for trying.)
At the cafe, the Metatron said something big was coming in the Great Plan. Aziraphale knows how trapped he had felt when he didn’t have God’s ear the first time something huge happened in the Big Plan. He can’t take a chance again to risk the world by not having a foot in the door of Heaven. That’s why we saw individual human deaths (or the threat of death) so much more this season: Elspeth, Wee Morag, Job’s children, the 1940s magician. Aziraphale almost killed a child when he couldn’t get through to God, and he’s not going through that again.
“We could make a difference.” We could save everyone.
Remember what Michael Sheen said about courage and doing good––and having to “look the dark in the face to be truly good.” That’s what happened when Aziraphale was willing to go to Hell for his actions. That’s what happened when he decided he had to go to Heaven, where he had been abused and belittled and made to feel small. He decided to willingly go into the Lion’s Den, to face his abusers and his anxiety, to make them better so that they would not try to destroy the world again.
Him, just one angel. He needed Crowley to be there with him, to help him be brave, to ask the questions that Heaven needed to hear, to tell them God was wrong. Crowley is the inspiration that drives Aziraphale’s change, Crowley is the engine that fuels Aziraphale’s courage.
But then Crowley tells him that going to Heaven is stupid. That they don’t need Heaven. And he’s right. Aziraphale knows he’s right.
Aziraphale doesn’t need Heaven; Heaven needs him. They just don’t know how much they need him, or how much humanity needs him there, too. (If everyone who ran for office was corrupt, how can the system change?)
Terry Pratchett (in the Discworld book, Small Gods) is scathing of God, organized religion, and the corrupt people religion empowers, but he is sympathetic to the individual who has real, pure faith and a good heart. In fact, the everyman protagonist of Small Gods is a better person than the god he serves, and in the end, he ends up changing the church to be better, more open-minded, and more humanist than god could ever do alone.
Aziraphale is willing to go to the darkest places to do the Right Thing, and Heaven is no exception. When Crowley says that Heaven is toxic, that’s exactly why Aziraphale knows he needs to go there. “You’re exactly is different from my exactly.”
____
In the aftermath of Trump's election in the US, Brexit happened in 2018. Michael Sheen felt compelled to figure out what was going on in his country after this shock. But he was living in Los Angeles with Sarah Silverman at the time, and she also wanted to become more politically active in the US.
Sheen: “I felt a responsibility to do something, but it [meant] coming back [to Britain] – which was difficult for us, because we were very important to each other. But we both acknowledge that each of us had to do what we needed to do.” In the end, they split up and Michael moved back to the UK.
Sometimes doing the Right Thing means sacrificing your own happiness. Sometimes it means going to Hell. Sometimes it means going to Heaven. Sometimes it means losing a relationship.
And that’s why what happened in the end was so difficult for Aziraphale. Because he loves Crowley desperately. He wants to be together. He wanted that kiss for thousands of years. He knows that taking command of Heaven means they would never again have to bow to the demands of a God they couldn’t understand, or run from a Hell who still came after them. They could change the rules of the game.
And he’s still going to do that. But it hurts him that he has to do that alone.
By and large I agree with this. But I also think that Aziraphale is being driven by less altruistic motives as well. I think he sees the Metatron's offer as a way that he can have something he'd never ever dreamed of - that he can have Heaven and Crowley as well. That he doesn't have to choose. And I think he's hurt and angry when Crowley doesn't leap at the chance to relieve him of that terrible choice that he's battled with for so long. He certainly isn't thinking of Crowley AT ALL in all of this. Except as something/ someone HE wants and needs. He's not considering anything of what Crowley might feel, or what he might want or need. It's all about Aziraphale's desires. And yes, by and large those are to do with doing the right thing. But in doing so, he's ignoring everything he has learned. Because I think the Job thing, all the minisodes in fact, were about "there is no dealing with a God who would sacrifice children to win a bet". And what Aziraphale should have learned is that what works, what mitigates the horrors of absolutism, is the grey areas, "blurring the edges" as Crowley puts it. He's not going to be able to do that in Heaven.
Aziraphale was savoring every second of that apology dance.
The thing is ... Neil has said pretty much from the beginning that this was the transitional season. The one to get them from book-based S1 to planned-with-terry-sequel S3. And only after the planned sequel would they get to retire to their South Downs cottage. So take heart. All is not lost. As Will said:
If then true lovers have been ever crossed, It stands as an edict in destiny. Then let us teach our trial patience Because it is a customary cross, As due to love as thoughts and dreams and sighs, Wishes and tears — poor fancy's followers.
Agree. As I said to my mom who has watched not one episode of Good Omens, this is like in the Hallmark movie where the big city girl and her small town boyfriend are trying to save Christmas or whatever but then the big city ex comes on the screen and convinces her to come back despite small town friend’s argument that they could be so much more together but she goes anyway—
We are at the end of act 2. Act 3 will make it right. (And I think Neil said if it doesn’t get renewed he’d find some other way to tell the story…)
I suspect that they have some kind of agreement in principle for S3 contingent upon viewing figures for S2. Which is why Neil is pushing so hard for people to watch as many times as they can in the first two weeks. Far harder than he pushed when S1 was released. He's already writing S3 (although he's had to put it on hold during the strike). And is talking about hypothetically filming in 2024. That wouldn't be the case if they had to start negotiations from scratch, I don't think.
