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greenglowinspooks · 6 months

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(DCxDP) The obligations of a rogue versus those of a parent (Pt. 4)

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Tw: descriptions of body horror, Dr. Crane has PTSD and Does Not Realize, Crane has an actual panic attack and just doesn’t care, the Riddler makes one (1) sex joke about Batman

Will be crossposted to AO3 eventually

(Pt. 1 here) (Prev here) - (Pt. 5 here)

(Masterlist here)

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Dr. Jonathan Crane is in his lab, the acrid scent of chemicals filling the air, and his hands are shaking.

Danny’s health, for the first week that he had him, had been steadily improving at an extremely quick rate. However, his healing had begun to stagnate. Danny said that it was because his body had run out of ectoplasm, and that while there was a lot of ambient ectoplasm in Gotham, he needed a stronger type in order to heal.

And so, that led Dr. Crane here.

He had stolen the research notes from the Penguin years ago regarding his experimentation on him.

(He quite vividly remembers the sound of bone creaking and groaning as it twisted, lengthened. The squelching of shifting tendons and muscles, the strange fabric-like tightening of skin. The feeling of going from man to monster, of losing all claim to his humanity.)

Danny had called him Liminal, part ghost. He had said that he was transformed by, among other things, a kind of synthetic ectoplasm.

Danny needed ectoplasm.

Crane had the research notes. He had every ingredient necessary. And yet, attempt after attempt failed.

The chemical smell burns his nose. His hands tremble.

Dr. Crane is not afraid.

He doesn’t feel fear anymore. He’s tried to, many, many times, but nothing has worked. And yet, his hands are shaking still.

(The horrifying sensation of vertebrae pop-pop-popping along his spine, growing and lengthening. The unbearable itching beneath his skin as toxin glands begin to form. The feeling of his teeth sharpening and elongating, of his skull growing, of his vision changing and brightening. The awful stench of chemicals. The awful stench of ectoplasm.)

Jonathan takes careful note of his shaking hands, his blurring vision, his accelerated heart-rate and shallow breathing.

(Human hands. Human vision. Human heart and lungs and organs.)

He takes note of them, but he does not let that distract him from the task at hand. Danny is not a chemist, but Jonathan is.

The boy knows enough about chemistry in theory, but he won’t go anywhere near Crane’s equipment. He seems to have some sort of intense fear of laboratory settings, probably developed during his stay with the GiW, and Crane is willing to respect that, if only because he cannot afford to lose him.

As such, Crane is the only one qualified to do this. And, unfortunately, if he isn’t successful the boy may very well die.

He heats the chemicals to precisely the right temperatures, adding each one to its correct container.

Dr. Crane thinks of the Scarebeast, that creature born of cruelty and greed and a sense of superiority. That creature which he tries to ignore is a part of him, that can never be removed. A damage which cannot be undone.

He pours the contents of a small beaker into a larger flask, watching the liquids swirl together. The stench in the air is becoming closer and closer to the one burned into his memory.

Crane’s whole body is wracked with unpleasant sensations. It’s truly unfortunate, he thinks, that despite his mind’s lack of fear, his body still reacts so harshly.

Jonathan’s eyes wander, eventually settling on a purple and green card sitting innocently on the corner of the table.

Right.

Even if they wiped out the GiW tomorrow, and even if Danny could survive without ectoplasm, he would still be in danger.

Crane has to get him back to good health. It’s the only way he can be sure that the boy can defend himself properly.

The solution in the flask begins to foam, and Jonathan does not hesitate as he adds the final ingredient. He pours the mixture into a new container, capping it and placing it into a freezer set to -40 degrees.

Hopefully this time he got the timing right.

Jonathan tries to relax, the ventilation in the room slowly but surely clearing the familiar smell from the air.

He thinks of the letter.

Surely, he thinks, that man can come up with some better material for his jokes. Or, at least something new.

Same old threats, same old attempted poisoning.

Aiming his threats at Danny, though, that was new. New and utterly unacceptable.

Scarecrow did what he had to.

He doubted that his solution would last forever, of course, as with that man it never did. As such, he would prepare both himself and Danny for the inevitable moment that his choices came back to bite them.

However, for the moment, they were safe. Danny could rest and recover, and Jonathan could figure out a plan to minimize possible damages.

Jonathan is no longer shaking.

He’s exhausted. This is his fifth attempt today, and each one leaves an unfortunate strain on his mind and body.

With a sigh, he settles himself into his seat at a nearby desk, opening up his computer and logging his most recent attempt. He still has to wait for it to chill to know if it was successful, but he can always update the logs later.

Once he’s done, he stretches, joints popping loudly as he walks to the freezer.

When he sees the results of his tireless work, the ghost of a smile flits across his face.

Success.

Jonathan picks up the jug of ectoplasm and leaves the lab, which is in all actuality the basement of the new apartment that he moved himself and Danny into after receiving the note. The scrappy old woman who was his landlord had told him that as long as he paid her five hundred dollars up front, she would let him set up in the basement without any questions or cop calls.

And so, the most expensive apartment in the Narrows was his.

At least, he thought, the distance between the basement and the apartment was short enough that Danny didn’t have to sit in while he was doing his labwork.

Jonathan knew that he didn’t exactly have a strong grasp on the concept of ‘lab safety,’ proven by his built-up immunity to almost every toxic chemical he’d ever encountered, and he doubted that Danny should be around such an environment.

He was back to the apartment quickly, not bothering to hide the self-satisfied smile on his face. Danny is sitting in his armchair, trying to read one of his books. Danny looks up, ready to greet him, when he sees the jug in his hands and pauses.

“Is that..?”

“Synthetic ectoplasm,” Jonathan says proudly, “I found the Penguin’s research notes and decided to recreate it, since you said that you needed it to heal properly. I’m not sure if it’ll work the same as what you usually have, but I hope it’s helpful all the same.”

Danny is standing, now, and looking at Jonathan with a strange look in his eyes. He looks, Jon thinks, like he’s about to cry.

Then Danny is rushing forward and wrapping his arms around Jonathan, his scrawny form shaking.

Jonathan is, for a moment, horrified. Did he do something wrong somehow? Why is this child, who’s so afraid of touch, hugging him?

And then he hears Danny’s voice, and he knows that it was all worth it.

“Thank you,” he’s mumbling, over and over, “thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much.”

“Of course,” Jonathan says softly, because what else can he say?

The boy cries in his arms for a while, and Jonathan briefly wonders what his life must have been like before, if a person like him can be seen as a comforting figure.

Then, Danny pours himself a small glass of the synthetic ectoplasm, putting the rest into the small fridge which had come with the apartment, and he settles back down, sitting in the armchair once again.

Jonathan sits opposite of him, and they chat with one another as Danny drinks.

Danny talks to him about the stars and tells him about different spaceships, and Jonathan makes sure to pay attention and ask the boy questions.

He doesn’t miss the way that Danny lights up every time he asks him something about his interests. He’s so passionate, so smart, a trait that he seldom sees outside of his fellow rogues, and Jonathan wants to encourage that.

It’s…nice. Peaceful, almost.

And then the front door flies open, because Jonathan isn’t allowed to have nice things.

“Jon,” a familiar voice rings out, “what the hell?!”

Danny is frozen in place, clearly terrified.

Jonathan heaves a sigh, turning to face the nuisance who’s entered his apartment.

“Eddie,” he drawls, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”

Edward’s face is red with anger as he invades Jonathan’s apartment.

“Oh, I don’t know! Maybe it’s the fact that you sent a bunch of rogues a cryptic message and then dropped off the face of the earth for two weeks! I was worried, Jon!”

Jonathan hums in acknowledgement.

“I didn’t think it was that cryptic,” he says, picking up a book in order to pointedly ignore the Riddler.

“Oh, of course you didn’t, you straw-stuffed hickory dickory dickhead. I swear, you’re always—” he pauses, finally having noticed Danny sitting opposite of Jonathan, “—who is this?”

“My apprentice,” Jonathan replies, dreading the upcoming headache he was no doubt going to develop from Edward’s company, “he’s helping me hunt down the GiW. His name is Danny.”

Edward gasps dramatically.

“You—an apprentice?! And you’re letting him sit in the old man chair?! You don’t even let me sit in the old man chair,” he wails, draping himself over the headrest of the couch with a flourish, “Jonathan, I thought I knew you!”

“Edward,” Jonathan says, “get out of my apartment.”

“Oh my goodness, this is incredible. You’re becoming the bat!”

“I am not becoming the bat, Eddie, now get out.”

Edward has a shit-eating grin on his face as he waltzes over to Danny. Danny, who seemed terrified when he first appeared, is now looking at him with obvious amusement written all over his face.

“I mean, look at him! The hair, the eyes, the scrappy build. If you put him in one of those traffic light vigilante costumes, he could easily pass as a Robin!”

“I’m not doing this with you today, Eddie.”

“Riddle me this, Jon: I am a treasure hidden inside of a chest. You can break me, or steal me, or give me a rest. I can flutter, or pound, or attack, or drop, but if you don’t have me, you’re certainly fucked. What am I?”

Jonathan pauses for a moment before he groans, dropping his head into his hands.

“Eddie.”

Danny sits still, a confused look on his face as he repeats the riddle silently. Then, his face lights up in delight.

“A heart!”

“Jon, I like this one,” Edward says with a smile, ruffling Danny’s hair, “you are correct! A heart, something that I wasn’t aware that our dear Jonathan had!”

“Eddie, stop.”

“No, no,” Edward says, “I was worried about you, you deserve this. I mean, you even missed girls night! You never miss girls night!”

“Girls night?” Danny asks, absolutely delighted.

“Oh, of course,” Edward says, sprawling over on the couch, dangerously close to just laying in Jonathan’s lap, “we have it once a week. I’m invited because of Selina and Jon’s invited because Harley likes him.”

“And what does girls night entail, exactly?”

“Eddie,” Jonathan groans, “please.”

“Well,” Edward hums, “we usually paint our nails, or watch a movie, or gossip about the other rogues, and occasionally, we tell each other about any ‘encounters’ we have with Batman,” he says, raising his eyebrows up and down.

Danny’s jaw drops.

“Edward, shut up,” Jonathan says, an irritated tone in his voice that wasn’t there before.

“No way,” Danny says, “I thought that Batman, like, hated you guys or something. You mean he actually..?”

“Oh, the Bat is much like a bottle of liquor or a cheap cigarette, in that he was made to be passed around.”

Danny chokes on air.

“Edward Nygma,” Jonathan hisses, getting out of his seat and looming over the man, “get the hell out.”

Edward pales.

“Leaving, leaving!” Edward says, dashing away from Jonathan. He pauses, turning to flash Danny a quick smile.

“Remember Danny, I’m your favorite uncle! Not any of the other rogues, me!”

With that, he leaves, the room falling completely silent.

And, as per usual, that silence does not last.

“You full-named him?” Danny asks gleefully, “and it worked?”

Jonathan just sighs, sitting down on the couch and rubbing at his temples.

“Please, don’t take anything Eddie says seriously. He’s a moron.”

“Dr. Crane, please let me come to girls night with you,” Danny pleads, his eyes sparkling, “I promise I won’t embarrass you.”

Jonathan groans.

“Of course you won’t, Eddie will do it for you.”

“Come on, please?”

“I think we’re a bit busy with the GiW at the moment,” Jonathan snaps. He pauses as he notices the crestfallen expression on Danny’s face.

This boy is going to be the death of him.

“Perhaps, though, when all that is taken care of…”

Danny cheers, grinning wildly, and Jonathan is not at all relieved to see him happy again. Certainly not.

The rest of the day is relatively normal.

Danny works on trying to get information from the GiW database while Crane refines his his fear toxin, both preparing for a raid on the GiW base they located in Gotham.

It was only a temporary base, nothing of note, but there was a chance of discovering more bases through it, and that wasn’t something either of them were willing to give up.

Still, something like this would take time. Rushing would only lead to failure.

…

Late in the night, long after Danny is fast asleep in his room, Jonathan pauses.

The GiW are not the only threat out there. They aren’t the only threat to him or to Danny. Perhaps it could be helpful to reach out to someone with greater resources than himself.

He sends a quick message to Red Hood.

Hopefully, he thinks, everything will go smoothly.

—

#dcxdp #dc x dp #dp x dc #dpxdc #dp x dc crossover #dc x dp fic #liminal scarecrow #Jon’s PTSD is triggered by the smell of ectoplasm because his life is a nightmare #HDJFNDNDNFKDJF #I am the master of emotional whiplash #rip Jon just trying to have some peace in this fucking house #never gonna happen king 🫡#oh also Eddie is not lying that bat can manwhore #and like half the rogues in Gotham know this from experience #and also most of the JL #and some of JL dark #btw Eddie and Jon are besties #they’re both awful but they make it work #when Jon full-names Eddie that just means that if he doesn’t stop whatever he’s doing he’s gonna get a dose of fear toxin #Eddie isn’t intimidating enough to full-name anyone so if he gets mad he just bashes whoever in the head with his cane #Jon is the living embodiment of ‘me and my girl don’t argue she bash me in the head with a rock and I walk it off like a man’#also side note I’m not doing any ships in this #because I don’t want to #they are just Like That #if you wanna read it that way though it’s completely fine #also shoutout 2 that one scriddler fic on ao3 that helped inspire that riddle LMAO

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mediumgayitalian · 13 days

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“Thought you might like this.”

Nico turns the thin plastic casing over in his hands. It catches the limited light from the one open window, refracting a burst of rainbow across the shadowy ceiling.

“What…is it?”

“Mixtape.” Will rocks back on his heels, hands swinging slightly at his sides. He hums idly, flicking his gaze across the room faster than Nico can track. Distracted. “Songs ‘n stuff.”

Contrary to popular belief, Nico knows what a mixtape is. CDs as well, for that matter. In fact he distinctly remembers when they came out — the transition from cassette to CD was a triumphant one. Way easier for him to save his game processes and transfer to new machines as they came. (He wonders, idly, what happened to his stack of CDs left at the Lotus. Are they still there, standing alone in his half of the room? Next to his dresser, across from Bianca’s coin and token collection? Is there enough dust in that standstill place to cover the entire living space in a thick blanket of forgotten memory?)

“I can see that, Solace. I meant — why.”

“Because!” Solace gestures grandly, hands fluttering in some particular way that means nothing, really; just accentuates his wide grin, his twinkling eyes. The rocking he’s constantly doing, back and forth, back and forth, the twitching of his fingers. Electrons on a wire. “It’s been a while since you’ve had a radio or anything, right? Figured you might have a couple years to catch up on. Might be fun.”

Nico turns the CD case over again in his hand, peripherally aware of the shifting rainbows, still, reflecting off Will’s hair now, dying it redgreengold. There’s sharpie scrawled across the surface, completely illegible except for the plethora of exclamation points, the doodle of a cat, and the chain of flowers drawn carefully around the edge.

Will is smiling so, so brightly.

“Thank you,” Nico says quietly. He clears his throat, looking away. “I’ll, um. I’ll listen to it. Tonight.”

“Great!” Will chirps. “I got lots more, I’ll stop by after my shift and you can tell me what you liked. That way you can have more input on karaoke night.”

“Oh, I’m not gonna —”

“See you tomorrow! Write down what you think!”

“— do that.”

Nico returns his parting wave helplessly, watching as he sprints down the stairs and then, for no discernible reason, cartwheels three times on his way across the common. Immediately upon righting himself he walks into a (thankfully unlit) brazier and goes sprawling, calling out, to no one, I’m okay! and bounding back off.

“How are you alive,” Nico mutters to himself. He turns back to the CD case, running his thumb across the edges. He notices, for the first time, the hearts that have been drawn along the clasps. A smile pushes its way across his face no matter how hard he tries to fight it back.

When he plays it that night, lying on his bed with his headphones tucked over his ears and his Walkman resting on his stomach, the first song is Walking on Sunshine.

He can’t fight back a smile then, either.

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blue-likethebird · 6 months

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Reusing the memory system from botw for the tears of the dragon storyline in totk was such a terrible decision on so many different levels that it’s honestly kind of impressive.

While the botw memory system had flaws of its own, there was one small but significant thing that worked in its favour: botw’s memories were largely separate from the main plot in the past, and have absolutely no bearing on the story being told in the present. Aside from a few specific instances (ie the calamity striking, the ceremony, Link and Zelda becoming closer) the memories are all self-contained moments that emphasize character development over driving the story. Because there’s no major narrative throughline between them, it gives players more freedom to discover in any order regardless of how much they’ve progressed through the main quest without running the risk of stumbling across a memory that ruins something else later on in the game.

(This got long so the rest of my analysis is going under the cut.)

The biggest change between the memories from botw and the dragon’s tears from totk is definitely what kind of information these cutscenes relay to you as the player. Botw’s memories are primarily snapshots of small interpersonal moments that hold very little significance to the greater narrative taking place in the past. Totk’s memories are the greater narrative. With only one major exception -that I’ll touch on in a sec-, every cutscene in the dragon’s tears shows a crucial moment of story development with no time left to explore the characters driving that story forwards. There’s no organic moment revealing, say, a quirk of Rauru’s that Mineru finds annoying, or Sonia’s sense of humour, or any of our literal Main Villain Ganondorf’s motivations for going to war with Hyrule. If there’s any moments of character focus they only happen in ways that advance the plot (meaning the only real character focus is on the characters totk wants the entire universe to orbit around, namely Rauru and Zelda), and as such it’s harder to bring myself to care about what happens to anyone.

To illustrate the point I’m trying to make here, compare the memories of the champions Link regains during the divine beast quests to the conversations with the ancient sages at the end of each temple. The memories make passing mentions of the ongoing preparations for the calamity, but the real purpose of those scenes is to showcase who the champions were as people before their deaths and give us a reason to mourn them, even though we know at the start of our journey that they’re all long gone. In contrast, the conversations with the ancient sages are all about the events of the imprisoning war and their promise to Zelda that their descendants will come to Link’s aid in the future, very obviously copy pasted for each of the five times that cutscene is brought up (which is a particularly egregious moment of bad quest design but that’s a rant for another time) in such a way that none of the 5 incarnations of that cutscene reveal anything new about the ancient sages as characters, to the point where none of them even show their faces. I care about Daruk because the game shows me that he cares deeply about the wellbeing of his fellow champions and brings out the best in others. So why should I care about the nameless, faceless sage of water? What’s there to move me about their struggles if my only interactions with the sages are a series of exposition dumps? If the game can’t give me a reason to sincerely care about its main characters, the whole rest of the story is meaningless.

(As an aside, I get the feeling someone on the dev team caught on to the issue I’m describing here, because the tea party memory sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of the dragon tear cutscenes. It’s such a jarring change of pace to have the otherwise plot-heavy dragon’s tears come screeching to a halt for a scene where Sonia sits down with Zelda to have a cute little tea party and talk about absolutely nothing of significance that the whole thing almost seems like it was hastily tacked on to the story later. Given that the next (chronological) memory sees Sonia fall victim to an unceremonious death by chiropractor, it feels like someone realized that Sonia really doesn’t do or say much in the scenes before she dies and threw together the tea party scene so players would have at least one moment to look back on fondly when she’s fridged. But I digress)

The story told in the dragon’s tears is a highly linear one. But the open-ended nature of botw’s memory system remains, meaning that these tears can be found and viewed in any order. At first this doesn’t seem so bad, since the first two tears you’re likely to find if you follow the game’s intended path are also the chronological first and second of the memories you can discover through these geoglyph tears. But after those first two, the game kinda gives up on guiding you towards these tears in a way that flows well with the story they wrote: the closest tear geographically to the two the game initially guides you towards correlates to one of the penultimate scenes of that entire storyline, while the next scene chronologically is found almost halfway across the map. As such, it’s all but guaranteed that you’ll spoil yourself in some way without using either a guide or the (somewhat unintuitive and never fully explained by the game) little map in the forgotten temple. Finding memories in order didn’t matter so much in botw because the scenes you could find still worked well as standalone scenes before you discovered every memory and pieced together the full picture, and the game is never trying to surprise me about the characters’ fates at the end of this storyline: hell the first memory you’re guided to shows the calamity striking. But in contrast, viewing a dragon’s tear at the wrong time can completely ruin the story they’re trying to tell in those cutscenes. During my playthrough, for example, the first tear I found after the game stopped guiding me to them showed Ganondorf removing Sonia’s stone from her dead body. At this point I had known Sonia existed for all of like an hour, so every subsequent appearance she made was ruined for me by the fact that I already knew she was nothing but cannon fodder to be killed off for the sake of another character’s pain (Rauru and Zelda a-fucking-gain). I expected to be pissed that it was so easy to spoil myself, or maybe sad in passing that a character with her potential was so underutilized, but instead I just felt… tired. I wasn’t even halfway to the first settlement and already I was completely numb to the story the game was trying to tell.

But the worst was yet to come. And oh boy was it ever a low point for storytelling in the Zelda series. Remember how I said up above that the memories in botw had no connection to the story in the present? Let’s just say the same cannot be said for the dragon’s tears.

It’s May 2023. I’ve just finished the sage of wind questline. I still have hope that the story the game is trying to tell will be good. Deciding that I’ll go to Goron city next, I head towards the Thyplo skyview tower to expand my map, catch a glimpse of a nearby geoglyph from the air, and glide over to check it out. This geoglyph shows me a memory that not only recaps the entire dragon tear storyline, but also ends on a bit of foreshadowing about Zelda’s fate that’s about as subtle as a brick to the fucking face. By exploring -the thing the game claims it prioritized above all else in the design of its world and quests- I’d once again been hit with spoilers for a major story detail.

My main objective in this game is to find Zelda. It’s the only driving factor behind my journey towards all these different regions. The current big mystery I’m supposed to solve is why Zelda’s causing so much hell for the people of Hyrule. I now knew exactly where she was and what the deal with her appearances in other parts of Hyrule was, and I’d found it completely by accident by doing something the game says over and over again that it wants me to do. Unlike with Sonia’s death, this time I was a mess of emotions. I was pissed the fuck off that this open-world game had punished me twice already for trying to explore. More than that, I was disappointed that a game I had been so excited to play, from a series I had so many fond memories of, had let me down like this. With every subsequent quest where the sages and I chased a Zelda I knew was fake to our next objective, and every NPC wondering where she was that I couldn’t tell the truth to, that disappointment grew. The entire rest of the main story was ruined for me before I had progressed past 1/4th of the regional quests and a third of the dragon’s tears. There was no more sense of anticipation or mystery. I finished the rest of the game with a bitter taste in my mouth and haven’t touched it again since.

Do I think this story could have been good? Honestly, I don’t know, and by now I don’t really care either (that’s a lie. I care so so much and that’s probably why I hate totk as much as I do). But it’s all irrelevant, because like Cinderella’s stepsister cutting off her own heel so she can cram her foot into a glass slipper that’s never going to fit, totk is sabotaged by the devs’ insistence that everything fit itself into a world they custom-made for botw. This isn’t a new formula that the series is following, it’s Nintendo slapping a new coat of paint on an existing skeleton, and I’m not optimistic to see what this particular approach has in store for the Zelda series. Especially not at the price they’re charging for it.

#bluebird.txt #salt of the kingdom #totk critical #long post #totk salt #totk spoilers #apologies to my followers for the long-ass whatever this is #I do think about things that aren’t how much I hate this game I’m just in a mood lmao #negative #it’s fine if you disagree I just had to put my thoughts in words

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codgod · 4 months

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and i love you, love you, love you / no it’s not so hard to tell

#.png #qsmp #slimecicle #qsmp slime #el mariana #qsmp mariana #slimeriana #fanart #can u believe the idea that started this was really angsty and toxic #i’m glad it turned into this tho #it’s fine that’s emblematic of their relationship or whatever

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makerandbean · 2 months

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this thing is getting. unwieldy. the pattern outright warns you about how heavy this thing gets if you do it beaded (it’s got something absurd like 5,000 beads on it including those beaded tassels) but i. did not fully appreciate how much 5,000 beads weigh.

#exciting adventures where i am playing both yarn AND bead chicken with this #and the yarn I’m knitting it with is no longer sold #which is sad bc it’s a really lovely silk :((#does always end up looking a bit bridal-y but whatever whatever #me to start off with: oh it’s fine if it looks bridal i’ll just knit another one #me now: I Love This Pattern And Also I’m Burning It When I’m Done #maker knits

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sonic-adventure-3 · 1 year

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no way in hell i’m finishing this but i’m proud of what i did so here

#wip #sonic #sonic the hedgehog #sth #my art #I GUESS #i don’t know if i know what i’m doing with lighting i just said fuck it we ball #i hadnt intended to draw these soap-like shoes but they just sorta appeared #i’ve drawn way too many neutral arm extended poses recently #this was sorta meant to be like an outfut ref but i don’t like it anymore <3 #whatever whatever whatever whatever whatever WHATEVER ITS FINE IM DONE WITH IT ONTO OTHER THINGS #ONTO NEW FRONTIERS EVEN. WHATEVER!!!!!!

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babygirlbuckaroo · 1 month

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i can’t believe the several months’ worth of what we thought was delusional clowning and ‘how funny would it be if…’ spec we did about bucktalia breaking up off screen before s7 is now just… canon. 10 mins into s701 and they’ve. broken up. off screen? just like we joked about? and for the reasons we said they would? ok!!!

#like Tim really sighed rolled his eyes and said ‘fine. whatever you guys say’#i feel like i’m losing my mind #911 abc #911 spoilers #rambling

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lenaellsi · 14 days

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it's honestly a bit odd to me that so many people have jumped on the 'aziraphale will be pulling all the strings and playing politics in heaven' train. like I think it's true that the metatron is underestimating aziraphale's intelligence and ability to disrupt the second coming even while separated from crowley, but I also think the idea that aziraphale is going up to heaven with a clear idea of how he's just been lied to, an understanding of how much danger he's in, and a plan to stop it is a huge reach.

frankly, aziraphale is very vulnerable to manipulation. I'm thinking now of neil’s post with the diary entry from before the edinburgh minisode where he was duped by two humans, the whole thing with the nazis in 1941, and his sponsorship of shadwell's various obviously fake agents (sergeant milkbottle, etc.). he's not nearly as savvy as fanon tends to portray him. he takes people at face value, especially people he thinks of as Good. (that's not a dunk, btw--I find these things endearing, and a sign of aziraphale's innate wish to see the best in people. I just think that sometimes the BAMF protective aziraphale of fanon overshadows the slightly more naive aziraphale of canon. and honestly, I also think TV aziraphale is just a bit softer than book aziraphale, though he is capable of stepping up when it counts.)

and he's a bad liar! I know it's a meme in the fandom that aziraphale lies all the time, but he doesn't like it, and he's bad at it. he gets nervous and comes up with terrible excuses and the only reason he ever gets away with it is because the people he's lying to are idiots (gabriel), have their own agendas (god, the other archangels), or trust him to be honest (crowley).

aziraphale's real strength is his ability to take sudden, completely unexpected action. that's one of the things that crowley admires most about him. "he's unpredictable," is what he says to nina, and it's true! aziraphale's greatest moments of rebellion have always come from spur of the moment decisions, not intricate plans. (if anything, crowley is the planner--the arrangement and the thwarting of the apocalypse, their two longest cons, were both his idea.)

aziraphale gives the sword away because when he is forced to make a decision under pressure, he tends to land on the side of rebellious kindness. shielding crowley from the rain in eden, lying to gabriel to protect job's family, defying the quartermaster and returning to earth via possession during the apocalypse, blowing up his halo--he does these things because he's following that same impulse. when aziraphale has time to over think, he frets and fusses and is paralyzed by indecision. (or worse, he falls back on what heaven has taught him.)

TL;DR: I don't think aziraphale has any sort of grand plan other than a generalized "make things better," and I certainly don't think he is planning to betray heaven. he might try to come up with a plan once he figures out how bad things are going to get, but my bet is that what will actually disrupt the second coming is an absolutely bonkers off the wall decision that no one, crowley included, could ever predict. and I think it’ll happen, as it usually does with aziraphale, just after he accepts a difficult truth that fundamentally shifts his worldview—in this case, his final rejection of the idea of “good” and “bad” people, and of the entire morality system of heaven and hell.

#good omens #good omens 2 #good omens meta #final fifteen #aziraphale #long post #been in a meta mood lately sorry #to be clear people can write whatever they want. playing with characterization is fine and good in fanworks #but also I do wonder if the fanon built over four years between seasons is seriously impacting the way people read the final fifteen #and because I suspect it will come up: his smile in the elevator reads as Aziraphale’s denial smile #the one where he plasters it on as a ‘this is fine this is what I want I am a Good Angel’ reaction #‘I’m not trapped in here with you you’re trapped in here with me’ is not a thought aziraphale would ever have about himself #he doesn’t think about himself that way #crowley thinks of him as a force to be reckoned with for sure. but aziraphale is not that sure of himself

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