gnomemnemonic

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It's a shame Tara mostly interacted with/was dating Willow for her entire tenure on Buffy because she could have done so much if she had gotten to talk to other characters. She and Giles would have been unstoppable together. She could have made Faith realize she was a lesbian. Hell, she almost made Spike realize he was a lesbian.

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Never posting my fanfiction. Call that AO2.

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Never posting my fanfiction. Call that AO2.

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being a humanities major who’s friends with stem majors is so funny because you’ll ask your friends what they’re doing today and they’re like “UGH it’s so stressful i have to stabilize the reactor core for my nuclear power midterm and then i have to build the supercomputer from i have no mouth yet i must scream for my electrical engineering homework :/ what about you” and you’re like “oh well i have to read a fun little book and write an essay about gender.” and they still think you have it worse

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love rereading some of my writing like damn this person really knows how to write that appeals to all the things I personally love

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love rereading some of my writing like damn this person really knows how to write that appeals to all the things I personally love

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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.

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hello average tumblr user. i want to play a game. in front of you is a female character. and i want you to genuinely and earnestly care about her without shipping her with a man, make her the mean lesbian best friend or the 'mum' friend. if you cannot manage to do this in the next 45 minutes i will release the hounds on you. live or die. make your choice

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Fun fact for our international followers: If someone in Australia cuts down a tree on public land to improve the view from their house, the local government will install a sign to block that view again

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"Why do you want to be a boy when you're such a pretty girl?" Why do you want to play another game when you already beat the last one? You fucking casual

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the average color of the universe, cosmic latte vs. aziraphale

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'there are no real men anymore. men nowadays are all too feminine, they even look and act like women' where are all these feminine men. where. can you pinpoint them on a map for me. please. can you direct me to them. im begging you. please. please please please pl

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( link to interview in the reply section )

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ok but we seriously needed more episodes about versions of the main characters as vampires. Vampire Cordelia could have been so much fun! Vampire Tara would have been sooo tragic and terrifying. Vampire Giles would have been a good way to explore more Ripper Giles. Vampire Faith trying to turn Buffy. Vampire Dawn!!!!!!!

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Part 2 of Buffy Mayhem!

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I've always been annoyed by fans who argue that the scoobies should have realised Buffy would be in heaven, because they have clearly failed to grasp dramatic irony. The existence of heaven, and Buffy being there, is something the audience has knowledge of, but there is no way Buffy's friends could have reached that conclusion. There are loads of reasons for them to believe she's in a hell dimension.

(And the next thing on the "bad friends" list is about them not digging her out of her grave, but people seem to ignore the fact that the gang got attacked by demons before they had actually finished what they were doing - they thought they had failed, they did not "leave Buffy to dig her way out".)

There's good reasons to criticise, maybe even dislike, Season 6 of BTVS, but some people go completely overboard and try to pick fault with everything.

Why are Buffy's friends so worried about Buffy possibly being in a hell dimension and not in heaven, just on the flimsy grounds that

the show has already established the existence of multiple hell dimensions over its previous five seasons;

the show has never before said anything to even suggest the existence of any sort of heaven (the show's official theological stance before Bargaining seems to be summed up by Buffy's "note to self: religion, freaky" in What's My Line?);

the possibility of the dead going to heaven when they die if they are Good People (regardless of any religious belief, which -- again -- Buffy canonically does not have) has never once been brought up as a reason to avoid trying to resurrect them before (nobody suggests this is why Dawn shouldn't bring her mother back in Forever; nobody suggests Giles must be wrong about Jenny being the ghost in I Only Have Eyes For You because the real Jenny Calendar would be in heaven);

the show has established repeatedly that you can go to a hell dimension if you jump into the wrong portal;

and Buffy died after jumping into a portal that a hell god created as part of her plan to go back to her home dimension in hell?

You know, I think it might be because they are bad friends.

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"God is in the details." Azirapale folded his hands primly in front of him and smiled brightly at Crowley for a moment before bending once more over the book that lay open on the desk in front of him.

Crowley scoffed and waved his wineglass with the practiced carelessness that allowed the wine to slosh to the very rim of the glass without a drop being spilled. He looked back over his shoulder as he sauntered across the floor of the bookshop. His eyes landed on the crown of white blond curls, piled over a busy brain that was fixed on finding a way out of their predicament. And more importantly, a brain that was not fixed on him. Crowley's lip curled and he threw back, childishly, "The devil is in the details."

Aziraphale's head lifted a little and his blue eyes flicked impatiently up at Crowley's now retreating back. "Yes, well," he said tartly, "perhaps they're in it together."

Aziraphale heard the falter and then stilling of Crowley's restless pacing. In the silence left, he could hear only the blood rushing in his own ears. The echoing of his own blasphemous words. Aziraphale fixed his eyes on the margin of the page, blank and empty as he wished his mind to be in that moment.