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Rumbelle being dapper as fuck

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♕ rumbelle alphabet ⇒ years filled with life and adventure

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*raises head* Did someone say historical Rumbelle fic?

I'm not gonna lie; I don't blame Rumple for not going with Bae to the World Without Magic. It's not his fault. With his past is and how people treated him, including his own wife, for basically deciding to want to live just to see his own son and not die, can you blame him for not going with Bae?

Even before those episodes of basically every person treating him like utter shit, the episode where he turns into the Dark One, just basically gives us so much about what his life was like before the Dark One.

Bae has fond memories of his father, but for his father, it wasn't all fond. It was survival. It was making sure there was food on the table while having to endure the ridicule of his entire village and people disdaining him for the simple act of running away and leaving his infantry behind by injuring himself just so he could live, because he knew they were going to die.

Granted, we weren't given why he left in that episode, but we knew that everyone viewed him as a coward, and one soldier made him kiss his boot just to humiliate him because he knew he had the power to do so.

A poor man who worked hard to make ends meet for his boy, and still he was able to give to a beggar on the street and invite him to his place for a warm meal, the very little they had.

A man with kindness, that was the man we and Baelfire saw. A good man.

But the man Rumple saw, was the man who whimpered and cried and was scared of everything falling down. Who was responsible for his son and was afraid of losing him and was close to because he had no power to stop it. So whimpering, bowing down, or running was all he could. Being a coward was Rumple's way of surviving. It was what he knew, and it was all he could do to survive.

It's easy for people, heroes, to preach about courage and bravery and make pretty speeches, but what I love about Rumple is that living by those speeches is a lot harder than making them.

When you have power, you don't let it go. Those who know what being powerless is like knows that. And those who fight and it comes naturally like Killian are a different breed.

Rumpelstiltskin was a normal man, a kind man, with a gentle heart. But the world ridiculed it because a man like Rumpelstiltskin whose kind and good and generous are not the ones who are admired.

Men like Killian and the knight who humiliated him are, because there's a power about them, a masculinity. They enjoy being big and strong because they have the power to impart that strength and make others feel pathetic. It gives them worth and makes them feel better to assert dominance.

And seeing how men like that always seem to get the upper hand of Rumple, to humiliate him and dominate him. And how he once was poor when he was good...

Can you honestly blame him for not wanting to let go of his power? Even if it made him a monster.

At least it got him respect in the society he lived in.

Because society only cares about power.

It doesn't care about whether or not you're a good man.

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Portrait of Sappho, fresco from Pompeii

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I'm not gonna lie; I don't blame Rumple for not going with Bae to the World Without Magic. It's not his fault. With his past is and how people treated him, including his own wife, for basically deciding to want to live just to see his own son and not die, can you blame him for not going with Bae?

Even before those episodes of basically every person treating him like utter shit, the episode where he turns into the Dark One, just basically gives us so much about what his life was like before the Dark One.

Bae has fond memories of his father, but for his father, it wasn't all fond. It was survival. It was making sure there was food on the table while having to endure the ridicule of his entire village and people disdaining him for the simple act of running away and leaving his infantry behind by injuring himself just so he could live, because he knew they were going to die.

Granted, we weren't given why he left in that episode, but we knew that everyone viewed him as a coward, and one soldier made him kiss his boot just to humiliate him because he knew he had the power to do so.

A poor man who worked hard to make ends meet for his boy, and still he was able to give to a beggar on the street and invite him to his place for a warm meal, the very little they had.

A man with kindness, that was the man we and Baelfire saw. A good man.

But the man Rumple saw, was the man who whimpered and cried and was scared of everything falling down. Who was responsible for his son and was afraid of losing him and was close to because he had no power to stop it. So whimpering, bowing down, or running was all he could. Being a coward was Rumple's way of surviving. It was what he knew, and it was all he could do to survive.

It's easy for people, heroes, to preach about courage and bravery and make pretty speeches, but what I love about Rumple is that living by those speeches is a lot harder than making them.

When you have power, you don't let it go. Those who know what being powerless is like knows that. And those who fight and it comes naturally like Killian are a different breed.

Rumpelstiltskin was a normal man, a kind man, with a gentle heart. But the world ridiculed it because a man like Rumpelstiltskin whose kind and good and generous are not the ones who are admired.

Men like Killian and the knight who humiliated him are, because there's a power about them, a masculinity. They enjoy being big and strong because they have the power to impart that strength and make others feel pathetic. It gives them worth and makes them feel better to assert dominance.

And seeing how men like that always seem to get the upper hand of Rumple, to humiliate him and dominate him. And how he once was poor when he was good...

Can you honestly blame him for not wanting to let go of his power? Even if it made him a monster.

At least it got him respect in the society he lived in.

Because society only cares about power.

It doesn't care about whether or not you're a good man.

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happy PRIDE i’m here i’m queer and i believe the land should be given back to the proper indigenous stewards.

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Robert Carlyle as O in The Mighty Celt (2005)

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im a person who wants to do lots of things trapped inside a body that wants to SLEEP at all times

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Gang how am I still sobbing over them over a decade later 😟

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Rewatching OUAT and fully obsessed again. Is the fandom even alive? Pls say yes

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married couple activities (arguing in the forest) decades before getting married x)

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about some of the people I interact with. I have a coworker who I am pretty sure is a MAGA type, and she is also a lovely woman who is dreadfully overworked and so good at connecting to patients when they call. I can see the conflict on her face when she talks to me, a gigantic tranny dork who speaks Spanish and affirms the LGBT community, but can also talk to her about her cows and knows about guns and stuff. I can see the fear in the eyes of my former Young Men’s leader when he misgenders me and realizes that I’m not an ideology but a person he has known for a long time. I can see the way my extended family stop and stutter over political discussions when they realize they are talking about me. And I don’t know why but lately it’s just made me think about my neighbor as a kid.

When we moved to Arizona, we moved next door to a lovely retired couple - John and Lucy. John was a veteran of WWII, he had an M.D. and a Ph.D. in radiology, and he LOVED us to pieces. His wife, Lucy, was a sharp and gifted woman - well spoken, very observant, and VERY clever. I just know that she used that cleverness as a mom to great effect, because with my and my siblings she always managed to find a way to send us home with candy and treats for a week despite my dad’s protests. We loved them, growing up, and even though they have long-since passed away I love them still, and I love what I learned from them.

John was, as stated, a WWII veteran. He was enlisted as a rifleman, and later as a front line medic, starting at Point Du Hoc and moving inwards to France and towards the Rhine. He let me do a report on him in 6th grade where he shared war stories with me he had kept to himself his whole life - he said it was out of respect for his friends who didn’t get to come home and tell their stories.

He said he told me because he knew I could respect the memories of his friends.

He showed me his collection of medals, and which he’d kept hidden away in a sock in his attic because he’d feel an immense grief any time he saw them. He had wanted to be a doctor his whole life, prior to being drafted he was studying medicine and had taken the Hippocratic oath to Do No Harm. He saw his medals as a reminder that he had Done Harm.

After telling me his stories he was able to convince himself that while he had Done Harm, it was only because his only other alternative was, to him, cowardice. He chose to be brave even if it meant acting against his Oath because he felt that if he didn’t do it someone else would have to go in his place and he would be responsible for the harm that befell them. I don’t think that’s true, but for him it was and that was something no being on earth could have ever dissuaded him from believing.

He shared wild stories - melee combat on the beach, clearing artillery bunkers, receiving a Purple Heart for being injured in hand-to-hand combat with a Wehrmacht rifleman he said he felt pity for because they were the same age and he had to imagine the man he was fighting had been drafted just like him.

He shared how he was awarded a Silver Star for charging a machine gun nest, but shared that he was most proud of not killing anyone in the process. He threw a grenade with the pin still in it and when the machine gunners jumped to avoid being blown up they were killed by someone else so he didn’t have to do it. He took the machine gun and shot the other machine gun in that French field to pieces so he didn’t have to kill the people operating it. He said they were giving out Silver Stars like candy but I knew he was being modest.

He told me about being redesignated as a medic, about how he crawled for about 500 yards on his belly to rescue an injured tank driver, then threw him over his back and crawled the same 500 yards back (1000 yards total) to treat his injuries. He said he met the man in an Army hospital in England after his spine was broken by a high explosive panzer shell was fired through a hollowed out French farmhouse and landed about 20 feet away from him.

He told me about all the people he helped and saved as a medic, he told me about his work in radiology and research after the war. He showed me a hallway that was quite literally wallpapered with academic honors he’d earned as a researcher. He told me about how his first Fourth of July back was a horror show for him because fireworks and German artillery make very similar sounds. He told me about how he woke up in a cold sweat well over half a century later hearing the screams of German artillery men being burned alive with flamethrowers, or hearing his own voice apologizing to the young German soldier he stabbed in the heart at Point Du Hoc.

He told me that when he was asked to present at a medical conference in Germany 25 years after the war ended that he was so scared he couldn’t step off the plane, and that his wife had to hold his hand and lead/pull him with her. He said he was not scared because he was worried about being triggered, but because he knew that someone somewhere outside of that plane had the course of their life irreparably altered by his military service. That to someone out there he was the cause of immense suffering and harm. That some unwitting waiter could be the son of the Nazi Officer he stabbed in the heart with a 12-inch hunting knife. That some woman asking questions in the audience would be the daughter or widow of a man he sent to judgement with a .30-06. He was scared that they would hate him.

He knew what the Nazi’s had done, he knew better than anyone I’d ever met. He’d watched the documentaries, he’s seen the PoWs returning from camps, he’d seen the civilians massacred and tortured by their regime, but he also knew that among the monsters were people like him - idealistic 20-somethings who only wanted to make the world better and were ripped away from that life by the Nazi war machine. And he spent his whole life mourning the loss of innocence and peace that was forced on so many people by such a corrupt power.

To be honest I don’t know if I could do that, but he could. He told me he could still feel the dead and lost with him, both when he slept and when he woke. He told me he thought he’d go to his grave never having told a word of this to anyone. That the stories of him and his friends and allies would disappear silently with him and those like him. That he had wanted that until he realized that he didn’t have to sell out to share the stories - that he could give the stories away for free to someone who would love the people in them, and not just the content of them. He didn’t want his stories to be used as Patriotic Pornography by some TV network or magazine. He wanted the people he knew to be respected, he wanted their memories to be honored and loved, and he entrusted me, a 12-year-old “boy” to do that.

He told me for years afterwards that after telling me these stories that he slept better than he ever had. That by sharing the stories with someone who could hear Him over the din of victory and glory and honor and revisionistic history. Someone who could see the man in the story and not just see the plot of a battle being won. He wanted to be human, and he wanted the people he saw die to be human too - everyone, not just the people on his side. He wanted someone to see and to know the anguish of having to look someone in the eye as heartblood muddies the ground beneath them and hope that they understand that this was not an act of love or hatred but an act of desperation. To hope that you had just taken out One Of The Bad Ones instead of a medical student or a poet who had been drafted. He wanted me to see how hard he had worked since then to build a world without scarcity, to build a world of peace. He wanted me to know SO badly that the cost of violence, any violence, even necessary violence, is always ALWAYS paid by both parties involved.

I think about the rise of the new right wing - the new Nazi movement’s traction in politics, and I feel sad and scared - the world that Johnathan J Yobaggy, my neighbor, my friend, and my hero, worked SO hard to build is being done away with by people who do not understand the cost of the path they are entering. I can see brief moments of recognition in the eyes of some of the people I mentioned - The former young men’s president who immediately regrets misgendering me and hen he makes eye contact with me and sees Me staring back at him and not a faceless “ideology.” I can hear it in the voice of my uncle who quietly comes up to me to apologize for some homophobic comment he made absentmindedly. I can see it in the eyes of racists and sexists being interviewed on TV when they realize that they didn’t vote for a concept, they voted for a real thing. And honestly, I have mixed emotions about it. Because while I understand frustration with the status quo, the importance of basic human needs like affordable good and rent, and I know the fear that comes with feeling powerless, I also can’t help but grieve the endless wheel of history bringing us back to this God Damned Fucking Place again. I hope we can avoid this fate, not just for our sake but for the sake of everyone who has ever tried to make the world safer. For everyone who has ever tried to make up for human nature, for everyone who has ever placed themselves on the offering plate to protect others from the cruelty they know lies just under the surface of mankind’s tenuous grip on progress. I want SO badly for there to be a solution to this, for the people who idolize the Nazi party and the impact of fascism to see that the price of this path is paid in more than just blood but in soul. That they’re allowing themselves to be devoured too. I want for the centrists and the fence sitters and the idealists who want to “change it from the inside” to see how dangerous our politics have become. I want them to see that they’re losing the things that make them great in exchange for a security blanket that’s now become far far far too small to ever work for them again.

Safety found in the past is already gone, and safety found in the future is only as real as a daydream. That any ideology that promises that by “joining us now we’ll make things rough so we can make things safe in a decade” is a promise made by those who will not have to fight the battles they send you to.

I don’t know if America was ever really great, but as long as John was alive it felt great to me. There is no ideology that can replace a neighbor. No tax plan that can replace a friend. No grocery bill that can replace community and connection. No amount of budget cuts that can replace kindness. No amount of suffering from people I hate that will ever make more love. I don’t know how to make America great, but I know how to make my America great and it is not by selling out integrity and compassion and community and fucking humanity to make eggs and gas cheaper. It is by seeing and hearing the people around me. I’m not Mormon anymore, but I still know the value of mourning with those that mourn and comforting those that stand in need of comfort. I’m not Christian anymore but I still have Eyes That Can See and Ears That Can Hear. I want to make this all stop but I can’t stop the collective power of tens of millions of people so instead I listen to my MAGA coworker tell me about how sick her kid was last week. I make jokes with my Young Men’s leader. I hug my uncle. I let them see me fully, as a human and not an ideology. As a woman and not the concept of gender. As a whole person and not someone who can be easily summarized or boiled down into something short and quippy. And I let them know I can see them fully too, and I can see all their humanity as easily as they can see mine. I just have to hope that this works - that enough people can See and Hear the people in their lives who matter to them to bring them out of their personal world of forms and into the real world.

I am probably, honestly, just spiraling a little bit. I took my ADHD meds today and in addition to helping me focus they make me a little anxious so I doubt things are as bad right now as they seem. But just in case there’s any truth to the way things seem to be going, remember, and I mean this seriously: Be kinder to each other, be gayer, and read more Terry Pratchett.

And for the love of god day hello to your neighbor.

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Biggest Rumple supporter right here gang

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3.11, Going Home 3.18, Bleeding Through

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Imagine having been born in 1905... And all your life it doesn't fucking stop. The Great War, the Spanish Flu, and then you go out of your mind for 7 years. Everyone is traumatised and nothing matters. Then another crash. And then the rise of fascism, and the War to end all Wars didn't and it's 1945 and you're just about still there. You may have fought or ferried the boys from Dunkirk or sabotaged the Nazi occupiers or worked in the factories and put out fires during the Blitz and you're lucky to be alive, because not all your friends made it. But you are and finally, fucking finally, it stops. It stops. You are tough as nails and you can put that strength to work into building something and you do, and people have cars and can buy icecream and you have a pension fund and the kids have money of their own and no nightmares.

I want that for us. I so want that for us. I want to be the generation that has seen fucking everything and is like a MRSA bug and unfazed and when that Cheeto finally dies, I want us to. Plant the gardens and clean the seas because we can and we want to and we remember some joy, some time of trust even when it got broken and we can say to the 20 somethings "let us show you what we can build, how it can feel."

And maybe Gen beta will take it all for granted like the boomers did, but we can give Gen Z and Alpha some peace because we, and Gen Z and Alpha have seen the Dark Times and fuck that noise.

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Rumbelle Things I Will Never Be Over 21/??