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#I'm very normal about this
prettybbychim · 7 months
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remember how nadja said laszlo refused to watch her all-time favorite comfort movie because "it reminds [him] of all the bastard children [he] fathered when [he] was a human."
(the same man that renounced his country of origin and refused to step foot there again because some pompous douchebags insulted his wife)
and remember how laszlo looked like he was taking a painful shit when briefly opening up to nandor, saying that he's "not very comfortable with emotional flamboyance"
and remember how laszlo raised baby colin on his own for an entire year and continued to act as a parental figure even after everyone returned and helped care for him
and remember how laszlo raised baby colin through all his life stages and now suddenly he doesn't have a kid anymore because colin robinson doesn't even remember any of it
and remember how laszlo fixated on helping guillermo to avoid confronting his new reality and how he ordered guillermo to kill the mini mimo clones that view guillermo as their father
and remember how laszlo went into a near catatonic state for three weeks after calling off his experiments because now he doesn't have anything to distract him from his kid-now adult who doesn't believe it when the others tell him truths about the past few years
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takeme-totheworld · 4 months
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I don't have the energy right now to try to recreate the post I accidentally yeeted into the void, but I've been having lots of feelings about the ongoing fandom discussion of Aziraphale's decision at the end of S2.
I wasn't surprised by his decision at all. The minute he said "I think I might have misjudged the Metatron" I had an immediate, overwhelming feeling of "OH NO" because I saw exactly where the scene was going. And I was right! I felt zero surprise when the episode ended the way it did. (Devastation, yes. Surprise, no.)
Not only that, I was shocked at how shocked everyone else was. Because I grew up in a toxic religious community, of which I was a very devoted and enthusiastic member until young adulthood. So I have firsthand experience with that kind of indoctrination, and know exactly what a mindfuck it is.
Look, it's possible that there's something else going on under the surface, that Aziraphale was being coerced or that he was lying to Crowley in order to protect him or that he was trying to send Crowley a coded message and it failed or whatever. I'm not the creator of this story, I don't know. But what deeply distresses me is how often I've seen people say that it has to be one of those other things because if it isn't—if Aziraphale made his decision of his own free will because he actually believes that Heaven is the side of good, or at least that it once was and will be again if it can just solve the whole bad leadership problem—that means he's either unforgivably cruel or unforgivably ignorant or both.
It's a painful reminder for me, every time, of the fact that if you are the victim of this type of indoctrination, a lot of people will assume that it's your own fault for being gullible enough to believe such obviously ridiculous and wrong things. (Hint: it's only obvious from the outside! Because if you're on the outside, you are not having your mind directly and repeatedly fucked with!) Or that if you've been exposed to contradicting information, but you still continue to believe the things that were indoctrinated into you, it's because you're willfully choosing to stay clueless.
And that is just not how that works. Yes, some people cling to their indoctrination because they're genuinely happy with their lives as part of whatever institution, because it stacks the deck in their favor in some way, because they like having a respectable-sounding excuse to be bigoted jerks, or whatever. But there are also lots of people who have just legitimately had their minds twisted into pretzels by years or decades (or in Aziraphale's case, millennia) of mental conditioning and manipulation.
You can generally tell the difference between the two. At least, if you come from the kind of background I do, you can. But I imagine that even if you didn't, it's probably fairly obvious once you get to know people who is a shitty person using their religion as an excuse to be shitty, and who is a fundamentally decent person who has just had their mind so thoroughly fucked with that they've been manipulated into believing total bullshit.
And breaking the latter group out of their conditioning isn't as simple as just "show them information that contradicts what they've been taught," as much as we all wish it could be. It's a long, messy, and traumatic process. Your entire worldview falls apart and it's terrifying. You lose a community and an identity in the process. And there's often debilitating guilt afterward, about the person you were and the things you did and said while you were still in it.
So I watched the ending of S2 and my reaction was, "Well, of course Aziraphale said the things he said and made the decision he made, he's not free of his programming yet." It made all the sense in the world to me even as it was excruciatingly painful to watch, because there was a time in my life when I made decisions every bit as jaw-droppingly fucked up and incomprehensible to outside observers, decisions I look back on now and still want to shake my younger self by the shoulders and scream "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU??" And the end of S2 took me right back to that time in my life, when my head was so thoroughly messed up that I made terrible decisions that hurt myself and alienated the people around me, all while wanting nothing more in the world but to be a good person and do the right thing. And I imagine that when Aziraphale finally breaks out of his own indoctrination he is going to be horrified and devastated by a lot of what he did and said, not to mention the betrayal of how thoroughly he was manipulated and gaslit.
Yes, I am projecting hard onto Aziraphale. Yes, this is just my own theory about the final 15. But I don't see anything in the story that flat-out contradicts this reading of his character. And honestly, I care less about the veracity of my interpretation than I do about the fans saying things like "I can't take the final 15 at face value because it would make Aziraphale a terrible person," or "If he really believed that stuff he was saying, Crowley should make him beg and grovel for at least a century before taking him back" or even "if he really believed that stuff, he deserves to have Crowley never speak to him again."
Just...as a person who used to be heavily indoctrinated and has to live with the memory of who I was and what I believed back then for the rest of my life, it's incredibly distressing.
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alchemicon · 1 year
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No because oda is literally the definition of haunting the narrative. His presence is felt everywhere by the viewer, because of how he dies. He's in every single kind thing that dazai does in the agency. He embodies the themes of the series and even asagiri's love for literature. His death changed the course of the story. Everyone wishes they had the impact he does.
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lost-in-frog-land · 2 years
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I recently learnt that the original purpose of having a curtain call at the end of a play is because in shakespearean times, everyone was very superstitious, and also pretty gullible, so it was basically the actors breaking the fourth wall and going "hey look we aren't dead, none of that was real, it's all okay!"
And then i started thinking about the ending of TGWDLM, and how, at the point that's supposed to be the curtain call, where the actors come out and show that they aren't dead, instead the characters come out, and show that they weren't destroyed but they are dead.
The fourth wall is still broken, that barrier between audience and actors is still breached, but only by Emma, and even then not really, because she's still in character, still acting like it's real.
Just, thinking about the implications of this it's so clear why that ending is so unsettling to us, as the audience. It's because we're used to getting the curtain call, and that fourth wall break at the end of a play to reassure us that none of it was actually real is still somewhat comforting. To not only not give it to us, but to subvert it in this horrifying way was an absolute genius move.
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Wanna kiss a priest and carress his body through his vestments and run my fingers through his hair and tell him how pretty he is until he's too flustered to speak.
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skeletorr2112 · 3 months
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me when when them when gays when me when them whe—
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kaonarvna · 4 months
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My Friend, do you fly away now?
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To a world that abhors you and I?
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All that awaits you is a somber morrow.
No matter where the winds may blow.
「 He had no choice but to fly away, sweet icarus. He had seen too much. 」
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totally-not-amie · 8 months
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HAIR DOWN MAYOI REAL 📢📢📢
i may be late to the party but here's my contribution to hair down mayoi 🫶
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Taken inspiration from this ss
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wiccawrites · 4 months
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u did not hear this from me but au where kimchay meet a few years later in life, when Chay is a rising musician who joins a tv competition in the hopes of making his mainstream break and Wik has made such a huge impact in the music industry that he's invited to mentor and judge said competition!!!!!! Chay's confidence is shaky at the start but HEY GUESS WHO SAVES HIM AND GIVES HIM A CHANCE AT THE LAST MOMENT AND BECOMES HIS MENTOR?
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phoenix-inblue · 7 months
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My cartoon crush
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wadebox · 15 days
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1:37 of just Damien demanding his Scottish eggs
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indestinatus · 2 months
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riptide (dark side³ version) is in the next episode
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takeme-totheworld · 3 months
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Aziraphale and Forgiveness, Pt. 2: The Source of Salvation
This series is now complete! Here's where you can find the other parts.
Part 1 here. Part 3 here. Part 4 here.
(This post ended up being way longer than I intended, oopsie! And no fun GIFs to break it up this time. Hope you like reading lots of words!)
So why would Aziraphale, an angel who has not fallen despite bending/breaking the rules many times, have so much emotional baggage around the topic of forgiveness?
Some disclaimers:
Disclaimer 1: I've seen enough of tumblr already to know that "does Aziraphale really have religious trauma?/how much does it motivate his actions?" is the subject of Discourse around these parts. I don't want to have that argument here. Aziraphale's experience with Heaven has strong parallels to my personal religious history, and those specific parallels are what I'm here to talk about.
Disclaimer 2: I am not a bible scholar or religious historian, if I mention specific church doctrines or bible verses it's only to illustrate the experience of growing up in my church. My actual biblical/theological accuracy may be sloppy.
Disclaimer 3: I haven't read Good Omens the book. I know there are differences, but I'm not addressing them. All my thoughts are about show!Aziraphale and show!Heaven only.
Okay. Here goes.
The next point I want to make is that Aziraphale has spent his life inside a system that has weaponized the concept of forgiveness. Because Heaven, in the Good Omens universe, operates a lot like a particular flavor of toxic Christianity that I happen to be very familiar with.
In the version of Christianity I was raised with:
Your only purpose is to serve God's will. Our own needs, wants, goals, etc, were all understood to be secondary to that purpose.
The specter of eternal punishment is always present. Like any self-respecting Evangelical church, we believed that if you weren't "saved" before you died, you would go to Hell and be punished forever. How do you make sure you're saved? Well...
The rules are not clear or consistent, so you're always left guessing. We were a Protestant denomination, so a foundational doctrine was "sola scriptura." (We weren't fancy enough for the Latin, though, we just called ourselves "bible-based.") The basic idea is that the bible is the word of God, it's infallible, and it's the only authority we need to follow. But the bible is a cobbling-together of texts written thousands of years ago, that have been translated multiple times. It's not self-evident to a modern reader what any given passage means. It contains internal contradictions all over the place. So...the bible is the only authority we need to follow, but it's confusing and needs interpretation. Enter pastors and other church leaders to help us interpret. Only...they each have their own pre-existing biases and preferred scholarly interpretations, so even within the same church, different pastors might have different ideas about things.
So, to summarize: Follow what the bible says! Don't understand what it's telling you? Ask your pastor! Different pastors give different answers? Ugh, you're thinking about this too hard. Go pray about it or something. Just figure it out.
New ideas and experiences are, at best, begrudgingly tolerated. Because doing God's will is your only purpose, remember? And the Bible (and your pastor) are the source of the only wisdom you need to fulfill the only purpose you have. So really, you don't need anything outside what the church has to offer you and it's all a distraction anyway. (...okay, if you really must, here's a watered-down, church-approved version of the thing, now shut up.)
This isn't just the church being a buzzkill. It keeps you dependent on them and ignorant of the outside world to whatever extent they monitor and censor outside influences. My church was not even that extreme about this, relatively speaking, but it was still enough to profoundly impact me and leave me confused and floundering in the larger world after I left.
No matter how hard you try to measure up, you're ultimately at God's mercy. So you spend your life trying to follow a bunch of confusing, opaque rules in the hopes that you can be "saved" and avoid eternal punishment. But here's kicker: none of it truly matters anyway, because we were also taught that everyone falls short in the end and that the only real salvation comes from God forgiving you for your sins. All you really have to do to be saved is accept his free gift of forgiveness...by...believing the right things in the right way and praying the right prayers about it. And then spending the rest of your life still trying to follow all the convoluted rules, because doing so is proof that you were sincere...in your acceptance of God's forgiveness...which you accepted by following even more instructions regarding what to believe and how to pray to ensure that you were accepting it correctly.
How do you know if you've done any of this right? You never can, truly, until you die and find out. Because God's not actually talking to anyone. So in the end, no matter what you do, you end up in the same place: at the mercy of God, who decides whether you're forgiven or not.
If you're thinking that sounds like an incredibly confusing and exhausting way to grow up, you are correct! It also has a lot of parallels in Good Omens.
If you are an angel working for Heaven in the world of Good Omens:
Your only purpose is to serve God's will. This one is obvious. If you're an angel, it's literally the only thing you were created for.
The specter of eternal punishment is always present. The eternal punishment that can happen to an angel is falling. We know it's a punishment, because we know Crowley's fall was painful and because we can see that Hell is a miserable environment for the demons. This isn't The Good Place, where demons gleefully sit around eating snacks in conference rooms and brainstorming new fun ways to torture humans. Hell in Good Omens sucks for everyone there. And we can assume falling is meant to be permanent, because if it wasn't Crowley and Aziraphale wouldn't have been so gobsmacked by the Metatron's offer to restore Crowley to angelic status. Because there's no precedent for that. Crowley himself says that being a demon has automatically rendered him unforgivable. As far as anyone in this universe knows, "fallen" is a permanent state.
So how does an angel avoid eternal punishment? How do angels make sure they don't fall? Well...
The rules are not clear or consistent, so you're always left guessing. Was falling a one-and-done mass exile of everyone who rebelled, right after the war? The way both Heaven and Hell talk about the fall and the "casting out" of the demons would seem to suggest so. But fear of falling is obviously ever-present among the angels, so they clearly don't know for sure one way or the other. And what would cause an angel who wasn't part of the original rebellion to fall? Aziraphale thought he would fall for lying about Job's children. The archangels threatened Aziraphale with falling for "consorting" with Crowley in S1. Gabriel expected to fall for saying no to Armageddon the Sequel in S2. But none of those falls actually happened. Clearly even the angels in the highest positions of authority don't know exactly what the rules are about falling. And who decides who falls? Gabriel says the demons were "cast out" after the war, but who did the casting out? Did God handle that directly? Was it the Metatron? Did the transformation just sort of...happen, leaving everyone unsure about the details? And what about present day? The Metatron said that Gabriel would have his memory wiped instead of falling, but does that mean the Metatron gets to decide if an angel falls, or was he covering for the fact that he doesn't know how it works either?
We, the viewers, don't know the answers to any of these questions. But it's fairly clear that the angels also don't know.
New ideas and experiences are, at best, begrudgingly tolerated. The angels know little to nothing about the world or humanity and are disdainful or outright suspicious of earthly experiences. In the case of the ones who have never been sent to Earth, this makes sense, although it begs the question of why there are so many angels who have never once been sent to Earth, the planet that is supposed to be central to the Great Plan.
It's obviously, at its core, about control and keeping the angels ignorant of anything that would broaden their perspective. But listen to how the angels themselves talk about it. When Gabriel sees Aziraphale eating sushi, he asks, "Why do you consume that? You're an angel." (Subtext: You don't need to eat, so what's the purpose of indulging in this experience?) When Aziraphale suggests he try the food himself, Gabriel starts talking about sullying the temple of his body or whatever. (Subtext: It's not technically forbidden but it would be a deviation from my function as an angel so I'm suspicious of it.) And look at Aziraphale himself. He lives on Earth for many hundreds of years before he can be persuaded to even try human food, and Crowley has to work at convincing him it's okay. He seems to know it's not forbidden but he's deeply distrustful of it anyway. (I have a theory that a holdover of this mindset is why he's so set in his ways, behind the times, and still more ignorant of humans that you'd expect in the present day, but this post is already too long.) The attitude cultivated among the angels is These things are not meant for us, we don't need them, and they are a distraction from our higher purpose, so it's better if we don't.
No matter how hard you try to measure up, you're ultimately at God's mercy. So, if you're an angel, you're meant to be doing God's will, and if you fail badly enough you can be punished forever by falling. But the rules are unclear, the way falling works is unclear, in most cases you're kept ignorant of everything but the bare minimum you need to know to do your job, God isn't talking to anyone, and the (seemingly) officially appointed Voice of God is also pretty remote and mysterious most of the time.
So the only time you'll ever know for certain that you've crossed the line is once you've already crossed it, when it's too late to do anything about it. At that point, the only thing that could save you from falling would be if God just...decided to be merciful, to grant you a pardon (i.e. to forgive you) and not do the casting out thing.
Believe it or not, I had to work really hard to keep this as short as it is. If you've read this far, I salute you. Now, what's the point?
Aziraphale and the other angels are part of a system where they understand very little, they have no real power, the stakes are eternal, and their only hope of escaping endless punishment if they fail is the possibility that God will decide to show mercy and forgive them.
Yes, in the real world this is all just bullshit spread by religious leaders to scare and confuse and manipulate people into compliance and in the world of Good Omens it's actually real. But the emotional impact of feeling that confused and powerless and at the mercy of a higher authority is going to be the same. Of course Aziraphale has some Big Feelings about the subject of forgiveness. Of course it's one of his favorite things. It's not just a nice thing you do for people. It's powerful enough to rescue someone from eternal punishment when nothing else can. Powerful enough to wield as a devastating weapon by withholding it. It's a tool of control in Heaven, but it's also the source of salvation.
I was going to segue from here into what I think the specifics of Aziraphale's mindset are, but it took me so many more words than I expected just to lay out the parallels between GO Heaven and (my experience of) real-world toxic Christianity so I'm gonna stop here. Next time I'm going to dig into what I think is happening in Aziraphale's head when he forgives Crowley, and also when he does things like shelter Jimbriel (a very forgiving action, even if the words "I forgive you" don't accompany it).
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hexiquin · 3 months
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to celebrate yohaji getting an anime i made memes last night
♡〜٩( ˃▿˂ )۶〜♡
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blood-orange-juice · 6 months
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Something, something, previous Childe-like samsaras included the hero being separated from a woman he dearly loved because of other people's trickery.
When I first compared the two stories I immediately thought "Tsaritsa", but what if it's Tonia. Since, you know, it's not romantic already.
(this boy has no respect for tropes. none whatsoever)
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morningfawns · 10 months
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Doodles!!!!!!!! He deserves a mug for being special
Bonus: Eto blehh with eyes under cut
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