#also was raised catholic so like

[bucketsofmonsters]

The Witch’s Apprentice - Part 4

cw: demon summoning,  prolonged isolation, more tags will be added as the story continues

male demon x afab reader

Word count: 4k

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4  Part 5 Part 6  Part 7

You woke up wrapped in Lucien’s arms, his tail coiled up your leg. 

You couldn’t get up if you wanted to. Not only were you trapped by a cuddly demon, your exhaustion was overtaking you. Your limbs felt like they were made of lead and your brain was attempting to lull you right back to sleep. You were convinced you could sleep here forever if you allowed yourself to. 

Which was exactly why you needed to get up. This place was dangerous, you couldn’t let yourself get too comfortable and completely succumb to it. 

As you started to rise, the demons arms around you tightened, pulling you closer to him. 

“Lucien,” you tried to call out but your face was smashed into his chest and instead it came out as an incomprehensible mumble. 

It was still enough to wake him, his grip on you loosening as he came to. 

You slipped out of his grasp, although his tail followed you to your new position standing beside him, curling right back up your leg. 

He looked up at you with a smile. “What are you doing up so early?”

“How long did I sleep?”

“Not long. Maybe fifteen hours.”

Your eyes widened. “Fifteen hours?”

“Relax, you needed the sleep. I wouldn’t have let you sleep forever, I only do that to the annoying ones.”

“Glad to know I was in such safe hands,” you said with a roll of your eyes and a playful smile. 

You looked back at him expecting to see that same wry smile as always on his face but instead his face had gone stony, his eyes darkening. 

“You have a decision to make,” he said, all the teasing gone from his voice as he rose to his feet, towering above you.  

His black eyes bored into you, asking you to make a choice about something, what it was you weren’t sure. 

“I don’t understand,” you said, searching for clues in his face but it looked nothing other than weathered and exhausted. 

“I’m being summoned. Time plays differently here but I can only stretch away from it for so long. So, what will it be?”

It didn’t feel like much of a decision at all. 

“Well, that means I’m going back. Of course I’m going back, what else would I do?”

“You could go somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Anywhere but there.” His voice was low and breathy, almost sounding as if he was pleading with you. 

“She’s my friend. That’s my home.”

“It’s your prison. You're free now, you’re out and you’re asking to go back.” His voice increased in volume as he spoke, hints of anger tinging his words. 

“Just because it is your prison does not mean it is mine. I want to go home.”

Creases formed between his brows and you couldn’t tell if they were from worry or anger. “And if I won’t take you?”

You reeled back at the suggestion, a bolt of fear running through you. 

You tried desperately to put more force behind your words, needing him to listen to you. “Take me back. Now.” 

In the back of your mind you were terrified that he'd leave you, that the unthinkable would happen and you’d be locked away from Eden forever.

He wasn’t surprised by your response. You could tell that much. If anything he looked overcome with dread, 

“Don’t say I didn’t try.”

His hand wrapped around your arm and suddenly you too could feel a distant tug pulling at the both of you. 

Without the adrenaline running through you this time, you got to actually see the change happen. The room around you faded away slowly, like a mirage you’d gotten a little too close to.

For a second you were nowhere. You didn’t even see black, just true nothing in all directions. Your stomach flipped and you leaned closer to Lucien, part of you terrified of being trapped in this void. 

And then everything faded back in and you were confronted with a familiar face. 

The second Eden laid eyes on you she grabbed your arm and yanked you out of the circle. You looked back apologetically at Lucien, the treatment feeling absurd after everything he’d done for you. 

Lucien’s gaze had hardened once more as he looked down at your witch. 

Eden’s focus wasn’t on him at all. Her eyes raked over your body, nails digging into the skin of your arm, like she was afraid you might slip away. Or maybe like she was afraid you might step back once more, back over the line she'd just pulled you from.  

“Are you hurt?” she asked frantically. “Did he hurt you?”

When she finally spoke, her voice was shaky and guilt pierced through you. You’d been off fucking around with your new favorite demon and she’s been panicking. You wondered how long she’d been like this, what she thought had happened to you. 

You pushed past her iron grip, throwing yourself towards her, arms wrapping tightly around her midsection. You buried your head in her neck, her familiar scent bringing waves of comfort to you. 

Her arms hesitantly wrapped gently around you but you could tell she was still looking up at him. 

As soon as your embrace loosened she pulled you behind her, putting herself between you and Lucien. Ultimately it was a futile gesture, he couldn’t reach either of you out here, but it seemed almost instinctive. She just wanted to put a barrier between the two of you and as much as you’d grown to trust Lucien, it made your heart swell. It awoke some unquenchable instinct, to throw yourself into danger to see if she’d come running. 

But there were more important things to attend to. You glanced around at the undamaged cabin, looking exactly as you’d left it. The only change was the new summoning circle beside the old one you’d broken. 

“You’re alright?” you asked. “They didn’t hurt you.”

Now that she had established that you were safe, she seemed uninterested in engaging with you. The question was ignored in favor of turning toward Lucian. 

“You’re a despicable man,” she said with a sneer. “What did you even gain? They’ve done nothing to you.”

 “You don’t understand,” you insisted, trying to get through to her. “He saved me.”

She regarded him with no less disdain at your declaration of what he’d done for you. 

You butted in once more, refusing to back down, not this time. “He didn’t do anything wrong, I owe him my life.”

Eden snapped, her head turning towards you as she stopped ignoring you. “We cannot do this right now, not in front of him.”

“When else? You said all he wanted was to hurt us and he saved me, how is that not substantial to you.”

“He did not save you,” she shouted.

You drew back at her harsh words. “What? No, he did. I don’t know what happened here but…”

“How many times have I warned you about demon trickery? This is exactly why I wanted to be there, why you two never should have been alone. How long did it take before he managed to make you break the circle.”

“He didn’t make me do anything, he protected me!”

“There was no threat. This was all a mistake, I never should have shown you all of this, you’re not built for it. Trusting you with it was a mistake, I’ve gone soft on you.”

“You’re wrong,” you insisted, eyes flicking to Lucien looking for help. He stared back silently, watching you from the sidelines.

“Am I? Then why was there no one here when I returned?” Eden asked. “Why did this dangerous threat do nothing to the cabin? What explanation do you have other than what is right in front of you, what you refuse to see because your heart is bigger than your head.”

“To what end?” you insisted, refusing to back down on the issue. You were not the fool here. There were gaps in what happened, sure, but her story was not flawless either. “He’s done nothing to me. He created a ploy to what, keep me safe and bring me back unscathed?”

She scoffed. “I don’t pretend to understand the machinations of demons. But neither, frankly, do you. At least one of us understands that.”

“You’re wrong.” It didn’t make sense, it was based on nothing but faux ideas of monsters and you wouldn’t stand for it. Not when he’d just saved your life. 

Lucien chose that moment to butt in. “She’s really not.”

Eden looked up at Lucien with wide eyes, seemingly wondering how things had gone so badly that she was on the same side as a demon. 

Both turned against you, despite everything. 

When Eden turned back to you she looked a little sick, less confident than you’d ever seen her before. “You’ve done so poorly you turned a demon honest. I would be impressed if I weren’t so disappointed.”

“It doesn’t make sense. He was kind, he didn’t hurt me.”

“All in service of some greater plan, I’m sure. You’ve heard it from his own mouth now, surely you don’t need any more hand-holding. The truth is right in front of you.”

“But then why would he tell me?” Your eyes flicked up towards the demon, the one you’d put all of your trust in for days. “Why would you…” You trailed off, dread pooling in your gut, a sickening bile of betrayal bubbling up inside of you. 

Lucien refused to meet your gaze, his face stony and unreadable. You wouldn’t have noticed so much if it hadn’t been such a shift from what he’d begun to show you. 

But maybe those emotions were fake too, another performance he was putting on. Another trick you were too stupid to see through.  

You’d been wrong, dangerously wrong. You couldn’t trust your judgment anymore, never should have in the first place, it seemed. 

Eden seemed to take your silence as acceptance, quickly sending Lucien away, 

The second he disappeared she turned to you, some of that manic energy from when you’d first returned appearing back in her face. It seemed she’d been hiding it from him, keeping it just under the surface. 

Both of them seemed so good at their faux emotions, Eden’s confidence, Lucien's performance as your rescuer. Maybe this was a skill you were supposed to have, maybe you were the odd one out. 

Eden’s hands gripped your shoulders, fingernails digging into your skin once more, clinging to you like a lifeline. 

“What did he say to you, how badly did he get through to you? He’ll try to lead you astray, to put you in harm's path. He’s a liar, you can’t believe him.”

“He didn’t say anything, he was just… nice.” And he had been. You couldn’t see the signs of this scheme that they both seemed so convinced were obvious. 

You could tell Eden didn’t believe you. She rarely did even before all of this, you knew it would be a long long time before she ever did again. 

The pressure of her nails subsided, leaving a dull ache of pain where their imprints remained on your skin. 

She pulled you along a familiar hall and you didn’t put up a fight, still caught up in trying to make sense of everything. 

You barely realized what was happening until she was guiding you to sit on your bed, pushing your hair away from your face and looking down at you with sad eyes. 

“This wasn’t your fault,” she said. “I should’ve known not to let you near all this. 

The reassuring graze of her fingers against your cheek faded and you heard the lock on your door click. 

“It will stay this way until you show a sense of self-preservation, alright?” she called through the door. “I will permit a lot of things but I will not allow you to hurt yourself.”

You collapsed back onto the bed with a sigh and heard her walk away, not waiting for an answer. 

With nothing better to do with your time, you ran through it in your head over and over and over again. Hours passed and you just lay there, turning the events over in your mind. 

The signs they’d both pointed to didn’t track, they didn't lead to anything. You couldn’t combine them to a point where they would make sense. If this was a trick, why had he told you the truth when you’d been so convinced? If it was to harm you or Eden why did he keep you safe in his home and bring you back here? You might not have been the best bargaining chip but you would be a good piece of leverage against her and instead here you were, locked back in your room, where you are no longer useful to him. 

None of it made sense. 

Right up until you stopped thinking about him as Eden’s type of demon, an unthinking force of evil trying to do as much damage as possible. 

Because there wasn’t any other perspective you could see. He didn’t hurt you because he didn’t want to. He didn’t hurt you because he saw someone who was scared and alone and couldn’t help himself, just like Eden had done when she found you all alone in the woods all those years ago. He didn’t hurt you because, as much as he might protest, some part of him cared. 

And, once more, he wouldn’t hurt you. 

You were betting your life on it. 

You didn’t have the materials for a summoning circle in your room but it didn’t matter. All you needed to be able to do was get him in here, you didn’t need protection from him. 

Honestly, you didn’t want the protection. You were convinced that the warding gave him something to hide behind. As long as he was locked in there, he could claim that he was a monster, that he would hurt you given the chance. 

Take that away and you’d find out what he would really do, one way or another. 

The summoning spell wasn’t long. All you needed to get him here were the words, everything else was to keep you safe or to keep him bound. 

The second he saw you, his eyes widened. You could practically see the gears turning in his head as you smiled softly up at him, giving him a little wave. 

He did not wave in return. 

His gaze dropped slowly to the floor, staring blankly as the seconds ticked by. He seemed baffled by the blank floor beneath him, trying to comprehend what could possibly be happening as you waited patiently for him to react. 

Finally, his gaze rose to meet yours once more. 

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. 

“Nice to see you too.”

“Genuinely, what is wrong with you? It's not a rhetorical question, I would love an answer.”

You shrugged. “I’m not sure. You should ask my witch, she’s got some theories.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” he insisted and you couldn’t help but think that he and Eden might actually get along if it weren’t for the fact he was a demon. They seemed to have a lot of similar ideas. 

“Well, nothing has happened yet. Do you intend on killing me?”

“I could do anything to you, you couldn’t stop me.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

The longer this went on, the more relaxed you became. This man had no intention of hurting you, that much was more than clear. 

“I should kill you right now,” he said with a growl, one that you didn’t even have it in you to pretend you found frightening. The both of you had long since passed that point. 

“Why?”

“Because I’m a demon. That’s what we do.”

“And yet here we are and I remain unharmed. So it seems demons are more complicated than that. Either that or you’re a shitty demon.”

He couldn’t seem to fight back a smile at that. “Yeah, well you’re a shitty witch.”

“I’m not a witch. A witch-in-training at most, although something tells me the training is not going to happen again for a very long time.”

“My bad,” he said, and you could almost detect a hint of sheepishness in his tone. 

“I know how you can make it up to me,” you said leaning forwards towards him from your seat on the bed. 

His head cocked to the side. “And how is that?”

“Tell me why you did it.”

He groaned. “You and your why’s. I’m not telling you anything.”

“Fine,” you said, “I’ll give it a shot then. Do you know what I think? I think you never imagined I’d break that warding. You were just trying to scare me or prove some point about me or whatever and then I broke the warding and you didn’t know what to do. I think I ruined your little plan and when confronted with someone who was scared and who trusted you, you helped them. Who wouldn’t?”

“Cute little story you’ve spun yourself.”

You shrugged. “It’s what I would’ve done.”

“You would’ve created a commotion to scare the shit out of a witch-in-training?”

“No, but testing someone? Trying to prove the very worst? Seeing when push comes to shove, what will people do? That’s not demon scheming.”

“Yes it is.”

“It’s really not. Seems more insecure than anything.”

That got a real hearty laugh out of him. “Oh, does it now?”

“At least that’s what my witch says when I do it. Do little tests and push at things to see if she trusts me. I mean, I’ve never made her fear for her life but she’s never trapped me and made me do anything so I think we have different levels of frustration.”

“She doesn’t believe in you,” he observed and you wondered if he was just now coming to understand that.  

You rolled your eyes. “Who would?” 

The question hung in the air and you could feel him waiting, wondering if he should answer it. 

You took the choice away from him, asking a question of your own in return. “When was the last time a human trusted you?”

“A long, long time ago, little one. Not to say I haven’t earned my reputation.” 

“I don’t know. You seem pretty trustworthy to me.” 

“You’d be surprised.” He looked down at the bare floor below him once more. “You know, there’s nothing stopping me anymore. I could take you away, let you leave this place.”

That caught you by surprise. “What? No, I… I can’t”

“Why? Because of the woods? I could take you right past them. There’s no way you’ve never wanted to leave. Come on, I could even take you back after, you don’t have to be imprisoned here.”

“This is my home,” you insisted. 

“What the fuck has she done to you? You could leave, right now, go anywhere. I’m offering you the world, one trip, no fees, no fine print. I never do that, you’d be a fool to refuse it.”

“She hasn’t done anything to me. She just wants to keep me safe.” At the end of the day, it always came back to this with the two of you, Eden forever being the wedge between you. 

“The little warden has you playing good little prisoner. I’m honestly impressed. And they call me manipulative.”

“Stop it. I know she’s wronged you but-”

“But? There is not but. She is a monster and you’re trapped in her web just as much as I am.”

“She is a good person.”

“Maybe you’re too far gone. I don’t know if I can help you.”

“I don’t need help,” you said. 

He opened his mouth to insist you did or tell you once more how much of a monster your savior was but you dismissed him before he had the chance. 

Without the warding, he could have stayed. He could have clung to this plane easily but he let you push him away and once more you were locked alone in your room. 

It took a long time to fall asleep. Your conversation with Lucien kept swimming around and around in your head. 

Eventually, exhaustion got the better of you and your room faded away to another familiar place. 

It hadn’t even been a full day since you’d left and Lucien’s room was just as vivid as when you’d been standing in it. 

He was there too, looking down at you with that hungry look he’d gotten in his eyes on occasion, when he thought you weren’t looking. 

“I’m glad you came back,” he said, walking over towards you, his hand moving under your chin, forcing you to look up at him. “It gets boring around here without you, I could always use a sweet little thing to play with.”

Your face warmed and you managed to stutter out, “I… uh…”

You heard a chuckle from behind you and dream Lucien dissipated in a puff of smoke as you stiffened. 

You whipped around to see Lucien again, a notably more real one, leaning against the wall. “Pity. I wanted to see what happened next. 

Your face burned, glad dream Lucien left before he could do anything particularly embarrassing. 

You folded your arms with a huff. “Are you just going to invade all of my dreams now?”

“Maybe. If they’re all as fun as this one was gearing up to be then you can sign me up.”

You clamored for a retort but came up empty, ending up just sputtering and then staring at him all while feeling as if your cheeks might melt and your heart might beat its way right out of your chest. 

He chucked again. “Relax. It’s sweet. Next time I’ll try and come in later, you could use some stress relief.”

You might actually spontaneously combust. “Please say you came for some reason other than to embarrass me,” you pleaded. 

He shrugged. “Just came to talk. Embarrassing you was an unexpected bonus.”

Next time you saw him in the non-dream world you were going to throw something at him.

“Talk about what?” you asked, desperately trying to change the topic. 

“We ended on bad terms earlier.”

Oh. That. You’d almost prefer he keep on humiliating you.

“Did you come to apologize?” you asked, trying not to sound too hopeful. 

But nothing could ever be simple with him. 

“You know,” he said,  “there’s lots of different reactions demons have when humans summon them, trap them, make them do their bidding, all that nasty business. Some get violent, some get tricky, some have given up and are just filled with despair, following along until they’re finally free. There’s no right reaction to this sort of thing, not really. But there’s one kind that we all hate, the real traitors. Because sometimes there is no fighting back, no despair. Sometimes they just happily fall in line. It’s certainly safer that way, I can’t fault anyone for listening, but to do it happily? And sometimes, eventually, they don’t even need to be forced. They just go along with it, anything for their little masters.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, I didn’t think you would. I won’t push too hard, you’re clearly not ready for that, but you witch is a very, very bad person.”

“She just doesn’t understand you. I’ll make her understand.”

“At least you're going to try. That’s something.” He spoke with a halfhearted smile, his mind clearly elsewhere. You wished more than anything you could read him, that you could understand what was going on in his head. 

“Of course I am. And she will understand, I’ll make her see that you’re not a threat, that she shouldn't be summoning you.”

The sadness written across his face was clear, with hunched shoulders and a furrowed brow betraying him as he stared down at you. 

Finally, after staring intently at you, contemplating something as he mulled over your words, he said,“Thyme.”

“Excuse me?”

“You didn’t have enough thyme. That’s how I can get in here. Most witches use way more than necessary just in case but you tried to make it exact and it fucked you over.” 

“Oh. I didn’t want to use more of my witch’s stash than I had to.”

“One of these days someone crueler than me is going to come along and that mindset is going to get you hurt.”

“I’ve been fine so far. Why did you tell me, if I fix it you can’t get into my head anymore.”

He shrugged. “Figure it out.” 

“Is it an apology or another trick”

“What do you think,” he asked with a smile. He enjoyed this, giving you little pieces of information and seeing what you’d do with them. 

“An apology,” you decided.

“Your witch would call that foolish,” he informed you, as if you weren’t already intimately familiar with the idea. 

“She already calls me foolish, might as well trust my instincts if it’s going to happen anyways.”

“I don’t know what I’ve done to make you think I’m so good-intentioned.”

You laughed. “Yeah, because you’ve been so cruel to me”

“I tricked you,” he reminded you, as if it had just slipped your mind. 

“And then you took care of me when I proved you wrong.”

“An outlier. You caught me off guard.”

“How?”

“Because you fell for my trick.”

“Oh, is that so? Maybe your expectations of me were too high. Do you think me foolish now too?”

“Maybe. I’m not entirely sure what to think of you.”

The room snapped out of existence as you woke with a jolt at Eden banging at your door, some food having already been slipped underneath it. You considered asking her to bring you more thyme but thought better of it. You didn’t think you’d be needing it anytime soon. 

[andthebeanstalk]

PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS

PUSSY.

BIG FLAPPY WET JESUS PUSSY.

JESUS' SOPPING WET PUSS-PUSS

[Edited months after posting to discourage catholics from replying to this post after finding that both the nice and much funnier not-nice responses to this were equally bad for my mental health. I didn't wanna delete it bc I was quite proud of some of my responses and it helps to have a visual reminder of why I left an abusive organization. Also, this means that any catholic who has reblogged this in an attempt to convert me, has now reblogged a post that, if clicked, links back to this. Use MY post for propaganda, will you!]

Thinking about how it was never made clear to me in Catholic school exactly WHY Jesus died for our sins. I just remembered that I was literally never clear on who the dying helped??

I've heard theories as an adult, but basically what I'm saying is pointless martyrdom seems a little pointless, and also with enough propaganda the big logical gaps in a belief system get really hard to see. Especially if questioning anything is blasphemy.

I would have gotten in so much trouble for insisting the teacher explain how Jesus helped us by being tortured to death by Romans even when God could have prevented it! God sent his only Son, they would have said! Be grateful, they'd say! Be guilty! Stop asking why he did that!!!

[aroaceleovaldez]

new TSATS prediction based entirely off the interview from the UK Rick Riordan newsletter

[rhyme-thinks-stuff]

You know, when I was playing through the first Hades game I was still mid religion-crisis and queerness-realization, and I'm just thinking about how nice it is going to be to Not worry about that while playing Hades II

I don't have to worry about whether it's more religiously correct to romance a guy as a guy character, or a gal as a gal player!

I can just enjoy playing the game and get flustered about pretty women and draw yuri of the characters without a care in the world! it'll be great :D

[tiny-huts]

Really fun how many time Matt tries to do anything with the gods or religion the fandom refuses to engage with the narrative and starts foaming at the mouth in barely concealed unprocessed Christian religious trauma.

[the-busy-ghost]

Alright uninformed rant time. It kind of bugs me that, when studying the Middle Ages, specifically in western Europe, it doesn’t seem to be a pre-requisite that you have to take some kind of “Basics of Mediaeval Catholic Doctrine in Everyday Practise” class. 

Obviously you can’t cover everything- we don’t necessarily need to understand the ins and outs of obscure theological arguments (just as your average mediaeval churchgoer probably didn’t need to), or the inner workings of the Great Schism(s), nor how apparently simple theological disputes could be influenced by political and social factors, and of course the Official Line From The Vatican has changed over the centuries (which is why I’ve seen even modern Catholics getting mixed up about something that happened eight centuries ago). And naturally there are going to be misconceptions no matter how much you try to clarify things for people, and regional/class/temporal variations on how people’s actual everyday beliefs were influenced by the church’s rules. 

But it would help if historians studying the Middle Ages, especially western Christendom, were all given a broadly similar training in a) what the official doctrine was at various points on certain important issues and b) how this might translate to what the average layman believed. Because it feels like you’re supposed to pick that up as you go along and even where there are books on the subject they’re not always entirely reliable either (for example, people citing books about how things worked specifically in England to apply to the whole of Europe) and you can’t ask a book a question if you’re confused about any particular point. 

I mean I don’t expect to be spoonfed but somehow I don’t think that I’m supposed to accumulate a half-assed religious education from, say, a 15th century nobleman who was probably more interested in translating chivalric romances and rebelling against the Crown than religion; an angry 16th century Protestant; a 12th century nun from some forgotten valley in the Alps; some footnotes spread out over half a dozen modern political histories of Scotland; and an episode of ‘In Our Time’ from 2009. 

But equally if you’re not a specialist in church history or theology, I’m not sure that it’s necessary to probe the murky depths of every minor theological point ever, and once you’ve started where does it end? 

Anyway this entirely uninformed rant brought to you by my encounter with a sixteenth century bishop who was supposedly writing a completely orthodox book to re-evangelise his flock and tempt them away from Protestantism, but who described the baptismal rite in a way that sounds decidedly sketchy, if not heretical. And rather than being able to engage with the text properly and get what I needed from it, I was instead left sitting there like:

And frankly I didn’t have the time to go down the rabbit hole that would inevitably open up if I tried to find out

[dirty-bear-rick-sanchez]

What’s the vibe on Rick being raised Christian and having some sort of trauma with it?

Obviously him being an aggressive atheist is a big thing but then we also see things like him desperately praying in the S2 premiere when he thinks he’s going to die because his collar won’t work/he gave his collar to Morty which is… not a response you would expect from someone who is so insistent he doesn’t believe in god and has no prior relationship with religion. Not to mention moments like in Anatomy Park when he tells the family that ‘Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, was born today’ (which is obviously played for laughs but still).

Also people picked up on the fact that Morty claims he was raised ‘non-denominational Christian’ in Rick: A Mort Well Lived, which seems to be at odds with what we see with the family currently - neither Beth nor Jerry seem overly religious. However, if Rick had a Christian upbringing of his own, this could have been passed on to Beth in some form or another.

I also wonder if Rick did genuinely continue to believe in god/Christianity to some extent until he lost Beth and Diane - since this was an event that caused a lot of change to his character and worldview, it would also make sense that this could shift his religious viewpoints from Christian (whether 100% or just to a smaller extent) to atheist, since he couldn’t believe in a loving god who would allow this to happen. Additionally, Rick being ‘the smartest man in the universe’ is often related to or even used interchangeably with his status as god-like, and this was the first time he saw true evidence of this power from another Rick, which would also challenge any beliefs he may have had in god.

I think it’s also worth pointing out Toxic Rick’s line in Rest and Ricklaxation: ‘You think anyone but me could do it in a million years? You think if god was real he could do it? The answer is no, if god exists it’s fucking me!’ This is a part of himself that ‘regular’ Rick considers toxic, which we can interpret both as (the more obvious and canon-accurate) Rick disliking his own ego and god-complex as well as these concepts and actions in other Ricks, and also as him viewing these ‘blasphemous’ ideas as toxic.

I’m sure other people have pointed all of these things out before and better than me, but I just find it interesting.

[brother-emperors]

same energy

Crassus, The First Tycoon, Peter Stothard / Crassus, Plutarch (trans. Warner) / Cic. ad Brut. 1.16 / The Romans in their Decadence, Thomas Couture

[gxlden-angels]

I love watching people discover the absolute chaos that is Christian Parody Songs

[meat-loving-meat]

I’m thinking about Modern!AUs in fanfiction and why sometimes they’re some of my favorite fics and also sometimes the Worst™️. (<-that is a joke. There is no such thing as bad fanfiction, just fanfiction I don’t personally like.)

Because I LOVE Modern!AUs that ask interesting questions about how the setting of a story impacts the characters—how much of the setting can you remove while still being able to recognize the characters in question? All of it? None of it? What new problems would living in a world with planes and phones create for these characters? How are the social and political tensions of the original canon reflected in our own world?

The “problem” (again, not an actual problem, just a personal preference) is that most Modern!AUs COMPLETELY refuse to engage with any of that. They instead become a stale rehashing of the original canon except with lower stakes. Nothing about the modern setting adds interest, and everything interesting from the original setting falls away.

I think that a lot of people write Modern!AU fics to deescalate the conflict of the original canon and give the characters more relatable problems, which isn’t universally terrible, but it can so easily become boring. I don’t WANT to know what it would be like if one of these characters was a florist and the other was a tattoo artist; I want to know what would happen if you gave one of them a gun.

[vulpinesaint]

it is a truth universally acknowledged that if you raise your child catholic they will turn out fucked up and strange. there are many ways in which this end can be achieved but rest assured no matter what path your child follows in life they'll always be weird about god

[cicadangel]

im not religious at all but ill still call myself catholic because i sure do ❤ symbols and rituals and suffering.

[nedsseveredhead]

I love my job so so much and it like. Always feels like a too good to be true situation. So i feel awful asking off again but also my lungs and chest hurt so bad and i cant speak more than a few sentences withoit going into a coughing fit so i really dont think itd be good for me to man the phones even from home. And my boss/coworkers have always been understanding and kind about my days off. I have the pto, this is what its for. We've talked about it. But i still feel so guilty lol

[anonymousbathtub]

The true nature of the mushroom pope (”The Voice”) revealed, Petr and his new human friend - Raphael - conspire to take them down for good! (An assassination performed by two 12 year olds can't be that hard, right?)

When finishing this painting I thought it’d be fun to mock it up into a mid-game menu screen concept :) 🍄

[andthebeanstalk]

In all my years, I've never seen a movie use non-christian pre-colonial religious imagery as a force of good against evil.

And the fact that in Wendall & Wild - a movie that takes place in a Catholic school, this type of imagery is portrayed as SO much more beautiful and powerful than the drab dreary Catholic imagery of the film... it was fuckin' rad as hell.

[shoutsindwarvish]

two different rabbis directly to me + multiple places online: jewish imposter syndrome is real and is (to varying degrees) almost a universal experience in one way or another

me, who has been actively practicing for over nine months and taken multiple classes while also being halachically jewish by birth: i am the exception and am an imposter in jewish spaces and should feel bad about it. no i will not elaborate on why i believe this is true of me and no one else.