#self-loathing?

[tleeaves]

Plagued by horrible feelings that don't go away, only fester. (I feel like everyone who knows me hates me or even mildly dislikes me, and I have literally no evidence whatsoever, everything is always circumstantial and my brain jumps to mean conclusions.)

Sometimes you grow up with this feeling like something is wrong with you and you step back and wonder if it was just the Catholic church environment and undiagnosed neurodivergence or if maybe you are a little bit fucked up and you can no longer hide it.

[ivynightshade]

fatima aamer bilal, excerpt from moony moonless sky’s ‘i am tired of making a religion out of my suffering’.

[text id: i am too little, and too much, and never enough.]

[slyssnakes]

It's a fitting punishment... To want something so much—to hold it in your arms—and know beyond a doubt you will never deserve it.

[dathen]

Know what absolutely kills me about Wyll is that his mantra is “it’s okay, the only person it’s hurting is me”

He’s forced into selling his soul to save the city: “I can’t regret it, it saved people and the only person it’s hurting is me”

Letting Karlach live knowing it will violate his contract: “The only person it will hurt is me”

Putting himself in danger endlessly so at least the powers he has will go to some use before he’s dragged to hell, knowing it risks him dying young and being trapped there early: “The only person it will hurt is me.”

I know for a fact that if he were given the power to make the decision re: selling his soul again to save his father in act 3, he would do exactly that. The only person it hurts is him, and over and over he’s marked himself an acceptable casualty in any situation.

[kaysdenofchaos]

I am an artist

[valtsv]

if you stabbed me and viscous foul-smelling black ichor poured out of the wound like smoke well i wouldn't be pleased about it but i wouldn't be surprised either

[rosarysgarden]

fatima aamer bilal, excerpt from moony moonless sky’s ‘i am an observer, but not by choice.’

[text id: i have the everlasting tendency to ruin everything i love.]

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Kiss Kiss Fallen Tree!

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[dainesanddaffodils]

Today’s Good Omens posting is about *spins wheel*

how Crowley’s self-loathing colors the way he sees Aziraphale’s interactions with him and how we should take that negative bias into account

I’m not even gonna talk about the whole final scene/misunderstanding because we’ve all talked about that one by now. Instead I want to talk about Crowley’s description of the 3 reasons Aziraphale calls him:

(Paraphrasing) “you’re bored; you need to tell someone about something clever you did; something’s wrong”

this is a succinct breakdown and it lowkey paints Aziraphale in a bad light; Aziraphale only calls Crowley when it’s beneficial to him; this is a transactional relationship

but like, I think, to some degree, those 3 reasons are simply the only reasons Crowley can actually imagine Aziraphale being interested in talking to him. The last one is a common song and dance between them, sure, but what about the first 2?

Aziraphale calling out of the blue, rambling about how things have been slow and quiet in the neighborhood of late and wanting to take that time to catch up - Crowley can’t fathom ‘Aziraphale missed my voice and wanted to make sure I was doing okay’ and turns it into ‘Aziraphale is just bored obviously’

Aziraphale calling, absolutely giddy, talking a mile a minute about something clever he’s done can’t possibly be ‘I’m the first person he wants to share his victories with, the person whose opinion matters the most to him now and always’ so instead it’s ‘Aziraphale just needed someone to tell this to before he popped’

(There’s an interesting thing implied here as well, which is that it’s Aziraphale calling Crowley regularly and yet we talk about how Aziraphale isn’t taking initiative in the relationship but I digress)

Point is, I think Crowley knows that Aziraphale likes him, it’s part of what makes everything so heartbreaking - the way he ends up being rejected in spite of that - but just like I think he misunderstands Aziraphale’s heaven proposal because he can’t see that Aziraphale thinks he is better than heaven already, he misunderstands any reason Aziraphale would possibly reach out to him as some level of wanting something rather than… just wanting to talk to him. He doesn’t recognize that he is Enough for Aziraphale, no strings or acts of service attached.

We just need one amazing kiss conversation to set this straight

[ineed-to-sleep]

Blacked out in front of my tablet and woke up with sketches of my Touchstarved mc + Kuras my beloved. woops

[feral-ballad]

Kim Addonizio, from Lucifer at the Starlite: Poems; “You Were”

[ivynightshade]

fatima aamer bilal, excerpt from moony moonless sky’s ‘we were put on this earth desperate, hungry and willing.’

[text id: in a sharp set of knives, i looked for a hand to hold. / i could not stop myself from needing to belong somewhere, even if that somewhere was a burial ground.]

[incomingalbatross]

Love how in the Hunger Games Peeta will be like "Obviously you're Haymitch's favorite because you guys are so alike and you understand each other," and Katniss will go "no I KNOW you're Haymitch's favorite. because Haymitch and I are so alike and understand each other"

There's a lot going on there.

[sunderwight]

Demon Shen Jiu is such a fun idea though.

Especially if he himself doesn't know. Like imagine, Yue Qi finds this abandoned baby and the baby is REALLY OBVIOUSLY not human. But this also enables Shen Jiu to survive being abandoned at such a young age -- a human baby would die without adequate nutrition or care, but demons are a little more resilient. Baby Demon SJ has a way more forgiving digestive system and can move under his own power from a much earlier age. By the time he's a year old he's hunting his own rodents and small birds, and has to be stopped from biting and mauling anyone he doesn't like. Which is most people. Qi-ge develops amazing reflexes.

Why do the slavers tolerate a demon baby hanging around? Maybe it's really not all that uncommon. Demons come across the borderlands from time to time, and are as liable to abandon their kids or die or etc as anyone else. It's maybe an open secret among slavers that demon-blooded kids are a better investment, even, because they can survive for longer on less. The only downside is if they don't ever look human enough to pass as human, because that limits potential buyers, but that's only relevant when the slavers are trying to sell them. For the purposes of having a network of street kids stealing and grifting and spying and etc, it's fine. A lot of the slavers themselves started out as demon-blooded street kids with no other options.

But in SJ's case, he pretty quickly starts passing as human. Mostly because he's quite strong, and he's convinced that he's the same as his Qi-ge, so he makes himself the same. Makes his hands look the same and his teeth look the same and etc. It's largely subconscious, and once he starts doing it, it becomes automatic. SJ forgets that he's a demon in the way that most people don't retain their earliest childhood memories -- although he remembers that some of the slavers were demons.

Then of course there's the question of why didn't the Cang Qiong cultivators notice?

A few options. One is that whatever kind of demon SJ is, it's really good at mimicking humans. Another is that he's only part demon, and like Luo Binghe, fully capable of handling both kinds of cultivation. So once he starts learning spiritual cultivation, even from a heretic like Wu Yanzi, he doesn't seem different from any other recruit with a patchy education on the subject. Anything else odd about him could be easily attributed to his exposure to Wu Yanzi and his wicked practices.

Although full demon SJ is a fascinating idea. (Also, it could contribute to all those qi deviations -- he's trying to cultivate AND "fake" human cultivation at the same time, I doubt Qing Jing's techniques are totally compatible with everything going on there even without the psychological turmoil.) Like I'd imagine Airplane wrote that SJ was abandoned on the streets as a baby, and the system was like "hmm he probably wouldn't survive that?" and then in some nine billionth wife arc, Airplane also creates a variety of demon that can fully pass as human (for some identity conflict with a prospective wife), even to the point of fooling human cultivators and demon-detecting tools. So the system just ties these two disparate pieces of world-building together in order to patch a critical plothole (Airplane doesn't know anything about babies). Which has the side effect that Shang Qinghua doesn't even know that SJ became a demon!

And SJ himself doesn't know. The only person who knows is Yue Qi.

Obviously this wouldn't come up much in PIDW, but it could be pretty funny in the SVSSS timeline. YQY just sitting there through the whole Luo Binghe being a half-demon reveal, wondering if he should say something. Subsequently being the most absolutely chill about the whole demon reveal thing anyway. Like he's definitely not upset that Luo Binghe is a demon, or part demon, and the multiple people who try to make a point about it just run afoul of his impenetrable smile and get nowhere.

Then eventually Yue Qingyuan decides that he should probably tell Bingqiu that Shen Qingqiu is a demon. For like, safety purposes if nothing else. He's kept the secret so long also for safety purposes (even if someone put Shen Qingqiu under a truth compulsion he wouldn't be able to admit to being a demon, because he himself doesn't know!), and he's done tons of stuff to prevent anyone ever finding out (although Xiao Jiu is so talented that he didn't have to do much), but Luo Binghe is the demon emperor. That changes things. If Shen Qingqiu is going to be visiting the demon kingdoms regularly then there's a chance something could reveal the truth unexpectedly, and that would probably be worse.

So Yue Qingyuan sits down and has a very serious discussion with Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe about how Shen Qingqiu is actually a demon, was just the cutest little demon baby in fact, here he drew a picture from memory of what Xiao Jiu used to look like before he learned to look more human, and also how a lot of slave kids and slavers and people who fall through the cracks in society have demon ancestry, some more recent than others, and Shen Qingqiu always retained a certain discomfort around his own kind because of the adult slavers who sold him off, and etc etc.

[bogdreamz]

korvo lost and farting 0 stars for you my boy

[iambutmortal]

"It wasn't the marshmallows fault I wasn't paying attention" punch me in the gut why don't you