Hello Everyone!

I know this has been said so many times already but Ice King has one of my favorite redemption arcs in any tv show. Because it wasn’t a redemption arc at all.

He didn’t adjust himself, instead the people around him adjusted their view of him. And once they understood him, and once he felt understood, he didn’t feel like he needed to take as many drastic measures to have interaction with others. He didn’t need to kidnap people because people started wanting to hang out with him. Thats just such a brilliant and beautiful twist on the villain to hero trope.

Hi! I was on Instagram recently and stumbled upon Nisreen Shehada's account. Before October 7, Nisreen posted very aesthetic, well crafted baking TikToks/videos (which looked delicious!) Since October 7, she has been sharing her daily life in Gaza.

This is the first reel of hers I saw. It's so important that she is not only documenting her daily life right now (for public record, for memory, for history) but that she is doing it in a format that is so familiar to anyone online right now.

I think that even well intentioned people can sometimes unintentionally dehumanize groups fighting for justice amidst tragedy. It is vital that we view Palestinians not just as victims or impoverished or assume life has always been this non-stop nightmare. Literally, Nisreen is like so many people I know. Like so many people you know! Just a regular lady who loves baking! Just your friendly neighborhood dentist! Aperson who loves their families. A devoted cat mom. A very stylish dresser.

I love that her page shows how people are living day-to-day now. And I love that it shows her finding moments of joy even in the darkest of times. ❤️

Please give her account a follow.

Edit to add: I've made a separate account for archiving videos and posts from regular people in Palestine documenting daily life. You can follow it @watermelllonarchive

Palestinian people who are suffering immensely in so many ways are still taking the time to rescue and help animals in Gaza for months now... and those who turn their backs on what is happening to Palestinian people... ya'll disgust me.

We are witnessing the grotesque reality of the martyred Palestinians and thousands of their massacred children being written off as mere afterthoughts. The way western media outlets steadfastly refuse to call the Israeli aggression and onslaught for what it is, which is genocide and ethnic cleansing, is just another way of dehumanizing Palestinians. 

Ineffable Husbands go on Television

The Great British Bakeoff:

Aziraphale: a bookshop owner based in Soho. He has a lot of prior experience, although they don't often cook where he comes from. He's really going against the grain! A lover of fine foods, music and antique books, his angelic charm will melt your heart.

"I've always loved this show, but I wouldn't be here without my partner! He's really the sweetest and he's always been supportive of me no matter what."

Aziraphale wins, due mainly to having six thousand years of experience and a few handy miracles. He becomes a fan favourite, and everyone wonders who his mysterious partner is.

Meanwhile Crowley on Gardener's World:

"Yeah, I really think it's important that the plants learn to fear me."

*cut away to Crowley screaming at his plants*

"I keep a firm atmosphere in my home. No slacking, no flaws. My partner doesn't appreciate my methods, but they've never failed me."

*cut away to shaking plants*

"What can I say? I'm just too cool for them. Hey, have you ever read the Book of Genesis? I had a cameo - yeah, the Garden of Eden. I was the snake."

The nation is very shocked when they realise that these two are in fact dating each other.

Something about FNAF 3 and Fazbear Frights taking place in 2023 in our current social media landscape

today im thinking about the huge buff bread guy from kikis delivery service. highly underrated guy

Israeli media reports that hundreds of stray dogs have been attacking groups of Israeli soldiers in northern Gaza since the beginning of the war.

Defining Ineffable Love (or, Aziracrow Learn the Rules of Romance)

(In response to this ask about ineffables and asexuality)

One of the major threads this season was Aziraphale and Crowley asking themselves what exactly is their relationship. Not what it is in terms of how much they love each other. (That's a given.) But what it is in terms of the human implications of their love.

Crowley and Aziraphale definitely come at the relationship with different perspectives, in terms of what they’re willing to admit to the relationship being. I don’t think we can entirely interpret it in human terms. –David Tennant (source)

For 6000 years, they’ve never put a name on their relationship. They didn’t, because they’re inhuman, genderless, sexless beings and they didn’t grow up (as it were) with labels. And even when they did learn them, they couldn’t say it was love, because admitting that was a death sentence.

All of Aziraphale’s heart eyes and pining could live comfortably in his mind if he never admitted what that said about him as an angel (trauma compartmentalization). Crowley tries desperately to be cruel and nasty to add white noise around the blatant reality of his constant loyalty to Aziraphale. If you don’t put a word to it, it’s not real and they can’t punish you.

After the Not-pocalypse, for all rights and purposes, Aziraphale and Crowley chose humanity as their identity. We see Aziraphale “playing house” in various human roles (as a landlord, a private eye, a magician).

We even see Crowley intentionally taking on human behavior to handle emotional issues: “Just breathe, that’s what humans do.” They’re slowly and intentionally enculturating themselves into the world they want to belong––earth.

Yet it’s setting up Maggie and Nina that makes Aziraphale and Crowley start thinking about their relationship as a human construct.

Because fundamentally, Aziraphale and Crowley are not human. Like Neil Gaiman tells us constantly, they can’t be defined in human terms when it comes to gender and sexuality. They can shift and move through each and any of those markers at will, purely for the pleasure of the thing: “angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort.”

IMO that makes them originally asexual, in the sense they were created without the need for sex. And it makes them fundamentally transgender and genderfluid, because while on earth, their sexless, eldritch spiritual bodies take on human, gendered forms and clothing. What gender (and sexuality) they identify with while on earth varies through the eras. Crowley definitely has a fluid gender identity, while Aziraphale appears to have settled on gay man (aka THE southern pansy) for his internal typology (although all of these identities are subject to change).

In the midst of all this fluidity, it’s no wonder Aziraphale and Crowley haven’t thought of their relationship in human terms before. There’s just so much different in them and their bodies than what they see in humanity. And there are no books and songs that show the kind of love they have, in the malleable, sexless bodies they have, with the background they have; it’s all ineffable.

Aziraphale and Crowley didn’t start out thinking they were in a romantic relationship. Whatever feelings they had were long repressed, redefined, and shuttled away. But they did love each other, without question. And it was that love which scared them, because it was bigger than anything they saw among humans, a love that was beautiful and blasphemous and unfathomable.

Kinda like what David Duchovny said about Mulder and Scully in The X-Files, “I don’t know if they’re in love. In a way, their relationship is deeper than that, because they cannot live without each other.”

Now take this profound, ineffable love and drop it into the little boxes and labels human culture has created for itself.

Full disclosure: I’m an asexual demiromantic person in a queerplatonic relationship, so I’ve done a fair bit of research on what romance is and how the rituals of romance are, in many ways, social inventions that vary from culture to culture. There’s love and then there’s romance, and they don’t always overlap. So my interpretation of Aziraphale and Crowley comes through this lens and the fact that Neil Gaiman has affirmed the validity of an ace-spec reading on our ineffables.

Which brings me back to my thesis: That only now are Aziraphale and Crowley thinking of themselves as a romantic couple, precisely because they are interfacing with humans and taking on their social rules.

I like this one asexual person’s description of their experience, which feels very much like our ineffables (from a very good article, I def recommend):

If there is a border between friendship and romance, then in my internal landscape, it goes right through a misty forest where no one has ever bothered to place signs.... Neither of us had intended to start anything even vaguely romantic, but the activities we did and the intense kind of immediate connection we had was coded as romantic in our culture.

That’s what Crowley realizes when Nina confronts him about his relationship to Aziraphale.

“It looks like that from here.” What Crowley and Aziraphale share is beyond definition, but Nina cannot imagine the anything beyond the human labels she was taught. The tragedy of an everlasting love is that it can only be conveyed properly to other humans if it is cast in such small human words––partner, boyfriend, husband.

Because when Crowley denied those human roles for Aziraphale, Nina slid down the path of thinking Aziraphale was just his “bit on the side,” because there were no labels left she could imagine for them. If you don’t put a word to it, it’s not real.

That’s the purpose of labels, to culturally validate a person's identity. Labels, of course, DO NOT create reality; people's experiences are always real, in all their varied ineffability. But labels allow a space for culture (ie other humans and political and legal society) to recognize formally your lived reality.

So Crowley started really thinking about him and Aziraphale, about the ineffable love between them and realized that in human terms, those would be the things he’d call Aziraphale, because those were the words that gave Aziraphale that place of importance in his life.

But with that realization comes all the human trappings and behavioral patterns around those words (the candlelit dinners, dramatic rescues, drinks at the Ritz, etc.) which Crowley had never thought of before, and yet… maybe romance is what he and Aziraphale have been doing all along.

That’s why this season centered so much around Aziraphale and Crowley using cultural artifacts (film and literature) to understand romance, because romance is so deeply socially-defined.

Aziraphale himself has been leaning hard into the romantic social cues (he’s more well-read in the cultural trappings of romance than Crowley is), especially post-Blitz. But when he watches Maggie and Nina dancing, he works up the courage to do something with Crowley that’s even more explicitly loaded as “traditionally romantic” than anything he’s done up to that point.

Because while risking their lives for each other and defying everything for each other is love in its purest form, dancing (specifically in Jane Austen’s world) is a public performance coded for potential marriage partners. It's an intimate ritual of the entire body. (And in British slang, dancing has been used as a euphemism for sex.)

Crowley's "We don't dance" is really telling, because it shows Crowley’s awareness of the unknowable devotion between them vs the human roles Aziraphale is asking him to fill, specifically its physical aspects. Aziraphale is asking to make their relationship more public, more physically explicit, more coded as romantic in a setting specifically intended to couple individuals.

While Maggie and Nina inspired Aziraphale to progress their relationship into a publicly physical direction, Maggie and Nina inspired Crowley to think of the emotional implications of their human roles: the commitment, security, and monogamy of a husband, a partner, an us.

That’s what he decides after Maggie and Nina confront him in the end. “You never say what you’re really thinking.” He wants to codify his relationship so they each become responsible to one another. Aziraphale has always been his soulmate, the one he could always rely on. But he wants to place a word and a role to their love that will bring with it Aziraphale’s commitment and dedication to him.

And that's another reason why Crowley kisses Aziraphale, because he knows Aziraphale was willing to make their relationship physical, and he wants that, too. To consummate this bond in the way humans do.

But Crowley doesn’t really know how to kiss; he’s not as worldly as he makes out to be. (It’s Aziraphale who owns the gun, and Crowley who’s never fired one.) He uses the kiss as a tool to get across to Aziraphale what he wants for them, in the physical language Aziraphale has been using, because "one fabulous kiss and we're good," right?

But it doesn’t work, because real life and real emotions don’t work like that; life and love don’t follow a script, despite the novels and plays and songs.

Aziraphale and Crowley spent this entire season trying to figure out what their relationship is and what they wanted out of it, trying to make sense of the unfathomable thing they share and the human implications of it, and not quite landing on the same page.