Ascaredcrow - WELL- - Tumblr Blog

Hannibal 1x10 Buffet Froid, Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (tr. McDuff)

my psychiatrist just diagnosed me with 19th century russian literature character

I'll absolutely do a more in depth and cohesive look through this song but I adore I, Carrion and I need to talk about it.

The way Hozier manages to convey the feeling of wonder and freedom and newness of Icarus taking to the skies. The tragedy of Icarus' beloved being his own undoing? The way Icarus so easily accepts his end, as if he can die happily having now known the love he's never before had? The desperation in the way Icarus prays that should he fall, he is still able to cling to his love til the very end?

And God this bridge? The way Icarus acknowledges that he isn't and never could be apart of the world he's known to love. Allow the ground to find its brutal way to me? You expect me to be normal after hearing that?

literally i just can’t comprehend any interpretation of hamlet that doesn’t put grief at the center like. hamlet’s father died and he is actively grieving throughout the play that is the driver of all of his behavior. “is hamlet actually crazy or is he putting on a performance” is a boring question to me because grief is a type of insanity. grief makes you feel like you are performing even when you are all alone. it makes you feel like you’re seeing things it makes you feel completely alone it makes you cling to the people around you it makes you push them away it makes you angry and sad and hamlet wants to kill claudius for replacing his father and taking his mother from him as much as he wants to kill him for revenge.

Me and Hamlet have so much in common (we fucking hate our mothers partners)

all this praise for female actors who have been hamlet onstage. well. what about the praise for ME. who has been hamlet so many times. inside my head

I wanna talk about The Angel Who Would Be Crowley.

Because I had a certain set of expectations, which got thoroughly trashed in the first five minutes of S2, and my genuine response is, "Oh, fuck, yup. You're right. That's WAY better."

Looking around at GO fandom, I'm not alone in this. So let's talk about it.

Basically, a lot of people (myself included) believed that he was a high-ranking angel, and therefore as chilly and remote as every other powerful angel we'd seen at that point. We pictured Crowley-To-Be as long-haired, regal and imposing --and the fanart at the time reflected this. I'd link some if Tumblr didn't hate links.

Something like this:

We were collectively drawing on a few things --mostly, Crawly's appearance and general bearing in the Biblical scenes of S1--

--But also scattered hints of his importance, backed up by conspicuous absences in Heaven and a few profound displays of power. That's all better covered elsewhere, so I won't reiterate the arguments here. All I'm saying is: I think our headcanons were justified.

But it turns out he was this:

!!!

With his curly little--!!

And his neat white--!!

IT TURNS OUT, he was an angel who squeaked and squealed when he was happy; who flailed his arms around and made explosion noises with his mouth to explain nebulas; who preened when told his stars were pretty. Furfur, who knew him before the Fall, says:

"You used to jump on me back, little monkey in a waistcoat..."

(The use of a diminutive there, 'little'...oh, that fascinates me.)

In a pretty huge subversion of expectations, we're given these glimpses of an angel who was sweet, and joyful, and heart-meltingly silly.

In sum...an innocent.

(Perhaps innocent to a troubling degree.

We see how he troubles Aziraphale, during their first conversation. He starts looking around and behind them, checking to make sure that no one can HEAR the blithe and reckless things coming out of this angel's mouth. This angel who talks like he's never been reprimanded in his life; like it's never occurred to him that anyone would want to hurt him.

Before the Beginning, Aziraphale understood Heaven better than he did. The danger is plainly occurring to Aziraphale.)

So now, we the viewers are in on a cruel joke that Aziraphale has known all along, which is that this --THIS-- is the angel who--

*checks notes*

--did a million lightyear freestyle dive into a boiling pool of sulphur. For asking questions.

...Imagine you are Aziraphale, and everything inside you wants to believe Heaven are the Good Guys, and God is Good and Everything She does is capital-R Right...and now try to reconcile that. Keep trying. I don't think he ever totally managed it in 6000 years.

All this gets further complicated when we learn that, despite all of the above, we were still right. That sweet excitable babby up there?

He WAS a powerful and high-ranking angel.

That much is explicitly confirmed, with significant evidence that he could have been among the mightiest of archangels...

...Who apparently accosted his fellow angels for piggyback rides. And was remembered millennia later by those (now fallen) angels as something 'little.'

What does that tell us about who he was? Is?

Hell, Aziraphale has known to be wary of the archangels (and the judgements of Heaven in general) since before the Fall even happened. He chooses to believe they are Good; he can't fool himself into thinking they are Safe.

Yet he's absolutely certain that Crowley won't hurt Job's children. Enough to stand in a burning building and say to them, "I can't save you, but don't be afraid. I won't need to."

And what reason does he give?

("I know you."

"You do not know me."

"I know the angel you were.")

What does that tell us about who he was? Is?

("The angel you knew is not me."

But how is Aziraphale supposed to believe that, when he can see him all the time?)

tl;dr --yes, this is better. I love the tragedy of it.

'Innocence died screaming' and all that.

someone ban him from using icarus as a metaphor because he's gone too far.

yes it's the mortifying ordeal of being known. but it's also the beautiful, inherently human, unique, rich, fulfilling ordeal of being known. just in case you forget sometimes.

I’m thinking about how in Butchered Tongue he says

‘But feel at home/ hearin’ a music that few still understand/ A butchered tongue still singin’ here above ground’

And he sings in Irish in De Selby part 1, knowing that we’re going to learn the Irish words and sing it with him at concerts. God I could cry

Unreal Unearth - Song/Circle Correspondences.

Descent: De Selby (Part 1); De Selby (Part 2)

First (Limbo, the unbaptised but virtuous): First Time

Second (Lust): Francesca; I, Carrion (Icarian)

Third (Gluttony): Eat Your Young

Fourth (Avarice and Prodigality): Damage Gets Done

Fifth (Wrath and Sullenness): Who We Are

Sixth (Heresy): Son Of Nyx; All Things End

Seventh (Violence): To Someone From A Warm Climate (Uiscefhuaraithe); Butchered Tongue

Eighth (Fraud): Anything But; Abstract (Psychopomp)

Ninth (Treachery): Unknown / Nth

Ascent: First Light

Aziraphale’s Choice, the Job Connection, and Michael Sheen’s Morality

I’ve had time to process Aziraphale’s choice at the end of Season 2. And I think only blaming the religious trauma misses something important in Aziraphale’s character. I think what happened was also Aziraphale’s own conscious choice––as a growth from his trauma, in fact. Hear me out.

Since November 2022 I’ve been haunted by something Michael Sheen said at the MCM London Comic Con. At the Q&A, someone asked him about which fantasy creature he enjoyed playing most and Michael (bless him, truly) veered on a tangent about angels and goodness and how, specifically,

We as a society tend to sort of undervalue goodness. It’s sort of seen as sort of somehow weak and a bit nimby and “oh it’s nice.” And I think to be good takes enormous reserves of courage and stamina. I mean, you have to look the dark in the face to be truly good and to be truly of the light…. The idea that goodness is somehow lesser and less interesting and not as kind of muscular and as passionate and as fierce as evil somehow and darkness, I think is nonsense. The idea of being able to portray an angel, a being of love. I love seeing the things people have put online about angels being ferocious creatures, and I love that. I think that’s a really good representation of what goodness can be, what it should be, I suppose.

I was looking forward to BAMF!Aziraphale all season long, and I think that’s what we got in the end. Remember Neil said that the Job minisode was important for Aziraphale’s story. Remember how Aziraphale sat on that rock and reconciled to himself that he MUST go to Hell, because he lied and thwarted the will of God. He believed that––truly, honestly, with the faith of a child, but the bravery of a soldier.

Aziraphale, a being of love with more goodness than all of Heaven combined, believed he needed to walk through the Gates of Hell because it was the Right Thing to do. (Like Job, he didn’t understand his sin but believed he needed to sacrifice his happiness to do the Right Thing.)

That’s why we saw Aziraphale as a soldier this season: the bookshop battle, the halo. But yes, the ending as well.

Because Aziraphale never wanted to go to Heaven, and he never wanted to go there without Crowley.

But it was Crowley who taught him that he could, even SHOULD, act when his moral heart told him something was wrong. While Crowley was willing to run away and let the world burn, it was Aziraphale (in that bandstand at the end of the world) who stood his ground and said No. We can make a difference. We can save everyone.

And Aziraphale knew he could not give up the ace up his sleeve (his position as an angel) to talk to God and make them see the truth in his heart.

I was messed up by Ineffable Bureaucracy (Boxfly) getting their happy ending when our Ineffable Husbands didn’t, but I see now that them running away served to prove something to Aziraphale. (And I am fully convinced that Gabriel and Beelzebub saw the example of the Ineffables at the Not-pocalypse and took inspiration from them for choosing to ditch their respective sides)

But my point is that Aziraphale saw them, and in some ways, they looked like him and Crowley. And he saw how Gabriel, the biggest bully in Heaven, was also like him in a way (a being capable of love) and also just a child when he wasn’t influenced by the poison of Heaven. Muriel, too, wasn’t a bad person. The Metatron also seemed to have grown more flexible with his morality (from Aziraphale's perspective). Like Earth, Heaven was shades of (light?) gray.

Aziraphale is too good an angel not to believe in hope. Or forgiveness (something he’s very good at it).

Aziraphale has been scarred by Heaven all his life. But with the cracks in Heaven’s armor (cracks he and Crowley helped create), Aziraphale is seeing something else. A chance to change them. They did terrible things to him, but he is better than them, and because of Crowley, he feels ready to face them.

(Will it work? Can Heaven change, institutionally? Probably not, but I can't blame Aziraphale for trying.)

At the cafe, the Metatron said something big was coming in the Great Plan. Aziraphale knows how trapped he had felt when he didn’t have God’s ear the first time something huge happened in the Big Plan. He can’t take a chance again to risk the world by not having a foot in the door of Heaven. That’s why we saw individual human deaths (or the threat of death) so much more this season: Elspeth, Wee Morag, Job’s children, the 1940s magician. Aziraphale almost killed a child when he couldn’t get through to God, and he’s not going through that again.

“We could make a difference.” We could save everyone.

Remember what Michael Sheen said about courage and doing good––and having to “look the dark in the face to be truly good.” That’s what happened when Aziraphale was willing to go to Hell for his actions. That’s what happened when he decided he had to go to Heaven, where he had been abused and belittled and made to feel small. He decided to willingly go into the Lion’s Den, to face his abusers and his anxiety, to make them better so that they would not try to destroy the world again.

Him, just one angel. He needed Crowley to be there with him, to help him be brave, to ask the questions that Heaven needed to hear, to tell them God was wrong. Crowley is the inspiration that drives Aziraphale’s change, Crowley is the engine that fuels Aziraphale’s courage.

But then Crowley tells him that going to Heaven is stupid. That they don’t need Heaven. And he’s right. Aziraphale knows he’s right.

Aziraphale doesn’t need Heaven; Heaven needs him. They just don’t know how much they need him, or how much humanity needs him there, too. (If everyone who ran for office was corrupt, how can the system change?)

Terry Pratchett (in the Discworld book, Small Gods) is scathing of God, organized religion, and the corrupt people religion empowers, but he is sympathetic to the individual who has real, pure faith and a good heart. In fact, the everyman protagonist of Small Gods is a better person than the god he serves, and in the end, he ends up changing the church to be better, more open-minded, and more humanist than god could ever do alone.

Aziraphale is willing to go to the darkest places to do the Right Thing, and Heaven is no exception. When Crowley says that Heaven is toxic, that’s exactly why Aziraphale knows he needs to go there. “You’re exactly is different from my exactly.”

____

In the aftermath of Trump's election in the US, Brexit happened in 2018. Michael Sheen felt compelled to figure out what was going on in his country after this shock. But he was living in Los Angeles with Sarah Silverman at the time, and she also wanted to become more politically active in the US.

Sheen: “I felt a responsibility to do something, but it [meant] coming back [to Britain] – which was difficult for us, because we were very important to each other. But we both acknowledge that each of us had to do what we needed to do.” In the end, they split up and Michael moved back to the UK.

Sometimes doing the Right Thing means sacrificing your own happiness. Sometimes it means going to Hell. Sometimes it means going to Heaven. Sometimes it means losing a relationship.

And that’s why what happened in the end was so difficult for Aziraphale. Because he loves Crowley desperately. He wants to be together. He wanted that kiss for thousands of years. He knows that taking command of Heaven means they would never again have to bow to the demands of a God they couldn’t understand, or run from a Hell who still came after them. They could change the rules of the game.

And he’s still going to do that. But it hurts him that he has to do that alone.

I dont care what the elitists and snobs think the first twenty one pilots album was a masterpiece and just because the emo kids loved it doesn't mean it was bad maybe they loved it for a reason

Of course this is coming from an emo kid myself so maybe I'm part of the problem

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Antigone - Jean Anhouilh (Tr. Lewis Galantière) | Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I've talked a bit about this before: I LOVE how in Frankenstein, Shelley had the perfect excuse to make an allusion to the Bible and genisis, and instead she chose Paradise Lost. Creature connects to a story about what a creation did rather than how someone made them, because the life matters more to him than the birth; in telling his own story, he brushes past his "origin" in less than a page.

By that choice, Shelley emphasizes the theme that what mankind creates matters less than how we respond to it.

Raskolnikov is to me what the Joker is to straight men

I can’t stop thinking about the depth and the weight of loss in Through Me. How it builds and builds. How the first part is about losing yourself, to new worlds, to forces larger than you, the enormity of it all. How you resist and resist it only to find out that you’re running yourself ragged, trying and trying to run against the tide until you understand that you have to let go and let the loss happen. I’m thinking about the second part, about losing people, losing loved ones. Trying to understand the loss by abstracting it. It’s a grave. It’s silence. It’s unheard footsteps at the door. About graves and graves and graves. And still you don’t understand it. And still you don’t comprehend it. Until you think of one person, who becomes loss embodied. And still, you cannot measure it

isn't it insane how one guy said "transgenderism needs to be exterminated" and basically the only people who has gotten upset over this are trans people? trans allies fucking suck at their job lol

looking for someone to show me that life isn't all about explaining your time

I routinely go insane about Hamlet's first soliloquy ending with "but break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue" when he spends the next act or so challenging, mocking, taunting, and torturing everyone with words because he can only do this when he is putting "an antic disposition on". I am frequently driven crazy by the thought of his madness being his ultimate performance, the one that consumes him, because it's the pretence that allows him to be honest.

“I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

Aumentano le entità delle Backrooms

zine i did about the foundations of decay! @mcrzines

nobody scream about the lyrics please all the versions are different