These are all real, actual phrases and I love them.
Everyone seemed to really need/appreciate this last time I did it so I'm doing it again:
“The oldest olive tree in the world located on the island of Crete. It is estimated to be as over 3,000 years old and still produces olives.”
—
gotta share @telesilla’s tags -
the world has ended so many times but the tree is still here and so are we
Inspired by @anonymousalchemist's amazing Fic, a crack in the heart where the fear shines out. If you love the concept of Jon stumbling into Nightvale, definitely give it a read!
Comic Transcript Beneath the Cut:
Anathema believes she is possessed by a demon. She comes to Aziraphale and Crowley for an exorcism. Aziraphale and Crowley pretend to know what an exorcism entails.
“You know someone possessed, book girl?”
“Maybe. I’m trying to figure that out. That’s why I came to you two.”
There’s an awkward pause, during which Crowley and Aziraphale exchange glances across the table.
“Well, angel, you go ahead tell her what the signs are.”
“I think you should, it’s your area of expertise.”
“Me? I’ve never possessed anyone. It’s your area now.”
“That was one time.”
“Oh my god.” Anathema puts her hands on the table. “Please tell me at least one of you knows what possession looks like.”
The children piled into Mr. Young’s dinky little car and it had driven off. Madame Tracy and Mr. Shadwell strapped on their helmets and rolled off on that dinky little scooter. That leaves Newt and Anathema to trod their way back to whatever thing they’d rolled in on.
“We could give you a ride. We’re parked just at the edge of the perimeter,” Newt offers.
“Thank you,” Aziraphale accepts.
He and Crowley follow the humans toward a gap in the distant chain link.
“So, you were saying?” Anathema sidles right up to Aziraphale and gives a pointed look to Crowley as she adds, “Before someone shushed you.”
Aziraphale lights up. “Oh, right! Well, in the garden…”
It takes several long-winded minutes just to get to Mesopotamia, so that’s where Crowley cuts in to pick up the pace. “Yeah, the ark.”
“I was getting there—”
“Sure. Then there was Jesus and then the Roman empire.”
“You tried your first oyster—”
“Mhm. Notable point in history.”
He rattles off all the major bullet points like a We Didn’t Start the Fire remix, allowing Aziraphale just enough to express the first thought on each before moving on to the next. The Crusades. The Globe Theatre. The guillotine. Witch Burnings. The Spanish Inquisition—
“You said you weren’t there for that one,” Aziraphale points out.
“I was there. At the right time. Not exactly the same places, though.”
“You were in Spain for the entire Inquisition?” Anathema asks.
Crowley shrugs. “Yeah, probably.”
He has no idea how long the thing actually ran.
She hums and gives him an appraising look. “Aprendiste algo cuando estuviste?”[1]
“Bastante.”
She smiles and it gives Crowley the smug feeling of having passed a test without trying. The conversation continues. In English, so as not to exclude the other two. After a silent struggle to cram his long legs into Dick Turpin’s narrow back seat, he does Anathema the favor of skipping ahead to Adam Young’s delivery. They cover most of the basics, in the convoluted way anything gets covered when Aziraphale and Crowley are explaining it at the same time.
“There’s the bus stop,” Newt interrupts, pulling the car to a halt at the curb. He turns in his seat to face them. “What will you do now?”
“I don’t know,” Aziraphale answers. Honest, lost, and soft.
“I will fall face first into bed and sleep for a week,” Crowley answers. No exaggeration.
Anathema turns in her seat and says, sweetly, “Entonces, que duermas con los angelitos.”[2]
Crowley’s jaw drops. He wonders if it’s unintentional—Nope. She’s not breaking eye contact. She knows what she said.
“What was that?” Aziraphale asks, oblivious.
Anathema looks at him, then back at Crowley.
“She said sleep well,” he mumbles.
_________________________________________
[1] “Learn anything while you were there?” “Quite a bit.”
[2] Conversationally, “Sleep well.” Literally, “Sleep with the angels.”
On the bus, Crowley feels unusually conscious of Aziraphale sitting in the seat next to him. Their shoulders touch. He doesn’t know where to look, so he turns his gaze to a smudge on the window and he thinks of Madrid.
He remembers an Andalusian dancer he bumped into repeatedly. Literally bumped into. She was a performer at his favorite night spot who desperately needed glasses, but refused to wear them for aesthetic reasons. So graceful during her rehearsed routines, but a hurricane of a person the moment she stepped off the stage. Five hundred years later, he’s thinking of the night she taught him the meaning of the phrase ‘de Madrid al cielo, y, en el cielo, un agujerito para verlo.’ [1]
“From Madrid to the sky,” he took her by the elbow moments before she knocked right into a table of men playing cards and tugged her in the opposite direction, “I keep hearing people say that. Why?”
“Oh! See, we all take pride living here, so that’s the local catchprase.” She let herself be led by the arm through the dark, smoky room. “We shorten it to ‘from Madrid to the sky,’ because the entire phrase is so well known.”
“And the entire phrase is?”
“From Madrid to the sky, and, in the sky, a little hole to see it from.” [2]
Crowley hummed thoughtfully. “I don’t get it.”
“It means that when you go to heaven—” She loved to speak with her hands. So, with the arm he wasn’t holding, her lightsome fingertips lifted up toward the ceiling. “The least you could ask for is that there will be a tiny little hole in paradise,” with a delicate flourish, the hand came down to her face and she made a pinching gesture in front of one eye, “from where you can look down and still see Madrid.”
“That… That’s frightening.”
“Wha—Why—What? It’s beautiful.”
“You’re not going to see shit from the sky if you don’t get glasses, I keep telling you.”
“Never.” She pulled her arm away from him and slapped his shoulder just a little bit too hard to be only playing. Her eyes were a real sore spot, then.
“Ouch, fine—Goodnight, then.”
“Goodnight. Que sueñes con los angeles.” [3]
All sarcastic like that was how Crowley heard the phrase for the first time. As he walked away, he quipped back, “Siempre.”
He meant it sarcastically in return. What he hadn’t meant at all was for it to be completely true.
Five hundred years later, on the bus out of Tadfield, Aziraphale asks, “What’s on your mind?”
Madrid. You. The blind dancer. The witch. Heaven. You. Always.
“Is there a little hole Upstairs where you can squat down and get a peek at Madrid?”
In the reflection, he sees Aziraphale’s eyebrows scrunch together. “How did you know about that?”
“What?” Crowley slaps his own legs and his incredulous face pivots from the window to Aziraphale. “It’s real?”
“No, but, in several check-ins, Gabriel wanted to know why the Spanish keep asking for it. What does it mean?”
Crowley tells him the story. All the way up to Siempre.
_________________________________________
[3] “Dream of angels.” “Always do.”
Shoutout to all my fellow ppl who see themselves as being simultaneously a boy and a girl. People who often wear clothes traditionally associated with their agab, or who don’t feel extreme dysphoria towards their body. People whose gender issues stem from within, and from knowing that they can’t just metamorphosise on a whim. People who’re a multiplicity in of themselves. People who’ve never known a life of gender singularity. People who’ve always been this way, people who’ve never known different. People who live exactly how they are, as confusing and conflicting as it may be sometimes. People whose friends and family would be beyond shocked and surprised if they told them they weren’t cis. People who love being this way. People who love having their own unique version of the masculine and feminine experiences, who use contradictory sets of pronouns. People who don’t really know if they can call themselves trans, but definitely aren’t cis, and altogether definitely don’t really care. People who are boys and girls and men and women and both and neither all at the same time. I love you. We’re the coolest. <3
How the media depicts the Apollo 11 mission:
Actual quotes from the Apollo 11 mission:
otto-woods
also according to michael collins when the three of them were discussing what neil armstrong should say when he first stepped on the moon, collins suggested armstrong say “Oh, my God, what is that thing?” and then scream and cut out his mic.
Everyone forgets Michael Collins and it’s fucking tragic.
I heard that Crowley helped to make Alpha Centauri and I like Crowley use spray..
16th century ring that unfolds into an astronomical sphere
This is how I’m proposing to my partner in the future, I’m using this ring
i blinked and accidently watched all of season 1 in prep for s2. their faces are fun to draw even if its unbelievably fucking hard to simplify sheen's.
Aziraphale taking care of the sleepy tired snek after the Armageddon
(based on this fic by my friend Kythen!! Let Sleeping Snakes Lie)
Aziraphale getting to fuck shit up with huge swan wings.
Crowley getting a bit of pranking out of his system.
Swans and sneks hissssssyyyy
You know what Good Omens does NOT get enough credit for? How it never, not once, makes gender presentation the butt of a joke.
Crowley presenting as female to be Warlock’s Nanny? The way this was filmed, acted, and written wasn’t made to be funny whatsoever. She was stunning, I loved the hat!
Pollution using they/them pronouns while the postman used the gender neutral honorific of sir for them? What’s there to make fun of? They’re royalty.
Archangel Michael, who has a traditionally male name, played by a female actress? Never questioned.
Lord Beelzebub’s androgyny? Only respect for the Lord of Hell.
Aziraphale sharing Madame Tracy’s body? Crowley recognized his angel and accepted it no problem. He was right about the dress too, it did suit him!
Crowley’s pure, unfiltered non-binary/gender-fluid energy in general? Fucking fabulous. Who could seriously make fun of this demon’s style? As someone once pointed out to me, you could swap him with Tilda Swinton and I’d see no difference. What an icon.
Good Omens is the first big show I’ve seen to basically avoid transphobia all together when the opportunity presented itself, and even say fuck you to the gender binary as a bonus. If the biggest binary in all the universe, Heaven and Hell, don’t give a damn about it then why should you?
Thank you! That was definitely what we were going for. I’m not certain we always achieved it – or at least, people didn’t always seem to see that was what we were doing. (It made me sad when a few people on Twitter reacted to Crowley-as-nanny as if it was meant to be a transphobic man-in-a-dress joke.)
For our angels and demons, it was intensely liberating having male and female actors auditioning for the same roles, and just picking the ones who we felt nailed the characters best.
Also, can I just hear a wahoo for the wonderful Archangel Uriel, Gloria Obianyo?
I did a very quick, sketchy comic because I was extremely inspired by this post. (Credit to @pinkdiamondprince for the original post.)
The entire analogy was just fantastic and so, so accurate, and I wanted to make a comic for it, even if it’s very sketchy because my attention span is nil.
#queer tag#asexuality#aromantic#comic#in love with this#bc yeah#trying to find smthn when what ur trying to find is an abscence of smthn?#very frustrating. augh#and the feeling when u give up on the search? after searching in all of those places and come out dirtied wet and a tad defeated?#when u realize that.. no. nono. you don't have turtles. and since u are Younger then maybe. just maybe they'll show up later. maybe?#and they don't. no.#you find something in its stead with prideful chests and a tall shameless stature and you feel yourself start to exhibit that too#and then the turtles don't feel all that important. not on good days at least.#thankfully a good ninety percent (90%) of the days are good ones#this is a great comic btw. makes me feel seen and appreciated