When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”
He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)
I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.
What is your objective?
Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.
I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.
I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.
Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.
Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.
How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?
Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.
Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?
First post! I made a tumblr account because of S2 of Good Omens. Literally no other reason. What a time to join the fandom!
Well, truthfully, I’ve been lurking around for a while, trying to get a feel for things. Now after processing some of the things i’ve seen, commenting, asking, etc, I thought why not make a post. It’s what you do, right? I won’t be offended if you take my outsider’s perspective with a grain of interloper salt.
So, I wrote this. A brief introduction: I’m a grown person with too many responsibilities and I’m spending my precious, infinitesimally small amount of free time typing my intrusive thoughts about a fictional angel and demon on my phone. Am I doing it right?
I think so. I’ve read some amazingly complex metas, character analyses, and wondrously intricate posts analyzing the significance of pretty much any and every detail you could want to read about on this site. Truly awesome investigations, intriguing connections and insightful inquisitions.
I’ve also read some character analyses that left me very, very concerned.
I know this is a t e n s e topic right now, but stick with me.
There is a fact walking around out there that I want to set the spotlight on:
Good Omens is a comedy.
Now, this isn’t important in a ‘y’all need to lighten up’ sort of way. This is important because of how comedies develop their sympathetic characters versus how tragedies develop their sympathetic characters.
Now, in my opinion, some of the best comedic fiction rides the tragedy line just right up to the edge without pushing it over. (See the movie Stranger Than Fiction for a fun example of this). But ultimately, while a tragedy primarily pulls your sympathy with the realism of the suffering of the characters, a comedy elicits your sympathy with the absurdism of their suffering. Now these two things are, importantly, not mutually exclusive - the dial between real and absurd has to be spun round and around to bring life to most stories, but eventually it will land on one or the other.
Very important note: suffering in absurdism is not a lower form of suffering than suffering in realism. Suffering is suffering, it’s just that sometimes the combinations of forces that inflict suffering have no business trying to act like they make any sense, and sometimes they are exactly what you’d expect them to be.
Also important fact! Crowley and Aziraphale are both, equally, the sympathetic characters in Good Omens. One is not subjected to tragic suffering whilst the other is dealt comedic suffering. They are both intended to be read as characters equally deserving of our sympathy.
Which in turn means, in GO, if you feel more sympathetic towards one of the Ineffables than the other, then that is the story showing you exactly where you have room to grow in your understanding of and capacity for sympathy.
Which brings us back to character analytics in fandoms.
While we are, without a doubt, discussing fiction, any publicly expressed opinions made while analyzing that fiction can have real world consequences.
When fans post biased, cruel, vengeful, hateful takes about a character in a story whose narrative is intended to shine a spotlight the absurd complexities of suffering and to challenge our ability to embrace and cultivate sympathy for someone we don’t understand, that has the potential to bring harm to the real world. If people aren’t willing to challenge themselves to recognize the value of sympathizing with the fictional characters whose actions are outside their understanding, then what do they take out into the real world? And if those fans find an echo chamber in a fandom because harmful language is treated the same as opinion language, then that can have additional damaging real world ramifications.
The last of the important notes, and a very important one: it sounds like there have been reports of harassment by users related to this topic. Harassment is never ever okay.
But it is crucial to speak up to say, no, some takes are not just opinion. It’s not just a simple scroll past or block. There are folks out there that have written posts detailing the harm and suffering that they want for a character because of how they perceive his actions - a character that is, without question, by the very nature of the story, one that is intended to be a recipient of their sympathy. These harmful takes need to be challenged.
It’s not about whether you agree or disagree with actions, it’s about whether or not you are capable of having compassion for a suffering character that is not contingent on your understanding of their motivations or perspective.
If you don’t have sympathy for one of the two sympathetic characters, then I think you’re missing a very important lesson that NG is trying to tell you.
To end on a light note, there are about 10,000 other things I’ve seen in this fandom that make me forget all of this. The ART, the fanfics, the absolutely bonkers metas, l love it. I have a couple crazy meta ideas myself but I think i’ve written enough for now. Be well everyone!
Sympathy (I’m considering how you feel, from my own perspective)
and
Empathy (I’m imagining myself in your situation, to directly feel and experience it)
For as hurt and angry and frustrated as Crowley and Aziraphale are at the end of S2, I don’t believe either choice came as a surprise to the other, nor do I believe they would necessarily want the other to have chosen differently, in the end.
They might not understand the other’s point of view. They might ask “how?” or “why?”
But, and this might be a hot take, I think if either had actually done it, gone along with the other’s suggestion, said “yes.
It would have come as a huge shock and, although they might not have admitted it, even to themselves, I think they’d have been a little disappointed.
Like, all I can imagine is Crowley saying: "Let’s go off together.”
And Aziraphale saying: “Alright, Crowley. Let’s leave this old world behind, forget everything, and go off to the stars.”
And Crowley just sort of gaping at him like… “Who are you and what have you done with my angel?”
Or, the reverse:
Aziraphale: “You can come back to heaven, be an angel again.”
“Oh, fantastic! Sign me up.”
And Aziraphale’s whole face crumpling up like: “Did I hear that right? Surely not.”
Aziraphale and Crowley are simultaneously infuriated by and endeared to the very things that set them apart.
since tumblr is going to start scraping blogs to train ai be sure to glaze and nightshade your art!! Not only will both of these programs protect your art from being copied but nightshade also poisons any ai that tries to steal it
here is some more info on these tools and where you can download them:
Aziraphale makes two very similar three-part facial expressions while he is alone with the Metatron:
Longing and regret as he looks out the window.
A glimpse of rage as he turns to the Metatron.
A mask of smiles or laughter quickly donned to cover the anger.
Look! Here he is looking out the window. Then his mouth compresses very briefly into an angry line as he turns his head in response to the Metatron insulting Crowley for his “damn-fool questions.” Then he fake laughs along with the Metatron.
“Angel…would you let me, if…if I were to kiss you now?”
“…you know we can’t…”
“That’s not what I asked.”
My take on what could have happened between 1941 and 1967. It’s 1958 and Crowley was feeling wine-brave and love-sick.
i drew this with a certain ending in mind, but left it open ended for you to decide. if you want to read the version of events that i didn’t intend for (lol), i wrote a little ficlet to go with this.
They had settled into comfortable silence some time ago. That in itself was a novelty for them, to have enough time to spend together that they could devote some of it just to…nothing. And yet it seemed that Crowley was about to disagree. Aziraphale could feel him staring, and most of all, he could feel him thinking. That leg hadn’t stopped bouncing in five minutes and it was slowly driving him nuts. He wondered what moral dilemma was swirling on his serpent’s tongue, ready to raise Aziraphale’s hackles.
“Angel?”
Aziraphale looked over to him and his heart kicked up in speed.
ALT
