just-elian

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Approximately 10 seconds before the invention of mercy.

…Look, all I’m saying is if Crowley did not see Aziraphale give the sword away, he must have seen it “flaming like anything” some other time. How appropriate would it be if our favorite “never actually killed anything” angel started disobeying by failing to smite our favorite demon in the Great War? Maybe because he remembered how divinely beautiful the Architect of Stars had been and couldn’t bear to destroy someone so wonderful?

This is one of my favorite headcanons, and unfortunately one of the very few that survived S2, so I decided I have to thoroughly enjoy it now before it too gets dashed by S3.

Did the fly hand off give anyone else “The Creation of Adam” reversed energy?

"You're an Angel, I don't think you can do the wrong thing."

Well that quote aged like a led balloon. :|

I drew this while listening to Lewis Capaldi's new album "Broken by Desire to be Heavenly Sent" on loop, but I will be okay again once Crowley says "I forgive you" and this sad, sad angel realizes what it feels like to actually admit he was wrong for once and then to be unconditionally loved and truly forgiven (in a way he has never been) anyway.

Deep breaths y'all.

On my first listen I missed the line about cleaning crews in the S2 opener... and so for way more time than I would like to admit, I thought it was canon that the reason the tunnels were so clean when Jon arrived was that Jurgen Leitner was hanging out down there with a broom, singing a happy little working song. 

I feel like we don’t talk enough about how many times Martin had to be told not to touch the explosives. 

If I see a bunch of C4 lying around, my first instinct is NOT: Imma touch it. 

Also what was up with that little giggle when he found it? Did he get possessed by the ghost of Gertrude “blow it up” Robinson or what?

“I don’t know if destroying this is going to kill that thing… but I am damn sure it’s going to hurt.” (MAG 78)

Ah yes. the TMA family motto. 

I almost stopped listening to TMA because of this moment.

I remember pausing before Michael’s (truly delightful) appearance, disappointed and angry at what I assumed was the quality of the writing and the poorly executed foreshadowing that this was, in any way, the correct way to deal with Not!Sasha. 

You see I had already had a pit in my stomach about TMA by this point.

A nausea that I get regularly in scifi and fantasy worlds when I can feel the world builders are about to murder their creation to give me a hard magic autopsy on a world that had functioned really well in the soft magic space. 

It was maybe a bit arrogant, but not entirely incorrect to assume that there was no way TMA could survive the big reveal it was leaning in towards. Horror, more than any other genre fundamentally depends on the unknown to function, and for it to survive “The Talk” with its scares intact, it would have to be something really special.

Spoiler alert, it was. It is. It was wonderful and unique so forgive me if I wax a little about the twin pillars of inevitability keep TMA’s magic organs beating even after they’ve been dissected:

1. The Entities are motiveless. 2. The Entities cannot be destroyed.

Now I know what you are thinking: Elian, you can’t be serious about (1). 

The Web is literally about the fear of being controlled, remember? It’s an Entity with a brain. To that I will say there is a definitive answer and the answer is; No, no it’s not. 

It’s lying to you and you’re being sucked into its creepy schtick. The Web is about the fear of being controlled. The Web doesn’t actually control a damn thing- at best it has a slightly better idea of cause and effect- but mostly it just sits there looking smug because you find that spooky and it understands the crawling inevitability of things like the apocalypse. And maybe, just like the rest of the Entities, it has avatars with a superiority complex who think they run the show, but no, none of the Entities ‘want’ or ‘plan’. And it’s actually really, fundamentally important that they don’t.

Because if even one had a brain, there would be a truly world-decimating rivalry and a defined consciousness and you’d be able to pin the line between them down. They wouldn’t be able to be to operate as the nebulous fear we know today. 

Our inability to conceive of them relies quite heavily on them not having what we would understand as ‘intention’. Our inability to conceive of them, and the multitude of chaotic experiences and representations they have in TMA is it’s life blood. 

As for (2). Well, that one’s also a delightfully important touch to ensure that TMA was always going to be a tragedy. I mean, imagine watching a show where someone was setting out to stop gravity. That’s essentially what our protagonists are pitting themselves up against in this series, full on Don Quixote style. 

Making fear, pain and suffering, a cosmic force of the universe, not only feels very natural to an audience and lends itself well to the horror genre, but if you bake a force into a world like that, a force as strong and omnipresent as the Entities, then it doesn’t matter how many times you shine a flashlight on it, or what your cast understands in any given moment of your script. Your problems are always going to be orders of magnitude bigger than them and they never actually had a chance.

If it wasn’t this apocalypse it would have been another. 

If it wasn’t your cast it would have been someone else’s world. 

There is no end to the wheel, which is both why it hasn’t been stopped before your cast arrived, and why your audience should fear it still. 

Full marks for our writers and production team, 0/10 for Jon getting his genre-savvy on in MAG 78. I am never thinking about that episode again after this.

Friends, Family, Avatars of unholy Fear, thank you all for coming today to witness a project which I have laboured tirelessly over for the last several years...

A sideshow clicks, and on the screen appears this text:

The 14 Entities Ranked by Sexiness: a definitive list.

There is screaming, the sound of a wet thud and then silence. I lament from beyond the grave solely about the fact that I did not get to make my “tie me up, mommy” joke about the Web.

“Never really knew what she felt ‘bout any of it, not really. Not in her own words. Guess that’s the thing about being the… chosen one, or – I mean, Agnes was always quiet, but even if you spend all day, every day throwing out commandments and laying down parables… at the end of it, you’re always just the point of someone else’s story, everyone clamoring to say what you were, what you meant, and your thoughts on it all don’t mean nothing.” (MAG 145)

After Jon reads Eugene Vanderstock’s statement on Agnes Montague (MAG 139) he grumbles that every other avatar gets to have their feelings burned out of them. In that moment, Jon is desperate to draw a clear line between the human and the inhuman. He wants to believe his feelings make him different. Still worthy of his own existence?

The problem with his assertion is that it is patently, canonically untrue that avatars have their feelings burned out of them and by far and away the most interesting counter argument to this assertion is Agnes Montague herself in MAG 67.

When Agnes dates Jack Barnabas in that statement, she does so in the same way she orders that black coffee every Tuesday. To follow a strange and uncomfortable and undeniable desire for something ordinary which would eventually manifest as a love so at odds with the Desolation she is aligned with that it ruins her as their saviour.

However, once you accept the cold, hard fact that Agnes has feelings, I’d encourage you to kick yourself in the feels one more time and consider Agnes as a child and what has been done to her.

Agnes. 

Given as a sacrifice by her own mother, born of fear and fire. Raised in expectation by Masochists Anonymous who never gave a moment’s thought to what it would be like to raise a child, and labelled her as nothing but a brat when she did not do what they wanted.

Fed to a spider’s nest at ten or eleven, just to see how it goes.

A lonely child staring out a window and never allowed around other children because of dark powers she would (could?) not control.

A child with a destiny, drawn into the fight far too early, and for whom it was always too late.

“She asked me if I had a destiny… I told her [no]. She looked at me, with the same sadness I’d seen on her face before. “That must be nice,” she said and went back to staring into the sunset.” (MAG 67)

Jon: I hate spiders, they are the worst.

S2-ish proto-Web!Martin: NoT aLl sPiDeRs! ╔(::◠::)╗!! Some are really nice and big and make you tea and-

Sorry if you are religious... or Brazilian, but the Redeemer gives me Big Vast Energy™.

My heart wants that soft happily-ever-after for JonMartin too, but my head keeps reminding me that the soft ending is them dying together, because them waking up Somewhere Else, with Jon having been released from the Beholding is actually, hands down, the cruelest thing you could do to either of them.

Think about it.

1. Jon has been stabbed and if we make him deal with that as a proper human, even if he survives, that means an extended hospital stay and Martin is once again, stuck by Jon’s hospital bed, only this time it’s his fault.

2. Letting Jon-survivor’s-guilt-Sims off the hook like that, allowing him to be fully human again in an unruined world? Not knowing whether it worked and if his old friends are safe? On top of knowing that he had no long term consequences for ending the world in the first place? Yeah... That’s going to do bad things to that man’s insides.

3. If you really want to twist the knife as it were, you advance time too, and you make Jon watch as the Fears slowly rise again, only this time he learns what it is to be truly powerless. The Fears just ignore him and the people of this new world don’t believe him when he tries to warn them because they haven’t lived with the Fears all this time. He’s nothing but a true watcher now, because all his choices were already made in his own world.

TL;DR I can’t write fluff because my brain is mean. ;_;

Lonely vibes ahoy! 

AU where the first scary book Jon comes across is a ‘Where is Waldo’ book and he is convinced the whole time that it’s a Spiral-based Leitner, but really it’s an ordinary book and ‘Where is Waldo’ is just like that...

Elian’s Quick & Easy Michael-Hands Recipe

Inspired by our favorite spiral entity, and brought to you by the studio who “y’know did that ghosty tape-hand thing a few halloweens back?”

You will need:

Very Useful Instructions:

1. Shape tissues like fingertips and stuff in each finger of glove, pressing the tissue in. Press harder. You’re not pressing hard enough. Oh good. Now you broke it... 

2. Wear the glove and make a small incision in between each of the fingers to reduce the webbing from the glove being stuffed with more finger than it was intended for. 

3. Tape around your finger. Start by making a tape ring at the base of each one. This is easiest done with the tape sticky side out first, then going back over it with tape right side down. If you like having fingers you may want to be careful of cutting off your circulation during this process and make these tape fingers a little looser than that. 

4. Cut away the rest of the glove at any convenient time.

5. Continue to wrap tape slowly around gloved fingers. Make sharp edges. Remember what sharp edges taste like in your throat. 

6. Paint fingers with nailpolish and spray tips with oddly blood coloured spray paint. 

Lastly, don’t worry too much about perfection - these are distortion hands - they can be a little rough around the edges. Just have fun with this little craft idea. :)