Amaya

My surprise gift for @tropical-gothic!

One night, before the creation of Suna, Reto & Chikamatsu go stargazing!

Moving forward each year I’d like to write a fic for each of my friends, rather than taking part in events. I wonder who will be next!

🎄 Merry Christmas! 🎄

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE

| 1.07 | “The Thing Lay Still”

Carefully I opened my eyes and looked at him again. All his natural gifts were there in a blaze of light: the delicate but strong limbs, large sober brown eyes, and his mouth that for all the irony and sarcasm that could come out of it was childlike and ready to be kissed.

The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice

Birds of Prey

Buzzards: Intelligence Division

Buzzards: They are often called the Intelligence Division (think Suna’s version of T&I). They are involved in both intelligence and counterintelligence, often planting information with as much deft as they extract them. They work very closely with other members of the police force– especially the Vultures and the Kites.

Sasori-centric. Features an OC who is a Buzzard.

x.X.x

 Once more.

There was the incessant drip-drip-drip of water from a faucet that didn’t exist.

“Why did you come for me?” The dead girl asked Sasori, still stiff from being sealed away in the Buzzards’ specimen scroll. “Why take me?” Her long brown hair was frayed and stuck out in all the wrong places. Her gray skin was starting to sag around her hazy eyes. It made her cheekbones too pronounced, too skeletal—

No good. Sasori needed it to have just the right amount of softness. Especially when she would smile. He needed it to be perfect.

“What were you going to do to me?”

 Read the rest in AO3!

i always forget just how fucked up neji was after the sasuke retrieval mission like 

LOOK AT HOW COMPLEX THIS IS. IT TOOK EIGHT MEDIC NIN AND A PORTAL TO HELL TO FIX THIS KID 

Interview With the Vampire + What We Do in the Shadows

Y'know, putting aside the potential a-/acephobic reasons, and the "not relying on overused romance tropes/shortcuts" reasons, I think one of the big reasons (that I haven't really seen talked about?) that Good Omens gets accused of queerbaiting is that it's basically the story of an existing relationship. It's not the story of how Aziraphale and Crowley fall in love, or admit that they're in love, or whatever that people tend to expect out of romance stories these days, at least, not in the traditional sense. Yes, technically we get to see their relationship develop and we do get to see them realizing and admitting to themselves that they are in love and that the other loves them back, but that's not really the main focus the way it is in a lot of stories where romance is involved. There's no "will they/won't they" drama, there's no big confession or relationship-affirming kiss or anything, because they've been in a developing relationship for nearly all of 6000 years. That's like, literally what the Arrangement is. It's their relationship, their "basically married", their "involved", their "together but we can't say it outright bc people are watching and also we don't wanna screw it up". And people aren't used to seeing that in stories about relationships (seriously, find me one example of a story where the main, endgame couple is together at the beginning and the plot doesn't revolve entirely around them having issues that they need to work out. Hollywood/the publishing industry is allergic to writing about healthy relationships that stay healthy and in tact and exist after they get together). So when they see Neil Gaiman say "it's a love story" they expect the story of Azi and Crowley falling in love and finally admitting it to themselves and each other and having a big climactic kiss to seal the deal. And when they get a couple who is basically married in everything but name, who have been together for 6000 years but have had to be so so careful and dance around their feelings bc ~bureaucracy~, who don't need a big kiss at the end, just a loving, tender look because they can finally relax and be in love together... it doesn't feel like enough to them. They were so busy looking for the "getting together" plot that isn't really there that they missed the love story that was there. Which is a shame honestly, because it really is an excellent love story. There's enemies to lovers and mutual pining and almost a sort of courtly love situation going on and it's excellent. And people don't see it because it's not what they were looking for.

The love story in Good Omens is also a very queer love story.  It’s the story of two people who have a relationship which exists in every single way except the official one.  And the fun thing is, it was one of those in the original book as well.  It’s a love story countless non-heterosexual people lived for decades, centuries even, and it’s a love story a lot of non-heterosexual people are still living today.  It’s just instead of saying “oh, no, they’re Just Good Friends”, the televisual version of Good Omens actually commits to the truth and says: “they love one another, very very much, and they aren’t allowed to do anything about it, because if they do, they’re going to wind up being flung out of their families and their jobs and their homes, and never allowed to return”.  (Never mind the families, jobs and homes they’d be thrown out of were each as dysfunctional as the other.  That isn’t the point: the point is this was their family, their job, their home and they didn’t know whether they’d be able to replace it.  Don’t belittle the risk until you’ve taken it). 

No wonder a lot of the heterosexual folks didn’t understand what they were looking at.  I think the part which is simultaneously both tragic and inspiring is there were a lot of non-heterosexual people who also couldn’t recognise it... because it wasn’t an experience they had any knowledge of.

When the show gave us a full montage of their past??? Episode 3 I think? Readers, I cried. That was so beautiful and magical and it was 3 am and I couldn’t believe that the show was awknowledging their love this way! “You go too fast!” The burning church scene! I was besides myself because I never thought they’d make it so clear in the show!!

And then I got online and people were pissed that they weren’t “canon” and I was extremely confused, let me tell you.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Neil Gaiman, who has repeatedly expressed extreme reluctance to alter anything that Terry Pratchett wrote out of respect for his memory, wrote HALF AN HOUR OF ROMANTIC BACKSTORY THAT DIDN'T EXIST IN THE BOOK AT ALL.

Seriously. Half an hour. That's half of an entire episode. In a six episode series. Half of an episode, with no interruptions, not even for the fucking opening credits. Do you know how many fucking pages that is for a script? How much of it Neil Gaiman fought to keep in? HALF AN HOUR. OUT OF WHOLE CLOTH. An entire LIFETIME'S worth of interactions, with its own internal plot, that wasn't there before. That's not an accident! And it sure as fuck isn't queerbaiting!

So a really interesting thing to me is I’ve heard a lot of younger people in the fandom say that “my mom watched Good Omens and even she could see it was a love story!” Folks, it’s because she knows what a marriage looks like.

I’ve been married 18 years and I have never seen a show on television that portrayed my marriage dynamics as well as Good Omens. Ever.

Married people are either relegated to this weird comedy where they really probably shouldn’t be married because they hate each other and it’s all a joke. Or they live in a world where sure the other does bad things, but they never get talked about or resolved. Or my personal favorite to cringe over, married so long that you’re just sort of one existing entity blob with a shared mind that doesn’t acknowledge there are two people with individual wants and needs (that sometimes don’t mesh).

Then Good Omens waltzes in where Aziraphale and Crowley share so many interests, but also maintain their own. Sure, they banter but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone say “Oh Lord, heal this bike” is antagonistic or in anyway indicative that the pair doesn’t still adore each other (Aziraphale shooting back with “perfectly normal velocipede” keeps the light tone going, even if they did). And they respect each other’s boundaries and needs, even to the end of the world.

It’s not just that we don’t see established relationships, it’s that we don’t see developed and healthy ones in media often. Throw the careful queer balancing game of “is it safe” on top and… I can’t think of another time I’ve seen that at all. Or even attempted.

And I am so grateful this show exists.

The people complaining that the show didn't go far enough or didn't openly state that they're in a relationship, are people who weren't in any queer relationships in the 80's or before and aren't in touch with that aspect of queer history.

Good Omens was published in 1990 and it depicts the lived experience of almost every queer person at the time. Because back then, and even in the 90's, we didn't say we were queer, we didn't say we were in relationships. Queer people who'd been in love and living together for decades told everyone around them that they were just roommates because anything else was liable to get them killed, or at least cost them jobs and housing and family and everything else.

Somewhere or other there's an art exhibit that is the only item (an AC unit I think) that was left behind when the artist's partner died of AIDS and since his was the name on the lease, the artist was unable to claim anything from the apartment and the family took everything including all the artist's belongings and left him without even anything by which to remember his love.

Good Omens is positive affirming representation of life as a queer person in a society where it's not okay to be queer, and it should stand as a reminder of that part of queer history, and of the fact that it can happen again.

I’ve nattered on this with several fellow Queers who were part of the comm in the 80′s and 90′s and we absolutely know and see this story (hell, one of them pegged on the wing extension in the prelude, “Oh! This is a love story!”) It’s actually been rather healing, seeing that coded dance without the destructive Hollywood  romeo-and-juliet doomed romance overtones slapped on it.

Jesus, I hadn’t even thought of this, but of course.

This is something that historians have been warning about for a couple of decades. How much of our history was not just on Twitter, but on MySpace, on blogs and web sites that came down after a few years, on e-mail, on texts. None of that leaves a record. Once the file is deleted, the server shut down and scrapped, the backup disks decay into being unreadable junk, that history is gone.

Does anyone remember when Obama and Clinton each held town hall campaign events on MySpace? Good luck finding anything about those now other than some news articles that say they happened. How many business zoom calls have formal meeting minutes taken? We are not saving histories. We aren’t even writing letters. I’m as guilty as anyone. My art is online and kept in the cloud. I make my Christmas Card every year, but I haven’t printed and mailed one in over a decade. It’s all sent electronically. Meaning that a generation from now no one will remember.

So the problem is bigger than Twitter. We are now a couple of decades into an age that will not leave any detailed historical record.

That is not good.

In pseudo and acadamic circles this has routinely been called the ‘digital dark age’, I even wrote on the subject a few years ago but can’t find that article right now. [There is even a Wikipedia article on the concept] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age#:~:text=The%20digital%20dark%20age%20is,technologies%20evolve%20and%20data%20decay).

It’s thought this might just be a black spot of knowledge, there are organizations working to stop this — archival websites primarily, but these are not able to penetrate all these corporate gated gardens, where paywalls, sign up walls, and more block access to. There is an ongoing campaign by megacorps to shutdown as many archival sites as possible.

This coupled with the fallibility of hard drives, CDs (make sure to back them up! They only have a 20-30 year lifetime!), and more and there is a chance that even though there is more information than ever before, more primary and secondary sources than ever, we may become just a strange blank spot in societal and cultural history. Digital decay is a terrifying concept that we are already beginning to live through.

@xkcd-for-that

This is exactly what I’ve been saying. It’s a loss of history. And, given how important it has been for activists of all sorts, it will be a loss for the future as well.

Interview With The Vampire: “In Throes of Increasing Wonder” Script

interview with the vampire (2022) | the tale of the body thief (1992)