Otters May Have Shifted During Flight

Just Crowley... walking...

Dear traveling lemons, I am so excited I got the ok to post these beautiful Cabin Pressure illustrations made by the talented Gracia via her Twitter page @Gracein140  

They are absolutely brilliant and I can’t get enough of them. You can also check her work out on her Facebook  page.

And I suppose it’s the same for Crowley, he’s a cocky bastard when he lies - so they think he’s like the most annoying piece of shit demon.

Crowley gets away with it because Hell knows that he’s the most successful demon they’ve got, but also that he’s pretty low ranking. ‘Excessively-cocky-and-proud-of-himself-but-also-slightly-nervous’ is kind of the demeanour you’d expect.

Plus… look, it’s Hell and he’s a demon— I refuse to believe they think he’s being totally honest about everything all the time. I doubt they think he’d dare lie about anything as major as hanging out with an angel, but they probably assume as a matter of course that he’s going exaggerating or fudging some of the details in his reports. I feel like a small amount of rebellion would be expected— it’s unlikely that many angels fell for being good little workers who always coloured inside the lines.

Aziraphale, meanwhile… well, as a really great post that I can’t actually find at the moment pointed out, Aziraphale gets away with it because the archangels think he’s an idiot.

Aziraphale is bad at lying because he always ends up feeling all nervous and guilty about it and is terrible at masking these emotions. A nervous and uncomfortable Aziraphale will try and distract by picking up on irrelevant phrases and figures of speech, eg. I like pears", “why would I have his shoe size?”.

He’ll make sweeping statements that are obviously not true, eg. every time he’s confronted about his relationship with Crowley.

(“We’re not friends, we just know each other from work” is such a more believeable lie than “I’ve never met him before in my life” when told to people who’ve just seen the two of you get together in an obviously prearranged meeting spot and have a full conversation. If you watch the clip, you can see Crowley start grinning when Aziraphale says this, because he knows that the fact that the angel is coming up with something so obviously made up means that he must like him really.)

When really nervous, he has a tendency to babble and take refuge in saying whatever he thinks his superiors would want him to say.

And Crowley generally recognises that these are all signs that Aziraphale is lying or otherwise nervous about something. The reason he’s been so good at getting the angel to do what he wants over the years is because he can tell the difference between ‘I really, really, genuinely don’t want to do this’ Aziraphale and ‘actually I secretly do want to do this, please talk me into it’ Aziraphale and respond accordingly.

The only time I can think of when Crowley doesn’t recognise these signs is at the bandstand, where he fails to realise that Aziraphale is lying about not knowing where the antichrist is. And that’s a time when they’re both under high stress and, crucially, Aziraphale immediately segues into telling an even bigger and more obvious lie about not liking Crowley.

The archangels on the other hand also recognise these signs, but seem to interpret them as Aziraphale just being an idiot. He’s not obviously back tracking and contradicting himself because he’s making things up on the spot, he’s not talking too quickly and trying desperately to go along with what the boss wants because he’s scared about being caught, no, he’s just really, really stupid.

Meanwhile Crowley is generally assumed by his own people to be making some shit up. Ironically, the angel is under far more supervision than the demon, but that’s because they question Aziraphale’s competence and effectiveness, not his honesty. They need a justification for letting him stay down there, and Gabriel’s a control freak, so he micromanages things of importance. They don’t trust him in the sense they don’t believe he can handle things reliably on his own, not in the sense that they think he’d dare lie to them.

Meanwhile Hell is just… lazy. Crowley’s superiors probably expect he’s fudging the truth all the time, but they also figure it’s to be expected, and do they really want to know? No. When Crowley says ‘they don’t care what’s REALLY happening as long as they get their reports on time’, it’s Hell he’s talking about. They really don’t give a shit. There’s something to be said for your bosses having low expectations. If he’s caught fucking up, or lies about something too big and then gets caught, that’s a different story. (As he says in the book and in the script, they’re keen on disobedience in general terms, but very much against themselves being disobeyed.) But for the most part, he doesn’t feel bad or even particularly nervous about lying, because that’s implicitly understood to be part of his job description. They don’t trust him, so he doesn’t have to work hard to keep their trust.

The really interesting part is how it filters into their personal dynamic with each other. In their relationship, Aziraphale is dishonest. Not openly and deliberately to Crowley most of the time, though we do see he’s capable of that (badly) when he withholds information about the Antichrist. But he’s habitually dishonest with himself and, by extension, his best friend, so Crowley’s learned to read him in the way no Archangel would ever even bother to try. He’s also learned to shrug off the ‘we’re not friends I don’t want to hang out with you’ brand of lies, because he knows they’re bullshit, and that in fact they’re usually concealing the opposite. Those words don’t bite, even make him smile sometimes, because yeah, sure, Aziraphale. Likewise, as you pointed out, he knows when Aziraphale’s no means NO and when it means ‘ugh I’m struggling, Crowley help, I need a way to rationalize this as okay so I can follow my heart without feeling like a Bad Angel’. It’s almost always the latter, but when it’s not, Crowley respects it. (When Aziraphale tells him it’s over, it’s over. Oh, it breaks both their hearts, and it pisses him off for sure, because Crowley transmutes pain into anger, but he stops arguing and walks off. That’s a real no. Spoken out of hurt and fear, a foolish decision, but still Aziraphale putting his foot down. And no one else respects Aziraphale’s boundaries, so Crowley damn sure will.)

And then he dives out of heaven, possesses a human, and when they attempt to execute him he gives them the most stone cold glare of all time before stepping into hellfire like it’s a warm bath, then fucking spits Hellfire at them while giving them The Most Feral Smile in existence.

David Tennant

If I post a wip and then never share the final version, please assume that I forgot about it… Close-up, full figure and best version ever <;

If you scroll down on ao3, you will find these settings. You can click on the "Choose skin" in order to customize.

There are three other options other than the default.

The low vision default is like this.

The reversi is the one closest to dark mode.

And the snow blue is this.

If you know code, you can probably customize it further but for the rest of us I think these options are enough :D

Click Create Site Skin

and then Use Wizard. Now you just fill in things.

Example:

(When I used bigger font I needed to make the gap smaller, and hex codes are easy to find online)

Click Submit

And then Use

This is what it looks like.

(I know it's terrible, but it's only an example)

Sunday portrait with Anthony J Crowley and Daffodils (which, Google teaches me, mean ‘Regard; Unrequited Love; You’re the Only One; The Sun is Always Shining When I’m with You’)

I hope you like it! <:

Another rough painting of these two because… How am I supposed to resist? XD

we’re on our side~

I’ve never liked self-deprecating humor because trying to figure out how to respond to someone using it makes me feel really awkward and uncomfortable. I also think that it’s a gateway toward normalizing negative self-talk.

In fandom, we know the terms “trash” and “clown,” and admittedly those are funny and overall they’re pretty harmless. (And they’re also interesting and fun examples of vernacular!) But I frequently see people openly disparaging themselves and their creations in their bios and posts and tags, and that never fails to disturb me.

I’d like to ask people in fandom–especially creators–to evaluate how they talk about themselves, and reconsider casually putting themselves down.

Here’s why:

Imagine you’re brand new to the fandom–maybe even new to fandom itself!–and you dive in, wide-eyed and enchanted. You’re seeing all this amazing content from people whose work you admire, and you’re inspired. You start to think that maybe you might want to write some fic yourself, or make some art, or learn how to do gifsets or fanvids. But some of your faves think their work is shitty. You think it’s awesome, and so do other people! But the talented person who made it thinks it’s shitty. So how on earth could your attempts ever be any good or worth sharing?

Speaking as someone who has depression, I am hesitant to follow or interact with people who use negative self-talk, because I work hard to safeguard my mental health. I want to see peoples’ creations and support creators, but if I’m also seeing negative self-talk pop up on my dash every time I visit Tumblr, or there it is in a bio every time I visit a person’s page, I’m going to take a step away from the person putting that out into the world even if I really like what they create. Also, I find it interesting that tagging for triggers is a commonly-accepted practice, but somehow negative self-talk doesn’t get scrutinized.

I mention this in another post I made about fandom but I’ll say it again here: the way we talk informs the way we think. Don’t let your head become a toxic waste dump! You also wouldn’t tolerate someone putting your friend down, so be your own friend and don’t allow it. Even if you think you’re only being self-deprecating, even if you only mean it casually. Also worth mentioning: disparaging yourself publicly opens you up to receiving reassurances from friends/anons, which can lead to reliance on external validation. Avoid going down that road.

There’s no rule that says that if you want to talk about your work or put it out into the world, you’ve got to put it down first. It doesn’t make you egotistical or self-absorbed to simply put your stuff out there without insulting yourself. It’s okay and understandable if you lack confidence; that’s pretty normal. But it’s also okay–and wonderful–to like and be proud of yourself and your own work!

And from bottom to top (really David, you need to thread your tweets as well! ;-p) 

Was Simon surprised by Staged’s success? “Yes, but then I also forgot what household names David and Michael were, because we had such a tight work schedule, until they then appeared on the front page of every national newspaper.”

Thanks to Staged’s repeated airings, Simon has been inundated with collaboration requests, and is currently considering a second series of Staged.

“We are talking about it, we are having those conversations. If we can come up with the right idea we will think about it because there is certainly the appetite for another series. I don’t want to tarnish what we are so proud of but it’s also important to keep making new work and putting it out there.”