✨PLazybones✨

@liferadayjune Day 14 - Favorite Duo

MEEEEAN GIIIILS OH MY GOD I MISSED DRAWING MY TOXIC AS HELL DUO

It wasn't close I beat the pants off that man, and others like him. I did it more than once. Some guys got humble and stayed. One guy got angry and stormed out.

And I think about that every fuck damn time I hear that bullshit, which seems to be all the fuck over the place these days. Oh, women are just fragile little soft delicate flower creatures who can't do ANYTHING and could NEVER compete with big strong manly muscular strong MEN.

I think about driving that dude into the mats and seeing the brutal reality of this big dude's misogany meet the realization that a woman was beating his ass literally that second, that none of his strength could stop the fact that I'd just hip thrown him facefirst into the mats and that had I actually connected with the axe kick to his neck I would have crushed a bunch of important shit and he could not stop me, and his whole psyche collapsing like a dying star in that moment.

Truth is a god in the way that gravity or magnetism is a god. He's just a manifested force of nature. He's sapient on some level, sure, which is a neat trick, but we managed to make meat think and we're not extraordinarily special about it either. He didn't invent humans and he didn't spawn the universe the way that Rose would have expected the god of her religion to have done; he has minimal to no interest in the day to day lives of any creature and only intervenes when someone actively wanders into his grip of influence. He's not a Capital-G God. Truth is to matter what fire is to flammable objects. He's a metaphorical (and perhaps even allegorical) chemical reaction.

Ed isn't an atheist because he saw god and cussed him out irl; Ed's an atheist because he doesn't believe that the brute force of Truth qualifies as a god. Quite frankly, I think that's a hell of a lot ballsier and a much more complete understanding of the situation. This perspective insulates him against idolizing the Truth as an ultimate divine force and makes Truth something that can be reasoned around or through, rather than with, which would never have worked.

Movie Howl is a soulful and quiet. Book Howl is a drama queen and Causing Problems and has a long string of jilted exes and couldn't shut up if you paid him.

Sophie and Howl drive each other up the wall at the beginning and it's really funny. Sophie and Howl are (despite themselves) very much in love by the end and they still drive each other up the wall and it's even funnier.

In the movie, Howl has been ordered by the king to participate in The War, and Howl is avoiding it because he is a brave conscientious objector. In the book, Howl has been ordered by the king to rescue his lost brother from the Witch of the Wastes, and Howl is avoiding it by any means necessary because he is a cowardly weasel who wants to stay as far from the Witch as possible.

In the movie, the Witch cursed Sophie because she was jealous about Howl speaking to Sophie for five minutes. In the book, the Witch cursed Sophie because Sophie had been doing surprisingly powerful magic for years without knowing it and it was actually starting to cut into the Witch's plans. (Sophie does not discover any of this until nearly the end of the book, but the reader can start to pick it up much earlier and the way Sophie's magic works is pretty darn cool.)

In the movie, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens, but this is implied to be nothing but nasty fearmongering. In the book, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens because Howl started the rumor so people would stop asking him to do wizard junk all the time.

The book lightly parodies a couple of tropes from Western fairy tales. In particular Sophie has internalized that, as the eldest of three sisters, her "destiny" is to fail so that her younger sisters will look cooler when they succeed, which is why she's so resigned to the hat shop at the beginning. (Sidebar: Sophie's sisters come up much more in the book and they're great.) There's also a really funny bit where Sophie attempts to operate a pair of seven-league boots.