Yes this is a bus on rails

“That’s right.”

“At the request of a princess.”

“Right again.”

“And you, who will be leading the expedition, are also a princess.”

“You’re very perceptive.”

“How big is your royal family, again?“

“We don’t have one.”

“But–“

“We overthrew our monarchy centuries ago, but we kept most of the titles around. The rank of ‘princess’ is held by the directors in charge of various civil service branches.“

“Huh. And the princess we’re rescuing today is in charge of…?”

“Public sanitation.”

“The Lord of Death’s Dominion kidnapped your public sanitation director?”

War hammer is a little outdated cause we mostly use guns now.

Framing hammer is fine and honorable.

Claw hammer sounds scary but its basically the most normal sort of hammer there is.

Ball Peen hammer is the kind that people ignorant of hammering will question you on. "It's for peening" you say but they won't believe you.

this is a way better model... you'll still get transphobic & intersexist drs of course but i prefer this to male / female or even having separate questions for gender & sex.

Which, okay, fine, except that there’s often like two, three feet of eel INSIDE THE SEAL. The stuff hanging out is just the end of the tail. And eels are astonishingly powerful for their size, true, but so are seal nostrils. (Why am I typing these words? How did my life come to this?)

The other theory, of course, is that they barfed up an eel and it came out their nose instead, but we’re talking a fairly impressive feat that the eel lined up just right to come out the nostrils, and also those are BIG eels. It’d be kinda like a human puking a spear of asparagus out of their nose. (Why am I typing THESE words, too? Why?)

The remaining theory, which is actually the one ascribed to by the lead scientist on the endangered monk seal project, is that dumb teenage seals are snorting eels at each other for fun. And y’know…I just…sure. We live in a world where that wouldn’t even be the tenth strangest thing I’ve heard about mammals.

I suspect that I’m about to step into something I would be wisest to keep well away from. But what the hell, it’s that time between Christmas and New Year’s. And nobody’s yelled at me over the internet since I said that the TV Aziraphale doesn’t use a cell phone. *

Canonically, which is to say using the text in the book, you don’t get any description of Crowley’s sex life. The only thing the book says is “angels are sexless unless they specifically make an effort”.  You can infer, and (more to the point) you can imagine, and lots of people have chosen, not unreasonably, to ship him with Aziraphale, but you are still Making Stuff Up. It could be Making Stuff Up that happens between paragraphs, or Making Stuff Up that isn’t mentioned at all, but it’s still Making Stuff Up.** (And using the kind of eagle-eyed textual analysis that Bible scholars used to decide exactly what a piece of four thousand year old verse definitely meant also counts here as Making Stuff Up.)

Which is the fun of fanfiction, and part of the tradition of fanfiction. As is, I’m afraid, grumbling at people who do not see that your ship is the only true ship, and choose to ship anyone else with anyone else.

If anyone decides that The Relationships in Their Fanfiction Are the Only True Fanfiction, it seems to me they are missing the point. The point is Fanfiction exists so that you can imagine, enjoy and fill in the gaps. The point is that you can change things and have fun with them. And the stories are absolutely true… for you.

The TV series gets deeper into Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship. It’ll be canonical for the TV series, and not canonical for the book.*** 

If I were to Pronounce on things that are not explicitly stated in the book, I still wouldn’t be telling you if Crowley was Canonically Gay. I would be telling you what I think, because it’s not canon unless it’s in the book. It won’t be TV canon unless it’s on the screen.

So, do not worry what other people think, and do not worry about what they say. These are not things on which people can be right or wrong, or on which anything can be “settled”. 

Make fun fanfiction. Enjoy yourself. Make things up. Share them. That’s the point.

*People would only bother him on it. And if anyone gave him one as a present, it would be still be in its box, on the same shelf as the still-unboxed Kindle.

**Which was what Terry and I did when we wrote the book. And what I had to do for the TV scripts when I needed to take the story into places the book hadn’t covered.