Thoughts and Things

It’s hard battling with your own head…

It’s hard battling with your own head…

Not to pile on here, but this doesn’t look exactly promising.

It means every art blog would have to go through every post one by one and appeal individual flagged posts as not to lose content. Seems unlikely.

And not just me being vaccinated, but everyone around me too, because there are some vaccines I cannot safely have and I rely on everyone else around me being vaccinated to avoid it.

Things like, oh, say, whooping cough, which I actually had as a child because I went to school with the victims of antivaxxers, and we all got super sick and coughed so hard the blood vessels in our eyes ruptured and every fit felt like you were going to die choking for breath.

And tonight, a friend of mine who happens to be a mother, hauled me into an argument on Facebook where people in her neighborhood group were hosting a “whooping cough party” cause one of their kids got sick, and the tag line was “come on over and get it over with lol”, and words cannot convey how much visceral hatred I had for this person in that moment. If I could have set them on fire with my brain, I probably would.

Because I can wholly remember sitting in bed clutching my little chest, desperate for the pain to stop, making that horrible wheezing sound, with tears streaming down my face, utterly convinced I was going to die if I couldn’t draw breath. And that went on for months because even with treatment, the cough can take up to three months to subside. And that is a horrible thing for a child to go through. I cannot stress enough how painful and terrifying it was and my parents for all their faults could do nothing. They’d done everything they could to keep me safe from other illnesses. I had all my other vaccines, I just couldn’t have that one.

And the thing is, you can get it again, it’s not a one time deal. You can get it more than once, and doctors actually recommend you get a booster shot for it every ten years, and I can’t do that. I cannot protect myself from it. I rely on other people being responsible, and taking the necessary steps to keep whooping cough outbreaks low, and the only way to do that is through regular routine inoculation.

And these fuckers are throwing a party??? What???

Let me be clear, it is through profound measures of willful ignorance, hubris, and yes privilege, that people have allowed for things like measles and whooping cough to make a come back. It is a privilege to live in a healthy society where you can expect all your children to make it out of infancy. It is a privilege to not die young from TB, it is a privilege that many people before you had to suffer for and work hard to bring about, all in the hopes that another child wouldn’t have to go into the iron lung from polio. And through the privilege of never having had to suffer, you have elected to do harm. You have elected to allow for the resurgence of mumps, and measles and coughs that sound like a death rattle in the lungs of infant children, and then you have the absolute audacity and malice in your souls to celebrate and throw “sickness parties” because you’d rather let your child suffer through unnecessary illness than be vaccinated?

How dare you. You have a moral and social obligation to protect your children and the people around you, and not only have you chosen to wave this responsibility, but you are actively endangering others?

How dare you.

And the thing is I know, I know in your own misguided way you think you are doing what is best for you child. But if the road to hell truly is paved with good intentions, I can tell you now with absolute certainty that you fuckers have got your own burning stars on the walk of shame.

Vaccinate your god damn kids. And get your booster shots while you’re at it. You might just save someone’s life without ever knowing or trying.

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.

Kylo was born with wealth, privilege, a loving family, and Force powers. Finn was an enslaved child soldier with no family and nobody who cared about him.

Kylo may have been influenced by Snoke but he was also influenced by Luke, Leia, Han, and Jedi values. Finn grew up hearing nothing but First Order propaganda.

MULTIPLE PLANETS. 

Also, his father. 

A princess without voice. A love beyond words. And the monster that tried to destroy it all. 

The Shape of Water is now playing in theaters NATIONWIDE! Get tickets: http://bit.ly/TSOWtickets

what is poe supposed to do?? let someone in authority go unchecked when they’re being completely shady???

And flip from Poe being a competent, trusted leader in TFA to a loose cannon was also really frustrating. Opening the movie with a character recklessly spending a bunch of lives while wisecracking is always going to put me off.