Aziraphale’s Bookshop Is Really Old Right? What If It’s Haunted But He Never Noticed

July art

Reblog if you support romantic same sex relationship themes and gay characters in childrens entertainment!

reblog if ur nonbinary, you support nonbinary people, or you just really fucking love vaporwave

Same

Sometimes I forget how stereotypically queer I am

Short hair✔️

Likes emo music✔️

Flannels✔️

Listens to welcome to night vale✔️

Says “mood” and “same” unironically✔️

Spends most time online✔️

Gay???? ✔️

being haunted by a person you’ve never met and never will, someone you’ll never actually be

but you’ve got people who love you, maybe it’s gonna be okay

being nonbinary and a fan of non-human creatures isn’t easy. like i’m constantly struggling with the fact that i’m both like “i wish there was more enby representation in humans” and “i’m the same gender as mewtwo and that fucking rips”

rb w/ a controversial food opinion

I am really baffled by the people attacking AO3 for hosting stories that involve rape, incest, pedophilia, and other dark things. Have…have they never been to a bookstore or library? People write stories about all manner of dark, horrible things. This is not remotely new. And at least on AO3 and other fandom platforms, the dark things are generally tagged. In bookstores and libraries, not so much.

V.C. Andrews was freaking popular when I was in jr. high and high school. Her books were in the school libraries. They needed to be stamped with trigger warning: EVERYTHING, but mainly things from the fun list of rape, incest, pedophilia, and child abuse. Her books are still sufficiently popular that there are new ones coming out despite the fact that she’s been dead for years!

Her books are in the library I work at. Her books are in most bookstores. Her books are probably still in the libraries of the jr high and high school I went to. Does that mean anywhere that has her books supports rape, incest, pedophilia, and child abuse?

That’s not how it works. Yes, there are occasionally things that a store or library will decide they don’t want to carry, no matter what. The first bookstore I worked at wouldn’t even special order The Turner Diaries. A lot of bookstores won’t even special order The Anarchist Cookbook. I’m sure there are other books out there that people are reluctant to touch, even with a ten foot pole. But, barring those few exceptions, most bookstores and libraries are not in the business of policing the content of the books they deal in.

Not because booksellers and librarians are all monsters who should be reported to the FBI, but because there’s a long history of censorship going very bad places very fast. Also, free speech is considered an American value. Hell, let me just link to the ALA page on censorship.

I don’t pretend to know why stuff like V.C. Andrews’ books, or the fics on AO3 that some people want to report to the FBI, are popular. I don’t get it. It doesn’t appeal to me. Yet I recognize that different dark things are in kinds of fiction that I do like - violence, murder, torture, war, other things that most of us really fervantly hope never to experience in our lives. I don’t know whether fiction is an outlet for whatever darkness lurks in everyone’s hearts, whether it’s a way of dealing with our fear of bad things happening, whether human culture just finds bad things fascinating, or what. Maybe humanity is just super fucked up and Pluto really is a warning buoy telling other civilizations not to go near the planet with the creepy mammal infestation on it.

But I don’t think going after fic platforms because some of the fic hosted there is disturbing is a solution to anything. (And if the people doing so are not also on an equivalent campaign against bookstores and libraries, I suspect that what’s going on is not what they claim is going on.)

something people don’t talk about enough: both extremes in autism

almost every autistic trait has something to do with extremes, and for most of them, autistic people can be on either end of the scale. sometimes this is for hyper/hypo sensitivity reasons, and sometimes it’s due to overcompensation.

examples of some typical autistic traits and their equally austistic counterparts:

no empathy? how about having such extreme empathy that you cry when your stuffed animals are ignored?

no/wrong facial expressions? how about exaggerated facial expressions because you learned early on you were doing it wrong?

nonverbal? how about being hyperverbal and not knowing when to stop talking?

highly advanced vocabulary? how about when you can’t remember common everyday words in conversation?

can’t tell when things are awkward? how about having such an sensitivity to awkwardness that you can barely stand being in the room when an awkward moment happens on tv?

has a meltdown over a small tag on their shirt? how about being so oblivious to physical sensations that you don’t know you broke a bone?

doesn’t follow social norms? how about a strict adherence to social norms, often accompanied by severe anxiety that you’re not doing it right?

can’t stand bright lights and loud noises? how about pressing lights so close to your eyes that you’re temporary blinded and constantly making noises when it gets too quiet?

no eye contact? how about intense, sustained eye contact that you don’t know when to break?

constantly rocking back and forth? how about being unable to walk without getting disoriented?

remember this when people say “you don’t seem autistic” - there is no quintessential autistic representation. this is what we mean when we say it’s a spectrum.

Trauma (The Misfits)

Believe it or not, the trauma I’m discussing is not from the training arc, but I’m sure some Underworld therapists will be making money off that in the future. Luckily for the Misfits (and unluckily for fans desperate for any information, anything at all, a single crumb), only four of them get targeted and of those four, only three of them are forced to deal with actual trauma. However, the two non-Iruma cases are rich in character insight, so it’s worth the time to look at them in-depth.

In order to tackle trauma, the character Orobas (not pictured) is introduced. He’s someone who’s envious of the Misfit class, and therefore the perfect target for outside forces to manipulate. His bloodline magic also makes him the perfect candidate to take on the class almost singlehandedly. For various reasons, every misfit ended up in a class for outcasts of the demon world, and that’s not a position you’d typically find yourself in unless you were dealing with something, so trauma was a good weak point to attack. It’s essentially a narrative tool that easily provides an in-universe explanation for why certain traumas are being addressed when needed without coming across and clunky.

For someone who was sadly missing (kidnapped) during the training arc, quite a bit is revealed about Jazz during the Harvest Festival. During Walter Park, we learned that Jazz’s family values skill above all else, to the point where the weaker party is in the wrong no matter the circumstances, which is how his older brother is able to get away with being a living nightmare. In that arc, a lot of what was shown was how Jazz was treated, while this arc highlights the effects that treatment has. Their dynamic could be taken as simple sibling rivalry, but his first expression upon seeing the illusion of his brother speaks volumes, and there’s no getting around the description of Orobas’ ability specifying “greatest fears” paired with images of Jazz dealing with his brother. But just this alone doesn’t truly deepen Jazz’s character. No, it’s what finally gets him to react. He’s able to keep himself relatively calm under the onslaught of his brother’s antics, but as soon as he’s called inferior, he snaps. This harkens back to his family’s focus on skill, confirming the suspicions that Jazz doesn’t have a lot of value in his family, as it’s clearly something of a trigger for him. There’s also the implications of “version of me” to consider. Jazz doesn’t want to be thought of as lesser, but he also doesn’t want to be like his family. He’s shown to be a caregiver, acting as the older brother figure to the rest of the Misfit class out of his desire to be different from his brother. As a reminder, these are all illusions of Jazz’s fears, so that specific word choice comes from his own feelings, indicating a fear of not just being inferior, but also anything like his family.

Clara’s trauma was established early on during her introduction when the only way she could interact with others is if she gave them whatever they wanted in exchange, as if her company is only worth what can be gotten out of it. Since Iruma and Asmodeus are her first friends, it stands to reason that she’s gone her whole life prior to meeting them not forming close bonds with anyone outside her family, so it’s understandable that she’d fear losing that connection. While not much new information is given, this scene does help establish that trauma can be eased by friends and family, but not erased entirely.

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