So I Just Found The Most Useful Photo Album In Existence For Tumblr Arguments

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Ah

One Piece and Minecraft

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HELL YES!

Awhile ago @ouidamforeman made this post:

This shot through my brain like a chain of firecrackers, so, without derailing the original post, I have some THOUGHTS to add about why this concept is not only hilarious (because it is), but also...

It. It kind of fucks. Severely.

And in a delightfully Pratchett-y way, I'd dare to suggest.

I'll explain:

As inferred above, both Crowley AND Aziraphale have canonical Biblical counterparts. Not by name, no, but by function.

Crowley, of course, is the serpent of Eden.

(note on the serpent of Eden: In Genesis 3:1-15, at least, the serpent is not identified as anything other than a serpent, albeit one that can talk. Later, it will be variously interpreted as a traitorous agent of Hell, as a demon, as a guise of Satan himself, etc. In Good Omens --as a slinky ginger who walks funny)

Lesser known, at least so far as I can tell, is the flaming sword. It, too, appears in Genesis 3, in the very last line:

"So he drove out the man; and placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." --Genesis 3:24, KJV

Thanks to translation ambiguity, there is some debate concerning the nature of the flaming sword --is it a divine weapon given unto one of the Cherubim (if so, why only one)? Or is it an independent entity, which takes the form of a sword (as other angelic beings take the form of wheels and such)? For our purposes, I don't think the distinction matters. The guard at the gate of Eden, whether an angel wielding the sword or an angel who IS the sword, is Aziraphale.

(note on the flaming sword: in some traditions --Eastern Orthodox, for example-- it is held that upon Christ's death and resurrection, the flaming sword gave up it's post and vanished from Eden for good. By these sensibilities, the removal of the sword signifies the redemption and salvation of man.

...Put a pin in that. We're coming back to it.)

So, we have our pair. The Serpent and the Sword, introduced at the beginning and the end (ha) of the very same chapter of Genesis.

But here's the important bit, the bit that's not immediately obvious, the bit that nonetheless encapsulates one of the central themes, if not THE central theme, of Good Omens:

The Sword was never intended to guard Eden while Adam and Eve were still in it.

Do you understand?

The Sword's function was never to protect them. It doesn't even appear until after they've already fallen. No... it was to usher Adam and Eve from the garden, and then keep them out. It was a threat. It was a punishment.

The flaming sword was given to be used against them.

So. Again. We have our pair. The Serpent and the Sword: the inception and the consequence of original sin, personified. They are the one-two punch that launches mankind from paradise, after Hell lures it to destruction and Heaven condemns it for being destroyed. Which is to say that despite being, supposedly, hereditary enemies on two different sides of a celestial cold war, they are actually unified by one purpose, one pivotal role to play in the Divine Plan: completely fucking humanity over.

That's how it's supposed to go. It is written.

...But, in Good Omens, they're not just the Serpent and the Sword.

They're Crowley and Aziraphale.

(author begins to go insane from emotion under the cut)

In Good Omens, humanity is handed it's salvation (pin!) scarcely half an hour after losing it. Instead of looming over God's empty garden, the sword protects a very sad, very scared and very pregnant girl. And no, not because a blameless martyr suffered and died for the privilege, either.

It was just that she'd had such a bad day. And there were vicious animals out there. And Aziraphale worried she would be cold.

...I need to impress upon you how much this is NOT just a matter of being careless with company property. With this one act of kindness, Aziraphale is undermining the whole entire POINT of the expulsion from Eden. God Herself confronts him about it, and he lies. To God.

And the Serpent--

(Crowley, that is, who wonders what's so bad about knowing the difference between good and evil anyway; who thinks that maybe he did a GOOD thing when he tempted Eve with the apple; who objects that God is over-reacting to a first offense; who knows what it is to fall but not what it is to be comforted after the fact...)

--just goes ahead and falls in love with him about it.

As for Crowley --I barely need to explain him, right? People have been making the 'didn't the serpent actually do us a solid?' argument for centuries. But if I'm going to quote one of them, it may as well be the one Neil Gaiman wrote ficlet about:

"If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization." --Robert G. Ingersoll

The first to ask questions.

Even beyond flattering literary interpretation, we know that Crowley is, so often, discreetly running damage control on the machinations of Heaven and Hell. When he can get away with it. Occasionally, when he can't (1827).

And Aziraphale loves him for it, too. Loves him back.

And so this romance plays out over millennia, where they fall in love with each other but also the world, because of each other and because of the world. But it begins in Eden. Where, instead of acting as the first Earthly example of Divine/Diabolical collusion and callousness--

(other examples --the flood; the bet with Satan; the back channels; the exchange of Holy Water and Hellfire; and on and on...)

--they refuse. Without even necessarily knowing they're doing it, they just refuse. Refuse to trivialize human life, and refuse to hate each other.

To write a story about the Serpent and the Sword falling in love is to write a story about transgression.

Not just in the sense that they are a demon and an angel, and it's ~forbidden. That's part of it, yeah, but the greater part of it is that they are THIS demon and angel, in particular. From The Real Bible's Book of Genesis, in the chapter where man falls.

It's the sort of thing you write and laugh. And then you look at it. And you think. And then you frown, and you sit up a little straighter. And you think.

And then you keep writing.

And what emerges hits you like a goddamn truck.

(...A lot of Pratchett reads that way. I believe Gaiman when he says Pratchett would have been happy with the romance, by the way. I really really do).

It's a story about transgression, about love as transgression. They break the rules by loving each other, by loving creation, and by rejecting the hatred and hypocrisy that would have triangulated them as a unified blow against humanity, before humanity had even really got started. And yeah, hell, it's a queer romance too, just to really drive the point home (oh, that!!! THAT!!!)

...I could spend a long time wildly gesturing at this and never be satisfied. Instead of watching me do that (I'll spare you), please look at this gif:

I love this shot so much.

Look at Eve and Crowley moving, at the same time in the same direction, towards their respective wielders of the flaming sword. Adam reaches out and takes her hand; Aziraphale reaches out and covers him with a wing.

You know what a shot like that establishes? Likeness. Commonality. Kinship.

"Our side" was never just Crowley and Aziraphale. Crowley says as much at the end of season 1 ("--all of us against all of them."). From the beginning, "our side" was Crowley, Aziraphale, and every single human being. Lately that's around 8 billion, but once upon a time it was just two other people. Another couple. The primeval mother and father.

But Adam and Eve die, eventually. Humanity grows without them. It's Crowley and Aziraphale who remain, and who protect it. Who...oversee it's upbringing.

Godfathers. Sort of.

It starts like this:

Cody stops dead in the middle of the hall, passkey tumbling from his fingers to clatter on the deck. Everything is grey and white and grim, and his armor is white white white without any markings at all. There’s an ache in his brain, a tremble in his hands, and not even the mercy of momentary amnesia to blunt the realization of what he’s done.

He remembers, vivid, vicious, the way it felt to take aim at Obi-Wan, the way he pulled the trigger. Remembers the fall, the look of surprise, the satisfaction. Remembers, too clear, what happened on the planet below just this morning, and the Rebel cell they put down, leaving no survivors.

There were children down there, he thinks, and feels sick to his stomach when before he’d only felt vague distaste.

Cody doesn’t know what happened. Doesn’t understand. There was the Emperor’s voice, the order—execute traitorous commanding officers, reliant on Palpatine’s verbal command alone—but…he doesn’t know how that became kill the Jedi, all the Jedi.

The 501st marched on the Temple. The 501stmurdered every child in the crèche.

Cody staggers, knees giving way. He stumbles into the wall, grabbing desperately for something to hold him on his feet, but there’s nothing. His stomach turns, and bile bubbles in the back of his throat as his vision wavers towards darkness.

Hells, but what have they done?

Instinct more than willpower pushes him back to his feet, gets him standing even as the world lurches. Cody thinks of his men, of the rest of the 212th, and has to swallow hard. He took casualty counts after they stormed the Rebel base. He saw the list of numbers marking the men who died, and all he felt was satisfaction at an operation successfully executed. No care for those under his command, his brothers. No thought for the lives cut short as anything other than statistics. And—it was him, it was him and Cody knows that, but what the hell was he even thinking? What was he doing? How could any part of him take that, accept that, and not even bother to spare a moment to grieve?

Cody’s breath hitches hard in his chest, not a sob but a close cousin, all tangled up with horror and remorse. All he has is slow-burn anger, the hotter burn of tears behind his eyes, and he aches.

His general is dead. His general is dead because Cody killed him, and Cody has spent the last two years serving an empire that declared every Jedi a traitor and burned the Republic to the ground.

A sob breaks through the quiet of the night-shift ship, loud and ragged and desperate, but it’s not from Cody’s throat. His head snaps up, and in an instant he’s moving, practically running down the corridor and around the next bend of the hall. There’s a figure in featureless armor slumped in the middle of the walkway, and Cody has one horrifying second where he can’t tell who it is. He looks and he doesn’t know, because the blank white armor is nothing but plastoid,

not even a hint of paint to set it apart from every other trooper on the ship. Hands are scrabbling at the helmet, hauling it off, but even that doesn’t help. Regulation haircut, no tattoos—they’re not allowed them, aren’t allowed any marks of individuality. Or maybe they just don’t want them, and that’s a thousand times more chilling to consider.

But—

But.

That gasping breath, that hitched sob. Cody remembers, because he’s the one who had to deliver the news of Waxer’s death in friendly fire. He’s the one who sat up for night after night, letting his brother cry into his shoulder, shaking, broken.

“Boil,” he says, and Boil chokes, shakes.

“We—we killed them,” he says, ragged, ruined, and Cody closes his eyes, reaches out. Hauls Boil in, clutching him close like he did after Waxer’s death, and tries not to think about how Boil’s face is just like every other clone’s, indistinct and unremarkable. How, ten minutes before, Cody would have thought of him by his CT number and seen nothing wrong with it, and Boil would have answered without so much as a second thought.

Cody doesn’t who which them Boil means. There have been far too many bodies left behind these last two years, too many victims. Too many Jedi, and Cody wants to shake, wants to curl up with Boil somewhere dark and hunker down until this all fades away, until they wake up, until it’s all a dream and it’s not real.

“Yeah, vod,” he says, and the name is unfamiliar on his tongue after two years without speaking it, clumsy and rough and half-forgotten. No brothers, in the Empire. Just soldiers. “We did.”

“It was us,” Boil whispers. “It was us but it wasn’t.”

There was something. Something that changed them. Not a lot. Not enough to take away memories or thoughts or training. But—they faded, after Order 66. They conformed. They let their generals and admirals do the thinking, took orders, followed them. there was nothing left of the individuals behind the identical faces, and no trace of the desire to find them.

Maybe that’s the most insidious thing of all. Whatever controlled them, it stripped away all thought of wanting to be people and not just weapons to be aimed and fired.

“Kriff,” Cody breathes, and digs his fingers into Boil’s hair. Sits back on his knees, lightheaded, and realizes that he’s shaking. He’s trembling, so hard he couldn’t aim a blaster even if he was pressing it against the side of his own head. And—maybe that’s a more tempting thought than it’s ever been. Maybe he would try, if he didn’t have Boil in his arms, coming apart.

Boil’s gauntlets scrape the plastoid of Cody’s armor, dig in. The sound that shatters out of is throat is almost a laugh, and he buries his face in Cody’s throat.

“Never heard you swear before, sir,” he manages.

Cody chokes on a breath, breathes out something that might be a chuckle in a kinder universe. “I was saving it,” he says, “for a time when it felt right.”

No need to say that that time is now. It’s obvious. So clearly, achingly obvious.

Boil’s words break into a sob before he can even get them out, and he digs his fingers into Cody’s armor like he’s going to try and claw his way through. “Waxer,” he breathes. “Waxer would shoot me himself, with what we did. He’d have executed me.”

Cody wants to argue, wants to protest. Waxer was kind. He was the kindest soul Cody ever met. But—

He thinks of Waxer, and then he thinks of Rex. Rex, lost during the Siege of Mandalore, dead and burned and gone, but if he could see Cody now—

Cody wouldn’t even deserve the mercy of a quick death, but Rex would probably give it to him anyway. And Cody wouldn’t even try to protest, knowing—everything.

It wasn’t them, but it was.

Cody doesn’t know what changed them, has even less of an idea what changed them back. But there was a change, there was something, and he knows it, feels it, sees it.

They’ve got their names back, and even if it’s much too little and far too late, they’re going to have to make the most of it.

.

(Or maybe it starts like this:

There’s a storm outside lashing the windows, but there’s always a storm on Kamino. There’s blood on the floor of the lab, a body, but Te Tinu can’t feel regret, can’t feel remorse. Not for this, not ever.

Her hand is steady on the blaster, unwavering as she presses it to the center of Nala Se’s chest. One hand on the weapon, her other on the computer, and she’s been studying for half a decade now to know how to do precisely this. The command is multilayered, delicate, precise, but Te Tinu is a scientist just as much as she’s a Rebel.

The Empire hasn’t reached its claws into Kamino yet. Nothing much has changed. But Te Tinu has seen the outside world, has watched the clones she grew from genetic material be born and raised and ruined, every shred of personhood stripped away.

Te Tinu is a scientist just as much as she’s a Rebel. They were creating souls in this lab, and Nala Se stripped all of that away with one organic chip, all for the sake of credits.

“You won’t be allowed to do this,” Nala Se says, coldly furious, but she keeps her hands raised, her body still. Her eyes are arctic, but Te Tinu meets them defiance, with hatred, with the resentment that she’s kept buried all these many, many years.

There are guards coming. That’s fine. Te Tinu never planned to leave this laboratory alive.

“You made your army, Nala Se,” she hisses. “You made your army and then you destroyed them. You stripped them of value, of meaning, for credits. You are the one who should have been stopped long ago.”

The computer chimes, the program loaded. Te Tinu smiles, even as Nala Se’s eyes widen.

“Look,” she says, and shifts just enough that Nala Se can see the holograms. The systems, the code she’s added, the command. “Look at this, Nala Se. Look at victory.”

“This isn’t victory, this is madness,” Nala Se tells her, but Te Tinu just smiles.

“It is a victory for science,” she corrects, and tips her head. “A victory for the Rebellion, too.”

Nala Se’s nostrils flare. “You will be slaughtered before you can take one step from this lab,” she says. “And I will undo every last piece of your shoddy work, Te Tinu.”

“Ah,” Te Tinu says, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her before the threat. “That would be most inconvenient, wouldn’t it? I spent so long on this, after all.”

Nala Se registers what she’s about to do half an instant before Te Tinu pulls the trigger. She always was the smartest person in any given room.

Coldly, Te Tinu watches her body collapse, long limbs tangling, bright blue blood seeping out across the tile. Deftly, she holsters the blaster, checks that the other scientist is equally dead, and turns back to the computer. There’s a thump against the door, a raised voice, but Te Tinu ignores it, focusing on her program. The biochips implanted in the clone armies are as flawless as any other aspect of Kaminoan design, for all that they’re meant for a fundamentally flawed purpose, so they’re almost impossible to disrupt. Te Tinu doesn’t need to disrupt them, though, just…change their current function.

The pre-encoded orders can’t be stripped away, replaced by new ones. It would be like reprogramming the chips from the ground up, but they’re already active, already working. A soft reboot is what’s needed, and Te Tinu’s program will do just that.

There’s no more Chancellor to pass out orders. He’s the emperor now, and the coding in the chips is quite specific. Without the direct title of Supreme Chancellor, Palpatine’s commands will mean as little as anyone else’s.

A weakness, though Nala Se never would have termed it so.

The door of the lab shudders, creaks. Te Tinu doesn’t look back, types in the last set of commands and activates them.

There’s a long, long moment as the blood pools and the door groans and someone speaks loudly, quickly, fiercely, so very unlike a Kaminoan.

Then, soft, the computer beeps.

The chips reset.

Te Tinu smiles, even as the door gives way. She turns to face the Defense Force, one hand going for her blaster, the other hitting the button that will trigger a wipe of every computer in the lab and leave them unable to reverse her work.

“For science,” she says, and raises the blaster, taking a graceful step forward. “For liberty.”

The Defense Force fires, but they’re already far too late.

Te Tinu dies with a smile on her face, bright blood on the floor of the lab, and regrets nothing but the time it took to make it here.

She’s won.)

.

Or maybe, maybe, it starts like this:

Cody looks around the room, at the figures there, at the familiar faces. At the same face, repeated, and some have scars to set them apart, some have old tattoos, but most don’t. Most of them have lost their markers, their names. Most of them have been turned into nothing but puppets for a greater cause. Puppets for a cause they once gave their lives to stop.

Cody looks around the room, at the remnants of Ghost and Torrent and the Wolfpack, at trooper after trooper who woke up this morning with the desperate, horrified realization of what they became. Of what they did, and how their hands were forced, and how they killed their generals, killed civilians, killed for an empire that destroyed them.

His hands are still shaking. They haven’t stopped since he remembered himself.

Cody wishes, dearly, just for a moment, that he had Rex at his back again, or Wolffe. But they’re both dead, and probably better off for it. He can’t imagine what Rex’s reaction would have been to the massacre at the Temple. To the fact that the 501st was used to do it.

Jesse is sitting in the corner, side by side with Boil and Wooley. They’re tangled together, grieving together, and it’s only seeing them like that that makes Cody realize how long it’s been since he saw any brothers touching. Not something deemed essential to performance, and so it was quietly shunted away.

Cody breathes, and breathes, and still his hands won’t stop shaking.

It’s Neyo, of all the troopers, who steps up beside him. He curls a hand around Cody’s shoulder, and—

Oh, Cody thinks, and has to swallow. It’s been a hell of a long time since anyone touched him, hasn’t it? Before Neyo, before Boil—he can’t even begin to remember.

“Breathe,” Neyo says, short, curt, but not unkind. “We all know we’re going to do something. The only question is what.”

Cody was a marshal commander, once, before the empire rose. Back when he could think clearly enough to be a commander, rather than just another follower. He knows strategy, and he knows tactics, and he knows how to prioritize what has to be done over what he wants to do. And yet—

He can’t make that decision here. Looking at the identical, unaltered faces, the unchanging grey uniforms, the plain white armor, all he can think is that he wants to burn the whole damned cruiser down around them and be done with it.

The break room is empty of anyone who isn’t a clone. The other officers don’t come here, don’t care. The clones make good obedient drones, who work well without supervision and don’t need a firm hand to maintain their fanatic belief in the Empire. Or at least, that’s how it was. That’s how it’s been for two years now.

Cody doesn’t care. In this, at least, it’s valuable, because it lets the clones gather without anyone thinking things are off.

He leans forward, elbows on the table, trembling hands clasped. Tries not to think too hard, tries not to dwell, but—

“It’s all of us, now?” he asks Neyo.

Neyo pauses, mouth tightening. Cody pretends not to see the way he presses his fingers tight against the numbers tattooed beneath his eye. “As far as I could tell,” he says roughly. “I contacted three other clone commanders on different cruisers, and they’re all…”

“Awake,” Cody supplies quietly, because that’s the only word for it. They were in a daze, these last two years. Dreaming, maybe, trapped in a nightmare. Now they’re all awake, but unlike with a dream, they have to deal with the fallout now.

Neyo grimaces, but doesn’t argue. “We don’t even know what happened,” he says, and there’s a thread of anger to it. “Or if we could go back.”

Back to sleepwalking, placid and loyal. Back to the haze of not caring, not being. Cody breathes out, and it shakes, but—

With rage, this time.

“We might not know how, but we know who,” he says tightly. “Only one person benefitted from us becoming…that.”

“So what are we going to do about it?” Sinker, at the next table over, asks roughly. His eyes are red, and Boost is nowhere to be seen.

The Wolfpack shot Plo Koon out of the air over Cato Neimoidia, fired on him from behind and brought his fighter down in a ball of flames. Until yesterday, every last one of them was proud of that fact.

Cody closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to look at Sinker’s face, his once-white hair grown in dark again, because individuality was another thing stripped from them alongside their free will. So that he doesn’t have to think about firing on Obi-Wan, and watching him fall, and feeling glad to have carried out an order.

They all murdered their generals. The only people in the galaxy who ever tried to fight for them, who ever treated them like people in their own right, and he and his brothers slaughtered them right down to the last youngling.

Cody’s going to be sick. But—later. When he can lock himself in his bunk and be weak, just for a little while.

Right now his brothers need him.

Forcing his eyes open, his breathing back under control, Cody looks up. He meets Neyo’s eyes, then Sinker’s, and smiles. It’s a rictus, death’s-head grin, full of teeth. “Glory to the emperor,” he says. “Long may he reign.”

Like, I knew shepherding was a boring job

but these guys really had nothing better to do

A message from what some might consider a ghost.

 A commanding voice no one has heard in eighteen years booms through the holonet, disrupting signals, heard in every corner of the galaxy; a swift and sure blade, ready to strike through the heart of the Empire. 

“This is Jedi Knight, General Anakin Skywalker of the Republic Clone Army. I have a message for Sheev Palpetine, our so-called ‘Emperor.’ Time is up, old man. It doesn’t matter how powerful you think you are, or how many guards and sith apprentices you surround yourself with. I’m going to burn you and your Empire to the ground.”

It ends as abruptly as it began. 

And the galaxy quakes.

Happy APAHM and here’s a poem comic about my experiences being trans and Chinese I did in three days for my English class! 

TTWTT I.... bootiful, just bootiful.

catch, and release

Some romantic subplots do not need conflict, per-say.

What do I mean?

I mean if you have a bigger story with a ton of stuff going on, a romance could be a place of rest to the character. A nice, stable relationship. That is only threatened when the big bad lobs a grenade at them and they need to fight over who jumps on it.

*Sobs forever*