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I'm seeing some confusion out and about over the title A Companion to Owls (generally along the lines of 'what have owls got to do with it???'), so I'd like to offer my interpretation (with a general disclaimer that the Bible and particularly the Old Testament are damn complicated and I'm not able to address every nuance in a fandom tumblr post, okay? Okay):
It's a phrase taken from the Book of Job. Here's the quote in full (King James version):
When I looked for good, then evil came unto me: and when I waited for light, there came darkness. My bowels boiled, and rested not: the days of affliction prevented me. I went mourning without the sun: I stood up, and I cried in the congregation. I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.
--(Job 30:29)
Job is describing the depths of his grief, but also, with that last line, his position in the web of providence.
Throughout the Old Testament, owls are a recurring symbol of spiritual devastation. Deuteronomy 4:17 - Isaiah 34:11 - Psalm 102: 3 - Jeremiah 50: 39...just to name a few (there's more). The general shape of the metaphor is this: owls are solitary, night-stalking creatures, that let out either mournful cries or terrible shrieks, that inhabit the desolate places of the world...and (this is important) they are unclean.
They represent a despair that is to be shunned, not pitied, because their condition is self-inflicted. You defied God (so the owl signifies), and your punishment is...separation. From God, from others, from the world itself. To call and call and never, ever receive an answer.
Your punishment is terrible, tormenting loneliness.
(and that exact phrase, "tormenting loneliness," doesn't come from me...I'm pulling it from actual debate/academia on this exact topic. The owls, and what they are an omen for. Oof.)
To call yourself a 'companion to owls,' then, is to count yourself alongside perhaps the most tragic of the damned --not the ones who defy God out of wickedness or ignorance, and in exile take up diabolical ends readily enough...but the ones who know enough to mourn what they have lost.
So, that's how the title relates to Job: directly. Of course, all that is just context. The titular "companion to owls," in this case, isn't Job at all.
Because this story is about Aziraphale.
The thing is that Job never actually defied God at all, but Aziraphale does, and he does so fully believing that he will fall.
He does so fully believing that he's giving in to a temptation.
He's wrong about that, but still...he's realized something terrifying. Which is that doing God's will and doing what's right are sometimes mutually exclusive. Even more terrifying: it turns out that, given the choice between the two...he chooses what's right.
And he's seemingly the only angel who does. He's seemingly the only angel who can even see what's wrong.
Fallen or not, that's the kind of knowledge that...separates you.
(Whoooo-eeeeee, tormenting loneliness!!!)
Aziraphale is the companion.
...I don't think I need to wax poetic about Aziraphale's loneliness and grappling with devotion --I think we all, like, get it, and other people have likely said it better anyway. So, one last thing before I stop rambling:
QSMP Actors AU where Quesadilla Island is the set of a reality TV show, except only the NPCs (and a handful of Islanders) know it's a TV show and the rest of them think it's 100% real.
Quackity knows because he's supposed to help guide the show in a certain direction if things get too chaotic / off-track, but he doesn't know everything the production team has planned.
Phil knows it's not real because he's observant and noticed the cameras & microphones on the first day. The crew lets him do his own thing and break the 4th wall because the audience loves that he's so self-aware.
Vegetta knows it's a TV show because he's been on other famous shows (cough, Karmaland) and he was invited by a member of the team (Rubius). He's under the impression that everyone else knows it's a TV show, but they're super in-character all the time.
Wilbur knows, but also thinks everyone else knows. He's MIA because he and his band had a tour-conflict nobody realized when signing contracts.
Fit knows it's a TV show because a rival production company that does Survival-esque shows (2b2t) sent him to check out their competition.
The crew genuinely doesn't know if Luzu knows or not.
Bad figured out it wasn't real but keeps forgetting because he gets wayyy too in-character.
Maximus knows because he's part of the crew. "Gordinho Gostosiho" is their way of interviewing the stars of the show without them realizing that they're on a TV show within a TV show.
I think it'd be really funny if the Brazilians and French legitimately crash-landed on the Island in the middle of filming and the producers were just like "This is great for numbers, let's leave them there and see what happens." (This would also mean Felps is "in the know" now because he hung out with the crew while he was "kidnapped." He just didn't tell anyone about it when he came back because he thinks it's hilarious).
ive exclusively been playing it by ear with the makeup (no tutorials or anything) and i somehow always end up looking like a secretary kind of so ive been practicing looking exasperated while wearing makeup cuz i figure i gotta work with what im given ya know
This is a little head cannon/What if Macaque had more original powers, a little more Starry Night dreamlike powers leaning into the more nurturing kind, you know, the moon and sun kind of powers? 🌙☀️
Maybe in the past, he was like a therapy friend to Wukong, someone he could really be himself with, vent, and tell his secrets without being judged in the safety of his own dreams. Someone he can truly trust, and that was Macaque.
Skip to Redemption Ark for Mac
Now he's a therapy friend to the whole MK team! (Against his will) They cuddle, pet, and vent to him with their problems. He's like one of Sandy's therapy cats, just bigger and grumpier.😾💕✨ he just has this way with people I guess
Okay, this is how it starts: Macaque and Wukong's first encounter was in a dream.
Wukong would not shut up about the pretty demon in his crazy dreams, often to his sworn brothers; he talked about all the fun and crazy adventures he'd have, the long meaningful conversations and jokes, and the occasionally moving pictures of otherworldly strong magical humans with sparkly eyes and spiky hair who wield giant weapons that shoots Fire called anime, and that this had been going on for a few months now.
This annoyed and concerned them; they think it's a demon trying to take over the Monkey King's mind or trying to brainwash him somehow, so Azure Lion and the Sworn Brothers all brainstormed together to devise a plan to somehow confront this tricky dream demon. Wukong doesn't want the fun dreams to end or scare off this other celestial monkey, so he decides to talk to his friend in his dreams. Wukong casually brings up the idea that the macaque should visit Flower Fruit and meet his sworn brothers! Macaque of course hesitates, not sure of the idea of traveling to an unknown island and meeting The Monkey King's questionable choice of sworn brothers, but of course, Wukong, sad and a bit offended, but he doesn't give up.
He decides to bring upon the Ultimate Weapon, begging and whining until Macaque crumbles and gives in, which eventually does. Mac reluctantly agrees to travel over to FFM in disguise, just to be safe he tells Wukong he'll be there. Within a month, Wukong couldn't be more excited; he was like a little kid waiting for Christmas day!
So this is what kinds of powers I think he should have.
😴 the first pic is crossing over to other people's dreams and making their experience life-like he has illusion magic so this makes sense to me. Wukong and macaque would prank the Brotherhood or play tags and hide and seek in their brother's dreams. 🌸The second pic is the soothing ability to calm one's nerves if they pet or cuddle him like a therapy cat,🐈 Wukong would groom him for hours to calm his nerves. now come copes with food🍑🍔🍭
🌸🎶I saved the best one for last the cute/sad little head Cannon I have
At the end of every dream Mac visits they would end it by dancing to music Mac would bring from the future laughing and stumbling while wukong slowly wakes up, wukong has always gone to bed early But now he goes even earlier to bed. Wukong always thought he was the luckiest monkey in the world he gets to have two Adventure and one of them is with his prettiest best friend Macaque 😚✨the monkey of his dreams.
🌸 Wukong couldn't truly dream of a world without his bestest friend🥰✨
IDK if you've ever said anything about it, but in the Lights Out AU, what was Wally's first reaction on realizing that Frank was alive and he wasn't alone anymore? I imagine it was...quite emotional
i Haven't talked about their Initial Reunion yet, no! but yes, it was very emotional! there were certainly many emotions!
namely: fear, confusion, shock, and nearly killing your friend with an oversized baseball bat <3
PSA: Please for the love of God stop using the word "cretin". It's a slur for people born with congenital hypothyroidism (CHT, that used to be called cretinism) that causes physical and intellectual disability.
I think it's unrealistic to expect a blanket moratorium on insults about intelligence, but words like "mong/mongoloid" (anti-Asian slur later applied to people with Down Syndrome), "spaz", "downie", "midget" and "cretin" refer to people born with specific developmental disorders. If you care enough not to use the "r–word", please steer clear of these as well.
thinking about steve getting kinda, sorta. jealous. that billy’s been with other guys while he, himself, has no experience in that area.
maybe it’s as they’re hanging out in steve’s room, a couple months or so into them fooling around and. they’re just lying there, on the bed. steve staring at that mark on his ceiling from when he threw a baseball in fourth grade only for it to come right back down and give tommy h a black eye and billy, well.
billy’s just talking. telling steve all about his- past endeavours. about those guys under the boardwalk and his friend who kissed him and stuck a hand down his pants when they broke into some dilapidated house to smoke shitty weed and that other guy who really knew what to do with his fingers if you know what i mean, stevie and.
steve can’t stand it anymore ‘cause. it sucks to think someone’s made billy feel better then he has, than he knows how to, so. he just-
“show me.”
it’s too sudden. too loud. even over the mixtape billy gave steve a week ago with the excuse that steve needs better taste.
and billy just sits there, eyes bugging out as a tinny guitar riff bleeds into the quiet of the room ‘cause. “what?”
and steve flushes a little. shrugs. “show me. teach me or whatever.”
“how to-”
“how to make you-” steve pushes his hair back. tries to make his voice sound a little less desperate. “i wanna make you feel good.”
and billy’s feeling kinda awkward himself so. he grins at steve. leers. drags his eyes up ‘n down. “man. i gotta put more effort in here. i mean, if you didn’t already know i was feeling g-”
but steve’s not having it.
“i wanna make you feel good. better than-” a pause. “those other guys.”
“you-” billy’s eyebrows shoot up. expression somewhere between incredulous and cat-who-got-the-cream. “you’re jealous.”
“jealous. ha.”
“you are.”
“i’m competitive.” steve levels him with a stare. nods once like that’s gonna make his point stick.
“uh huh.”
“it’s totally different.”
“right.” billy grins, unable to help himself. “so.”
“so.”
steve sits up. on his knees. leans forward, one hand on the bed beside billy’s waist and the other inching its way up beneath the hem of those shorts steve has a love hate relationship with.
“teach me.”
and it’s billy’s turn to flush. freckles fading beneath pink as steve’s index finger rubs circles just south of his hip. let’s out a stuttering breath that ends in yea’okay as he reaches up to pull off his tank. teeth making little indents in his bottom lip as steve stares.
and steve’s a good student, right? well. maybe not in class but. with billy laid out all pretty under him, touching. talking, well. steve’s pretty sure he could get himself an A+ on listening and attentiveness alone.
meta talk. i don't quite know how to word this properly, but adding french creators to the qsmp is the riskiest thing quackity studios could've done and it doesn't surprise me that the success to which it was executed was minimal.
adding portuguese speaking creators exclusively from brazil as the first batch outside of the initial english and spanish speakers was the perfect "soft expansion" for the server when you consider the reason for the project's conception - because quackity had experienced poor treatment from white americans as a bilingual latino creator and sought to unite his two communities in an empowering way, further expanding this very noble and personal idea to encapsulate all communities and all languages spanning across the entire world. inviting more latino creators who have likely had the same experiences and would be able to appreciate what the project is trying to achieve is a no-brainer.
it's an uncomfortable thing to touch on (which is why i've never, ever, seen it spoken about on this website), but minecraft projects and communities have always had massive problems with all forms of bigotry, but especially racism. white americans and white europeans have probably not felt the euphoria of seeing their culture celebrated in mainstream global entertainment projects as they already absolutely dominate the entertainment industry on a global scale. as someone who is visibly brown and living in europe, i've always got a lot of grief from classmates and co-workers in the form of ignorant jokes and flat out exclusion - it's an unfortunate cultural norm that bleeds into streaming due to the medium's casual and open nature, unnoticed or unchallenged by white viewers who don't want to have to confront a content creator's bigotry in fears of having to stop watching them. something that cannot be ignored by the people it's actually affecting. there is a reason dsmp and hermitcraft cosplay meet ups are dominated by pale skin.
i love the qsmp because its inclusion of latin american creators and quackity's selectiveness based on personal experience have largely (and i do mean largely, not entirely, but that's a discussion for another day) eliminated that problem.
the most prominent and succinct example i can think of is the photo of quackity's bedroom that was mocked countless times by his english speaking community and his bigoted english speaking friends when he streamed on the dsmp - when that photo was brought to the qsmp, forever, a fellow latino creator, was the first person to gently offer solidarity because he had come from the same impoverished latin american background. to me, and to a lot of minorities, that is what the qsmp is about. yeah, sharing languages in a minecraft server is novel, it's a fun way for americans who did poorly in high school to get back into learning spanish, but it stands for so much more when you're a racial minority. when your pleading in the dsmp fandom was drowned out and ignored for the entire duration of its run. when you're completely unrepresented in minecraft tournaments, and when known bigots are encouraged to participate in said tournaments to boost viewership because numbers are paramount. when you are finally seeing your culture appreciated rather than mocked on streams with tens of thousands of viewers all over the world as part of a massive project with a brilliant, engaging story.
it was obviously necessary to branch out of the americas at some point with what the project is attempting to achieve, but such a task is daunting when the next group you're inviting and their community probably do not have the capacity through personal experience to appreciate what the project stands for at its core in the same way the first batches do. can non americans all relate in discussions of the internet and entertainment industry being america and by extension english speaking centric? yeah, of course. but can white europeans relate when the only representation you have in said media revolves around harmful bigoted stereotypes? can there be a quiet solidarity between a white frenchman and a brown brazilian based on experiences with government, racial profiling, and online mockery? no. and in the landscape of livestreaming stupid jokes for entertainment alongside fast paced gameplay, these nuances are probably not going to be acknowledged.
in complete contrast to the solidarity exhibited between quackity and forever when discussing their poverty growing up in latin america, i have not forgotten and never will forget aypierre excusing his constant racist jokes aimed at the brazilians on his uniquely "french dark humour" that the brazilians, hurt by his comments, could "not understand." this is not an excusable cultural difference, but a symptom of white european privilege, and total ignorance towards what the project is meant to stand for. a smooth integration of all the world's cultures necessitates white european and white american introspection in a way that i haven't seen a lot of streamers capable of. admitting fault to such a degree and the ego of a large online personality do not often mesh well.
i'm always very irritated when people (especially english speakers) complain about them not "adding the germans" sooner despite us seeing applications for german speaking admins many months ago - because it would not be a task of simply throwing out server invites to content creators and cobbling together an animation of a submarine crashing into the island. you cannot downplay the ambition of this project and the mammoth task its trying to accomplish. people take for granted and forget that this is an unprecedented melding of cultures that would never otherwise interact and clash on the rare occasions they do. the french qsmp community being small and the french creators largely being outliers when it comes to the qsmp is not something born out of malice or purposeful exclusion, but simply a symptom of an unspoken lack of solidarity and inability to meaningfully relate based on everything from wildly varying privilege to global placement.
and don't get me wrong - i'm not excusing things like the times at which events are broadcast (i literally live in europe and have to stay up until sunrise to see most events, i think the admins do have to bite the bullet and begin structuring events around a new timezone that isn't the globally inconvenient unsustainable PST), or the exclusion of clips from french content creators at the presidential dinner, but i think attributing those admin choices to the brazilian community being unfairly favoured is downplaying what the qsmp as a project means for minorities, especially when the brazilian community receive the most scorn for infamously being the first to call out bigoted behaviour from qsmp content creators. yeah, it sucks that the french haven't slotted into the qsmp as well as the brazilians and aren't anywhere as numerous, but with all these unspoken contributing factors being taken into account, i can't be surprised.
i wish quackity and his team the best in smoothly integrating more languages and cultures in this amazing project in the future, but for the love of god please understand that the implications of this project and its impact are far larger than any streamer "drama" you might've witnessed in the past. and stop underplaying what this project is trying to achieve in an online landscape saturated in bigotry.
Every so often I give fanfic writing a try not bc I think I'll ever post anything but to remind myself that writing is fucking hard thank you fanfic writers for doing this so I don't have
You know what I’m fucking tired of? People assuming Kirk is still on hard drugs or has a disability just because of the way he talks and expresses himself. Any real fan knows Kirk has social anxiety and it shows the most in interviews, especially ones that are vulnerable and require him to reflect on things. It’s harder for him to speak in certain interviews based on the topic and situation he’s put in. He has good days and bad days like everyone else. It’s not the easiest for him and that’s okay! We should be here to support and encourage him. Instead, people were making all kinds of shit jokes and disrespectful comments under the clip they posted on ig from Kirk’s So What interview. (Metallica even turned off the comments now)
Kirk is an extremely emotional person and I’m sick of people making fun of how he naturally is. He’s very sweet and doesn’t deserve this. I’m the same way as Kirk and I relate to him so much about being introverted and awkward when talking to others. It’s stupid that people don’t realize that not everyone speaks well in front of a camera. Plus it is even more nerve wracking for him because he knows this interview will be viewed by LOTS of people. That can lead to him being more anxious too. People need to stop being so damn ignorant and learn to shut their mouths. It’s sad there’s no human decency or kindness. Just because he’s famous doesn’t mean he has no feelings or care about things people say. I’m sure it affects him deeply.