Chapters: 9/14 Fandom: Malevolent (Podcast) Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships:

Ma modeste contribution en ce funeste mois

I miss when everyone on my dash listened to Welcome to Night Vale so there’s be a good chance that on any ole day someone would reblog a quote that would grab me by the throat and forcibly ascend me to a higher plane where I understood myself and the universe better and with more kindness but also a little spook

We'll have the first results of the French legislative election in 5 hours. On the off chance that someone who reads this is still on the fence, go vote for whichever candidate isn't RN.

I love people at grocery stores.

I have been looking for ground coriander for an embarrassingly long time. I have moved my cart out of the way 7 times for people who actually know where stuff is. I move to the side, looking thoughtful so people know that they should say “excuse me” and grab what they need instead of waiting.

Someone stands beside me. They stand beside me for a couple of minutes, which is 10,000 years in grocery store time. “What are you looking for?” I ask. “I’ll look for yours if you’ll look for mine, we’ve been standing here long enough to look at everything except what we’re looking for.” They almost immediately find my ground coriander, and I find them their ground whit poor.

I go up to two young women. “Excuse me, I know this is weird,” immediate suspicion, “I know you don’t work here,” relaxation, “but do you have any idea where the crushed tomatoes would be? It’s not in with all the other canned tomatoes.” Relief. And I’ll be damned but it was in the pasta aisle like they said - turns out, there’s more overlap between “tomato” and “tomato sauce” than you would think.

I am 5’5”, looking at something on the top shelf. A man about my height stands next to me, looking up. I ask him which one he needs. He knows more English than I know Spanish, but we end up mostly doing charades. I scoop our [cereal, soup? can’t remember] off the top shelf using a packet of spaghetti I picked up earlier as leverage.

I love you, everyone I’ve met at the grocery store.

I was right

I am not trying to ruffle any feathers, but I have to say this before Season 2 comes out, so I can act smug when I’m right. Here is my number one prediction for Good Omens Season 2:

There won’t be a voice-over.

Now hang on. I know it’s a controversial opinion. Let me explain.

I have noticed that virtually every adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s books has some sort of voice over, either diagetic (like Going Postal, where it’s part of the framing device) or non-diagetic (Hogfather). And I get it ! If you’ve read any of the Discworld book and have this weird brain quirk where a part of you is always thinking about how this would translate on screen, you’ve probably noticed two things:

1. There’s visual humour in text form. How ? This man was a genius and a will be missed forever.

2. There’s so much that just can’t be translated on a purely visual level. The footnotes! Should we just leave the footnotes out ? They’re so great! They add so much to the world in general. There are running jokes that only appear in the footnotes ! Should we just accept that it won’t make it to screen ?

Yes. I’m sorry, but yes. Some things will be lost. Maybe you can integrate one of these jokes as recurring background events ? A lot of people are not going to notice though. There’s an expectation that the reader will read all of the words, while the viewer may not see all that’s happening on screen (although, to be fair, you will be noticing new puns on every re-read for years in the case of the Discworld).

(In comparison, adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s work are less prone to voice over. If I remember correctly, Coraline didn’t have one. Sandman starts with a bit of voice-over from the main character, but nothing more after that. I don’t remember any in American Gods. MirrorMask has left me nothing but the memory of a fever dream, so I can’t be sure. )

This is not to say that the voice-over in season one was pointless. It establishes the tone, to start with. If you remember, the opening narration is about the age of the Earth, in which we learn that it was created on the 21st of October, 4004 B.C., and therefore learn its star sign. It’s a good way to show that yes, there are angels in this, and demons, and the garden of Eden, and if you want to think too hard about this, they’ve got you covered. But if you think that these depictions are either blasphemous or religious propaganda, it might be a good time to learn to take a step back (and a joke, in my personal opinion).

But there are definitely instances of narration that would never have happened if season 1 wasn’t a book adaptation. I am thoroughly convinced that Dog’s experimentation with chasing and being chased by cats would have been screen only. Maybe a scene. Maybe something happening in he background. Who knows.

And here’s the thing. Season 2 isn’t the adaptation of a novel. I remember a tweet by Neil Gaiman about how he and Pratchett had a sequel plotted out, but even that isn’t season 2. According to the same, tweet, Season 2 is how we get there.

My number 2 prediction is that there will be a an intense heist scene during which Sadie and Dottie both try to steal some incriminating letters unbeknownst to each other.

I have reopened the webshop and art-for-sale at tomgauld.com and added a few new drawings: www.tomgauld.com/art-for-sale

@oloreandil et moi étions sur la même longueur d'onde, @sometimes-gloriousstudent a confirmé, j'étais donc obligée :

And for the record, it does go perfectly.

Listening to these people talking themselves into doing the one thing they've been warned not to do is HILARIOUS. Well, maybe we SHOULD go down Copland Road...

desperate times and measures and so forth, to be fair, but if the entity living in my eyeballs after getting catapulted there from a magic book who’s familiar with various otherworldly shit that I just found out existed earlier that day said they had a bad feeling about going into a dilapidated house in an isolated clearing, I would not go into that house