thinkin bout that ask neil got. “why can’t aziraphale make the paint stain go away?”
“i would know it was there”
on the surface, it doesn’t make sense that it would be any better for crowley to make it go away. aziraphale can’t change the fact that he knows the paint stain was there whether he’s the one who disappears it or not.
you could suggest there’s some magic thing going on. like crowley is ‘better’ at cleaning. there’s no real indication that this is the case; while crowley tends to be tidier by nature, aziraphale acknowledges that he could make it go away, but he would always know it was there.
so the problem is that it was there in the first place.
brian had a really interesting suggestion, which was that maybe aziraphale feels like crowley got them into that situation, so he feels like crowley should be the one to take care of the consequence (the stain). i suspect that aziraphale probably does feel that way - just a little earlier in the episode, he’d been placing the blame for losing the antichrist squarely on crowley, which is why they’re here, in this mess. and although i’m sympathetic to all the things crowley was going through that led him to dump the antichrist with the nuns and leave ASAP, i can also understand why aziraphale would feel like it was no fault of his, because hell didn’t give him the baby, he didn’t even know it was coming, and he had no practical way of finding out they were following the wrong boy.
i know people are internally screaming “no livi, it’s obviously just because aziraphale wants crowley to do nice things for him!” i know you’re screaming that because it’s the same thing i scream internally every time someone tries to find a practical reason for why the stain can’t just be miracled away or why aziraphale can’t just remove his own chains. but look, what i’m saying is exactly the same thing, just with more history and rationalizing behind it. aziraphale cares about his relationship with crowley, and wants to be reassured that crowley still cares about him, too, so it’s more meaningful for crowley to “undo” the situation that he, according to aziraphale, got them into. it’s…it’s like an apology of sorts. and i think crowley knows this, which is why he shoots aziraphale that distinctive affectionately-exasperated look.
i mean, in a real life situation, if your partner spills something of yours by accident - let’s say they tripped and bumped into a table with a glass on it - you probably wouldn’t hold a grudge against them for that. mistakes happen. but you’d probably feel much better if they said “oops, sorry, i’ll help you clean up” than if they said “oops, you take care of it.”
so what “i would know it was there” really means is “i’m hurt that this happened at all.” and by removing it, crowley is essentially saying “i’ll make it as OK as i can.”
I have this headcanon that Crowley is indeed “better” at miracling stains away/repairing damage because he’s a Starmaker, and as such he miracles not just matter/space, but also time, and even when it isn’t primarily a time miracle, like his time stops, mucking around with time along with matter will come naturally to Crowley (because they’re one to him, they’re space-time), so the Crowley in my head repairs things by undoing, rewinding the damage, and thus, in a manner of speaking, the stain wouldn’t have been there. Kinda like, the matter the coat is made of “forgetting” about it?
But, not reblogging to disagree at all, just to add further thought, and another one of those is… Like, it’s about the favour, isn’t it? It’s about Crowley doing a nice thing for Aziraphale, and I think that goes without any further requirements to make it meaningful. It doesn’t even have to be sorta Crowley’s fault the stain got there, or Crowley doesn’t have to be better at miracling away stains, no, I mean… Aziraphale is saying he’d always know the stain was there, that he’ll always keep the bad memory anyway. But with Crowley miracling it away, the memory is no longer a bad one. No, the bad memory gets, like, overwritten with a much better one, one of Crowley doing Aziraphale a favour, entirely for the purpose of making him happy. This is a very nice memory to keep, so even if Aziraphale won’t ever forget about the stain, now it’s a positive memory, and he’ll remember it as long as he keeps the coat (and probably well beyond that). Does that make sense?
My take on it is this: Aziraphale has a pattern of regarding miracles as “cheating.” He doesn’t want to do “real” magic, because it’s more of a challenge to do it the human way. He doesn’t want to miraculously know French, he wants to learn French like a human does. He goes to a barber to keep that same haircut he’s had for millennia instead of miraculously styling it himself. He doesn’t want to make his clothes out of the ether the way Crowley does, he wants to buy them and meticulously care for them by hand, the human way.
But if Crowley does the thing for him, he doesn’t feel like he’s cheated. He doesn’t have to feel guilty about using a frivolous miracle/doing something he isn’t supposed to, either. A more extreme example of this kind of rationalization is when he suggests that Crowley should kill the Antichrist so that Heaven (and more specifically Aziraphale, acting as Heaven’s proxy) isn’t culpable.
At the same time, yes, I think it’s because he loves Crowley and likes the idea of Crowley doing kind things for him. But I think it’s also an example of Aziraphale’s just-a-bit-of-a-bastardness coming out, and an example of how he rationalizes things to himself. Let Crowley do the thing, he’s a demon and he doesn’t have to be held to the same moral standards as an angel!
(NB: I adore Aziraphale and I’m not saying this to bash him at all. My read on him is that he is a good person at heart and desperately wants to do the right thing, but he’s also very complicated, and that’s a big part of why I love him so much.)
it’s so strange to me to see how many people in the fandom simply aren’t aware that crowley doesn’t like queen, and that’s a big part of why it’s so funny that they’re pretty much all he’s been able to listen to since the 1970s.
like. nothing against people who do like queen, but our demon boi does not.
Do we know whythe Bentley turns everything to Queen? He’d had that car for decades before Queen even existed. Before Queen, did the radio stations all, say, turn to Bluegrass in the Jazz era? Was it a punishment, or has his radio always been haunted? Did that just happen when he installed his first 8-track player? If it was the former, what transgression did he commit that this was inflicted on him? Or was it just an inexplicable phenomenon resulting from his gayness for Aziraphale? Like the Bentley just absorbed the radiated gayness for decades and now is expending all the pent up gayness in the form of Queen music, like the body releases excess chemicals through its pores, because Queen music is the most pure expression of that gayness. Does it play Queen because Crowley expects it to, and so it does? And what first caused him to expect such an odd occurrance? Could he not convince himself otherwise and cause it to stop?
I just….I have so many questions.
It’s not just the Bentley. All tapes left in any car for more than a fortnight turn into Best of Queen. So, canonically, every person in the Good Omens Universe with a car faces this problem, not just Crowley (though he gets the most angry about it and notices it more than most other people). You do pose a good question, though: what did it turn into before, if anything?
i mean, we don’t actually ever see it happen to anyone else, it honestly could just be that Crowley believes it does, even he knows he unconsciously influences reality
ido want to know when it started though
That’s true! We don’t actually know that it happens to anyone else. The line in the book says that it’s alltapes left in acar, implying any and all cars, but we also know the narrator isn’t a fully reliable one. We can assume it happens to everyone else and no one else pays enough attention to know or care except Crowley and a select few others. Or it could be, like you said, only happening to Crowley, and he just assumes it’s a problem everyone faces.
Personally, I think Crowley probably heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” one too many times and was like, “You know, this shit is so annoying. You know what would be even more annoying? If everyone who was dumb enough to leave their tapes in the car too long had to listen to it.” And he forgot he is someone who is dumb enough to leave his tapes in the car too long, and has had to listen to it ever since. So…at least since 1975, since that’s when that particular song was released.
I’m personally of the opinion that Crowley doesn’t hate Queen so much as he just can’t stand listening to it anymore. He would like to be able to have other options when it comes to music, but it’s been several decades and now he’s pissed.
I think this is a joke which makes more sense to those of us who are older, and possibly of British location (I’m Australian but a lot of things extend to here from the UK). To me it’s funny because back when we had tape players in cars, it was highly likely the car you were in HAD a Best of Queen tape in it, it was just… ubiquitous.
So the thought that it used to be a different tape and just transmogrified over a period of time was both funny and plausible. I always took it to be all cars, and also that yes, Crowley definitely doesn’t like Queen because he’s heard it so many times (like lots of other normal humans who wonder how this tape ended up in their car when they don’t remember buying it).
tl;dr it’s an early 90s joke which makes sense to people who were adults at that time. Cassette players man, what a concept.
Yes, exactly! It’s a funny little bit that not only got lost in translation from book to screen, but is also a relic of the time when the book was written. It was meant to be one of those very relatable annoyances in life that are funny to explain through supernatural means, like the fabled portal to an alternate dimension in the laundry room where all your missing socks end up.
It feels like more of an absurdist non-sequitur in the show, especially since there is absolutely zero attempt to explain what’s going on. By all appearances, he’s just an unfathomably ancient demon who happens to blast thematically appropriate Queen songs wherever he goes.
listen I see your headcanons about Aziraphale loving sweets and cakes and pumpkin spice lattes with extra shots of syrup and what have you and that’s valid but consider:
Aziraphale takes his tea with no sugar
the two things that Crowley is specifically mentioned consuming in the book are angel cake and cocktails made from date palm liquor which, based on my extensive research, is basically the most appallingly sugary-sweet alcohol mankind has ever managed to produce
therefore I present the following counterpoint: Aziraphale does not have any particular fondness for sugary things (though he enjoys a bite of something sweet now and then), but Crowley has the world’s worst sweet tooth and tries (very very badly) to conceal this.
like, Crowley isn’t quite sure why, but he feels like he should be ordering coffee blacker than his soul
(which, like, he probably should stick to darker coffee because the lighter a coffee roast, the more caffeine it has and like, the poor thing’s got bad enough anxiety as it is, he doesn’t need to add high doses of caffeine to his system, but that’s neither here nor there)
but also like…. he Hates it, but insists on ordering it, because espresso strong enough to melt your intestines seems like the sort of thing the human Anthony J. Crowley would drink, so he gets it and he hates it and all he really wants is some double whip sugary caramel frappe Starbucks-y monstrosity that’s loaded with more sugar and dairy than your average milkshake and he’s staring sadly down at his ultra-concentrated cold brew cup of Bitterness™…
…only for Aziraphale to sigh and say “oh dear, this candy apple latte really seemed like the thing at the time, but it’s a great deal too sweet for me. You wouldn’t mind swapping, would you, dearest?” and hitting him with the big eyes like Crowley’d be doing him such a favor if they swapped drinks…
…and Crowley tries not to look too relieved, and gives a big put-upon sigh. “All right, angel, I guess I could take it off your hands”
and so Crowley gets his sugary-sweet disaster of a drink that barely even qualifies as coffee at this point because it’s more whipped cream than beverage, and Aziraphale hides his grin behind a calculated sip of the triple-concentrated espresso hell-drink
post-canon i really want crowley to let his sweet tooth flag fly and just make himself every kind of brownie that never seem to get stale and pour infinite sugar in his pale, milky coffee while aziraphale gags in the distance and still manages to be in love with him.
This is beyond valid and straight into Ultimate Truth.
I continue to search Tumblr for only the finest of Crowley metas and this one surely qualifies!
Something that’s been very interesting to me, in this new wave of post-miniseries Good Omens fandom, is the apparent fannish consensus that Crowley is, in fact, bad at his job. That he’s actually quite nice. That he’s been skating by hiding his general goodness from hell by taking credit for human evil and doling out a smattering of tiny benign inconveniences that he calls bad.
I get the urge towards that headcanon, and I do think the Crowley in the miniseries comes off as nicer than the one in the book. (I think miniseries Crowley and Aziraphale are both a little nicer, a little more toothless, than the versions of themselves in the book.) But maybe it’s because I was a book fan first, or maybe it’s because I just find him infinitely more interesting this way–I think Crowley, even show!Crowley, has the capacity to be very good at his job of sowing evil. And I think that matters to the story as a whole.
A demon’s job on Earth, and specifically Crowley’s job on Earth, isn’t to make people suffer. It’s to make people sin. And the handful of ‘evil’ things we see Crowley do over the course of the series are effective at that, even if the show itself doesn’t explore them a lot.
Take the cell phone network thing, for instance. This gets a paragraph in the book that’s largely brushed off in the conversation with Hastur and Ligur, and I think it’s really telling:
What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.
In essence, without any great expenditure of effort (look, I’d never say Crowley isn’t slothful, but that just makes him efficient), he’s managed to put half of London in a mental and emotional state that Crowley knows will make them more inclined to sin. He’s given twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or half a million people a Bad Day. Which, okay, it’s just a bad day–but bad days are exhausting. Bad days make you snap, make you fail at things, make you feel guiltier and more stressed out in the aftermath when you wake up the next day, makes everything a little worse. Bad days matter.
Maybe it’s because I’m a believer in the ripple effect of small kindnesses, and that means I have to believe in its opposite. Maybe it’s just that I, personally, have had enough days that were bad enough that a downed cell network (or an angry coworker because of a downed cell network) would honestly have mattered. But somebody who deliberately moves through the world doing their best to make everyone’s lives harder, with the aim of encouraging everybody around them to be just a little crueler, just a little angrier, just a little less empathetic–you know what, yes. I do call that successful evil.
It’s subtle, is the thing. That’s why Hastur and Ligur don’t get it, don’t approve of it. Not because Crowley isn’t good at his job, but because we’ve seen from the beginning that Hastur and Ligur are extremely out of touch with humanity and the modern world and just plain aren’t smart enough to get it. It’s a strategy that relies on understanding how humans work, what our buttons are and how to press them. It’s also a strategy that’s remarkably advanced in terms of free will. Hastur and Ligur deliberately tempt and coerce and entrap individuals into sinning, but Crowley never even gets close. We never see him say to a single person, ‘hey, I’ve got an idea for you, why don’t you go do this bad thing?’ He sets up conditions to encourage humans to actually do the bad things they’re already thinking of themselves. He creates a situation and opens it up to the results of free choice. Every single thing a person does after Crowley’s messed with them is their own decision, without any demonic coercion to blame for any of it.
You see it again in the paintball match. “They wanted real guns, I gave them what they wanted.” In this case, Crowley didn’t need to irritate anybody into wanting to do evil–the desire to shoot and hurt and maybe even kill their own coworkers was already present in every combatant on that paintball field. Crowley just so happened to be there at exactly the right time to give them the opportunity to turn that fleeting, kind-of-bad-but-never-acted-upon desire into real, concrete, attempted murder. Sure, nobody died–where would be the fun in a pile of corpses? But now forty-odd people who may never have committed a real act of violence in their entire lives, caught in a moment of weakness with real live weapons in their hands, will get to spend the rest of their lives knowing that given the opportunity and the tiniest smidgen of plausible deniability, they are absolutely the sort of people who could and would kill another human being they see every single day over a string of petty annoyances.
Crowley understands the path between bad thought andevil action. He knows it gets shorter when somebody is upset or irritated, and that it gets shorter when people practice turning one into the other. He understands that sometimes, removing a couple of practical obstacles is the only nudge a person needs–no demonic pressure or circumvention of free will required.
I love this interpretation, because I love the idea that Crowley, who’s been living on Earth for six thousand years, actually gets people in a way no other demon can. I love the idea that Crowley, the very first tempter, who was there when free will was invented, understands how it works and how to use it better than maybe anyone else. And I really love the idea that Crowley our hero, who loves Aziraphale and saves the world, isn’t necessarily a good guy.
There’s a narrative fandom’s been telling that, at its core, is centered around the idea that Crowley is good, and loves and cares and is nice, and always has been. Heaven and its rigid ideas of Right and Wrong is itself the bad thing. Crowley is too good for Heaven, and was punished for it, but under all the angst and pain and feelings of hurt and betrayal, he’s the best of all of them after all.
That’s a compelling story. There’s a reason we keep telling it. The conflict between kindness and Moral Authority, the idea that maybe the people in charge are the ones who’re wrong and the people they’ve rejected are both victim and hero all at once–yeah. There’s a lot there to connect with, and I wouldn’t want to take it away from anyone. But the compelling story I want, for me, is different.
I look at Crowley and I want a story about someone who absolutely has the capacity for cruelty and disseminating evil into the world. Somebody who’s actually really skilled at it, even if all he does is create opportunities, and humans themselves just keep living down to and even surpassing his expectations. Somebody who enjoys it, even. Maybe he was unfairly labeled and tossed out of heaven to begin with, but he’s embraced what he was given. He’s thrived. He is, legitimately, a bad person.
And he tries to save the world anyway.
He loves Aziraphale. He helps save the entire world. Scared and desperate and determined and devoted, he drives through a wall of fire for the sake of something other than himself. He likes humans, their cleverness, their complexities, the talent they have for doing the same sort of evil he does himself, the talent they have for doing the exact opposite. He cares.
It’s not a story about someone who was always secretly good even though they tried to convince the whole world and themself that they weren’t. It’s a story about someone who, despite being legitimately bad in so many ways, still has the capacity to be good anyway. It’s not about redemption, or about what Heaven thinks or judges or wants. It’s about free will. However terrible you are or were or have the ability to be, you can still choose to do a good thing. You can still love. You can still be loved in return.
And I think that matters.
It’s also worth noting that when Crowley gives people means and opportunities to make a bad choice, that doesn’t take away from them the ability to make a good choiceinstead.
If people were only offered one possibility to act, it would make their sin less meaningful, it would make Crowley’s work less meaningful. But for those who actually decide to not go and yell at their secretary because the phone network being down has been rougn on their nerves, it’s also an effort that becomes meaningful in the right way.
So, yeah, I really agree on all of this, especially the part about free will. That’s what is essential in both Crowley and Aziraphale’s characterizations, and it’s at the very core of the story.
You know what? This makes me want to see a story where Aziraphale and Crowley are actually incredibly good at their jobs. They’ve been on Earth all this time and they really are the most effective field agents Heaven and Hell have - never mind if that effectiveness is cancelled out by the arrangement.
When Crowley and Aziraphale go rogue, someone has to fill in for them. After all, there’s still a job to be done, even if no one anticipated having to do it. However, whoever the new agents are - whether they’re a new principality and a new demon of equivalent rank or a small team of Angels and arch-angels against a little squad of imps - have nowhere near the level of “success” that the previous two did. They don’t understand Earth, humans, or free will, and they’re about four thousand years away from being at the same place the Ineffable Husbands were when they made the arrangement.
I want to see Heaven and Hell, who laughed and sneered at their earthly agents, come to realize just how valuable they were. I want the sweet satisfaction of the two sides missing Crowley and Aziraphale as a jealous ex misses you after you’ve long since moved on.
Aha yes, the reaction of Heaven and Hell alone would be priceless !
I agree with the OP 110%. Crowley is notbad at his job, he’s fucking brilliant at it. But he doesn’t do this 1-on-1 crap like in the old days. He’s become a Logistical Nightmare of Efficency in the most nightmarish of hellish sense. He sows discontent and malaise through thousandsof souls at a time, not just a handful who happen to be near by.
If anything, if you really didn’t want to classify Crowley as “evil”, he’s a Trickster God. He’d hang out with Loki and Papa Legba.
He just sets up the pieces and lets Humainty choose how they want them to tumble. He gives you the choice to do right, but is right there to point out how much worse/fun being bad will be. All for the the low, low price of your soul. And yes, maybe he sort of pads his success by picking people already leaning into their darker inclinations (again, see the Paint Ball into Live Ammunition), but it’s also why he always seems so disapointed when they come up with things before he can even suggest them (see the “animals” in the Bastille, see the “stupid Nazi spies” in WWII). An argument could be made he’s disapointed they got there before he could. But it’s cool, because he’ll take the credit anyway.
Heaven and Hell are absolutely going to notice both Crowley and Aziraphale’s absenses, eventually, though maybe in a human generation or two. Not right away, they’re slow to catch up. And that’s what’ll make Our Side victorious.
It makes me a bit nuts when either A or C are considered incompetent. If they actually sucked at their jobs, either one would have been replaced ages ago, because in addition to taking credit for human things, someone is doing the blessings and temptations each side asks for.
But Crowley is that bit better because he takes initiative. He invents ways to get people to sin. And he’s willing to put in hard work if necessary, as when he went out at night to move markers for the M25.
Not only are they very good at their jobs, they’re very good at each other’s job! That’s the whole point of the Arrangement, that both are capable of pulling off blessings and temptations.
You know at some point Crowley was out there giving Aziraphale lessons in How to Tempt Humans, mostly for his own amusement, and probably waaaay before the Arrangement crossed his mind, because he’d never suggest it if he didn’t already believe Aziraphale capable of matching his skills. And Crowley must have done enough good miracles on his own for Aziraphale to be confident he could pretend to be an angel without giving in to his chaotic/trolling tendencies or else he’d never have agreed to it.
What you did to the M25 was a stroke of demonic genius, darling.
You know, it’s just occurred to me that, presumably, Crowley had to prepare these acetates himself. I just find the thought of him tracking down the OHP pens and acetate, painstakingly tracing the map (little forked tongue sticking out?), and writing the caption under it as neatly as he can, endearingly hilarious.
Every part of this is endearingly hilarious and someone should give him his Wahoo!
Also, the handwriting is sort of semi-calligraphy, the kind people who are trained in calligraphy use when they want to be neat but lazy (and also don’t have the right kind of pen). This just feeds into my headcanon that Crowley has awesome Gothic Font Calligraphy skills developed from writing soul contracts in the Middle Ages, but he doesn’t use them any more because it’s too hard.
Anyone remember those promotional flyers at nycc that gave Crowley’s contact info as Aziraphale’s bookshop?
It implies he’s easier to find there than anywhere else. Just, yeah, have people ask your not-enemy if you’re around, that’s not weird or potentially dangerous for both of you at all
Crowley, making fucking flyers asking for help finding the anti Christ:
“Seems about right, somethings missing tough…”
The part inside Crowley that makes him go to watch children’s Saturday morning cartoons in cinema after he got dumped:
“Put a little cartoon baphomet on it!”
Crowley: “PERFECT”
Wait so are we just supposed to bring all 11-year-olds we find to a SoHo bookshop?
Idk this sounds like the set up to an absolutely hilarious accidental dads scenario (to which autocorrect suggested I meant accidental sass but I assure you all the sass from the abandoned 11-year-olds following Crowley around like a train of ducklings will be absolutely intentional).
Is there anything more iconic in Good Omens than David Tennant driving a flaming Bentley down an English road while Bohemian Rhapsody plays?
Possibly, but it’s still an awesome moment.
Especially when our lanky demon steps out, swaggering like an action movie star here to save the day, giving the one-liner he clearly spent half the journey thinking up: “You wouldn’t get that sort of performance from a modern vehicle.”
I wrote “In Love with My Car” because Crowley loves his car, period. It’s his home, in a way his flat never really is. When filming it’s final destruction, David Tennant’s only acting direction was: you are the Doctor and you just saw the Tardis destroyed. (Side note: that is the perfect kind of direction to give DT, not because he used to be the Doctor, but because he’s a huuuuuge Doctor Who fanboy and has probably written that fanfiction.)
Now, I learned more than I really ever thought I’d need to know about vintage cars while researching this story, but for those who have not, in the book Crowley has a 1928 Bentley, and on the show a 1933. This is rather a big difference.
I mean the ‘28 is cute and all. It’s like an old timey cartoon of a car. If I saw one of these on fire driving down the road, I’d be like “no, that’s fair, I expected that.”
The ‘33 is, if nothing else, much more in line with modern ideas of what a cool car should look like. Graceful, curving, solid. This was a car that was made to have good performance - above average, but you know, not German automobile levels - but also made to make you look rich and awesome in a decade where most people were not.
But book or TV show, it does NOT change the fact that Crowley loves the Bentley. Perhaps even more so in the book - like scroll back up and look at that thing. It’s like a sports-tractor. Book Crowley is very concerned with always having the latest, coolest flashiest things, yet he has a car that looks like it frequently gets outpaced by snails. Even TV Crowley, with his fondness for mementos and antiques, is constantly changing and updating his look to match the height of cool in every era, and the vintage Bentley look probably peaked in like the 1960s in the James Bond era.
What I’m saying is, if the point was to just look cool, both Crowleys would probably be driving some model of Jaguar at the very least.
But also in both - though you can obviously see it better on the show - the Bentley performs like a modern Jaguar (or, whatever). Like, Crowley shouldn’t be able to do 90 in Central London for the simple fact that a vintage Bentley can’t reach those speeds. The ‘33 could, as its max speed, under ideal circumstances which included “going downhill” and “perfectly smooth and straight road.” But Crowley drives it, screeching up the road, handling corners perfectly, at speeds that would make any driving instructor pass out.
But the Bentley is the Best Car. Crowley knows this, believes it, feels it in his soul. So when other cars start getting better, the Bentley does too, to match them. No fancy foreign Ferrari is going to outperform his awesome Bentley!
There’s been a lot written about how Crowley interacts with the spaces in his apartment. He keeps everything clean and open and minimalist, because space is such a luxury in Hell. He shouts at his plants because he’s reliving the abuse he suffers in Hell, and the rejection he received from Heaven.
The Bentley, though, represents the face he shows the world. Dark and powerful and cool and a little out of place but full of so much unmistakable style that really you have to question what every other car is doing wrong by not being a Bentley. This is exactly the kind of being Crowley wishes to be. The kind that turns every head when he comes in a room, the kind that always handles everything with effortless grace and style, the kind that everyone makes space for and just watches pass in utter awe.
Even when he talks to the car, primarily during the bits where it’s on fire, he’s encouraging it, telling it how good of a car it is, how it can do this utterly insane thing that it really, really can’t. It’s the complete opposite of how he treats his plants (degrading and berating them when for every tiny failure), because while the plants represent a part of himself he’s trying to distance himself from, the Bentley allows him to be who he wants to be.
And that is something that he would never, ever exchange for any other vehicle.
Anyway, you can read more about my thoughts on Crowley’s thoughts on his car in my fanfiction, “In Love with My Car” over on AO3!
(Note to readers: looking like a very good chance of no update this week. I will post this evening with current progress on my upcoming stories.)
woke: the nazis recognized crowley because he was working for british counterintelligence
also woke: crowley didn’t actually know exactly when and where aziraphale’s book deal was going down, he just had a vague idea, so he’d been busting into churches at random for about the past month and a half, hopping around on his burning feet, and each time he did it he Loudly announced his entrance like “here comes anthony j. crowley to save the day!” because he had a whole plan, he was gonna be so suave, but it was never aziraphale, and he ended up interrupting several other clandestine nazi meetings so that word got around in nazi circles of anthony j. crowley, the weird hopping church guy, and then when he finally did happen upon aziraphale’s deal, he was just so incredibly happy to see his angel that he completely forgot his smooth introduction, but the nazis recognized him as the weird hopping church guy so they did it for him.
Also he absolutely thinks “here comes Anthony J Crowley to save the day” is a smooth introduction.
Also Aziraphale would also think it was a smooth introduction so it works.
A scene from Ineffable Penguin’s OA3 fic “Villainous” great fun, go check it out. @ineffablepenguin I couldn’t decide shirt on or off so I did both. :)
(and just to be REALLY CLEAR, I love them both. But the differences are fascinating, since it’s the same author adapting his work after almost 30 years. And how often do you get to see *that*?)
Crowley
Okay. So Book!Crowley is healthy.Just, absurdly well-adjusted. This is a man (demon) just happywith who he is and where he is in life. Sure Hell is annoying, but they mostly leave him alone, and he’s supposed to do paperwork, but… doesn’t. (They never check on the other end, it’s fine.) Aziraphale might be a little hung up on Heaven & similar, but he’s coming to his senses. Slowly. It might be another couple thousand years. But Crowley can wait.
But Show!Crowley is *trying* so very hard. To be cool, successful, appreciated. Book!Crowley gets an award for the M25 motorway, Show!Crowley gets blank stares and stupid questions. This is someone who wants recognition, who wants love, and isn’t getting it. He’s erratic and fragile, kind of chip-on-his-shoulder, and part of this is David Tennant himself (who has never *once* played a character I would describe as “emotionally stable.”) But part of it is the way Show!Crowley is written.
I’m thinking of the paintball scene where Aziraphale calls Crowley “nice.” Book!Crowley rolls his eyes and says, “All right, all right.Tell the whole blessed world, why don’t you?” (”Yes, angel, I know, but I’m on the clock right now and my boss is not happy.”) Show!Crowley, well. Memorably slams Aziraphale into a wall with, “SHUT IT. I’m a DEMON. I’m not NICE. I’m never NICE. NICE is a four-letter word.” @everentropy has a very nice meta about Crowley’s issues with the word nice, but no matter how you slice it, this says (loud and clear) that Show!Crowley is notcomfortable with his softer side. Not even a little bit. He is “Cool Demon Crowley” because at least that’s safe.
The terrified houseplant joke also gets a different varnish in the show. In the book, it’s as if Crowley skimmed a magazine, read an article about talking to plants, read anotherarticle about the benefits of screaming into pillows, and then sort of combined them? This comes right after the joke about Crowley’s speakers (which his expensive sound system doesn’t have, because he wasn’t aware it *needed* speakers). This makes “threatening the houseplants” feel more like an “angels and demons trying to understand humanity, but subtly missing the point” sort of joke.
But on the show it’s more sinister. In Crowley’s big moments of pain and anguish, he is surrounded by those plants. With the show-specific “de-motivational” posters lining Hell, I think it’s fair to day that Crowley treats his plants this way because that’s just how he thinks motivationworks.That’s how it works inHell.
Show!Crowley is real danger of saying “Screw it. These jokers (Hell) (Aziraphale) don’t APPRECIATE what I do. What is the point of any of this. I’m OUT.” And then, actually leaving.
Aziraphale
Book!Aziraphale is a little mysterious. We don’t spend *that much* time inside his head, and the time we doget mostly revolves around his books. But we do learn that his taste in books is kind of… subversive. Here’s an angel who likes to collect books of prophecy (accurate and inaccurate) and bibles with printing errors. Aziraphale says he’s loyal to the Great Plan and the Word of God and all that, then turns around and attributes the entire book of Revelations to bad mushrooms. And when he’s drunk, he turns into a clever little rules lawyer. Nope, Book!Aziraphale has absolutely been Doubting Heaven, sneakily, for a long time. And he lays on the angelic Sweetness and Light a little thick for Crowley’s benefit.
Book!Az is tough, and a little ruthless. He’ll do things like glare at customers, and scare mobsters away from his shop. Killing the Antichrist is his plan, not Crowley’s. But Show!Az is just pure sweetness, and pure light. There’s no part of him that isn’tthe sugary lemon meringue frosting you get on the surface. And the show makes it veryclear that that is strength. You don’t have to be tough to be strong.
And that’s the difference. The 1990 novel was about questioning authority, questioning structures, questioning whatever role society hands you. The Antichrist just… refuses to be the Antichrist, and that saves the day. Crowley is our model: neither angel nor demon, critical of both, happy in his own world. Az is the one who needs to finish shaking off his programming. And when I was a teenager, that was exactly what I needed to hear.
But now… Adam says that Satan cannot punish him, because Satan did not love him first. This series is about the terrible risks of loving, and the strength that comes from being honest, being vulnerable (”I’m just a kid” “That’s not a bad thing to be.”) The importance of letting yourself be known.Show!Az and Show!Crowley switch bodies at the end. How much more *known* can you get?
But, it’s hard. It’s so hard for both of them. It’s hard for Crowley to take down all his defenses, and publicly acknowledge that he would rather die than never talk to Aziraphale again. And it’s hard for Aziraphale to stay sweet and pure and emotionally honest, and in love, because it can hurt so much. But they do it. It’s worth it. And that’s the message I needed now, Mr. Gaiman. Thank you.
Okay, but, do you know what we’re not talking about enough? The body swap scene.
So, in my opinion, the mark of a good plot twist is that you shouldn’t see it coming the first time around, but the second time through, you should wonder how you possibly missed it. The body swap scene is that 100%.
David Tennant plays Aziraphale-as-Crowley almost identically to how he plays Crowley. The exceptions are marvelous to watch – seeing the Bentley is my favorite, when Aziraphale-as-Crowley smiles more broadly and easily than Crowley ever lets himself until the end dinner at the Ritz be still my heart.
But in Hell? No discernible difference. The swagger is there. The casual seeming disregard for the danger he’s in. Seriously, the energy of his entrance when he’s brought into the courtroom is identical to his “Hi, guys” in the graveyard at the beginning.
I love this. Because it’s how Aziraphale would play it. Hell doesn’t frighten Aziraphale the way Heaven does. Demons are, in his book, straightforward. He just has to out-intimidate them, and Crowley already does that. So be Crowley, and that’ll do the deed. And he knows Crowley well enough to pull it off without a single hesitation. The only time it felt even slightly not-quite-right (in terms of not questioning that it was Crowley) was the utterly amazing little nose wrinkle. And I’ll forgive Aziraphale that – he knows he’s won; he can gloat a little.
But MICHAEL SHEEN, FRIENDS.
Crowley-as-Aziraphale is a completely different story because Crowley is not as good at the facade as Aziraphale is.
He almost is. When Crowley-as-Aziraphale is getting dragged away by the angels? That reads as Aziraphale 100%. But in the park with Aziraphale-as-Crowley? In the bookshop? And especially in Heaven opposite the angels? That is so obviously Not-Aziraphale that I DO NOT KNOW how I missed it the first time through. And that is a testament to Michael Sheen’s talent.
Aziraphale is a being who shows emotion with his entire self. He is never still, not his hands, not his body, not his face. Everything he is feeling plays out across every inch of him. He is effusive and genuine and has no idea how to push away any emotion even a little bit.
Think of all the other times we see him in Heaven! He’s nervous, he’s anxious, he’s flustered, he’s doing that thing with his voice and his face when confronted with these beings who genuinely terrify him. He can’t hide it.
But Crowley is all too familiar with pushing down emotion. Crowley is guarded, he is caution personified, he reserve and preservation, and with his angel’s life in his hands, on Heaven’s home turf? He can’t shake that.
Crowley-as-Aziraphale is so still. His face, his body language, his posture, it’s all this perfectly calm facade hiding a smoldering fury that Aziraphale might be incapable of achieving. But when Crowley-as-Aziraphale is confronted with the angels and see how they treat his soulmate best friend, he cannot hide that fury. It’s in his eyes, his face, his voice. But Michael Sheen-as-Crowley-as-Aziraphale plays it so well because it comes across as Crowley-as-Aziraphale saying to the angels, You broke him. You pushed him too far and you broke him and this is what it looks like, and you should be terrified.
And it’s all so perfect, and they’re both so talented, and I don’t think we talk about it enough.
And – Aziraphale is good with details, with getting all the little puzzle pieces to fit. Crowley is a big picture demon. He has imagination. He has sharp leaps of insight that leave everyone else behind.
I love how Crowley and Aziraphale are different kinds of intelligent. They’re both super smart and idiotic at the same time, but in different ways and it’s beautiful.
Aziraphale is book smart. He knows obscure facts, history, literature, math. He can do calculations and understand Old English easily. If you give him enough time, he can analyze situations well and come up with an excellent strategy. Remember, he was the one who realized something went wrong with the baby swap, and he wasn’t even there when it happened. He’s also the first to suggest being at Warlock’s birthday party and works out all the details about the Antichrist.
Yet he can’t pick up on sarcasm to save his life, walked right into the trap the Nazis had set for him, and thinks Major Milkbottle is a real person.
Crowley is street smart, or social smart. He can read a room and think on his feet. When Aziraphale is confronted with angels, he turns into a stammering mess, but when Crowley is confronted with demons, he comes up with an escape plan on the spot. He may not know whether ducks have ears or who Agnes Nutter is, but he can tell when someone is lying or doesn’t have good intentions. He knew which kid was the Antichrist despite never having seen any of the Them before, that the war was still on despite the Horsepersons disappearing, that Greta wasn’t who she said she was, and who to bribe for his M25 plan. He can also read and understand Aziraphale better than anyone else. And that’s not even getting into his ability to keep up with and use the latest technology, design, music, and fashion.
They may both be idiots, but they’re also intelligent in ways unique to them, and it makes them perfect for each other.
It is another way they make a brilliant team, actually.
Exactly. It’s even visible in their lying / self-defence styles (which are essentially the same thing in the context of Heaven/Hell). Aziraphale cannot handle any deviation from the “script” and is easily flustered, but he always has a script and just the right wording to go along with it to avoid appearing inconsistent. So, when presented with something unexpected, he especially feels the pressure of not being allowed to get it wrong. Hence all the nervousness. For him, preparation is a “crutch” that he thinks he wouldn’t manage without. Yes, it makes him feel more comfortable, but, as evident from several scenes at the end, he’s also capable of improvising.
Sometimes that improvisation has hilarious consequences, though: for instance, in the “sorry, right number” scene, when he’s so overwhelmed by his sudden discovery that he ends up blurting out the truth instead of coming up with a more conventional (and far less suspicious) way to end a phone call (therefore, you could say that the “phone call” script has failed due to the high anxiety levels :D).
On the contrary, Crowley is naturally comfortable with improvisation. He’s capable of remaining cool and collected. He lies confidently, sometimes even smugly. Unlike Aziraphale, he doesn’t trip himself up by practicing phrases and, therefore, cutting off other potential escape routes. He trusts himself to figure out the right thing as he goes.
And one more ironic thing. Crowley is careful and calculating when needed, but not even once did he thought to question Aziraphale’s odd behavior after their Tadfield outing and doubt his words. Why? Because he’s trusted Aziraphale for thousands of years. Because, intuitively, Aziraphale is not someone to whom words like ‘suspicion’, ‘deception’ can apply. If the roles were reversed, I don’t think Aziraphale would suspect Crowley of something like this either, but remarks like ‘You are a demon. That’s [lying] what you do’ prove that he doesn’t discard this fact (possibility) altogether. Yes, again, intuitively he knows that it’s Crowley and that he would trust Crowley with his life, so this is basically Aziraphale trying to convince himself of things (in this case, suspicions) he doesn’t feel, but it’s still something that goes through his mind (as a cautionary tale, a warning if you like) and enters his speech. What he does here is apply conventional, “safe” scripts to reality and repeat them from time to time to ensure they are not forgotten and/or overlooked. They are also what he bases his defence against Heaven on.
As noted earlier, Crowley is good at developing ideas from scratch. Whereas Aziraphale, it seems, is more likely to operate in the established context. His creative (and ultimately world-saving) interpretations of ineffability (more evident in the book rather than in the series) are a proof of that. In a way, he simply doesn’t have the luxury of discarding anything he’s been taught and coming up with something different. He has to function within the system to survive. And so he does.
I like to think this is why the Arrangement worked so well for them, too. If they traded jobs not at random, but according to their unique skills, they’d get better results than doing everything themselves (aside of the benefits of not doing the things at all that would cancel each other out or only one having to travel). By their different intelligence types and ways of thinking, there will naturally be tasks that are easy for Crowley, but difficult for Aziraphale and vice versa. I imagine Aziraphale will be great at following along with the tasks that come with a more detailed script, while still bending the rules given in the assignment into something more desirable for him. Likewise, Crowley improvises all the time. A vaguely worded assignment will probably stress out Aziraphale, because he doesn’t know what is expected of him, but Crowley will strive on the freedom of interpreting it as suits his ideas. On the other hand, given too much freedom to be creative, Crowley will end up with one of those ridiculous complicated schemes that backfire on him as much as on everyone else. I can’t see that happening to Aziraphale. It’s not just that they balance each other out as friends/partners in a social context; they also really make a great working team.
If they played out their individual strengths right, they don’t only get to avoid some of their work, they also get better results. I don’t think this is something they’ll have been able to do from the start, they’d have to get to know each other’s working style and strengths first, but the Arrangement was on for a full thousand of years. Aziraphale is rather a good analytical thinker. Crowley is creative and puts in lots of effort to get the best credit he can while putting in the least amount of work possible. They’d figure out who does what best eventually.
It’s also something I think would give them an edge in a post-canon confrontation, should it come around. Not only do Heaven and Hell not really know them very well, but both of them also have lots of experience doing each other’s job, bending the rules and thinking outside the box. Heaven and Hell would be facing an angel who has been doing temptations for a millennium. A demon who knows how to do a blessing so well nobody ever caught on. Their (former) superiors don’t really know what they’re up against.
