me, reading aloud a post i just saw on a Queen fanblog: okay but Aziraphale and Crowley are ‘car friend/gay who can’t drive’ solidarity
my roommate, Amias: bold of you to say Crowley can drive
me: him having a car is literally critical to the plot of the book
Amias: doesn’t mean he can drive.
me: are you saying Crowley’s belief that he can drive is the only reason he can?
Amias: yes that’s exactly what i’m saying.
me: if he suddenly was deprived of occult powers and got into a car he’d be like “what the fuck is this”? that’s what you’re saying?
Amias: yes!! look, he goes 110 miles an hour in the middle of London and things rearrange themselves around him, he couldn’t pass a traffic test if his life depended on it. crowley can’t actually drive he’s just doing magic constantly
me: …somehow you’ve convinced me
Tag: good omens
yfip: anthony j crowley
- has owned the same car for like 70 years & only put gas in it once to get a james bond window sticker
- exercises a regime of terror over his house plants
- criticizes other demons despite being the worst demon ever
- charged into a burning building to save his supposed enemy
- thinks gluing coins to the sidewalk qualifies as demonic evil
- quotes action movies when stressed
it kinda bothers me that people harp on about az’s insensitivity in that infamous “especially not to you” scene? like, sure, he was being thoughtless, it should be obvious that crowley can feel love, but you have to consider the fact that crowley actively plays along, acts like he really can’t (“nope, can’t sense a thing”). even before that, he denies good actions repeatedly and tells az he’s being sensitive. idk, I agree that az’s oblivious, but cruel? It’s not like they don’t both have biases?
I think this is a fair observation. Aziraphale isn’t cruel. I think what he is is self-absorbed. Consider the fact that Aziraphale was disappointed that the apocalypse was happening, but not entirely persuaded that the Earth was worth stepping out of line to save until Crowley pointed out how Aziraphale personally would suffer should the Earth disappear (No sushi, no bookshops). He’s rude to customers because they threaten his personal hobby (taking his books). I think the only really “nice” thing he does is at the very end when he decides to sacrifice himself for a random handful of humans. But he doesn’t do it because he’s cruel. He does it because he focuses on what’s around him to the extent that it affects him, and his ability to shut himself up in his shop where he wants to be. I think this is a rather dramatic character development; Aziraphale goes from “bummer, I guess Earth is going to be destroyed, I wish it weren’t but oh well” to literally frantically body-hopping to get out of Heaven to try and stop it.
I think you’re right that Crowley’s own veiling of his feelings is partly responsible for Aziraphale’s failure to notice when he deviates from typical demonic behavior, such as feeling love. Especially towards the beginning of the book, Aziraphale strikes me as being much less inclined to challenge the status quo than Crowley, and would put less critical thought into things that contradict his current worldview. So he would write off odd behavior rather than considering that it might be evidence of something he’s not aware of. Again, he wouldn’t do it because he’s stupid or purposefully mean, but rather because he just sort of…doesn’t think he needs to analyze it all that much i guess? So Crowley would have to do something really, bluntly irregular to get Aziraphale to take note of it. Which he doesn’t want to do, because he’s trying to be a “proper” demon.
I mean, d’you know what eternity is? There’s this big mountain, see, a mile high, at the end of the universe, and once every thousand years there’s this little bird-“
“What little bird?” said Aziraphale suspiciously.
“This little bird I’m talking about. And every thousand years-”
“The same bird every thousand years?”
Crowley hesitated. “Yeah,” he said.
“Bloody ancient bird, then.”
“Okay. And every thousand years this bird flies-”
“-limps-”
“-flies all the way to this mountain and sharpens its beak-”
“Hold on. You can’t do that. Between here and the end of the universe there’s loads of-” The angel waved a hand expansively, if a little unsteadily. “Loads of buggerall, dear boy.”
“But it gets there anyway,” Crowley persevered.
“How?”
“It doesn’t matter!”
“It could use a space ship,” said the angel.
Crowley subsided a bit. “Yeah,” he said. “If you like. Anyway, this bird-“
“Only it is the end of the universe we’re talking about,” said Aziraphale. “So it’d have to be one of those space ships where your descendants are the ones who get out at the other end. You have to tell your descendants, you say, When you get to the Mountain, you’ve got to-” He hesitated. “What have they got to do?”
“Sharpen its beak on the mountain,” said Crowley. “And then it flies back-”
“-in the space ship-”
“And after a thousand years it goes and does it all again,” said Crowley quickly.
There was a moment of drunken silence.
“Seems a lot of effort just to sharpen a beak,” mused Aziraphale.
“Listen,” said Crowley urgently, “the point is that when the bird has worn the mountain down to nothing, right, then-”
Aziraphale opened his mouth. Crowley just knew he was going to make some point about the relative hardness of birds’ beaks and granite mountains, and plunged on quickly.
“-then you still won’t have finished watching The Sound of Music.”
Aziraphale froze.
“And you’ll enjoy it,” Crowley said relentlessly. “You really will.”
“My dear boy-”
“You won’t have a choice.”
“Listen-”
“Heaven has no taste.”
“Now-”
“And not one single sushi restaurant.”
A look of pain crossed the angel’s suddenly very serious face.
Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens (via beardedbarefootandbespectacled)
a good omens AU where everything is the same but the bentley turns everything into taylor swift
#but imagine the demons trying to contact crowley in TAYLOR SWIFTS VOICE
FUCKING CHRIST
you’ll be the prince and I’ll be the princess it’s a love story baby Y O U C A N H O P E F O R N O T H I N G B U T T H E M E R C Y O F H E L L
“Bebop,” sniffed Aziraphale.
It’s the introduction of Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, verbatim, in comic form! 😀
Friendly reminder that Crowley didn’t misplace the Antichrist: he took Adam exactly where he was supposed to take him. The displacement is actually on the scatterbrained Chattering Order of St. Beryl sisters’ heads.
Somewhere in London, a demon shouts “FUCKING THANK YOU” for what seems like no reason.
*Bohemian rhapsody plays in the background*
…God, does it make me happy this has been circulating again lately.
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
Good Omens; Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman (via mylittlebookofquotes)
some prelapsarian aziraphale and crowley ❤
i drew heavily on the theory that angel halos are in fact black holes but tbh im real bad at designing non-human things like. look at it. it has only 4 limbs
I’ve never read Good Omens (don’t hate me), but I observe that the angel is scarier than the devil and I believe that is theologically accurate.
“You’re rescuing kittens now?”
“Look, it’s got such lovely eyes.”
“We have places to be – though…you are right.”
so guess who loves ineffable idiots
just moving along like everyone else 