Kryptaria

*Crowley in Hell in 1943*

Crowley: So the idea is to make this massive super center where people can buy everything and anything for their home at unreasonably low prices...

Ligur: That doesn't sound very evil...

Crowley: EXACTLY! Too good to be true, right? Until you get there. Then you're shuffled through this endless maze of choices and ideas and inspiration for all of your decorating needs. You end up spending hours there, drudging from show room to show room.

Ligur: I still fail to see what about that...

Crowley: Are you kidding me?!? Husbands and wives arguing over which dining room set best matches their living room. Kids crying for cheap toys that mum and dad keep saying 'no' to. GIANT shopping bags that allow for a bunch of the tiny household and office appliances you didn't know you needed, but they're oh so cheap!!! Everyone leaves frustrated, compromised, and broke! I'm effectively turning their freedom of choice against them! And the best part? Once they've endured all of that... They have to go home and build the furniture themselves, spending even more hours decoded the instructions and diagrams!

Hastur: But if people are going to get so frustrated and angry, then why won't they just leave?

Crowley: They can't! I purposely influenced the chief architect to create a pathway that they are literally herded though like cattle! They can't leave until they walk all the way through!

Beelzebub: But why would people go there if they know it's going to take them hours to shop?

Crowley: I'm actually quite proud of this bit; we put a resturaunt right in the middle! Swedish food, Swedish dishes, and desserts so rich that the children are wound back up and bouncing off the walls for the rest of the trek! They break things, demand for more toys, and frustrate their parents even more!

Hastur: Why Swedish?

Crowley: Why not?

Hastur:

Ligur:

Beelzebub:

aziraphale + reductress headlines

where tv crowley and book crowley most significantly diverge is the bookshop fire. in the book, “Crowley cursed Aziraphale, and the ineffable plan, and Above, and Below.” in the tv show, instead of cursing him, he calls out for him desperately before falling to the floor with a quiet “you’ve gone.” for book crowley, az is “Aziraphale. The Enemy, of course. But an enemy for six thousand years now, which made him a sort of friend.” for tv crowley, aziraphale is his “best friend.” naturally, in the bookshop fire, tv crowley is in fucking agony. this is not how book crowley reacts.

see, one of book crowley’s most basic traits is his optimism. “Because, underneath it all,” the book says, “Crowley was an optimist. If there was one rock-hard certainty that had sustained him through the bad times—he thought briefly of the fourteenth century—then it was utter surety that he would come out on top; that the universe would look after him.”

it’s a really beautiful passage. and i can’t relate to it at all. 

after the fire, book crowley thinks he might “get completely and utterly pissed out of his mind while he waited for the world to end.” where book crowley only considers it, tv crowley actually does it. he does go to wait out the end of the world while drunk, and does give up, and he does break down, and he is not an optimist; he is a mess. that struck me. i’ve never seen a heroic character so blatantly need help before. but crowley gets help; he finds a friend and confesses how much aziraphale means to him; he gets back in the car and forges onward through the fire, even though he’s clearly Not Okay.

and there, on the flaming m25, book crowley and tv crowley diverge again. tv crowley is not an optimist; he’s not holding the bentley together with the hope that it’ll all work out. but he does it anyway. tv crowley doesn’t have optimism, but he has something that is, to me, even more important. in the show, “Crowley has something no other demons have, especially not Hastur: an imagination.”

an imagination. strangely enough, in the book, crowley admits to lacking it: “They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination,” book crowley says. but tv crowley has that imagination, and that is what saves him–and that, to me, makes so much sense.

tv crowley is traumatised. when he fell, some part of him broke, and while he claims he “sauntered vaguely downwards,” he really took a “million-light-year freestyle dive into a pool of boiling sulphur,” and it hurt. tv crowley is hurt. and so am i. 

Book! Crowley was written by young men with the world at their feet, and really, why wouldn’t you feel optimistic as your life starts out?

TV! Crowley was written by a man who lost his best friend to Alzheimer’s and no, it wasn’t a fire, but this man knew/ knows intimately that you don’t just pick yourself up from that straight away. You go and you drink and you mourn andyou grieve and you cry.

And only when that’s happened and you come to terms with the fact that this man is never going to come back, you shift to accommodate that loss and then you look toward what needs to be happening.

So I saw this ask on Mr Neil Gaiman’s tumblr and I had to draw those two, again. 

Click on it for better quality.

All credits go to @dontjustlivefly and @spagtittihands on twitter.

Thanks for asking!

Older Warlock :D

– Those are a pair of Crowley’s glasses he snatched from the Bentley’s glove compartment. Crowley is so proud. The Them think he looks like a dick and don’t hesitate in telling him so. (”Yeah, but it looks awesome on Nanny!” “Mister Crowley is a DEMON from HELL, of COURSE he’s COOL.”)

– He got the snake tattoo for his 18th birthday. Crowley cried. The pictures of that day show a red puffy snake tattoo and red puffy snake eyes. 

– The book is a recommendation from Aziraphale. Warlock loves to read, and he can read while walking, experience he got from playing Pokemon on his gameboy and walking. (He loves to read, he just doesn’t agree with Aziraphale’s tastes. He likes YA. Aziraphale reads whatever Warlock brings him, no matter how horrible he thinks modern litterature has become. Crowley asks why they keep this weird book club if they’re just gonna suffer through. They ignore him.)

– The “Not the Antichrist” tshirt is a gift from Adam, for their 15th birthday. The year prior, Warlock had given him an “Antichrist” tshirt. They love to wear them together. The shirt is now getting too small and discolored, and it’s still Warlock’s favorite.  

– Friendship bracelets. When Warlock was 12 he was sent to summer camp and came back with a truckload of friendship bracelets and gave some to his godfathers. Aziraphale thought the idea was incredibly charming and taught himself- and then taught Crowley- to make them. One white, one black. Aziraphale is learning how to make it tartan.

– He went through a phase where he walked like Crowley, but it just looked silly. You need to biologically be a snake for that. The Them told him he looked like a dick, that time too. 

Well, you’ve still got one of them.

BONUS:

The unicorn…