WARNING: By writing this post, @grigiocuore and me don’t want to disrespect a serious mental illness like BDD, this is just a figment of our imagination and nothing more. The idea came to our mind thanks to some sweet and delicate tweets by Michael Sheen about body positivity. Always try to love yourself as you are without shame, humans are such a wonderful species in every form of appearance.
What if Mr. A. J. Crowley has increasingly painful thoughts and feelings about his body over the centuries? He could suffer from BDD (Body Dysmorphic Disorder) and could have known about it for the first time only during 1900, when he finally started to understand his psychological condition and how to deal with it with all the difficulties involved. The points of this thesis are summarised below.
Sunglasses   Â
Crowley rarely takes his sunglasses off. The only moments when he does it are when he feels safe in his apartment and in Aziraphale’s bookshop. It seems that he is ashamed of his yellow eyes, even if he has the ability to hide himself from the view of the rest of the people around him. He has worn sunglasses of every shape and style since the Roman empire, isolating his particular eyes from the world. He even got a collection of all alike sunglasses in the glove box of his beloved Bentley.
Mirrors
In his modern and minimal apartment, mirrors are absent. He doesn’t like to see his thin body. He’s extremely conscious of his choice of clothes and body language and the impression they convey - the saunter, the vague bad-boy swagger - but he doesn’t like to actually see it reflected back at him; he doesn’t do those things because he likes them on himself, but to hide himself behind them.
Following the Fashion Trends
Crowley follows the fashion standards of any age he’s living in with ferocious intensity, and reinvents his whole appearance with it. Differently from Aziraphale, Crowley moulds himself to the age he’s living in, and reinvents himself every time - head to toe: and while this can easily interpreted as merely one more evidence of his streak of dramatic flamboyance, it makes a lot of (painful) sense when seen in the context of his demonic condition. Demons don’t belong, by definition: they’re the outcasts, the damned, the castaways. Crowley very clearly hates Hell, and doesn’t fit in there at all - which makes him an outcast among outcasts. So we have a demon who can barely remember Heaven, and feels no kinship with the dwellers of Hell: this leaves Earth and Crowley wants to fit in there so badly. Earth is the one space left in creation where he feels if not welcome at least not openly shunned, and if he needs to perpetually reshape himself to keep being acceptable to it, then so be it. Aziraphale doesn’t mind standing out; he’s steadily true to himself, and would let the world remould itself around his shape. Meanwhile, Crowley wants nothing more than to blend in - because the solitude he knows is terrible and bleak, and more unbearable than anything his angel has ever experienced. Aziraphale can afford to look different and act different and not adapt to society’s expectations because he’s never been made feel ashamed of what he is. Crowley doesn’t. He’s alone, and Earth is the last chance he has; and he would do anything - cut and change and reshape any part of himself - to feel and look like he nearly belongs there.
In 1862, at St. James’s Park in London, he asks his best friend for the “suicidal pill”, that is the holy water. After the refusal of Aziraphale, in the Sixties he tries to organise a robbery in a church to get his hands on the water. Finally, when the angel gives it to him in the car, he caresses the thermos while lost in his thoughts, feeling a bit guilty and ashamed. Luckily, he will never use it on himself.
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