#nice demon

my queers

Ang3l: they/them, amab, takes estrogen, cannibal

Dev1l: they/them, afab, takes testosterone, cannibal

This is the future the woke left want/j

And so then, Crowley is the Serpent of Eden, who sets the human story in motion, and, presumably, the need for an Armageddon, where humans are measured and sorted into Good and Bad, sent to Heaven or Hell.

And someone else in another post I read long ago pointed out that Crowley signs to start the Armageddon process at the beginning of the series.

While Aziraphale signs for the package with the tools of the Four Horsepersons, at the end of the series, to end the Armageddoff process. [I could not find a gif or a video of this anywhere, so sorry, you get a crappy photo of my screen I took with my phone.]

So, once again, their roles are reversed --

Crowley starts humanity, Aziraphale is supposed to end it.

Crowley starts Armageddon, Aziraphale ends it.

And Aziraphale ends it in another sense, too, as he's the one [in the series, not in the book] whose creativity and critical thinking skills come up with the argument about the Great Plan vs the Ineffable Plan.

This has also got me thinking about how Aziraphale and Crowley, despite being absolute grade A idiots, are actually ridiculously powerful.

If Aziraphale is one of the ten most important angels, and his job is to literally end everything, it explains some things. Like why the other angels are so insistent on getting him back up to Heaven, instead of just writing him off as a weirdo and a soon-to-be casualty of the War. Like why the Metatron says, "We will leave the portal open for you, do not dawdle." Like why the Quartermaster angel says, "Your whole platoon is waiting for you."

And then there's Crowley. And there're lots of people who like the idea that he's just a nobody in Hell. "They just said, get up there and make some trouble." But then again, he's the only demon we know of who can stop time.

He's the only demon who has an imagination. Which. If all the demons and Satan fell at the same time, for asking questions. I wonder what changed. Why has Crowley kept asking questions, which seems to me to be crucially linked to having an imagination. Meanwhile Hastur and Ligur and Beelzebub, etc., and even Satan, are fatally literal-minded. Satan is defeated by Adam's creativity in naming his adoptive father as his only meaningful father, breaking the expectation and tradition of bloodline. So that kind of creativity is extremely powerful in the story.

Okay, so THAT SCENE(TM). The Tadfield Manor scene.

I can't stop thinking about it so here we fucking go.

What the hell is going on in this scene?

Like, they just found out that they spent 11 years co-parenting the wrong boy, and that the actual Antichrist is out there on the loose somewhere.

They both know that if and when the Apocalypse happens, their relationship and one or more of their existences is over, for good.

Like, they are staring down the actual End of the World, the end of each other, the end of love, armed with a tartan bow tie and a tyre iron.

And Aziraphale is .... flirting? Like, we do not have time for these puppy-dog eyes, Aziraphale!???

But Crowley .... goes for it? He performs the kindest, simplest act of service, for no other reason than that his angel asks, fuck, he doesn't even ask, he just expresses a need and makes That Face.

And then, and I am starting to think this is crucial, Aziraphale says, "Thank you."

When we get to the next episode, episode 3, and see their whole history throughout the millennia, there are two scenes where thank you is very pointedly left out. At the Bastille: Aziraphale says, "I suppose I should say thank you for the rescue," and Crowley leaps to his feet to stop him: "Don't say that!" In the car in 1967, a baffled Crowley clutching a tartan Thermos says, "Ngk -- should I say thank you?" and a wrecked Aziraphale grimaces and says, "Better not."

But here, Aziraphale doesn't ask. He just says it. "Thank you."

What is in that thank you? I see what you are doing for me, I see what I mean to you, and I feel it too.

That little glance he gives as he scurries away becomes a guilty glance with this context, because he knows Crowley would have told him not to say it.

Crowley, for his part, makes that soppy, can't believe I'm this smitten over you face behind his back and then enters a series of system malfunctions.

For Crowley, this is revisiting the scene of his biggest failure as a demon, the one he was just torturing his houseplants over as a form of psychological projection.

He's back at the scene of the crime, and trying to be very blasé about facing up to the fact that he's a failure of a demon and he has fucked up not only his orders from Hell, but also his plan to avert the Apocalypse by nannying a perfectly ordinary human boy for the last 11 years.

Meanwhile, Aziraphale is just leaning hard into all the unspoken stuff that's been piling up between them for the last 2,000 years. Speedrunning the dance of request and fulfillment, saying thank you out of fucking nowhere, giving puppy dog eyes and beaming smiles left and right...

~~~

All of this layered on top of the ongoing conversation about the nature of Good and Evil, which they started in the car on the way there. Crowley recounts the Evil Plan, Aziraphale waxes poetic about evil containing the seeds of its own destruction, Crowley dismisses it as an ordinary cockup, but maybe he's thinking in the back of his mind, that's me, I'm the seed of evil's destruction, because I'm the cock-up. I'm bad because I'm too good. But I'm not good enough to not be bad. I brought the Antichrist into the world, which will end the world and end Aziraphale, and I also wasn't good enough to even bring him into the world in the right place.

So I think when he turns the guns into real guns, three things are going on for Crowley.

1) He has to counterbalance that overwhelming kindness and Aziraphale looking at him like he's Good, with something very very Bad. This is like Aziraphale stepping closer by giving him the holy water, and then pulling back by distancing himself with "you go too fast for me." And it's like Crowley rescuing Aziraphale in the Bastille and then asking for the holy water as insurance; while Aziraphale sets up the Bastille situation and then pushing Crowley away, hard, when he asks for the holy water. There's always a whiplash, an overcorrection, when one of them makes a step forward that feels too vulnerable or too risky. The coat scene is extremely vulnerable for Crowley, so the guns and the wall slam are his overcorrection.

2) Crowley's also grappling with his own identity as a demon, and trying to prove to himself that he's a good demon, which again, means being Bad. So he has to cancel out being kind to Aziraphale with being cruel to the humans.

And 3) he is making his move in the overarching conversation about good vs evil as a whole, about their sides. Aziraphale said guns in the right hands "lend weight to a moral argument," and making the guns real is Crowley's rebuttal.

Aziraphale's response to the real guns is to be appalled. Crowley can't stand to upset his angel, and he relents. "No, they aren't. No one's killing anyone, they're all having miraculous escapes, wouldn't be any fun otherwise."

I remember reading this part in the book years ago, and my interpretation of it was always that he makes the decision to give them miraculous escapes after Aziraphale calls him out. He's playing out this millennia-old internal struggle in this sequence -- is he the evil demon who gives humans the tools to be unbearably cruel to each other? Or is he just a trickster god using those tools to cause mayhem and confusion and make humans think about their choices [so that maybe they can use their free will to choose better, a chance he was never afforded].

He makes this decision, for Aziraphale, in front of Aziraphale, and Aziraphale sees it and names it. "You know Crowley, I've always said that deep down, you really are quite a nice--"

And Crowley reaches the end of his capability to cope with the cognitive dissonance and slams Aziraphale against the wall, to set the record straight-- "I'm not nice, nice is a four-letter word."

Crowley is at the end of his rope, and Aziraphale is just turned on.

~~~

So, like, okay, what is going on in each of their minds?

For Aziraphale, I think he is trying to pull Crowley along to doing this his way. This day trip to Tadfield is coming off the back of the birthday party yesterday, where he insisted on trying to fix it without violence, by being at the party to stop the dog. Crowley was trying to push Aziraphale to kill the boy, but Aziraphale insists on doing it with human magic tricks and without killing.

And Aziraphale is the one who calls Crowley up with this idea about looking into the birth records, while Crowley was at home yelling at his plants. I think Aziraphale is trying to take the lead a little bit and remind Crowley of his goodness, and say, okay, you said we can fix this 11 years ago, let's not give up now, let's keep trying, but we have to do it the "good" way, the "right" way. Aziraphale is on board with stopping the Apocalypse, but not yet on board with admitting that he's on Crowley's side. He's trying to draw Crowley over to his side without having to acknowledge the ways he is like Crowley.

Crowley is not avoiding the tension, not trying to pretend anything, although he is struggling. He is letting himself feel the push and pull between the evil demon side and the free-will advocate, between some sense of professional failure in his role as a demon of Hell, and his inexorable love for Aziraphale. He's trying to grapple with both and figure out which one he is, face his mistakes, be the demon spouse he wants to be to Aziraphale, but it's really fucken stressful for him.

~~~

Whether or not Crowley understands that he's made a decision, there is one other detail that I think bookends the story being told in this sequence.

When they arrive, they walk into the Manor courtyard in a way that highlights their differences -- Crowley rebelliously crosses the grass, Aziraphale sticks to the pebbled path. They are looking around, not at each other.

When they leave, they are side by side, shoulder to shoulder, even brushing up against each other.

They're realigned again. Aziraphale is back to verbally emphasizing the differences -- "Angels aren't occult, we're ethereal" -- but the physicality tells the truth.