Blogthing

We all know sports fan activities tend to be masculine-coded and therefore socially acceptable while story fan activities are coded feminine/queer and therefore looked down on.

So don't worry about it. It would be nice if we could all meet around the water cooler and chat openly about our feelings without censoring ourselves or fearing judgement from those who don't necessarily understand. But that's why we have cons and tumblr etc.

So. This is a bit about Good Omens, but actually about a lot of queer stories with cynical or outright unhappy endings.

I think people like NG(fuck him sideways with a stick) see happy endings as overdone, cliche, old fashioned, predictable. If you want to be subversive, edgy and cool, you need to have a tragic ending, or an ambivalent one, or a cynical one.

But the thing is, if you're writing a queer story, you're writing for an audience that rarely gets a happy ending. The queers rarely get to live happily ever after in a joyful world. That's why we so deeply appreciate stories that celebrate queer joy. Because it's so rare.

So these (mostly) heterosexual (mostly) men write queer stories for queer audiences and don't realise that for us, we expect the tragedy, the ambivalence, the cynicism. For us, if you want to be subversive, write that happy ending, that hopeful ending, that affirmative ending. We won't expect it. I promise. You can be an edgelord by subverting the queers have to suffer trope. We will all be impressed by your audacity. I promise.

Indoor gardener Crowley and corporate librarian Aziraphale get off on the wrong foot.

And I waxed poetic about how it was funny that we had this activity, this little slice of the universal human experience of painting on the cave walls... and now we spank children for it.

and he was dead silent and then just hung up the phone. I thought I had offended him, but instead he had gone directly to the hardware store and purchased blackboard paint and redid his son's room and bought a bunch of chalk as well.

Indoor gardener Crowley and corporate librarian Aziraphale get off on the wrong foot.

Early set up for bundle offer

Yeah, according to the book, that’s how they talk to him in Hell when they’re displeased.

I was actually blown away by this scene, because in the book it’s very tongue-in-cheek. It plays up the whole “Crowley and Aziraphale don’t know how to human properly” angle. It’s a bad copying mechanism for the pervasive anxiety that plagues Crowley, but it’s still quite light in tone. I was expecting something similar.

Instead, we got this incredibly … dark scene. The music is tense, Crowley’s teeth are bared. It feels more tragic than funny, because. That’s how they treat him. That’s how he feels God treated him.

Like, imagine if he was treating a person like that, or even a pet. The only reason Crowley’s fury isn’t horrifying is because it’s directed at a bunch of plants, who don’t actually have feelings (I mean these ones do, because prolonged exposure to demon powers probably has weird effects on everything, but even then their consciousness is probably very limited).

It’s not a just copying mechanism for anxiety anymore, it’s a constant revival of his traumas. He has all this anger and fear and pain inside, and he redirects it on his plants.

There’s a big blank space in the narrative regarding what it’s like for Crowley in Hell. We know there are awkward PowerPoint presentations. But we ALSO see Hastur kill two demons (Eric the disposable demon fed to the hellhound, and the usher thrown into the holy water bath). Those luckless demons appeared to be terrified. The residents of Hell who were witness to the executions didn’t bat an eyebrow. So it seems as if Hell is the kind of place where violence and corporeal punishment between demons is common, which I’m sure we could have guessed, but this is Crowley’s home (work? Birthplace? Family?). This is the place he’s told he belongs- where he comes from and where he has to return. He’s a low-ranking demon in a place where low-ranking demons are tortured and terrorized, apparently for fun. It’s possible that Satan’s apparent regard for him affords some measure of protection, but we don’t really know.

Book!Crowley is very frightened of Hell, sort of the equivalent of how scared Show!Aziraphale is of Heaven. In the book, Heaven leaves Aziraphale alone, but Crowley does the “deeds of the day” thing with Hastur/ Ligur, gets messages during the Golden Girls, and has instructions dropped directly into his mind. It doesn’t seem like any of this is exactly uncommon. In the show, Heaven harasses Aziraphale more, but it seems like Crowley’s relationship with hell is about the same. There’s a lot of meta about Heaven-the-cult’s psychological torture of Aziraphale, but what I don’t see discussed as much is the fact that Crowley lives in concrete, physical danger. When he’s at work, colleagues get murdered (discorporated? Do we know what it means when a presumably bodiless demon is eaten by a hellhound? 🤷‍♀️). How does that affect him? Just look at how he lives when he’s at home on Earth:

Desk and throne, the only place where we ever see him lounge, in full view of the TV Hell uses to harass him.

Barren. Bleak. Austere. Compare that to Aziraphale when he’s at home:

Yes, Aziraphale is scared of his bosses and anxious at baseline, but he can relax. Crowley never relaxes. We never see him peaceful. Not once.

Some of that is down to their respective personalities. Some of it is the fact that Aziraphale’s best friend supports and protects him, while Crowley’s best friend pretends he doesn’t know him- on a good day. But some of it might be because Crowley has been, and will likely continue to be, physically hurt by Hell.

Whe you’re trapped in a relationship where you’re being harmed, you don’t let your guard down. Crowley doesn’t. Hell can invade any part of his life, including his thoughts, if the “instructions-dropped-into-the-brain” trick is any indication. His coping mechanisms are cultivating his ultra-cool guy persona so he can pretend nothing hurts him, and projecting onto his plants. He snaps once at Aziraphale, which shows us he feels safer with him than anyone else (he never loses his cool with Beelzebub and he never exhibits anger at Hastur and Ligur- he’s mocking and sarcastic). He doesn’t feel that he deserves anything that makes him feel good. He doesn’t ask Aziraphale to treat him better because he doesn’t feel he deserves it. And it’s all mixed up in what does it mean to Fall; are the demons fundamentally changed in some way or does the harm they wreck on one another come from a dark place that all beings (angels, demons, humans) could access in the “right” circumstances (which is personally what I believe). It’s hard to untangle but the bottom line is: