Blogthing

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:

Book Crowley:

In the book, Crowley terrorizing his houseplants is, like many things, introduced to us as this comedic little jokey-joke kind of thing like “haha the demon doesn’t really understand the human thing, he heard about talking to plants so they’ll grow better and misunderstood it and decided it meant scaring them into cooperation.” Which, obviously, we should know is bullshit from the get-go because if there’s one thing that can be unequivocally said about Crowley, it’s that he gets humans, and loves learning about and understanding human things. But, y’know, Good Omens is an absolute masterclass in the art of unreliable narration, so that’s where we start.

And then when Armageddon gets started and Aziraphale’s been discorporated and Crowley’s just kind of driving around confused and scared and not sure what the heaven he’s supposed to do now, when he gets a call on the radio from Downstairs basically saying “hey what the fuck man you fucked up big time and you’re gonna get tortured The Most once we finally do catch up to you, you piece of shit!” and Crowley finally gets righteously pissed. And his exact train of thought is (paraphrased, because my copy of the book is out in the car and I’m too lazy to go and get it): “It was the way they talked to you. Like you were a houseplant that had started shedding leaves on the carpet.”

Book!Crowley’s relationship with Hell is... fractious, for sure. He, like Aziraphale, pays nominal lip service to his employers despite taking a very clear stance against them by choosing the side of Humanity over Hell. He’ll defend his fellow demons, absolutely, because he recognizes that his fellow scrubs at the bottom of the corporate ladder are just keeping their heads down and doing their jobs, but he has beef with upper management in a pretty serious way that he hasn’t been dealing with up until that exact moment because... well, because he’s scared to. He knows what the higher-ups in Hell are capable of, and the thought of being on the receiving end of it terrifies him. Crowley enjoys being a demon in a theoretical sense, enjoys provoking and challenging humanity and seeing what they’ll do with the obstacles he throws up in their path, but he doesn’t enjoy working for Hell because he’s really not on board with the master plan, and he hasn’t been dealing with that at all.

So if you mostly enjoy your line of work, but you loathe your employer and your direct supervisors are pieces of shit, what are you to do? You can’t retaliate against your bosses directly because that’s the fastest way to get your ass canned (literally, in this case, shoved in a can and left to rot in the Pit for a few thousand years). So you complete the Chain of Screaming by terrorizing your houseplants a little bit.

This, to me, is the crux of Crowley’s journey in the book: his personal code of ethics is in direct conflict with Hell’s agenda, and despite spending the entire novel trying in various ways to completely fuck up Hell’s master plan, he hasn’t really accepted the ramifications of that. In his own way, he’s walking something of a similar line to Aziraphale. He’s more honest with himself than Aziraphale is, and more unwilling to fall in line with something he doesn’t agree with, but he’s still trying to maintain an unstable conflict of interests. 

And this is what resolves itself when he takes Aziraphale’s hand at the airfield and accepts that if he’s really going to commit to defying Hell and being on Humanity’s side, he’s going to have to stand up to Satan himself on their behalf. The cracks were in the foundations a long time ago, but Crowley acknowledging to himself that he’s the houseplant and he hates how Hell treats him is the first real sign that the collapse is imminent.

Show Crowley:

I think we’ve all grasped the fact that show!Crowley is in a... um... different emotional place than book!Crowley. I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s any more traumatized or angry than book!Crowley was, just that he’s in a different point in his journey. Book!Crowley feels to me like he’s made his peace with God, to some extent or another, as much as any demon ever can. Still gonna call out God’s fuckery bc like. demon. Not being on board with God’s bullshit is literally the fundamental tenet of the job. Still, he’s already wrestled with that and figured out where they stand, and has moved on to confronting his issues with Hell. He’s not exactly stable or at peace with himself yet, but he’s laid at least one major issue to rest by the time the story picks up.

On the other hand, show!Crowley absolutely has not made his peace with God. Show!Crowley is still 100% down to fistfight God at 3AM in a Denny’s parking lot between the dumpster and the beat-up 1999 Chevy Suburban and is also struggling with the complicated feelings about working for Hell that his novel counterpart is working through.

So the reframing of the houseplants not just as an outlet for Crowley’s complicated feelings about Hell, but for Crowley’s complicated feelings about God makes sense for show!Crowley. Crowley stewing in self-loathing over having fucked up the Antichrist switch and then proceeding to launch into a vicious screed against a disobedient philodendron is such a telling thing. This isn’t just venting, this is emotional self-harm. This is Crowley reframing his pain over his Fall and how he still hasn’t resolved this within himself yet, casting himself in the role of God and striking down whoever he pleases for any little transgression whatsoever.

So what am I getting at?

Both versions of Crowley are definitely using their houseplants as a way to deal with issues they’re not ready to confront head-on. The difference in what those issues are is a fascinating microcosm of how book and show characterizations diverge, but ultimately that’s what both Crowleys are doing. Not the worst coping mechanism ever, I guess, but probably not the healthiest one, either.

Bonus:

Show!Crowley tosses the “Fallen” houseplants out to a compost heap somewhere and dumps them there, and if they live or die is up to them, because he is the plants and the plants are him and that’s what was done to him.

"And it seems like it's worth your time, right? And, by the way, there's actually- the superpower inside of feeling alien is admitting that you might be an alien."

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

the first osprey is the father, the one that comes later is the mother.

ospreys are not eagles, they're ospreys

ospreys only eat fish, that's why they don't register this starling as possible food

the starling got home safely

the starling was not trying to eat the eggs, it was mostly curious and you can see it trying to hop under the osprey every time the osprey tries to sit down again--this is because the starling is still a baby and has the instinct to get under an adult for warmth, even though it mostly has its feathers. this scares the osprey because that is a Foreign Creature near its eggs.

at the end of the video you can see the ospreys starting to turn the eggs. birds do this so the yolk and/or embryo don't stick to the shell of the egg, which is bad for the egg's health.

wanted to draw a fabulous trans crowley for pride so here he is