The Master-Maid

you're the nice one. here's your friend. best friend even. and you love him even as you worry you're doomed. and now they're here to take you away. he comes up to you. he kisses you. its a kiss that condemns you but nevertheless you forgive him. you give up everything for humanity. and you do it all with a smile! you turn the other cheek!

But we know it isn't as simple as that. I think maybe part of the tragedy of Crowley's fall is that he wasn't alone when he fell. He was surrounded by angels who in one form or another challenged Heaven's authority. They should have been his allies, they should have understood each other, but he ended up lonelier than ever.

Even after being cast out, Hell and all its demons are still playing by Heaven's rules. The choice was meaningless from the start. It wasn't about subverting or escaping the system. The only autonomy any of them had was to pick between being the hero or the villain.

I'm not making a final judgment on if I think Crowley's relationship to hell is less interesting than his and Aziraphale's relationship to heaven, but I think a large component of what's going on is that Crowley's relationship to hell is a lot less explicitly textual. It exists in a space of inference and speculation, and in a series with so much to talk about already, it has faded a bit into the background.

The main point I look to emphasise is that Crowley breaking with heaven, and Crowley founding his own side, (population 1-2) are two separate events, neither of which we have a full picture of yet. All of the demons were angels once, and cast out of heaven. Crowley is different from the other demons because of the relationship he has to hell, not the relationship he has to heaven.

Yes, a lot of that is because Crowley isn't evil enough to ft in with the expectations of the job, but as you say, that isn't the full story. If we follow the metaphor from the authors of heaven and hell being different floors of the same organization, The Fall wasn't getting fired, it was getting demoted.

I personally quite like adding in a metaphor that Crowley's "I only ever asked questions" could be a reframing of something to the effect of "would you be interested in forming a team to collectively bargin with leadership for better working conditions?" and the Great War could have essentially been a union busting move, and labour lost very badly.

In this framing, hell isn't really evil in the same way heaven isn't really good. They are performative evil, because that is where the system put them. Heaven is performative good, because that is where the system put them. Crowley wasn't innately evil enough to be suited to the role, but my guess would be that the other demons weren't at the start either. It became what they had to do, and from there it became who they were. Crowley gamed himself out before being corrupted by the system.

If we continue with the labour / leadership metaphor, there is a case to be made for siding with the demons, who are oppressed into their situation. They do evil and torture the bad humans because that is the job they were press-ganged into doing by heaven. I could imagine a different character in Crowley's position being all for being on the front line of the armies of hell, trying again to challenge heaven's authority and take over the whole organization into a worker owned operation without the atrocities. There would be plenty of ways to make that character very sympathetic.

That is not the direction Crowley went in.

Crowley opts to live a double life. He crafts a fictional version of himself, and reports back what that fictional character has accomplished. Largely out of things that did happen, but selectively edited, highly distorted, and lacking certain pivotal details. Where Aziraphale mostly hides from heaven by hiding who he is from himself, Crowley owns himself enough to own the need to regularly outright lie to hell. Given how far hell can go to invade Crowley's mind, that's a pretty ballsy route to go down.

Crowley pulls it off by being really good at his job. His broad spectrum malaise is a very effective strategy, aside from the occasional shooting himself in the foot. He keeps up with the times, he makes new technology work for him, he gets results. Crowley cultivates an image of himself as a very effective demon. Hastor and Ligur hate that he isn't old school, but head office don't seem to mind.

The more he gives hell results, the less they look into him. It's how he avoids scrutiny. Taking credit for what humans do to themselves is a double win. Every now and again he has to get his hands dirty, and he makes a point of making it spectacular. The M-25 was a stroke of demonic genius.

Aziraphale doesn't do this. He doesn't pretend not to drink tea or alcohol, he tries to get Gabriel to try eating sushi. He loves puttering about his bookshop, and making sure no one ever buys anything, he isn't trying to sell an image of himself as the superstar bestest angel ever. In the cancelled bookshop opening scene we see that it may actually be disadvantageous for Aziraphale to be seen as too good at his job, but even so his target isn't finding the ideal false presentation to sell to heaven, his target is rationalising what he actually did as something heaven should want him to do. He goes along with the Godfathers operation needing an excuse to honestly report his activities accurately to heaven. He was thwarting the wiles. The food and drinks are part of the human disguise, ect… He doesn't always have good excuses, but the point is he isn't falsifying most of what he sends back to heaven the way Crowley is falsifying most of what he sends back to hell.

Aziraphale is a moderately disgruntled employee of heaven that is publicly a misfit. Crowley is a full on double agent on the side of Crowley, faking being a loyal model employee of hell, because he knows being valuable protects him to a degree. A less successful demon might not have survived punishment post Edinburgh, a less useful demon might have not survived an allegation by Furfur even without the photo. They tossed a small demon into the holy water essentially on a whim. When you are deeply cynical of a system, but also aren't free to leave it, making yourself indispensable is a pretty obvious strategy to take.

Aziraphale and Crowley are both trapped in abusive situations by heaven and hell. Aziraphale mostly doesn't know that's the situation he is in, because he feels safer not knowing. Crowley fully knows it's an abusive situation, and can't lie to himself about it, but he also knows he won't survive leaving. So he shadow leaves. He strategises. He plays the game. He stays ahead of things, like with the angel guide telling demons to report Aziraphale sightings to Crowley. He works the system, and finds moments of freedom where he can.

The workplace dynamics here are fascinating. Hastur and Ligur appear to have loyally bought into Hell's management's sense of the situation (as expressed by Dagon's pep talk). They resent Crowley because he's better at the job management sets before them all than they are, despite his obvious lack of buy-in and loyalty. They're constantly hoping to discredit him in management's eyes, and are gleeful when they get a chance to get him fired destroy him.

And the thing is, the thing management doesn't want Crowley doing -- fraternizing with an angel -- is a thing they (or at least Ligur) are also doing. The hypocrisy is delicious!

And, of course, fully mirrored in Heaven with Michael ratting out Aziraphale to Gabriel. It's possible to read Gabe's reaction a few different ways, but I like to read it as genuinely oblivious COO (the Metatron is CEO) who truly believes his own bullshit about there being no backchannels.

Really, I get the sense that Satan and the Metatron are high on their own supply, which filters down at various concentrations to their management cadre. Dagon is a True Believer; Beez isn't. Gabriel is; Michael isn't.

A secret tryst in Rome 41 ad.

A mild NSFW piece I created for my friend @vavoom-sorted-art. She requested this scene and I couldn't help but say yes!

EVEN PARENTS ARE SUPPOSED TO ENCOURAGE RESPONSIBLE READING/VIEWING BEHAVIOR. NOT filter everything ahead of time for their kid.

When my kiddo was 5, his pediatrician was asking him the usual Well Child Visit questions (“What are your favorite foods? What do you do to get your body moving? Do you know what to do if you get lost in a public place?” Etc.) and she asked, “What do you do if you see something on TV that scares or upsets you?”

I piped up like, “Oh, he doesn’t watch TV without one of us in the room,” which was true at the time and is still largely true now. She said, “Yes, but that won’t always be the case, so make sure you’re talking to him about what to do if he sees something that upsets him.”

So we started talking to him about that, and the answer is simple: “Turn it off or leave the room, and talk to someone you trust about what you saw and what you’re feeling.”

The answer is NOT “Ask your parents to make sure you never see anything upsetting again,” because that’s just not possible — and ultimately that would be doing the kid a disservice, since sooner or later he’s going to be out in the world where we can’t control what he watches or reads. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to make sure he’s watching/reading age-appropriate stuff, it just means that’s not the only safeguard he has — and that’s a good thing.

So yes, content creators aren’t your parents and aren’t responsible for making sure you never see anything you don’t like — but also, your own parents should have taught you what to do when that happens. So if they didn’t, take it from me, your internet mom:

Turn it off.

Walk away.

Talk to someone you trust about how you’re feeling.

This shot through my brain like a chain of firecrackers, so, without derailing the original post, I have some THOUGHTS to add about why this concept is not only hilarious (because it is), but also...

It. It kind of fucks. Severely.

And in a delightfully Pratchett-y way, I'd dare to suggest.

I'll explain:

As inferred above, both Crowley AND Aziraphale have canonical Biblical counterparts. Not by name, no, but by function.

Crowley, of course, is the serpent of Eden.

(note on the serpent of Eden: In Genesis 3:1-15, at least, the serpent is not identified as anything other than a serpent, albeit one that can talk. Later, it will be variously interpreted as a traitorous agent of Hell, as a demon, as a guise of Satan himself, etc. In Good Omens --as a slinky ginger who walks funny)

Lesser known, at least so far as I can tell, is the flaming sword. It, too, appears in Genesis 3, in the very last line:

"So he drove out the man; and placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." --Genesis 3:24, KJV

Thanks to translation ambiguity, there is some debate concerning the nature of the flaming sword --is it a divine weapon given unto one of the Cherubim (if so, why only one)? Or is it an independent entity, which takes the form of a sword (as other angelic beings take the form of wheels and such)? For our purposes, I don't think the distinction matters. The guard at the gate of Eden, whether an angel wielding the sword or an angel who IS the sword, is Aziraphale.

(note on the flaming sword: in some traditions --Eastern Orthodox, for example-- it is held that upon Christ's death and resurrection, the flaming sword gave up it's post and vanished from Eden for good. By these sensibilities, the removal of the sword signifies the redemption and salvation of man.

...Put a pin in that. We're coming back to it.)

So, we have our pair. The Serpent and the Sword, introduced at the beginning and the end (ha) of the very same chapter of Genesis.

But here's the important bit, the bit that's not immediately obvious, the bit that nonetheless encapsulates one of the central themes, if not THE central theme, of Good Omens:

The Sword was never intended to guard Eden while Adam and Eve were still in it.

Do you understand?

The Sword's function was never to protect them. It doesn't even appear until after they've already fallen. No... it was to usher Adam and Eve from the garden, and then keep them out. It was a threat. It was a punishment.

The flaming sword was given to be used against them.

So. Again. We have our pair. The Serpent and the Sword: the inception and the consequence of original sin, personified. They are the one-two punch that launches mankind from paradise, after Hell lures it to destruction and Heaven condemns it for being destroyed. Which is to say that despite being, supposedly, hereditary enemies on two different sides of a celestial cold war, they are actually unified by one purpose, one pivotal role to play in the Divine Plan: completely fucking humanity over.

That's how it's supposed to go. It is written.

...But, in Good Omens, they're not just the Serpent and the Sword.

They're Crowley and Aziraphale.

(author begins to go insane from emotion under the cut)

I was talking with @irisbleufic about differences between show! and book!Aziraphale, and especially about the line “I’m soft” in the show, because it really threw me for a loop, but the reblog chain contracted some incredibly odd formatting, so this is a hopefully more-comprehensible version:

@imaginaryelle:  random but re: Aziraphale’s show characterization vs book: I enjoy both, but they are so, so different in weird ways and when I rewatch the show I’m just left with dissonance & wondering WHY that change happened. The “I’m soft” line struck me the hardest, because I have literally never thought of Aziraphale as soft. Not emotionally. The closest to the book we got was maybe the french executioner? But then he just ignores the implication. The show version feels almost unfinished, as a character.

@irisbleufic: I mean, Aziraphale is physically soft, no question, but in any other sense?  Whoa, nope.  Not unless you count how soft he is for Crowley once he gets put through the wringer of a failed apocalypse and unlearns some of those rude, holier-than-thou tidbits he says to Crowley from time to time.  I mean, he’s soft for Crowley before their ordeal, but the ordeal is what adjusts (and hopefully eradicates) his prejudice. I’ve always found the whole “I can’t expect you to know what love feels like” thing remarkably callous, and the fact that Crowley gets cut off before he can say what his perception of a great sense of love is like just…ugh, I’ve always loved that moment so, so much, because it’s quite a perfect encapsulation of this entire disconnect between book characterization / miniseries characterization that we’re talking about:

“Odd,” muttered the angel, “I keep getting these flashes of, of…” He raised his hands to his temples.“What?  What?” said Crowley. Aziraphale stared at him.“Love,” he said.  “Someone really loves this place.” “Pardon?” “There seems to be this great sense of love.  I can’t put it any better than that.  Especially not to you.” “Do you mean like—” Crowley began. There was a whirr, a scream, and a clunk.  The car stopped.  [Enter Anathema, etc.]

@imaginaryelle: Yes, yes, I love that moment too! Okay, it took a bit longer than I hoped but I finally got my thoughts in order on this, and it ended up way longer and more like an essay than I originally thought it would, but I really enjoyed playing with it so I hope you enjoy it too.

Yes, absolutely Aziraphale is physically soft. He’s even described exactly that way by Shadwell (“the soft one in the camelhair coat”), and it seems to be pretty clearly about his appearance and presentation. Shadwell thinks Aziraphale is gay, fastidious (tries not to touch anything in the WFA headquarters) and an easier mark than Crowley, though he still finds the idea of threatening him “terribly risky.” We also have Aziraphale’s plump hands in the gun conversation at Tadfield Manor and the Compline reference too. But those and the intelligent/English/gay footnote are actually the only description of him I can find in the text. The only reference to height is that snake!Crowley has to look up at him, but that doesn’t tell us much. Which was surprising to find, because I had thought there was a little more than that, but yes. Physically Aziraphale is soft and I love that about him.

On a non-physical level, yes, exactly, in the book Aziraphale is extremely callous. Quite often. It actually surprised me, going back through my notes, how rarely he’s portrayed as anything else, but I think it does overall build a picture of him that, to me, has always been pretty immovable. I’ve never really been able to set aside that Aziraphale is, as Crowley says, a bastard. And he’s fairly thoughtless about it a lot of the time. He’s offhandedly pretty harsh on Crowley on a number of occasions, most of which got really toned down in the show. There’s the conversation about love, yes, which got especially confused in the show (the presentation made it seem like Aziraphale was talking about the Manor rather than all of Tadfield and they didn’t follow up on it well, and then it’s further muddled by the stain-miracle interaction). I would love to read pretty much anything on the subject of what Crowley was going to say there and how things are different for demons, because mmmmm, world building, and of course I love Crowley too.

But back to Aziraphale: there’re other callous remarks to Crowley too. In their very first interaction we have this:

“Yes, but you’re a demon. I’m not sure if it’s actually possible for you to do good,” said Aziraphale. “It’s down to your basic, you know, nature. Nothing personal, you understand.”

And then, when Crowley keeps on with his “but what is it about, really” line of conversation:

“Best not to speculate, really,” said Aziraphale. “You can’t second-guess ineffability, I always say. There’s Right, and there’s Wrong. If you do Wrong when you’re told to do Right, you deserve to be punished. Er.”

Like, here, let me just rub your face in the Fall for a second. You can’t help your basic nature but also you deserve punishment. Ouch. (And this is not in the show. In the show he references Crowley’s being a demon as related to “[making trouble] is what you do” and has what looks like a pretty disturbing experience watching his gift of kindness result in the immediate death of a lion by flaming sword.)

It’s implied book!Aziraphale is embarrassed about having said that, but he doesn’t actually change his tune. He brings up the “you’re a demon” thing twice more, both in situations where it’s clear he thinks he has the moral high ground, because of course he does, he’s an angel. (book!Aziraphale is less openly doubtful of Heaven’s rightness until closer to the end, I think.) In contrast, throughout the show it’s often Crowley who reminds Aziraphale that he’s a demon, and thus not nice, not forgivable and not to be thanked while Aziraphale maintains that Crowley is a good person. For another example, book!Aziraphale, in the wake of failing to find records of Adam at the manor, has zero reaction to Crowley’s fear, and Crowley is pretty obviously freaking out:

“What are we going to do now?”

“Try and get some sleep.”

“You don’t need sleep. I don’t need sleep. Evil never sleeps, and Virtue is ever-vigilant.”

“Evil in general, maybe. This specific part of it has got into the habit of getting its head down occasionally.” [Crowley] stared into the headlights. The time would come soon enough when sleep would be right out of the question. When those Below found out that he, personally, had lost the Antichrist, they’d probably dig out all those reports he’d done on the Spanish Inquisition and try them out on him, one at a time and then all together.

He rummaged in the glove compartment, fumbled a tape at random, and slotted it into the player. A little music would …

… Bee-elzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me …

“For me,” murmured Crowley. His expression went blank for a moment. Then he gave a strangled scream and wrenched at the on-off knob.

“Of course, we might be able to get a human to find him,” said Aziraphale thoughtfully.

“What?” said Crowley, distractedly.

And shortly after this, of course, Aziraphale finds the Book and just leaves when Crowley’s trying to confirm they’re still on the same side. In the show, this interaction doesn’t even happen. Crowley’s annoyed that they can’t find anything, but he’s not scared, and Aziraphale’s idea about using human operatives and his discovery of the book are split across several scenes and a fair chunk of time passing. Tv!Crowley watches him go into his shop into a sort of confused way, where book!Crowley is “feeling very alone” after not getting a real answer to two questions in a row.  

We can say this with confidence because 1) the place Aziraphale and Crowley have been quietly going native for the last 1,500 years or so is England (Wessex and later London); and 2) Michael Sheen is audibly Welsh and David Tennant is audibly Scottish, and they have both adopted English accents for their roles.

There's some Word of God on this, too:

and

The accents are a choice. That means the Englishness is deliberate.

Obviously the masculinity is as well, in that Sheen and Tennant are both male and Aziraphale and Crowley default to male-coded for most of the story. And it's English masculinity, English Christianity, and the Cold War spy novel in combination that create the inescapable silence and terrible fear in which Crowley and Aziraphale must exist.

It's not just the eternal warmongering police state and bureaucracy, it's not just that God's left her angels to go feral like pigeons, it's also that Crowley and Aziraphale are coded as English men, and that combination means 1) they do not talk about feelings, ever

My man(-shaped entity) physically cannot say feelings words

David Tennant literally gives Crowley that English stiff upper lip.

and 2) They are a nationality and gender of people who touch and are touched among the least in the world. Like there is research on this, and I read that research in the 90s in a book first published in the 70s, I mean it is not news.

It took 6,000 years and one Armageddon for our beloved, mostly male-coded entities to get to this point--

--and they're both still clearly having a moment about it.

Thank you so much! I am so glad that I have the opportunity to share queer history! I have been thinking for a minute about how to answer this question because there are so many possible answers. I first thought was I wish people knew more about The Institute of Sexology because it plays a big role in how we linguistically understand queerness today. Then I realized that this is true in Europe and much of North America, but there are a lot of places in the world where that isn't the case.

My second thought was The Golden Orchid Society because I feel it has much to teach in terms of queer history outside of Eurocentric terms, but I knew this wasn't quite the right answer. Then I thought of a guest article that was written: Brazilian Dictatorship and the Queer Movement, and then Simon Tseko Nkoli and Joël Gustave Nana Ngongang came to mind.

Around this point, I realized there is not one simple answer to this very good question. What I truly wish is that people had more knowledge and access to knowledge about the queer history of their region. I have gotten messages from people around the globe asking for information about their countries, sometimes, I have had answers, but all too often, I haven't.

The Husbands in 1793

EDIT: I made a significant error when I wrote this. As @goodjomans kindly points out in the comments to Part 2 of this essay (massive shoutout for this, goodjomans! also I love your name!), Aziraphale is the one who dresses the executioner in clothing like Aziraphale's original ensemble, not Crowley. This changes my conclusions about the meaning we can take from this scene!

On the one hand, mea culpa, y'all. I shall get on with eating my crow. On the other hand, I had to go through this frame-by-frame to catch which of the ineffable spouses puts Jean-Claude in his new togs, and the answer only lasts three frames. Here it is:

After Aziraphale changes his clothes, but before Crowley snaps his fingers and unfreezes time, there's a shot of the executioner over Crowley's shoulder, and he is now wearing a light coat with gold embroidery on the shoulders like Aziraphale's. Aziraphale arranges the executioner's death, not Crowley. So I feel like an idiot for missing it, but not a total idiot.

Let's discuss how this information changes what we can read from this scene! I'm going to leave my original text in place and edit with bold green. I can still stand by most of this essay, but this detail changes how I read the meaning of the husbands' communication at the end of this scene.

So we're all clear on the fact that the universe of Good Omens is an inescapable nightmare dystopia in which either of the husbands' merciless authoritarian regimes could be watching or listening to them at any time, yes? And that if either are caught 'fraternizing' with the other that means discorporation, torture, memory wipe, and/or death for either or both of them, yes?

Which means Crowley and Aziraphale can never speak or do anything openly to each other about their friendship or attraction or love. Everything they say and do has to have an innocuous meaning they can point to in case anybody ever sees or hears something Team Azcrow can't explain away. Walls (and ducks) have ears, and the price of slipping up--as we see in 1827--is heavy.

When a character says or does something that has two distinct meanings because they need to disguise what they really mean from one party but make their meaning plain to another, lit-nerds (and lit nerds🍃) call this equivocation. Equivocation is a kind of coded communication meant to pass hostile ears and eyes in plain sight but reach its intended recipient with its true meaning. The 1793 scene is jammed with it.

A lot of that coded messaging revolves around the clothes Crowley and Aziraphale choose in this scene, so--THESIS PARAGRAPH, BITCHES--we're going going to talk about how their clothes read to the people of this time period and location, what their clothes tell us about their characters, how their clothes help them equivocate, and what they're really saying with that equivocation. And Spoiler A-fucking-lert, it is ROMANTIC AF PRETTY GD ROMANTIC. Let's get nerdy!

So we open in the dark. There's distant lights and the occasional flare from them moving through space but for the most part we get the angel that would eventually become Crowley alone in enough darkness that he himself isn't even giving off particularly significant amounts of light.

But then, enter Aziraphale. He arrives in a big ball of blue light shining above him that really emphasizes Crowley's red hair. They get tied to the colors we most often see them attached to, especially in promotional materials.

From here the entire scene gets slightly brighter, even once Aziraphale's light dims down. They're both lit up once they're together, even it the middle of literal nothingness.

They start the universe next, using Crowley's hand crank, which gives off a magic that's a combination of their two colors - purple.

A very similar color to this shows up in heaven as a signal flare for their accidentally too powerful half a miracle. It's a color tied to a miracle so big it could've revived someone 25 times and also a miracle that got the engine of the universe running.

And then. Creation starts. Our first image is a very Heavenly aesthetic. It's a blueish light cutting through the clouds much like Az just cut through the dark.

And what explodes from that is the thing that set me down this little rabbit hole in the first place: it's purple scattered through with red and blue lights.

As the initial burst fades, the blue and the red separate, the color fading except for this tiny blue dot and this growing red zone on the right.

The blue then fades, leaving us with an extremely Crowley coded palette here and a very orangeish red. There's shades of gray, a little bit of light, but not nearly as much color. As the sequence moves the darkness grows but does start slowly filling with small points of light.

We then end up with shades of gray both light and dark. There's balance here, even if it's not particularly colorful.

And then all at once a pinkish red bursts forth with these intense clawing tendrils. At the core of it, from the heart of it, is a bright blue ball of light.

It fades into a blue heart surrounded by darkness with whisps of white resembling a certain someone's hair. Or, as some friends pointed out two people embracing.

As the nebula settles a few other colors set in but the primary scheme is still red and blue. An almost violent plume of red emerges on the left side of the image.

And from this moment on most shots of the two of them back them with their respective color schemes.

They chat and Aziraphale gets anxious. He looks for a distraction and is immediately drawn to the space where the colors mix.

And as we fade out the other colors in the picture fade. We get the most balanced blue and red get. And on the far corners fairly clear dark and light.

Might be a bit basic, but I haven’t really seen this talked about explicity anywhere, and this is a Roman hill I’m willing to die on: Crowley (Crawly) 1000% knows that Aziraphale is at that bar in Rome (gonna throw in the quickly-googled term “popina” here?) when they meet 41 AD. 

From the script, we know he’s in the middle of some soul-destroying work on the appalling Emperor Caligula and is in a terrible mood. Well, there’s one thing hanging around Rome that might cheer him up a bit, and there is no way in Hell™ he can resist the temptation of a bit of angelic cheeriness, no matter how much he (possibly) loathes himself for it. Crowley has masterminded this meeting despite all his snarky attitude.

Look at how he looks around to his right at the beginning of the scene (the sassy barmaid is right in front of him, not to his right): 

Before being *massively surprised* when Aziraphale appears right there a moment later:

No fooling sassy barmaid. And the Angel is clearly game for acting as a bit of a pick-me-up/temptation.

(No way the work with Caligula would be a quick temptation.)

(Also, sure, might be reading into things way too much, but notice how the camera makes some unusually big, sudden cuts around the “Just nipped in for a quick temptation” line” here ^ , circling all the way from Aziraphale’s right to looking over his left shoulder in three big jumps. It’s almost like the camera slithers around Aziraphale/them both in classic Crowley-tempting-Aziraphale fashion, e.g. as seen in ˅ )

Crowley’s a skilled old tempter, and he knows juuuust how to play this game and get Aziraphale on the hook (not that Aziraphale is reluctant to take the bait):

I didn’t. I didn’t want to be this person. But Aziraphale is sitting RIGHT THERE looking like A TOTALLY RESPECTABLE Roman citizen circa 40 AD. Maybe the hair might be unusual, but the Romans LOVED blonde hair. They thought it was cool and foreign and exotic in sort of a sexy way.

But Crowley is so historically confused. And I think the production design is too good and Neil Gaiman is too on top of his game for this to be accidental. It must mean something. 

I - HAIR

What is on your head Crowley. Are you the emperor? Are you a victorious general currently participating in a victory parade? 

Sure, you sometimes see laurel wreathes in portraits. But FUNERAL portraits.

That crown is a symbolic thing, to celebrate your victories in life. It’s not STREET WEAR. 

And okay. It’s 40-41 AD. Caligula is emperor. Military chic is in. If you’re a guy, you’re wearing your hair short and un-styled (LIKE AZIRAPHALE.) Those dramatic little spit curls wouldn’t show up until at least Nero. 

But actually, pulling back for a second - are you appreciating the absurdity that is this hairstyle? Because it took me a second to notice that only the FRONT HALF is curled.

Which is a Roman hairstyle. But it’s a Roman LADY hairstyle. 

(It tends to get called ‘Flavian Hair’ because the Flavian era ladies of the 70s-90s got pretty extreme about it, but you still had less… dramatic versions in the 40s.)

That’s you, Crowley. That’s your style reference. Honestly, if you had just kept your hair long everybody would have thought you were a cool barbarian chieftain or something. 

II - CLOTHES

The black is fine. It’s eccentric, but fine. Romans wore black. Wearing black was Cato the Younger’s *thing.* It gets associated with mourning and/or protest, but it would have been really visually confusing to have Crowley wear some other color. This gets a pass.

Nope, my question is about his articles of clothing. There’s a charcoal grey garment that seems to be a toga + undershirt. It’s looped over Crowley’s arm, which is a classic toga give away. 

That part’s fine. But over the top, he’s wearing a true black… short cape? Shawl? it’s really hard to tell, because whatever it is, he is NOT wearing it correctly (is it folded in half?) Also, that irregular red zigzag pattern is very strange and I do not recognize it from anywhere. Seriously, I can’t even decide on a continent for this garment.

III - JEWELRY

Emperor Nero usually gets credit for inventing the first sunglasses, after he started watching gladiators fight though a green gemstone. He won’t be emperor for about ten years. But hey, he probably got the idea from somewhere. And dark glasses are just a really sensible way to hide your snakey eyes. This is also the first time we see Crowley put up some proper emotional barriers, so it’s a good place for the glasses to be introduced. (@theladyzephyr has a wonderful meta that goes into a lot more detail here.) 

So the sunglasses are good. BUT THAT BROOCH.

Okay. This is Aziraphale wearing a fibula plate brooch

It’s a really Roman style, and a really Roman shape (a “pelta”)

I’ve never seen one that looks like angel wings, but a Roman citizen is going to look at that and see a soppily patriotic Imperial Eagle. How nice that this lovely man from Germania/Greece has made some money and become such an exemplary citizen!

But Crowley is wearing a penannular (pin-and-ring) brooch

That’s not roman. That’s a style from the British Isles (Irish, Pictish, Scottish, Welsh.) It says barbarian, boonies, outskirts of the civilized world. 

And nobody @ me with pictures of pin-and-ring brooches from Rome. Those are small, cheap, and undecorated. They’re the cultural equivalent of safety pins. This is patterned like a snake, and it’s the size of Crowley’s palm. 

AND THAT’S ANOTHER THING. They didn’t do snake-themed jewelry in the British isles. Snakes didn’t have the best cultural associations there, and there weren’t too many of them there to begin with. This isn’t something Crowley picked up because “hey, a snake, cool,” and then got attached too. This must have been commissioned special. 

But you know who LOVED snake jewelry? 

ROMANS. 

Romans associated snakes with healing and rebirth - clinics sometimes had lil snakes crawling around on the ground to give the place good vibes. 

You cannot tell me that Crowley could have existed in Rome for any length of time and not picked up some of this jewelry. Which leads me to my conclusion:

IV - CROWLEY IS EXTREMELY NEW IN TOWN

The unfashionable pin and hair? The clothing draped the wrong way? The cultural colorblindness of wearing a laurel crown when you’re not supposed to? Crowley looks like a tacky tourist because he is one. He’s not staying here long, he “just nipped in for a quick temptation.”

He’s in a bad mod because he’s had an awful day, everyone keeps looking at him funny, the temptation was a complete bust, he has culture shock, and now he’s just trying to get a drink. But they don’t have any PROPER drinks like ALE or MEAD here, so he just orders “whatever’s drinkable.” He’s even not sure what they drink in Rome. 

many are talking about his repression which is very valid… and yet the thing to me that stands out about aziraphale is that he’s actually… incredibly stable in his identity and that identity IS incredibly queer. queer by the standards of heaven AND by human standards as well

metatron describes his “de facto partnership” with crowley as “irregular.” and in fact aziraphale in his entirety is irregular. he likes and makes it his business not only to understand but to be a connoisseur of all manner of things angels aren’t supposed to even remotely care about. food. music. books. theatre. sleight of hand. and more.

it’s the sort of behavior that would’ve gotten him othered, treated as a bit odd, in heaven even if he hadn’t chosen to consort all across the earth with a literal demon. and it IS treated that way - the fact is aziraphale even as an angel has got proclivities that set him apart from the rest of the host (even after offering him the highest position in heaven, metatron still acts deeply dismissive of him… like aziraphale’s bookshop is merely a quaint little hobby of his that can be easily transferred to another custodian, and not a literal extension of who aziraphale has become, full of his tartan and unique bibles and special vintages of wine and the books arranged in a very specific way)

so. aziraphale is a queer angel but of course he’s also queer to other humans. but in such a way that… he had his realization a LONG time ago, and put the matter very much to rest after that. aziraphale is perpetually something like several centuries behind schedule. he owns an ancient computer that probably continues to run windows 98 simply because aziraphale’s decided it should. he wears the same waistcoat and coat for generations because he simply likes them precisely the way they are and sees no reason to change them. but the idea that he doesn’t know how he comes across to others - of course he does. he knows he looks like your prim and proper grandfather and he prefers it that way

aziraphale looked around at humans in the 1880s and said: ah yes. this is where i fit. and promptly ensconced himself in that queer subculture. learned the gavotte. read his austen. loved crowley from afar. aziraphale is fiercely and vibrantly queer. just with the sort of assurance of someone who lives with his lover in a commonlaw marriage for decades and then shows up at city hall for the certificate once society decides it’s ‘allowed.’ like… he hasn’t had any need to know what grindr is because aziraphale’s ‘scene’ was a century and a half ago and it defined romance for him too.

but my favorite thing about aziraphale is how much of him is about appearances versus the truth. he can lie straight to angels’ faces and sleep at night. he knows he comes off soft but he once wielded a flaming sword. he dissembles helplessness but he’s far from it and he knows precisely how it makes others treat him. and at the core of aziraphale is rigidity, inflexibility of ideas… his sense of self is stable where crowley’s is malleable, and so on, and so on

and the fact that he’s continuously fixated on trying to misguidedly do the right thing, the fact that he seeks heavenly approval and wants to fit the world into his schema of good vs evil… in no way do i think that means he isn’t one hundred percent aware of how he feels about crowley or what it means about him by angelic or human standards. i’ve seen some folks saying that aziraphale doesn’t want to like kissing crowley and like… as much as i love me some brideshead revisited/atonement flavored angst; i put forth that it’s not internalized homophobia or queer panic but simply: “i’m trying to do the right thing for both of us and you won’t let me.” and “i wanted our first kiss to be different.” he was envisioning an entirely different flavor of romance than what he got but he emma woodhoused too close to the sun

like, y’all. aziraphale in all likelihood has a glorious collection of historical queer erotica. he just has a feathery diva coat hanging in his closet, and for what. “oh, good lord” he says at crowley’s revolutionary outfit in the bastille, while eyeing him up like an entire meal. he’s so good at affected propriety, at carefully constructed stuffiness, but between the two of them aziraphale’s got to be the one who has experience

Happy birthday Janis Joplin!

Born on the 19th of January, 1943, Janis was one of the most well-known US musicians of the 1960s. She performed at Woodstock, and was most famous for her cover of Kris Kristofferson’s Me and Bobby McGee, which reached number 1 in the Billboard charts in the year after her death. Janis was bisexual, having relationships with men and women throughout her life.

“It was an admirable thing and altogether precious.”

Gas cloud surrounding the star Fomalhaut.

go to part 1 | go to part 2 | go to part 3 | this is part 4 | go to part 5 [coming soon]

We never see Sauron—at least not in The Lord of the Rings—and that was funny to 13 year old me. When I first followed Frodo on that journey to Mount Doom I wondered at the choice to name a book after a villain who doesn’t actually appear in it. There’s the arrow of red light from Barad-dûr’s highest tower, of course, or the dark cloud with the reaching arm that rises over Mordor at the moment of Sauron’s defeat, but both of these function as suggestions of his presence or the weight of his attention only; they are the interpretations of the events as seen by others. Likewise, the one and only time Sauron speaks we receive his words through an intermediary—a contrite Pippin who has sneaked a peek at the palantir.

But Sauron is always there. The threat or the fear of him is always just at the edge of our peripheral vision: in the far-flung, millennia-long plots[1]; in the metaphors that put him everywhere all the time, disembodied limbs reaching to encompass all of Middle-earth (“his arm has grown long”) or disembodied eyes searching[2]; in the almost campy performance of evil on display when he orders his minions to steal only black horses from the Rohirrim; in the capitalized pronouns; in the metonymy and other evasive forms of address his orc underlings use to circumnavigate invoking him. In poor Sméagol’s other self[3].

In the ever-increasing weight hanging from Frodo’s neck: our antagonist is on that journey, too, literally and figuratively barreling towards his own destruction.

Along that journey Tolkien tells us numerous names and epithets for him—103 according to Richard Blackwelder’s A Tolkien Thesaurus—not counting the many he goes by in other texts. One of those is “The Nameless Enemy.” This word—“nameless”—is first applied in this way by Boromir at The Council of Elrond and later by Faramir, suggesting that invoking the name “Sauron” may be considered dangerous or even taboo to the Men of Gondor.

But “nameless” is far more appropriate than this simple explanation can express.