Is This How I Blog?

How do I drive this thing?

[ghostlymarauder]

and what if I say Matt Murdock is just the physical representation of the lyrics "I've never seen brown eyes look so blue" from ethel cain's nettle, huh? then what?

[eth-ash-n-thorn]

Yeah, I know it’s technically incorrect, but I couldn’t help myself.

[were--ralph]

like to charge reblog to cast

[eth-ash-n-thorn]

Reblogged it twice, in the hopes of adding a bonus third.

[were--ralph]

like to charge reblog to cast

[thegaymertrainer]

I FINALLY FOUND IT AGAIN

[cthulhu-with-a-fez]

via @mylordshesacactus

[shortlesbian]

[naamahdarling]

Kink in public. So not okay.

[eth-ash-n-thorn]

It’s like that thing where you tie an elephant to a garden stake.

[beardedmrbean]

[were--ralph]

Mario party ass minigame

[demigirlboss2girlrotboogaloo]

The wway she says "Gary fucked it all up" gives me life.

[pteren]

i didn't think to turn on the sound when i first reblogged😭

[sadclowncentral]

weird how no one ever comments on the absence of smells unprompted. the nose just isn't a topic of conversation unless it's urgent huh

[sadclowncentral]

"it's dark in here" normal regular observation

"finally some quiet" relatable exclamation

"doesn't smell like anything in here" absolutely deranged sentence

[louisinart-like-cuisinart]

Anyway if you see this you have to reblog and tag with a delight from ur day -- even the littlest thing counts

[neil-gaiman]

Why do you think the studios aren’t giving in to the demands?

Stubbornness, foolishness and greed.

[beelzeebub]

Pride month in Hell 🏳️‍🌈

a little gomens drawing i did a while back (follow my gomens twitter acc!)

[neil-gaiman]

i’ve looked and i don’t believe you’ve ever answered this before but what are/would be crowley and aziraphale’s zodiac signs :)?

You need to be born and to be born while the stars exist and there are dates in order to have zodiac signs. Or indeed, birthdays.

[eth-ash-n-thorn]

I like to believe that Crowley, when asked, says that he’s a Sagittarius because he’s proudest of how that one turned out. Aziraphale, in contrast, prefers to pretend that he didn’t hear the question correctly and someone just called his name and ‘oh, I really must go, it was lovely talking to you—!’

[squidwujun]

Damn Crowley really isn't coping well

[eth-ash-n-thorn]

I like to believe this is an alternate timeline where Crowley takes Aziraphale up on that offer to be reinstated as an angel, but this is how he is as an angel, and Aziraphale immediately regrets it.

[concoulor]

you watch one single good omens animatic on youtube and then youtube thinks you need to see 102838949 more

[alexxuun]

Also, since i’m on the topic of good omens/daredevil, they’re the same person just different font. The only difference is they switch hair colour between the show and the comic.

[gimmeirishkisses]

The Being Unknown

THAT scene was not heartbreaking because of miscommunication

I’ve seen a lot of posts lamenting that Crowley and Aziraphale just needed to TALK to each other. That if they hadn’t been speaking past each other in that S2E6 ending, it would have been okay. That they have major MISCOMMUNICATION issues.

And that’s bullshit.

(No, I’m being inflammatory. Miscommunication is part of it, but not the meat of it.)

The crux of that conflict was NOT miscommunication. Rather, the heartbreak came from Aziraphale’s fundamental misunderstanding of Crowley. Let me elaborate.

It's More the Being Unknown

(just listen to it okay)

Before Crowley can confess and make known his desire for them to explicitly be a couple, Aziraphale tells him to hold that thought because, “I have some incredibly good news to give you”.

The good news? “I could appoint you to be an angel. To come back to heaven and everything. Like the old times, only even nicer.”

As a viewer, I knew without the shot cutting to Crowley how he would react. In absolutely no world would Crowley ever interpret that as good news. I bet you didn’t think he would either. It was sickeningly obvious to everyone apart from Aziraphale that Crowley would never want to go back to heaven or be an angel again.

And how does Crowley react to this news? “And you told him just where he could stick it then?”

So despite Aziraphale’s evident excitement and framing the news as “incredibly good”, Crowley is still holding onto hope that Aziraphale knows Crowley well enough to know he would be disgusted by such an offer.

They go on, Aziraphale describing heaven as “the side of truth, of light, of good”.

Panicking, Crowley presses, twice, “Tell me you said no?”

But Aziraphale can’t reassure Crowley. He completely misjudged how Crowley would take the news. He emphasises that, “If I’m in charge, I can make a difference”.

Let’s pause there.

Why did we as audience know that Crowley would have never taken up this offer or responded positively to the invitation?

Firstly, because we AGREE with him that both heaven and hell are toxic. That is the position we are encouraged to take up throughout the show.

The Job minisode was a key moment depicting the evil of heaven this season. It showed us Aziraphale’s discomfort and distress over heaven’s role in human suffering, and his first small act of rebellion by saving Job’s children and lying to the archangels. We are meant to see this as positive character development for Aziraphale. So Aziraphale’s supposed backslide this episode is meant to feel bad.

Secondly, we know that Crowley would never have responded positively to this news because we KNOW Crowley as a character. We saw him furious with Gabriel for wanting Aziraphale to shut up and die. We saw him alone, lamenting that he never meant to fall, he just had questions. We saw him time and time again pull Aziraphale towards a morality that eschews dogma and accounts for “shades of grey”, especially throughout the minisodes. Fuck, the first season centres on Crowley working together with Aziraphale to defy the Great Plan espoused by heaven and hell both.

It should be OBVIOUS to anyone who knows Crowley that he wouldn’t want to rejoin heaven.

That’s why it’s so fucking gut-wrenching that Aziraphale doesn’t know this. He doesn’t understand this fundamental core of Crowley. It’s the Being Unknown of it all that hurts.

Going unknown as any angel to me

So, Crowley is reeling over the fact that his de facto partner of 6000 years fundamentally does not know or understand him. But what also fucks Crowley up is he thought he knew Aziraphale better than this. He thought at least since the antichrist saga that he and Aziraphale were on their own side. He was wrong.

Because the second horrifying aspect of the bomb Aziraphale has just dropped is that he thinks he can make a difference if he is in charge in heaven. He is naïve enough to thing that they can do good as angels. And Crowley is so very disappointed in that naivety, after all they’ve seen and been through. “You’re better than that.”

At this point, I think Crowley is trying to lay all cards on the table to save Aziraphale from himself. From his incredible naivety and religious brainwashing. Despite being gutted by how badly Aziraphale misjudged him, Crowley loves him and wants him to know that, and hopes wildly that Aziraphale will drop this misguided plan and run off with him.

Yeah okay some miscommunication

At this point in the conversation, I think there is merit to the miscommunication argument.

Aziraphale fails to engage Crowley on the crux of what he is saying, i.e. that they are an “us” pretending for their whole existence that they aren’t. Aziraphale honestly looks confused while Crowley pours his heart out.

Aziraphale brings the conversation back to the invitation, “I’ll run it. You can be my second in command. We can make a difference”. Thus framing the relationship in terms of allyship, a partnership working towards the greater good, rather than take up the romantic framing that Crowley has introduced.

And then Aziraphale’s, “nothing lasts forever” comment. Yes, definitely, Aziraphale meant one thing with that and Crowley heard another.

But still mostly not a miscommunication issue

As Crowley walks away, Aziraphale tries to make their disagreement about miscommunication. “I don’t think you understand what I’m offering you.”

But Crowley does understand the offer. He’s not reacting this way due to miscommunication. His reaction arises from his experience with heaven, because of how it has shaped him. It’s only now become obvious that Aziraphale wasn’t in agreement with Crowley about eschewing heaven for their own side. It's a misalignment of worldview and values. “I think I understand a whole lot better than you do.”

Was the kiss a miscommunication? I think it was Crowley making a last ditch effort to make Aziraphale confront the crux of what he was confessing. To strip away the pretense they'd maintained their whole existence. (What Aziraphale meant with the “I forgive you” line is somewhat ambiguous. But I don’t necessarily think that means Aziraphale and Crowley were miscommunicating with each other there. I’ll think on it some more and post later…)

In summary

Suffice to say, the outcome of the conversation (going their separate ways) and the desperate, charged, heartbreaking tone permeating the scene was not set into motion by any miscommunication.

Aziraphale wanted to restore Crowley as an angel to heaven. He clearly communicated that. Crowley hated that idea. He clearly communicated that.

The issue was that Aziraphale didn’t understand a fundamental part of Crowley, while Crowley assumed that Aziraphale did.

It was the being unknown :’(

...

P.S. I’m not arguing for Aziraphale being “in the wrong”, or saying he’s bad for not knowing this about Crowley, or that he doesn’t have his own justifications for why he thinks working with heaven is good, etc. This meta is purely about locating the source of devastation and heartbreak within the interaction, and pushing back against the claim that miscommunication was the decisive factor.

[eth-ash-n-thorn]

I wonder how much of it is naivety, and how much is raw denial. Because we’ve seen that Aziraphale denies, and he denies hard, especially when it comes to Crowley. “We’re not friends!” “I don’t even like you!” “We’re hereditary enemies!” “I barely know him!” We know he doesn’t really believe that Crowley is inherently evil (even though he says it all the time) because he’s very quick to remind Crowley how good and kind and nice he is, and is typically pretty darn smug about it.

Aziraphale is something of a fake-it-til-you-make-it kind of entity, and the ending to me felt like he was speaking it into existence. Like if he says “Heaven is the good guys” enough, it’ll eventually be true. He’s stubborn and kind of single-minded, in everything from thinking he can strong-arm Heaven into a moral 180, to escaping Heaven without a body and possessing someone to go stop the apocalypse, to snagging the Bentley for a trip to Edinburg, to getting himself arrested because he wanted crepes. I think he wanted that reassurance and encouragement from Crowley, like the psych-up for the bullet catch all over again, but with absurdly higher stakes and sacrifices. But even without it, he slapped his best I-am-totally-in-control-of-this-situation smile right over the mounting panic and got in that elevator.

[eth-ash-n-thorn]

Inspiration courtesy of my shuffled playlist, but I cannot shake the idea of Meatloaf in season 3 of Good Omens. Like, messy post-breakup Crowley tearing through London at absurd speeds to “I’ll Kill You If You Don’t Come Back”? Aziraphale making a mad-dash escape through Heaven to “Bat Out Of Hell”? Something tender happening to the piano melody of “I Would Do Anything For Love”? Some euphoric we’re-finally-together-and-everyone-else-can-get-bent (possibly while peeling out in the Bentley) to “Dead Ringer For Love?” Any use of “Heaven Can Wait”? I’m just sayin’.

[armageddidnt]

Yall realize this means that the MOST MINOR MIRACLE that Crowley and Aziraphale are capable of performing, when done together, could bring back 25 people from the dead??? Next season, if they ever realize their true power, it is going to be over for heaven AND hell 

[eth-ash-n-thorn]

Now, with this in mind, think about the end of season 1. Aziraphale had his flaming sword back. Crowley, in a moment of desperation, had stopped time (and restarted it with the hand-crank engine starter from the Bentley, which carries a whole new oomph after seeing Crowley use the same thing to start the engine of the universe at the beginning of s2.) And they were both holding hands with the antichrist. And all three of them were, in unison, fully prepared to tell Satan himself to step the fuck off. If they had decided in that moment to combine their power for a real miracle? Oh man. Shit would have gotten real.