the cunt off to end all cunt offs are you actually kidding me people fucking died this shit was felt thousands of miles away through tremors in the earth the sheer cosmic power of their facecards rippled through the ether and kier goddamn eagans ghost on the big waffle in the sky shivered and turned around like Something Just Happened
btw I knew all those cowards were gonna turn their backs. love them all etc we are all adults but I knew all those cowards were gonna turn their backs. sorry, dylan fans. and yet irving b PERSISTED. irving b had NO friends, NO lover, NO fire, NO tent. irving b had his intuition and the sight of the love of his life in dreams. it was very cold but irving b said: i am gonna serve so much cunt like you've never seen, i'm gonna serve more cunt than there's snow around. and he waterboarded the mole for breakfast. the b stands for BITCH
I have on and off been tracking songs that get stuck in my head and, spammy special case[1] aside, it’s a two-day process.
most recent example: this morning’s second involuntary musical imagery (good) showed up as if it had always been in the rotation, but it could only be from when my sister texted me about it Sunday afternoon. I listened to it once, maybe twice, texted her back about how cool some of the sounds were, then put the album down as something to investigate later, and here it was again today as I was doing my morning routine.
[1] special case: repetition, such as in commercials and popular tiktok/reels audios
it has taken me until today to interpret the story/moral of sodom and gomorrah within aziraphale accepting jim into the bookshop and giving him sanctuary. and in his decision to return to heaven. are you serious
#ignore this i barely know what im saying. but aziraphale. your abraham is showing (@thesherrinfordfacility)
#<- wait where does Abraham come into this#Abraham is the father of Isaac#I don’t think that has anything to do with Sodom and Gomorrah but I’m no exert (@indigovigilance)
Abraham's the one who convinces God to give Sodom and Gomorrah a chance. The angels were on their way to destroy the cities when Abraham insisted they take a break to rest and to be given lunch.
After the angels ate, God went, "Well, I'm planning to make Abraham rule a nation, so I might as well let him in on what I'm up to." God explains that Sodom and Gomorrah are awful and Abraham goes "Wow. I'm not questioning your decisions or anything, but when you say 'destroy the city,' you obviously wouldn't do that if there were 50 righteous people in there, right? As a most wonderful and gracious God, surely you wouldn't do that." And God goes, "...right, yeah, obviously I'd spare the city in that case." And then Abraham responds, "I know I'm just dust at your feet, but if the count came up just five short, you wouldn't destroy the city just for the lack of five people, right?" and God goes, "Yes, of course, I'm not so petty as to spare a city for the sake of 50 righteous people but not for 45 righteous people; that'd be crazy." And eventually Abraham negotiates God down to 10 before declaring victory and going home.
Unfortunately for Sodom, Lot's the only righteous man the angels encounter before going "fuck this shit, I'm out", and even if you count his wife and daughters, that's nowhere close to ten. That one family is given the opportunity to escape, and Sodom and Gomorrah burn.
So what's Abraham's role in this?
Abraham, like Lot, shelters and feeds the angels (which brings in a whole bunch of societal rules about hospitality).
Aziraphale, of course, shelters and feeds the angel who shows up at his own door.
Abraham is the one who somehow gets away with questioning God's plan. Whether you want to attribute it to Abraham being reckless or Abraham selflessly spending the political capital he apparently, bafflingly has, he's bold enough to use flattery to push God into being willing to spare an entire city. Obviously you can't just tell God "look, boss, this is a really, really terrible idea," but if you're very careful about it, you can sometimes get God to agree to a plan that was clearly not what God had originally been planning to do.
Aziraphale, of course, has somehow gotten away with lying to God's face. He has also, of course, been willing to step into the line of fire and say, "Well, we all know the Great Plan, but there's also the Ineffable Plan..." — providing both the emotional appeal of "wow, this would be absolutely horrid" and the graceful exit of "but of course that was never the actual plan anyway." And, whether you interpret it as recklessness or self-sacrifice, Aziraphale has now headed up to Heaven to try to disrupt Heaven's stated plans again.
We don't know exactly how Aziraphale plans to do that, but we know he was there at Sodom and presumably got to see Abraham diplomatically redirect God, and we know Aziraphale himself diplomatically redirected Gabriel and Beelzebub at the airfield at the end of Season 1, so it would be entirely reasonable to suspect he's going to try for that again. Much like with Abraham negotiating on behalf of Sodom, giving the Earth a chance may be the best Aziraphale's able to do, but that's worth enough he has to try.
want runs deep in you, heavy and thick, and the dam is creaking under its weight.
want is like dust, thousands of years worth of dust on your heavy shoulders and you dare not move. if you stay very still and keep to yourself maybe no one will notice.
want is like grief, love left unclaimed. want is like hunger and you are famished.
Aziraphale is literally such a good character. The more I think about him the more I go completely feral. He was specifically created as a warrior to fight and protect. He’s soft and camp and likes feather boas. He’s spent 6000 years acting like he’s the most kind and polite perfect little angel but he’ll fucking destroy you with a single glare. He’s an absolute bitch. His face lights up with the smile of a thousand suns. He’ll kill someone for crêpes with his boyfriend. He lies to God. He needs the biggest hug in the whole world. His standards will NEVER be met. He has travel sweets. He painted his bookshop the colour of his soulmate’s eyes. He’s one bad day away from having a mental breakdown so intense it would explode half the planet. He loves humans so much but if any of them so much as speak to him he’ll require three business days to recuperate. He is THE Southern Pansy. He declared war on Hell because they interrupted the Jane Austen ball he meticulously planned just to dance with his boyfriend. He is so so traumatised and hasn’t experienced a straightforward emotion in his life. He WOULD bite people if he was given the opportunity. He is the most annoying bastard you’ve ever met (affectionate). He can’t speak French.
It's been six months since the release of season two so I would like to present to you: a collection of gut-wrenching, earth-shattering, tear-jerking, life-ending, bone-breaking, blood-pouring, heart-stopping, grief-inducing Good Omens posts I’ve had the unfortunate opportunity of coming across
I will try to assign credit but some of these are from Pinterest & were already cut off.
@ azirascrowley on twitter
@ thinkaziracrow on twitter
@catloverwhovian and @livebloggingmydescentintomadness on tumblr
@toasty-cowboy on tumblr and @ goodomenson on tik tok
@ youryurigoddess on twitter
@ azfellndco on twitter
@ itstimihey on twitter
@wilyserpentofeden on tumblr
@doodlejoops on tumblr
amazon fucking prime
@ lamew1tch on twitter, @lamew1tch and @deadspe11s on tumblr
My head cannon is that the 1941 Church/Magic Show/Zombie evening (date??) ended badly and Crowley did a geographic to Hollywood where he worked on the film (it would have been in production in 1941) and kept a souvenir.
Spoiler alert; the Maltese Falcon is literally a (secretly) gay icon.
So here’s the thing. I’m usually not one for talking about head canons. There’s no way we’ll ever really know why Crowley has the Maltese Falcon alongside his other two “winged statues” (wink wink, nudge nudge) in his flat. But in my little art director heart I really feel like some context could help people think about the historical implications of what the Maltese Falcon might represent for Crowley, and how life often imitates art.
So how is this mysterious black bird (ahem) a symbol of coded queerness in film?
The Maltese Falcon, written & directed by John Huston and released in 1941 (ahem), is an adaptation of Hammett's 1930 novel, which features not one, but three openly gay villains in San Francisco. If you want to adapt this novel in 1940's Hollywood, you had to deal with the Hay's Code,
...A set of moral censorship guidelines for the American filmmaking industry, and was effective in place until 1968. There are several reprehensible facets to the Code, but the one most relevant here is Section 2 – titled simply “Sex” – Item 4: “Sex Perversion, or any inference to it, is forbidden.” While this does not explicitly forbid filmmakers from the use of homosexual characters in a narrative, the implication is transparent enough. Any positive gay representation was clearly made impossible.
Screenflipped (How Subtext Saved (and Damned) Homosexuality on Screen)
The Hays code effectively sublimated all the gay representation in the novel into subtle coded references (sound familiar?) that could be defended if taken out of context, but taken as a whole paint a very erotic gay picture:
Cairo’s calling cards and handkerchiefs are scented with gardenias. He also fusses about his clothes and becomes upset when blood from a scratch ruins his shirt. And if you look carefully, he makes subtle fellating gestures with his cane during his interview with Sam Spade (Bogart)...Some gay critics have also focused on the falcon as a phallic signifier; the way it is treated and touched by various characters.
Emanuel Levy
What's amazing about this is that, despite how coded the references have to be, and how negative the portrayal might be, this is probably "the first example of an explicitly gay-coded villain in American film."
Think about it. Crowley loves movies, and in 1941, when the whole world was burning, and the object of his desire is so close for the first time in decades, and yet still so impossibly far away, he could go to a movie theatre and watch gay characters lust after an equally unobtainable Maltese falcon on the silver screen. Who wanted (like him), and were sexual and dark (like him). Who had to sneak around, and make innuendos and use coded signalling and double speak, just to exist.
And even though the hero of The Maltese Flacon finds a perfect straight-laced, alpha male rogue in Humphrey Bogart, "it's undeniable that Bogie was a gay ally -- or as allied as you could get in that era. He frequented gay bars and had close friendships with gay men throughout his life, including Charles Farrell, Spencer Tracey, William Haines, Noel Coward, and even a young Truman Capote (who beat him at arm wrestling)."
And just one year later, arguably in his most famous film role, Bogart played another hero in the (also subtly queer coded) film Casablanca, alongside noted bisexual actor Conrad Veidt in his last ever film role before his death.
Veidt played the hero int the first positive gay romance ever featured on film, Different from the Others (1919). It was a SILENT FILM, that's how early it was. Why do I mention Casablanca and Veidt? Take a look at the posters on the wall in the backstage room after the bullet catch in season 2...
Queer history is, albeit quietly, woven into the very fabric of Good Omens. You can't hear it over the noise of the traffic, but it's there.
Right, this might be controversial, or I might be the only one who sees this moment in this way, but I need to talk about this now. It’s really sweet when Crowley says this, except what happens afterwards isn’t sweet at all. And can I just add right now that I love both Azirpahale and Crowley, they’re both wonderful and also brillianty flawed, I don’t hate either of them. But as far as I’m concerned Crowley behaves really stupidly here.
GIF by ladybokatankryze
C: I’m going to get the humans out of here and then I’m coming back. I won’t leave you on your own.
A: I know.
Oh dear, Crowley. Why did you leave him on his own after saying this? Why did you let Aziraphale down? Why does no one talk about the fact that you did? You walked out that bookshop and Aziraphale was so confident you would come back that he expressed this confidence to the humans and then defended his reliance on you, “Crowley will have a plan,” “Rescuing me makes him so happy.”
But you didn’t come back, Crowley! Why? You left the bookshop, spotted Muriel and then in some super weird ADHD* move just left Aziraphale to sort out the demon problem on his own whilst you went off to heaven. Whyyyyy?
Now okay. I admit, Crowley was working towards the ultimate goal of finding out what the heck had happened to Gabriel, which was something that needed to be done. He spotted the opportunity, knew it probably wouldn’t come up again and so took it. He did what probably needed to be done. He also did it expecting that the demons wouldn’t ever be able to enter the bookshop because Aziraphale was never going to say they could come in. It’s not his fault Maggie is an idiot. I still love him and so does Aziraphale. Also Aziraphale is perfectly capable of defending himself in some ways and we see this after Crowley leaves…
BUT. What a mistake.
He basically left Aziraphale on his own to fight the demons. An Aziraphale who trusted so absolutely that Crowley would come back, and that Crowley would know what to do, that he hadn’t bothered to come up with the whole plan himself. He didn’t have to. Aziraphale and Crowley are a team, they work together and they don’t let each other down.
Except this time Crowley did.
It’s unclear exactly how long Crowley spent in heaven watching the trial etc but since the ball starts at 6.30pm and the demons seem to turn up not that long into the evening, we can assume it’s a really long time. By the time he comes back it’s very clearly morning again, the entire night has passed. Maybe Crowley didn’t intend to be away that long, maybe he expected his jaunt to heaven to be quicker, or maybe this is because time passes differently in heaven and Crowley had no way of knowing exactly what time he’d return to earth, but whatever the reason, he leaves Aziraphale alone for a really long time, after explicitly stating that he won’t leave him on his own.
By the time he does turn up it’s long after the battle is over and long after Aziraphale has been forced to take an action he really didn’t want to take in order to defend himself and the bookshop.
Just look at Aziraphale’s face when Crowley returns, he isn’t super delighted to see him, he's sort of happy, but more looks like he can’t believe Crowley is actually there.
When he says, “You came back!” he sounds kind of surprised and also perhaps relieved. Why? Because he’s given up on Crowley coming back by that point. He has no idea what has happened to him or why he let him down so badly.
I think we can fairly safely assume that Aziraphale and Crowley can sense at least to some extent where the other one is when they are both on earth if they try to do so, and it’s probable that at some point after sorting out the demon problem Aziraphale had wondered where Crowley had gone and tried to sense him, so likely he knows Crowley has been away from the earth. What he doesn’t know is where he’s been or whether he went there willingly (at least until he turns up with a bunch of angels, at which point he’s intelligent enough to work it out).**
So now he knows where Crowley went, but he doesn’t know why or what he discovered. He’s still in the “Crowley let me down,” space at this point. Then Crowley asks what happened to the demons and Aziraphale has to tell him he blew up his halo. Crowley finds this delightful and he laughs, but for once they aren’t laughing together. This is only the second time that we have seen Crowley laugh at Aziraphale (the first is when he mocks him about thinking he’s a demon after the Job thing, which he quickly stops doing and switches to being kind when he realises how upset Aziraphale is). When he laughs about the halo he doesn’t mean it to be mocking, it’s actually the same disbelieving reaction that he does on the walls of Eden about the flaming sword, except magnified, he doesn’t just do a single “you what?” of disbelief and amusement as he does in Eden, he properly laughs because he knows Aziraphale better and thinks their relationship can take the laughter.
Usually he’d be right, but the problem is he’s just let Aziraphale down. So while he isn’t really mocking Aziraphale, because he loves that Aziraphale does these unexpected and wonderful things, Aziraphale doesn’t like the laugh at all. Look at his face. He glares at Crowley and his look very much is one of, “if you’d come back like you said you would, if you hadn’t let me down, I probably wouldn’t have had to do it at all.”
Then since Crowley rather stupidly doesn’t read the reaction and stop laughing the look changes more to, “I’m really upset about all this, please, please don’t laugh at me, you’re hurting me.”*** It's only shown briefly so it's difficult to capture, but you can just catch this in his expression before the camera cuts back to Crowley, and then again for a second when it recuts to Aziraphale, just before he reacts to the arrival of the demons.
Basically, Aziraphale is really fucking pissed off and upset with Crowley at this point. (Side note, Maggie and Nina look less than impressed by the laughter too – even they know it’s not the right reaction.)
If you need anymore evidence of how annoyed he is, look at how far away he stays from Crowley whilst he’s laughing. Aziraphale never stands that far away from him!
Luckily for Crowley Aziraphale is very good at forgiveness, and also very much likes it when Crowley takes charge of a situation and thankfully Crowley finally steps up. Whilst Aziraphale worries about what he’s done (look at the tension in his hands) Crowley categorically declares there will be no war and the demons react by listening to him. You can see Aziraphale start to reconnect with Crowley, his eyes flick back to him and then once Shax is up and awake his hands relax and he closes the distance between him and Crowley, angling his body towards him and standing close to him again.
Crowley is going to sort things out and Aziraphale’s faith in him is easily restored, although without doubt it’s suffered some damage underneath.
So what does this all mean? Well, firstly Crowley hurts Aziraphale deeply here and doesn’t realise he’s done it (and this is the second hurt he’s caused him within the space of a few days). Aziraphale forgives him pretty quickly, because Crowley unknowingly repairs things and Aziraphale is so full of love that it will take more than this one transgression to break their bond.
What it does mean though is that Aziraphale has just had a reminder of the demonic nature of demons shoved in his face. Crowley has just hurt him in several different ways in the space of a very short time. I doubt he consciously sees this as demonic because by this point I don’t think he really even thinks of Crowley as a demon on a day to day basis, but I do think he is responding to that hurt in a very human way.
Look, if your partner left you in a sticky situation and told you they would be back immediately and then didn’t turn back up for hours wouldn’t you be pissed off? Even if nothing happened (if Maggie had never let the demons in for example) you’d still have a few things to say about your partner’s hours of absence – yes, even if they had just unveiled a huge clue about why the whole situation was happening in the first place. That wouldn’t undo all your thoughts about how they let you down really badly and left you on your own in a terrible situation.
Another issue is Shax’s demonic nature – specifically how Shax has hurt him during the attack on the bookshop. If Crowley had been there there’s no way Shax would have had even half a second to get in her jibes to Aziraphale, but he’s not there and Shax gets her chance. What she does is play on Aziraphale’s fears about Crowley’s feelings for him (right at a time when Crowley is letting him down) and also remind Aziraphale of some of the ways in which he is a less-than-stella angel (as a side note I find it really interesting that Shax seems to have this ability to look at people and see their worst fears about themselves – do all demons have that or does every demon have a slightly different ‘power’?) So now Aziraphale has been let down by Crowley, which has directly led to Shax hurting him, and had his worst fears about his own nature brought to the forefront of his mind.
He’s been let down, mocked and emotionally wounded, and he goes into the conversation with the Metatron carrying that hurt, only to hear the Metatron singing his praises and telling him he’s, “the perfect angel for the job”. The Metatron deliberately soothes Aziraphale’s worst fears about himself in order to manipulate him. I’m not saying Aziraphale doesn’t see through it or that he is completely taken in by it or that this is his motivation for accepting the job, I think there’s more to it than that, but well… something to think about?
Mainly though, Crowley acts in a bit of a daft way here. His jaunt to heaven is funny and useful for moving the mystery along, but in terms of his relationship with Aziraphale it's an absolute disaster of a move. I'd want the "I was wrong" dance as an apology for that one if it was me. Just saying.
Popping back up here in the thread (thread? reblog chain?) to add:
Gosh are you ever right, Aziraphale is really NOT at all happy with Crowley laughing about the halo. He looks like he would say something like "Crowley be serious..." were it not for the room full of people that already want him dead lol.
I recently posted about Aziraphale in Season 1, and how the Bandstand Breakup was really about Aziraphale resisting Crowley's insistence that he, the angel, needed to murder the Antichrist child to save the world. In S1 both Crowley and the archangels use some of the same language ("ridiculous") to disparage Aziraphale's desire to be gentle, to never kill. Everyone wanted Aziraphale to be a fighter, except Aziraphale.
I feel as though one reason Aziraphale is upset here is because Crowley seems to still be taking joy in the angel's fighting power, and it's not what Aziraphale wants. If Crowley had come back as quickly as expected and actually *helped* him, maybe Aziraphale would have been able to stay gentle and restrained, the way he wants to be.
It also reminds me of how is S2e1 Crowley doesn't seem to understand Aziraphale's desire to take care of Jimbriel, whether he "deserves" it or not--because he *needs* it, because it's the kind thing to do.
This is a really interesting take. Aziraphale is telling everyone repeatedly that despite being capable of it he doesn't actually want to fight. It's why he does wild things like shoot a child and blow up his halo when he's backed into a corner, because he doesn't actually want to fight and therefore has never considered the tactics necessary to do so effectively and without taking rash actions.
It's why in the graveyard in Edinburgh he just looks at the two men until they give him what he wants. He doesn't fight them overtly or get cross or speak loudly, he just gently influences them with whatever angelic power he has until they give in. It's what he also did in the deleted series one scene when the things come to the bookshop.
Aziraphale will fight or stick up for himself when pushed but he'd rather do it in his own way with words or by stealth than by aggressive physical actions.
Funny, isn't it, how we all remember the left half of this picture and not the right half? Crowley was the one pushing Aziraphale into that corner, because child-murder was the only solution Crowley could see.
"Aziraphale will fight or stick up for himself when pushed"
I don't think we *ever* see Aziraphale truly stick up for *himself* with violence. He deploys the halo because he's protecting Jimbriel and a bunch of humans, but he is fundamentally a Shield, not a Sword.
I know that I have just as much desire in my heart for BAMF!Aziraphale as anyone else: for people (very broadly speaking) to see him, recognize his power and how he leashes it, and show him respect, but I have to accept that Aziraphale doesn't want this. He would much rather never have respect than be respected for his ability to do violence. Or even to be respected for having the ability to do violence & refraining, because that's really the same thing, isn't it?
This can be a bit confusing because it's an area where TV!Aziraphale diverges from book!Aziraphale. My headcanon is that Michael Sheen had a lot of input into this characterization, that he worked with Neil to develop an Aziraphale who's actually trying to be good. "Not just pretend good. But properly good."--which is a line said by Crowley, but in a flashback that's so firmly within Aziraphale's POV (and diary??) that I consider it *extremely* unreliable.
But I as I write about this, I think the distinction between "pretend good" and "properly good"* has been something Aziraphale has been thinking about & working on since the time of Job, at latest. Because Heaven is clearly all in on "pretend good", right? But Aziraphale is certain in his heart that there's such a thing as "properly good", and that the Almighty probably agrees with him about it, if he could only get through to them and have a real conversation. In the meantime, he has to muddle his way, listening to the humans but also following his heart.
And both heart and logic say, "properly good" can't be only for the strong & violent. The important moral actions have to be available to the weak and mild, just as much as to the strong. So he *acts* weak and mild, always, so he feels just as constrained as those without great power. So he gets his way without hurting people. Yes, he puts more-than-human love into his smiles, but they don't overwhelm human inclinations--it's the *queer* Scottish thug who lends him his phone, the other one just does nothing.
I have read at least one fic in which we learn that Aziraphale doesn't want to resort to violence because there's a threshold past which he can't control it anymore; that his brakes were designed to fail, which explains why he rides them so hard. This fits both with Gabriel's expectation that he'll be a "lean mean fighting machine" once he's back in fighting trim, and also with the observation that Aziraphale has two speeds, Stop and Go go go go. This is not an angel who does things by halves.
My own headcanon for some time is simply that he's got a lot of untreated, or self-treated, PTSD from the Great War. The description of him in Furfur's angel-spotting guide indicates that he's a fearsome smiter, and this is the printed description, not Crowley's hand-written annotations. A reputation for heroic deeds during the War would presumably have been a factor in putting him on gate duty in Eden. In the confusion of battle, the line between "hero" and "war criminal" can get very thin; and Aziraphale may well feel that he crossed it at some point, whether his colleagues agree with him or not.
In either case, the rescue game may be more than a game, on his side. It's entirely possible that he counts on Crowley to rescue him, not from danger, but from the necessity of becoming dangerous himself.
And I don't think, after the halo business, that Crowley has recognized that as clearly as Aziraphale hoped he had.
The description in Furfur's guide is clearly written by Crowley ("Repulsively soft", dear?), though, so the smiting could be misdirection.
Crikey, I just realized.
In "Lockdown" when Aziraphale talks about the burglars who broke into the bookshop, Crowley says "Did you smite them with your wroth?" Another data point that Crowley thinks the idea of Aziraphale smiting is amusing.
It's entirely possible that he counts on Crowley to rescue him, not from danger, but from the necessity of becoming dangerous himself.
Yes. And part of the thrill of the rescue game for Crowley is that he gets to rescue, to feel more powerful than, someone dangerous--instead of always having to run from danger. Aziraphale *hates* being dangerous, but Crowley .... Crowley was an adrenaline junkie before adrenaline had been invented, I think he's gotta *like* being around a danger that's sometimes only barely leashed.
Everyone saying that we'll get another kiss in S3, but what if we get two actually? Like, one of them is angsty, the type that says "I'm about to do something risky to save the world but before I need to kiss you just in case I die" and the other is finally when they get their deserved happy ending (after almost dying)
Why limit ourselves? A thousand kisses. S3 should be 40% plot 60% ineffable grinding
jbbartram-illu
dededos
yousharknotpass
janainaart
kaledo-art
stormborns
