Somehow we got lucky and even though it was very busy in St James’s Park today, we got to sit on the iconic bench! To whoever glued the coin on the ground please know that we watched someone try to pick it up! Crowley would be proud 😌
TERFS STOP INTERACTING WITH THIS POST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I DONT LIKE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IF YOU DONT RESPECT TRANS WOMEN GET OFF MY BLOG!!!!!! PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!!!!!!!!
Aziraphale’s Choice, the Job Connection, and Michael Sheen’s Morality
Update: Michael Sheen liked this post on Twitter, so I'm fairly certain there is a lot of validity to it.
I’ve had time to process Aziraphale’s choice at the end of Season 2. And I think only blaming the religious trauma misses something important in Aziraphale’s character. I think what happened was also Aziraphale’s own conscious choice––as a growth from his trauma, in fact. Hear me out.
Since November 2022 I’ve been haunted by something Michael Sheen said at the MCM London Comic Con. At the Q&A, someone asked him about which fantasy creature he enjoyed playing most and Michael (bless him, truly) veered on a tangent about angels and goodness and how, specifically,
We as a society tend to sort of undervalue goodness. It’s sort of seen as sort of somehow weak and a bit nimby and “oh it’s nice.” And I think to be good takes enormous reserves of courage and stamina. I mean, you have to look the dark in the face to be truly good and to be truly of the light…. The idea that goodness is somehow lesser and less interesting and not as kind of muscular and as passionate and as fierce as evil somehow and darkness, I think is nonsense. The idea of being able to portray an angel, a being of love. I love seeing the things people have put online about angels being ferocious creatures, and I love that. I think that’s a really good representation of what goodness can be, what it should be, I suppose.
I was looking forward to BAMF!Aziraphale all season long, and I think that’s what we got in the end. Remember Neil said that the Job minisode was important for Aziraphale’s story. Remember how Aziraphale sat on that rock and reconciled to himself that he MUST go to Hell, because he lied and thwarted the will of God. He believed that––truly, honestly, with the faith of a child, but the bravery of a soldier.
Aziraphale, a being of love with more goodness than all of Heaven combined, believed he needed to walk through the Gates of Hell because it was the Right Thing to do. (Like Job, he didn’t understand his sin but believed he needed to sacrifice his happiness to do the Right Thing.)
That’s why we saw Aziraphale as a soldier this season: the bookshop battle, the halo. But yes, the ending as well.
Because Aziraphale never wanted to go to Heaven, and he never wanted to go there without Crowley.
But it was Crowley who taught him that he could, even SHOULD, act when his moral heart told him something was wrong. While Crowley was willing to run away and let the world burn, it was Aziraphale (in that bandstand at the end of the world) who stood his ground and said No. We can make a difference. We can save everyone.
And Aziraphale knew he could not give up the ace up his sleeve (his position as an angel) to talk to God and make them see the truth in his heart.
I was messed up by Ineffable Bureaucracy (Boxfly) getting their happy ending when our Ineffable Husbands didn’t, but I see now that them running away served to prove something to Aziraphale. (And I am fully convinced that Gabriel and Beelzebub saw the example of the Ineffables at the Not-pocalypse and took inspiration from them for choosing to ditch their respective sides)
But my point is that Aziraphale saw them, and in some ways, they looked like him and Crowley. And he saw how Gabriel, the biggest bully in Heaven, was also like him in a way (a being capable of love) and also just a child when he wasn’t influenced by the poison of Heaven. Muriel, too, wasn’t a bad person. The Metatron also seemed to have grown more flexible with his morality (from Aziraphale's perspective). Like Earth, Heaven was shades of (light?) gray.
Aziraphale is too good an angel not to believe in hope. Or forgiveness (something he’s very good at it).
Aziraphale has been scarred by Heaven all his life. But with the cracks in Heaven’s armor (cracks he and Crowley helped create), Aziraphale is seeing something else. A chance to change them. They did terrible things to him, but he is better than them, and because of Crowley, he feels ready to face them.
(Will it work? Can Heaven change, institutionally? Probably not, but I can't blame Aziraphale for trying.)
At the cafe, the Metatron said something big was coming in the Great Plan. Aziraphale knows how trapped he had felt when he didn’t have God’s ear the first time something huge happened in the Big Plan. He can’t take a chance again to risk the world by not having a foot in the door of Heaven. That’s why we saw individual human deaths (or the threat of death) so much more this season: Elspeth, Wee Morag, Job’s children, the 1940s magician. Aziraphale almost killed a child when he couldn’t get through to God, and he’s not going through that again.
“We could make a difference.” We could save everyone.
Remember what Michael Sheen said about courage and doing good––and having to “look the dark in the face to be truly good.” That’s what happened when Aziraphale was willing to go to Hell for his actions. That’s what happened when he decided he had to go to Heaven, where he had been abused and belittled and made to feel small. He decided to willingly go into the Lion’s Den, to face his abusers and his anxiety, to make them better so that they would not try to destroy the world again.
Him, just one angel. He needed Crowley to be there with him, to help him be brave, to ask the questions that Heaven needed to hear, to tell them God was wrong. Crowley is the inspiration that drives Aziraphale’s change, Crowley is the engine that fuels Aziraphale’s courage.
But then Crowley tells him that going to Heaven is stupid. That they don’t need Heaven. And he’s right. Aziraphale knows he’s right.
Aziraphale doesn’t need Heaven; Heaven needs him. They just don’t know how much they need him, or how much humanity needs him there, too. (If everyone who ran for office was corrupt, how can the system change?)
Terry Pratchett (in the Discworld book, Small Gods) is scathing of God, organized religion, and the corrupt people religion empowers, but he is sympathetic to the individual who has real, pure faith and a good heart. In fact, the everyman protagonist of Small Gods is a better person than the god he serves, and in the end, he ends up changing the church to be better, more open-minded, and more humanist than god could ever do alone.
Aziraphale is willing to go to the darkest places to do the Right Thing, and Heaven is no exception. When Crowley says that Heaven is toxic, that’s exactly why Aziraphale knows he needs to go there. “You’re exactly is different from my exactly.”
____
In the aftermath of Trump's election in the US, Brexit happened in 2018. Michael Sheen felt compelled to figure out what was going on in his country after this shock. But he was living in Los Angeles with Sarah Silverman at the time, and she also wanted to become more politically active in the US.
Sheen: “I felt a responsibility to do something, but it [meant] coming back [to Britain] – which was difficult for us, because we were very important to each other. But we both acknowledge that each of us had to do what we needed to do.” In the end, they split up and Michael moved back to the UK.
Sometimes doing the Right Thing means sacrificing your own happiness. Sometimes it means going to Hell. Sometimes it means going to Heaven. Sometimes it means losing a relationship.
And that’s why what happened in the end was so difficult for Aziraphale. Because he loves Crowley desperately. He wants to be together. He wanted that kiss for thousands of years. He knows that taking command of Heaven means they would never again have to bow to the demands of a God they couldn’t understand, or run from a Hell who still came after them. They could change the rules of the game.
And he’s still going to do that. But it hurts him that he has to do that alone.
I present to you (posted months ago, but well worth it for a reblog here) The Telepathic Husbanding Initiative, plus ya know, Possessive DemonHusbanding ;)
F*cking kills me that Crowley quite literally heard Aziraphale's silent dog whistle for help and peered backwards, once again giving us confirmation that his spine is more of a suggestion than a fully formed construct.
I truly don’t think people realize how dingy and dark most movies and tv shows actually are so they can’t appreciate the work and skill it takes to make gifs look the way your brain “remembers” it looking.
Another before and after example:
This gif needed 6 different adjustment layers, not including the sharpening process, which is its own separate challenge. The blue window was also changed to green to keep the palette more consistent and to reduce the range of colors needed, because a wider range of colors generally results in worse gif quality since gifs only support a max of 256 (compared to the millions your monitor can display).
Arty Farty Post: Y'all out there who colour on the regular will like this one.
I generally usually don't like ShuttleArt pencils unless they're the metalics (they're epic) but, this set of 174 mama bear gave me a fair few years ago is an oil based soft core set.
They go on a little like chalk and oil paint combined. They look lovely unblended, but, I've recently started using a different type of blender pencil. Derwent. I've been a staunch Lyra Rembrandt lass for over two decades, but they're like f*cking hens teeth and unicorn farts combined to get a hold of now, and I have a limited number of them left. Needed to find a new type that works for me. These are really bloody good, but I think that they work with these *specific* pencils better than they would any others. Maybe other oil based ones. I'll experiment.
Anyway, example of what the two combined do, below.
Pic 1. Non blended.
Pic 2. Half blended.
Pic 3. Fully blended.
Dudes (GN) These are really fecking lovely to work with and give great results.
Only thing I would say is don't be tempted to blend the whole page at once. Stick to your sections and colour sets. Otherwise it dulls and drags.
thank you SO much zzurro, who reached out for a discord banner & icon commission of my vampire hunter crowley!!!
y'all know i haven't drawn gomens in a looong time, and i haven't taken illustration commissions in even longer, but getting free reign over this design def motivated me to have as much fun as i possibly could with it. and i had such a good timeee 🥺
i won't dive into anything too deep just yet, but know that i am thinking hard about adding illustration comms back to my vgen 💛
Nine year old me is very, very pleased with forty-one year old me right about now!
Best thing, whilst in Smyths Toys, I told Steve there is no point in having adult money if you can't spend it on chilld like things
The guy behind me giggled and proceeded to pick up the exact same models, lol.
First of all, my husband is a giant child... I didn't do this, he did this then told me to photograph it! 😂
And second, my new dino babies have found their forever home with the one I already owned that came from Hoo Zoo in Telford (STUPID expensive as he was!) 😁
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
theartofmadeline
vaporwave
dailybridgerton
yousharknotpass
annaxmalina
