dinkywinks replied to your post:
Also somebody who’s watched Good Omens needs to...
All he did was ask some questions and hang around with the wrong crowd, but he’s still so fucking certain that he’s unforgivable.
Yes!!! And I have like seventy-three different responses to that, because:
Okay in the book “sauntered vaguely downwards” is an objective statement by the text, but in the show we have only Crowley’s own word on it, and so what would it mean if he’s exaggerating/underxaggerating? (yes I know, not a word, not the point) What if he really was truly a rebel at one point, was truly evil? Should that change the fact that we the audience look at Crowley and mostly see the actions of someone who, at the time the story takes place, is not that bad of a guy, and makes sure nobody dies when he gives real guns to the paintballers, and cares more about saving the world than the actual good guys?
The actual system as written says he’s unforgivable, says that a demon cannot be redeemed, says that there’s no such thing as redemption for a fallen angel. Heaven and Hell and all the forces among them say so (and God doesn’t say a god-damned thing, God lets the angels war and damn as they like, God plays games with the universe and smiles all the time). So if it’s wrong for Crowley to be considered irredeemably damned, then all the hosts of Heaven and Hell and divine judgment itself is wrong.
"Asking questions,” suggesting that divine judgment itself could be wrong, daring to doubt, is probably what got Crowley damned in the first place.
If Crowley could be redeemed then maybe he’d have to try seeking redemption. And that’s an impossible game, a losing game, a fixed game all around, because any good deeds you do to earn redemption are by definition selfish and therefore can’t count anyway. And maybe it would cost too much to try and fail.
And if he were redeemed, if he were an angel again, he’d have to follow those rules, those fixed rules, those unfair rules, where there’s no room for doubt or error and maybe it’s better to be damned anyway. If you’ve already been cast out of everything for breaking the laws, at least you don’t have to follow them any more. Maybe he doesn’t want to be a part of any system that’s so fixed and broken in the first place. Maybe he damn well knows better than God.
Maybe the hubris of thinking he knows better about what’s fair and what’s not fair and what’s kind and what’s merciful than God is the sin that damned him in the first place. The sin of doubt is right there bound up in the sin of pride, the sin of thinking you should to have the answers or things ought to make sense.
Angels and demons aren’t supposed to have free will. That’s supposed to be the whole point. Humans ate the apple and gained the knowledge to choose, but angels are meant to be automatons, to be as they were created, to do as they’re told. (But demons are fallen angels and demons rebelled in the first place, and if they had enough free will to rebel and be damned for it then they must all have the capacity for both good and evil, demons and angels both, all of them. And if they don’t, if rebellion from Heaven was itself an act of creatures who never had a choice, then Crowley was damned just like every other demon for actions that were not even his own fault, and we’re back to where is the justice in that?)
So maybe Good Omens isn’t the story of an angel and a demon developing free will, it’s the story of them discovering, after six thousand years of exercising it in tiny ways again and again, that they actually have it. They always had it. They just didn’t know.
(And maybe all the hosts of Heaven and Hell have it too, but without the apple to show it to them, none of them realize. They act as they’re told they have to act because nobody ever gave them the knowledge that they’re able not to. Six thousand years of grapes and oysters and crepes and sushi, of eating and acting and bargaining, and Crowley and Aziraphale both are so much more human than anybody ever realized they all have the capacity to be.)
I will never get over Crowley who’s so damn sure that God’s ineffable rules are capricious and cruel, who knows he broke them and still secretly wishes for everything he lost when he lost Heaven and grace, and refuses to consider going back so those same rules can cross him all over again, standing up to protect humanity from those same rules and ineffable plans. I just won’t.
