Apparently in the book, Aziraphale and Crowley are implied to be a gay couple MANY TIMES.
A girl at Warlock’s birthday party calls Aziraphale a faggot.
Anathema automatically assumes that Crowley and Aziraphale are a gay couple after Crowley says “Goodnight miss. Get in, Angel.” to Aziraphale
Also, One scene I wish would’ve been acted out as it is in the book is when they both get shot with the paintball guns. How it happens in the book is Aziraphale ends up FALLING BACKWARDS INTO A RHODODENDRON BUSH and Crowley sinks down on a statue.
Crowley believes he is bleeding YELLOW and DYING and instead of, ya know, helping Aziraphale UP AS HIS ANGEL HAS JUST SAUNTERED VAGUELY DOWNWARDS INTO A BUSH, HE JUST CHOOSES TO CRAWL INTO THE BUSH AS WELL, BELIEVING SOMETHING IS SERIOUSLY WRONG WITH BIOLOGY. Aziraphale tells Crowley it hurt and it hit him under his ribs, which he brushes off TO ASK IF ANGELS BLEED BLUE.
Aziraphale proceeds to the same self examination as Crowley.
Crowley only figures out it is PAINT when he TASTES IT. They conclude it is PAINT.
6000 years on earth, and these idiots don’t know what a paintball gun is.
One of the books on the shelf that Jimbriel is organizing is Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. I have to admit it’s been a while since I read it, (er, several decades, if I’m truthful about it) but my enduring memory is it seemed like the author wrote it in a linear fashion, then took all the chapters and threw them up in the air and put them back together at random, because it bounces back and forth in time in a confusing kind of way. There is a method to this madness, however, and the structure is deliberate. It’s also dealing with bureaucratic absurdity, but that’s not what I’m trying to explore in this particular meta. It’s the bouncing back and forth in time bit.
Now we have two series of GO to feast on, we seem to be slowly piecing together the expanded history of the GO universe in an inferred kind of way. It’s rarely given to us directly in a chunk, it’s mostly by a comment here and there and then we try to join the dots.
So we’ve learnt that there was a great deal of time that existed for Heaven before time on Earth got started, in 4004 BC, maybe an ineffably long period of time, maybe millions of years, maybe not. Sometime prior to 4004 BC, however, there was a rebellion in Heaven between at least two factions of the angels. This event is sometimes called the Great War - which is what Aziraphale is referring to in S2E6 when he is removing his halo for demon-detonating purposes; he’s not referring to what us humans would call World War 1 in the early 20th century. The result of the Great War led to the formation of Hell. The angel known as Lucifer was the leader of the losing side, and he was known as Satan afterwords. A third of the heavenly host of angels were sent with him down to Hell, and this event is called the Fall. They became fallen angels, or demons. At some point, there is supposed to be a second War, one that will decide who is the winner once and for all time. Well, that’s supposed to be the Plan - God’s Ineffable Great Plan, right? And we all know how the first attempt for that to get started ended up, don’t we?
As we start to look more closely into parallel stories and scenes between the two series, some curious pairs of parallels are starting to emerge. And even more interesting is that some of these pairs indicate that they will get a third presentation - I’m not just talking about the 1941 Blitz scene here, there are others! And I’m going to try and talk about one of them here, that I think has largely slipped under the radar up until just recently.
There was a meta by @newfangledfancy here about the two parallel scenes in S1 and S2 involving miraculous escapes from being shot with a loaded gun, and we should expect a third one in S3. It’s worth pausing and heading over to read it at this point, but if you don’t, I’ll try to fill you in - and I will revisit in the future, as while it contained the seeds of inspiration for this meta, it also reveals something interesting about Crowley's backstory that's worth discussing on its own. You probably know what and where the S2 “miraculous escape” is referring to: the Bullet Catch scene during the 1941 Blitz minisode in S2E4. But where is the one in S1? It’s at Tadfield Manor, in S1E2, after Crowley has turned all the paintball guns into real guns, and Norman, on the yellow team, cracks it, does a big rant about his life and charges into the firing line of the opposing red team, only to be shot straight in the heart.
Let’s rewind this a little bit, because I want to talk about when Crowley and Aziraphale first arrive at Tadfield Manor. All seems calm and quiet. They stroll in side by side – and are each shot by a paintball. Yep, this has been watched over and over, comments made about the colours of the paint, how they represent their various “sides”, and the sexual innuendo in way Crowley miracles it away after Aziraphale makes heart-eyes at him. But you’ve all missed once very important clue about what was about to go down in the next few minutes that was right in front of you all along.
Maybe I should pause this meta just here and refer back to my big colour meta I posted recently. I specifically went to all that work so I could come here and discuss the following event at Tadfield Manor.
Firstly, the paintball colours. There are three: blue, yellow and red.
There is a discrepancy between the colour that book!Crowley and screen!Crowley gets hit by. In the book its yellow, but in the tv series its red. Just at this point I’m going to emphasize that yellow is not the same as gold; gold is one of the colours of Heaven, but yellow is usually associated with fear.
Secondly, Aziraphale is hit with blue paint. That’s consistent with both book and tv. Then Crowley blows the blue taint of Heaven away, because Aziraphale needs help to escape its abusive clutches, its not something he can do on his own. Ah, a cute demonstrative metaphor there, another layer to that little scene.
BUT YOU DON’T SEE A BLUE COLOURED TEAM IN THE FOLLOWING BATTLE! Where is the blue team, that supposedly represents Heaven in the following battle? Did they just vanish when Crowley snapped his demon-miracle into place? I dunno, but we just see a yellow and a red coded team for the rest of the battle. But if blue is always Heaven-coded, yellow is fear, and red, while often demon-associated should be seen more as an indication of passion…what it really going on? Who is at war with who? It can’t be Heaven against Hell, because Heaven is not present, per se, as you know it, and neither is Hell, which is usually green. Oh no, it’s not that black and white…because we are watching a battle where Hell doesn’t yet exist, there is only Heaven at this point. One side, one faction, in fear, the other fighting with passion, and the division that actually creates the ‘blue’ side is yet to occur…
We’re watching a re-enactment of the Great War.
Let’s take another step back, to here: S1E2, around 15.46 minutes in. Newton Pulsifer is about to start a new job (wait, what? What the Hell is Newt doing mixed up in this? To honest, I'm not quite sure...*looks at a certain at note she made IN ALLCAPS again*...oh ffs- that is the worst joke, its got to be one of Terry's...now I can't stop cackling...oh, god now I've spotted another awful, awful joke...poor Newt, I love you more every second...)
*ahem* Back to the impending battle. Because it's here in the office of UNITED WORLDWIDE HOLDINGS (HOLDINGS) - an office *wink wink* of management and bureaucracy, that we establish the tension. As Newt slides into his seat, Nigel the manager arrives to ask who is exited about the upcoming "training initiative." Turns out, not really anyone has much enthusiasm for it.
Janice is going to complain to HR. Nigel points out there is no "I" in team, and Norman, who apparently organized the whole thing, proceeds to pick the three 'eyes' out of the "team building exercise."
This is going well, isn't it? [Newt departs. His role here is done.]
Lets skip to Tadfield Manor and the "training initiative" is underway. The Red team, lead by Nigel the Manager, seem to have the upper hand. The Yellow team see to be pleased at a chance to let off some steam with anyone who has annoyed them, the bitches.
Then God drops in to make an interesting observation.
Firms these days expected more than that. They wanted to establish leadership potential, group cooperation, and initiative, which allowed their employees to fire paintballs at any colleagues who irritated them.
Oh. Right. Lets deliberately cause a little chaos so we can see who's got leadership potential, who works together, and who actually has some brains? Go God! Lets start a little War and we'll pick the new Archangels out of the winners? Nice one. Plus, we get rid of all the troublemakers in the process, and we'll just be left with those who like to follow management's orders...
Then Crowley ups the ante. As the young woman who was the only keen employee to come, and is on the Red team, no less, runs past and asks "Who's winning?" he snaps his fingers and to change all the paintball guns to real guns.
Cr: You're all going to lose.
Az: What - what the Hell did you just do?
Cr: Oh, they wanted real guns, so I gave them what they wanted.
You're all going to lose.
Aziraphale does his best to protest at the demon's bit of wicked mischief.
Az: But there are people out there shooting at each other!
Cr: Well - Lends weight to their moral argument. Everyone has free will, including the right to murder. Just think of it as a microcosm of the universe.
A microcosm of the universe?
Who's universe, Crowley? Yours? The humans? It's a big universe out there...
Things don't seem to be going to well for some, and Norman, on the Yellow team, has finally reached his breaking point. He makes a declaration. I'm only going to quote the last bit of his little speech, as I want to deal with the first bit in another meta. As he takes off his tie, and wraps it around his head, he says:
"They want war, we're going to give 'em war! OK guys, let's go get the bastards!"
Hmmm. Do the visuals remind you of anything?...
He turns around to charge out - and is promptly shot in the heart. While it's Nigel the manager he is facing when it happens, it's actually the young woman from the Red Team who ran past Crowley and Aziraphale inside the Manor, who asked who was winning, that fired the shot. The implications of this? I'm going to save that for another meta.
The sequence moves on to the infamous wall-slam encounter, which I don't think we need to go over here, so lets skip to where Crowley and Aziraphale have finished questioning the past-Sister Mary Loquacious and have decided they've found all they are going to find here its time to leave. The police have arrived and have broken up the fight. The fun and games are over. As they walk, floating unnoticed and serene, through the chaos, Aziraphale starts to ponder.
Az: You'd think he'd show up, wouldn't you? You'd think we could detect him in some way.
Cr: He wont show up, not to us. Protective camouflage. He wont even know that his powers will keep him hidden from prying occult forces.
Az: Occult forces?
Cr: You and me.
Az: I'm not occult. Angels aren't occult, we're ethereal.
Crowley refers to the two of them as one kind of entity, but Aziraphale insists there is a difference - they aren't the same. Not any more.
The War is over, and the division between Heaven and Hell has been created.
[Edit: I've since finished a meta on the Bentley and it's connection to crossing the thresholds between worlds. I mention this scene in it, as it is actually a beautiful example of two different times and places existing at once, overlaid on one another, as indicated by the smoke - that's a sign we are in a subliminal space. Its why Aziraphale and Crowley seem to just glide through untouched and noticed, as they aren't really there, in a way.]
Will we see another echo of the Great War in S3? Possibly.
It's the 3-card Monte. Its the three cowrie shells and a lone caraway seed. It's the Professor's Nightmare, where you don't know how long a piece of string rope is.
It's a f*cking Mobius strip that has no beginning and no end, infinitely going around and around.
This whole interaction. They're so adorable and flirty. Aziraphale gets to be cared for. Crowley gets to do the caring. They both need this kind of affection so much. It's such a lovely, silly moment of them adoring one another.
There was absolutely no need to do any of this. They're in the middle of trying to avert an apocalypse. But they still take the excuse to play a game of damsel in distress and knight in shining armor (without threat of discorporation!) because it makes them both happy.
Aziraphale's coy little smile and blush! Crowley's "I can't believe I love this ridiculous being" definitely-no-way-not-a-smile! I love them.
Aziraphale is catastroflirting while Crowley is having an identity crisis
Okay, so THAT SCENE(TM). The Tadfield Manor scene.
I can't stop thinking about it so here we fucking go.
What the hell is going on in this scene?
Like, they just found out that they spent 11 years co-parenting the wrong boy, and that the actual Antichrist is out there on the loose somewhere.
They both know that if and when the Apocalypse happens, their relationship and one or more of their existences is over, for good.
Like, they are staring down the actual End of the World, the end of each other, the end of love, armed with a tartan bow tie and a tyre iron.
And Aziraphale is .... flirting? Like, we do not have time for these puppy-dog eyes, Aziraphale!???
But Crowley .... goes for it? He performs the kindest, simplest act of service, for no other reason than that his angel asks, fuck, he doesn't even ask, he just expresses a need and makes That Face.
And then, and I am starting to think this is crucial, Aziraphale says, "Thank you."
When we get to the next episode, episode 3, and see their whole history throughout the millennia, there are two scenes where thank you is very pointedly left out. At the Bastille: Aziraphale says, "I suppose I should say thank you for the rescue," and Crowley leaps to his feet to stop him: "Don't say that!" In the car in 1967, a baffled Crowley clutching a tartan Thermos says, "Ngk -- should I say thank you?" and a wrecked Aziraphale grimaces and says, "Better not."
But here, Aziraphale doesn't ask. He just says it. "Thank you."
What is in that thank you? I see what you are doing for me, I see what I mean to you, and I feel it too.
That little glance he gives as he scurries away becomes a guilty glance with this context, because he knows Crowley would have told him not to say it.
Crowley, for his part, makes that soppy, can't believe I'm this smitten over you face behind his back and then enters a series of system malfunctions.
For Crowley, this is revisiting the scene of his biggest failure as a demon, the one he was just torturing his houseplants over as a form of psychological projection.
He's back at the scene of the crime, and trying to be very blasé about facing up to the fact that he's a failure of a demon and he has fucked up not only his orders from Hell, but also his plan to avert the Apocalypse by nannying a perfectly ordinary human boy for the last 11 years.
Meanwhile, Aziraphale is just leaning hard into all the unspoken stuff that's been piling up between them for the last 2,000 years. Speedrunning the dance of request and fulfillment, saying thank you out of fucking nowhere, giving puppy dog eyes and beaming smiles left and right...
~~~
All of this layered on top of the ongoing conversation about the nature of Good and Evil, which they started in the car on the way there. Crowley recounts the Evil Plan, Aziraphale waxes poetic about evil containing the seeds of its own destruction, Crowley dismisses it as an ordinary cockup, but maybe he's thinking in the back of his mind, that's me, I'm the seed of evil's destruction, because I'm the cock-up. I'm bad because I'm too good. But I'm not good enough to not be bad. I brought the Antichrist into the world, which will end the world and end Aziraphale, and I also wasn't good enough to even bring him into the world in the right place.
So I think when he turns the guns into real guns, three things are going on for Crowley.
1) He has to counterbalance that overwhelming kindness and Aziraphale looking at him like he's Good, with something very very Bad. This is like Aziraphale stepping closer by giving him the holy water, and then pulling back by distancing himself with "you go too fast for me." And it's like Crowley rescuing Aziraphale in the Bastille and then asking for the holy water as insurance; while Aziraphale sets up the Bastille situation and then pushing Crowley away, hard, when he asks for the holy water. There's always a whiplash, an overcorrection, when one of them makes a step forward that feels too vulnerable or too risky. The coat scene is extremely vulnerable for Crowley, so the guns and the wall slam are his overcorrection.
2) Crowley's also grappling with his own identity as a demon, and trying to prove to himself that he's a good demon, which again, means being Bad. So he has to cancel out being kind to Aziraphale with being cruel to the humans.
And 3) he is making his move in the overarching conversation about good vs evil as a whole, about their sides. Aziraphale said guns in the right hands "lend weight to a moral argument," and making the guns real is Crowley's rebuttal.
Aziraphale's response to the real guns is to be appalled. Crowley can't stand to upset his angel, and he relents. "No, they aren't. No one's killing anyone, they're all having miraculous escapes, wouldn't be any fun otherwise."
I remember reading this part in the book years ago, and my interpretation of it was always that he makes the decision to give them miraculous escapes after Aziraphale calls him out. He's playing out this millennia-old internal struggle in this sequence -- is he the evil demon who gives humans the tools to be unbearably cruel to each other? Or is he just a trickster god using those tools to cause mayhem and confusion and make humans think about their choices [so that maybe they can use their free will to choose better, a chance he was never afforded].
He makes this decision, for Aziraphale, in front of Aziraphale, and Aziraphale sees it and names it. "You know Crowley, I've always said that deep down, you really are quite a nice--"
And Crowley reaches the end of his capability to cope with the cognitive dissonance and slams Aziraphale against the wall, to set the record straight-- "I'm not nice, nice is a four-letter word."
Crowley is at the end of his rope, and Aziraphale is just turned on.
~~~
So, like, okay, what is going on in each of their minds?
For Aziraphale, I think he is trying to pull Crowley along to doing this his way. This day trip to Tadfield is coming off the back of the birthday party yesterday, where he insisted on trying to fix it without violence, by being at the party to stop the dog. Crowley was trying to push Aziraphale to kill the boy, but Aziraphale insists on doing it with human magic tricks and without killing.
And Aziraphale is the one who calls Crowley up with this idea about looking into the birth records, while Crowley was at home yelling at his plants. I think Aziraphale is trying to take the lead a little bit and remind Crowley of his goodness, and say, okay, you said we can fix this 11 years ago, let's not give up now, let's keep trying, but we have to do it the "good" way, the "right" way. Aziraphale is on board with stopping the Apocalypse, but not yet on board with admitting that he's on Crowley's side. He's trying to draw Crowley over to his side without having to acknowledge the ways he is like Crowley.
Crowley is not avoiding the tension, not trying to pretend anything, although he is struggling. He is letting himself feel the push and pull between the evil demon side and the free-will advocate, between some sense of professional failure in his role as a demon of Hell, and his inexorable love for Aziraphale. He's trying to grapple with both and figure out which one he is, face his mistakes, be the demon spouse he wants to be to Aziraphale, but it's really fucken stressful for him.
~~~
Whether or not Crowley understands that he's made a decision, there is one other detail that I think bookends the story being told in this sequence.
When they arrive, they walk into the Manor courtyard in a way that highlights their differences -- Crowley rebelliously crosses the grass, Aziraphale sticks to the pebbled path. They are looking around, not at each other.
When they leave, they are side by side, shoulder to shoulder, even brushing up against each other.
They're realigned again. Aziraphale is back to verbally emphasizing the differences -- "Angels aren't occult, we're ethereal" -- but the physicality tells the truth.
~~~
Anyway, I'm not sure I've quite pinned it down, there's a lot going on, and they're both extremely stressed out, but showing it and dealing with it in very different ways.
i'm the most oblivious go fan out there but i only just noticed that when crowley blows away the blue paint stain from azi's coat his own red stain is also blown away???? and idk what's wrong w me but that's 1000x hotter than just azi's stain being gone?????
