Repod Roundup: Good Omens Edition
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
These are part of a much longer series - a non-religious Advent calendar for each day of December by Snowfilly1 and all of them are lovely, really.
[The Bentley] has developed quite a few non-car-like pieces of knowledge over the years. The first of which, of course, is the ability to be aware of herself as a car, and the things she can do as ‘not car-like.’
The second was an awareness of her partner. (She does not think of Crowley as an owner, nor herself as a possession. They are partners. The Bentley can’t go fast without her partner.)...
Here are some gifts Aziraphale has given Crowley:
A curving wing in the rain. Call it protection, call it safety, call it love. An act of unthinking grace: I have this thing; this is all I have; I offer it to you. Call it the thing Crowley remembers every day for 6,000 years; the thing that becomes the foundation and the building blocks and the crowning glory of his life. Call it the thing Aziraphale judges his every action against, afterwards…
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
In which Crowley’s informal av club ends up being slightly more revealing than he’d planned. This fic has lovely little gems of lines: “... then—with the agonizing slowness and precision of an elderly lady punching her PIN into a credit card reader— [Aziraphale] picked up the paper…” And, it has some interesting discussions of adaptations in general and adaptations of Pride and Prejudice in particular. (I’m with Crowley on this matter.)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Much more melancholy - three days before the Apocalypse, Crowley asks Aziraphale to cut his hair. It’s all warm and sweet and gentle - and mournful - with a lot about how we build identity and work through transitions. When I first made this, I found a sample of improvised piano in the rain, and it pleased me to continue the rain theme.
How short?” Aziraphale asks quietly.
“Short,” Crowley says. “Take it off.”
He runs his hand through Crowley’s long red hair, his fingers snagging in the tangles of an updo taken down carelessly. Aziraphale thinks of hair blowing in a desert wind as thunderclouds gathered on the horizon. He doesn’t remember the names of the cities the Flood washed away, or the song someone sang to their children as they all huddled on the roof of their hut, or whether he wept when the waters receded. But he remembers Crowley’s dusty hair, the braid behind his ear…
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
And onto some fic written by me. This originally started for a femslash exchange, and it was interesting to dig into Agnes Nutter’s POV. Fun to find a character that might get her attention, really. In this case, Constant-in-Affliction, v. modest, surprisingly daring. I ended up doing a lot on Agnes’s prescience, and what it meant to know exactly how a relationship was going to go. Sometimes I think Agnes is an analogue for Christ, in that she healed the sick and was executed in a painful way, and she left behind a book to follow. And sometimes I think she’s an analogue for god, at least the god of Good Omens. Loving something, with all that vulnerability and risk, all laid out in four-dimensions. (Also, I think I was trying to imply that by accepting the love affair, Agnes was accepting her super-prescience - that she decided to be brave. So! Constant-in-Affliction saved the world…? Eh. Not sure if that ever came through for the reader, though.)
And, always a good time to get into the kind of medicine that involves leeches and placing every herb under a guiding planet. (I had story notes!)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
I wrote “Reading in Bed” first, because I wanted Aziraphale to have a good time, and then I threw in a minor detail about how the angel liked to read different translations of the same book, like different vintages of wine to savour, and then I stumbled into a scholarly treatise about two versions of Persuasion, where the key word did not have an exact cognate in the language and the different choices the translators made… and it got very thinky.
I don’t remember exactly where “Dappled Things” came from, except of course for the Gerard Manly Hopkins poem:
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow…
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange…
They both ended up in 2nd Person, both an exploration of each characters internal stresses and what they think of the other… I think I might have been doing a Podfic Bingo with ‘splice two fics together’ or something.
I do find it interesting that where Aziraphale sees his uncertainty as something to be worked through and triumphed over, Crowley sees the dappling of his character as something beautiful. How the comfort that Aziraphale takes for granted is something that both attracts and scares Crowley. (Am never not going to love Crowley’s elbow-knobby, surprisingly comfortable hugs.)
As a podfic this ended up fully SFXed, with the slightly anachronistic Sabre Dance/Spinning Plates Music moving through the noise of the air raid. Is Crowley gallantly fighting or is he a clown? Either way, the sweat is flying. And I do dearly love the gentle clock and blackbird song for the second half.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
There’s something about femslash that often makes me go for the dark and angsty. I’m so sorry! I do write happy fics with girls in it, I promise! I just… I just have a bit of an urge to go wild.
In this case, I was filling a prompt for the Femslash Exchange - Crowley/War. And I was definitely doing a destructive kind of a romance there, but also exploring Women In Wartime - the ones sheltering behind walls to wait it out, the captives, the warriors, the beautiful casus belli. Helen is a bit of a cipher, really - there are wildly different interpretations of her from different sources, and I suppose I wanted to explore that a little.
As for the recording, I’m not sure I have much to say about it, except that voices were tricky because both Crawly and War have a bit of a drawl. I kept War’s voice a bit higher for characterisation reasons and hope I managed to keep them different enough. Also, as I recall I did a big trawl looking for ancient Greek instruments and ended up with a double-reed duduk in place of an aulos. Shrug. We do what we can.
