There are people who like Crowley. He finds it annoying, but there are.
The two old ladies a few flats below, for example. All he did was say “good morning” to them a few times on the stairs (he blames Aziraphale for getting him into bad habits) and use them as a dumping ground for disobedient pot plants (it’s easier than killing them. He still doesn’t know how something that technically doesn’t have eyes is capable of looking at him like that) and suddenly he’s “that nice Mr Crowley” and they keep trying to ply him with cups of tea and biscuits.
Often he takes them up on the offer, making the excuse that it’s basically research by this point. Hell would be unstoppable when it came to tempting the unwary if they could just figure out how little old ladies always manage to get people to have a cup of tea.
Then there are the two men who live down the street who talked to him about his car one time. I mean, he probably should have tried to tempt them into envying it or something, but after spending most of his time with Aziraphale— who Does Not Understand about cars— it was easy to get sucked into a long conversation about old cars and how they don’t make them like that any more and how good of a condition he’s kept his in.
Now suddenly they’re saying “hi” to him every time they pass and often he says it back automatically. Sometimes they’ll ask him for his opinion on different models of car— it’s a nightmare.
Even when he’s on temptations, aside from the people he’s actually trying to make like him— at least right up until the last moment, when they suddenly realise that they really don’t like him all that much at all— if he’s dealing with any sort of business, there are usually at least some people lower down who hate their bosses enough to appreciate this guy who is very obviously trying to make everything go as wrong as possible.
Crowley has been invited to parties. And drinks in the pub. And even, once, a coffee morning for some of the neighbourhood stay-at-home parents, complete with small children running around. And alright, some of these events were actually quite fun (the latter group keep nagging him to come back— it was the first time anybody managed to get the kids to stay quiet for the whole morning), but it’s an embarassing thing to admit, even to yourself, and certainly he’d never tell anybody else about it.
By comparison, there are people who really dislike Aziraphale.
Customers mainly. Aziraphale can be fucking scary when it comes to customers. He’s this weird, slightly intimidating old man who keeps insisting that you absolutely don’t want to buy any of his precious books— and if you argue with him for too long, you’ll soon find yourself back out on the street, the shop door bolted shut behind you, and with no memory of how you got there.
There are whole forums on rare book dealers’ websites full of people hating on Crazy Old Mr Fell, who clearly has no respect for his collection (after all, if he did, he’d surely get that obvious mould infestation seen to, wouldn’t he?) or any idea of the fact that at least half of it belongs in a fucking museum.
The local mob has its own, fairly obvious reasons, for hating Mr Fell— although considering what happened to the last few people they sent to try and ‘do business’ with him, they’ve decided that it’s probably safer to hate him from a respectful distance.
There’s also a subset of people who just find his old-fashioned language and failure to keep up with modern culture or technology very annoying. After all, if you don’t know that Aziraphale actually did live through several previous centuries, his habit of calling bicycles “velocipedes” and all music that isn’t classical “bebop” sounds utterly ridiculous. People assume that he’s putting it on to sound quaint. (And, honestly, a good 40% of the time they’re completely right.) Plus his insistence on spouting heavenly propaganda at every opportunity can make him come across as a tad too good to be true at times, which rubs some people up the wrong way.
(It really doesn’t help that Aziraphale’s ability to sense emotions means that he can tell when people take a dislike to him unfairly, and if he’s feeling petty will frequently respond by upping the ante and deliberately coming up with more and more ludicrously old-fashioned phrases, while a certain demon— who has had this technique used against him often enough to recognise it on sight— struggles not to burst out laughing.)
Now, the interesting thing about this is that, since Aziraphale and Crowley live so close together, there are absolutely some places where these two populations (the people that like Crowley vs the people who hate Aziraphale) overlap.
Meaning that there are totally people who see the two of them eating at a local restaurant or driving somewhere together and wonder to themselves what on earth that nice Mr Crowley sees in that awful Mr Fell.
