moki-dokie
ya know that vine? yeah
bunjywunjy
Unnerving
trusthimhesadoctor
devilsss-dyke-deactivated202202
David Tennant is funny cause he’s like a weird little Scottish Presbyterian man with 4 kids who wears dorky sweaters and doesn’t know what the eggplant emoji means and has no social media accounts but his type cast is “Slutty Goth Thot” and I think that’s beautiful
good-omens-fanart
good-omens-fan-comics
rafaelafranzen
amira-zahirah
Crowley don't care about gender since the beginning of time
(Yeah, that's a woman jeans)
(Also Aziraphale too with madame tracy)
gayglitterqueen
johannesviii
liria10
it still amazes me how twelve’s era was arguably one of the best in the series, yet hardly anyone i know has seen it. it was thematically consistent (death, love, identity, queerness, moral complexity, trauma, hope) and cinematically beautiful (heather coming up through the water on an alien planet, the stars in the child!doctor’s eyes, the universe crumbling). twelve’s era explored the otherwise taken-for-granted concept of quirky-guy-with-automatic-authority trope; not that the show never explored it before (midnight is a gorgeous example), but this era continuously called it out, questioned it, and broke it down (think time heist, everything danny pink says, and how flatline was basically a whole-scale deconstruction of it). the doctor went through real and steady character development, emerging first from regeneration as hiding his vulnerability behind a brusque exterior, then becoming softer yet willing to destroy the universe when it comes down to it, before eventually deciding that the most important thing to be was kind. this era gave us a morally ambiguous companion (clara) who actually gets her own opening sequence, and then her own tardis. we got a female master with her own character development arc. bill actually gets to take off to explore the universe with her girlfriend (after a season long arc about identity).
and the marketing went from this:
to this:
fun episodes that end happily? check. unreliable narrator? check. good old fashioned angst? check. explorations of gender, heteronormtivity, and socially constructed power dynamics? check. just really soft, beautiful characters trying their best and looking out for each other? check check check.
And to top it off, he marked the end of a beautifully written grief cycle of the time war- acceptance! He wasn’t the same as before it, but he was learning to integrate the things he had learned from it into his life, and that’s beautiful! It’s probably why I and so many others imprinted on him as we moved out of teenage life and the traumas we have faced- here is this amazing person, who has faced terrible things, who has tried to smile in their face (9), has broken down and gotten sad and hopeless (10), has lashed out and been rude because he didn’t know how to handle the things happening to him (11), but has, ultimately, come through it! Not that it never got him down again, not that I wouldn’t say 12 still has his depressiony times here and there, but he has accepted the things he has been through, and is trying to be kind, which is the theme throughout his time as the doctor and I just love that.
Watching Twelve grow from “snarky & brusque old dude” to “kind & tired intergalactic David Bowie” was absolutely mesmerising and I love his era with all my heart
ironfounderson
persephinae
Something that’s been very interesting to me, in this new wave of post-miniseries Good Omens fandom, is the apparent fannish consensus that Crowley is, in fact, bad at his job. That he’s actually quite nice. That he’s been skating by hiding his general goodness from hell by taking credit for human evil and doling out a smattering of tiny benign inconveniences that he calls bad.
I get the urge towards that headcanon, and I do think the Crowley in the miniseries comes off as nicer than the one in the book. (I think miniseries Crowley and Aziraphale are both a little nicer, a little more toothless, than the versions of themselves in the book.) But maybe it’s because I was a book fan first, or maybe it’s because I just find him infinitely more interesting this way–I think Crowley, even show!Crowley, has the capacity to be very good at his job of sowing evil. And I think that matters to the story as a whole.
A demon’s job on Earth, and specifically Crowley’s job on Earth, isn’t to make people suffer. It’s to make people sin. And the handful of ‘evil’ things we see Crowley do over the course of the series are effective at that, even if the show itself doesn’t explore them a lot.
Take the cell phone network thing, for instance. This gets a paragraph in the book that’s largely brushed off in the conversation with Hastur and Ligur, and I think it’s really telling:
What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.
In essence, without any great expenditure of effort (look, I’d never say Crowley isn’t slothful, but that just makes him efficient), he’s managed to put half of London in a mental and emotional state that Crowley knows will make them more inclined to sin. He’s given twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or half a million people a Bad Day. Which, okay, it’s just a bad day–but bad days are exhausting. Bad days make you snap, make you fail at things, make you feel guiltier and more stressed out in the aftermath when you wake up the next day, makes everything a little worse. Bad days matter.
Maybe it’s because I’m a believer in the ripple effect of small kindnesses, and that means I have to believe in its opposite. Maybe it’s just that I, personally, have had enough days that were bad enough that a downed cell network (or an angry coworker because of a downed cell network) would honestly have mattered. But somebody who deliberately moves through the world doing their best to make everyone’s lives harder, with the aim of encouraging everybody around them to be just a little crueler, just a little angrier, just a little less empathetic–you know what, yes. I do call that successful evil.
It’s subtle, is the thing. That’s why Hastur and Ligur don’t get it, don’t approve of it. Not because Crowley isn’t good at his job, but because we’ve seen from the beginning that Hastur and Ligur are extremely out of touch with humanity and the modern world and just plain aren’t smart enough to get it. It’s a strategy that relies on understanding how humans work, what our buttons are and how to press them. It’s also a strategy that’s remarkably advanced in terms of free will. Hastur and Ligur deliberately tempt and coerce and entrap individuals into sinning, but Crowley never even gets close. We never see him say to a single person, ‘hey, I’ve got an idea for you, why don’t you go do this bad thing?’ He sets up conditions to encourage humans to actually do the bad things they’re already thinking of themselves. He creates a situation and opens it up to the results of free choice. Every single thing a person does after Crowley’s messed with them is their own decision, without any demonic coercion to blame for any of it.
You see it again in the paintball match. “They wanted real guns, I gave them what they wanted.” In this case, Crowley didn’t need to irritate anybody into wanting to do evil–the desire to shoot and hurt and maybe even kill their own coworkers was already present in every combatant on that paintball field. Crowley just so happened to be there at exactly the right time to give them the opportunity to turn that fleeting, kind-of-bad-but-never-acted-upon desire into real, concrete, attempted murder. Sure, nobody died–where would be the fun in a pile of corpses? But now forty-odd people who may never have committed a real act of violence in their entire lives, caught in a moment of weakness with real live weapons in their hands, will get to spend the rest of their lives knowing that given the opportunity and the tiniest smidgen of plausible deniability, they are absolutely the sort of people who could and would kill another human being they see every single day over a string of petty annoyances.
Crowley understands the path between bad thought and evil action. He knows it gets shorter when somebody is upset or irritated, and that it gets shorter when people practice turning one into the other. He understands that sometimes, removing a couple of practical obstacles is the only nudge a person needs–no demonic pressure or circumvention of free will required.
I love this interpretation, because I love the idea that Crowley, who’s been living on Earth for six thousand years, actually gets people in a way no other demon can. I love the idea that Crowley, the very first tempter, who was there when free will was invented, understands how it works and how to use it better than maybe anyone else. And I really love the idea that Crowley our hero, who loves Aziraphale and saves the world, isn’t necessarily a good guy.
There’s a narrative fandom’s been telling that, at its core, is centered around the idea that Crowley is good, and loves and cares and is nice, and always has been. Heaven and its rigid ideas of Right and Wrong is itself the bad thing. Crowley is too good for Heaven, and was punished for it, but under all the angst and pain and feelings of hurt and betrayal, he’s the best of all of them after all.
That’s a compelling story. There’s a reason we keep telling it. The conflict between kindness and Moral Authority, the idea that maybe the people in charge are the ones who’re wrong and the people they’ve rejected are both victim and hero all at once–yeah. There’s a lot there to connect with, and I wouldn’t want to take it away from anyone. But the compelling story I want, for me, is different.
I look at Crowley and I want a story about someone who absolutely has the capacity for cruelty and disseminating evil into the world. Somebody who’s actually really skilled at it, even if all he does is create opportunities, and humans themselves just keep living down to and even surpassing his expectations. Somebody who enjoys it, even. Maybe he was unfairly labeled and tossed out of heaven to begin with, but he’s embraced what he was given. He’s thrived. He is, legitimately, a bad person.
And he tries to save the world anyway.
He loves Aziraphale. He helps save the entire world. Scared and desperate and determined and devoted, he drives through a wall of fire for the sake of something other than himself. He likes humans, their cleverness, their complexities, the talent they have for doing the same sort of evil he does himself, the talent they have for doing the exact opposite. He cares.
It’s not a story about someone who was always secretly good even though they tried to convince the whole world and themself that they weren’t. It’s a story about someone who, despite being legitimately bad in so many ways, still has the capacity to be good anyway. It’s not about redemption, or about what Heaven thinks or judges or wants. It’s about free will. However terrible you are or were or have the ability to be, you can still choose to do a good thing. You can still love. You can still be loved in return.
And I think that matters.
Good Omens owes quite a lot to The Screwtape Letters and smattering of other Screwtape writing that CS Lewis did, and this is one of the things.
yes yes yes to all of this. look, i enjoy a lot of the soft gentle crowley stuff, but crowley is legitimately a bastard, whose job–which he is actually very good at–is getting people to do terrible things, largely by making them just a little bit miserable. he doesn’t force anything. he doesn’t even give them a push. he just sets up the ideal circumstances for people to be awful to each other and leaves them to it.
and he still chooses to save the world, not because he’s secretly just a wonderful person, but because even though he’s actually kind of an asshole he still retains the capacity to be decent. he can make that choice
(and yesss someone finally mentioned the screwtape letters. i have so many issues with c.s. lewis’s apologia, but that was such a good exploration of the nature of evil. i should reread it)
fishyfishyfishtimes
