#and i haven't even TOUCHED on foucault yet incredible

[thesherrinfordfacility]

thinking about The Resurrectionists minisode and how Aziraphale doesn't quite grasp the effects of poverty in societal power structures. thinking about heaven's rigid hierarchies and hell's looser ones. thinking about God as The King, The Ruler, The Good, The Light, and hell as The Evil.

thinking about how Aziraphale is going to try and change heaven from the top down. thinking about the roles Gabriel and Michael and Uriel had were as the arbiters of God's will. thinking about Muriel, and how lonely it is at the bottom of the ladder.

thinking about Job's children and Aziraphale lying to the Archangels.

thinking about ACAB. about how a cop trying to do good is still reinforcing unbalanced power dynamics. about heaven having no checks and balances, because you can't check the word of God.

thinking about how there is no direct comparison to real life, because heaven is Good, and hell is Evil, and there is no room for debate because you know who heaven has? God. and God is Good. and thinking about how close Aziraphale was to grasping that maybe God isn't always Good, but he still can't accept that. how he keeps trying to just explain why Job doesn't want new children and justifying why wee Morag should be healed and insisting to talk to God in s1 because if She just took his call, he could explain everything and She'd understand, obviously! because She is Good, even if the Archangels aren't always, so it must be a misunderstanding.

thinking about hell being understaffed. thinking about demons being mostly miserable. thinking about how Satan is superficially God's opposite, but not and never God's equal.

thinking, always thinking, always thinking, about The Resurrectionists minisode and how Aziraphale doesn't quite grasp the effects of poverty in societal power structures. thinking about Aziraphale's "but that's the good bit! the lower you start, the more opportunities you have," and Crowley's "that's lunacy," and Aziraphale's "no, that's ineffable." thinking about Aziraphale not immediately clocking just how embarrassed Maggie is to have the rent conversation, how she doesn't even try to argue, how she says she can be out asap, about his confusion why she'd even suggest that.

thinking about Crowley being a high-ranking angel of some kind before falling. thinking about Shax and Furfur just trying to get better lives via promotion. about just needing a cuppa to get through your shift. about angel-Crowley's dismissive nature, about how he remembers Aziraphale's and Shax's and Furfur's names now and didn't seem to bother with that before the Fall. about Crowley teaching Shax about sarcasm and humanity, even when she's threatening him. about power and losing it, about power and never having had it to begin with, and about God's power, who could unmake the universe in a heartbeat if She so desired.

there's something in here, but I can't stop thinking long enough to piece it all together. we need to know more about God in the GO universe and exactly what Her nature truly is. but it's all so unbalanced. truly, no angel other than the metatron could have convinced Aziraphale to come back to run heaven, because he's the voice of God, and even he only did so with some master manipulation.

(thinking about punching the metatron in his stupid face)

(and finally, thinking about how a cool flashback minisode for s3 could be the trial of King Charles I in 1649)

sorry this is long, and thanks for letting us all ramble to your inbox :) -💭💭

oh nonnie, you really are going through it ain't ya?✨💓 don't apologise for it being long, everyone is more than welcome to slide their ramblings into my inbox✨

fuck it im getting in the trenches with you, as long as noone minds it being pretentious philosophical crap, but ive had this knocking about for a couple of days, and after your ask i rewatched ep3 and found it was the perfect one to demonstrate what im trying to say!!!

"God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players (ie. everyone), to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."

power is like a huge game of chess, manipulating pieces around the board and pushing forward your advantage pawns just as much as sacking your queen, even when it's the most compelling piece on the board, and still being able to pin your opponents king.

power is like a dance where one usually thinks that because they are following the steps they have control over where their foot will land, but not understanding that regardless of the steps, how you dance them is controlled by a tempo and a rhythm.

power is like when someone has ordered a meal based on a description, building a mental image in their head, and what you serve is something resembling the description close enough that they can't argue sufficiently to send it back because they got what was advertised.

power is control, and influence, the ability to bend and shape everything around you. power is not leaving anything to chance, or coincidence, because to assert power is to exact where the hammer falls. power is nothing other than control, and the absence of power is not only weakness; its mirror is also disorder. it's chaos, and anarchy.

there are, obviously, conflicting schools of thought on power. but im going to refer to nietzsche, as a fairly obvious example (and entirely just my interpretation), and his suggestion on power being in line with his thoughts on the "death of god". with this, we can infer that humanity would achieve true power through self-realisation, and not by conditioning their actions in response to a higher stake, such being god or the salvation of their soul; to act only in purpose to their own selves, and not a higher, deterministic influence.

i think this is exactly where the crux of aziraphale's response to power sits in ep3. he truly believes, thinking only on a base level, that the digging up of bodies is wrong; it's desecration, and, as he believes, intrinsically against the will of god. but crowley, as others have pointed out, rightly shows him that the duality of morality is seeped into everything and how you perceive morality entirely depends on your perspective, borne out of your experiences you have been dealt and gone through. digging up bodies is morally wrong on the surface, but it befits a higher, good purpose (education in medicine, precipitating the ability to help people and do further good). this, for a short while, truly shifts aziraphale's world view; we can see that.

so when morag is injured, he's prepared to exact his own power, and help and save her. he's hesitant, because it's not something he's entirely confident in doing, but he's willing and prepared. and then morag died. morag tripped over a wire, got blasted with a grave cannon, and died. but, from aziraphale's perspective, was this an accident? or was tripping the wire a divine intervention following the fact that aziraphale had had a shift in mentality with dalrymple? and morag dying - was it an assertion of power that was in direct retaliation of aziraphale daring to think he could exact his own power, his own control, by saving her? possibly, and would explain why he continues to be conflicted throughout his narrative; not only out of fear, potentially, but in surrender to the power of god.

when it comes to the apocalypse in s1, aziraphale and crowley directly contradict what they thought would be an assertion of absolute power and, especially in aziraphale's case, potentially realised that power may not be the core of god's agenda after all. averting armageddon might just have been part of the wider, ineffable plan. i think this is where aziraphale begins to shift his understanding of god; that through his own, free will and action, he can still do good, and still be of god, but he has power that is ultimately his to control.

the job storyline similarly parallels this whole thought process; that aziraphale felt immediately that he would be punished for asserting his own power in the situation with the children. he has a power over gabriel and the other angels by way of lying to them; in his mind his actions, his free will to lie, his power, directly contradicted god's power and will. but he (as far as we know by crowley's account, crowley was not there to drag aziraphale down to hell) was not cast out, and did not fall. so does that mean he did indeed do the right thing? or, if we understand god to be omniscient but benevolent, was this mercy? could aziraphale have interpreted his fear of falling as a warning, the first strike? it would make sense, given he chooses not to interfere with the heavenly policy on jesus' crucifixion, despite his evident hesitancy with it.

i think that aziraphale puts a lot of stock in ineffability because it's a comfort that power resides elsewhere, and all he has to be is a conduit. call it cowardice or pragmatism, i think sometimes to aziraphale that it's just semantics. in his mind, he is simply bowing to the power of god, out of faith and reverence and perhaps - yes - fear, and that's understandable. but i similarly think he starts to question ineffability in the context that when the power comes from an unknowable source, where the motive and agenda is completely unknowable to boot, the right thing to do is question that power. and this adds further context to why he chooses to rejoin heaven; that in taking control of the power that resides within him, he might be able to influence things for the better, because he's realised - or at least realising - that he is not simply a puppet for god to control (whether or not she did want to control him, or even intended to).

aziraphale was, once, an angel that went along with heaven as far as he could. but now? whilst i do think that the metatron obviously had some influence over aziraphale through manipulation, i think it's slightly depreciative of aziraphale's character development to remove his own agency from that decision - realising his own power through free will and action, and using this to potentially leave behind something better, and completely effable, and material. he has changed, he has developed, and whilst he may not be successful in his agenda to change heaven, and it might be dangerous, the fact that he felt he had the power to try speaks volumes to me✨

(i too would love to see a Charles I substory; however questionable his belief in divine power residing within himself, the narrative of governing and being accountable only to his own conscience - because he was the earthly representative of god, in his eyes - could be something really special to see in GO!)