#he didn't have to help job's kids. he didn't have to help elspeth. but he did

[lenaellsi]

i've mentioned this before and it's a Hot Take maybe but. i don't think it's fair at all to characterize crowley's "you and me, what do you say?" speech from s2 as being equivalent to "fuck the earth run away with me to the stars right now" a la season 1

i guess i can see why it might come off that way, with gabriel and beelzebub having just left and crowley drawing the comparison to them, but a lot of people have sort of extrapolated from that this dichotomy where suddenly aziraphale is the one who cares about saving the world and crowley only cares about himself and aziraphale. and while i think crowley certainly prioritizes their mutual safety and is more likely to get spooked when faced with threats from heaven (i wonder why) crowley also loves earth?? he talks about it all the time.

the last time there was an apocalypse, crowley was the one who proposed saving the world, and he had to talk aziraphale into it. and like...he was planning breakfast at the ritz, wasn't he? he didn't want to leave. obviously "you can't leave this bookshop" meant "you can't leave me," but it also LITTLE bit meant the bookshop, and earth.

the circumstances of s1 were very different than the end of s2. crowley only wanted to run in s1 when 1) the end was about 4 hours away, 2) from his POV he and aziraphale had no idea where the antichrist was, so they wouldn't be able to stop anything even if they did stay to die with the humans, 3) aziraphale was about to Talk To Heaven the same way crowley tried to before the Fall, 4) demons were actively pursuing him for purposes of torture and annihilation. and in the end, he STILL stayed.

idk. if we're going to give aziraphale the benefit of the doubt for the Many Things he said in that convo, then i think we can afford to give crowley the benefit of the doubt that "we need to get away from them" and "go off together" might mean something more along the lines of "please don't go back to heaven, stay with me, it can be the two of us against them all." THAT was what crowley's emotional arc this season was leading to, with the flashbacks and his big revelation in ep 5, the same way aziraphale's was leading to leaving. every single one of the flashbacks had crowley choosing to help someone else at great personal risk--why would that lead to the conclusion that he actually wants to leave without trying to help? (of course, he did want to abandon gabriel. but I don't think that was even a little bit irrational after aziraphale's failed execution. walking away from the heavenly host who has done nothing but hurt both of them is not the same as walking away from earth. it's still a problem--ignoring heaven and hell will not, ultimately, fix anything--but again, it's not the same as abandoning humanity on a whim.)

TL;DR I don't think it's a fair reading to say that crowley's proposed solution to The Heaven And Hell Problem is "fuck humanity, let's give up." i think he was proposing working together against heaven and hell with the option of an exit strategy if everything went wrong, which is what he ALWAYS tries to do. (see: arrangement + holy water.) his need for an escape route and his tendency to prepare for the worst is something that is definitely hindering him in, for example, his relationship with aziraphale, but it also makes sense. because, you know. the last time he tried doing anything about heaven he got his wings lit on fire. so.

[dee-morris]

Aziraphale's Anxiety

There's something I feel like we don't talk about enough when it comes to things that Aziraphale is afraid of. Fanfictions, especially human AUs, interpret his fears and his "rejection" of Crowley as a form of internalized homophobia, and given the strict oversight and corporate-megachurch-coded supervisors I get it. A lot of us have had similar experiences with religion, except Aziraphale gets the added perk of knowing that what they're threatening him with is actually real and not an abusive power play.

But anyway.

Setting side the Final Fifteen for the moment because I stand by my hypothesis that we don't know everything that was happening in that scene or exactly why the characters behaved the way they did, Aziraphale's fears have been primarily guided by a desire to protect. Usually Crowley, but not always. He meddled in Elspeth's situation to try to protect her from going to hell. And if you do the math, he wasn't wrong to do so. A couple of years of misery and poverty against an eternity of torture? For an immortal creature who actually understands the concept of eternity, it checks out.

When he said no to the holy water he wanted to protect Crowley. When he gave him the holy water, it was to protect Crowley, in a lesser of two evils kind of way. When he broke up with Crowley at the bandstand, I think several things are going on: he wanted to protect the earth, he wanted to protect Crowley, and he knew that ultimately leaving the planet wouldn't guarantee their safety because when the end came the ENTIRE universe was getting shut down, not just the earth.

And here's my favorite example: the Job minisode. We really do not talk enough about the fact that Aziraphale could have walked away from this situation at any time without consequences. He never broke the rules. Gabriel told him, All we're doing is not stopping hell. And Aziraphale didn't stop Crawley, technically; Satan's diabolical minister had already decided he wasn't killing anyone. All Aziraphale did was help him, which wasn't the same as stopping him. Rules lawyer Aziraphale my beloved.

So he didn't lie to the Supreme Archangel's face to protect himself or the kids (unless he thought they'd off the kids if they knew they had survived, but that seems unlikely, the trials were over at that point); he did it to protect Crawley. And he was fully prepared to go to hell over it. Not happy about it to be sure, but resigned. And I believe that it wasn't losing his status in heaven that upset him but losing his role as Earth's protector.

Anyway, that's just something that's been kicking around in my head. We've spent so much time between seasons reveling in fanfiction that it's easy to lose track of the canon characters. Aziraphale's anxiety has rarely been on his own behalf, and higher self esteem won't fix his problems.

I stand by my belief, however, that a roll in the hay might help. There fanfiction and I are in complete agreement.

[snek-eyes]

Hi Vee! 🤗 I hope you had a wonderful few days! I'm back with more meta questions 🤭 I hope that's okay, if not, just ignore me pls 😅 I've seen some people say Aziraphale isn't empathetic, some say Crowley isn't empathetic, but I think both of them have a LOT of empathy. They just show it very differently, and I think the perfect example is the Edinburgh minisode. Azi is caught in his Heavenly indoctrination a lot of times, like when he thinks body snatching is bad before actually thinking about it in a more complex matter instead of just black and white and as soon as ge does, he's suddenly all in favour of it and what made him change his mind is his empathy. With Crowley, he seems very cool and suave on the surface but he always acts and helps and protects, like with Elspeth; he didn't just save her from suic*de but he actively changed her situation as much as he could (he couldn't bring Wee Morag back for her because it wasn't in his power so he chose the next best thing he could change which was her poverty) to give her a reason to live, too. Or when he talks to Job and Sitis - you wrote an amazing meta about that already but I think the gist of it was that he sees the big picture which is that he needs to find the kids in order to save them and knows he will save them and that they'll all be fine. I think they both possess a great deal of empathy but express it in different ways which I think actually mirror their love languages: Crowley acts on his empathy, he does what he can to help people but isn't vocal about it, and Azi is vocal about it but he sometimes needs a nudge from Crowley to see the big, complex picture for that. Whats's your view on the matter? I'd love to hear your thoughts! 😁🤍

- 💫

Aziraphale (and Crowley) vs Empathy

Hey there! This was really interesting to think about!

So from my understanding (and if you're someone that has a better one, please feel free to chime in!), empathy is the ability to understand someone else's emotions, whether intellectually or by sympathetically feeling them yourself. But lacking empathy doesn't necessarily mean that you can't care about people, it just means that you don't exactly understand their emotions.

I'm saying this because after thinking about it, I actually don't think Aziraphale is very empathetic. Despite the fact that he does care a whole lot! Aziraphale is a protector, from Adam & Eve to Job's kids to that one nameless child Dalrymple couldn't save to Wee Morag, etc etc, we see him acting against what he Should be doing because he cares so damn much. But it seems to be because he has a strong moral code and believes that the alternative to acting is an injustice, more than he is putting himself in anyone's shoes and thinking about how they might be feeling. It's the difference between "I care that this sad thing is happening to you" and "I care because I can tell you are sad."

Like in the Edinburgh flashback, when he realizes what happened to the child, he's devastated because it's a tragedy that a child died, horrifically, and that all that's left of them on this earth can be contained in a bottle. His previous moral rule that digging up bodies is a sin because it's just wrong is overwritten because he's been shown an actual tangible consequence.

It would explain a lot about the number of times, especially in s2, when he either does not recognize how upset Crowley is, or if he does, he doesn't get why or take it seriously.

Saying things like "Still a demon?" or "I haven't seen you since, the flood?" without realizing why Crowley might find those upsetting and not friendly banter material.

While he doesn't seem to pick up on Crowley's bad mood in Uz, by Rome it seems like he has learned to at least see it, if not understand it. Regardless, he's still making a go at cheering Crowley up.

Aziraphale doesn't get why changing the Bentley is personally upsetting to Crowley, until Crowley connects it to something equally relevant for Aziraphale: Selling his books.

This also made something click for me wrt his scene with Maggie when she suddenly starts crying about striking out with Nina. He is completely at a loss as to why all these details are upsetting her, right up until she mentions being in love. He understands love, aww! But, crucially, his initial reaction is more "Oh, being in love is wonderful!" than "Oh, I see that must be hard for you." And he responds by wanting to solve her problem, he doesn't get that she's probably just looking for advice from an older queer to help her feel better about it, more than an actual solution.

The scene that kicks off the modern day where Maggie is upset about not being able to pay her rent. Aziraphale doesn't really engage with the fact that she's breaking down in front of him, he's doing whatever he can to placate her so he can just leave with his records.

Alright, let's get to the final fifteen because this would explain something that's always caught me. During Crowley's confession, Aziraphale looks SO confused as to why Crowley is getting upset. Aziraphale is coming at this from what he sees as a logical perspective, and Crowley is making an emotional plea. Aziraphale straight up does not understand how the two halves of this argument are connected.

When Crowley says he understands better than Aziraphale, it's like he's saying he has the intellectual high ground, and that's why Aziraphale decides they've reached an impasse.

Again, this isn't a knock on Aziraphale at all, it's just how he sees the world.

Meanwhile Crowley... I'm honestly not sure how to read Crowley on this.

He'll either project his own trauma onto other people or possibly recognize shades of it in their circumstances at the drop of a hat (the goats, the plants, lonely Muriel in heaven, the scene in S1 when he's hanging off his throne and goes from lamenting about how his fall was unfair right into to calling out God because testing the humans to destruction is unfair)

He is pretty good at knowing how people are going to react when he does his demonic mischief, although that might just be a logical extrapolation from experience.

On the other hand, he seems very confused when people go against his expectations (Jane Austen, Maggie and Nina not wanting help).

He seems to have a good handle on how Aziraphale feels in most situations, although Aziraphale's need to protect people is a huge blind spot he does not understand. So maybe that's just years and years of studying him and trying to understand. "Just enough of a bastard to be worth knowing," after all.

While he understands Elspeth's circumstances, he's not exactly, comforting? to her? When Morag is like "tell me that's not what I think it is" he immediately throws her under the bus in favor of chaos ("8D oh it most certainly is"). And when Aziraphale melts the body, he doesn't even look at Elspeth who's freaking out, his eyes are entirely on Aziraphale.

What do other people think?

[ineffablenlghtingales]

Okay, so with episode 3, we get some more backstory of Aziraphale and Crowley in Scotland (and get some of David's natural and maybe a bit exaggerated accent, but I'm not complaining. I loved it).

I died, I absolutely died when Crowley imbibed that laudanum. Not even kidding. 🤣😂

It starts with Gabriel holding a mug (his mug apparently) Muriel unexpectedly appears on Aziraphale’s doorstep and does a not very good job at pretending to be human (not her fault though, her first time on earth). But she's so ridiculously cute! I like her. Also, the exchange between her and the ineffable husbands. I can't.

Muriel *tries hard to be a human inspector constable* Crowley: Oh? You were transferred from another human settlement? Which one? Muriel: ... Crowley *grinning*: First time here on earth? *Thinking to himself* Definitely an angel, that one. Aziraphale: *so done*

She’s sunshine and sweetness personified, with solid comedic timing. Crowley pulls Azi aside and they talk about what's going on.

Then, we have Crowley planning to bring Nina and Maggie together, while Aziraphale is still hellbent on driving Crowley’s Bentley to Edinburgh to pursue his “clue.” Crowley is still reluctant to give him the keys.

Then, back to 1827 Edinburgh. Crowley and Aziraphale meet Elspeth digging up a grave. Crowley is of course, amused, while Aziraphale explains why grave robbing is wrong.

Azi, in the present day, drives the Bentley to Edinburgh and I love how irritated Crowley gets at him when 1) he drives under the speed limit bc the demon can sense when the car's under said speed limit, 2) Aziraphale changed the color of the vehicle from black to yellow and 3) "Are those travel sweets?" Crowley is not pleased.

Back at the bookshop, Gabriel is trying to figure out gravity. Crowley (gawd I love him) can't remember the why of gravity and I really enjoy how he comes down the stairs with a neat pile of books only to toss them in a haphazard mess (shame on you, bad demon, take care of those books! Why do you even both carrying them down if you're going to just throw them like that? 🤣)

Back in 1827, Crowley and Azi meet Mr. Dalrymple and learn more about his night work. Aziraphale, in the present time pretends to be a journalist and enters The Resurrectionists, the pub Maggie talked about. He learns about the records in the jukebox turning into the song "Everyday". Then he shows a picture of Gabriel to the pub owner, and the latter just so happens to recognize it.

Aziraphale notices the sign of the pub and sees Mr. Dalrymple depicted there, with a butcher's knife. He remembers.

Back in 1827, Aziraphale changes tactics and supports Elspeth. Elspeth gets her friend Wee Morag to help them, promising that one body (which she intends to give to Dalrymple) can get them off the streets. In the cemetery, Crowley and Azi notice guns that, set off by trip wire, go off.

Wee Morag accidentally sets on off, gets shot and dies. After some time, Elspeth decides to take Wee Morag’s body to Mr. Dalrymple for payment.

Dalrymple, however, doesn't give Elspeth very much for the remains bc Azi did some work with hastening the corruption, didn't Before they leave, Elspeth swipes a bottle of laudanum from his collection and returns to the crypt to drink the laudanum so she can be with Wee Morag. Aziraphale and Crowley try to talk her out of it. Crowley ingests the laudanum himself, which has a peculiar effect on him. (This was one of my favorite parts). "No. More. Dying. Enough dying. NO. MORE. DYING. NO MORE DYING. " Then, he shrinks, growls at Aziraphale and roars. He makes all these weird noises (I bet David had a good time doing this part, seriously. Crowley's just out of his mind here haha). Then Crowley gets very big and booms at Elspeth, "You have sinned very bigly....be good. Not pretend-y good but properly good!"

Unfortunately, as the demon and angel are leaving the scene, Crowley’s pulled through the ground to Hell, presumably to be punished.

In the present day, we see Azi in the cemetery in Edinburgh. He asks two men if he can use a phone and calls Crowley to reveal he’s in the cemetery and currently staring at the statue of Gabriel. He also tells Crowley that Mr. Dalrymple left Edinburgh in disgrace in the 1800s, killed himself and got a pub named after him. Aziraphale tells Crowley what he learned at the pub about Gabriel’s visit there. Then the pun. Holy hell, the pun. Crowley says he has to go because of the "awning of a new age" excuse me, sir. I love puns, so I appreciated that.

Then, then another of my favorite bits, Crowley brings on a rainstorm to try to get them to have their moment. Maggie tries to apologize for the other night when they were stuck in the coffee shop together. Crowley, I love him, have I said? He's hilarious. "Come on, rain proper. Hard." He makes it rain harder, hoping they seek shelter under an awning. They do, but then the awning breaks, dumping water on their heads.

Crowley finds Shax outside as she transforms into different people to remain incognito, and he's not impressed. I love he doesn't give a shit and just doesn't let her in. Also, we see how protective he is of his angel okay.

Next episode's recap ➵

[hybridempress]

Of course it makes sense that Aziraphale would ask Crowley to go back to Heaven with him.

Of course it makes sense that he believed Crowley would be happy to come back to Heaven with him.

Think about the way that Crowley talks about or views his Fall. Every time he mentions it, he is either super vague or he is extremely sad and remorseful. Either way, he doesn't actually take responsibility for his Fall.

"An Angel who did not Fall so much as saunter vaguely downwards."

"I didn't mean to Fall, I just hung around the wrong people."

"I only ever asked questions. That's all it took to be a demon in the old days."

It is always made very clear that he never wanted to Fall. It was never what he intended. It is something that he regrets. It is something that happened to him, not something that he did. Something that was undeserved. Something that he is extremely distraught over and that he doesn't want to be blamed for or even properly admit that it happened.

Crowley is also fundamentally a good person. He pretends not to be because it gets him in trouble. He refuses to let Aziraphale say that he is a good person, whenever he does something good he comes up with an excuse or an ulterior motive, but his excuses don't even always work. He's been punished before. And yet, over and over again we have seen him put his own life at risk to do the right thing.

He is devastated at the idea that God is going to flood the world and kill all living things. He saves Job's livestock and his children and makes sure their family is saved and reunited. He drinks literal poison and convinces Elspeth not to kill herself and helps her get a head start on a new life so she doesn't have to suffer anymore. He redirects Nazi bombs to kill Nazis. He convinces Aziraphale to form an "Arrangement" with him where they both either do a temptation and a blessing or neither of them do anything at all because it "balances out" and he doesn't actually try to make an effort to do bad things. He mostly leaves the humans alone. All of the "sins" that he has invented have been either inconvenient, frustrating, mildly mischievous, or actually kind of funny and have an equal amount of good effects on humans as they do bad. He's never shot a gun before. The only times we ever see him bring actual harm to something is when he (accidentally) drops some graveyard watchmen down a deep hole, kills Nazis, and (assumedly) throws a potted plant into a wood chipper. He refuses to kill Adam because he's "personally not up for killing kids." He convinces Aziraphale to stop Armageddon with him because he loves the world, he loves humans, he loves life on Earth, and he is fundamentally against the idea that humans should be "tested to destruction." He is a better person than all of the other angels and he is even a better person than Aziraphale in a lot of scenarios.

Of course Aziraphale would think that Crowley would want a chance to go back. And not just to go back to the same system that had hurt them both before, but to go back to a Heaven that Aziraphale was planning on recreating in their own image. A Heaven where both of them could make a difference on a massive scale and be able to protect the Earth and all of the humans in it without having to worry that they would ever be in danger again. A Heaven where Crowley would never be cast out for asking questions or making suggestions. He truly believes this is the best case scenario for both of them, where they can be together without having to hide themselves anymore and they can do things their own way forever, and they can always help people in the process.

So when Crowley says no, it sends him spiraling. He panics. "No, this isn't how this was supposed to happen. You were supposed to be happy about this. That's the only reason I said yes, because I thought it would be what you wanted. I already told them yes, I can't take it back now, you can't just abandon me with this when I did this for you." He means it when he says that he needs Crowley. He is begging Crowley to reconsider. When he says "nothing lasts forever" he doesn't mean that his and Crowley's life on earth can't last forever, he means that he is willing to give it all up if it means that Crowley will be happy, if it means that the two of them can be together unconditionally and that they can make a difference together.

Aziraphale tells the Metatron that he doesn't want to go back to Heaven. He only changes his mind when the Metatron says that Crowley can come with him. And after Crowley leaves him, and the Metatron comes to collect him, he seems now so unsure of himself. He starts to say something along the lines of "I think I--" forgot something? changed my mind? whatever it was, he is hesitant to leave. He doesn't want to anymore. It's just that I don't think he can back out of it now, or at least he thinks that he can't back out of it, he doesn't think he's allowed to change his mind--or maybe he really can't. And for him, Crowley kissing him and then leaving the bookshop feels like an act of manipulation. And it's Crowley leaving because things are hard. Crowley does this a lot. He leaves when things get hard. He usually ends up coming back, but he does always leave. Aziraphale feels like he's being abandoned, and he doesn't know if Crowley can come back this time. He's just hoping that Crowley will.

[taurnachardhin]

Crowley got in so much trouble for the Elspeth thing because he stopped her from committing suicide. I have seen the argument that it's weird he was punished so harshly just for telling Aziraphale to give her money, but I don't think that was it. Crowley's mission on Earth was to try to get as many human souls damned as possible. I think (within the GO universe, like just to be clear, I don't personally believe in damnation) Elspeth's soul was almost certainly going to Hell had she died in that moment. Potentially even just for the suicide itself, regardless of the state of her heart otherwise. So by stopping her from committing suicide, Crowley not merely nudged someone away from sin instead of toward it; he knowingly robbed Hell of an outright win. If someone down in Hell noticed that, then yeah, I think it's totally plausible that that would have earned him a serious punishment. The fact that he then also encouraged Aziraphale to give her money, and made her promise to be good, surely wouldn't have helped his case, but that wasn't the main offense.

Furthermore, I think it's worth pointing out that I don't think we've ever seen Crowley do something so plainly against Hell's interests before. The greatest good we've witnessed him do up to that point in history was probably not killing Job's kids, but as long as Job believed they were dead, it still served Satan's purposes, so that was more a matter of following the spirit if not the letter of his orders. (Also the human kids will remember that it was a demon who spared their lives, so Crowley could probably argue his actions were a net gain for Hell anyway.) I mean what else "good" did he actually do in the flashbacks up to 1827? Make sure Hamlet got a good turnout? He saved Aziraphale from being executed, but that probably didn't move the needle for Hell since it didn't affect a human soul, and in the process, Crowley got an executioner sent to Hell faster, so that still looked like a win for him. So yeah, stopping Elspeth from going to Hell was a big deal.

The fact that he wasn't seen on Earth for 40 years suggests to me the possibility that "the punishment fit the crime" and Crowley was tortured during that period in the place of Elspeth's soul. (Either to make up exactly for the time they could have been torturing her--Elspeth might have lived another 40 years before dying of natural causes--or just because of the biblical significance of 40 as a period of trial.) This obviously scared Crowley enough to ask Aziraphale for the holy water so he could avoid it happening again, but I wonder if this was a turning point for him in another way as well. Is Elspeth the last individual he attempts to tempt directly? Maybe his experience of torture in Hell made the consequences of his work on Earth more unconfortable for him to think about, and this is when and why he turned to his "causing a general annoyance" approach to demonhood. Making people more frustrated and therefore more easily tempted to sin on their own puts some degrees of separation between his actions and their consequences for human souls, and maybe this helped alleviate a little of his guilt.

[snek-eyes]

Hi 👋 I have a question, and since I love all your meta, I thought you might be the right one to answer this.

I read a post that said Crowley wouldn't have saved Elspeth had Aziraphale not tried to save her soul first and...I'm confused. I'm not putting a link bc I don't want to bash anyone but this feels canonically wrong. Crowley has always been saving innocents even before he and Aziraphale became friends. He was against the flood, horrified even, and he saved Job's kids AND Sitis even before he and Azi became even friends. And he's the one saving Nina and Maggie from Saraquiel and who, earlier at the ball, is the first one to be alarmed and worried about the humans.

I'm thoroughly confused now because...am I wrong? I was absolutely certain it's canon Crowley would have saved Elspeth either way, and while Aziraphale did want to save her soul, he was very skeptic about giving her money and needed to be talked into it by Crowley. Help.

Hey there! I haven't directly seen posts like that but I've seen people mention them, and it's a take that does not sit right with me. From where I'm standing, "Crowley wouldn't have saved Elspeth if Aziraphale hadn't tried to save her soul" is technically true, but in the rules-lawyer sense that if Aziraphale hadn't gotten involved, Elspeth would presumably have been able to sell her corpse, maybe get her and Morag off the streets like she planned, and so wouldn't have ended up attempting suicide and thus wouldn't have needed saving.

book!Adam @ show!Adam: This is exactly why you were supposed to tell them to stop mucking people about.

show!Adam: whoops

But as for Aziraphale being Crowley's motivation in the scene where he downs the laudnum... I wrote about this a little before, but the reason why Crowley saves Elspeth is literally the episode title: "I Know Where I'm Going."

But that's not where she's going. She doesn't know what she thinks she does, and dying now is going to seal that mistake, and separate her from Morag, forever.

Crowley saving Elspeth is the same as when he jumped in and saved Sitis before she damned herself. He didn't run into that room full of angels for Aziraphale's sake, and neither did he swoop in to down a bottle of laudnum and tell a soul guaranteed for hell, "Hey knock that off and be properly good or else."

Aziraphale and Crowley's bond might be epic, but the two of them have motivations and values outside each other.

(followup)