#i can totally see where aziraphale is coming from desperately wanting to live a lie just so he can be at peace with his beliefs

[randomfandomss]

oohhh okay then...alright

What a devastating yet perfect finale. I, of course, anticipated that after Season 1 Aziraphale would have a lot of growing to do for his and Crowley’s relationship to ever work, and guessed that would be taken up this season in some capacity.

...and I am not sure what to say. He still has complete faith in heaven when time and again they have proved themselves to be utter pieces of shit. He believes in himself, that he can make a difference which, yes! He can...but I strongly believe that one has to have the guts see the reality and acknowledge it, with all its goodness and faults in order to be able to really make a difference. So far he has just refused to do so.

He said, “Nothing lasts forever”, yet he has always refrained from questioning the “ineffable plan”. Staying in the comfort of what has been defined as “goodness” by god, never questioning anything at all even though, it has been proved through whatever we see of their shared history that Aziraphale has always grown, learned something and generally become a better angel whenever things had been questioned and the right answers had been given.

He has to break out of this cycle and see things as they are, clearly. About heaven, about self imposed restrictions, norms defined by people who only care about power and don’t give a fuck. He as learned how to live on earth but has he been truly been awake all this time? He needs to start seeing things in full color, that have so far been distorted by his black and white perception for the world. He believes and hopes but the thing he is placing belief in is fundamentally broken.

On the other hand Crowley, to say I've been heartbroken over what happened to him would truly be an understatement and I'm not sure what else to say...So I will leave it at that. The way he found a companion in Aziraphale, someone who accepted him for all he was and tursted him. Someone who SAW him, because I think thats what he would've always wanted. To be understood, when no one, neither Heaven nor Hell ever did. To have this dream shattered into a million pieces once again. When he had finally made peace with his existence, with who he was, all the good and the bad bits, and found some rest from the incessant questioning. When he was ready to just...be, Aziraphale asked him to go back to the place that had hurt him profoundly, SO MUCH. Aziraphale asked Crowley to be restored into what his idea of what good and right is, the ideal existence for him. Crowley has never been an angel nor a demon and Aziraphale knew him since the beginning...how could he not see that?!?! He was the ONLY one who SAW it.

Is he trying to fool himself or Crowley? Aziraphales ideal existence is where something never goes bad or is never wrong, that, in itself is toxic and I believe the next season will obviously focus on that.

I know he desperately wanted to be with Crowley for eternity and live the “ideal” life with him but his definition of ideal itself is wrong. He needs to challenge his beliefs and inspire others to do so as well if he wants to really LIVE and not just exist.

Anywho that is Neil Gaiman’s department, SO!!

SO, I will WAIT to SEE where they go next and I will looking out for that SUPER MEGA APOLOGY DANCE from Aziraphale :D

[ravelqueen]

Since I only now finished the second season there is already quite a bit of meta available for the end and while I find a lot of it interesting and I'm not saying it's wrong (because who knows where Mr. Gaiman is hopefully taking us) I also think it's fascinating that at the core of a lot of theories seems to be the assumption that Aziraphale acted out of character in that last scene when I find he acted extremely like himself.

1) The decision to go back to heaven

Aziraphale has - different from Crowley - never been comfortable acting independently from heaven. He did it when he found it necessary (and later more comfortable along with the deal) but there's always been a very clear level of discomfort around it. Crowley was circumspect with his more virtuous actions because he was worried about the possible consequences - Aziraphale has always felt guilty, because what if he was really working against Her?

So him jumping at a chance to work with heaven presumably under his directives, under directives that would understand that you can't just e.g. exchange children, a more compassionate heaven makes total sense to me.

And sure he has to give up the comforts he's grown accustomed to - the food, the books, the variety humanity provides - but he's not selfish. He wasn't going to give them up only to make Armageddon possible, but he certainly is ready to sacrifice them for the greater good. As he tells Crowley: I can make things better.

2) Why does he believe Metatron?

Angels Don't Lie.

This season has hammered this idea home and good - sure they can obfuscate, they can leave out details, they can forget, but they don't lie.

And yes of course he himself is proof that they certainly can and nothing will happen, but I do think that he believes himself to be an abberation in this case and that the only reason he hasn't been punished is because Crowley is the only one that knows. And he's still mostly really bad at lying so I think he truly believes he'd be able to spot it - in a way even Aziraphale's first lie was extremely see-through but since angels don't lie they also don't know how to spot them in themselves.

(Plus i also think that since Aziraphale is one of the lower tier angels he's convinced that also gave him a pass.)

3) Asking Crowley to come back to heaven with him, knowing that would hurt him

Now the second part of that assumption is the crux, the most central part to why his actions are very much in character for Aziraphale, because does he know?

I don't think he does and all his actions during their flashbacks and interactions proves that at the heart of it he fully 100% believes that if he could, Crowley would jump at getting to undo his Fall.

Because to him Crowley is good and Crowley is Kind - and he's only forced to pretend he isn't because as a Demon he can't be. And he just wants Crowley to live happily, to be happy and for Aziraphale that means not being Fallen.

I don't think Aziraphale wants to change Crowley or that he spent 6000 years trying to fix him or anything toxic like that. But we see how he feels about the mere idea of Falling, how he acts when he's sure it's his time to go after Job - he's devastated, he's crying, he's desperate.

And it's not like Crowley is helping - Hell is hell and he never sugar coats that. And while Aziraphale had over the millenia gotten a few stern talking-to's, he's never been punished the way he had to watch Crowley he punished.

And on top of it all, he remembers Crowley pre-Fall, how happy, how joyful, how full of wonder and how he didn't have to hide any of this then. How he could just be this way without having to hide it away.

So i don't think he realises that Crowley's decision to be alone so he doesn't have to play along with Hell's schemes actually applies to the whole system.

And the reason he doesn't realise this is because at the heart of it, he believes in heaven. Despite everything, despite the cruelties he's seen and been done to him, he believes that there is something like the Ultimate Good, the place God's plan is truly realised and he believes that that place is Heaven. It's not the system's fault, it's the angels who made the decisions and even those aren't evil (because Angels Are Good) they are misguided or clueless or uneducated etc. Aziraphale clings to this world view and he always has done so - he's even in s2 adamant that Heaven Is Good and Hell Is Evil.

So of course he would want to be in charge, to change Heaven the way he always felt it should be.

And of course he'd want Crowley there; to an extent Crowley is his standard of who Angels/ Heaven should act/be - kinder than anyone no matter the circumstances.

So I do think his offer was heartfelt, was supposed to be their triumph as a couple, to be able to be part of a whole but also together, where they belong and where they can make things better for the humans they're both so fond of.

Even his reaction to Crowley disagreeing to go fits perfectly in what we know of him - we get pretty much the exact same reaction when Crowley refuses to help with Gabriel: a plea, an earnestly expressed desire to do it with Crowley but just as earnest obstinacy to go at it alone if Crowley doesn't want to join him.

So all in all while that last scene breaks my heart and makes me want to shake him it fits so well into the Aziraphale we've come to know that I can't find myself being mad at it.

[elizabethrobertajones]

What are some of your favorite episode titles from the show?

Hiii :D

Just skimming through the list…

What Is And What Should Never Be, just because it’s so dang poignant of the entire concept and the pain Dean goes through in the episode… 

Lazarus Rising, because of the story in the title, and obviously you see the title card before you ever know it was angels, and so when you have it without the context it’s so painful, wondering if Dean really has a clean miraculous resurrection… and then by the end it seems so… except you KNOW the angels’ terms and conditions for it are coming down the road.

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Dean Winchester - titles in first person kill me and this one is so painful. Most of the episode deals with all the ghosts, but the philosophy as Dean debates with Sam and Bobby through the episode are the core discussions which tell us everything about Dean’s faith and what the angels are to him, and his problem with God which is such a wonderful part of his characterisation as he takes it into his own hands to fix what God won’t.

On The Head Of A Pin… Honestly this one just because Terry Pratchett got to me first and it makes me laugh to imagine Cas and Anna and Uriel prancing around together :P

In the satirical novel Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, the angel Aziraphale is said to be the only angel who could dance on the head of a pin, as he learned the gavotte in the 19th century. Also, in Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett, Granny Weatherwax says the answer is 16 if it’s an ordinary house pin.How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_on_the_head_of_a_pin%3F

The combination of Two And A Half Men, The Third Man, The Man Who Would Be King and The Man Who Knew Too Much in season six. It’s a total disaster of a season (I’m watching it right now, up to 6x11 right now :D) but there’s structural things that even if they’re later hacks to make it look like the story always matched up, helped sell it to me, a casual viewer, on my first watch through, and I loved that collection and the story contained behind it, using the joke title of the first to add Cas in as the “third man” in the next one, and then the parallel of Cas and Sam in the titles as they go through their struggles in the end of the season, both wrestling internally with themselves, metaphorically and literally. 

Live Free Or Twihard - okay, I’m a sucker for some of the joke titles, and I was on the internet as a teenage girl at the time Twilight was massively popular, and therefore had to maintain vicious intellectual snobbery about it… I moved past it, but I still absolutely crack up about the Kristen and Robert characters in the cold open of that episode. 

Appointment in Samarra - I already knew the story before I saw the episode, so I took one look at the title and had a huge nerdgasm about it, and as Death and Dean and Tessa interactions are all some of my favourite things in the show, I’ve always loved this to bits, and the way Death was always going to give Sam back his soul and was just testing Dean to show him a lesson, and the way he begins to take an unintentionally fatherly role to Dean because he’s so freakin desperate for a father figure and radiates it, every older dude in the universe ends up filling the role one way or another :P 

How To Win Friends and Influence Monsters… Look, I’d half expect that to be a real book on Dick Roman’s shelves as he goes around giving business lunch speeches to all the monsters and leviathan. It’s quintessential season 7 nonsense and I love this storyline and no one can stop me… it appeals to my mistrust of CEOs and the sense that capitalism wants to dumb us all down and consume us, and it appeals to my basic political compass as like the trash entertainment for people like me :P 

Plucky Pennywhistle’s Magical Menagerie: you just KNOW something horrible is behind that title, and my instinctive reaction to it, as someone who had to skip town whenever my uni home town had “clown week”… well, it’s my favourite episode and I am Sam. 

We Need To Talk About Kevin, and A Little Slice of Kevin… LEAVE MY GUY ALONE

Do You Believe In Miracles? NOT ANY MORE

Red Meat: Isn’t it just viscerally horrible in a way that somehow even in this show manages to promise that it’s more viscerally horrible than the normal viscerally horrible fare, that the show isn’t exactly stingy with handing out? Within like 10 seconds you realise that Sam is that slab of red meat and it gets worse from there :P

Don’t Call Me Shurley… literally fuck off Robbie Thompson. Anyway my parents made me watch Airplane like a hundred times as a kid so that one was a wonderful thing to see and obviously has all the promise of what it actually is - Metatron bullying Chuck into dropping the whiny hiding writer act and busting out some of the old testament God he still has buried in his personality, so there’s some deep meta about personalities and names in there, all hidden in a terrible pun re-punned as the title >.> 

Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets - it feels like a complete poem I could just hold in my hands in that form and not need to do anything else with. Most of Yockey’s titles do but I’m picking on this one as it’s especially haunting :D

Stuck In The Middle (With You): See also: the “fuck off” about “little slice of Kevin”

Lost And Found oh god, my smol nougat child being dressed from the lost and found. Cas being lost. Jack being found. New lil family together and losing the old family. HOLD ME. I can’t write more or I’ll cry :P

Wayward Sisters - not going to lie, I sobbed the first time I saw that title appear on the screen, just for seeing those words emblazoned on the show permanently. We can debate the wayward daughters thing and how good of a title it actually is, but it’s where we collectively ended up and it’s more about what it means than what it says. 

Various And Sundry Villains - watching Yockey vagueblog Buckleming through artful writing choices right down to the title was a petty delight of mine this season so I’m giving it its own paragraph. Like, look at all these people. It’s not even all the villains, Asmodeus popped to the shops and missed all the fun. What the fuck is going on this season. 

Let The Good Times Roll. This season was built on dramatic irony, and this episode was shaped perfectly around its own title and it was magnificent in terms of teasing us with this promise of the “good times” and then snatching them away. And, of course, in literary analysis terms, this season HAD to end on the “ironic” note which is the one between happy ending and tragedy, the one where there’s a clear and excellent victory or three and at the beginning of the episode a fascinating exploration of what good times and happy ending might be and assembling a new family and wider community around them, but still, the worst happens as a result, and that was Dean finally giving in to his so-called destiny and saying Yes to some version of Michael, but in order to complete the whole killing the devil nonsense he’s been tasked with forever. So of course, the dumb freeze frame ends on Michael having his good times roll.