Crossover Good Omens And The Crow

The Night That Changed an Angel (or, why does Aziraphale still wear that shabby vest?)

Mini-Meta Musing (#4)

I've been brooding for a long time about, of all things, Aziraphale's worn velvet vest and the long cream jacket he's kept in "tip top condition for over 180 years now." I love the sweet familiarity, but this is the same angel who popped across the Channel and almost lost his fluffy-topped head in 1793 for dressing like an aristocrat.

"I have standards!"

He's the height of elegance, extravagance even. A dandy. We've seen the same at the Globe Theater 1601, Edinburgh 1827, and even as a Knight of the Round Table in 527 Essex, where he's wearing a glorious pelt across his shoulders! However, sometime after Edinburgh 1827, Aziraphale's stylish extravagance ends. He adopts the dress of distinguished but modest gentility. No seamstresses strain their eyes for days hand stitching ruffles and trims for him any longer. When we next see him in 1862, his clothing is refined, simple, and serviceable. It becomes his uniform, with only minor replacements. Why? What happened to change him?

Edinburgh 1827 happened. And his encounter with tragedy ran over his sensibilities like a locomotive.

Aziraphale had, we were told, saved his earnings over time and had bought land, invested wisely, and became quite well off. He used real money, not miracles, to build the bookshop, paying the builders well and taking care of bills honestly. He built himself up to a more than comfortable lifestyle, from nearly nothing. And his clothes are real, not miracled from nothingness like Crowley's. (source: original showrunner)

Aziraphale's wealth allows him to afford luxurious tailoring and fancy shoes and ruffles and trims. He'll certainly pay the cobblers and tailors and seamstresses well for their labors. It will be a substantial expense for the era. (The linked post gives a wonderful perspective on 1793 lifestyles and costs.)

https://agoodflyting.tumblr.com/post/753227014283083776/why-aziraphales-white-satin-pumps-are-ridiculous

The angel's Edinburgh multilayered and trimmed top coat, soft leather gloves, matching scarf, jacquard vest, silk cravat, etc., look entirely out of place in the back alleys where the poor huddle. Walking the clean, gas-lit avenues with Crowley and Elspeth, Aziraphale is oblivious to the privilege he has in this world.

As he strolls along in philosophical banter with Crowley about the "blessing" of poverty, the angel spouts trite pontifications created by the rich to justify poverty. He genuinely believes Elspeth has more opportunities for goodness.  After all, look at Wee Morag.  He respects her goodness tremendously.  It proves to him his “rightness.”  And so he sabotages Elspeth’s attempt to sell the body she dug up in her attempt to support Wee Morag.  Dalrymple gets no body, Elspeth gets no money, and Aziraphale believes he’s saving her soul.

It’s a poignant moment, though, when Aziraphale cradles the jar containing a tumor from a seven year old child who died because there wasn’t enough medical knowledge to save him.  Turning point number one.  It becomes Real, not a philosophical debate.  Selling stolen bodies puts good in the world.  He’s all for it now, and goes back to encourage Elspeth.  Good heavens, he’s even willing to help this time!

But, as we know, it all goes wrong.  Wee Morag is shot by a grave gun, and dies of her injuries.  Elspeth steals laudanum, and plans suicide.  Crowley drinks the laudanum, saves her in a compassionate Scottish frenzy, and is stolen away by hell because of his kindness.   And it is All. Aziriphale’s. Fault.

Turning point number two.  Another watershed moment where Aziraphale’s world changes again.

One of Crowley’s last earthly acts, before getting plunged into hell, is to have Aziraphale give Elspeth all of his pocket money.  What is pocket money to the angel is a fortune to her, one that can set her up for a better life.  I have no doubt that in the aftermath of the traumas of that night, missing and worrying about Crowley, Aziraphale thinks about all of this.  He considers all of the money he casually spends on fine clothing and expensive tailoring.  He wonders how many lives could change if that money was better spent on helping to relieve the poverty that surrounds him.  He wants to help, and to try to make amends for the harm he caused.  What would Crowley do, if he were free to be kind? And so Aziraphale changes.

I’d love to know the story of how it all played out.  Did he sell his fine clothing and donate the proceeds?  Did he become involved in charitable foundations?  Did he buy the clothing of a simple gentleman and decide to preserve it, however worn it became, as a reminder to himself of his past blindness and vanity?  We see in Season 1 how important it is to him to preserve that coat. (Sure, it's also a fantastic opportunity to flirt and flutter those angelic eyelashes... But, nonetheless!)

By Season 2, the angel who took too long justifying a life-saving miracle for Wee Morag, and who hesitated to give Elspeth his 90 Guineas, willingly and freely gave Maggie forgiveness for thousands of pounds of debt. I'd love to know what else he's done over the last 180+ years!

Whatever happened, it began that night in a graveyard.

Aziraphale’s phone rings.  He answers, expecting it to be Crowley.  But to his surprise, it’s a demon he’s never met.

“I’m Crowley’s replacement,” the demon says.  “He’s not done anything impressive lately, and Downstairs doesn’t like how ineffective he is at keeping you in line.  So now he’s shuffling paperwork and scooping up hellhound shit while I do his job for him.”

“Ah… I see,”  Aziraphale says icily.  “Well, I most assuredly do not look forward to working with you.”

The demon laughs.  “Feeling’s mutual.”

Twenty-four hours later, the demon is very surprised to find himself discorporated in his sleep.  He can’t explain what happened, he has absolutely no idea.

“Don’t let it happen again,” Beelzebub says, annoyed, and sends the demon back up.

After a mere three days, the demon ends up discorporated again.

A new replacement is sent up.  This one lasts for a week and a day.

A third replacement is sent up.  This one lasts for exactly four hours.

Three demons are sent up next time.  Two manage to stay alive for at least five months.  In that time, they botch four very important temptations, and the citizens of London inexplicably find their daily lives much improved in thousands of little ways.  Traffic and pollution are nonexistent, injury and illness are miraculously avoided.  Church attendance is up five hundred percent, and every politician and CEO is struck by the urge to donate as much money as possible to charity.  There’s a general feeling of contentedness and goodwill in the air that wasn’t there before.  It feels downright heavenly.

Suddenly, Beelzebub is having a very hard time finding anyone to take Crowley’s post.  Bribes and threats make no difference.  The rumors have spread and only grown more disturbing in the telling.  Not one demon is willing to go up there and face the cold, calculated, merciless wrath of the angel known as Aziraphale.

Crowley absolutely loses it when someone gets around to telling him.  “Y’know, I could’ve warned you,” he says gleefully.  “Been working with him for thousands of years.  I know exactly how much of a bastard he can be.”

After running the numbers and seeing how many souls they’ve lost to Heaven in the past year, Beelzebub gives up and concludes that trying to replace Crowley is a massive waste of resources Hell can’t afford.

After one year, Aziraphale receives another phone call.  He answers, with bated breath, and nearly shouts for joy when he hears a familiar voice.

“Hi, angel.  Lunch on me?”

Hello, mods! I'm not looking for recommendations, just asking a question if you have the time to answer it: how do you keep track of all the fics you've read? There is a truly impressive and garguntuan amount of recs on this blog, and they are all tailored to each individual's ask. What is your process of recording and retrieving the information about each fic?---How do you know which fics to note down, and what do you note down about them? -Thank you for reading

Hi! I posted here about how i organise my extensive AO3 bookmarks to help me find and filter for fics I have already read.

Of course, not all the fics recommended on the blog are fics the mods will have personally read. When searching for fics outside of my usual reading range or things I just hadn't thought to search for the process is a bit different.

It always starts with tags. You can throw in a bunch of tags to filter on, but the more tags the fewer results. So sometimes I use only one or two tags, or swap around the tags I'm looking for. Excluding tags, too, if I'm looking for one thing and not another.

Depending on what's being requested it is often more useful to use the "search within results" function towards the bottom of the filter options. If it's something without a specific tag, or to search more broadly and not limit the search to the tags.

If the request is a very specific one or centred on a small detailed rather than a broader concept, it will often involve opening a fic and either giving it a skim read or ctrl+F to search the entire work for key words to discover if it includes the kind of scene I'm looking for.

Whether a fic is "good" or not is subjective, so I won't rule anything out if, for example, I personally don't like it. If I find an abundance of fics I will try to judge which ones fit the request more or which ones appeal to me the most--which ones I would want to read. (This is how my "to read" bookmarks are continuously growing and feels like a super perk of the job, honestly.)

And this is why it can sometimes take quite a long f*cking time to compile a list of fics for an ask. But I enjoy it, which is why I'm still doing it. I've re-watched series two about seven times now, just having it playing in the background while I'm searching for fics.

I've been so efficient recently, in fact, that the queue is looking very healthy. So we're going to up the number of posts published a day to two. There's still over 400 asks in the inbox, though, so it's still a wait of months for any asks to be published!

- Mod D

Crowley’s Roman Look is Very Strange

I didn’t. I didn’t want to be this person. But Aziraphale is sitting RIGHT THERE looking like A TOTALLY RESPECTABLE Roman citizen circa 40 AD. Maybe the hair might be unusual, but the Romans LOVED blonde hair. They thought it was cool and foreign and exotic in sort of a sexy way.

But Crowley is so historically confused. And I think the production design is too good and Neil Gaiman is too on top of his game for this to be accidental. It must mean something. 

I - HAIR

What is on your head Crowley. Are you the emperor? Are you a victorious general currently participating in a victory parade? 

Sure, you sometimes see laurel wreathes in portraits. But FUNERAL portraits.

That crown is a symbolic thing, to celebrate your victories in life. It’s not STREET WEAR. 

And okay. It’s 40-41 AD. Caligula is emperor. Military chic is in. If you’re a guy, you’re wearing your hair short and un-styled (LIKE AZIRAPHALE.) Those dramatic little spit curls wouldn’t show up until at least Nero. 

But actually, pulling back for a second - are you appreciating the absurdity that is this hairstyle? Because it took me a second to notice that only the FRONT HALF is curled.

Which is a Roman hairstyle. But it’s a Roman LADY hairstyle. 

(It tends to get called ‘Flavian Hair’ because the Flavian era ladies of the 70s-90s got pretty extreme about it, but you still had less… dramatic versions in the 40s.)

That’s you, Crowley. That’s your style reference. Honestly, if you had just kept your hair long everybody would have thought you were a cool barbarian chieftain or something. 

II - CLOTHES

The black is fine. It’s eccentric, but fine. Romans wore black. Wearing black was Cato the Younger’s *thing.* It gets associated with mourning and/or protest, but it would have been really visually confusing to have Crowley wear some other color. This gets a pass.

Nope, my question is about his articles of clothing. There’s a charcoal grey garment that seems to be a toga + undershirt. It’s looped over Crowley’s arm, which is a classic toga give away. 

That part’s fine. But over the top, he’s wearing a true black… short cape? Shawl? it’s really hard to tell, because whatever it is, he is NOT wearing it correctly (is it folded in half?) Also, that irregular red zigzag pattern is very strange and I do not recognize it from anywhere. Seriously, I can’t even decide on a continent for this garment.

III - JEWELRY

Emperor Nero usually gets credit for inventing the first sunglasses, after he started watching gladiators fight though a green gemstone. He won’t be emperor for about ten years. But hey, he probably got the idea from somewhere. And dark glasses are just a really sensible way to hide your snakey eyes. This is also the first time we see Crowley put up some proper emotional barriers, so it’s a good place for the glasses to be introduced. (@theladyzephyr has a wonderful meta that goes into a lot more detail here.) 

So the sunglasses are good. BUT THAT BROOCH.

Okay. This is Aziraphale wearing a fibula plate brooch

It’s a really Roman style, and a really Roman shape (a “pelta”)

I’ve never seen one that looks like angel wings, but a Roman citizen is going to look at that and see a soppily patriotic Imperial Eagle. How nice that this lovely man from Germania/Greece has made some money and become such an exemplary citizen!

But Crowley is wearing a penannular (pin-and-ring) brooch

That’s not roman. That’s a style from the British Isles (Irish, Pictish, Scottish, Welsh.) It says barbarian, boonies, outskirts of the civilized world. 

And nobody @ me with pictures of pin-and-ring brooches from Rome. Those are small, cheap, and undecorated. They’re the cultural equivalent of safety pins. This is patterned like a snake, and it’s the size of Crowley’s palm. 

AND THAT’S ANOTHER THING. They didn’t do snake-themed jewelry in the British isles. Snakes didn’t have the best cultural associations there, and there weren’t too many of them there to begin with. This isn’t something Crowley picked up because “hey, a snake, cool,” and then got attached too. This must have been commissioned special. 

But you know who LOVED snake jewelry? 

ROMANS. 

Romans associated snakes with healing and rebirth - clinics sometimes had lil snakes crawling around on the ground to give the place good vibes. 

You cannot tell me that Crowley could have existed in Rome for any length of time and not picked up some of this jewelry. Which leads me to my conclusion:

IV - CROWLEY IS EXTREMELY NEW IN TOWN

The unfashionable pin and hair? The clothing draped the wrong way? The cultural colorblindness of wearing a laurel crown when you’re not supposed to? Crowley looks like a tacky tourist because he is one. He’s not staying here long, he “just nipped in for a quick temptation.”

He’s in a bad mod because he’s had an awful day, everyone keeps looking at him funny, the temptation was a complete bust, he has culture shock, and now he’s just trying to get a drink. But they don’t have any PROPER drinks like ALE or MEAD here, so he just orders “whatever’s drinkable.” He’s even not sure what they drink in Rome. 

But then Aziraphale shows up and invites him to lunch some place fashionable. So everything’s going to be okay.

So in case anyone wonder what I got up to in December and January, BEHOLD.

As a wee birthday surprise for @ashfae​, I built Aziraphale’s bookshop as a book nook :) It also lights up:

It is entirely possible I got carried away, but that’s half the fun :D I’ll pop a few of the progress pictures and what i used below, so I don’t entirely flood your timelines, so you can see the sticky mess I made :)

Afficher davantage

My view on God mode Aziraphale in “Offerings” a strange AU with mer-people

You can find it here : https://archiveofourown.org/works/24356293/chapters/58734520 Special note for the beautiful artworks as a cover of each chapter (it’s what make me want to draw this^^) PLEASE READ THE TAGS before reading

Supreme Archangel Aziraphale

For Ditys by @angellilou-art

The Color War

It's been so long since I posted a fic y'all probably thought I forgot how to. And maybe there's a part of me that did. But here's one that I have just posted!!! Read it on Ao3!!!

The Color War

“I still don’t understand why you’ve insisted we both wear white for this,” Aziraphale said. He looked in the mirror and scowled. It reminded him a lot of Heaven, and that was something he would be more than happy to put behind him.

Crowley came up behind him and wrapped his arms around Aziraphale. He nuzzled into the angel’s neck and sighed. “I have a surprise, I told ya,” He murmured right back.

Aziraphale does not...

Aziraphale does not need to learn and see how awful Heaven is

Gif by @crowlixcx

Does not need to suffer to 'deserve' Crowley

He suffered and cried enough (and so did Crowley)

He does not need to explain to Crowley why he spent millennia 'pretending' they are not friends

Crowley knows why.

Gif by @capinejghafa

Aziraphale does not need to apologise for how he'd turned Crowley away again and again

Crowley knows they can't really run away. Not for long. Not when the whole Universe is set to be destroyed when the Earth is done with. Not when they are always watched.

Aziraphale does not need to Fall to understand Crowley or be worthy to be with him or to understand anything better

Crowley loves him as the angel he is. And Aziraphale loves Crowley exactly as he is. A demon. A demon with a soft heart.

Crowley doesn't want Aziraphale to change. And Aziraphale doesn't want Crowley to change either.

BONUS

Crowley is IMO not self-destructing because Aziraphale left. I think he understands why he did. And I think he will help him willingly. Because Crowley loves Earth too.

It's not like S1 when the world was about to end and Aziraphale was gone.

Aziraphale is gone because the world is about to end. And that was the case in S1 too, Crowley just didn't know it. He does now. He helped when he found out then, and he will again.

Here is the scanned and cleaned version. It was made to be coloured, so go for it, post your art and please tag me ^^