Hoo boy it has been TOO DAMN LONG since I’ve had time to write, my fingers are ITCHING for it, please accept this piece of something I spat out in approximately twenty minutes while sick and between jobs.
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“Who were you, before?”
Crowley raises his head off the back of the chair, squinting in confusion through his askew sunglasses. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks. Aziraphale runs his hands nervously along the side of his glass, staring intently at an old burn mark on the table. His prim posture is slipping into a slouch, but he’s not as drunk as Crowley — not yet.
“Well, I don’t imagine Crawly was your name when you were an angel,” he says.
Crowley freezes, feeling instantly sober without even making an effort. He sits up, pushing his glasses back straight on his nose, staring at Aziraphale, who is still studiously avoiding his gaze.
“What the he— what on Earth do you want to know that for?” he demands. Aziraphale shrugs, and takes another swallow of wine.
“The humans have started this quaint tradition,” he says, “of sending each other cards at Christmas. Many of them use it to send well wishes to family and friends they haven’t talked to in a while. I wondered if I oughtn’t send a few to my colleagues up in— Well, I suppose they’d find it odd.”
“What’s that got to do with ME?”
Aziraphale takes another generous swallow of wine, and reaches to refill his cup. “Well— apart from check ins with Gabriel and Uriel and some of the others, I really haven’t kept up with what’s going on in Heaven since, well, since I was set to guard the Garden.”
“Can’t let ‘em see you without your sword, it was your signature item,” Crowley ribs him, trying to drag the conversation back into well-trod, safe territory. Aziraphale ignores the dig.
“It was only — I was thinking about the angels I knew before I came down to Earth, and I realized I didn’t know — who you’d been. Before.”
“Before I Fell,” Crowley finishes for him in a monotone. Aziraphale flinches slightly at the word, but he nods.
“Yes.”
“Why do you care now, all of a sudden? Why not ask me right in the Garden?” Aziraphale finally looks at him, if only because he’s scandalized.
“Well that would have been rather rude, wouldn’t it? I mean we were hardly—“ He huffs, turning back to his glass. “It was just that I wondered if I had known you.”
“You didn’t,” Crowley answers, too quickly. Aziraphale looks back at him again, quirking an eyebrow upwards.
“Are you sure? We mostly all knew each other, in the beginning.”
“Oh for Satan’s— why does it MATTER, angel? Whoever that was, they’re gone. I’m a demon. Do you think the name would even mean anything to you? Do you remember who Beelzebub was? Or Asmodeus? HASTUR? Our names were scrubbed from all the records. Except Lucifer, suppose the Almighty wanted to make an example of him.” Crowley slumped back into his chair, reaching for his own glass and tossing back whatever was left, before beckoning the bottle closer.
“But you still remember it.” He looks back to find Aziraphale watching him now, and frowns.
“I told you, whoever that angel was, he’s gone now. I’m just Crowley.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m a demon, Aziraphale. I’m literally a snake. THE snake. What else do you want?”
“Do you think maybe the angel that you were — do you think God… Do you think your fall was—“
“If you say ‘ineffable’—“
They fall silent, watching each other across the table. Crowley sighs, sits back up, leaning towards Aziraphale.
“Don’t ask those questions, angel,” he says softly. “Not those questions.” The drink suddenly feels heavy in his head. He stands up, forcing the alcohol from his system until he’s steady on his feet, and he turns and leaves Aziraphale sitting at the table, quiet and alone.
Do you ever think, on one of their many, many “Totally-Not-A-Date” lunch dates that Crowley (who only ever seems to eat around the angel) ever just like, orders apple pie for dessert just to be a little shit.
“Sure I can’t tempt you?” he says, proffering the bowl forward where a slice of hot apple caramel pie is slowly melting the vanilla ice scream scoop on the side, “it really is quite good.”
And Aziraphale, declines politely, sipping on his after dinner coffee like a gentleman while the demon shrugs and demolishes the whole thing in under a minute flat. “Suit yourself.”
Or one one other memorable occasion:
“Toffee apple?” the demon asks, the fun fair carnival lights flickering and swirling around them as the sound of children laughing intermingles with the bright clanking jangling melody of the carousel spinning in front of them to a tune that sounds suspiciously familiar.
“What? Oh, no…thank you,” Aziraphale declines, noticing that Crowley only procured the one anyway. “We really should get down to business…”
“Suit yourself,” he says, crunching into it and eating the whole thing, core and all.
He doesn’t even particularly like apples, he just likes the way the angel flusters whenever he does it. Still, these humans were onto something when they took the fruit of all knowledge and dipped it in molten sugar and baked it into pies, like some sort of clever metaphor for making the truth easier to swallow. Bloody ingenious humans, in their own round about way.
Eventually, at some point, the angel concedes and allows himself to be talked into a spoonful of apple pie somewhere down the centuries. It really is quite scrumptious, but it’s nowhere near as delicious as the look on Crowley’s face when he says yes.
I ALMOST LOST MY MIND. someone make this a fanfic because if you don’t I mcfreaking will on God I will if you would allow me!
Or yah know… you could write it 😉
I’ve got like, 1000 words tapped out in Ao3 right now lmao
When director Douglas Mackinnon asked Peter Anderson and his studio to design the opening titles for Good Omens, the Amazon Prime TV series based on the book by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, he had only one major stipulation.
“He said,” recounts Anderson, “‘I want you to promise me that you send us emails that start with, ‘This might sound absolutely mad, but our idea is dot dot dot’. That set the tone for the creative process, which was wonderful.”
It’s fair to say the London-based Peter Anderson Studio came through with flying colors on that brief, Anderson himself describing Good Omens’ animated titles as “a totally bonkers mishmash of all animation styles in a way where they feel as if they belong together.”
The titles certainly feel like something inspired, at least in part, by Terry Jones’ famous animated cut-out vignettes in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The twist is that Good Omens’ opener employs illustration, physical props, character animation, 3D and even live-action footage to foretell the show’s story about the clash of Heaven and Hell and the coming apocalypse.
“Our titles really mimic the drama,” says Anderson, “because in the show, for instance, you’ve got a classic English countryside and then suddenly a spacecraft that’s been drawn by a child and re-made in 3D comes flying down and aliens come out that have duck heads. We had to work in that same totally bonkers spirit.”
In the opening titles, a myriad characters from Good Omens are in procession — often via escalators up (and down) — to the end of the world. From concepts and storyboards, Peter Anderson Studio launched into a major exploratory process of generating imagery that directly referenced the show’s cast of people and creatures. Ultimately, all the characters seen in the titles actually began as “real,” live-action people.
“It’s me as many characters,” says Anderson. “And then there are different members of our studio wearing the costumes from the actual show, sometimes filmed on a green screen walking on a travelator. Then what we did is we cut them out and we made real people look like strange animations by tracking two-dimensional heads onto them.”
This is where things become even more surreal. Each one of the two-dimensional heads, reveals Anderson, are actually “in-disguise” representations of the show’s two lead actors, Michael Sheen and David Tennant, who play the angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley, respectively.
“The reason we did that,” states Anderson, “is that Neil said that he felt there was good and bad in everybody, and the angels and the demons represented the good and bad that exists within the world. So we’d take Michael and David’s faces and adapt them by, say, adding a mohawk or sunglasses, for example.”
That’s not the only detail to look out for in Good Omens’ opening titles, which warrant multiple viewings to catch several Easter eggs. Anderson says look out for a cactus wilting as a demon walks by, or even one moment where a someone realizes they are on a downward escalator path to Hell, only to start running up the people-mover the wrong way.
“Whether you interpret the titles as the characters choosing their sides to go to war, or as something where we all approach the end of the world and we’re going to go one way or the other, it’s up to you,” concludes Anderson. “I hope there are lots of double meanings in the storytelling.”
do you ever think about aziraphale’s books, why he chose to surround himself with, of all that earth had to offer, books.
books are collections of knowledge and imagination; they are literally humanity distilled into stories. there is nothing, in my opinion, more profoundly, fundamentally human than a book. and aziraphale’s home is filled with them, filled with human stories that he doesn’t want anyone to buy take from him. he lives his entire life surrounded by books; he is an angel and can create the most lovely, safe space imaginable, and he chooses to stuff it floor-to-ceiling with books.
I mean, those two are a black hole of show praise. Fair enough. They are fucking fantastic characters and Sheen and Tennant nailed it completely. But these are some moments/things I loved that are not our fave Angel and Demon dream team, because there was so much brilliant stuff in this show.
-That hilarious camera pan-down to the recently-puppified Dog the Hellhound. I mean, that whole sequence was funny, but this shot in particular emphasized the humor. Great directing.
-Dog’s glowing eyes (on his adorably Good Boi face) when he tries to threaten the cat. So cute.
-Gabriel’s “just buying pornography!” ruse to avoid drawing attention to himself but totally just weirding out the customers. Just so hilariously out of touch with life on earth.
-Hastur just shrieking his head off for a solid minute after the holy water.
-Miranda Richardson acting as two different people at once. She was seamless. When she was pantomiming for Aziraphale’s lines, I totally bought it. How can an actor be that good?
-That long shot of War with a shit-eating grin after she receives the sword and chaos is just letting lose behind her. Cinema.
-The confused Tibetans retreating back into their tunnel after running Dick Turpin off the road. I just thought it was a really fun and cute shot.
-”Chow. It’s Italian. Means ‘food.’”
-I still get such a kick out of Agnes turning herself into a human bomb. The sequence was so well done in the show.
I just love thinking about the scene where Crowley and Aziraphale hit Anathema from Anathema’s point of view. A bickering gay couple (one who’s wearing sunglasses at night) hits her and her bicycle with a car from the 1920s in the middle of the night. The bicycle and her are perfectly fine. The gay couple offer to drive her home, Bicycle Race by Queen is playing. One second her bike has new gears, the next it doesn’t. They drop her off. One calls the bike a “velocipede.” She was so confused by it all she forgot her super special book, poor thing.
