GO meta Signal Boost: Something that’s been very interesting to me, in Good Omens...

[cimorene]

c-is-for-circinate posted: Something that’s been very interesting to me...

There’s a narrative fandom’s been telling that, at its core, is centered around the idea that Crowley is good, and loves and cares and is nice, and always has been.  Heaven and its rigid ideas of Right and Wrong is itself the bad thing.  Crowley is too good for Heaven, and was punished for it, but under all the angst and pain and feelings of hurt and betrayal, he’s the best of all of them after all.

That’s a compelling story.  There’s a reason we keep telling it.  The conflict between kindness and Moral Authority, the idea that maybe the people in charge are the ones who’re wrong and the people they’ve rejected are both victim and hero all at once–yeah.  There’s a lot there to connect with, and I wouldn’t want to take it away from anyone.  But the compelling story I want, for me, is different.

I look at Crowley and I want a story about someone who absolutely has the capacity for cruelty and disseminating evil into the world.  Somebody who’s actually really skilled at it, even if all he does is create opportunities, and humans themselves just keep living down to and even surpassing his expectations.  Somebody who enjoys it, even.  Maybe he was unfairly labeled and tossed out of heaven to begin with, but he’s embraced what he was given.  He’s thrived.  He is, legitimately, a bad person.

And he tries to save the world anyway.

This touches on something I was just discussing with perhael the other day and vaguely planning to write up into a post in the near future. It's more overlapping than covering the point I wanted to make, and my perspective isn't entirely aligned with this one, but it's a great post about a fascinatingly obtrusive issue in the emerging Good Omens Renaissance fanon that I've devoted a fair amount of thought to.

Comments

[cimorene]

'perhaps', lol.

I agree that the changed emphasis in those scenes provides a different overtone. I think the two sets of emphasis aren't incompatible - like you can interpret them as more or less about the same events, theorizing that his motivation is a mixture of concern for humanity and more personal concern for his relationship with Aziraphale in both cases - but that arises more from looking at them side-by-side than from just looking at one or the other.

Although overall, outside of that scene, the importance of free will and the fact that being good is a choice in general are thematically central.

[daegaer]

;-)

Definitely free will and doing good as a choice is the important thing there, for both of them. Aziraphale has to choose action as well, and it's pretty clear that he's a fairly lazy angel, as well as idolatrous by official standards (he worships books, after all).

A really big difference, for Crowley at least, is what exactly he curses - in the show it's the Great Plan at the bandstand scene, but in the book it's everything:

"Wet and steaming, face ash-blackened, as far from cool as it was possible for him to be, on all fours in the blazing bookshop, Crowley cursed Aziraphale, and the ineffable plan, and Above and Below."

He's renounced Satan and all his works - and everyone else and their works too. He claims more and more free actions after this, even if he might not recognise the freedom until the end. (He chooses first to desert, then changes his mind to try to get to Tadfield, to drive madly across London, under the Thames, etc, decides effectively to destroy the Bentley even before reaching the M25 and so on).

Of course, he also hates anyone pointing out when he has chosen to do something good or good(ish) :-)