See, the thing about Crowley is that he’s clever. He’s curious. He asks questions; he wants to know. He’s the only demon with imagination. He was a maker, a builder of stars before he was kicked out of Heaven, and whether he was a master architect or a celestial construction worker doesn’t really matter; he got to put nebulae together and thought it was pretty cool.
If you take a clever, inquisitive, imaginative creature of any species and you deprive it of constructive outlets for its mental energies, eventually, it will become destructive. Or self-destructive. Or both.
And so you get demon Crowley who constructs elaborate plans to take down the London mobile phone network instead of, y’know, just miracling it broken; who goes out and physically moves road markers in his dedication to influencing major infrastructure projects to infernal designs; who plans Ocean’s Eleven-level capers to get holy water (and yes I think that one is at least subconsciously about getting Aziraphale’s attention but it’s not only that); who comes up with a multi-year-long con to influence the child he thinks is the Antichrist; who stages elaborate rescues of his favorite angel; who figures out a way to trick Hastur on the fly and clearly loves it. And I think he genuinely does relish things like the M25 project, because without him making up games and puzzles and problems to solve for himself, life as a demon is incredibly fucking boring. Hell doesn’t really seem like a place where creativity and initiative is encouraged.
I think Crowley constructing these sort of Rube Goldberg sin-generating machines is part of how he deals with being a demon. When push comes to shove, he doesn’t have the stomach for the kind of gleefully sadistic hands-on violence we see some of the other demons display, and he doesn’t have the intellectual disposition for compromising humans’ free will. But it’s not like he can’t be deliberately destructive. Yes, the paintballers aren’t killing each other, but that’s not a consequence-free scenario. But I don’t think Crowley can really let himself think too deeply about that, because at the end of the day, he has to survive as a demon. So he takes what he is doing and he hides it from himself in the form of a game or a puzzle or an experiment, and suddenly it becomes palatable and intellectually engaging and maybe even fun. It’s both a distancing mechanism (hey, I just gave those paintballers the guns; they were the ones who decided to pull the trigger) and a way to keep himself from metaphorically or literally pulling his own feathers out from boredom.
(I think this ties into his ideas about violence, too. The violence we see him most disturbed by–the Flood, the crucifixion, and in the book, the Spanish Inquisition–it’s all violence of the strong against the weak. And someone strong hurting someone too weak to fight back isn’t just cruel; it’s unimaginative. At least give both parties a fighting chance. Now we’ve got something interesting going on.)
Basically what I’m saying is that Crowley is equal parts a nuclear physicist doing cutting-edge research and trying to forget he’s building an atomic bomb, and that parrot who pecked all the keys off someone’s laptop cause he was left unsupervised and under-stimulated. Parsing out how fundamentally “good” or “bad” he is is completely irrelevant, because neither his creative behavior in Heaven or his destructive behavior in Hell are innate. Both are situational.
Okay, but now I’m thinking about what Crowley does after the whole armageddon’t thing is over, and he doesn’t have Heaven’s starmaking or Hell’s mischief to act as a creative outlet.
And sure, he could go out and do all the stuff he was doing before but without backing from Hell, but it wouldn’t be the same. Crowley doesn’t just like creating, he likes getting recognition and praise for the stuff he creates. Look how pleased with himself he is when he’s showing off the M25— he wants that “wahoo!” from his superiors, he probably really likes getting commendations for stuff he’s actually done. Plus there’s the fact that doing bad things because Hell tells you to is one thing— you’re just a guy stuck doing an unpopular job— but doing them just because you want to? That’s no better than Hastur, that is, that’s mean.
He might still have fun creating small-scale inconveniences (he absolutely still glues coins to the pavement outside the shop. Aziraphale tuts and looks disapproving and pretends not to be pleased when the trick ends up distracting potential customers from walking into the shop), but without external approval, I doubt he’d do anything more elaborate.
Aziraphale is different. He likes helping people, but it’s something he wants to do, not something he needs to do. If the world suddenly rearranged itself so that he wasn’t needed anymore, then I’m sure he’d be able to go back to his books and his restaurants and his regency snuffboxes with some relief.
I can certainly see him missing Heaven (not the Heaven he experienced and the way the way they treated him, but the idea of Heaven that he made himself believe in for so long, and the feeling that he had a Purpose and was being a Good Angel) but not the job itself.
Crowley, on the other hand, is going to need something to do.
Every wall in the South Downs cottage, and most of the ceilings, has a mural because Aziraphale thought that it would be nice and, more importantly, it was a long-term project to keep Crowley occupied for a few months.
Their cupboards are full of plates and cups made with varying levels of skill, from the year he took up pottery.
He tries knitting, sketching, embroidery, whittling, sculpting… I dunno, I just like the idea of Crowley needing to find a new creative outlet, but at the same time being kind of overwhelmed by having freedom for the first time in his existence, and just wanting to try absolutely everything.
Have I reblogged this addition? Because I love it.
My headcanon is that they both already have a lot of random skills they’ve picked up over the years, because they’ve had to blend in with humans, and because not all their time on Earth is occupied with working, eating and drinking, and after 6,000 years you need a hobby or two.
I think Crowley already knows a lot of fiber crafts from time spent as a woman-shaped creature. He’ll say that it’s because idle kvetching while you’re weaving or spinning flax or whatever is a good time to introduce temptations, but he likes having something to do with his hands. But it’s not like he could keep any of the stuff he made while he was under Hell’s employ; a hand-kitted afghan isn’t a very demonic look.
But you’d better believe that cottage has 6,000 years of human textile styles in it.
I’m just adding that one of the few scenes I liked from 1992 Screenplay Omens was this scene, which ties in perfectly with @fuckyeahisawthat and @cheeseanonioncrisps commentary:
POLLY Hello, Mister Crowley. Professor Aziraphale? I’m having some trouble with the etruscan pot shards.
AZIRAPHALE Well, let me see them.
He walks over. Looks into the box. It’s full of pottery SHARDS.
AZIRAPHALE Oh, yes. They’re genuine, all right. Let’s see. Probably a grain storage pot.
CROWLEY looks into the box. He takes the SHARDS, and as he talks he BUILDS the pot up out of shards, almost absent-mindedly, fitting the bits together like a jigsaw puzzle.
CROWLEY Thrown by Big Joe the potter the morning after he discovered his wife had run off with a goat-herd. You can see his mark on the side, here. Also a brief and obscene cuneiform inscription about goats.
JLEY (sic) TOSSES POLLY the completed pot, and LEAVES.
POLLY That’s… remarkable. Is Mister Crowley an expert in etruscan pottery?
AZIRAPHALE No. He owns a nightclub.
That last line killed me 😂😂😂