SarahTheCoat

An illustration I made for baby’s first fanfic, which you can read on the A-O-3 right here.

Oh my god, he found a kitten

Oh gosh, I love the unfocused kitten eyes, Crowley’s laugh lines, the snek squat, the gentle way he’s picking it up….so so good!

If you want more Good Omens + Kittens, @triffidsandcuckoos wrote a truly delightful and wonderfully clever fic around the concept: Plaid, Feliform, Doom, Nebula

My work for Amazon Prime

gUYS I'M SCREAMING THERE IS A COUPLE WHERE LATER AZIRAPHALE AND CROWLEY TAKE THE BUS

It seems like it’s not the bench they’re sitting on later, though. It’s located in a different place. But it certainly looks like they miracled themselves an identical one right next to it!

Number 2 is the monument and 3 is the bench where the couple from your screenshot is sitting.

There’s no similar bench next to the monument on the right -- there’s an old one instead, with no armrests (it’s right behind Anathema). In the scene from ep6 this old bench disappears though.

Clearly, when Adam fixed everything he took the opportunity to upgrade the old bench.

I have wanted to talk (rant) about a miracle in Good Omens that, I feel, does not get enough exposure (such as in the meta posts that discuss miracles, like this one, but also in general discussions of Good Omens awesomeness). The miracle of Aziraphale&Madame Tracy getting to Tadfield airbase with Shadwell.

We get to see just the start of this miraculous flight in the TV show.

(GIF source - thank you, @fuckyeahgoodomens​)

The book describes this scene in glorious detail - first 

Putputputputput and a blue nimbus began to outline the scooter and its occupants with a gentle sort of a glow, like an afterimage, all around them.

- as we see in the show. And then:

I would like to draw attention to the “probably wasn’t going at more than two hundred miles an hour” bit. The top speed I can find Crowley going is 120 mph (in London, after the bookshop fire). While Aziraphale may be wary of Crowley’s driving, let it be remembered that the Angel is not afraid to go fast (well, at least in a physical sense. Okay, that still sounds wrong. In a literal sense. I’m not talking about 1967 here!)

To be fair, Aziraphale did slow down some over time. Per script book, he crosses the M25 at a mere 100 mph. And how saddened I am that we do not get to witness that crossing in the show!!! Even though it is described in the script briefly, the book offers a full, colorful description:

WHAT AN IMAGE!

But apart from the sheer aesthetic of it, I would like to discuss the more functional/mechanical aspects.

Crowley drives the Bentley to M25 as fast as the terrain allows, including in the book crossing the River Thames, apparently, across its bottom, which is special in its own right, and blasts across M25. Through an astounding and much celebrated feat of imagination and sheer willpower, with white knuckles, clenched teeth and glowing eyes (something-something “biospatial feedback?” per the book? always been curious about that little detail) he keeps himself and his most immediate belongings from combustion - in the book it is noted that he moves Agnes Nutter’s book to “the safety of his lap”. Then and for the following 30 miles Crowley keeps the Bentley together, but it becomes a fireball, a mess of burnt metal with no paint left and completely melted tires. It is damaged beyond repair, and memorably explodes in the show. 

And by all accounts, Crowley is exhausted by this process. In the book he “wasn’t feeling very well” by the end of the journey. In the original TV script he falls down upon exiting the remnants of the Bentley.

Let’s compare this to Aziraphale’s miracle.

Aziraphale lifts a scooter with two corporations 40 feet into the air, and flies it 40 miles to the Tadfield airbase at speeds of 100-200 miles per hour. Even more impressively, he generates a sort of force-field bubble, which is unharmed by the flames of M25 other than fading at the edges and completely protects the scooter, its passengers and their belongings (the Thundergun) from harm.

It is explicitly stated both the in the book and the TV show script that the impact of M25 is not limited to the ground, and flying over it is no easier than crossing at the ground level.  

The M25 is so terrible that even a Duke of Hell cannot protect himself from it. In fact, Crowley seems to believe there is no way for a human to get across.

Well, I guess someone forgot to inform Aziraphale of this. While Crowley applies all his powers to keep from catching fire and has to remember not to breathe, the protection Aziraphale affords his human companions is so absolute that Madame Tracy thoroughly enjoys the flight (while Shadwell is simply terrified, but never mentions other discomfort).

And apparently Aziraphale does this without visibly breaking a sweat? The landing is not described, but there are no mentions of “stumbling away from the scooter”. In fact, the whole journey is never mentioned again, like it’s no big deal. (How cool is that?!)

Crowley has an amazing imagination, and his ability to stop time is highly impressive. But as far as transporting goods and people across occult obstacles - I think Aziraphale takes the cake.

Well, let’s bear in mind that Aziraphale had two things going for him that Crowley didn’t–namely, Shadwell and Madame Tracy. Shadwell might not have much imagination, but Madame Tracy certainly did, and all three of them were firmly convinced of the righteousness of their cause, which I imagine helped. Whereas poor Crowley had only his own resources to draw on, and also a much larger chunk of inanimate matter to deal with. He’d probably have reached Tadfield in better shape if he’d just let the rest of the Bentley go and pulled up with nothing but the driver’s seat and steering wheel. Which would have been hilarious, but not nearly as cool and dramatic XD

I think the impressive bit, really, is the protection Aziraphale provides as they cross the M25.

The speeding up tbe moped, making it rise into the sky are probably easy miracles for either of them. Crowley must do that miracle routinely (or perhaps unconsciously) on the Bentley because it goes over is own top speed.

When Crowley crosses the M25 he has Hastur in the car. He uses the crossing to burn Hastur up. So possibly, if Hastur wasn’t in the car at the time, Crowley would have used a protective miracle too and spared the car. Once Crowley had crossed and the Bentley was on fire it seems he couldn’t remove it and could only keep the Bentley together.

It is also possible that the idea of a protective miracle for crossing the M25 wouldn’t have occurred to Crowley. Perhaps, it is another example of Crowley getting caught by is own mischief.

Y’know, as much as I love all the beautiful fanart of Crowley before his Fall as a graceful majestic Elberethian Star-Kindler sort of figure

I also get a kick out of picturing him standing out in the void in a bright orange jacket and a hard hat with a STOP/SLOW sign, waving angels to proceed with caution past a nebula construction site, bored out of his skull and idly wondering how one figures out when to stop for lunch when Time hasn’t been invented yet

:D

Here’s the thing, though, he looks less mortal here than he’s looked in a long time, yellow eyes on full display, no tempting smile, just one charred snake driving supernaturally badly, but he looks so terribly human here. Helpless and grieving and unguarded. Love all over his face, but the kind of love that has nowhere left to go. Tender and terrible.

to add on some things that kill me about these parallels:

in the first one- his mouth is shut. he’s on a mission to get to aziraphale and he’s doing that. to get away from hell. he’s determined, motivated.

in the second one- notice the ever so slight parting of his lips. he’s out of breath- panting one could say. he’s lost aziraphale and now he has nowhere to go, but he drives anyway. he’s distraught, heartbroken.

his hair is another big thing for me. in the first one, it’s all brushed back and neat, the exact way he likes it. he’s presentable and put together.

while in the second one, it’s down on his face (the first time since ancient rome actually) and an utter mess. so is he. he doesn’t care about who sees him in this state. the only person he cares about is gone. so who gives a shit.

Are we going to talk about this transitional look?

Hair is re-sculpted but with sticky-up bits all over the place.

Clothes shiny, disheveled, but technically all there.

Glasses slid down his nose, more transparent than any other part of the show.

Rapidly shifting expression.

The front he puts up has never looked more like an act.

To anon who said: Consider this: Caduceus = Crowley and Azi

I…I mean

What I like about Good Omens is that the characters’ ages directly correlate to their overall usefulness to the plot

You know, I don’t think Aziraphale and Crowley get enough credit. Their incompetence kept both Heaven and Hell complacent for 11 years, secure in the belief that the Antichrist was right where he was supposed to be and everything was going according to plan. And by focusing on the wrong boy, they indirectly succeeded in doing exactly what they set out to do: they ensured that the Antichrist grew up as a normal human child. Their plan worked, y'all. Just not…quite…how they expected. Also, let’s bear in mind that Crowley wasn’t solely or even mostly responsible for the mixed-up babies. He followed the orders he was given: he handed Adam off to the Satanic nuns at the hospital. It wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t told to which nun he should surrender custody (and seriously, WHAT THE HELL, HELL–the most important Entity in the most important Plan you’ve carried out since Creation began, and you didn’t establish and carefully carefully check and re-check a full chain of custody??? You let your man Hastur burn all the records so that no one, INCLUDING YOU, could go back and verify them later?!?) or that the first person he encountered there was a non-Satanist who wasn’t even supposed to be there that particular evening and had no clue what was going on, or that all the competent nuns had gotten thrown out of their reckoning and distracted by the Youngs’ early arrival, or that the one nun who wasn’t otherwise occupied happened to be Sister Mary, who wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box and didn’t stop to wonder why the guy who’d just arrived and stayed for under a minute told her something different from the Mother Superior who’d carefully orchestrated the whole business.

Oh yeah, nor was it Crowley’s fault that the nuns weren’t in the habit of immediately tagging each newborn with an ID bracelet.  Which you’d think they would at least have done with the Young child straightaway, because he wasn’t supposed to be involved in the Antichrist plot and after all, they were expecting two other babies that night…

Even after the hand-off and he raising of Warlock, they were still involved:

I mean it’s complex, but Ineffable plans, amirite?

And honestly, Aziraphale was instrumental in getting Shadwell and Tracy there, too, and we know from the book that it was seeing all those pairs of enemies teamed up together including Aziraphale and Crowley, that inspired Adam in his final acts of defiance.

Not to mention they stepped up just as Beelzebub and Gabriel were trying to convince Adam to restart the Apocalypse. How terrifying is that to a kid, even an all-powerful one? (Especially Gabriel, king of gaslighting, amirite?) And then, to have an angel and a demon stand up to their bosses, back you up, promise to take your side, no matter what you choose to do?

I mean it’s fun to joke about their incompetence, but really. They save the world by being themselves, and that’s a big theme in all the versions of the story.

mmhmm! and in the applicability dept, life is full of Great Tasks that get done by lots of people each doing their part, large or small, loud or quiet, in the middle of things or around the edges.