#grrr tumblr won't let me format this like a script

[azirapherale]

Of things unsaid

AZIRAPHALE Ah, yes, I thought perhaps they might send you. [beat] Well.. [beat] I’m ready to go. CROWLEY Go where? AZIRAPHALE To Hell. CROWLEY I’m not taking you to Hell, angel. Notice Crowley doesn't confirm or deny being sent to take Aziraphale to Hell. Just that he - who was ordered to slaughter the blameless goats of blameless Job's and did. not. do. it. - is not doing this either.

AZIRAPHALE Why not? CROWLEY Well, I don’t think you’d like it.

"Why not?" is answered with a deflection that is more or less an "I don't want to," and very much not a denial that he was sent to do it. And if not liking Hell is a reason for an angel to not be taken there, no angels should ever have gone. It is by definition and design a miserable penal colony for wayward angels, such that none of them like it.

AZIRAPHALE But you have to. I’m like you now: A demon. CROWLEY (laughing) Sorry. You think you’re a demon? With your curly little… and your neat white… 

Making fun of Aziraphale for suggesting that he's a demon is another deflection. Crowley does not deny Aziraphale's claim/worry/supposition that he is a demon. It's implied by the joke that he isn't, but only because the joke relies on the incorrect premise that demons cannot have cute curly hair or neat white clothes, like it's an immutable law of celestial physics or an unbreakable sumptuary law. Hmm...

I'm not even going to bother showing you images of Crowley's curly hair because we both know there's more pictures of his curly hair on your phone than there is of your own family.

AZIRAPHALE I’m a fallen angel! I lied. To thwart the will of God.  CROWLEY Well, yeah, you did but… I’m not gonna tell anybody. Are you? AZIRAPHALE (Shakes head no) CROWLEY No. Then nothing has to change, does it? Again Crowley does not deny Aziraphale's assertion that he is a Fallen Angel, whereas, tellingly, he does confirm that Aziraphale lied to thwart the will of God. Then they enter into their first ever arrangement, which is quite possibly thwarting the will of God even more.

AZIRAPHALE (long pause) But what am I? CROWLEY You’re just an angel who goes along with Heaven as far as he can.

That sounds like a shift away from the Heaven faction to me. One very fascinating thing about Good Omens, the magic of holy water and hellfire notwithstanding, there doesn't seem to be much difference between angels and demons beyond aesthetics and political faction. Even being "good" or "evil" is an aesthetic. None of the demons seem to actually know what "evil" is and are flummoxed when humans come up with far worse than occurs to them. Most of the angels do horrible things but call them "good," a rose by any other name and all that.

AZIRAPHALE That sounds um… CROWELY Lonely? AZIRAPHALE (Nods) CROWLEY Yeah.  AZIRAPHALE But you said it wasn’t! CROWLEY I’m a demon. I lied.

Nice touch, that, lamp-shading lying by bringing it up in a conversation that one can easily suspect may be constructed out of a pile of lies (even if they are lies of omission)

In light of all that, I would like you to think about the poetry of this scene in which Aziraphale, never having had his Grace boiled out of him in Hell, excises it himself or some goodly portion of it anyway, and casts it down with his own hand, for his own reasons, with his own free will.

#good omens 2 #meta #textual analysis #aziraphale #angelic halo #subtext #I feel that the later scene echos the former #grrr tumblr won't let me format this like a script