aethelflaedladyofmercia: tsilvy: krakensdottir: guardian-of-soho: krakensdottir: aethelflaedlady

aethelflaedladyofmercia:

tsilvy:

krakensdottir:

guardian-of-soho:

krakensdottir:

aethelflaedladyofmercia:

dailygoodomens:

Wearethefallen.Neverforgetthat.

I think I’ve said this before but - Crowley is so mad at himself for screwing this up.

Like, Crowley is a bad demon on purpose. He does his “irritating prank” temptations and his “basically an elaborate civil engineering prank” tricks. But he’s making a choice. He’s being his own kind of demon.

And he tries to undermine the antichrist but that’s him rebelling against the system.

He long ago decided if he was going to fail at being a demon, he was going to fail on his own terms. He follows his own rules, he does things his bosses don’t understand, he gets confused praise when no one can figure out how his methods are so successful.

Granted, 75% of that is just him taking credit for things humans do but no matter. He’s living his best life.

But just an old-fashioned cock-up? That’s embarrassing. That’s out of his control. That’s not something he can be proud of in even a twisted way. He screwed up and now he and Aziraphale will suffer for it.

And now he has to face the fact that maybe he does all the dumb s**t we love about him because he’s just not good enough to be a real demon. And that hurts, because he’s no longer failing by choice, he’s failing because he’s defective.

All of this. Plus, he looks like he’s bracing himself for the consequences. There’s a thousand-yard stare mixed in with that rage.

He absolutely is. He immediately goes to role-play with the plants exactly what’s about to happen to him, and you know where he got the dialogue–it’s so much more brutal and blunt than his usual rambling style of talking, but it’s exactly how Hell talks. “Just couldn’t cut it.” And the consequences: “This will hurt you so much more than it hurts me.” We’ve seen the Hell-Hound, we’ve seen the holding cells in Hell, and we know they don’t spare the failures.

Oh yeah. This is why I think this particular enactment was Hell-based rather than God-related. Like, I think his general set-up here with the garden and literally playing God is normally more of a Fall-coping thing, but this one ‘therapy session’ is very much more Hell-themed.

Ouch. So you’re telling me that he was feeling like that, that the notion of being punished was so ingrained in him to immediately having to act it out on his plants, that he considered himself ‘dead meat’ two whole days before Hastur called him out on it, and yet he kept stalling on his plans to leave earth even after Aziraphale rejected his offer to his face, twice. That’s… a lot.

This whole show is A Lot.

And I think there’s aspects of both “recreating the Fall” and “recreating Hell’s punishment” in that garden. Crowley’s got a lot of fear and resentment and rage and that’s the only outlet he’s got, so it needs to cover a lot of ground.

(And don’t forget, in the book he comments that his superiors in Hell have a way of making him feel like a plant that just started shedding leaves on the floor which…SO MUCH to unpack there.)