#look im not saying im going to write this story
Something that’s been very interesting to me, in this new wave of post-miniseries Good Omens fandom, is the apparent fannish consensus that Crowley is, in fact, bad at his job. That he’s actually quite nice. That he’s been skating by hiding his general goodness from hell by taking credit for human evil and doling out a smattering of tiny benign inconveniences that he calls bad.
I get the urge towards that headcanon, and I do think the Crowley in the miniseries comes off as nicer than the one in the book. (I think miniseries Crowley and Aziraphale are both a little nicer, a little more toothless, than the versions of themselves in the book.) But maybe it’s because I was a book fan first, or maybe it’s because I just find him infinitely more interesting this way–I think Crowley, even show!Crowley, has the capacity to be very good at his job of sowing evil. And I think that matters to the story as a whole.
A demon’s job on Earth, and specifically Crowley’s job on Earth, isn’t to make people suffer. It’s to make people sin. And the handful of ‘evil’ things we see Crowley do over the course of the series are effective at that, even if the show itself doesn’t explore them a lot.
Take the cell phone network thing, for instance. This gets a paragraph in the book that’s largely brushed off in the conversation with Hastur and Ligur, and I think it’s really telling:
What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.
In essence, without any great expenditure of effort (look, I’d never say Crowley isn’t slothful, but that just makes him efficient), he’s managed to put half of London in a mental and emotional state that Crowley knows will make them more inclined to sin. He’s given twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or half a million people a Bad Day. Which, okay, it’s just a bad day–but bad days are exhausting. Bad days make you snap, make you fail at things, make you feel guiltier and more stressed out in the aftermath when you wake up the next day, makes everything a little worse. Bad days matter.
Maybe it’s because I’m a believer in the ripple effect of small kindnesses, and that means I have to believe in its opposite. Maybe it’s just that I, personally, have had enough days that were bad enough that a downed cell network (or an angry coworker because of a downed cell network) would honestly have mattered. But somebody who deliberately moves through the world doing their best to make everyone’s lives harder, with the aim of encouraging everybody around them to be just a little crueler, just a little angrier, just a little less empathetic–you know what, yes. I do call that successful evil.
It’s subtle, is the thing. That’s why Hastur and Ligur don’t get it, don’t approve of it. Not because Crowley isn’t good at his job, but because we’ve seen from the beginning that Hastur and Ligur are extremely out of touch with humanity and the modern world and just plain aren’t smart enough to get it. It’s a strategy that relies on understanding how humans work, what our buttons are and how to press them. It’s also a strategy that’s remarkably advanced in terms of free will. Hastur and Ligur deliberately tempt and coerce and entrap individuals into sinning, but Crowley never even gets close. We never see him say to a single person, ‘hey, I’ve got an idea for you, why don’t you go do this bad thing?’ He sets up conditions to encourage humans to actually do the bad things they’re already thinking of themselves. He creates a situation and opens it up to the results of free choice. Every single thing a person does after Crowley’s messed with them is their own decision, without any demonic coercion to blame for any of it.
You see it again in the paintball match. “They wanted real guns, I gave them what they wanted.” In this case, Crowley didn’t need to irritate anybody into wanting to do evil–the desire to shoot and hurt and maybe even kill their own coworkers was already present in every combatant on that paintball field. Crowley just so happened to be there at exactly the right time to give them the opportunity to turn that fleeting, kind-of-bad-but-never-acted-upon desire into real, concrete, attempted murder. Sure, nobody died–where would be the fun in a pile of corpses? But now forty-odd people who may never have committed a real act of violence in their entire lives, caught in a moment of weakness with real live weapons in their hands, will get to spend the rest of their lives knowing that given the opportunity and the tiniest smidgen of plausible deniability, they are absolutely the sort of people who could and would kill another human being they see every single day over a string of petty annoyances.
Crowley understands the path between bad thought andevil action. He knows it gets shorter when somebody is upset or irritated, and that it gets shorter when people practice turning one into the other. He understands that sometimes, removing a couple of practical obstacles is the only nudge a person needs–no demonic pressure or circumvention of free will required.
I love this interpretation, because I love the idea that Crowley, who’s been living on Earth for six thousand years, actually gets people in a way no other demon can. I love the idea that Crowley, the very first tempter, who was there when free will was invented, understands how it works and how to use it better than maybe anyone else. And I really love the idea that Crowley our hero, who loves Aziraphale and saves the world, isn’t necessarily a good guy.
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.
He loves Aziraphale. He helps save the entire world. Scared and desperate and determined and devoted, he drives through a wall of fire for the sake of something other than himself. He likes humans, their cleverness, their complexities, the talent they have for doing the same sort of evil he does himself, the talent they have for doing the exact opposite. He cares.
It’s not a story about someone who was always secretly good even though they tried to convince the whole world and themself that they weren’t. It’s a story about someone who, despite being legitimately bad in so many ways, still has the capacity to be good anyway. It’s not about redemption, or about what Heaven thinks or judges or wants. It’s about free will. However terrible you are or were or have the ability to be, you can still choose to do a good thing. You can still love. You can still be loved in return.
And I think that matters.
It’s also worth noting that when Crowley gives people means and opportunities to make a bad choice, that doesn’t take away from them the ability to make a good choiceinstead.
If people were only offered one possibility to act, it would make their sin less meaningful, it would make Crowley’s work less meaningful. But for those who actually decide to not go and yell at their secretary because the phone network being down has been rougn on their nerves, it’s also an effort that becomes meaningful in the right way.
So, yeah, I really agree on all of this, especially the part about free will. That’s what is essential in both Crowley and Aziraphale’s characterizations, and it’s at the very core of the story.You know what? This makes me want to see a story where Aziraphale and Crowley are actually incredibly good at their jobs. They’ve been on Earth all this time and they really are the most effective field agents Heaven and Hell have - never mind if that effectiveness is cancelled out by the arrangement.
When Crowley and Aziraphale go rogue, someone has to fill in for them. After all, there’s still a job to be done, even if no one anticipated having to do it. However, whoever the new agents are - whether they’re a new principality and a new demon of equivalent rank or a small team of Angels and arch-angels against a little squad of imps - have nowhere near the level of “success” that the previous two did. They don’t understand Earth, humans, or free will, and they’re about four thousand years away from being at the same place the Ineffable Husbands were when they made the arrangement.
I want to see Heaven and Hell, who laughed and sneered at their earthly agents, come to realize just how valuable they were. I want the sweet satisfaction of the two sides missing Crowley and Aziraphale as a jealous ex misses you after you’ve long since moved on.
Aha yes, the reaction of Heaven and Hell alone would be priceless !
I agree with the OP 110%. Crowley is notbad at his job, he’s fucking brilliant at it. But he doesn’t do this 1-on-1 crap like in the old days. He’s become a Logistical Nightmare of Efficency in the most nightmarish of hellish sense. He sows discontent and malaise through thousandsof souls at a time, not just a handful who happen to be near by.
If anything, if you really didn’t want to classify Crowley as “evil”, he’s a Trickster God. He’d hang out with Loki and Papa Legba.
He just sets up the pieces and lets Humainty choose how they want them to tumble. He gives you the choice to do right, but is right there to point out how much worse/fun being bad will be. All for the the low, low price of your soul. And yes, maybe he sort of pads his success by picking people already leaning into their darker inclinations (again, see the Paint Ball into Live Ammunition), but it’s also why he always seems so disapointed when they come up with things before he can even suggest them (see the “animals” in the Bastille, see the “stupid Nazi spies” in WWII). An argument could be made he’s disapointed they got there before he could. But it’s cool, because he’ll take the credit anyway.
Heaven and Hell are absolutely going to notice both Crowley and Aziraphale’s absenses, eventually, though maybe in a human generation or two. Not right away, they’re slow to catch up. And that’s what’ll make Our Side victorious.
It makes me a bit nuts when either A or C are considered incompetent. If they actually sucked at their jobs, either one would have been replaced ages ago, because in addition to taking credit for human things, someone is doing the blessings and temptations each side asks for.
But Crowley is that bit better because he takes initiative. He invents ways to get people to sin. And he’s willing to put in hard work if necessary, as when he went out at night to move markers for the M25.
Not only are they very good at their jobs, they’re very good at each other’s job! That’s the whole point of the Arrangement, that both are capable of pulling off blessings and temptations.
You know at some point Crowley was out there giving Aziraphale lessons in How to Tempt Humans, mostly for his own amusement, and probably waaaay before the Arrangement crossed his mind, because he’d never suggest it if he didn’t already believe Aziraphale capable of matching his skills. And Crowley must have done enough good miracles on his own for Aziraphale to be confident he could pretend to be an angel without giving in to his chaotic/trolling tendencies or else he’d never have agreed to it.
