#never stop

nobordersonlybuttcheeks:

nock-and-bolt:

Sixty: Apparently “spite” is not an “appropriate answer” to “what motivates you?”

fenrislorsrai:

aziraphaleisagender:

quaidpoppinjack:

aethelflaedladyofmercia:

krakensdottir:

aethelflaedladyofmercia:

mirach:

janara7:

angelsnuffbox:

quaidpoppinjack:

quaidpoppinjack:

codenamecesare:

aziraphaleisagender:

aziraphaleisagender:

Can I get some more art acknowledging Aziraphale’s trauma because like yes Crowley’s should be acknowledged but Aziraphale is suffering from anxiety and the abuse of the other angels and the Rules and I just

please!!!!! show!!!!! Aziraphale recovering!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Do I have to do all the crying around here

1. Aziraphale is terrified of the other angels, especially Gabriel; he grows small, he stumbles over his words, he fidgets, he backs down quickly. He does what they tell him to, until Crowley helps him find a way to work around them. (Bless Crowley’s patience, even though he’d curse me for saying that)
2. Aziraphale clings to the idea of Heaven being the good guys, because if Heaven is not good, then he must face the fact that they are bad–and because trauma and anxiety fuck with the brain, he follows that to the conclusion that he is bad, and he has been terrified of being bad since at least the war that banished the fallen angels. If he is bad, then he is lost to the God who he’s trying so fervently to believe in.
3. (point 2 is especially prevalent in anxious children, but it follows you. It follows you all the way to your death. Maybe you get better at ignoring the voice telling you you’re bad; but it’s always there)
4. He lies desperately, not out of spite, but out of fear of what might happen if the authority figure knows the truth. Abused people of all ages lie to survive.
5. No one cares about him. He knows no one cares about him. Crowley’s the only one who cares, and Aziraphale is so indoctrinated into “Demons are evil” that he can’t quite convince himself of that. He loves Crowley. He loves humanity. But he was born and raised and trained in Heaven, and their apparent prevailing attitude is, “No one but angels matters”. And if Aziraphale, an angel, does not matter…
6. Armageddon is a tipping point. He’d already been getting better. He’d been letting himself loosen, letting himself question (in his own head only), and he was beginning to relax. It takes several hard shocks to his idea of who he is, what part he plays, and how the other angels think and act, for him to see that this isn’t right, and he needs to do something. The reason he seizes on killing Adam is ambiguous, but I’m torn between two thoughts: A) Because he’s trying to tell himself he’s still an angel, and what would an angel do when faced with a problem? Kill it. B) It’s the only sure-fire way of stopping things that he can think of. He’s pressed for time, his body has been destroyed, his faith has been destroyed, and now is as good a time as any to go absolutely fucking insane. There’s nothing to lose. There’s no consequences. Either this works or it doesn’t. Fuck it.

Anyway Aziraphale was abused and has anxiety and I need to wrap him in a blanket and get him some cocoa.

Yes! Aziraphale’s huge issue is that he believes losing faith in Heavenis the same thing as losing faith in God.I believe Aziraphale never loses faith in God– that’s why he never Falls despite lying and defying Heaven and so on. 

But when Metatron tells him the point is to win the war, not prevent it, I think that’s the point when Aziraphale finally starts to separate Heaven from God in his mind– realizing that he can oppose Heaven and still keep faith with God.

What I love most about his big “Is that the ineffableplan” rules-lawyering moment is that Aziraphale weaponizes his own anxiety against Heaven and Hell. From the Garden on, Aziraphale worries that he’s not doing the right thing. He secretly thinks there must be something wrong with him because the other angels seem so certainwhat’s right, and he’s not. At last he realizes that they don’t know either– but they’ve been pretendingthey know God’s will and using that feigned confidence to do what theywant.

Aziraphale forces Heaven to admit that they don’t know any more than he does– he finally understands that his anxiety and feelings of inadequacy have been an illusion caused by their lies. He turns it around on them and forces themto experience the kind of self-doubt that their hypocrisy imposed on him for 6,000 years. No wonder they try to execute him later.

This! This is the thing I’ve been saying!!! Aaaaaahhh! I’ve been reading good omens fic for over a decade or more now and everybody writes about Crowley’s trauma, and now we’ve got the series and have even more information about aziraphale and everybody wants to explore Crowley’s trauma.

And I LOVE and adore Crowley , don’t get me wrong, ive has fan art of book!crowley stuck up in the greenhouse for years now, but what is happening is lots and lots of fic exploring Crowley’s trauma with Aziraphale having to put himself in *another* box to be there for Crowley so crowley can process.

And he wants to be there! Totally! But maybe I’m missing the fic or the comics or something? There are these HUGE hanging issues for Aziraphale. And within the series, he hasn’t actually processed any of it! There is so much massive potential there! And even in the kinkmemes when someone is asking for aziraphale hurt/comfort, he ends up having to be the one comforting Crowley and I am starting to tear my hair out because let the angel process is trauma!

That quote @aziraphaleisagender about how no one cares about him and he knows it is so freaking depressing and so true!

I actually wonder if there’s a reason people aren’t really drawn to write it if there really is a lack of that sort of fic. Like is Crowley’s pain more attractive? (Aestheticly or narratively)Is it people think Aziraphale is an angel so he should be able to deal? Is it because he can be a prick to crowley?

I binge-read about 2050385 Gomens fanfics since May when it jumped out of it’s small fandom niche and basically replaced Sherlock in popularity. But I can count on my fingers anything that has someone- anyone- comforting him, it is 99% Crowley in the hurt and Aziraphale or someone providing the comfort.

Like why is his trauma not valid????

Reblogging this again because I just went and looked and holy cow, it really is hard to find fic where aziraphale is the one being comforted rather than Crowley. Someone made a collection on AO3 called hurt aziraphale and I’m going to look through those.

The fandom h/c thing for Crowley it s starting to remind me of the one sided H/C slants for Draco, Snape, Spike from Buffy, Erik (magneto) Sherlock, Bucky, Loki etc where the sexy coded character (like I can’t see book!snape as sexy but I mean Alan rickman) is lusted over by everyone, attacked, raped, captured, tortured, enslaved etc. drugged sometimes to the point it kinda reads like torture/ rape porn with stockholmey elements. And after they are rescued and in recovery, other characters are still lusting over them and triggering them.

and then a sort of plainer or not so attractively described character or the ‘good’ one most the time ends up the one doing all the comforting. And that character always has to be 100% perfectly focused on the hurt one, is always apologizing for not being able to handle the trauma, isn’t allowed to be upset about anything in their own past, has to be able to actually read the hurt persons mind to know all the triggers or ends up apologizing for paragraphs (um like literally for some characters - okay Charles Xavier). They aren’t allowed to recieve any comfort from anyone, but the comforted person will show them affection sporadically in between attacking them for caring- that the carer must also shrug off and stay dedicated.

I don’t know why fandom gravitates that way, but I’ve seen it forever. I’m kind of over it, but it’s sooooooo popular. Any fandom, at least two or three of the top fics in the most popular airing will be a H/C with rape (I’m not a fan of the words non/con cause it feels like a weird euphemism for rape) torture, slavery, forced addiction, torture device attached— and it’ll always be the character fandom has deemed as the sexy one or with a conventionally attractive actor, or the one meant to be the rakish character. It’s never the plain one/ the good one. Kirk / Spock is one of the pairings I’ve seen it go both ways- but maybe cuz it’s been around so long? But so is Victorian Sherlock Holmes and that tends to be one sided. Who knows!

That was like a quarter of a century’s worth of ranting there.

I’ve been having so many thoughts about this lately because I’ve been working on a zine fic that focuses on Aziraphale recovering from abuse and Crowley helping him through it, and it’s incredibly upsetting why there aren’t more fics like that, as if we just expect Aziraphale to move past all that shit he went through immediately after the apocalypse :(

Not to mention that, personally, I’m tired of narratives that have Crowley portrayed as good for nothing other than being a pretty looking mess who needs to be taken care of by Aziraphale.

The collection is mine, you can find it here: Hurt Aziraphale
You will also find stories there where Crowley is hurt too because at this point I also content myself with morsels and if at least a part of the story is focused on Aziraphale’s trauma, I add it to the collection.

I especially recommend stories by BuggreAlleThis(@aziraphalelookedwretched​ ) and @hotcrosspigeon‘s series Hurt!Aziraphale stories (some are unfinished though). I’ve also written a few stories about Aziraphale’s trauma and you just inpired me to put them into a series, so here they are: Aziraphale hurt/comfort:)

I also have written a number of Hurt Aziraphale stories, which I just realized on trying to link to them that they are inconsistently tagged. Going to make my list below, and later try to gather them into either a collection or a series or something. Here’s twenty-something times either Aziraphale gets comforted, or the comfort is mutual, or I look at Aziraphale’s trauma or anything along those lines. Every fic is completed.

Also, for fun, here’s Sawdust of Words in its entirety, my (WIP) series that explores both Aziraphale and Crowley’s trauma and recovery across 6000+ years. Hasn’t updated in a year but I’ve got one more with a beta reader right now and another I’m working on.

As for why we focus on Crowley’s pain - I think the “he suffers beautifully” aspect of it is definitely there; and I think physical pain suits him better, and is easier to h/c - having done several different psychological trauma variants, that stuff is hard. So it might be a path of least resistance thing. And I think we can’t rule out the fact that people like seeing the quiet fussy angel go BAMF. There is something thrilling about Aziraphale rescuing Crowley with sword blazing, or yeeting Gabriel through a wall for insulting his demon.

And there is recovery in that. Aziraphale has been so crushed down for so long that having him take the initiative to do the rescue, having him stand up to his bosses in defense of his demon, having him put aside his doubts long enough to give Crowley the cuddles he needs – yeah, these are all ways of acknowledging and dealing with his trauma, too!

I think it’s easy for us to have Crowley be the “he’s hurt needs a cuddle” (because he presents as so tough) and Aziraphale be the “he’s hurt needs to let loose” (because he’s blatantly so repressed). And we forget that it also goes the other way – that Crowley needs to let loose from the personas he wears for protection, and that Aziraphale needs a goddamn hug once in a while!

(Side note regarding Sawdust of Words: I’m somehow eleven stories in and no one has gotten a big goddamn comfort hug? Believe me that is being fixed immediately.)

And finally, I think we need to consider that Aziraphale’s emotional trauma is, if not entirely unique, definitely a sort of specific and personalized pain, whereas the kind of physical pain heaped on Crowley is a lot more generic. For better or worse, fandom is trope-y as hell, and there are a lot more generic pain tropes (including yes torture and rape) where you can easily slot it Crowley’s character; but to really get into Aziraphale’s basically-raised-in-an-abusive-cult-and-needs-to-learn-to-trust thing? You’re relying a lot less on classic fandom tropes and a lot more on your own understanding of these issues. And I think there’s plenty of people willing to explore that, but it’s a much smaller set of writers.

Still. We are out there. :)

Keep reading

I was going to say.. I’ve noticed moremeta here that explores Aziraphale’s trauma in detail, far more so than Crowley’s. This issue is well recognized and discussed in the fandom, not least because it’s far more relatable to many of the users on here - not necessarily the cult aspect, but emotional abuse and how it follows you forever? Yeah, most of us feel that lol. Whereas relatively few of us have been in Crowley’s snakeskin shoes.

Perhaps there’s not a whole lot of overlap between the majority of fans who write fanfic and the writers who delve into meta here on Tumblr. Tbh even the Crowley whump normally seen in fanfic is relatively limited - it doesn’t focus on the long-term effects of living in constant fear, like hypervigilance or touch aversion (I mean, for smut reasons there’s usually not a lot of that, lol). It’s more focused on injury and immediate aftermath.

And honestly like, there’s nothing wrongwith that. Fandom should make you happy, and fanfic should be written for the author’s pleasure. As tiring as the trope-yness might be, it’s not an actual bad thing to be criticized. Just frustrating if it’s not what you’re looking for.

The only solution I’ve got is… if you’re writing inclined, and it’s the subject that interests you, maybe write fic for it. Hopefully that’ll inspire more. Aethelflaed here’s already done that, and so have several other people I follow. Might never outnumber the tropey whump fic, but y’all could definitely collectively produce enough for hours of browsing.

(Also keep in mind, the very fact that Az’s trauma IS more relatable might actually steer some people away from writing about it. While some folks find release in writing about the things that have hurt them, many others use fic as an escape and try not to touch on issues that are gonna cut too deep. Disappointment from family members inflicting personal feelings of low self-worth that never quite let you go… that’s a sickeningly common experience and not one everybody wants to write about it. It’s easier and safer to stick to the fantasyland of beating up pretty characters, so that may be what a lot of people do, on purpose. Without knowing what’s going on in a writer’s head, it’s best not to judge.)

I think this:

Perhaps there’s not a whole lot of overlap between the majority of fans who write fanfic and the writers who delve into meta here on Tumblr.

Is super important. I think the audiences overlap but meta writers are not necessarily Whump writers.

(And speaking of meta — was it @wanna-b-poet31 who wrote all those excellent metas on both Aziraphale and Crowley’s abuse and recovery?)

The one thing that can get a little frustrating with a fandom structured between Tumblr, Instagram and AO3 is how unorganized it can be. There could be a massive IG community on Aziraphale Trauma and Comfort art and I would have no idea. Who knows how many Good Omens Tumblr fans are missing this set of posts because they and their mutuals are too many degrees of separation from us, but have their own thoughts they would want to chime in with?

Anyway, not sure what the solution is apart from as @krakensdottir says — if you are so inclined create the fic/meta/art you crave. Possibly create a Discord or similar location where fellow fans can gather and discuss. Throw out the “Aziraphale Trauma Discussion” signal and I will try to make my way there!

(Also to clarify my comments above: it is NOT a bad thing that some topics are tropier or some writers take more trope-laden routes. It’s definitely a consideration — some readers/writers prefer heavier trope concentration some don’t — and I’d say on the whole fandom leans towards MORE TROPE. Enjoy what you enjoy, tho, there’s room in this fandom for everyone!)

This is where Tumblr makes me want to pull my hair out because I *miss* discussion. Maybe I need to join a discord that doesn’t depend on hearing. Anyhoo-

@krakensdottir you make a good point about writers just wanted to go with the formulaic trope or just wanting to try their own hand with a fandom staple. I was thinking about what you said here: “beating up pretty characters”- because that was sort of the trope I had in mind when I was saying that I was only seeing hurt/comfort with Aziraphale having to pack his pain away to comfort Crowley because his suffering was more attractive to write. I wonder why that is- not just crowley, across all fandoms. I skimmed through good omens under the kudos sorting, more the first few pages of fics, it’s mostly Crowley getting the brunt of it and also getting most the comfort. And the pattern in some of the other fandoms I follow was interesting- it, like Cherik Merlin LOTR hobbit cinematic- verse marvel thinks like sticky and Loki Gen and pairing -I checked a few more I am blanking on- it’s the character written as a tortured soul or ambiguous allegiance or morally grey character, or the character of an actor with a cult following.

And@aethelflaedladyofmercia the spread of fandom is a HUGE thing that maybe I haven’t taken into consideration. There’s a lot of things in good omens fandom alone where groups of people have decided Headcanon x is basically canon and assumes everyone acknowledges this in fic, except another group on a different social media space has never heard of that and embraced a different thing they assume everyone *must* know. Thank you for taking time to make the recs listed and to others that did.

Also@aziraphaleisagender I’m glad you brought this whole thing up because it’s drawn out some interesting stuff from people.

@quaidpoppinjack I haven’t used this blog in years, but now that I’ve checked the notes on this post I’m shocked that people have brought up this topic again. I agree with you, the majority of h/c fic I’ve found has the same pattern (Cherik is a WILD fandom when it comes to “who deserves more comfort”), and that’s why I made this post 2-3 years ago. Because I was tired and cranky and every time I saw a headcanon or ficlet that centered Aziraphale’s pain, someone other than the OP would swoop in and say “yeah but Crowley is in pain too!!!”

Like. We know. That’s not the issue.

Anyway, thank you for finding this discussion interesting, you’re a peach <3

Most of my long works are some form of mutual hurt comfort, where they’re unpacking what’s happened.  While Crowley definitely has bad times, i generally treat him as a bit more resilient. He’s had a long time to deal with his issues and mostly knows them.

Aziraphale I generally treat as the one more in need of comfort because he’s got fewer coping skills. You don’t have to deal with your negative feelings if you never admit you HAVE them.  Effectively he’s trying to unravel a life of toxic positivity and identity issues. If you spent so much time trying to conform and now you’re left that group, who are you?

Holloways is the long series where they deal with that. And also an enormous amount of introspection on their place in universe. No real physical trauma, but a lot of little things that remind them of past wounds that they now finally feel safe to deal with. Like going ring shopping to get married should be fun, but Aziraphale needs to deal with what thee ring he already wears means.

A short one I have is “All the Little Comforts” which is basically Emotional Exhaustion/Comfort for Aziraphale.

A Bit Snug has then share Crowley’s corporation through Armageddon and trying NOT to share their trauma. Then having to deal with trial separately, but getting to heal from them separately. End chapter of that is focused heavily on Aziraphale healing from the trial and Crowley’s past experience with similar helping him through that.

@ouidamforeman as OP I am claiming the right to reblog with your tags because I Love Them

LISTEN LISTEN I NEED TO TALK ABOUT THIS BECAUSE IT INTERESTS ME SO MUCHso like…..Good Omens is very interesting because as an actual work of fiction it straddles a weird line between likefandom-y and not as conducive to fandomand something that pisses me off sometimes is that some of the really good bits of canon are glossed over or not discussed by fandombecause they’re not really things that are easy to Fandom aboutand weirdly significant chunks of Aziraphale and Crowley’s characters are one of those thingsespecially this Aziraphale’s Issues thingand the torturing Crowley thingfandom at large tends to latch onto characters who can be shipped together and whumped onand not as much on aspects of characters that are negative or complicated to write aboutand for better or worse A&C are all of those things lmaoand like ppl were saying aboveone of Crowley’s issues is that he’s hurt physically and that’s easier to write about and conceptualizeplus ppl seem to interpret him as ‘the sexy one’ or something and physically torturing the pretty character is a Thingwhereas Aziraphale’s character issues aren’t physical and a huge part of his struggle is ideologicalwhich is just more complicated to understand and less conventionally sexy to write about I guessbut what makes me sad is that their arcs about physical and mental trauma mirror each other and go togetherand they’re really well suited to help each other with their issuesso when there’s this one-sided thing going on in the majority of content it makes me sadalso everyone read the book. neither of them is the sexy one in that they’re just stupid and sad lmaoit’s more obvious in the book that Crowley is actually the more well-adjusted one likehe has the fear and his weird fake performance to deal with the external threat he’s underand he’s obviously terrified of hell bc they hurt himbut he’s pretty ok with who he is and how the world works?meanwhile in the course of the story Aziraphale has his worldview torn down and his cognitive dissonance ripped throughone of his Things is just that he seems really chill when he isn’tlike yeah Aziraphale makes Crowley feel safe and can protect him that’s v v goodbut I also care very much about Crowley being a mental safe space for AziraphaleAziraphale is safe to come out of his shitty ideas and emotional trauma with Crowley! I want to read about THATgo meta