Kaanha-ki-barkat - There Is No Charm Equal To Tenderness Of Heart.

There are so many unintended consequences to well-intentioned actions. It feels like a game you can’t win.

#whipped

I feel like you’ll appreciate this photo I took several years ago when I was in school of a raven getting spooked by something in the bushes

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“So, I’ve got a question,” Adam said slowly, in the way Aziraphale had come to quite nearly dread. It meant the boy had been thinking, which was a very good thing, of course; but it also meant the question was likely to be of the uncomfortably acute sort that adults of all kinds, human, angel, or demon as they might be, disliked having to answer. The sort that made one feel rather like, well, Adam, the first one, right after the bite of apple but before he’d found himself a convenient leaf.

Quite precisely, Aziraphale set his book aside and slipped his spectacles from his nose, folding in their temples and tucking them with care into the pocket of his jacket. In the cottage’s kitchen, he could hear Crowley bustling about, putting together the tea things; oh, they could always miracle up an afternoon tea, yes, but Aziraphale did think it was so much nicer to have the real thing. And wasn’t it lovely that Crowley agreed?

He smiled at the boy, who was, after all, not quite exactly human. (Oh, they’d handled the thing with his father, of course, but had anyone taken the mother’s heritage – or even her identity? – into account?) “Yes, Adam?” he prompted.

“Right. Only, you’re an angel, right?” said Adam, his mop of muddy-gold curls flopping over his ears in a way which made Aziraphale’s fingers itch for scissors.

“If that’s your question, young man…” Aziraphale said, trailing off in that slightly forbidding way common to schoolteachers of a certain ilk the world over.

“No. I mean, yes. Sort of?” Adam said. “Only, there’s these magazines, the ones Anathema reads? She lets me read them too, when she’s done with them, and there’s this one that’s all about angels….”

“Ah,” Aziraphale sighed. “You mustn’t believe everything you read just because it’s been written down, Adam,” he said, well aware of the irony. “People do write the most astonishing tosh at times.”

“The magazine said there were sorts of angel,” Adam continued, a bit stubbornly. “What sort are you?”

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tickety-boo?

when i watched good omens, i didn’t expect to love tv crowley, and it fuckin blindsided me. all at once, i thought, oh gosh, damn, and fuck, roughly in that order, and here’s why.

where tv crowley and book crowley most significantly diverge is the bookshop fire. in the book, “Crowley cursed Aziraphale, and the ineffable plan, and Above, and Below.” in the tv show, instead of cursing him, he calls out for him desperately before falling to the floor with a quiet “you’ve gone.” for book crowley, az is “Aziraphale. The Enemy, of course. But an enemy for six thousand years now, which made him a sort of friend.” for tv crowley, aziraphale is his “best friend.” naturally, in the bookshop fire, tv crowley is in fucking agony. this is not how book crowley reacts.

see, one of book crowley’s most basic traits is his optimism. “Because, underneath it all,” the book says, “Crowley was an optimist. If there was one rock-hard certainty that had sustained him through the bad times—he thought briefly of the fourteenth century—then it was utter surety that he would come out on top; that the universe would look after him.”

it’s a really beautiful passage. and i can’t relate to it at all. 

after the fire, book crowley thinks he might “get completely and utterly pissed out of his mind while he waited for the world to end.” where book crowley only considers it, tv crowley actually does it. he does go to wait out the end of the world while drunk, and does give up, and he does break down, and he is not an optimist; he is a mess. that struck me. i’ve never seen a heroic character so blatantly need help before. but crowley gets help; he finds a friend and confesses how much aziraphale means to him; he gets back in the car and forges onward through the fire, even though he’s clearly Not Okay.

and there, on the flaming m25, book crowley and tv crowley diverge again. tv crowley is not an optimist; he’s not holding the bentley together with the hope that it’ll all work out. but he does it anyway. tv crowley doesn’t have optimism, but he has something that is, to me, even more important. in the show, “Crowley has something no other demons have, especially not Hastur: an imagination.”

an imagination. strangely enough, in the book, crowley admits to lacking it: “They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination,” book crowley says. but tv crowley has that imagination, and that is what saves him–and that, to me, makes so much sense.

tv crowley is traumatised. when he fell, some part of him broke, and while he claims he “sauntered vaguely downwards,” he really took a “million-light-year freestyle dive into a pool of boiling sulphur,” and it hurt. tv crowley is hurt. and so am i. 

i also give up. i also break down. i don’t, and can’t, ever believe that the universe is looking out for me–or for anyone. i am not an optimist. but you know what? i have imagination. i have friends. and if it came down to me to help save the world, that is exactly what i would rely on.

Yudhishtira and Duryodhana for the Swap headcannon.

“Yudhishtira is relieved that the path of dharma runs so straight and broad. A king’s son becomes king, and his own father has only ever been Regent, holding the throne for the next heir. The eldest son in the family becomes King, and Suyodhana is a full year older.

Yudhishtira wishes the path of dharma were not so crooked and full of traps for an unseasoned walker. A king’s son becomes king, and his own father was king, and his uncle though the elder only ever Regent. The eldest son in the family becomes King, and Suyodhana is a full year older.

Suyodhana says, “Mother, look what a bride our Arjuna has won with his valour,” and hands Draupadi forth as Pritha comes wondering out from her cottage. All too soon there will be Panchal to sit in counsel with, but it is good to see his mother pull his new sister into an embrace.

Suyodhana says, “I will gamble no further, I cannot wage my family,” overlapping withYudhishtira saying, “This is only a friendly game, I would not take your lands.”

“You are my brother,” he tells Karna. “We are bound together, that remains as true as ever it was. I pray you, forget my delusions about the nature of our tie, and remember only its affection. Let me crown you again, but King of Hastinapura now, and Emperor in Indraprastha.”

“Monochrome Across the Centuries: A Lookbook by Anthony Janthony Crowley”

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