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joycrispy · 8 months

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One thing I love about Crowley --never stated, but consistently shown-- is that he is, at heart, an engineer.

I have a few different things to say about that. Let's unpack them.

As the Unnamed Angel, we see his designs for the Pillars of Creation are millions of pages long, comprised of cramped text, footnotes, diagrams, schematics, etc. It's very...Renaissance polymath, in the way it implies a particular intersection of artist and inventor.

Also: in the naked romanticism with which he views his stars.

We already knew he made stars, but in s2 we learn that he did NOT sculpt each of them by hand. He designed a nebula ("a star factory," he says) that will form several thousand young stars and proto-planets, and all --aside from getting the 'factory' running-- without him lifting a finger. We also learn that these young stars and proto-planets stand in contrast to those made by other angels, which are going to come 'pre-aged.'

...I'm reminded of Hastur and Ligur's approach to temptations. Damning one human soul at a time, devoting singular attention to it over the course of years or decades, and how that stands in contrast to Crowley's reliance on, quote, 'knock-on effects.'

Ligur: It's not exactly...craftsmanship. Crowley: Head office don't seem to mind. They love me down there.

Hm.

I'm also reminded of the M25.

The M25 may not be as grand as a nebula (sentences you only say in GOmens fandom...), but LIKE his nebula it's an intricate, self-sustaining engine that does Crowley's work for him, many times over. Again.

That's some pretty neat characterization --and so is the indication towards Crowley's disinterest in victimizing anyone tempting individual people. It takes a considerable amount of planning and effort (and creeping about in wellies), but in accordance with his design the M25 generates a constant stream of low-grade evil on a gigantic scale.

Cumulatively gigantic, that is. Individually? Negligible.

But no other demon understands human nature well enough to parse that one million ticked-off motorists are not, in any meaningful way, actually equivalent to one dictator, or one mass-murderer, or even one little influential regressive. That's the trick of it. Crowley gets Hell's approval (which he NEEDS to survive, and to maintain the degree of freedom he's eked out for himself), and at the same time ensures that any actual ~Evil Influence~ is spread nice and thin.

It's some clever machinery. And he knows it, too:

The Unnamed Angel and Crowley are both proud of their ideas.

(musings on professional pride, Leonardo da Vinci, the crank handle, and 'the point to which Crowley loves Aziraphale' under the cut)

In the 1970's Crowley gives a presentation on the M25, projector and all, to a room full of increasingly impatient demons. Maybe the presentation was work-ordered; the 'can I hear a WAHOO?' definitely wasn't.

Before the Beginning, the Unnamed Angel can barely contain his excitement about his nebula. Aziraphale manages a baffled-but-polite, "....That's nice... :)"

11 years ago, Hastur and Ligur want to 'tell the deeds of the day,' and Crowley smiles to himself because (according to the script-book) he knows he has 'the best one.'

(Naturally, his 'deed' has nothing to do with tempting anybody, and everything to do with setting up a human-powered Rube-Goldberg machine of petty annoyance. Oodles of 'Evil' generated; very little harm done.)

Hastur and Ligur don't get it, of course. That's also consistent.

Nobody ever knows what the hell he's talking about.

It didn't make it on-screen, but, in both the novel AND the script-book, Crowley was friends with Leonardo da Vinci. The quintessential Renaissance polymath. That's where he got his drawing of the Mona Lisa --they're getting very drunk together, and Crowley picks up the 'most beautiful' of the preliminary sketches. He wants to buy it. Leonardo agrees almost off-the-cuff, very casual, because they're friends, and because he has bigger fish to fry than haggling over a doodle:

He goes, "Now, explain this helicopter thingie again, will you?" Because he's an engineer, too.

(It is 1519 at the latest, in this scene. Why the FUCK would Crowley know about helicopters, and be able to explain them, comprehensively, to Leonardo da Vinci?

...Well. I choose to believe he got bored one day and worked it out. Look, if you know how to build a nebula, you can probably handle aerodynamics. And anyway, I think it's telling that this is his idea of shooting the shit. 'A drunken mind speaks a sober heart,' and all. He probably babbled about Aziraphale long enough to make poor Leo sick)

Apart from Aziraphale, Leonardo da Vinci is the only person Crowley has any keepsakes or mementos of.

Think about that, though. Aziraphale's bookshop is bursting with letters, paintings, busts, and personalized signatures memorializing all the humans he's known and befriended over 6000 years (indeed: Aziraphale has living human friends up and down Whickber Street. He's part of a community).

Crowley doesn't have any of that. It's just the stone albatross from the Church (for pining), the infamous gay sex statue (for spicy pining), the houseplants (for roleplaying his deepest trauma over and over, as one does), and this one piece of artwork, inscribed, "To my friend Anthony from your friend Leo da V."

To me, at least, that suggests a level of attachment that seems to be rare for Crowley.

...Maybe he liked having someone to talk shop with? Someone who was interested? Someone engaged enough to ask questions when they didn't immediately understand?

...Anyway.

There's also the matter of the crank handle.

This thing:

This is one of the subtler changes from the book. In the book, Crowley knows Satan is coming and, desperate, arms himself with a tire iron. It's the best he can do. He's not Aziraphale; he wasn't made to wield a flaming sword.

The show, IMO, improves on this considerably. Now he, like Aziraphale, gets to face annihilation with what he was made for in his hand. And it's not a weapon, not even an improvised one like the tire iron.

He made stars with it.

[both gifs by @fuckyeahgoodomens]

If you Google 'crank handle,' you'll get variations on this:

Crank handles have been around for centuries. Consisting of a mechanical arm that's connected to a perpendicular rotating shaft, they are designed to convert circular motion into rotary or reciprocating motion.

Which is to say they're one of the 'simple machines,' like a lever or a pulley; the bread and butter of engineering. You'll also get a list of uses for a crank handle, archaic and modern. Among them: cranking up the engine of an old-fashioned car... say, a 1933 Bentley. That's what Crowley has been using his for, lately. But he's had it since he was an angel and he's still, it seems, very capable of it's angelic applications.

Stopping time. For instance.

(This is conjecture on my part, but, I like to imagine that Crowley has the ability to stop time for the same reason I can --and should-- unplug my computer before I perform maintenance on it. Time and Space are a matched set, after all, and in his designs in particular, one feeds into the other.)

I know everyone has already said this, but: I REALLY LIKE that when he needs to channel the heights of his power, he does so not with a weapon but with a tool. Practically with a little handheld metaphor for ingenuity. One from long-lost days when he made beautiful things.

(And he loved it. Still loves it --he incorporated that metaphor into the Bentley, didn't he?)

Let Aziraphale rock up to the apocalypse with a weapon: he has his own compelling thematic reasons to do exactly that. Crowley's story is different, and fighting isn't the only way to express defiance. And if you've been condemned as a demon and assumed to be destructive by your very nature, what better way than this?

He made stars. They didn't manage to take that from him.

Neither Crowley nor Aziraphale are fighters, really --they have no intention of fighting in any war. They'll annoy everyone until there's no war to fight in, for a start. But between the two, if one must be, then that one is Aziraphale. Principality of the Earth, Guardian of the Eastern Gate, Wielder of the Flaming Sword... all that stuff. Even if he'd prefer not to, it's very clear that Aziraphale can rise to the occasion, if he must.

Crowley was never that kind of angel. He wasn't a Principality. He doesn't have a sword.

...And yet.

It's Crowley who protects. He's the one who paces, who stands guard, who circles Aziraphale and glares out at the world, just daring anyone else to come near.

In light of everything else I've said here, I think that's interesting.

Obviously part of it is that Aziraphale enjoys it and, you know, good for him. He's living his best life, no doubt no doubt no doubt. But what about Crowley? What's driving that behavior, really?

Have you heard the phrase, 'loved to the point of invention'? Well, what if 'the point of invention' was where you started? What if where you end up involves glaring out at the world, just daring anyone else to come near? What is that, in relation to the bright-eyed thing you used to be?

What do we name the point to which Crowley loves Aziraphale?

...Thinking about how an excitable angel with three million pages of star design he wants to tell you all about...becomes a guard dog. Is all.

#good omens #ineffable husbands #aziracrow #Crowley #Aziraphale #good omens 2 #good omens meta #unfortunately I do not have trains of thought #only long meandering strolls of thought #sorry about it #anyway tl;dr Crowley is a nerd #also I have a strange emotional attachment to the idea of 1500's Crowley...#...facedown in a pile of Mona Lisa sketches; drunkenly info-dumping about Aziraphale #and Da Vinci is just like. 'Ahhhh mio amico Antonio. You fucking simp.'

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exo-dus404 · 25 days

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Finally posting this AU here;

It’s 1 year anniversary of this AU!!

CW: This au contains general dark themes, brainwashing, non-consensual body modification, violence, machine gore, etc. please read at your own risk!

This is my rw au(Project Triple Affirmation), it takes place in a setting where the Ancients are still alive. One day, Looks to the Moon announces that she has found the Triple Affirmative—the answer to the Great Problem: to eliminate death by uploading all consciousnesses to a virtual reality, for without death, there is no rebirth, thereby breaking the cycle. She sees herself as the savior of everything, granting an ethereal eternity.

To put it into simpler words: Moon with her local group killing everything and uploading their victim’s consciousness to FP’s processor(a virtual reality).

While Moon claims that her plan “Solves” the Great Problem, her real agenda is far more radical: she wants to play god. To create a new world in her vision.

There’s still a lot more lore in this au, I’ll slowly get to them in my later posts.

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sleepinginmygrave · 4 months

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okay everyone is doing this so

if this post get 1500 notes before january 5th, i'll post my art on here

yes it's a lot that's why i'm doing this hehehe

#please don't get this to 1500 #not like it's possible #moi

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firestorm09890 · 1 month

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Penny stardewvalley makes me so sad because she's SO sensitive to, like, basically everything you tell her (telling her that you can't stand children while two children are nearby is a pretty lousy move but -1500 friendship?? being a jerk to other characters' faces typically loses you about 50 points, and if you choose the option labeled "creepy" and ask Leah for a kiss in her 2 heart event she physically hits you and kicks you out of her house but that's only -100 friendship…) and so if you want to befriend her it's a whole lot of lying and tiptoeing around her feelings (2 hearts: George was right but saying that makes her feel bad. 6 hearts: her food sucks but even if you try to be polite about it she feels like a failure; only a bald-faced lie pleases her. 8 hearts: saying you don't want to be tied down with a family loses you a little bit of friendship and she's only happy if you say you want kids) and I can't help but think she's a product of her environment. She lives in a trailer with only her mother, who gets drunk every night and has something of a temper. Penny's like a skittish rescue animal who won’t even come out from hiding under something unless you leave her lots of treats

#stardew valley #penny sdv #I didn't mention the SECOND opportunity to lose 1500 friendship with her #because I think if you go out of your way to date her and then tell her that you don't like her that way then you deserve it #but yeah she's super volatile #i was upset for a little bit after reading that one post saying the ‘right’ answer in the 2 heart event is ableist #like nooooo not my favorite farming game :(#except that in the context of several other things in the game it becomes clear that winning someone over #does not always mean doing the right thing #looking directly at how the easiest way to befriend shane and pam is by enabling their alcoholism #which is framed as a harmful thing even if the characters themselves like it #you have to lie to befriend other characters too like with sam dropping his egg #and you can lose a little friendship based on preferences like sebastian asking about what books you like #though to be fair if i saw someone who could potentially be cool and i found out that what they like was stuff im not into id also #lose interest a little #anyway those are all examples spread around on different characters #penny's got it all at once #me post

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hoofpeet · 4 days

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Hiii it's comm time again if anybody wants a blorbo drawing...

#hoof draws #kinda #spent around ~1500 bucks in the move so... i'd like to fix that dent a little

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sepezzz · 6 months

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merlin fanart?????? in 2023????????

more context for these in the tags

#OK SO this is like my silly little 1500 years later au i have running in my head #where merlin is a sad old man wizard living in an eclectic townhouse in london #he and kilgarrah sorta made up cuz who else is there to talk to after 1500 years #he keeps kilgarrah in a cat body tho to keep him in check #he lets himself age between like 25 and 45 #then he'll wind it back before his joins start hurting too much lol #old man #ok that's it for now! might doodle more for this au later teehee #merlin #merlin bbc #merlin emrys #merlin fanart #kilgarrah

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crystallizedtwilight · 1 year

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Pumpkin patch shenanigans

#lock shock and barrel #boogie's boys #the nightmare before christmas #tnbc #MyArt #to the 1500 people who followed me in the past 24 hours hi #I typically just do niche fan art like this lol

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rlyehtaxidermist · 3 months

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vote in your primaries.

Americans: Check your state's primary date here.

Pro-Palestinian activist groups are already calling for an "uncommitted" vote in the Democratic primary in Michigan specifically as a protest against the atrocities in Gaza and more broadly the lack of any real challenge to Biden's candidacy.

This is something that every data analyst in the parties will see and have to deal with. If "Uncommitted" gets enough votes, party delegates can even officially be listed as "uncommitted", which is very visible.

"But Orange Man-" This isn't the "if you don't support us you support them" of FPTP general elections. This is the Democratic Primaries. Harm reduction rhetoric is irrelevant here; Biden has no serious primary opponents.

1500 voters in New Hampshire voted in "Ceasefire", which was enough that the Biden campaign had to acknowledge it - even though their response was "see, only 1500 people cared?" And for one primary - yeah, that would be the response. Let's not make it one primary.

let's make number get bigger people

#'only 1500' for a write-in campaign in one state can snowball. fucking start rolling that snow #for reference i have done political data analysis for small campaigns. i KNOW what they look at. i know how the databases work #i am not going to breach NDA for it but like. this sort of thing DOES matter. please trust

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canisalbus · 8 months

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saw the post with Vasco and Machete vibe checking a bubble and was curious if they'd actually be similar sizes as dogs?

I'd been picturing Machete as a small trembling terrier and Vasco as a long leggy bloodhound

They're pretty equally matched I think, I'd say roughly 70 cm (or 28 inches) at the withers. Their breeds are fictional, but physically their closest irl counterparts would be Ibizan hound and Porcelaine. Both fairly large hunting dogs.

#since I haven't drawn them with other people yet I think I'm failing to communicate #that they're both taller than average in anthro form as well #like around 185 cm/6'1" I'd say #that includes Machete's heels though so maybe Vasco wins by just a smidge?#but with them on they're equal and Machete of course has the ear advantage #to be fair I haven't adjusted any of that to the average height of the late 1500s which was likely significantly shorter than in modern day #it would get needlessly complicated just I haven't bothered #answered #ccghastly

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achillesuwu · 1 year

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I just think it would be HILARIOUS if Merlin dates someone for a loooooong time some centuries after Arthur's death and that someone is immortal.

Idk, just the idea of merlin having that ex vampire dude he dated for 276 years or something and they parted in good term. They are still good friends and it drives Arthur INSANE

More Merlin actually living for 1500+ years and meeting new people because you can NOT convince me that if someone live for more 1500 years in a world where there are others long-living beings they will not form bond that defy every social expectation

like (-still not dating merthur -)

Arthur : you dated him for nearly THREE centuries!?

Merlin : well, yeah?

Arthur : and you want to make me believe that you two cuddling on the couch was totally platonic!?!?

Merlin, 1500+ yo and very much know how to communicate with his friends and ex-partner: yeah??

Arthur I just noticed that I wanted to be the one sleeping on you on the couch and I don't know what to do with those feelings pendragon : YOU PLAYED WITH HIS HAIR AND KISSED HIS FOREHEAD

Merlin : WE BROKE UP FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO ARTHUR

Merlin that got married multiple times but is at the same time kind of married to Freya.

Merlin that blows Arthur mind because he has an orgy with his 5 immortal Friends-with-benefits and they is completely chill about it.

Arthur just can NOT understand how this isn't cheating.

Just, Arthur (freshly immortal btw) being incapable of understanding Merlin's centuries long relationships with other immortals.

Arthur being a tiny bit insecure because how the fuck can he try to win Merlin's heart when he is competing against a 1500 yo marriage, a 700 relationship that for him doesn't look platonic at ALL, 5 immortal "friend with benefits" and Gods know who else when he was "only" merlin's best friend for 10 years 1500 years ago :((((

Meanwhile, everybody else that know that now that Arthur came back there is no way that anything happen with anyone else: aaaaawwww, merlin!!! tell us everything!!!! And when is the wedding??? You better not elope like you did with Catheline. It was two hundreds years ago!!!! HE DIDIN'T SAY THAT NOTHING HAPPENED!!! NOTHING HAPPENED.

#merthur #arthur pendragon #It's 1 am #merlin bbc #I just think that not enough fic show that Merlin is 1500 years old #Like it's actually insane #my shit

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