Aziraphale, Crowley, and politics

Spoilers for the streaming series adaptation of Good Omens, and the Sandman storyline A Game Of You

There is a meme image making the rounds showing Aziraphale with the caption “the system is broken and must be fixed” and Crowley with the caption “the system is working exactly as intended and must be dismantled”. In my cultural politics and politics politics, I side with Meme Crowley. But I think the meme badly misunderstands the story of Good Omens and the political questions it raises.

Crowley just does not hold the position attributed to him in the meme. Though we see his stance change over time, he always acts on the assumption that The System cannot be disrupted. In the “present day” of GO2 he wants to personally stand outside The System and pursue what joy and love he can in his own life, and this is integral to the ending.

Considering the flashbacks presented in GO2, I read Crowley as having come to this position having actively rejected the attitude the meme misattributes to him. Maybe he fought in the War In Heaven to destroy The System … or maybe he supported the view often attributed to Satan that The System is fine, the problem is just that the wrong person holds authoritarian power. If the latter, he was on the wrong side; what we see of demons in Good Omens suggests that it is a very good thing that Satan lost the war.

Seeing Crowley as an agent of Hell in S1 and most of the S2 flashbacks, he operates within The System. He often does so by disrupting the exercise of power when that offends his fundamental kindness, yes, but he never disrupts the institutions themselves, even when he finds himself opposed to The System’s core project of The Apocalypse. The end of GO1 has Crowley content to leave Heaven and Hell in place, having successfully prevented them from destroying either the home he enjoys (Earth) or his relationship with Aziraphale.

His experiences trying to act kindly within The System, culminating in the crisis of trying to prevent The Apocalypse, give us the Crowley of the present-day plot of S2, so pessimistic about any complicity with The System that he would rather lose his beloved than enter into complicity again. That is a rejection of The System, yes, but not the same thing as working to alter — much less destroy — The System.

The story of GO2 offers a lot of reasons to think that Crowley is right to not challenge The System. The love between Gabriel & Beelzebub sets them out of The System rather than against it; them walking away without even attempting to alter The System which would keep them apart is our happy ending.

Indeed, the story of GO1&2 gives us a much stronger case for Aziraphale’s choice than one can make for it in our real world. The meme’s “the system is broken and must be fixed” is where he stands. Unlike in our world, in the world of Good Omens there has been one and only one effort to disrupt the cruel logics of The System, and that was through violence at the direction of a Satan whom we can only evaluate indirectly. Again, all of the indirect evidence we have — Hell and the work of the demons — tells us that the guy was a shithead.

Someone needs to take a crack at proper reform, at least once, before tearing everything down!

This grumbling about the meme wound up making me even more excited about the prospect of a GO3.

If we get the GO3 which Gaiman says GO2 was intended to set up, based on the idea he and Pratchett worked out, it seems unmistakable to me that the Gabriel & Beelzebub relationship foreshadows how the GO3 story will have love between Crowley & Aziraphale prove be stronger than The System separating them, just as it was in GO1. But it will have to deliver that differently from Gabriel & Beelzebub, else what’s the point?

GO’s cozy-ness makes it more a Pratchett story than a Gaiman story. Gaiman’s core theme of The World Is Beautiful And Terrible is blunted into Don’t Miss How Beautiful The World Is. That’s not a fault; we will get plenty of Scary Trousers Gaiman from the next season of the Sandman streaming series, if that’s what you want. I don’t know Pratchett as well as I know Gaiman, but I do know that his core theme is Kindness Is The Most Important Thing. It is deep kindness which draws Crowley and Aziraphale together, brings them to redeem each other, and enables them to save the world along the way.

I think this gives us at least three sides of Gaiman in competition with each other to shape whether the implication in GO2 that ending one’s complicity with The System is sufficient gets reïforced or countered.

1. The Sandman takes the long way around the stories of Dream, Destruction, and countless minor characters to understand why sometimes we can and must just walk away, whatever the cost, to end our complicity with The System.
2. Good Omens is one of many Gaiman riffs on Paradise Lost, and Gaiman likes to hint at what Milton tried to prove: The System is just beyond human ken, and Lucifer’s seeming rebellion against The System is the hidden truth of how The System is ultimately just … maybe.
3. There is a thing about the Sandman arc A Game Of You which I think about a lot. There are things in the trans representation in Game which are A Problem, but there is one criticism of it which I flatly reject: when the Moon refuses to accept that Wanda is a woman, the story is not making Wanda’s womanhood incomplete, it is saying fuck The System, the Moon is wrong. To make sure we don’t miss that point it ends the whole story by bringing the wisest and most compassionate being in the Cosmos to ratify who Wanda is. So maybe in GO3 Crowley or Aziraphale or the two of them together will reach past the Moon and tear down Heaven itself.