#badcrowleytakes

[badaziraphaletakes]

All the people saying Crowley's trauma has "made him a better person" need to read this

@peculiar-persephone

[thingsisayinmyhead]

Yes! This!

The funny thing is that if I had to, if I had to, gun to my head, HAD TO choose, my favourite would be Crowley.

But it's Aziraphale who is under open, aggressive, and mean-spirited attack from parts of the fandom. Which is, I think, why our rebuttals are usually equally as vocal.

But we need to talk more about how the very same people often corrode the character of our beloved, amazing Crowley into a pale shadow of himself, some helpless whiny victim who feels put upon by Hell and Aziraphale and whose actions are informed by nothing but trauma. I wouldn't trust that Crowley with anything sharp, he might accidentally cut himself.

But it feels nice to imagine the real, canon Crowley kicking these peoples asses; both for talking shit about his angel and then simply because they seem to think he couldn't or wouldn't.

[badaziraphaletakes]

Okay this blog is basically now BadAziraphaleTakesAndBadCrowleyTakes

Behold:

NEITHER! OF! THEM! ARE! NAIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And we literally have an actual therapist on record saying their relationship and the way they behave toward each other is HEALTHY and that it's only the circumstances that surround them that are unhealthy!!!!!!!!!!! What more proof do we need?????????

[badaziraphaletakes]

This is not how a healthy relationship looks

This is how Crowley feels about this post:

Friendly reminder that:

1. Crowley is not petty about things that are painful for the two of them. He banters with Aziraphale because he knows he likes it, not to upset him.

2. Crowley knows d*mn well that his plan wasn’t any better than Aziraphale’s. He knows they both only have sh*tty options. And he knows that’s not Aziraphale’s fault.

3. Crowley needs to apologize just as much as Aziraphale does. In their final conversation (for now), they both were stressed and terrified and inadvertently hurt each other by saying hurtful things they didn't mean. (And in Crowley's case, he kissed Aziraphale without consent. He didn't mean to hurt him by doing it, and Aziraphale didn't object and kissed him back, and Crowley let go quickly, as he should have done, but it was still wrong of him.)

Thank you and good night.

[badaziraphaletakes]

Bad Crowley Take for y'all, to mix it up a little bit!

Me when I read this:

Y'all, Crowley did NOT choose to fall. He’s said so many, many, many times. We're getting real tired of explaining this. (EDIT: What I, Mod X, meant to convey here is a. That given that Crowley said he didn’t mean to fall, it feels wrong to doubt his word about his own ab*se, and b. Whatever else Crowley may or may not have chosen, he definitely did not choose being thrown into a pool of boiling sulfur - assuming heaven knew it was there- on himself. No one “chooses” to be tortured that way. Hope this clears some things up. Sorry for the confusion caused by my poor wording.)

And one person’s ab*sive household (company? I don't even know lol) is NOT a "better" or "worse" experience to live through than another. That's just not how it works. We do NOT get to say one ab*se survivor had it “better” than another.

[badaziraphaletakes]

Yes!!!

You know what irks me? The fact that in fanon, whether it be a fanfic or headcanon or fanart or anything else, Aziraphale is almost always represented as a homebody introvert who seldom leaves the bookshop, only talks to Crowley, and is actively annoyed by humans— whereas Crowley often goes on periodic solo outings before visiting Aziraphale and also is depicted with much stronger connections to characters like Anathema or Maggie/Nina or the Them. Because in canon, it’s Crowley who takes weeks-long naps and actively avoids speaking to others. People forget that Aziraphale had friendly banter with Maggie and Nina before s2 even started, and he was just as horrified at the idea of killing kids as Crowley was!! He actually LIKES Earth and going out and talking to humans (as long as they aren’t bothering him or trying to buy books). I would argue he’s even more personable and willing to make outside connections than Crowley is (he sent Shadwell mourning gifts, forgave Maggie’s rent, wanted to entertain kids at Warlock’s birthday, etc).

To me this is THE personification of the pattern of people treating Aziraphale like a female love interest; people are determined to isolate Aziraphale from any support system and make him solely dependent on Crowley, who is allowed to have all the independence and friends he wants. Aziraphale is just some entity who exists to make Crowley happy and be there for him without any relationships or life of his own, right? Right?????😒

[badaziraphaletakes]

Inside every bad Aziraphale take, there is an equal and opposite bad Crowley take

CROWLEY DID NOT NEED TO BE TRAUMATIZED IN ORDER TO BECOME A GOOD PERSON

HE WAS ALREADY A GOOD PERSON BEFORE HE FELL

TRAUMA IS NOT NECESSARY FOR CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Also please, for the love of Frances McDormand, stop saying that the less-Autistic-appearing, higher-masking, post-fall, traumatized, more subdued version of Crowley is a better person than our happy excited Autistic Starmaker. That take is rancid and I'm getting real tired of explaining why.

[badaziraphaletakes]

Bad Crowley takes now, too... this day just gets better and better

This is a bad Crowley take. I haven't seen the victim-blaming language applied to him before, but there's a first time for everything, it seems.

Like, how can you blame someone who's had his kind of life for having a "flight" reaction?

[badaziraphaletakes]

Thank you answering my ask! I come bearing gifts - plesae forgive my terrible scribbling over the usernames as I'm graphics illiterate :(

Hopefully you can read this pile of UTTER NONSENSE. Ta! Sadie

He... he has literally always had the choice to show Aziraphale the door???? If anything he has never had the choice to choose to NOT show Aziraphale the door! Why aren't we talking about the fact that Crowley's never had the chance to openly express his love to his husband and tell him how much he means to him?? That's the real injustice here.

It would be SO MUCH EASIER and infinitely safer for both of them to show each other the door and yet for 6000 years they have chosen again and again (and again and again and again and again and again) not to do that! That's part of what makes their relationship so beautiful!

I mean, yes, there's a kernel of truth in there about how the fandom woobifies Crowley and treats him like some kind of pitiful golden retriever with no mind of his own. That annoys us too here at BAT. (Seriously, we talk about it at least once a week 😂) He's also our good Autistic not-a-boy, and we won't let anyone babify him on our watch. (Is 'babify' a word? Whatever, it is now lol.) But... isn't implying that he doesn't have a choice about staying with Aziraphale an act of woobification in itself?

Oh and Aziraphale had to be 'talked into trying to save the world' BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T HAVE ANY WAY TO DO IT!!! He agreed the moment he heard a viable plan for stopping Armageddon that wouldn't get him or Crowley incinerated.

And... "doing nothing for 6000 years"? Don't even get me started, ugh.

[badaziraphaletakes]

Is anyone else getting a little tired of the "Ineffable Dumbasses" thing?

Like, I'm sorry, but how would you have handled their situation better than they have?

[badaziraphaletakes]

Ah, yes, our favorite characters being *checks notes* horrified by *double check* someone who has ab*sed and tried to kill them in the past is *triple check* one of the funniest scenes in the show. Sure.

Wowza. We agree - this is nauseating. 😳

The feather-duster bit was funny. But this... no. This was devastating.

Thank you for the submission! :)

[badaziraphaletakes]

[Mod M's addition]

I hope the day comes when I'll stop using this meme.

Wow, I'd argue very strongly with OP there that choosing to be kind is so much stronger than when it's "effortless" or whatever (I agree with mod X, I don't think it's ever effortless). Crowley is a character that, every time he does good, it's an ACTIVE CHOICE. He doesn't have to, none of the other demons around him do so, it's against what other ppl tell him his supposed "nature" is. He has nothing to gain and everything to lose, and he still does it. It's one of my favourite things about him. He's so conscious about his choice btw, that he tries to hide it.

Which is the same reason we love Aziraphale for breaking the rules as a CHOICE to do the right thing, even if he may get in trouble. It's what Crowley loves about him. Aziraphale and Crowley are not so different in the end. That's the whole point of the story. And that's why they work well together, that's why they get along, that's why they fell in love. And that's why insulting Aziraphale diminishes Crowley's character immensely.

There's a lot of assertions here I find highly questionable (the idea that Aziraphale is jealous, for example), but there's one thing in particular I wanted to highlight.

Kindness isn't always effortless for anyone.

Especially traumatized people.

There are going to be days when you don't feel like being kind to anyone. There are going to be days you feel like treating the world as badly as it treated you. You have to actively choose not to. Some days it takes a lot of effort.

And the harder it is, the more your choice to be kind anyway says about you as a person.

Every time you make that conscious choice, you are showing you are a good person.

To say otherwise diminishes Crowley as much as it diminishes Aziraphale. One of the things that's so beautiful about Crowley's character is that he has absolutely nothing to gain from doing the right thing (and a great deal to gain from doing wrong). He has every possible justification to not be kind.

And yet he chooses to be kind anyway.

[badaziraphaletakes]

The Starmaker: A whole essay apparently

I don’t necessarily think the anti-Aziraphale hate is, for the most part, people projecting - at least not more than would be the case for any other character in any fandom.

I think it is primarily due to anti-Autistic bias, and here's another reason why:

Because the moment the fandom most dislike in Crowley - namely, the moment when they say “Nice to meet you” and go right back to being excited about their stars instead of adhering to social pleasantries - is their most Autistic moment. And happened during the period of time that overall they were acting at their most autism-esque.

So many people have said that moment was them being arrogant and superior and self-absorbed. Autistic people get called that constantly. (I’m ashamed to admit that I too fell into the trap for awhile of thinking that moment was them being arrogant, too. I’m not immune to this kind of bias. Anti-Autistic prejudice is so pervasive in our society that we can’t get away from it.)

People have said Crowley was a better person after they fell (despite the fact that we’ve seen that their defining moral trait, their tendency to question injustice, was already in place before then). Given that post-fall Crowley acts FAR less like an Autistic person, that take gives major “they were acting really Autistic before but then they had a super traumatic experience and that fixed them” vibes, and I REEEEALLY don’t like it. (I also have extremely mixed feelings about the “trauma makes you a better person” idea to begin with, but that’s another conversation).

People are even saying Crowley had to fall in order to become someone who could love Aziraphale and be loved by him… WHAT?!!! I’m going to be doing some thinking about what that implies, but I can tell you right now it’s not good.

Our beautiful, excitable, joyful, Autistic-esque Starmaker was just as worthy of Aziraphale as Crowley is. There was NOTHING bad in what we saw of them as opposed to post-fall Crowley, nothing that suggests they “needed to fall to learn a lesson” or anything like that, and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.

[chocolatecoffeeshot]

Are we forgetting…..

Where Aziraphle calls him ‘Nice’ and ‘Good’

Obviously thats for being a demon and Crowley is mad because he sees himself as utter goodness and and only says ‘unforgivable that’s what I am’ because he thinks he can absolutely forgive himself and live laugh love on earth as he likes because he absolutely wanted to fall :)

Hi :) I cannot find words to express what utter bullshit this is.

Hi, thank you for the submission! :) This is a good one to point out. We, too, are not fans of this take. It's been floating around a lot and it's not cool.

It's time for us to point once again that Aziraphale says all those things about Crowley ("We don't have a lot in common - you are fallen", "I don't even like you", &c &c) in a world where heaven and hell may at any time be listening to anything they're saying.

Is it possible Aziraphale believes some of the unpleasant things he says about Crowley? Okay, sure, theoretically it's *possible*, but the thing is, we have no evidence of it - and it's not fair to assume something like that without evidence.

Put another way - It's not okay to assume victims believe the things their ab*sers force them to say.

[badaziraphaletakes]

Seriously!!

Honestly sad innocent puppy boi Crowley is so boring!

#BadCrowleyTakes

It’s eerie how much the way people put the worst possible spin on the smallest of Aziraphale’s actions reminds me of the way people misjudge me as an Autistic person.

(See also: female character treatment.)

How can we possibly blame him for not wanting to let Gabriel in? He’s terrified of him. He doesn’t know yet whether he’s faking his amnesia.

I'm not going to go through the list detail by detail because I have a life (unlike this person 🤣) and it's already overwhelmingly clear how they are determined (like so much of the fandom, sadly) to bend over backwards to make him a villain based on the stupidest, tiny details, and attribute the worst possible motivation to everything he does based on the thinnest of evidence.

[badaziraphaletakes]

I should clarify this.

What I meant to say - and I expressed this poorly, and I am truly sorry about that - is that, given that Crowley has said he didn’t mean to fall, I think it’s inappropriate at this point to assume he did mean to.

Also - he may have meant to *rebel*, but that’s different than saying he meant to *get chucked into a pit of boiling sulfur*. Suggesting that he meant for *that* part to happen Is giving victim-blamey vibes.

Also also - it is never anything other than unhelpful or offensive to say the ab*se one person lived through is “worse” than the ab*se another person lived through. It all sucks. It’s all terrible and traumatic and shouldn’t happen.

Bad Crowley Take for y'all, to mix it up a little bit!

Me when I read this:

Y'all, Crowley did NOT choose to fall. He’s said so many, many, many times. We're getting real tired of explaining this.

And one kind of ab*sive household (company? I don't even know lol) is NOT a "better" or "worse" experience to live through than another. That's just not how it works.