#the issue with LWA asks is they so neatly and beautifully sum up everything that i literally have nothing to add

[thesherrinfordfacility]

LWA: I'm going to be reactionary today (not to you), because I've now come across this persistent if small subset of viewers who are outraged that Aziraphale directly asks Crowley for things in S2. This despite S1's plot engine being driven predominantly by Crowley directly asking Aziraphale for things, one of them unjustifiable, and getting him to say yes to all of them. (S1 has Aziraphale indirectly asking for HAMLET, paint removal, and handcuff removal.) It's parallel structure that uses the dialogue shifts to open up new avenues for characterization...

Anyway, to avoid just grousing, I'd like to tie this into the question of greyness. Because despite our haste to endorse Crowley's position on living within grey areas, the script insists that he is not always correct or even good at it (any more than Aziraphale is always correct or good at it). Moreover, while I don't think the series has any profound or even accurate engagement with the concept of yin-yang, the fundamental point that the two characters embody necessary and complementary forces is crucial to the series' argument. (It's not an accident that a yin-yang symbol appears right behind them in the coffee shop during their ep1 conversation.) So, Crowley's asks:

The Arrangement: the Arrangement is a pragmatic exercise that enables them to engage in their favorite activity, namely, being lazy. The high comedy of this is that being lazy is the most moral thing they could possibly do in the GO universe. The full moral implications of the Arrangement are not visible to either character in both novel and series, although Novel!Aziraphale is much more aware of how it fractures the Good/Evil binary than TV!Aziraphale is. I know that the fandom likes to think of Crowley's work as being somehow noble, "giving humans choices" and all that, but the Nuremberg Defense he drops on his foot at the end of the novel calls this interpretation into question. Doing their jobs is "messing about" by the novel's moral standard, and the series is heading in that direction by the end of S2. Humans make choices just fine without Crowley intervening. In other words, the Arrangement is an apparently grey choice ("that would be /lying!/") that leads to a moral absolute in the novel and appears to be heading in that direction in the series--namely, that supernatural interference with human free will is wrong, full stop.

Averting Armageddon: AKA treason. Everything in the script obviously endorses Crowley's request and Aziraphale's agreement with it, although TV!Crowley has a potentially fatal moral lapse along the way (see #4). The plot structure of s1 is yin-yang in action, as Crowley loses most of his narrative drive after ep3 and Aziraphale correspondingly gains it.

Holy Water 1862/1967: for Aziraphale, the resolution to the Holy Water argument in 1967 is a true grey decision in which there is no good resolution from his POV, just a less bad one. It might have been less grey if 1862!Crowley had managed to restrain his immediate emotional response to Aziraphale's refusal and just denied that it was a suicide pill (cue the end of s2ep6 for Crowley deciding the emotional marriage proposal was a better option than relaying what he had discovered in Heaven). 1967 doesn't resolve the problem--yes, Crowley responds to Aziraphale's obvious pain, but is he responding in the way Aziraphale needs him to?--and the characters apparently never return to it. But the point is that Aziraphale can, in fact, negotiate grey areas successfully, if at great cost to himself.

Kill the Antichrist for me, as a treat: at some point you're going to ban me for discussing this! Here, both the novel and series are emphatic that /there is no grey area/. You cannot kill children, no excuse, doesn't matter if they're the Antichrist, still can't kill them. What's interesting is that TV!Crowley is 100% in the wrong here for committing a hit-and-run against Aziraphale with a trolley problem, but Aziraphale's initial response is /also/ wrong: it's "I've never killed anything before," not "killing children is wrong." Aziraphale falls victim to the trolley problem because he's /not/ in full right/wrong binary mode here! Crowley screws up by misclassifying a non-grey problem as a grey one, while Aziraphale also screws up by substituting a subjective objection for an absolute one. Ironically, that is, the problem in that subplot is not that Aziraphale is too different from Crowley, but that he's tiptoed too close to him. Meanwhile, Crowley shows himself unwittingly capable of risking Aziraphale's life--which is what he's doing here--for his own convenience. Like the Holy Water argument, the underlying problems in this conflict are never resolved.

And now Aziraphale in S2, where Aziraphale is learning how to ask for things:

Help with Gabriel: Aziraphale's decision to help Gabriel is an act of radical charity that brings him close to holy fool status, I think. It's possibly dangerous, there's no real reward, and Gabriel tried to murder him (erm, yes, that); then again, Gabriel-as-Jim is in full factory reset mode and is entirely helpless. Like a child, in fact, so see #4 above. I don't think "liking" or "not liking" Aziraphale's choice is relevant to the moral problems raised by the entire situation, which are extraordinarily difficult and stretch across multiple philosophical, theological, and political domains--what do you /do/ with a bad person in trouble?--and left for the viewer to chew on. My own reading is that the script endorses Aziraphale's decision to help despite the total lack of benefit to and potential danger to himself (he's still unsure how "awful" Gabriel/Jim is). Crowley, by contrast, does not ever appear to fully understand what Aziraphale is doing. His agreement is not an agreement, since it involves concealing the actual reason for his willingness to participate, and his initial response is to just abandon Gabriel/Jim. Of the two, it's Aziraphale who negotiates the extreme greyness of this particular grey area with more success. You can certainly argue that Aziraphale should have been more attuned to Crowley's anxieties, but then Crowley's decision to give away the whole darned body swap suggests that maybe Crowley should also have listened more to Crowley's anxieties.

Taking the Bentley: this exchange is Aziraphale reverse-Crowleying Crowley. In the Gabriel ask, Aziraphale is clear but doesn't do a good job arguing his case, and Crowley resorts to glowering silently. When he convinces Crowley to let him take the Bentley, though, he tries out the same kind of experimental button-pushing that Crowley does in s1ep1. No, he shouldn't have changed the Bentley when he drove it, but it's unclear how many of those changes are the Bentley's doing, and he had no way of knowing that Crowley could feel the alterations until Crowley yelled at him. A more significant problem is that it's not clear if Crowley fully /hears/ what Aziraphale is truly asking, which is for Crowley to acknowledge that they are sharing each other's lives. It would be easier for Crowley to hear that if Aziraphale would just come out with it, but...

Come to Heaven and be an angel again: now, /this/ request is definitely wrong, and Crowley correctly refuses. Crowley's refusal is in contrast to s1 Aziraphale, who sacrifices his own boundaries to Crowley in the Holy Water incident. (If you can see where I'm going here, between the Holy Water and the child killing, I think the problem is not Aziraphale refusing to give Crowley things and then giving in, but Aziraphale needing to learn that sometimes /Crowley/ should get an absolute no.) This is the bad side of Aziraphale's binary thought process on full display. The decision to go to Heaven on its own, though, strikes me as much more in tune with his decision to help Gabriel regardless of personal danger or potential reward, and the extraordinarily ambiguous closing shots are about as grey as you can get, right down to the lighting.

i can’t tell you how excited and trepidatious, in equal measure, i got at the words “going to be reactionary today”, LWA✨ - but it usually means some excellent Hot Tea is heading my way though, and this is no exception!!!

(i would never ban you for discussing your Favourite Bugbear, perish the thought!!! but i may well start cataloguing them in my favour for an apology dance, so proceed with caution)

at some really interesting points in the story, i think crowley betrays his own narrative, and the image that he holds of himself. i noted something - and this is quite tangential to your ask but humour me - from the coffee-shop scene, specifically in the part where bohemian rhapsody (BR) is playing at the time of him questioning aziraphale about what’s going on, and if he needs help. 

BR is a swift but a fairly complete story that follows the relatively basic hero-narrative structure. rundown to help illustrate my point: hero has issue, hero decides to solve said issue, hero goes on adventure, hero has conflict of conviction, and hero prevails. well, i don't think it's particularly accidental (because - of course it probably isn't) that the dialogue from "listen, something big is going on in heaven", up until crowley downs his caffeine nightmare, is overlayed with the section of BR that seems to fit best with the adventure mark of said structure, and that the rest of the song is missing. i'll come back to this in a minute. 

i like the note that crowley loses a lot of his narrative drive after ep3, but i'm wondering if it potentially happens earlier than that - specifically in ep1? his (as we know more solidly now from s2) tendency to insert himself as the hero? to my mind, his 'hero-narrative' in s1 is derailed quite quickly after inception, specifically in the main antichrist plot. he’s given the antichrist and delivers it (issue), wants to stop armageddon and enlists his counterpart to help (decision to resolve) and they decide to meddle in warlock’s childhood to ensure that the apocalypse never comes to fruition - so, by this point, we’re pretty much on par with the adventure mark in the structure.

but then we get to the bench scene, and crowley offers up the dilemma of the hellhound and… record scratch. aziraphale is obviously alarmed by this detail, one that has a direct bearing on how the rest of the narrative will go, and that crowley wouldn’t think/remember to share it at this point. crowley tries to claw it back, says that it won’t matter; if they’ve done their jobs right, because it will be sent away unnamed. he doesn’t consider that whilst they may have influenced the kid, the kid is ultimately going to do what it likes, and potentially unravel it all anyway.

aziraphale however does propose this eventuality (which by-the-by also serves to indicate perhaps how much aziraphale might understand humanity a bit more than crowley does - that a human child is of course going to name a stray dog and want to keep it), and crowley instead jumps straight into a solution that involves tempting aziraphale to kill a child. this is, loosely, crowley’s mark of having a conflict of conviction - that their plan will work - and he chooses a solution to that. whilst that solution would resolve it, it doesn’t take into account the world, and people, around him, nor indeed the consequences (harking back to our last chat).

what occurs thereafter is arguably aziraphale leading the overall story with his hero-narrative instead - from the point that he shakes off crowley’s suggestion, and proposes instead to stop the dog himself - and crowley’s grasp on his hero-narrative disintegrates (albeit the two re-converge in ep6). the precipitating events in s1 would not have occurred if aziraphale had not reached this proposed solution, or at least not in the way we ended up seeing them - as you said before, LWA, it’s highly doubtful that aziraphale would have survived, in any way, killing an innocent child. 

(we see him distraught at the prospect of lying to god to save job's children, and bowing to the 'inevitable' of falling (despite him knowing that he likely did the right thing) - for him to actually kill the child antichrist would be bad enough, but to find out later that warlock wasn't the antichrist to begin with? aziraphale would surely have bypassed falling entirely and walked himself straight into hellfire)

the coffee-shop scene in s2, imo, suggests much the same; crowley learns of the “naked man” (issue), downs coffee (decision to resolve said issue), and abruptly leaves the table to go play hero (adventure). the rather aggressive overlay of BH, specifically the part of “will not let you go (let me go)” suggests to me that this is where we, and crowley, need to anticipate the upcoming conflict of conviction beat, and ask: what will crowley decide to do?

so we head into the bookshop, he discovers gabriel, and the So Did I argument ensues... and crowley resolves to storm out. he doesn’t explain to aziraphale why helping gabriel is a hard-no for him, and - again, as far as the narrative indicates - essentially abandons him. it isn’t until he learns of the book of life that he even resolves to go back to the bookshop, and fakes an apology to insert himself into the narrative that aziraphale is on… but what would have happened if he hadn’t learnt of the book?

that’s considerably unknowable, but regardless - the missing last verse and outro of BR arguably spells it out for us. by crowley walking out, abandoning aziraphale and betraying the narrative he set himself on, the result would have been the exact same as what we see at the end of s2. just like those lines in GOFLB later on in the episode, i think it’s rather telling that they were cut/left out.

so - in s1, crowley attempts to drag aziraphale along on his story where he gets to play hero, and immediately cocks it up with the antichrist ask, alienating aziraphale for the majority of the narrative up until aziraphale reconciles that heaven is not on the side of humanity like he and crowley are, and he immediately goes to bring crowley back into the fold. in s2, crowley drives himself back into the narrative a bit more successfully than his attempts in s1 (with calling aziraphale for check-ins, meeting up at the bandstand, etc) but arguably the damage has been done in s2, and aziraphale and he continue to be at odds for the rest of the show - not necessarily in ways that relate specifically to the gabriel/jim plot, but crowley abandoning aziraphale sets the tone for what's to come.

the thing is - and i may be skewered for this - i don’t think crowley operates in the grey as much as he likes to think he does. it’s all very well that he intellectually understands beyond a moral-dualistic concept, but he doesn’t always put his mouth where his money is:

it's fairly clear to the audience that he cares for aziraphale at the very least, and is concerned largely by his wellbeing and safety - and yet won’t tell him important information that would make aziraphale amenable to, or more receptive to, crowley playing hero and asserting his protectiveness. that, and the fact that he completely forgets to safeguard aziraphale when confronting jim in ep5.

he considers it wrong to hurt the innocent or cause them suffering, but drops graveyard guards down a huge shaft in a completely disproportionate response of self-defense, and only remarks that he might have “slightly overdone it” (oh, and attempts making his best friend kill a child - arguably still innocent regardless of their origin - so he doesn’t have the stain on his own conscience).

he is vocal of his vehemence of heaven/hell having any interference in his existence on earth - and that of aziraphale’s - but does not once stop to consider the moral implications of messing about with nina and maggie, or with warlock... or with any other humans as a supernatural entity, for that matter

as an example of the other way around - crowley obviously hates gabriel being in the bookshop, and the risk that it confers onto aziraphale's safety. and yet, in ep3, he is clearly showing some level of acceptance, patience, and camaraderie with him. this is probably subconsciously showing his recognition that jim is entirely innocent, but i dont think it's out of crowley suddenly understanding aziraphale's charitable, altruistic perspective in ep1 on protecting him; instead, it's perhaps because his level of thinking still slips into the binary: jim = good, gabriel = bad... something that i'm personally not convinced is completely fair in the first place (but that's a different post).

that’s not to say that aziraphale is any better - of course he’s not, and in some instances aziraphale is even worse in this regard - but the hypocrisy of crowley’s assertion that he exists beyond heaven and hell’s machinations is manifestly unsupported by his own actions and choices which, as he confirms in job, he has the free will to decide for himself.

i’m not quite sure how it’s possible to miss, in this respect, that regardless of interpreted historic trauma, that crowley (speaking specifically about tv!crowley here) is altogether not entirely a good person, grey or otherwise. he doesn’t really demonstrate a whole lot of that greyness - balance - with any great consistency. his decisions and attributes appear to be entirely based on his own agenda; saying in job that he’s on his “own side” is probably as close, for me, to true self-description as he gets as of the end of s2.

aziraphale on the other hand just doesn't seem to grasp what the greyness actually means. his intellectual analogue is very much on the dualistic, binary scale, and it's certainly not something he truly understands by the end of s2 either. whilst i do think he's able to separate heaven from god, and separate them both from angels, and then separate himself from all of it, he still holds to the belief that there is superiority in the absolute concept of good.

his comment on hell being "the bad guys" notwithstanding (which, given the events of ep5/ep6, is not a wholly incorrect assessment to be fair to him), it's his assertion that heaven remains the side "of truth, of light, of good" that gives pause. whilst he may acknowledge that it hasn't embodied this in some time, he at least believes that it was always meant to (which, to me, is odd, if you consider that 'heaven' was probably never meant to be good before the fall - because hell didn't exist to given heaven that level of definition - and was just meant to be). but aziraphale may have always considered god to be good. this is again not something supported in the narrative whatsoever; at 'best', god is completely amoral.

and even more interesting, as you said LWA, is that aziraphale is the one of the two of them that seems to land himself in predicaments that are grey, and is able to navigate it better in certain circumstances. those circumstances - the suggestion of killing the antichrist*, the giving of the holy water, the protecting of gabriel/jim, and returning to heaven to make a difference there - all pose a dilemma to aziraphale where it pulls into question what he fundamentally believes in morally. the fact that by proximity to crowley in s1 that he essentially betrays that (goes to shoot adam, gives crowley the holy water), but in s2, after some distance has been established between them, he sticks to his metaphorical guns (protects gabriel, goes to heaven), i think shows the true essence of where their dichotomy lies.

*i personally still consider this to be a grey decision, because i can see why crowley suggests it; the weighing up of one against the many. the issue i cannot reconcile is the tempting aziraphale into doing it instead of crowley... imo, don't suggest a grave, horrendous action if it's not one you're prepared to consider doing yourself, or at least communicate why you can't do it... but that's my personal take.