Analysis of Aziraphale’s characterisation in Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman.
This meta essay was originally written and published on Tumblr and Ao3 in 2019 — it’s silly and written as much for humour as it is for textual analysis, with curse words and sarcastic comments, and I’m afraid it’s not terribly academic, but I came across it as I was digging through other stuff and thought it’d be fun to repost.
I tried in vain to hyperlink my footnotes, but unfortunately Medium refused me at every turn, and it would be too dense to embed all my citations in the text — if you have the option of having a second tab open and you care about the footnotes, you might find it easier to swap between one tab for the footnotes and another for the meta proper.
The analysis in this is purely about book Aziraphale’s characterisation, not the television show’s ideas, and I’m publishing the text of the essay broadly as it was published before. The only real changes I’ve made are purely cosmetic — I had a bad habit at the time of italicising every other word for emphasis, and it makes it unreadable, so I’ve taken all the unnecessary italics out, and I’ve made a few other minor cosmetic changes to make it more readable.
A tiny CW here for affectionate discussion of the homophobic slurs used within the original text, with quotes of the slurs themselves.
With that said, enjoy!
Why is Aziraphale so gay?
Short answer: because he’s just Like That.
Long answer:
Listen. I… adore Aziraphale. I just think he’s neat.
There’s a variety of like, takes on his character that I’ve noticed across fanworks and the like, but one of the most baffling, for me, is always this idea that Aziraphale genuinely is as innocent as he appears, that he’s a naïf caught unawares by innuendos and sexuality, and, most confusingly of all, that he doesn’t know exactly how gay he comes across as.
There’s often an element of comedic obliviousness in Crowley and Aziraphale not really realising how gay they come across as a unit, and that’s just because of the complications of their personal relationship and how impossible it would be to describe to humans, who have such a simplistic view of the world, but…
As individuals, though, it’s different.
Listen, both Crowley and Aziraphale have chosen their own specific artifices in order to blend in with the world around them, and they’ve both chosen elements of human costume that fit about them, mask their true natures.
Let’s look at Anthony J. Crowley, apparently a flash young man with expensive tastes.
This fits in with the way he generally chooses to attire himself, in the sleek, skinny black suits[1], in his snakeskin shoes[2], with the sunglasses he wears all the time[3], but it also goes up with a few other things, like his adoration of gadgets. He has the watch of “a rich deep sea-diver”, he has the sexiest pen on the planet[4], he has a “sleek computer”[5], and his apartment?
Oh, his apartment is a minimalist’s dream, and a human person’s fucking nightmare:
“Crowley’s London flat was the epitome of style. It was everything that a flat should be: spacious, white, elegantly furnished, and with that designer unlived-in look that only comes from not being lived-in.
This is because Crowley did not live there.”
Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 253). Transworld. Kindle Edition.
I just… I love that passage a lot, because it speaks a lot to Crowley’s general aesthetics — he favours clean, sleek lines; he likes black and white; he likes things to be shiny.
Go back a hundred years, and I expect his tastes would be very different — he’d still have all the new bits of modern tech (like the Bentley), but he’d have very on-point fashion for the era. Crowley, in short, is a flash bastard because he likes to appear as a flash bastard, and that means keeping up with the times. He loves cute little trends, like James Bond bullet-hole stickers to put in your back window[6], and he likes to come across as being on top of everything.
Of course, a lot of this is just artifice.
There are things he is attached to, and those things actually tend to go against his sleek, modern aesthetic: my two big examples of this are the Bentley, and his plants.
With the Bentley, like… It’s a 1916 Bentley. Yes, it’s an expensive car, but it doesn’t look sleek and sexy compared with the Porches and Teslas that A.J. Crowley, the human, would probably favour — a car like that takes maintenance, and work, and is actually pretty difficult to drive, and the sort of young man that A.J. Crowley is probably wouldn’t bother with it except sometimes.
And the plants? I mean, the way Crowley looks after his plants, it’s so revealing. This whole thing about an otherwise minimalist apartment being filled with green, verdant lushness is interesting in the 90s (he probably started the trend!). Yes, you can think about the connotations of Eden inherent, but the thing that’s interesting to me, again, is the idea of care.
Crowley cares.
A.J. Crowley is the sort of young man that can afford not to care, because he’s flush with cash and he jumps readily from trend-to-trend, but Crowley himself, he really does care and likes to maintain the little things, and he’s polite, and it’s hilarious. He pretends to be this Byronic bastard with his sexy suit, and yet when he’s late for a meeting, he jogs up, says, “Sorry!” and awkwardly waves his hand[7], because the artifice falls away. A.J. Crowley is meant to be a slick, swish bastard: Crowley has so many feelings, all the time, and just happens to also like to sink ducks.
Why does Crowley do this?
Well, because… A.J. Crowley, except for being human, is pretty much what Hell and the demons want him to be, and what he’s expected to be. He’s not supposed to care; he’s meant to be selfish and nasty at the drop of a hat. Crowley, on the other hand, cares very deeply, and there are things in the world that he loves, like his car, like his plants, like Aziraphale, like humans, like Earth — he isn’t mean to “love” anything. To Hell, love is the four-letter word.
And we know this! He didn’t mean to Fall: he just hung out with the wrong people, did the wrong things, and before he knew it, there he was down in the grass, slithering with the best worst of them!
People seem to take it as fact very easily that Crowley is very built-up in his artifice, and yet when it comes to Aziraphale, it’s amazing how many people seem to fall for his act — but of course, even Crowley falls for it half the time, and he really does know better?
Certainly, Aziraphale isn’t as in-touch with things as he probably could be if he bothered to pay any attention at all, but there’s so many elements to his demeanour, where he really puts on a specific outward appearance, and he does it for a reason.
Aziraphale is an angel of the Lord — he’s a Principality, which is comfortably in the mid-range of the celestial pecking order — and, just like Crowley, he has built up layers of artifice.
Aziraphale, as an angel, is meant to be above reproach.
He’s actually extremely defensive about being a proper angel in a way that Crowley isn’t about Hell: he gets irritable about being called occult[8]; despite being as guilty as Crowley is of pursuing human vices, he gets sharp about pointing out that they’re supposed to be above that sort of thing[9]. Of course, this is because he doesn’t want to be an angel, not really. He fits in with the angels about as well as Crowley does with the demons — he isn’t cold enough to be an angel, isn’t exacting enough, is too emotional, is too soft. This is meant to be a soldier of God, and yet when he holds a flaming sword in his hand, his first thought isn’t “With this, I can cut through the ranks of the demonic hordes!” or some other violent thought: it’s “oh, this could keep that poor lamb warm, no?”
So, let’s examine Ezra Fell, and what he looks like from the outside.
There’s only one or two aspects of physical description that we know, but one of them is a description of Aziraphale’s hands as “plump”[10], and, curiously enough, that his hands are “elegantly manicured”[11].
The former makes a good deal of sense, given what we know of Aziraphale’s dietary habits — much as he mocks Crowley’s penchant for sleep, he certainly takes on a human vice in the form of food, and he’s definitely got a sweet tooth.
One of my favourite moments is when he gets dashed with cake at young Warlock’s birthday party, and then eats some of the cake that was on his suit[12]. Like, Aziraphale, no…
The most revealing of these little nods to his capacity for food, though, I think, is when he reaches over the table and picks up Crowley’s slice of cake[13].
Like, firstly, it’s phrased as he “helped himself”, which implies a sense of familiarity with the two of them, but especially in that Crowley obviously ordered the angel food cake, but if Aziraphale feels comfortable reaching across and eating it, without even saying, “Are you gonna eat that?”, then I would guess that Aziraphale is very used to Crowley ordering things he doesn’t eat, likely because Aziraphale will, just as a matter of habit they’ve built up.
Secondly, it’s… gluttonous. Finishing his own food and then reaching for Crowley’s, and Crowley doesn’t point it out, but I just love how hedonistic Aziraphale is in this area? It’s the same with his reverence in handling books — he adores them, “worships” them, even[14], which is very unangelic indeed.
But, Johannes, you might say to me. It’s almost 2000 words into this meta, and you haven’t told me why Aziraphale is so gay, yet!
I’m getting to that.
In fact, I’m about to get to it.
His hands.
There, we’ve begun the gay part.
The revealing element of the manicure is twofold.
Firstly, getting a manicure feels nice: it’s an act of self-care, and it’s a really pleasant experience to have someone look after your hands, especially because it usually comes with a pleasant social sphere where you chat a good bit too — I would actually note that Aziraphale going to a manicurist instead of doing his hands himself makes a good deal of sense to me, in the same way that Aziraphale actually goes out and buys his clothes, rather than just miracling them onto his body.
In fact, his thought process even implies it’s somehow a moral choice to go out and buy clothes (expensive clothes!)[15], which is a hilarious fucking show of Aziraphale’s fake I’m-a-good-angel-watch-me-bend-the-concept-of-morality-to-my-will routine[16], but anyway. Aziraphale likes to give himself little, pleasurable things, and I absolutely think nice, warm, comfortable clothes (made of tweed and wool and tartan) are part of that; I think the manicure is part of that too, and I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if as well as his manicurist and his tailor, he has a regular hair salon that he goes to and stuff like that.
The thing is, these tailored elements, especially in the 90s (which was when the term metrosexual was coined, I would remind you), would have been seen as a pretty feminine (or, with men like Aziraphale, gay) thing, but like… I am 100% he knows that.
The second element of having a manicure is in the actual appearance of the thing: you look at Aziraphale’s nails, buffed to a neat polish, with even beds, perfect on every finger. He does not need to get them manicured to reach this state of being. In fact, he doesn’t need to let them grow at all! But they’re so neat that you look at his plump hands, and your brain immediately supplies the word “elegant” to his nails, which! Is interesting. Why do I think that Aziraphale knows how gay it looks, to have pretty hands? Because.
(The fact that an eleven-year-old girl clocks Aziraphale and calls him a faggot[17] isn’t really helpful from an analytical point of view, but I would like to note that it’s my favourite bit of the book, and just thinking about it cracks me the fuck up. What I will note, however, is that like.
Aziraphale does not at all act surprised that a small child just called him a homophobic slur, because a) children are closer to Hell than anyone else, b) getting called homophobic slurs is just par for the course in his line of work, and c) he then looks “desperately” at Crowley? Like, what’s Crowley supposed to do? Why did he think any of this would work? God, I love Aziraphale. What an idiot. What a hero. Man-shaped creature of my dreams.)
So, there are three things people notice about Aziraphale when he meets them. Firstly, English. If I start talking about why Aziraphale chooses to come across as English, I’m going to start talking a lot about imperialism and cold indifference pretending to be polity and affability, and that’s a whole other essay, so let’s just move neatly on. Intelligent — yes, intelligent, that’s okay. And, then, “that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide.” We know that Aziraphale isn’t actually gay, because the book tells us so: “angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort.”[18]
But…
People talk to Aziraphale, right, and it’s like there are big, blaring lights over his head that say, G A Y!! I AM GAY!!
And what lights those lights? Because it isn’t as if he flirts with people — he’s charming in a weirdly reserved, librarian-esque way and polite. Part of it is in elements of his appearance. The tweed, the tartan, the wool and knit; the elegantly-manicured hands; the way he talks, politely and in a very well-read way that makes irritating Americans go, “Oh my god, I love English people,” and then list off some Scottish landmarks they know.
And, you might say, but he acts like that because he’s old-fashioned! Like Crowley says, he doesn’t pay attention to the passage of time! He’s stuck in 1950, or stuck in the 1880s, and just doesn’t know how to act more modern! For God’s sake, he bows to people!
Fascinating that you should say that. Because, yes, in many ways, Aziraphale is stuck in the past. However, if, indeed, Aziraphale was stuck in the 1880s, or even in 1950, he absolutely would not address people the way he does, as in, every person he meets in the same affable, friendly, vaguely paternal way. The thing about language and politeness is that it changes over time, and Aziraphale talks to people in a way that a) implies great familiarity, and would have done even 100 years ago and/or b) superiority, in a way that would have made his social superiors furious 100 years ago, and in 1990, just makes people confused.
Dear, dear chap, young lady, dear lady, dear man, my dear, and so forth. This is just how Aziraphale talks to other people — it’s neatly informal, and it’s friendly, warm. It connotes age compared to those you’re talking to (which, you know, he has about 6000 years on most people, but he doesn’t look that much older).
Just from personal experience, this is a thing I notice a lot from older gay men, and especially as a gay man, it’s normally a sign that with this guy I can chill and be at home with them, especially in a gay-dominated space — addressing people like this is normally something people associate with maternity, and when an older man calls you “dear”, especially when he calls everyone “dear”, you do tend to read it as gay AF, which I’ll talk more about in a second.
Of course, some people might read it as hetero and flirtatious. This is one of those moments which I think a lot of people like, miss, because they think, oh, Aziraphale is innocent, he doesn’t always follow innuendos, but:
[Anathema] glared at Crowley. ‘I have a bread knife, you know,’ she said. ‘Somewhere.’
Aziraphale looked shocked at the implication. ‘Madam, I assure you — ’
Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (pp. 93–94). Transworld. Kindle Edition.
He knew exactly what she meant, and he didn’t bother pretending not to — he bristled and got offended, but not angry. Just shocked. And why shocked, and not angry, not defensive? Also, note how quickly “young lady” and “my dear” go out of the window — suddenly, Anathema is Madam, and they’re on equal footing.
I would say, based off this interaction, that Aziraphale’s “my dear”s and “young lady”s form the same purpose that his tweed suits and soft furnishings do, that his English demeanour does: they paint him as non-threatening. He isn’t a threat, he isn’t aggressive: he’s just a sweet librarian-esque guy, couldn’t do any harm to anybody, but he’s also an authority, and he’s naturally older than you/your superior in this conversation.
Y’ever get called “dear” by an old lady that wields passive aggression like a sword flaming with holy fire? It’s like that.
And yet as soon as Anathema implies that maybe Crowley and Aziraphale are a threat to her, he throws away that usually endearing conversational flair for something else, because if he were to call her my dear here, it wouldn’t at all come across as “I hear what you’re saying, but you’re wrong”; instead, it would come across as condescending, even lascivious, because it would be pressing that “aren’t you a little lamb, and I’m sweet but I’m in charge” thing further. It doesn’t fix things, but it does take a step back.
The fact that his exchange ends on Crowley calling Aziraphale “angel” and Anathema going “oh, they’re gay, whoops, misread that situation” is funny on its own, but kind of explains exactly why Aziraphale does that shit. Anathema feels, “realising” that these guys are gay, that she’d been “perfectly safe” the whole time[19]. Why? Because Aziraphale is a man, yes, but he isn’t a masculine man — he’s prim and soft and quiet. You trust him, almost implicitly. And Aziraphale likes that — he likes for people to think of him as non-threatening and paternal, and part of that is coming across as desexualised as possible.
Soas a gay dude, and again, talking from anecdotal experience… There are men in the gay community that are kind of “paternal” — when new gays enter a space, they take you under their wing, they help you find your footing with coming out, and they act, you know, like a dad.
From outside the community, I can understand why it’d come across as something sexual, but like, it isn’t — these men have their own sex lives but in this capacity, even if they make lascivious jokes, there’s a sense of duty and responsibility (and a lot of the time, these guys are celibate anyway because of historical contexts and overhang from the past few years, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, and it’s neither here nor there), where, you know, they want to look after other people in the community.
Any queer space is normally held up by its oldest clientele, regardless of their own gender and the like: because queer spaces so often hold people who are outcasts, you do end up with these natural mothers and fathers and parents within the community, and there’s a big focus on found family.
And so when I hear Aziraphale say, “my dear,” et cetera, I think of men I’ve known like him, especially when you consider that in the 1880s, he attended a “discreet gentleman’s club”[20], where he learned to gavotte.
The gavotte is… Cute. Apparently, there’s a 19th century column dance (no fucking idea what that is) called the gavotte, but I don’t think that’s the one Pratchett and Gaiman meant — I say this because I have searched in vain for evidence of this 19th century gavotte, mentioned in Curt Sachs’ book, The World History of the Dance (trans. by Bessie Schonberg, originally in German), and have found literally none, except for like, 5 other pages that have copied and pasted the Wiki line saying that Sachs says the actual gavotte bears no similarity to the 19th century “column dance”. So, let’s just assume they meant an old gavotte, as in the baroque dance with its root in a folk dance, naturally in line with the pastoral idea.
It’s fucking gay, lads, and I am all about it.
Putting aside what I can say about the French and their incredible contributions to gay culture as a whole, the gavotte is bouncy, it’s airy, it’s fun: you dance around the other dancers, you kick and you jump, you come close, you touch hands, you come apart again.
Gavottes (as music) as a whole kind of died off with the end of the 19th century[21], but in general, already, in the metropolis[22]… You just didn’t really do dances like that as much? Not as like, men? It would have been a fun thing for these, *coughs* discreet gentlemen *coughs* to play with, especially because the gavotte would usually include, God forbid, some women. Especially because a lot of the time, in a gavotte, there’s kissing, and we wouldn’t want to be kissing any women, now.
Here’s the full stop in the evidence section of my “Aziraphale is gay on purpose” manifesto. When Shadwell comes to Madame Tracy when Aziraphale is possessing her[23], Aziraphale says something that’s just… so funny, but so indicative of self-awareness.
So, Shadwell refers to Crowley as “the swish southern bastard in the sunglasses”[24], but to distinguish from the southern bastard, we have the southern pansy, the epithet he favours instead of Aziraphale’s name[25].
And what does Aziraphale say, when Shadwell breaks into the room, in search of a southern pansy, who he believes has been “bothering” Madame Tracey?
‘Some Southern pansy,’ he said, ‘I heard him. He was in here, suggestin’ things to yer. I heard him.’
Madame Tracy’s mouth opened, and a voice said, ‘Not just A Southern Pansy, Sergeant Shadwell. THE Southern Pansy.’
Shadwell dropped his cigarette.
(Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 304). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
So, here.
Aziraphale not only says, “It is I, who you only refer to as this,” but he capitalises it. It’s a fucking title now, and he just lays claim to it like it’s a fucking lordship. What a man(-shaped creature).
He doesn’t fuss over the sobriquet, doesn’t act offended — he knows how he comes across, he knows how Shadwell thinks of him, and it doesn’t bother him whatsoever.
Because, as I said, it’s on purpose.
Let’s talk about the discreet gentleman’s club. Why would an angel, an inherently sexless being, unless they’re making an effort, go to a gentleman’s club of this kind? What does an angel need to be in a gay bar for? Is he going there to get some?
Maybe (more power to him!), but I don’t think so.
This was in the 1880s, of course. Where was Crowley at the time? In bed, getting some sleep, because he slept in for that century[26]. So, if Crowley was in bed, asleep, who did Aziraphale have in the world? That isn’t like, an implication about the Arrangement: what I mean is that like, Crowley is Aziraphale’s enemy, but he’s also his only friend on an equal playing field with him. He doesn’t get on with any of the other angels, and who else is on his level for like, heavenly nature? Nobody. He didn’t have the other angels: there were only humans around. So he picked some humans.
And why would he pick these ones? Why would an angel pick the members of a discreet gentleman’s club to take up with? For that matter, why is he so fond of first editions of Wilde[27]? Why would an angel make the choice to present himself in the gayest way possible, so that absolute strangers meet him, and clock him as gay?
Sure, part of it is about appearing non-threatening, sure, I get that. But… That’s not all.
Let’s talk about Aziraphale and other angels.
Crowley says of the angels that they aren’t inherently virtuous, and that he’s met some who were vindictive about their smiting[28], but what we mostly know about Heaven is that it’s boring[29]. Cultivatedly boring, too. For example, despite Heaven having all the best choreographers, angels don’t dance, except Aziraphale[30]. I think that it’s telling the almost every time the narrative addresses the issue of Heaven, we’re either seeing it from a neutral POV, or it’s coming from Crowley’s.
There’s a reason we don’t see that much into Aziraphale’s head, when it comes to Heaven — his feelings there are too complicated, because we get the impression that, like Crowley, he doesn’t fit in with Heaven, but it’s not as simple as that. The narrative tells us that living alongside humans has the same effect on Aziraphale as it does on Crowley, but in the opposite direction — we can take this to mean a few things: that Aziraphale tends toward more little vices than Crowley (which, between the Gluttony, Wrath, and Greed, he probably does), just as Crowley has his unexpected virtues; that Aziraphale has begun feeling negative emotions just as Crowley feels unexpectedly positive ones; that Aziraphale, too, feels connected to humans and their humanity, more than Heaven and Hell.
But the thing is, right.
In the beginning, Crowley is a trusted enough lieutenant of Lucifer’s that they send him up to do the tempting. The first tempting, in fact! He did not so much fall as saunter vaguely downwards, and yet it was him where they were like, “Oh, Crowley’s the guy for the job, we’ll send him,” and… You know, him and Aziraphale chat.
And at the very beginning, Aziraphale’s flaw, as an angel, is that he’s too soft. He looks at Eve and Adam, and he’s overcome with sympathy for them, so much so that he puts his flaming sword to keep them warm, and then he worries about it, all afternoon, because he knows it was probably the Wrong thing to do, from Heaven’s perspective, but it was the kind thing. He couldn’t bear looking at them like that.
This is the funniest thing about Aziraphale — he’s capable of this heavenly, ethereal concentration on tasks, and he sometimes is so focused on An End Goal that sympathy goes out of the window (e.g. in accidentally killing a dove and not even noticing; in being like, “listen, maybe just kill the eleven-year-old, yeah?”), but he feels so deeply, when he does feel.
The angels do not feel.
They have duty. They are above feeling. It isn’t about sympathy: virtue isn’t about being good or kind to people. It is about doing what is Right, in the ineffable sense of Rightness or, more likely, Righteousness.
Aziraphale is reluctant to talk to Heaven. He says, outright, that he wants to talk to Crowley, but he should talk to Heaven[31]. He says he suspects he and Crowley have more in common than Heaven and Hell respectively, and like… Let’s just look at it, right. Let’s look at it.
He sets up the circle, he says the Words… And they don’t bother to answer. They don’t bother to answer, in fact, until he does it a second time. Let’s just mull this over for a second: Heaven, well-organised, and likely with barely any of their agents on Earth, where they might be corrupted, at any one time, and their guy, one of the Principalities, who was there at Eden, calls them up, and they just fucking let the phone ring, until they “eventually” answer[32].
What does that say to you?
Does it say, ah, our Aziraphale, one of our number, our unit, for we are the angels of the Lord, and we are all of one army?
Nuh-uh. No, it doesn’t.
Some notes about the way that Metatron talks to Aziraphale: initially, the Metatron doesn’t even fucking greet him. It doesn’t say, “Hello, Aziraphale,” and it doesn’t make any greeting whatsoever. It says, “Well?” in an expectant tone, and the Metatron speaks to him in “flat, dead tones”[33].
In general, the Metatron acts like talking to Aziraphale is one of the greatest chores in the known universe. Aziraphale, for his part, is not surprised by this. It isn’t that Aziraphale doesn’t notice. I will say this time and time again, and I will scream it from the rooftops and from the mountains: Aziraphale is polite in the most English way possible, which means he is well adept at sarcasm, irony, and passive aggression. He knows when people are being rude to him: the way that he normally deals with it is by pretending it isn’t happening. With most people, this is a subtle way of gaining control over the situation, but with the Metatron? No. With the Metatron, he desperately tries to believe this isn’t happening[34], and tries to pretend he doesn’t notice, because it hurts to acknowledge it.
Aziraphale is desperate to believe the best of Heaven, to believe they don’t want to let all these humans die, because that would be wrong, that would be bad, and he is reminded, painfully, dreadfully, that humans don’t matter to Heaven anymore than they do to Hell. They’re just the board on which the game is played: they don’t matter.
And how does he feel?
Bitter.
Not surprised. Not shocked. Just bitter[35].
Because the thing is, Aziraphale knows. He always knows what the Right thing to do is — just as he says at the beginning, there are things that are Right and there are things that are Wrong, but being Aziraphale, he often chooses to do the right thing instead of the Right thing. It’s too virtuous to make him worthy of Falling, but it makes him a bad angel.
This isn’t textually stated, but like…
With Crowley, you know that it’s mostly him that moved away from the demons first. He never really meant to fall in with their lot anyway — he just kind of ended up with them, and he isn’t really a demon in the sense that he’s particularly evil or sadistic. He’s just good at what he does, and imaginative in a way that demons mainly aren’t. The demons’ main complaint about Crowley is that he’s become too human, which means that in the beginning, he was fine — they think it’s him “going native” that has made him this way.
With Aziraphale…
The way that he talks to Metatron, in my opinion, is likely indicative of Aziraphale’s general interactions with other angels. He expects to be talked down to, and responds with fake cheerfulness; he makes very little mention of other angels and of Heaven in the rest of the book, except when talking about angels in the general sense; when he shows worship and reverence, it’s towards books, not to other angels, or to God Himself.
I would actually suspect, from the beginning, perhaps even before he actually gave his sword away, the other angels always knew there was something slightly off about Aziraphale. The angels, by their nature, are homogenous: either you are an angel, or you Fall, and therefore, you are a demon. Aziraphale, though, hasn’t Fallen, but he also doesn’t fall into step the way he should: he sidesteps his orders, he second-guesses the Word, and he does what he feels is right, instead of what he knows is Right.
From the beginning, I expect Aziraphale felt strangely disenfranchised amongst his own people, even though he’s never done anything specifically wrong. Even though they never see him in his private moments, or perhaps his time with Crowley, they can clock just in conversation that he is Not Like Them, and they treat him curtly, stiffly, accordingly. They probably feel awkward and uncomfortable around him, even though he isn’t doing anything unkind or unpleasant, just that he’s different. It isn’t anything he can help, either: it’s just the way that he is, and much as he might try to appear angelic in the right way, it’s impossible to keep it up, because it’s something undefinable that makes him noticeably different in conversation.
So why, indeed, would Aziraphale identify so much with gay people?
Why, indeed, would he go out of his way to present himself as a gay man? Not just as a matter of being non-threatening, then, but as a matter of kinda clicking with people like him — also subtly (or not subtly) pushed out by their own families, without being pushed out all the way. Gossiped about, and undergoing a great personal risk just while living his life, constantly worrying about presenting in the right angelic/straight way, constantly tiptoeing this line between being himself, and being disgraced, cast out by his family.
Avoiding that family, in fact, until it is absolutely necessary, and then not even flinching when he’s talked down to, because he’s so used to it.
There’s something, to me, very beautiful in the idea of Aziraphale, who knows exactly what that feels like, what that whole uncomfortable identity issue feels like, and could be embittered by it while living his human life, and instead, wears it so fucking obviously on his sleeve, and uses it to connect with humans in the same boat as him. Goes to their clubs, even, and finds his friends with them; reads poetry by men who know exactly what that disenfranchisement feels like, and were destroyed by it.
Because isn’t that Aziraphale, at his core? Not without flaws, no, because he’s so flawed, but so desperately full of feeling when it comes to the vulnerable that he throws himself out there — gives away his flaming sword, throws his heart into everything, and then throws himself in the path of Lucifer himself, because it’s the right thing to do, Rightness be damned.
God love that Southern Pansy.
Me too, for that matter.
[1] This is actually just collective headcanon, though. I combed through the book, and his suits are never described! Just that he was wearing a suit on the day of the Apocalypse, but never what his suits look like, or what colour they are. We just think, oh, black suit, because… Crowley.
[2] “… he was wearing snakeskin shoes, or at least presumably he was wearing shoes…” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 16). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[3] “‘And he wears sunglasses,’ sneered Hastur, ‘even when he dunt need to.’” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 18). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[4] “[The pen] was sleek and matt black. It looked as though it could exceed the speed limit.” Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 20). Transworld. Kindle Edition.
[5] “because a sleek computer was the sort of thing Crowley felt that the sort of human he tried to be would have. This one was like a Porsche with a screen. The manuals were still in their transparent wrapping.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (pp. 253–254). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[6] “The only time Crowley had bought petrol was once in 1967, to get the free James Bond bullet-hole-in-the-windscreen transfers, which he rather fancied at the time.” Gaiman, Neil and Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 23). Transworld. Kindle Edition.
[7] “‘Hi,’ said Crowley, giving them a little wave. ‘Sorry I’m late, but you know how it is on the A40 at Denham, and then I tried to cut up towards Chorley Wood and then — ’” Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 18). Transworld. Kindle Edition.
[8] “‘I’m not occult,’ said Aziraphale. ‘Angels aren’t occult. We’re ethereal.’
‘Whatever,’ snapped Crowley, too worried to argue.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 111). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[9] ‘You don’t need sleep. I don’t need sleep. Evil never sleeps, and Virtue is ever-vigilant.’ (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 113). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[10] “[Crowley] took the gun from the angel’s plump hand and sighted along the stubby barrel.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 103). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[11] “Aziraphale spread his elegantly manicured hands.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 47). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[12] “‘You said it was him!’ moaned Aziraphale, abstractedly picking the final lump of cream-cake from his lapel. He licked his fingers clean.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 84). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[13] “Aziraphale helped himself to Crowley’s slice of angel cake.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 71). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[14] “[Aziraphale] opened it reverently. Aziraphale was an angel, but he also worshipped books.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 119). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[15] “Angels had certain moral standards to maintain and so, unlike Crowley, he preferred to buy his clothes rather than wish them into being from raw firmament. And the shirt had been quite expensive.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 103). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[16] He does this a lot, but my other favourite point of him doing this is when it’s literally the end of the world, and he says to Metatron that doing some business stuff is a matter of “probity, not to say morality” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 249). Transworld. Kindle Edition.), which is insane, and I love him.
[17] “‘You’re rubbish,’ said Warlock. ‘I wanted cartoons anyway.’
‘He’s right, you know,’ agreed a small girl with a pony tail. ‘You are rubbish. And probably a faggot.’
Aziraphale stared desperately at Crowley. As far as he was concerned young Warlock was obviously infernally tainted…” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 76). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[18] “Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide. Two of these were wrong; Heaven is not in England, whatever certain poets may have thought, and angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort. But he was intelligent.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (pp. 167–168). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[19] “‘Can we get on?’ said Crowley. ‘Goodnight, miss. Get in, angel.’
Ah. Well, that explained it. She had been perfectly safe after all.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett Terry. Good Omens (p. 95). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[20] Aziraphale had learned to gavotte in a discreet gentlemen’s club in Portland Place, in the late 1880s…” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 262). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[21] Apparently, the scherzo took over.
[22] Assuming they meant the Portland Place in London, and not the one in Dublin, but based on the way it’s phrased as “in Portland Place” with no further explanation I would assume London.
[23] I know he wouldn’t like me calling it “possession” but that’s what it fucking is, even if you’re an angel. “Ethereal”, not “occult”, my arse.
[24] “The other one, the swish southern bastard in the sunglasses, was — Shadwell suspected — not someone he ought to offend.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 245). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[25] Pansy is like, one of my favourite homophobic slurs? I just want that down for the record, it isn’t relevant to anything, I just think it’s like, in my top three, maybe even my top two.
[26] “He’d slept right through most of the nineteenth century, for example. Not because he needed to, simply because he enjoyed it.” Gaiman, Neil. Good Omens (p. 38). Transworld. Kindle Edition.
[27] “He had a penchant for Wilde first editions.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 49). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[28] “Some angels weren’t paragons of virtue; Crowley had met one or two who, when it came to righteously smiting the ungodly, smote a good deal harder than was strictly necessary. On the whole, everyone had a job to do, and just did it.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry). Good Omens (p. 259). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[29] “But Crowley remembered what Heaven was like, and it had quite a few things in common with Hell. You couldn’t get a decent drink in either of them, for a start. And the boredom you got in Heaven was almost as bad as the excitement you got in Hell.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 23). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[30]“Firstly, angels simply don’t dance. It’s one of the distinguishing characteristics that marks an angel. They may listen appreciatively to the Music of the Spheres, but they don’t feel the urge to get down and boogie to it. So, none. At least, nearly none. Aziraphale…” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 262). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[31] “He ought to tell Crowley. No, he didn’t. He wanted to tell Crowley. He ought to tell Heaven.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 246). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[32] “Eventually a bright blue shaft of light shot down from the ceiling and filled the circle.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 247). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[33] “‘Well done,’ said the voice, in flat, dead tones. ‘There doesn’t have to be any of that business with one third of the seas turning to blood or anything,’ said Aziraphale happily. When it came, the voice sounded slightly annoyed. ‘Why not?’ it said.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 248). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[34] “Aziraphale felt an icy pit opening under his enthusiasm, and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening.” (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 248). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
[35] ‘Thank you,’ said Aziraphale. The bitterness in his voice would have soured milk. ‘I’d forgotten about ineffability, obviously.’ (Gaiman, Neil & Pratchett, Terry. Good Omens (p. 248). Transworld. Kindle Edition.)
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