Someone confirm for me: Aziraphale’s bookshop in the show doesn’t have a flat above, does it? It’s pretty clearly a two-story building, and the bookshop is two stories high. I suppose he could have two second stories that occupy the same space, but it seems like a lot of trouble. (There’s a lot of show fic that still has the upper-story flat, and I’m not great at pulling out visual details, but I had to do a lot of architectural research to write Peter Grant POV, so-- it’s not there, right? Which is weird because that’s a big part of my mental setting of the story.)
On his sixteenth birthday Warlock was sitting on the floor, paging through the family photo albums. He only appeared in the ones from the past four years, because it was four years ago that his family had moved to The Middle Of Fucking Nowhere, A Neighborhood Full Of Stuck-Up Assholes, New Jersey, USA, and he had run away from home. He had gone to the run-down, dark old Victorian mansion up the hill that everybody said to stay away from because it was haunted or maybe worse, because it reminded him of the bedtime stories his Nanny used to tell, and he was only twelve and scared, and he thought maybe he could camp inside until he figured out what to do next. But the wrought-iron gates in unsettling patterns had all been locked and far more solid than they looked, so he’d ended up curling up in the lee of one of the massive gateposts and crying himself to sleep.
He’d been awakened, several hours later, by a teenage girl leaning through the gate and taking a photo of him with an old Polaroid camera (that photo is his first appearance in the family albums. He looks awful, he looks several days dead, it’s the greatest photo ever taken of him.) Then she’d asked him what he was.
He’d stood up and crossed his arms and said “My name is Warlock, and someday I will grind all the kingdoms of the world beneath my feet.” And she’d given him a suddenly much more interested look and said, “Perhaps you will,” and invited him in for milk and cookies.
They were the sort of milk and cookies that kind of explained why everybody else warned their kids away from here, but he hadn’t been raised up by Lillith Astoreth just to be put off by a bit of arsenic in a bedtime snack, and the whole place just felt like … like it was the home he’d only ever had in dreams before. And somehow he’d ended up telling the girl and her family the whole story, how nothing had felt right since that awful trip to Megiddo, and then last month he’d been sick and had his blood tested and it had come out that he wasn’t his parents’ kid, not genetically, and he’d never been theirs in any way other than genetically anyway, and he was pretty sure they didn’t want him anymore.
“Well, of course you aren’t theirs!” Mr Gomez had said. “You’re a born Addams if I’ve ever seen one, boy. We must have just lost track of you a bit: the English branch of the family always has been a bit careless.”
And after that it had all just fallen into place, the way things used to just fall into place around Nanny and Brother Francis sometimes, and with about the same amount of hissing and claws, and now four years later he didn’t even know what state the Dowlings lived in anymore, but he knew in his bones he was an Addams and always would be and would always have a family he could come home to who loved him for exactly what he was.
But.
He’d come from somewhere.
Maybe Addamses were occasionally spontaneously generated out of the darkness in old deserted graveyards, but he’d still come from somewhere - and more importantly, he’d ended up with the Dowlings somehow.
And he was pretty sure that Brother Francis and Nanny Ashtoreth must have been Addamses too, because he’d met a lot of Addamses at this point, and they would have fit in perfectly and exactly, and they loved each other the consuming way that Morticia and Gomez did. And Wednesday and Pugsley agreed, and Morticia wanted a chance to grill Brother Francis on how to maximize the slug population in her garden, and Grandmama still asked for Nanny Ashtoreth bedtime stories sometimes.
Not that he had any evidence that Francis and Ashtoreth were his real parents, who’d put him with the Dowlings as some sort of creepy cuckoo child thing, and they’d just lost track of him in all the chaos around the move to the US, and they were still looking for him, but he had hopes.
So he was looking through the old family albums. He was back to the 1860s now and no luck, but if they were Addamses, there was no reason to stop so soon - a girlish-looking Grandmama was still turning up in them now and then, after all.
Icons from the Rothschild Canticles:
I wandered back to my old 3-Point Characterization game, so here are my Three Important Points of Characterization for all the important Good Omens characters
Aziraphale:
He’s just enough of a bastard to be worth liking. (And, maybe just as important: he’s the sort of bastard who is worth liking.)
He is fascinated by little things that fit other things inside them, especially when the things that fit inside them are bigger than they ought to be. That’s why he loves books: that the humans have figured out how to take two smallish pasteboard rectangles, and fit entire universes inside them, with no miracles at all, is endlessly fascinating to him. Used bookstores are the same way, only scaled up a few times. That’s why he likes his Regency silver snuffboxes too: they’re so little, and fussy, and beautiful, yet in the space inside they are full of possibility and memory. And that idea of a small, folded-up thing that somehow contains universes: it’s why he loves the Earth, and Earthly things, and wine, and humans in general, and Crowley in particular. (You’d think this would also make him interested in things like clockwork, but clockwork has the peculiar property of containing less than it ought to: all that fuss and complexity just to move a stick around in a circle! What would be the point of a clockwork universe, really, after all, it would be 90% clockwork and 10% universe.) (He’s still making up his mind about computers.)
Everybody’s first impression of him is that he is English, and intelligent, and gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide. All three of these are 100% absolutely accurate, except when they absolutely aren’t. He is very proud of all of them.
Crowley:
Deep down inside, there is a spark of goodness in him. (Okay not really all that deep.)
He gets deeply frustrated by inefficiency and bad design. Sometimes people describe him as the “only demon with any imagination”, but it’s not the sort of imagination that creates great artistic wonders out of nothing or builds gorgeous flights of fancy. It’s the sort of imagination that can look at a bunch of parts and systems, and see exactly how everything will fit together to make things happen; who can throw a galaxy out in one handful and know that every star will spin effortlessly into precisely the orbit where it belongs; who can glue one penny to a street in Soho and see exactly how the consequences will spread out across the world, one penny dropping at a time; who can turn the M25 into the Odegra without needing to use a single miracle to cheat. He is continually surprised that other people can’t do this, and continually disappointed when he trusts them to have done it well and it turns out they’re so shit at it that they don’t even understand that their plan will take 10x as long and 100x the effort for the same result as the obvious one he saw right away, and that this makes it not a good plan, and that this makes Crowley want to go off and cry. It’s why he loves the Bentley: it knows exactly what it’s made to do, and it does it in the most straightforward and elegant way imaginable. And it’s why he loves Earth, because it’s such a complicated system that he still finds new things in it every day. (You would think this would make him constantly frustrated with Aziraphale, who could be called the patron angel of not getting anything done, but part of efficiency is knowing exactly what it is that you truly want to accomplish, and when Aziraphale isn’t lying to himself about what he wants, he is extremely good at getting it in the most efficient way possible; even if it isn’t always a plan or a want that seems sensible from outside, it’s always amazing to watch it all fall into place.) (He’s still making his mind up about God’s planning abilities.)
He’s nobody special, he’s just an ordinary working person doing his best to get by. That #1 and #2 in fact are quite rare and special (even outside of Hell) has never made a dent in his conviction that this is true. (And it’s not that he hates himself; self-hate requires a conviction that you are especially bad. He doesn’t particularly think he’s less than other people, it’s just that he doesn’t ever assume he’s greater than them either, until he’s faced with overwhelming evidence that they are extraordinarily awful..)
Adam:
Adam has known his entire life that he is special and he is loved. The entire world has always whispered it in his ear, and he’s never had reason to doubt it. This is the kind of thing that can rapidly turn someone into a monster when they’re suddenly, for the first time, confronted with the possibility that maybe they aren’t special, maybe nobody actually cares. But luckily at exactly the right point in his life he was given a chance to learn that perhaps the most special thing of all is being perfectly ordinary in every way, and that’s something that nobody will ever be able to knock out from under him. (Of course he isn’t perfectly ordinary in every way and doesn’t really want to be, but a person must have something to aspire to.)
He wants to fix the world, and he knows it’s his responsibility to do it, just like it’s everyone’s. If Christ was the Christian concept of redemption personified, Adam is the Jewish concept of tikkun olam personified: he is not required to finish fixing the world himself (sure he could if he had to, that’s not the point), but neither is he free to stop trying. Any more than anyone else is.
He’s got charisma out the wahoo, and the kind of natural leadership ability that makes management consultants cry into their coffee, and absolutely no personal ambition or desire for power at all.
Warlock:
He has always known he’s loved. Which he shouldn’t, because his parents were awful and his childhood was people he cared about leaving him, one after another, but somehow early on someone planted in him the certain conviction he was loved, and he’s never been able to shake it, no matter how much evidence to the contrary.
He is special. Not necessarily in a good way, but he’s always felt like he’s something he wasn’t supposed to be, and he isn’t something he was supposed to be, and that little bits of that other self who should have (or maybe shouldn’t have) been keep bleeding into him. He can fit in perfectly well if he wants to and he tries, but sometimes he doesn’t want to and he doesn’t try and then that other self starts to seem real enough to wrap around himself like armor (or a hug).
Partly because of the above, and despite the combined efforts of a great many very wealthy humans to ruin him, he’s turned out to be (more or less) an okay kid. Which is frankly one of the greatest triumphs in this world.
Tracy:
She likes who she is. She really does. She’s confident in herself and she wouldn’t change a thing about how she has lived her life, and she doesn’t need anyone else’s approval or assurance to be happy with her life.
She’s a performer - in a lot of ways her whole life is a performance; the way she presents herself to the world, the most important skill in both her jobs. She’s good at it. She enjoys it. Putting on a performance for the world is when she feels most herself, because it is when she’s the most herself. (She is camp, I think, in the purest joyful way. Is she trans? I’d have to know more about trans history in London to really decide on this for sure. But at least she spent enough time around drag queens in the 70s to learn the true art of camp.)
She’s a good person. Deep down, she’s just good. She’s the kind of good who can take in an angel entirely and accept all that he is without missing a step. She’s the kind of good who can ask Shadwell to move in with her just because she thinks they’d both like the company, and then make it a happy way to be.
Shadwell:
He’s grown into himself, like a rootbound plant. He’s the sort of natural introvert who was okay enough with being alone that he lost all the habits and skills required to build relationships, and when he got to the point in his life where he needed them, he didn’t even know where to start, and just turned farther into himself. He’s coiled himself into a little box and decided it’s comfortable enough, he can live with it - and forgotten that leaving the box is even an option.
Despite that - where a lot of men in that situation turn angry or rotten as they turn in on themselves - instead Shadwell has turned kind, which happens sometimes too. He does not know this about himself, and most of the people who encounter him don’t know this either, because he’s not what kindness is supposed to look or sound like, but if anyone sticks around long enough to uncurl him a little - under that layer of crust and meaningless slurs, he’s kind.
He’s super ace. Everything he knows about human sexuality he learned from very old books, and he has never noticed that this was a problem, because it’s all significantly less real to him than, say, witchcraft. But the books say things like “seductiveness” exist so he takes it on faith that they do.
Anathema:
She’s a Professional Descendant, the last of a line of them, in fact. This will fuck you up.
She’s a very meticulous and detail-oriented person, which has come in handy a lot, but can also easily tip over into anxiety and panic and flailing and perfectionism and fear of success when the details start to fail her. She would like to be a big-picture person, and once in awhile she even manages it.
Her entire life is, objectively speaking, ridiculous, and whenever she’s tempted to start taking herself seriously, she remembers not to, and that’s her biggest saving grace.
Newt:
He’s bad with computers. But not in like, a magic powers, microprocessors-turn-into-dust way. Actually, he is, in theory, fairly good with computers; he has a solid understanding of the principles, he’s good with numbers and with detail work and with logic. And he can be around technology all the time without it going bad. It’s just that he’s just good enough that, sooner or later, he gets ahead of himself and is convinced he can do something he can’t, he gets excited about how well it’s going and gets sloppy, he takes the leap of misplaced confidence and then always crashlands in the most damaging way possible. And then, of course, after a certain point, he learns to expect the disaster and gets nervous and then screws up even more.
He knows how lucky he is. He knows that given the amount of expensive machinery he’s broken, he could very likely be in prison or worse, except that he’s a white straight(ish) British male with a reasonably good education and no obvious disabilities and a mum who loves him unconditionally and is financially stable enough that the worst catastrophe he’s ever had to consider is “moving back in with Mum,” and on top of that he’s had a lot of lucky chances, and a beautiful woman who really truly did want to have sex with him at least once (he double-checked). You could say #woke, but mostly he’s just thankful about what he’s had instead of bitter about what he doesn’t. And that’s rare enough among all types of people.
He is the sort of person who could very likely end up like Shadwell in forty or fifty years. What might save him is that he does, fairly often, take the ill-judged leap of faith when it’s put before him (like becoming a witchfinder, or sneaking onto a military base to stop the world from ending; like every time he tries again with a computer); and that he is thankful more than bitter; and that he met Shadwell and Shadwell saw himself in him before it was too late.
I've still been hanging out on good_omens_kink and lower_tadfield and remembering how fun kinkmemes are! I have posted a prompt about every other page pretty steadily, and so far had about 1.5 fills, which is about the number I've written, so, fair.
I am really enjoying watching the kinkmemes negotiate how to write very specific requests for characters who are canonically nonbinary and of fluid embodiment in a way that both makes sense with canon, is clear enough to get the authors what they want, and isn't going to be read as grossly offensive by any gender community at all. (I think I have come to the conclusion that this is in fact not possible - beacuse at least some of the gender communities have built their terminology around the idea that specifying is *always* offensive - but the memes seem to have achieved a fairly tolerable balance, and it's just really nice that nobody's assuming (and nobody's getting offended at being asked to clarify.) It's really nice to be on a kinkmeme were somebody replies to a request for clarification of parts with "please not maggots" and this is 100% reasonable in context. :D
Your three point characterizations just made a whole bunch of things click into place for me (not about the characters directly, so much as...personal resonance with said)
I can't speak to GO, which I read ages ago and don't remember much of, but I love the idea of three point characterization and enjoyed your post from last fall. I usually have something similar in my head when I start to write (or it develops as I write); but going forward I'm going to try to do it more systematically.
I am sometimes careful about doing to much of this, because it can end up feeling like I've pinned the characters to a wall like butterflies and they're dead. But I also, after I've been writing awhile, start to get paranoid that I'm drifting off model. So I find 'three things' a good compromise between the two.
He gets deeply frustrated by inefficiency and bad design. Sometimes people describe him as the “only demon with any imagination”, but it’s not the sort of imagination that creates great artistic wonders out of nothing or builds gorgeous flights of fancy. It’s the sort of imagination that can look at a bunch of parts and systems, and see exactly how everything will fit together to make things happen;
This characterisation of Crowley (dammit, Firefox, if I want to use British spelling I will!) is similar to my thoughts on Sauron's character, once you strip away the malice and cruelty and will to dominate and conquer. Underneath the Evil Overlord, he is a smith, engineer, and project manager of surpassing skill, who can coordinate a 3000-year long plan to bring down an overwhelmingly powerful enemy empire (Twice!), and who can plan and arrange the logistics to support an Early Medieval-level army of several hundred thousand in the field. If you know anything about Early Medieval "militaries", you know that Just Wasn't Done. (Except maybe in China, where they also understood this "logistics" thing).
Honestly, the older I get, the more I come to believe that "logistics" is THE skill. And you get a lot of bitter logisticians because so many humans are so bad at it that they don't even realize it matters.
Crowley's skill in it has been somewhat hidden because he hasn't really had a goal that he's invested in, but it's there in all the work we see him do (and it's there in how he interacts with God) and it's there in his bitter resignation at how nobody else can ever see it coming.
The management-related skills: logistics, project management, accounting (another form of logistics), managing people/leadership have, except for "leadership", been chronically underappreciated. They are rarely[*] heroes of the stories, usually background non-entities if they exist at all, or, at worst, the obstructionist bureaucratic enemy of the hero who just wants to "get 'er done" and doesn't appreciate what that involves.
[*] See Poul Anderson's The Man Who Counts for such a hero (Nicholas van Rijn), who is completely unappreciated by the character who thinks he's the hero until the very end, where The Girl points out that wanna-be hero guy wouldn't have survived the first meeting with the locals, let alone gotten anywhere, without van Rijn's diplomatic skills and organizational abilities.
Edited (punctuation is good.) 2019-08-22 01:39 (UTC)
I think a lot of the reason they end up as obstructionist enemies is that so many people in those positions in the real world aren't actually good at their jobs - I have yet to have a supervisor or manager who actually has noticeable skill, training, or talent at any of those things, because the way people get hired for those jobs doesn't find people that will actually be good at those things. Some of them learn on the job enough to rise to basically competent, most of them don't. So it's easy to stereotype them as obstacles, because usually in the real world they are.
I have occasionally encountered heroes who have those kinds of skills (like Crowley! And a lot of ship's captains, too) but that part of their skill is rarely foregrounded or a big part of their identity, other than the very occasional hero accountant in humorous fantasy.
There's been some speculation about why the Nazis recognize Crowley in the church scene, and whether he's got connections with British counter-intelligence, and someone suggested SOE:
Which is beyond perfect, given that Crowley's most provable area of competence is "fucking with large-scale infrastructure so as to cause maximum obstruction and damage to morale to the maximum number of people" (see: the M25).
a) they would have killed to recruit him; and b) he would not have been the weirdest person working for SOE, not by a long shot.
I have read a lot of fic where the bombing is presented as a last-minute miracle, but it makes much more sense with Crowley's general style and the staging of the scene and the genre it was parodying that actually he'd known what was happening for days/weeks and diverted that bomb via mundane methods (faked orders? mechanical sabotage? pilot blackmail? any of the above?) and then staged it for maximum drama.
I dunno, I'd still favour miracle as a way of reliably diverting a bomb to a precise location, given that their targeting was never that good to begin with. But there still needs to be an explanation of why the hell the Nazis have heard of him.
This could also explain how he knows about the book deal, though tbh his supernatural "Aziraphale is doing something stupid" sense seems to be pretty highly-developed.
I feel like one doesn't need a supernatural sense to know when Aziraphale is doing something stupid, one can just assume.
But idk - I think my relationship with the book has colored my view of the flashbacks, which were pretty clearly not carefully crafted to make logical and historical sense, but it's perfectly reasonable Crowley heard about Aziraphale in the Bastille through mundane means, too. He'd been in there long enough for it to have gotten out in grapevines to someone who was paying attention. (Although tbh I still root for that one to have been an elaborate roleplay scenario.)
There was that moment with the bomb where even Crowley seemed unsure it would land when and where it was supposed to, which is part of what makes me lean toward it not being a miracle. And the general inaccuracy is part of what makes it possible to fudge things like sabotage or false orders without needing a miracle, because everyone would assume it was just standard inaccuracy and not look very close (...and the inaccuracy is probably partly a result of demonic intervention anyway, it's Crowley's kind of thing.)
IIRC, there's a bit in Leo Marks's book (he was top crytographer for SOE) where he sends a memo round to other departments essentially telling them to send him all the people they were trying to get rid of for being Too Fucking Weird/Difficult. One of his best cryptanalysts liked to canter up and down the corridors pretending to be a horse.
Guy Burgess got appointed to teach a sabotage course for Section D (before it got rolled into SOE) essentially on the basis that ... he worked for the BBC? Possibly also on the basis, I like to imagine, that people looked at Walking Disaster Area Guy Burgess and went "Wow, he really knows how to Fuck Shit Up."
So, you know "A. J. Crowley is somewhat strange and wears sunglasses all the time"? "I saw A. J. Crowley without his glasses once and I think there's something wrong with his eyes"? NOT EVEN GOING TO REGISTER ON THE SCALE OF AMBIENT WEIRD. FOCUS ON THE IMPORTANT THINGS. DON'T YOU KNOW THERE'S A WAR ON?
Your third Crowley point makes me think of "He's just zis guy, you know?". It's his most British trait. No one special, no one to take notice of, just quietly doing the best job he can. A tradesman.
...Without consulting me, my brain has just mapped Aziraphale/Crowley onto Polgara/Durnik and I'm going to go try to think about anything else.
Yes! Crowley as ordinary tradesman is important. (I think that's one of the reasons why the Raphael stuff is an active turnoff for me.)
And the reason his "general inconvenience" schemes always backfire on him is that he never thinks to factor himself into them as anything other than just another ordinary person making do.
Me too, since I have no idea! Maybe he'll have to go all the way back to the portrait hall. (Maybe there's a portrait of some old Addams who has Crowley trapped in a gazing-glass...)
I picked up a headcanon somewhere that the reason the Addamses are so sprawling and diverse is that they just adopt anybody who is clearly and Addams, geneaology be damned, and I love it so much.
And by that rubric, Warlock is *clearly* an Addams.
Someone confirm for me: Aziraphale’s bookshop in the show doesn’t have a flat above, does it? It’s pretty clearly a two-story building, and the bookshop is two stories high.
Hard to judge the height of the building; from production photos, they definitely only built two storeys in physical reality, but I don't recall if we ever see higher than that in the external shots to know if they CGI-ed in more.
But the (two storey) bookshop interior seems to have a huge skylight, which indicates there can't be something above much of it.
Also given that (at least in book-canon) Aziraphale doesn't sleep, I refuse to believe he owns that much physical space and hasn't filled it with books. And it looks from multiple scenes as if the bookshop itself is both his office and his comfortable-hanging-out-and-drinking-with-friend space.
I'm pretty sure I found show footage that makes it clear it's only two stories (which seemed kind of odd actually because the kind of building it's supposed to be is usually at least three. But then it also consistently gets described as a Victorian building, which it obviously cannot be.)
In the book he has a "disused" flat upstairs that is mostly book storage, because it came with the building, and there is a lot of fic that makes much of turning that space into something livable. But the show bookshop seems to be much more architecturally set up as a library/bookshop first and foremost. I suppose it's possible he has a flat attached that is not part of 3D space, but again, why would he?
It’s a fairly large bookshop; part of the second floor could be a small efficiency flat? It needn’t even have electricity or running water, since he’s apparently had it since the late 18th century, unless there have been Zoning Inspectors involved at some point. A room with a pallet, wardrobe, and a shitton of books, at the top of a rickety stair leading up from the back room of the shop. All his tea making stuff is downstairs so it doesn’t even need a hot plate or sink, though he probably has a mirror.
Also if you just want it for post-Armageddoff curtainfic or something, Adam could totally have added it.
You could even fit a small 2- or 3-room flat along one of the sides of the second story (or even a larger flat, sort of in a square like a castle around a courtyard -- so much room for book storage) without getting in the way of the skylight and book-lined atrium. And that's a fairly tall first floor, too, easily 12 feet.
I am glad you are invested in this enough to take screenshots!
But now I want a good shot of the interior to see if the balconies are backed by wall or window. If there are rooms back there they'd be narrow, but that could make a really cool flat actually... I wish the google results weren't flooded with results from the pop-up, which is a completely different layout.
Well, here's the best we got, though if you could get your hands on the TV Companion book, there might be more helpful set photos since it has a whole chapter on the bookshop. As near as I can tell the second floor has shelves all around the central atrium in a circle, with a very slim walkway and maybe a foot-high guardrail (or it could just be stacks of books) along the ledge. I don't at all see how one gets up there; there are a few shots that hint at something like wrought iron spiral stairs, but nothing's ever shown clearly. Maybe you have to fly? There's no indication that it would work with one of those old library rolling ladders. In any case, it doesn't really look like there are aisles leading back towards the exterior walls, so if you want to interpret it as having a weird old castle-ish flat around the central court, or whatever, there's nothing to contradict it. There must be some kind of rooms between the circular shelves and the windows, because when the place burns, flames are pouring out of the second floor windows.
I didn't realize till I was looking at the screenshots that the walls are helpfully labeled with the cardinal directions. The shop entrance is to the north, and I don't think we ever get a great shot of it.
The "back room" seems to be just a section of the shop, poorly hidden behind some bookshelves, in the eastern quadrant, with late 19th/early 20th c cupboards and kitchen-looking surfaces and tea things, the gramophone, an old computer, lots and lots of papers and cubbys and other junk, and one of at least two (?I think?) workdesks that he has scattered around the place. That's also where there's the small table and two chairs where they drink. The couch Crowley lounges on is somewhere around there, but it doesn't seem to be exactly IN the "back room" part of the shop -- though it isn't really easy to follow how exactly space works during the drunk sequence, and he moves around a lot, and the couch doesn't show up again until the fire which also makes it hard to parse space, so it could be sort of up against a shelf between the atrium and the "back room". Anyway, it's a very open plan, and the "back room" isn't really a separate space from the rest of the shop.
HAVE FUNNNNN
his point is - dolphins!
no one has a copy of agnes nutter's book! and there's no need to be rude about it!
All right, here’s my best guess at the show-canon bookshop floor plan. Click to embiggen. The south quadrant is a huge contradictory mess and I can’t swear I’ve got it right, but I’m fairly sure of the rest of it. And I do think I finally found the spiral staircase, in the background of the last scene of ep 1! I’m not sure exactly what’s going on in the s and e corners, both of them seem to have walls that don’t match up with the exterior, but the angles we get on them (especially poor in the s) don’t show any doors leading to possible other rooms. Shrug emoji!
Not to scale, not an exhaustive representation of bookshop contents, etc.
Hopefully this is useful to someone because I don’t think I actually need it for the stuff I’m currently working on ...
(Oops- the sigil in the center should be rotated by 45 degrees... this one probably opens a portal to hell instead, or something.)
Wow! That's very complete. And it does look like there aren't windows on the balconies, which means that either there are rooms behind the shelves, or he just covered all the windows with books.
....I don't know if anything I'm working on will need this level of detail either. But you should make it a top-level post so if people do need it they don't have to stalk my comments to find it. :P
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lower_tadfield and remembering how fun kinkmemes are! I have posted a prompt about every other page pretty steadily, and so far had about 1.5 fills, which is about the number I've written, so, fair.
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Thank you.
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This characterisation of Crowley (dammit, Firefox, if I want to use British spelling I will!) is similar to my thoughts on Sauron's character, once you strip away the malice and cruelty and will to dominate and conquer. Underneath the Evil Overlord, he is a smith, engineer, and project manager of surpassing skill, who can coordinate a 3000-year long plan to bring down an overwhelmingly powerful enemy empire (Twice!), and who can plan and arrange the logistics to support an Early Medieval-level army of several hundred thousand in the field. If you know anything about Early Medieval "militaries", you know that Just Wasn't Done. (Except maybe in China, where they also understood this "logistics" thing).
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Crowley's skill in it has been somewhat hidden because he hasn't really had a goal that he's invested in, but it's there in all the work we see him do (and it's there in how he interacts with God) and it's there in his bitter resignation at how nobody else can ever see it coming.
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[*] See Poul Anderson's The Man Who Counts for such a hero (Nicholas van Rijn), who is completely unappreciated by the character who thinks he's the hero until the very end, where The Girl points out that wanna-be hero guy wouldn't have survived the first meeting with the locals, let alone gotten anywhere, without van Rijn's diplomatic skills and organizational abilities.
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I have occasionally encountered heroes who have those kinds of skills (like Crowley! And a lot of ship's captains, too) but that part of their skill is rarely foregrounded or a big part of their identity, other than the very occasional hero accountant in humorous fantasy.
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https://fluffmugger.tumblr.com/post/186036510507/anotherhawk-awesome-fan-number-one
Which is beyond perfect, given that Crowley's most provable area of competence is "fucking with large-scale infrastructure so as to cause maximum obstruction and damage to morale to the maximum number of people" (see: the M25).
a) they would have killed to recruit him; and b) he would not have been the weirdest person working for SOE, not by a long shot.
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I have read a lot of fic where the bombing is presented as a last-minute miracle, but it makes much more sense with Crowley's general style and the staging of the scene and the genre it was parodying that actually he'd known what was happening for days/weeks and diverted that bomb via mundane methods (faked orders? mechanical sabotage? pilot blackmail? any of the above?) and then staged it for maximum drama.
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This could also explain how he knows about the book deal, though tbh his supernatural "Aziraphale is doing something stupid" sense seems to be pretty highly-developed.
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But idk - I think my relationship with the book has colored my view of the flashbacks, which were pretty clearly not carefully crafted to make logical and historical sense, but it's perfectly reasonable Crowley heard about Aziraphale in the Bastille through mundane means, too. He'd been in there long enough for it to have gotten out in grapevines to someone who was paying attention. (Although tbh I still root for that one to have been an elaborate roleplay scenario.)
There was that moment with the bomb where even Crowley seemed unsure it would land when and where it was supposed to, which is part of what makes me lean toward it not being a miracle. And the general inaccuracy is part of what makes it possible to fudge things like sabotage or false orders without needing a miracle, because everyone would assume it was just standard inaccuracy and not look very close (...and the inaccuracy is probably partly a result of demonic intervention anyway, it's Crowley's kind of thing.)
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Hey, he's not always getting double-crossed by Nazis or being locked in the Bastille! Significant periods of time are spent reading! Or eating!
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Guy Burgess got appointed to teach a sabotage course for Section D (before it got rolled into SOE) essentially on the basis that ... he worked for the BBC? Possibly also on the basis, I like to imagine, that people looked at Walking Disaster Area Guy Burgess and went "Wow, he really knows how to Fuck Shit Up."
So, you know "A. J. Crowley is somewhat strange and wears sunglasses all the time"? "I saw A. J. Crowley without his glasses once and I think there's something wrong with his eyes"? NOT EVEN GOING TO REGISTER ON THE SCALE OF AMBIENT WEIRD. FOCUS ON THE IMPORTANT THINGS. DON'T YOU KNOW THERE'S A WAR ON?
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Your third Crowley point makes me think of "He's just zis guy, you know?". It's his most British trait. No one special, no one to take notice of, just quietly doing the best job he can. A tradesman.
...Without consulting me, my brain has just mapped Aziraphale/Crowley onto Polgara/Durnik and I'm going to go try to think about anything else.
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And the reason his "general inconvenience" schemes always backfire on him is that he never thinks to factor himself into them as anything other than just another ordinary person making do.
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And by that rubric, Warlock is *clearly* an Addams.
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Hard to judge the height of the building; from production photos, they definitely only built two storeys in physical reality, but I don't recall if we ever see higher than that in the external shots to know if they CGI-ed in more.
But the (two storey) bookshop interior seems to have a huge skylight, which indicates there can't be something above much of it.
Also given that (at least in book-canon) Aziraphale doesn't sleep, I refuse to believe he owns that much physical space and hasn't filled it with books. And it looks from multiple scenes as if the bookshop itself is both his office and his comfortable-hanging-out-and-drinking-with-friend space.
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In the book he has a "disused" flat upstairs that is mostly book storage, because it came with the building, and there is a lot of fic that makes much of turning that space into something livable. But the show bookshop seems to be much more architecturally set up as a library/bookshop first and foremost. I suppose it's possible he has a flat attached that is not part of 3D space, but again, why would he?
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Also if you just want it for post-Armageddoff curtainfic or something, Adam could totally have added it.
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But now I want a good shot of the interior to see if the balconies are backed by wall or window. If there are rooms back there they'd be narrow, but that could make a really cool flat actually... I wish the google results weren't flooded with results from the pop-up, which is a completely different layout.
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I didn't realize till I was looking at the screenshots that the walls are helpfully labeled with the cardinal directions. The shop entrance is to the north, and I don't think we ever get a great shot of it.
The "back room" seems to be just a section of the shop, poorly hidden behind some bookshelves, in the eastern quadrant, with late 19th/early 20th c cupboards and kitchen-looking surfaces and tea things, the gramophone, an old computer, lots and lots of papers and cubbys and other junk, and one of at least two (?I think?) workdesks that he has scattered around the place. That's also where there's the small table and two chairs where they drink. The couch Crowley lounges on is somewhere around there, but it doesn't seem to be exactly IN the "back room" part of the shop -- though it isn't really easy to follow how exactly space works during the drunk sequence, and he moves around a lot, and the couch doesn't show up again until the fire which also makes it hard to parse space, so it could be sort of up against a shelf between the atrium and the "back room". Anyway, it's a very open plan, and the "back room" isn't really a separate space from the rest of the shop.
HAVE FUNNNNN
his point is - dolphins!
no one has a copy of agnes nutter's book! and there's no need to be rude about it!
obvious scene is obvious
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Not to scale, not an exhaustive representation of bookshop contents, etc.
Hopefully this is useful to someone because I don’t think I actually need it for the stuff I’m currently working on ...
(Oops- the sigil in the center should be rotated by 45 degrees... this one probably opens a portal to hell instead, or something.)
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....I don't know if anything I'm working on will need this level of detail either. But you should make it a top-level post so if people do need it they don't have to stalk my comments to find it. :P
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"please not maggots", heee!
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