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Application take 2~
Aug. 14th, 2019 05:54 pmPlayer: Meg
Contact: classylassy at gmail
Age: over 30 and accelerating!
Current Characters: None
Character: Aziraphale
Age: over 6000 years
Canon: Good Omens (book)
Canon Point: Post book
Background: Aziraphale is an angel. Quite literally. He's one of God's creatures, a Principality, Guardian of the Eastern Gate, and so forth. He believes in God's ineffable plan for humanity and trusts God's will.
...well.
That's how it was supposed to be.
In reality, he's very aware that God has done (or allowed) some highly questionable things, and his demon counterpart, Crowley, has helped him with the questioning. Crowley isn't responsible for all of that, though. The first time they meet, it's not long after Crowley successfully tempted Eve with the apple and then Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden.
Aziraphale, obedient servant of God and God's will, gives them his flaming sword because he feels sorry for them.
In the next few thousand years, Aziraphale is Heaven's main representative on Earth. He has a human body, which is not immune to hurt and so forth, but he has the divine ability to heal said body and to keep it going long past a normal human's lifespan.
He becomes friends with Crowley, who's Hell's main representative on Earth. They establish an Arrangement out of pragmatism. If there are miracles and sins to be accomplished in the same area, then isn't it easier for one of them to do both and then nip back home? It's the same net effect. As long as they send the right memos to their respective head offices and make themselves look good, one with the wiles, and one with the thwarting of said wiles, then it's fine.
There's pain; of course there is. Aziraphale does actually care about humanity, and he doesn't like to see people get hurt, and at times it's unavoidable.
As they're each the only person who has a fair idea about what the other's going through, their relationship strengthens. They still don't entirely trust each other (Aziraphale has less trust than Crowley, because Aziraphale still thinks Heaven is largely good) but they rely on each other. They frequently meet up to feed ducks, or to go to tea.
It's quite a nice existence, really. Up until Hell sends the Antichrist to be born on Earth, triggering the Apocalypse, a war which Heaven and Hell will play out (Aziraphale is convinced Heaven will win, initially). It means the end of their existence, too.
So he and Crowley join forces at last, formally, neither one aligned to their home offices, and help save the world.
Crowley niggles at him during the course of the book, from their very first conversation about Adam and Eve being thrown out of the Garden of Eden, through to instances such as talking about who’ll win the war between Heaven and Hell and why Aziraphale really shouldn’t want it to happen at all. Aziraphale continues to believe that Heaven is basically good and that he’ll go along with it, but in specific cases he will accept that Crowley’s actually right.
They’re both somewhat horrified when Crowley receives word that the Antichrist is to be born into the world. Crowley arranges a baby swap so that he’ll grow up as the son of an American ambassador and his wife, but there are two babies being born at the convent that night and so this goes wrong. The Antichrist ends up going home with a couple in Tadfield.
Crowley is the one to realise that they’re not watching over the correct child, after eleven years of equal access to him (they each arrange tutors and gardeners and so on to teach the child).
Aziraphale wants to believe everything’s just fine, but then he has to accept that it’s wrong. This means everything is going horribly wrong, and they have to find the real child so they can stop Armageddon.
Aziraphale wants to be the nice one (more details in the Personality section) but cannot; he has to be ruthlessly pragmatic at times. This includes suggesting that the child be killed so that humanity can be saved. They don’t need to have a war at all! But Heaven, through the Metatron, tells him no, they want to win the war. Not avoid it.
This messes up much of what Aziraphale has believed – for millennia. He’s always believed that Heaven is Good and Hell is Bad and so of course everything that Heaven does is correct. He realises that he should have told Crowley that he’d found the child before he’d told Heaven anything. He realises that he should have trusted Crowley first.
Talking to the Metatron means having a circle of power in his bookshop. He is interrupted by Shadwell while this is still operational. Shadwell believes that he is a demon that Shadwell can exorcise, and in trying to convince him otherwise Aziraphale walks through the circle. That discorporates him, leaving him as only a spirit, and a fire starts in the bookshop to burn it down.
Finding out that Heaven wants war shatters him, but he comes out of it furious and ruthless and determined to find a way to keep humanity as it is. He has always worked with Crowley in various ways, and now he’s much more committed to being with him and to trusting him. He finds a willing body (Madame Tracy, Shadwell’s landlady and eventual romantic partner) to house him until Adam (the Antichrist) separates him into his own body again.
Everyone converges on Tadwell, where Adam lives. It takes Crowley some effort to get there thanks to the demons he has to stop. In the course of getting through various human and supernatural barriers, Crowley’s Bentley catches on fire and he keeps it together purely through force of will.
Together, with Adam and with help from others too, they find a way to stop the war.
The epilogue shows him and Crowley basically back to how things have been for a long time, largely thanks to Adam. The bookshop and the Bentley are back. Everything has been burned, and resettles back where it was. It’s not exactly the same. Aziraphale can’t rely on Heaven any more, and has to learn to cope without. They have a new understanding between them, where they’re on their side. If Heaven and Hell come after them, they’ll deal with it.
Personality: Aziraphale is an angel, and he likes having that structure around him. He believes in God, he believes in Heaven, he believes in the ineffable plan.
This is one of Aziraphale’s lines from very early in the book, in his first conversation with Crowley (named Crawly at the time). “There's Right, and there's Wrong. If you do Wrong when you're told to do Right, you deserve to be punished.”
He likes that structure, and he relies on it a lot emotionally – but inside, there’s something about him that questions it. He goes along with Adam and Eve getting thrown out of the Garden of Eden. But he gives them his flaming sword, which he’s very much not supposed to do, because he feels sorry for them.
This is a really big deal for him across the entirety of the book. He wants to believe, but he can’t completely. There’s part of him that feels guilt, and worry.
Another example:
“Aziraphale had tried to explain it to him once. The whole point, he'd said—this was somewhere around 1020, when they'd first reached their little Arrangement—the whole point was that when a human was good or bad it was because they wanted to be. Whereas people like Crowley and, of course, himself, were set in their ways right from the start. People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.
Crowley had thought about this for some time and, around about 1023, had said, Hang on, that only works, right, if you start everyone off equal, okay? You can't start someone off in a muddy shack in the middle of a war zone and expect them to do as well as someone born in a castle.
Ah, Aziraphale had said, that's the good bit. The lower you start, the more opportunities you have.
Crowley had said, That's lunatic.
No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.”
It’s something that Aziraphale continues to struggle with. He’s very set in his ways and finds it difficult to think outside the box.
He and Crowley have the Arrangement, which means that they divide up the work that needs to be done for both Heaven and Hell. Aziraphale canonically feels some guilt about this at times, but he’s pragmatic about it, too. This is a good example of how he can be pragmatic when he can see that something is effectively the right thing to do (even if the methods aren’t really OK). S
Similarly, they both feel uneasy about the baby Antichrist because they don’t want Armageddon to happen. Aziraphale allows himself to be persuaded by Crowley’s argument that if they have equal influence on the child, then both Heaven and Hell will be satisfied with them and then the child will be allowed to grow up basically as he/she wishes.
He does pay attention to the little things at times, such as when Crowley sinks a duck and Aziraphale complains. Crowley brings it back up. He also is more careful about Sister Mary waking up in a happy way after they get information out of her, which is something that doesn’t bother Crowley at all. He makes sure that Crowley won’t actually let anyone get killed at the retreat. When he’s at the suspected Antichrist’s birthday party and one kid grabs a gun, he turns it into a water pistol. They run over Anathema on her bicycle, and Aziraphale heals her, and fixes her bike, and even adds a puncture repair kit to it. He makes Crowley drop her home. So Aziraphale consistently shows times of doing the morally good thing even when it’s little, even though he accepts morally not great or even pretty bad things because they’re part of Heaven’s instructions.
He knows that he should be 100% behind Heaven. However, he’s not, and this galls him during the book. When the matter of the war between Heaven and Hell/Armageddon is raised, he automatically says that Heaven will win. It’s only Crowley’s desperate questioning that makes Aziraphale acknowledge out loud that he doesn’t really want that. Crowley appeals to his weak spots, he talks about how Hell has all the best composers and there are no sushi restaurants in Heaven, he talks about how Aziraphale would not be happy with a harp.
Aziraphale is not incapable of admitting to himself that he doesn’t always agree 100% with Heaven, such as when he gave away his flaming sword before he’d even met Crowley. He says that he’s not allowed to disobey. But Crowley makes him think actively about it.
Aziraphale will take little acts of petty vengeance, and will consider them acts of good, such as setting a traffic warden’s notebook on fire.
He's a
He’s fascinated by people and by Earth in general. He and Crowley have big long talks about anything and everything, and he likes to watch films and learn about things like gorillas making nests.
He tries not to worry about things, and it often takes Crowley’s questioning to make him do so. Such as the Antichrist growing up ‘too bloody normal’. It turns out that Crowley is completely right and they have the wrong child.
There’s an overall theme of Aziraphale being wilfully blind about things. He enjoys life as is, and he doesn’t want to question it, but deep down he’s often actually not OK with something that’s going on. He remains wilfully blind about technology too because he’s had no need to get involved with it. He is pretty ignorant about popular culture, including dancing and music. The only dance he knows how to do is the gavotte. He likes books. He’s in a kind of stasis like this. He’d be happy enough to remain on Earth as it is, basically forever.
He gets very excited about some visceral, fairly mundane things. He loves food and wine. He loves magic – not the miracles that both he and Crowley can perform, but actual sleight of hand magic. Even though he’s dreadful at it.
He will preach thoughtlessly as it’s automatic for him, but is thoughtful about actually doing good. An example is when they run over Anathema on the way to search for the real Antichrist. He goes perhaps over the top in healing her fracture, and not only fixing her bike but ‘improving’ it. Then he lectures Crowley about how evil contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Just after the halfway point of the book, he’s found out where the actual Antichrist is. He knows he should tell Heaven. He wants to tell Crowley. He trusts Heaven with it first, because then they can stop the war (possibly by killing the child)! It doesn’t need to happen! But then Heaven says the point is not to stop the war. The point is to win it.
And Aziraphale finally understands. Completely.
This is a good example of how he will be mercilessly pragmatic if necessary (willing to kill the kid), but also pragmatic in a good way (if humanity needs saving then he will save humanity). He likes humanity as a whole, he truly believes that Heaven should be encouraging humanity, and he doesn’t want humanity destroyed.
He’s then discorporated, but he’s not going to let that stop him. He finds a way to inhabit a willing body back on Earth.
Another example of being ruthless – he sends a sergeant somewhere unknown because they have to get past him to go stop Armageddon. (It turns out he sent him home.)
"I'm the nice one, " said Aziraphale. "You can't expect me to—oh, blast it. You try to do the decent thing, and where does it get you?" He snapped his fingers.
He then is able to use the structure of what he’s always believed to stop Armageddon. If this is all part of God’s ineffable plan, which is beyond the understanding of humanity, demons, and angels, then perhaps it’s also part of God’s ineffable plan to stop Armageddon.
Things are back to normal again at the end of the book, thanks to Adam (the Antichrist), thanks to Aziraphale and Crowley, thanks to everyone else, but really everything is also different. Aziraphale has millennia of beliefs to address, and is also concerned that Heaven will come after him.
He has a lot to figure out at this point in his canon. He’ll still be kind to people and will want to help them, but he is aware of Heaven possibly watching, and he’ll have to deal with that void where his strong belief in Heaven used to be.
Abilities:
Immortality - Aziraphale has a mortal body, and an immortal soul.
Physical endurance - doesn't really need to eat, sleep, etc. Still likes to. Would be very upset if he couldn't eat little treats now and then to keep his strength up.
Healing - on himself, and on others. Generally only what he can get away with, without people noticing.
Mind control - Aziraphale can exert small scale mind control; he can use this to interrogate, or to make people believe something different has just happened to them. He likes to be gentle about this and give them a nice memory.
Miracles - he can perform all manner of miracles, big and small, including things like fixing a broken bike or adding a bike rack to Crowley's Bentley (about which Crowley is not delighted). He tends to stick to the minor ones, as anything big can get him into trouble with Heaven, and post book, he especially doesn't want to be noticed by Heaven.
Possession - only when discorporated, so I don't expect it to happen regularly!! He can bumble around finding a mind to inhabit. This works better with consent but he doesn't have to get consent first.
Love - he can sense love on a grand scale.
Wings - he has a pair of angelic wings which are usually invisible and intangible.
Alignment: Piphron. A large part of his arc is accepting that he really doesn't trust Heaven... and accepting that he really can rely on Crowley, and perhaps he should even trust him. He wants to believe in something greater than himself, because it's easier, but also because that's how he was created. How he was made. It's very difficult for him to finally admit that he actually doesn't trust Heaven.
Other:
Aziraphale won't do anything that'd break the world and will only do things that seriously affect others with very specific consent. He doesn't want to give away his identity. I'm happy to put up a permissions post for that if you think it necessary, and/or to take nerfs.
General Sample: here and here
Emotion Sample: here
