#aromantic crowley

[ineffable-kelpie]

Rating: T

Wordcount: 51,149

Chapters: 12/12

Summary:

(A sequel to Smoke and Mirrors)

Every muscle in Crowley’s body clenched as the previous day came rushing back. Not a dream. Aziraphale was real, solid, and alive. He was here, he was back, he was…

He was currently making himself a little too much at home in Crowley’s personal space.

(Aziraphale has unknowingly spent over a year on a simulated Earth, building a relationship with an imaginary version of Crowley. Crowley has spent that time alone, miserable, and unsure if he'd ever see his best friend again. Now together and safe once more, they learn how to navigate the new reality in which they find themselves.)

#good omens fanfic #angst #relationship negotiation #unreality tw #unreality #aromantic crowley #asexual aziraphale #asexual crowley #cyankelpie's fic #reality check #fact and fantasy #IT'S FINALLY GOING UP YALL #it's been 84 years #not actually it's only been like one but also IT'S BEEN OVER A YEAR #AND THERE'S STILL ONE MORE PART TO THE SERIES AFTER THIS #this will probably be the longest thing I write in a while #I had this idea in December 2021 it's eaten over a year of my life #I'm being dramatic it's not like I didn't take breaks to work on other things #still #I will be glad when it's all done and posted #anyway updates will be every Friday so you know what today is #FAN #FIC #FRIDAYYYYY #there's still a little time before Saturday where I am #nailed it

[vulpinesaint]

seventy three fics in the aromantic crowley tag on ao3 i love you. others have seen my vision... we are united in being so fucking correct...

#valentine notes #fanfic #aro crowley #aromantic crowley #how was i tagging it.

[vroomvroomwee]

Lgbtq people saying it's queerbaiting because two people didn't kiss or fuck on screen has the same vibes as cisgender heterosexual people saying two characters aren't gay and completely missing romantic undertones just because the two didn't kiss or fuck on screen

Aphobia is just recycled homophobia

#ace #aro #aromantic #asexual #aromanticism #asexuality #queer #gay #lgbtq #lgbtqia #is this about good omens? #yep #good omens #goodomens #crowley #aziraphale #ineffable husbands

[inhonoredglory]

Defining Ineffable Love (or, Aziracrow Learn the Rules of Romance)

(In response to this ask about ineffables and asexuality)

One of the major threads this season was Aziraphale and Crowley asking themselves what exactly is their relationship. Not what it is in terms of how much they love each other. (That's a given.) But what it is in terms of the human implications of their love.

Crowley and Aziraphale definitely come at the relationship with different perspectives, in terms of what they’re willing to admit to the relationship being. I don’t think we can entirely interpret it in human terms. –David Tennant (source)

For 6000 years, they’ve never put a name on their relationship. They didn’t, because they’re inhuman, genderless, sexless beings and they didn’t grow up (as it were) with labels. And even when they did learn them, they couldn’t say it was love, because admitting that was a death sentence.

All of Aziraphale’s heart eyes and pining could live comfortably in his mind if he never admitted what that said about him as an angel (trauma compartmentalization). Crowley tries desperately to be cruel and nasty to add white noise around the blatant reality of his constant loyalty to Aziraphale. If you don’t put a word to it, it’s not real and they can’t punish you.

After the Not-pocalypse, for all rights and purposes, Aziraphale and Crowley chose humanity as their identity. We see Aziraphale “playing house” in various human roles (as a landlord, a private eye, a magician).

We even see Crowley intentionally taking on human behavior to handle emotional issues: “Just breathe, that’s what humans do.” They’re slowly and intentionally enculturating themselves into the world they want to belong––earth.

Yet it’s setting up Maggie and Nina that makes Aziraphale and Crowley start thinking about their relationship as a human construct.

Because fundamentally, Aziraphale and Crowley are not human. Like Neil Gaiman tells us constantly, they can’t be defined in human terms when it comes to gender and sexuality. They can shift and move through each and any of those markers at will, purely for the pleasure of the thing: “angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort.”

IMO that makes them originally asexual, in the sense they were created without the need for sex. And it makes them fundamentally transgender and genderfluid, because while on earth, their sexless, eldritch spiritual bodies take on human, gendered forms and clothing. What gender (and sexuality) they identify with while on earth varies through the eras. Crowley definitely has a fluid gender identity, while Aziraphale appears to have settled on gay man (aka THE southern pansy) for his internal typology (although all of these identities are subject to change).

In the midst of all this fluidity, it’s no wonder Aziraphale and Crowley haven’t thought of their relationship in human terms before. There’s just so much different in them and their bodies than what they see in humanity. And there are no books and songs that show the kind of love they have, in the malleable, sexless bodies they have, with the background they have; it’s all ineffable.

Aziraphale and Crowley didn’t start out thinking they were in a romantic relationship. Whatever feelings they had were long repressed, redefined, and shuttled away. But they did love each other, without question. And it was that love which scared them, because it was bigger than anything they saw among humans, a love that was beautiful and blasphemous and unfathomable.

Kinda like what David Duchovny said about Mulder and Scully in The X-Files, “I don’t know if they’re in love. In a way, their relationship is deeper than that, because they cannot live without each other.”

Now take this profound, ineffable love and drop it into the little boxes and labels human culture has created for itself.

Full disclosure: I’m an asexual demiromantic person in a queerplatonic relationship, so I’ve done a fair bit of research on what romance is and how the rituals of romance are, in many ways, social inventions that vary from culture to culture. There’s love and then there’s romance, and they don’t always overlap. So my interpretation of Aziraphale and Crowley comes through this lens and the fact that Neil Gaiman has affirmed the validity of an ace-spec reading on our ineffables.

Which brings me back to my thesis: That only now are Aziraphale and Crowley thinking of themselves as a romantic couple, precisely because they are interfacing with humans and taking on their social rules.

I like this one asexual person’s description of their experience, which feels very much like our ineffables (from a very good article, I def recommend):

If there is a border between friendship and romance, then in my internal landscape, it goes right through a misty forest where no one has ever bothered to place signs.... Neither of us had intended to start anything even vaguely romantic, but the activities we did and the intense kind of immediate connection we had was coded as romantic in our culture.

That’s what Crowley realizes when Nina confronts him about his relationship to Aziraphale.

“It looks like that from here.” What Crowley and Aziraphale share is beyond definition, but Nina cannot imagine the anything beyond the human labels she was taught. The tragedy of an everlasting love is that it can only be conveyed properly to other humans if it is cast in such small human words––partner, boyfriend, husband.

Because when Crowley denied those human roles for Aziraphale, Nina slid down the path of thinking Aziraphale was just his “bit on the side,” because there were no labels left she could imagine for them. If you don’t put a word to it, it’s not real.

That’s the purpose of labels, to culturally validate a person's identity. Labels, of course, DO NOT create reality; people's experiences are always real, in all their varied ineffability. But labels allow a space for culture (ie other humans and political and legal society) to recognize formally your lived reality.

So Crowley started really thinking about him and Aziraphale, about the ineffable love between them and realized that in human terms, those would be the things he’d call Aziraphale, because those were the words that gave Aziraphale that place of importance in his life.

But with that realization comes all the human trappings and behavioral patterns around those words (the candlelit dinners, dramatic rescues, drinks at the Ritz, etc.) which Crowley had never thought of before, and yet… maybe romance is what he and Aziraphale have been doing all along.

That’s why this season centered so much around Aziraphale and Crowley using cultural artifacts (film and literature) to understand romance, because romance is so deeply socially-defined.

Aziraphale himself has been leaning hard into the romantic social cues (he’s more well-read in the cultural trappings of romance than Crowley is), especially post-Blitz. But when he watches Maggie and Nina dancing, he works up the courage to do something with Crowley that’s even more explicitly loaded as “traditionally romantic” than anything he’s done up to that point.

Because while risking their lives for each other and defying everything for each other is love in its purest form, dancing (specifically in Jane Austen’s world) is a public performance coded for potential marriage partners. It's an intimate ritual of the entire body. (And in British slang, dancing has been used as a euphemism for sex.)

Crowley's "We don't dance" is really telling, because it shows Crowley’s awareness of the unknowable devotion between them vs the human roles Aziraphale is asking him to fill, specifically its physical aspects. Aziraphale is asking to make their relationship more public, more physically explicit, more coded as romantic in a setting specifically intended to couple individuals.

While Maggie and Nina inspired Aziraphale to progress their relationship into a publicly physical direction, Maggie and Nina inspired Crowley to think of the emotional implications of their human roles: the commitment, security, and monogamy of a husband, a partner, an us.

That’s what he decides after Maggie and Nina confront him in the end. “You never say what you’re really thinking.” He wants to codify his relationship so they each become responsible to one another. Aziraphale has always been his soulmate, the one he could always rely on. But he wants to place a word and a role to their love that will bring with it Aziraphale’s commitment and dedication to him.

And that's another reason why Crowley kisses Aziraphale, because he knows Aziraphale was willing to make their relationship physical, and he wants that, too. To consummate this bond in the way humans do.

But Crowley doesn’t really know how to kiss; he’s not as worldly as he makes out to be. (It’s Aziraphale who owns the gun, and Crowley who’s never fired one.) He uses the kiss as a tool to get across to Aziraphale what he wants for them, in the physical language Aziraphale has been using, because "one fabulous kiss and we're good," right?

But it doesn’t work, because real life and real emotions don’t work like that; life and love don’t follow a script, despite the novels and plays and songs.

Aziraphale and Crowley spent this entire season trying to figure out what their relationship is and what they wanted out of it, trying to make sense of the unfathomable thing they share and the human implications of it, and not quite landing on the same page.

Part 2 of this Analysis, covering a correction in Crowley’s statement (“You don’t dance”) and the further implications of dancing/sex.

#please see the part 2 listed at the end for an analysis Crowley’s “you don’t dance #good omens #good omens 2 #ineffable husbands #go s2 meta #go meta #good omens meta #queer #asexuality #asexual #aromantic #genderfluid #gos2spoilers #go s2 #good omens 2 meta #ineffable romance #*mine #*mymeta

[just-being-aroace]

What happens with aroace coded characters in fandoms that really annoys me:

Frodo Baggins: never involved in a relationship, loves his friends — fandom: he’s so in love with Sam, he even lets him and his family live with him

Bilbo Baggins: never married, dedicates his life to writing, adopts Frodo and loves him like a son — fandom: I ship him with Thorin so much

Sherlock Holmes: dedicated his life to his work, very loyal to his friends, never married or had a real relationship — fandom: he’s in love with Irene! He’s in love with John!

Aziraphale & Crowley: canonically ace according to the book, poster characters for a qpr — fandom: why don’t they just f**k? Why don’t they just k**s? This is queerbaiting!

There are probably more examples because it’s definitely a pattern.

#aroace #aromantic #aromantic asexual #asexual #im very aroace #ace #ace community #aro #aroace character #ace characters #sherlock fandom #fandom #sherlock holmes #aroace bilbo baggins #bilbo baggins #frodo baggins #aroace Frodo Baggins #aroace Sherlock Holmes #lotr #lord of the rings #the hobbit #good omens #aziraphale and crowley

[thebasementgirl]

When I told my mom that I'm asexual she gave me a long speech about why I shouldn't say that about myself and I wasn't that and I should get these thoughts out of my head. That rant ended with me crying ugly. That's why I decided not to talk about it with her anymore.

I've been wearing a black ace ring on my right hand for two years now and a few weeks ago I bought a white aro ring for my left hand.

Today my mom told me that she thinks my white ring is ugly and asked me why I bought it. As I didn't want to say the real reason, I said it was because of Ineffable Husbands. The black one is Crowley and the white one is Aziraphale.

And I myself loved what I said. Now that's what I'm going to call my aroace rings

Ps: guys I'm seeing a lot of you are worried and I'm thankful for your care. But just for the record, my mom is a great mom and she loves me very much. It's just bc this is something confused for her and she was never really good with words. But we're fine and hopefully we're getting better. Pls do not talk anything bad about her bc I love my mom and it would hurt me too. Thanks for all your love. ~ Louie

#asexual #asexuality #ace #ace girl #aromantic #aro #aro girl #ace ring #aro ring #good omens #aziraphale #crowley #ineffable husbands #aroace

[multifandom-garbage-compactor]

Can we please get the crowly, "yes you can be both asexual and a slut" bost but with aroace?

#I flopped 🤓 #good omens season 2 #good omens #Crowley #anthony j crowley #anthony janthony crowley #asexual #asexuality #aromantic #aroace

[mx-anthony-janthony-crowley]

happy queer people month

[Image ID: Three photos of Aziraphale and Crowley from Good Omens Season 2 posters, with the aroace, nonbinary and transgender pride flags side-by-side in the background. End ID]

#good omens #pride month #crowley #aziraphale #david tennant #michael sheen #ineffable husbands #aziracrow #good omens 2 #good omens tv #neil gaiman #terry pratchett #aroace #aromantic #asexual #nonbinary #transgender #would have put genderfluid flag in there but i'm using this as my header image thing and it's already in my pfp #queer #pride #lgbtqia+ #gay gay homosexual gay <3

[ineffable-ezra]

I headcanon Crowley and Aziraphale as both being at least somewhere on the asexual spectrum, and potentially demiromantic or grayromantic.

#good omens #crowley #aziraphale #david tennant #ineffable husbands #michael sheen #asexuality #asexual #asexual spectrum #aromantic spectrum #neil gaiman

[edosianorchids901]

For Aro Week! Best friends share their hobbies with each other 💚

@goaroweek

#good omens #ineffable husbands #crowley #aziraphale #art #aro week #go aro week #aromantic

[aceofallspades]

i don’t want aziracrow to kiss in season 3.

if i had the time i would write an essay entitled “we should just kiss like real people do” about the fact that aziracrow did not need the kiss to be cannon, and how this is shown through the fact that the kiss is messy and bitter rather than romantic.

the one time they displayed behaviour ‘typical’ of romantic relationships, it was wrong because they are supernatural beings who do not feel in the same way as most humans. the kiss was a last ditch effort from crowley to get aziraphale to stay, the only way he could think to express his feelings because that’s what the humans that they’d spent so long around did.

but it didn’t work.

as we’ve seen from the rest of the show, they did not need such behaviours to show their feelings for each other, at least not to the audience.

whether you headcannon them as aromantic/asexual or not, it is impossible to erase the fact that they aren’t human, so will not act on their love like humans, and i feel like further kisses would undermine that.

#good omens #good omens 2 #aziracrow #aziraphale #crowley #ineffable husbands #aromantic #asexual

[silverwanderingcrow]

Okay I have feelings and I'm not sure how long this is going to be so bare with me here

So, when watching doccy who as I was growing up, I had dvds rather than watching it on BBC iPlayer, but only the dvds I could find in charity shops, so i had a random selection of David Tennant basically. The collection grew over time and now I'm watching episodes I didn't even know existed! This is amazing for me to discover David Tennant eps I've never seen before!

I would like to talk for a moment about 10 and how he has been portrait in fanon and now in canon.

So when I was watching 10 growing up I felt a connection to him that as I got older I identified that I saw him as asexual, and the people i interacted with in my life also felt this and confirmed my suspicions as their headcanons as well. But more recently I have descovered the sexualisation of 10. While this is okay for me, we're all entitled to our opinions, I noticed this starting to appear in canon, most notably in the 50th anniversary, with the constant comments about how sexualised 10 is. Personally I prefered when his sexuality was ambiguous.

I have also noticed this shift from mostly could be ace to hot gay sex in good omens. Idk maybe it's the sexy David effect but I just think maybe we could have some more ace good omens, just to balance out the onslaught of Hot Gay Sex TM.

I could go on and on about how characters have been sexualised in fanon all day but I'm going to end it there. Just something to think about

Tldr: to me 10, aziraphale and Crowley are ace and I'm saddened about the sexualised nature of them in fanon.

#good omens 2 #good omens #ineffable husbands #crowley #aziraphale #aziracrow #go2 #good omens season 2 #go 2 #michael sheen #david tennet #david and michael #david tennant #doctor who #10th doctor #rambles #aromantic #asexuality #asexual #aroace #silver speaks

[vroomvroomwee]

This is your daily reminder that it's OK to headcanon them as ace, or even aro. They can be asexual if you want them to be. I know it can be frustrating seeing other people invalidate your headcanon and even waste their time writing entire essays about why it isn't valid (especially after the ox rib scene) but until the show says otherwise (which I dont think it will) they are what you headcanon them to be and no one is allowed to take that away from you.

#sending virtual hugs to all ace and aro people who feel theyve lost representation because of this #i love you all so much #good omens #goodomens #aziraphale #crowley #goodomenss2 #good omens 2 #ineffable husbands #good omens season 2 #aziracrow #goodomenss2spoilers #asexual #ace #aromantic #aro #aroace #aro ace #queer

[inhonoredglory]

Happy Aromantic Week!! 💚🤍🖤 Go check out the aro goodness at @goaroweek woohoo!

#my icons #feel free to use!! #happy aro week! #aromanticism #aromantic #go aro week #aroace #good omens #ineffable husbands #aziraphale #crowley #good omens fanart #go fanart #aromantic icons #aromantic pride icons #*myart #*mine

[just-being-aroace]

Things about me that clicked after I discovered that I’m not only asexual but also aromantic:

how I’ve always wanted a relationship and then didn’t know what to do in one

why the relationships never worked out for me

why I find romance books boring after reading two or free in a row

how I always felt that I would prefer to be in a relationship in ‘advanced’ stage where everything is comfortable and steady instead of the romantic beginning

how I never understood what people meant when they said they want Aziraphale and Crowley to be something more than they were in the show

how I never understood why finding a partner is the ultimate life goal

how I never understood why people said that some things and activities were better enjoyed with a loved one

why my dream date is eating together or doing some parallel activity like reading simultaneously

why Bilbo and Frodo Baggins being single and not interested in dating was always so appealing

why what I assumed was a fictional crush was actually me liking a character because they liked literature and art

how I never understood the phrase ‘love at first sight’ and how it made me icky because of the assumption that you could fall in love because somebody is pretty

how I always said that it would be okay for me to live in separate bedrooms with my partner

why I never understood why people would want to take part in programs like ‘Love Island’ or ‘Too Hot to Handle’

#aroace #aromantic #aromantic asexual #im very aroace #asexual #aroace community #ace community #aro #ace #aziraphale and crowley #good omens #aroace bilbo baggins #lotr #queerplatonic #queerplatonic relationship

[allthemarrowoflife]

if you cannot understand how much good omens is a queer love story maybe that's because their queer love story is not for you to understand. it's ineffable.

#in other words #please let asexual and aromantic have something i'm begging you #ineffable lovers #ineffable husbands #ineffable spouses #ineffable partners #good omens #aziraphale #crowley #neil gaiman