I dont post often but I’m excited about this! I got my first tattoo these last couple months and it has healed enough from the color work to take a good picture. The inspiration behind it was my favorite scene with the Bentley and Crowley from “Good Omens” by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. It’s an excellent book and i highly recommend it.
badxwolfxrising asked: I am genuinely sorry to bother you with this, but I am hoping you can help settle what is becoming a very unpleasant multi-fandom argument-is Crowley canonically gay? Some people feel he is, some people feel he may be bi/pan, but there is quite a lot of nastiness floating around Tumblr aimed at people who wish to write fan fic about Crowley having romantic interest in people other than Aziraphale. Any insight you could offer into these characters would be much appreciated. You're a treasure. <3
I suspect that I’m about to step into something I would be wisest to keep well away from. But what the hell, it’s that time between Christmas and New Year’s. And nobody’s yelled at me over the internet since I said that the TV Aziraphale doesn’t use a cell phone. *
Canonically, which is to say using the text in the book, you don’t get any description of Crowley’s sex life. The only thing the book says is “angels are sexless unless they specifically make an effort”. You can infer, and (more to the point) you can imagine, and lots of people have chosen, not unreasonably, to ship him with Aziraphale, but you are still Making Stuff Up. It could be Making Stuff Up that happens between paragraphs, or Making Stuff Up that isn’t mentioned at all, but it’s still Making Stuff Up.** (And using the kind of eagle-eyed textual analysis that Bible scholars used to decide exactly what a piece of four thousand year old verse definitely meant also counts here as Making Stuff Up.)
Which is the fun of fanfiction, and part of the tradition of fanfiction. As is, I’m afraid, grumbling at people who do not see that your ship is the only true ship, and choose to ship anyone else with anyone else.
If anyone decides that The Relationships in Their Fanfiction Are the Only True Fanfiction, it seems to me they are missing the point. The point is Fanfiction exists so that you can imagine, enjoy and fill in the gaps. The point is that you can change things and have fun with them. And the stories are absolutely true… for you.
The TV series gets deeper into Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship. It’ll be canonical for the TV series, and not canonical for the book.***
If I were to Pronounce on things that are not explicitly stated in the book, I still wouldn’t be telling you if Crowley was Canonically Gay. I would be telling you what I think, because it’s not canon unless it’s in the book. It won’t be TV canon unless it’s on the screen.
So, do not worry what other people think, and do not worry about what they say. These are not things on which people can be right or wrong, or on which anything can be “settled”.
Make fun fanfiction. Enjoy yourself. Make things up. Share them. That’s the point.
*People would only bother him on it. And if anyone gave him one as a present, it would be still be in its box, on the same shelf as the still-unboxed Kindle.
**Which was what Terry and I did when we wrote the book. And what I had to do for the TV scripts when I needed to take the story into places the book hadn’t covered.
***They don’t contradict each other, but there is territory covered by the TV series that isn’t covered by the book, particularly about Crowley and Aziraphale in bygone years. Also the Present Day in the book is probably the early 1990s, and the Present Day in the TV series is 2019ish, although 11 years ago in the book wasn’t particularly 1978, and 11 years ago on TV is post-ubiquitous cellphones but pre-smartphones.
Then again, Good Omens is just Black Books fanfiction and there’s no denying it.
Not just fanfiction, but the special magic kind of fanfiction you can only make happen when you write it over a decade before the thing that it’s fanfiction of exists. That’s what makes it so special.
I’d always assumed that Crowley and Aziraphale were author avatars
They were, of course: I’m Crowley and Aziraphale, and Terry was Crowley and Aziraphale. But everyone else in the book is the authors too, including Dog and Crowley’s houseplants. That’s how writing fiction works.
thetraciwho asked: Hi =) I recently had the opportunity to meet David Tennant and was excited to have him sign my copy of Good Omens. A friend remarked that it seemed disrespectful to have anyone but the author sign a book. I have decided my friend is a busybody, who should mind her own paperback collection. Am I wrong?
It’s your book. You own it. You paid for it (or perhaps were given it). Nobody else gets to tell you what to do with your book. There are no book rules except those that you, as book owner, impose.
So of course you can get David Tennant to sign your book. It will make David happy to do so, and make you happy as well. I don’t mind at all, and Terry is in no position to complain any more. (Joke. He wouldn’t have minded.)
You can get your class at school to sign a book you love for you. Or you can colour it in. You can even fold down the corners of the pages if you need to, or read it in the bath. Or make it into something like a humument.
Your book.
Heart's Corrie Martin chats to David Tennant at Glasgow Film Festival about his friend Jodie Whittaker taking on the Tardis, and his new best pal, Michael Sheen
- Corrie Martin: How's it make you feel about playing a demon, opposite Michael Sheen?
- David Tennant: What's great about that is I get to do lots of scenes with Michael Sheen. He's the angel, and I'm the devil, but of course both the characters are a little bit more ambiguous than that. So that's the fun of those parts. Crowley's not as bad as he likes to think he is, and Aziraphale's not as good as he likes to think he is. And so the way these two bounce off each other, they're sort of like an old married couple. They've been together on Earth for millennia, they team-up to avert the Apocalypse. To get to work with someone like Michael, you couldn't really ask for better. We've only just finished, it was about 48 hours ago, and it was a very, very enjoyable double-act to be a part of
- Corrie Martin: Are you going to be messaging being like 'love you, miss you'
- David Tennant: Of course, we've already done that
- Corrie Martin: Is it a proper bromance now?
- David Tennant: I think it probably is yes! Certainly, Crowley and Aziraphale are the bromance that never dies, I mean they've been together since the Garden of Eden, so Michael and I've got quite a lot to aspire to
David Tennant talks about Good Omens…
David was just interviewed for the Glasgow Film Festival, and he answered a few questions about Good Omens…
Good Omens, a big budget production to be screened on Amazon Prime, is a different story altogether. When the first teaser images of Tennant and co-star Michael Sheen in costume were released last year, there was a feeling abroad that this was about as close to a Celtic acting dream team as you could get – Tennant, a former Doctor Who and star of Broadchurch and Harry Potter, alongside chameleon-like Welshman Sheen, who has played everyone from Brian Clough to Tony Blair and Kenneth Williams. But although both men knew each other well, they had only acted together once before: 15 years ago, on Stephen Fry’s Evelyn Waugh adaptation Bright Young Things. And even then they never actually shared screen time.
“Although we spent quite a lot of time on set and in prep and socialising a little bit, we didn’t have a single scene together. So I’ve known Michael all that time and never really had a chance to properly act with him until now. So when Good Omens came up, and I knew Michael was involved, that did feel like I could finally tick a box I’d been hoping to tick since I first met him.”
And how was the box-ticking experience?
“It’s always a gamble working with someone, even someone like Michael who I knew relatively well,” Tennant admits. “But at the same time it can be hugely exciting to discover a new working relationship and that’s mercifully been the case with Good Omens. Just about every scene I have it’s Michael and I staring at each other and that could have been a grim experience over the six months of the shoot if he hadn’t been such a joy to be around.”
In fact, Tennant is feeling “rather excited” about Good Omens. He, Sheen and the rest of the crew recently viewed a “sizzle reel”, a rough trailer put together by the show’s Portree-born director Douglas Mackinnon. And he liked what he saw.
“It’s quite hard tonally to get a grip on what Good Omens is, because it’s this very unique world that comes from Terry and Neil’s novel and from the scripts, which Neil has adapted pretty faithfully from that novel,” he says. “I think it’s quite unlike anything I’ve ever been in before and possibly anything many people have seen before. It’s like a sort of fairy tale with a kind of very real world setting. It’s a farce and it’s also deeply serious, It’s all things at once and not quite any one of them. If the rest of the show turns out like this early trailer that we’ve all seen I think it’s going to be quite special.”
Beyond the show itself, the involvement of Amazon also makes Good Omens feel a little out of the ordinary. For a start there’s the amount of cash available to the show – “We’ve clearly got a bigger budget than any BBC show I’ve ever worked on before,” says Tennant – and then there’s the palpable sense of ambition and expectation coursing through the production.
“That whole Amazon-Netflix model seems to be the future and there’s a sense that you’re working with a company that people are watching very keenly at the moment to see what’s going to happen next. From an acting point of view you just turn up and you do your job like you do on anything else. That’s the same on Good Omens as it was on a low budget British film like You, Me And Him. The nuts and bolts of it are the same every day. But it’s when you take a step back you see the ambition of something like Good Omens and the resources that we’ve got to play with. It’s very exciting to be able to be part of that.”
A few more of Hell’s motivational posters. I had too much fun with these. The hardest part was just persuading the art department that I was serious about getting them to forget everything they had ever learned about design…
I’ve never asked anyone to make sure that they used Comic Sans before.
Every mention of a new scene adds about a year to my life. This is what TV adaptations should do! So happy Neil is showrunning, even if he’d rather be writing..!
Having watched this scene being shot this morning, I think people will like it. It contains everything. Including what the J stands for.