lin11a

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She/she/cheese / Adult woman / I just love the good old 2D animation and comics, so I reblog what's great and what's funny ! I didn't post anything myself for now and maybe never will. Take a seat and enjoy the discoveries !

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Rumination N. 7 - The Stain

Rumination n. 7 - The Stain

I am about to say something outrageous, but this scene is haunting me and I need to take it out of my obsessive brain.

We all have been thinking about the (not so) slightly maniacal, sphinx-like smile that appears on Aziraphale's face at the very end of e6 end credits, and how it seems to suggest that something is brewing inside the angel's head.

But this is not the scene that is haunting me. It's this one:

Now, like many of us, I've been toying with possible scenarios involving the Metatron and the threat of the Book of Life, and I want to take a moment to say something up top: I have mixed feelings about the Book of Life as a thing. Not just because we don't know anything about how it actually works and, if we want to be punctilous, we don't even have undisputable confirmation that it exists and it's not in fact a myth that the Heaven-regime has spread in order to keep everyone in check (that Heaven has regime-like strategies for controlling its ranks, possibly even before the Fall, it's clear by the appalling callousness of the Metatron saying "For one Prince of Heaven to be cast into the outer darkness makes a good story", meaning a story that works as an effective cautionary tale). But most of all because this all-encompassing Book of Life seems to me like the kind of overpowered magic-object-ex-machina plot device that can really break a narrative, and I am willing to accept it only because I trust Neil Gaiman entirely. Also, I have a feeling that, on a metaphorical level, the prospect of being "erased from the Book of Life" has already happened, in a way (but that's matter for a different rumination).

That said, I am wondering if it's Aziraphale the one we should be worrying about. Mr "I would always know the stain was there", aka fixing something is not enough, the preferable solution is to make sure that the bad thing never happened in the first place, so its memory will not haunt you, its remaining smudge will not darken the perfect picture that you want your existence to be.

I am wondering if that creepy smile means that he is planning to steal the Book of Life, like several metas and fics imagined, but not to keep himself and Crowley safe: he could be planning to steal it in order to undo the Fall.

And sure, that would mean erasing the 6000 years of his and Crowley's history together, and nobody in his right mind would do that - but is Aziraphale in his right mind? When he steps into the elevator, he is as broken as Crowley is, and possibly more, because in addition to their relationship crumbling into dust, he also has to deal with the pull of his desire to bring into reality the idealized version of Heaven that he has always hoped for.

He is shattered. He has lost Crowley, has lost his bookshop, has lost Earth. He is involved against his will in the Second Coming plans. He's hyperventilating as the elevator goes up, shoulders and chest struggling to find air - is on the verge of a panick attack. He is in the mindset of someone who is feeling his entire existence slipping away under his feet at lightspeed, not knowing how or why, not a split second to realise what is happening.

It's not impossible, when you are in such a state, to shut down and cling to one and only one thought: how do I undo this?

It's not impossible, if you are in the middle of a traumatic response, to fixate on finding the single, cursed, wrong turn that sent you down the path that lead you in this place of devastating pain and fear, obsessing over the idea that if you can correct that one error, everything will be fine again. Because you just cannot process the idea that what happened is destined to stay "happened": it's just too big and too wrong and too unthinkable to become a part of your biography like all events before that - as per the definition of trauma by Judith Herman.

You cannot reconcile it with the rest of your life, you enter in a state of mind that denies reality and treats it like a a gamer would treat a mission that he messed up between to saving points: yes, it sucks, but nothing to worry about, you just go back in time and this time do things the right way. You just need to identify where you went wrong.

This is, I think, the place where Aziraphale's mind is in the final scene.

"What have I done wrong? Where did I do the wrong thing? When did I say the wrong word? What incident brought us here? How could this happen if I love you so much? Why would you shout and be angry at me if I love you so much? What evil force could prevent you from seeing that I love you so much? This is all a mistake. How can we not be together right now if I love you so much? How can the fact of us being separated exist in the same world where I love you so much? This must be a mistake. What is it that I need to undo to save us, our dream? To make the error and all this pain go away? If only I could find the mistake, the single bad thing that threw a monkey wrench into our happiness..."

But he cannot find one single moment in their long history together that stands out as "the" mistake to blame for what just happened, and he keeps going back and back and back, looking for "the" thing that ruined their plans.

If only we were not on opposite sides.

I think that, right now, in Aziraphale's head, the one original error that lead him to lose the love of his life is the Fall. It's the initial irreparable fracture that ripped in half the angelic population of the beginning and made impossible for the two parts to be together ever again.

Of course Crowley did and could not want to be "restored" to his former angelic status, he can see why, he's not blind. And probably he's more than ready to recognize that Crowley is right in refusing that offer. The proposal was wrong in the first place. The solution to all their problems isn't making Crowley not a demon anymore, it's making sure that there were no demons to begin with.

"If I'm in charge, I can make a difference."

I can make a different ending for this scene that just went horribly wrong. I can make a different reality where this horrible moment could never happen.

And if this is what is going through his head, his next task - and Crowley's mission - will be to accept that sometimes there is no undoing. You can either find a way to patch things up and find the right path again, or stay broken and astray. But either way you will have to come to terms with the fact that some mistakes cannot be undone, and the bad things that happened cannot be erased. You can only learn to live with them, accomodate their painful memory in your existence, accept the presence of a stain that will always be there, underneath.