anthony crowley (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
demonicmiracle) wrote2019-07-23 06:57 pm
demonicmiracle) wrote2019-07-23 06:57 pm
Entry tags:
(lifeaftr) application
Player Information
Name: Justine
Age: 25+
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
batsecretary
Current characters: n/a
Character Information
Name:Anthony J. Crowley
Series: Good Omens (TV)
Appearance: Crowley has two main forms, the first is his preferred and is human-shaped, allowing him to move about on Earth without raising any suspicion. He dresses like a washed up rockstar, his red hair constantly changing with fashions, there's a snake tattoo just below his right temple, and he's always wearing a pair of sunglasses. His wings are attached to this shape, although they’re only visible when he wants them to be. Under the glasses, his eyes are yellow and slitted, like those of a snake; although sometimes he can make them look slightly more human.
The other form is a serpent, significantly larger than a regular snake. He’s capable of moving between these two forms, or taking parts of one (see: a big ol’ snake head on a man’s body, just for shits & giggles). Demons do seem to have some control over their forms, but — he’ll look like slutty David Tennant 99% of the time.
Age: 6000+ years, it’s hard to put a definitive age on him since he’s been around before time existed.
Canon Point: End of canon, as he and Aziraphale are dining at the Ritz.
Canon History: Good Omens (TV) wiki page, see also: the Bible.
Personality:
Describing a demon should be simple. They’re evil, they’re violent, they’re destructive. That’s how they were made to be and honestly, there isn’t much they can do about it. Free will is for humans, that was part of the point with the apple.
Ironic, then, that the one demon who seems capable of truly exercising free will is the one responsible for all that apple business. Enter: Crowley, an angel who didn’t so much fall as saunter vaguely downwards, although the truth of how he was cast out of Heaven tends to change to suit his moods. The crux of it seems to be that he never quite meant to, and never quite settled into to being a demon the way other fallen angels did. Some part of him seems to be innately complicated compared to other demons, a fact that isn’t helped by his time on Earth. He’s gone a bit native, you see.
This isn’t to start saying that Crowley is by any means a shining beacon of goodness, or that he should’ve remained an angel, that would be inaccurate to say the least. Crowley is a fairly selfish being, most of the time. He’s fascinated by humans and openly admires their creativity and cleverness, but he has little care for them on a one-to-one basis. This is practical in a way, and it’s not that there can’t be exceptions. But still. He shows almost no regard for pedestrians while driving, including when he does hit someone, acting more put out by the whole business instead of expressing concern for the woman who went flying over the front of his car. And while he isn’t willing to do the deed himself, he’s more than happy to try to talk Aziraphale into killing a single child to save the rest of the world. Most of the time, Crowley is looking out for himself. Someone’s gotta do it, after all.
There’s also the fact he’s spent a considerable amount of time making sure that as many humans as possible were as miserable as possible. Crowley has a job and he’s rather good at it, it just so happens that job is trying to tarnish people’s souls so they end up in Hell. The difference between what he does and what a regular demon does is that he likes to leave it all up to the humans, how they deal with whatever negative emotions he inspires. Crowley isn’t the devil on someone’s shoulder talking them into committing a sin, he’s just that bad day you had, because the phones were down, because there was too much traffic, because your ex’s new girlfriend looks really good on instagram, and then you take that bad day out on someone else, and a little bit of goodness is lost.
But there’s still free will. That’s important to Crowley.
Of all the characters in the show, even literal angels, Crowley seems to be one of the few with a strong sense of fairness, of right and wrong, which maybe makes sense, considering the whole apple nonsense. He questions why Adam & Eve were kicked out on their first offence, he balks when informed that God plans to drown everyone, including children, all because She’s displeased with a bunch of humans, and he seems particularly perturbed by the worst of the violence that humanity can come up with. It’s this sense of fairness that seems to drive his acts of Hell ordained wickedness on Earth, it’s the reason he maintains the importance of free will in everything he does.
The one place he isn’t fair is with the plants in his flat, a recreation of a garden, where they’re held to an impossibly high standard and destroyed for even the smallest mistake. But we don’t have time to unpack all that.
Let’s focus back on all those messy human things. Those emotions.
Most demons seem capable of only a handful of emotions, namely things around anger, pride, confusion (only one person in this show has a brain cell and it’s Pepper, the 11 year old) and hate. By contrast, Crowley runs the whole gamut of emotions, from fear to hope to anger to loss to love. He’s one of the more emotionally open and emotionally vulnerable characters in the show, and that comes from an apparent willingness to expose himself to the mortifying ordeal of being known. Unsurprisingly, this mostly happens around and because of Aziraphale, but in general Crowley shows a range and depth of emotion that other demons just completely lack. Even from the beginning, there’s a surprising tenderness to the way he talks about Jesus, empathising and sympathising with someone who should be his enemy. Crowley shows disgust at learning about the Flood, he’s anguished over his Fall, he grows jealous in petty human ways, he gets a strong sense of satisfaction from his work, and he breaks down when his best friend is killed. He’s even kind and gentle on occasion, although that’s definitely more reserved for Aziraphale. Crowley craves companionship, he goes out of his way to seek it, and he seems to understand that in order to truly have it, he has to be open to a) having emotions and b) admitting them. Multiple times in the show, he puts himself and his emotions on display in the hope that it won’t be tossed aside.
It is! Twice! But friendship and love are complicated and they work it out in the end.
All that said, the stuff about free will, the mortifying ordeal of being known, the whole mess with being cast out of Heaven. It could speak to someone who takes themselves far too seriously, but while Crowley certainly has his broody moments, mostly when alone, he’s clearly also enamored with the world and with experiences, and isn’t shy about indulging himself or having fun. His sense of fun may be a little skewed, considering it once involved turning paintball guns real, during some company’s team building exercise, but it’s still fun. He likes comedic plays, he cultivates a collection of music, he uses words like wahoo, he gets drunk and rants about how smart dolphins are, despite apparently not knowing quite how dolphins work. There’s a playfulness to Crowley, an edge of dramatics, a bit of flair that suggests he does know how to enjoy himself. Even when he’s facing imminent destruction, he takes the time to leap up on a chair and put on a bit of production to trick a Duke of Hell, a creature more powerful and dangerous than he is. There’s creativity there, an imagination, something else that most demons lack. It’s all very free will of him. It’s very human of him, which is also the point. By extension, he’s a lot better at interacting with other humans than most demons are, being perfectly of capable of developing professional relationships. In the book, he’s described as Hell’s most approachable demon, and while not exactly a high bar, it does say something about Crowley. He’s fun, he can be charming, he’s cool. Or at least, he likes to think he is, the actual effectiveness of any coolness he tries to cultivate is varied.
See: the aforementioned wahoo. And just the seventies in general.
He’s doing his best. For whatever that’s worth.
Abilities:
Powers:
The best way to summarize angelic/demonic power is to say that they’re reality warpers. They’d call it magic, or miracles, but when it comes down to it, they aren’t beholden to the laws of reality the way most people are. Crowley is capable of giving plants sentience, simply because he wants them to be afraid of him. He kept a burning car driving for an hour through sheer force of will. He can wish clothes and other items into existence from raw firmament. He can kill animals & resurrect them with a thought — this could apply to humans as well, as Hastur is able to do the former. Physics doesn’t apply to demons (or angels, since they’re of the same stock), although there do seem to be some limitations to the shapes that he can turn his body into; the eyes are always the same, for example. He’s able to travel through the phone lines, and Aziraphale & Gabriel seem capable of instantly teleporting, which means demons likely are as well. Although they seem to forget this. Frequently. It’s possible there are limitations on distance, or maybe it takes a lot of energy. Or maybe they’re just idiots. We don’t know.
Crowley is a somewhat unique case compared to other demons, in that they all lack the imagination to do anything truly interesting with their power, while most of what he does seems to be almost beholden to how he imagines the world. As long as wants something badly enough, as long as he can imagine it strongly enough, he can make reality bend to his will in a way that even other demons can’t. He also has a knack for time related magic, being capable of stopping it even when in the presence of Satan and an archangel.
As part of his general demonic-nee-angelic nature, he’s considerably more hardy than a human (Crowley gets hit in the chest by water from a firehose and gets back up a few seconds later), has no need to eat/breathe/drink/sleep (though he indulges anyway), has a set of black wings that seem to just disappear when he doesn’t want them around, and seems to be able to sense what humans want (unlike angels, who can apparently sense love). They're also able to manipulate humans in various ways, from forcing them to answer questions, to making them unable to perceive them.
It's not specified in the show how Crowley is able to consistently find Aziraphale to bother him over the millennia, but considering Gabriel is able to sense that something evil has been in the bookshop, it seems likely that angels & demons are able to sense each other. Crowley probably just got very good at honing in on Aziraphale.
Nerfs: obviously Crowley won’t be able to just miracle himself back to Earth, since that would defeat the purpose of a jamjar game, and I’m happy to say that his teleportation is limited to short distance or completely nerfed, same for flying. I noticed time related abilities were mentioned in the FAQ, I’m happy to nerf those too if necessary, although Crowley really only sticks to using it for short, AoE time stopping, so I’m not sure if that needs the nerf as much as like, someone who can travel through time would need.
It’s easy enough to excuse Crowley just forgetting to use his powers occasionally, since 90% of the problems in the show could’ve been solved by miracles, and yet:
Skills:
• Knows enough about human childcare to successfully act as a nanny for several years. Wild.
• Manipulation — while this could fall under demonic abilities, it seems more like a cultivated skill. He doesn’t manipulate the way demons do, whispering someone’s ear. He’s more inclined to just figure out what they want and use that against them, or tricking people into thinking they’ve come up with an idea themselves, and he’s very good at manipulating beings who fall outside his usual purview (see: Hastur, Aziraphale. Mostly Aziraphale, this skill likely exists because he’s spent 6000 years playing games with the angel.)
• Engineering — he redesigned a motorway so that it was still functional while also representing a demonic sigil; behind the scenes information has him with blueprints and plans that have been covered in equations, and I doubt he hired a local engineer to draw those up for him. He was also responsible for making nebulae during Creation, if you count 'forming celestial bodies using divine methods' as a kind of engineering.
Inventory: One (1) outfit, seen here, a very very expensive watch, a pair of Valentino sunglasses, his mobile phone, and the keys to the Bentley, just to make him cranky about not having access to the car.
Sample
Thread Sample: sample from previous TDM
Name: Justine
Age: 25+
Contact:
Current characters: n/a
Character Information
Name:
Series: Good Omens (TV)
Appearance: Crowley has two main forms, the first is his preferred and is human-shaped, allowing him to move about on Earth without raising any suspicion. He dresses like a washed up rockstar, his red hair constantly changing with fashions, there's a snake tattoo just below his right temple, and he's always wearing a pair of sunglasses. His wings are attached to this shape, although they’re only visible when he wants them to be. Under the glasses, his eyes are yellow and slitted, like those of a snake; although sometimes he can make them look slightly more human.
The other form is a serpent, significantly larger than a regular snake. He’s capable of moving between these two forms, or taking parts of one (see: a big ol’ snake head on a man’s body, just for shits & giggles). Demons do seem to have some control over their forms, but — he’ll look like slutty David Tennant 99% of the time.
Age: 6000+ years, it’s hard to put a definitive age on him since he’s been around before time existed.
Canon Point: End of canon, as he and Aziraphale are dining at the Ritz.
Canon History: Good Omens (TV) wiki page, see also: the Bible.
Personality:
Describing a demon should be simple. They’re evil, they’re violent, they’re destructive. That’s how they were made to be and honestly, there isn’t much they can do about it. Free will is for humans, that was part of the point with the apple.
Ironic, then, that the one demon who seems capable of truly exercising free will is the one responsible for all that apple business. Enter: Crowley, an angel who didn’t so much fall as saunter vaguely downwards, although the truth of how he was cast out of Heaven tends to change to suit his moods. The crux of it seems to be that he never quite meant to, and never quite settled into to being a demon the way other fallen angels did. Some part of him seems to be innately complicated compared to other demons, a fact that isn’t helped by his time on Earth. He’s gone a bit native, you see.
This isn’t to start saying that Crowley is by any means a shining beacon of goodness, or that he should’ve remained an angel, that would be inaccurate to say the least. Crowley is a fairly selfish being, most of the time. He’s fascinated by humans and openly admires their creativity and cleverness, but he has little care for them on a one-to-one basis. This is practical in a way, and it’s not that there can’t be exceptions. But still. He shows almost no regard for pedestrians while driving, including when he does hit someone, acting more put out by the whole business instead of expressing concern for the woman who went flying over the front of his car. And while he isn’t willing to do the deed himself, he’s more than happy to try to talk Aziraphale into killing a single child to save the rest of the world. Most of the time, Crowley is looking out for himself. Someone’s gotta do it, after all.
There’s also the fact he’s spent a considerable amount of time making sure that as many humans as possible were as miserable as possible. Crowley has a job and he’s rather good at it, it just so happens that job is trying to tarnish people’s souls so they end up in Hell. The difference between what he does and what a regular demon does is that he likes to leave it all up to the humans, how they deal with whatever negative emotions he inspires. Crowley isn’t the devil on someone’s shoulder talking them into committing a sin, he’s just that bad day you had, because the phones were down, because there was too much traffic, because your ex’s new girlfriend looks really good on instagram, and then you take that bad day out on someone else, and a little bit of goodness is lost.
But there’s still free will. That’s important to Crowley.
Of all the characters in the show, even literal angels, Crowley seems to be one of the few with a strong sense of fairness, of right and wrong, which maybe makes sense, considering the whole apple nonsense. He questions why Adam & Eve were kicked out on their first offence, he balks when informed that God plans to drown everyone, including children, all because She’s displeased with a bunch of humans, and he seems particularly perturbed by the worst of the violence that humanity can come up with. It’s this sense of fairness that seems to drive his acts of Hell ordained wickedness on Earth, it’s the reason he maintains the importance of free will in everything he does.
The one place he isn’t fair is with the plants in his flat, a recreation of a garden, where they’re held to an impossibly high standard and destroyed for even the smallest mistake. But we don’t have time to unpack all that.
Let’s focus back on all those messy human things. Those emotions.
Most demons seem capable of only a handful of emotions, namely things around anger, pride, confusion (only one person in this show has a brain cell and it’s Pepper, the 11 year old) and hate. By contrast, Crowley runs the whole gamut of emotions, from fear to hope to anger to loss to love. He’s one of the more emotionally open and emotionally vulnerable characters in the show, and that comes from an apparent willingness to expose himself to the mortifying ordeal of being known. Unsurprisingly, this mostly happens around and because of Aziraphale, but in general Crowley shows a range and depth of emotion that other demons just completely lack. Even from the beginning, there’s a surprising tenderness to the way he talks about Jesus, empathising and sympathising with someone who should be his enemy. Crowley shows disgust at learning about the Flood, he’s anguished over his Fall, he grows jealous in petty human ways, he gets a strong sense of satisfaction from his work, and he breaks down when his best friend is killed. He’s even kind and gentle on occasion, although that’s definitely more reserved for Aziraphale. Crowley craves companionship, he goes out of his way to seek it, and he seems to understand that in order to truly have it, he has to be open to a) having emotions and b) admitting them. Multiple times in the show, he puts himself and his emotions on display in the hope that it won’t be tossed aside.
It is! Twice! But friendship and love are complicated and they work it out in the end.
All that said, the stuff about free will, the mortifying ordeal of being known, the whole mess with being cast out of Heaven. It could speak to someone who takes themselves far too seriously, but while Crowley certainly has his broody moments, mostly when alone, he’s clearly also enamored with the world and with experiences, and isn’t shy about indulging himself or having fun. His sense of fun may be a little skewed, considering it once involved turning paintball guns real, during some company’s team building exercise, but it’s still fun. He likes comedic plays, he cultivates a collection of music, he uses words like wahoo, he gets drunk and rants about how smart dolphins are, despite apparently not knowing quite how dolphins work. There’s a playfulness to Crowley, an edge of dramatics, a bit of flair that suggests he does know how to enjoy himself. Even when he’s facing imminent destruction, he takes the time to leap up on a chair and put on a bit of production to trick a Duke of Hell, a creature more powerful and dangerous than he is. There’s creativity there, an imagination, something else that most demons lack. It’s all very free will of him. It’s very human of him, which is also the point. By extension, he’s a lot better at interacting with other humans than most demons are, being perfectly of capable of developing professional relationships. In the book, he’s described as Hell’s most approachable demon, and while not exactly a high bar, it does say something about Crowley. He’s fun, he can be charming, he’s cool. Or at least, he likes to think he is, the actual effectiveness of any coolness he tries to cultivate is varied.
See: the aforementioned wahoo. And just the seventies in general.
He’s doing his best. For whatever that’s worth.
Abilities:
Powers:
The best way to summarize angelic/demonic power is to say that they’re reality warpers. They’d call it magic, or miracles, but when it comes down to it, they aren’t beholden to the laws of reality the way most people are. Crowley is capable of giving plants sentience, simply because he wants them to be afraid of him. He kept a burning car driving for an hour through sheer force of will. He can wish clothes and other items into existence from raw firmament. He can kill animals & resurrect them with a thought — this could apply to humans as well, as Hastur is able to do the former. Physics doesn’t apply to demons (or angels, since they’re of the same stock), although there do seem to be some limitations to the shapes that he can turn his body into; the eyes are always the same, for example. He’s able to travel through the phone lines, and Aziraphale & Gabriel seem capable of instantly teleporting, which means demons likely are as well. Although they seem to forget this. Frequently. It’s possible there are limitations on distance, or maybe it takes a lot of energy. Or maybe they’re just idiots. We don’t know.
Crowley is a somewhat unique case compared to other demons, in that they all lack the imagination to do anything truly interesting with their power, while most of what he does seems to be almost beholden to how he imagines the world. As long as wants something badly enough, as long as he can imagine it strongly enough, he can make reality bend to his will in a way that even other demons can’t. He also has a knack for time related magic, being capable of stopping it even when in the presence of Satan and an archangel.
As part of his general demonic-nee-angelic nature, he’s considerably more hardy than a human (Crowley gets hit in the chest by water from a firehose and gets back up a few seconds later), has no need to eat/breathe/drink/sleep (though he indulges anyway), has a set of black wings that seem to just disappear when he doesn’t want them around, and seems to be able to sense what humans want (unlike angels, who can apparently sense love). They're also able to manipulate humans in various ways, from forcing them to answer questions, to making them unable to perceive them.
It's not specified in the show how Crowley is able to consistently find Aziraphale to bother him over the millennia, but considering Gabriel is able to sense that something evil has been in the bookshop, it seems likely that angels & demons are able to sense each other. Crowley probably just got very good at honing in on Aziraphale.
Nerfs: obviously Crowley won’t be able to just miracle himself back to Earth, since that would defeat the purpose of a jamjar game, and I’m happy to say that his teleportation is limited to short distance or completely nerfed, same for flying. I noticed time related abilities were mentioned in the FAQ, I’m happy to nerf those too if necessary, although Crowley really only sticks to using it for short, AoE time stopping, so I’m not sure if that needs the nerf as much as like, someone who can travel through time would need.
It’s easy enough to excuse Crowley just forgetting to use his powers occasionally, since 90% of the problems in the show could’ve been solved by miracles, and yet:
Skills:
• Knows enough about human childcare to successfully act as a nanny for several years. Wild.
• Manipulation — while this could fall under demonic abilities, it seems more like a cultivated skill. He doesn’t manipulate the way demons do, whispering someone’s ear. He’s more inclined to just figure out what they want and use that against them, or tricking people into thinking they’ve come up with an idea themselves, and he’s very good at manipulating beings who fall outside his usual purview (see: Hastur, Aziraphale. Mostly Aziraphale, this skill likely exists because he’s spent 6000 years playing games with the angel.)
• Engineering — he redesigned a motorway so that it was still functional while also representing a demonic sigil; behind the scenes information has him with blueprints and plans that have been covered in equations, and I doubt he hired a local engineer to draw those up for him. He was also responsible for making nebulae during Creation, if you count 'forming celestial bodies using divine methods' as a kind of engineering.
Inventory: One (1) outfit, seen here, a very very expensive watch, a pair of Valentino sunglasses, his mobile phone, and the keys to the Bentley, just to make him cranky about not having access to the car.
Sample
Thread Sample: sample from previous TDM