Greening App
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inlovewithmycarOOC
Name: Green Rivers
Age: 34
Contact:
Character(s) Played: N/A
IC
Name: (Anthony J.) Crowley
Canon: Good Omens TV
Canon Point: Post Series
Age: 6000+
Appearance: Tall, dark, dubiously handsome with good cheekbones and a head full of red hair. At first glance, he looks like your average man in his mid-late forties, albeit a rather stylish one who, at some point, got an elaborate tattoo of a snake on the side of his face. Upon closer inspection, Crowley is a bit... uncanny. There is something almost reptilian about his mannerisms, those snakeskin boots he wears seem almost fused to his skin, he never takes off his sunglasses, and he can do really weird things with his tongue.
Not to mention his tendency to hiss a bit.
Outfit | Without shades
Abilities:
- STRENGTHS.
- Well-versed in human nature.
- Sweet-talking/temptation
- Shapeshifting
- Imaginative
- Weird biology
- Ageless (or just perpetually middle-aged), Crowley is effectively immortal - his physical form can be destroyed fairly conventionally (barring a few exceptions like fire and disease, if it would kill a human, it will discorporate him.) The well-placed demonic miracle may make things a bit tricky - but mostly "death" is just really, really annoying inconvenience to him.
- His corporation is effectively a meatsuit with organs being optional (and so too are food, water, sleep, and air). He's pretty fireproof, both to the Hellish kind and your garden variety bonfire. He can also possess a receptive host (this is shown when Aziraphale shares a body with Madame Tracy after getting discorporated, and when he and Crowley switch bodies before their execution)
- He has some serpentine traits he can't just glamour away and his other corporeal form is a giant red and black snake. All we know about his true, demonic form is that it's reptilian and has a lot of teeth.
- Angels and Demons got big ol' feathery wings. Like everything Crowley has, they're sleek and black. They can flap. Presumably he can also use them to fly.
- Ageless (or just perpetually middle-aged), Crowley is effectively immortal - his physical form can be destroyed fairly conventionally (barring a few exceptions like fire and disease, if it would kill a human, it will discorporate him.) The well-placed demonic miracle may make things a bit tricky - but mostly "death" is just really, really annoying inconvenience to him.
- Effectively angels and demons can cause minor warps in reality. These seem limited to being within a localized area around them or one has to be intimately aware of the area they're miracling if doing it remotely. Miracles are largely convenient in nature; Crowley and Aziraphale's favourite table in their favourite restaurant is always available when they want it. A stain or mess can be blown away with just a thought. A satchel of books survives a church bombing unscathed during the blitz. A traffic warden's notebook goes up in sparks to avoid a ticket (Aziraphale does this in the book, Crowley does it in the show). A recently deceased dove can be revived by breathing life into it (Crowley does this in the book, Aziraphale does it in the show).
Trickier things like passing through a wall of flames unscathed, and driving a burning car for 45 minutes without it falling apart takes a lot out of Crowley physically and requires a good imagination to maintain certain degree of denial for that long. So for miracles to be performed, the mindset of the one performing them is integral. For example, Crowley has an unplugged fridge stocked full of gourmet food that never goes off because (while we know that's not how any of that actually works) Crowley assumes that putting food in a fridge will keep it fresh indefinitely and so reality warps around that assumption.
- Demonic miracles are not necessarily used for evil. Angels and Demons are functionally similar so Crowley can use his reality bending powers to do blessings as well as temptations.
- Stopping Time (Temporarily): Not necessarily sure if this is a miracle or something unique to Crowley. It's definitely something that only happens in the TV series. It could just be a little Dr. Who reference. He does it twice, and one time it takes them to a completely different place, and I have no idea how it works, please just nerf it completely.
- Angels and demons can perform some degree of mind manipulation. Crowley is shown to put Sister Mary in a brief trance where she can tell him only the truth (though the truth isn't always the same as 'useful information') and Aziraphale makes it so that she awakens from it having dreamed of 'whatever she likes best'. Hastur and Ligur are able to plant temptations directly into the minds of mortals. It is possible to extrapolate that this is just a general thing demons can do since they seem to expect the same methods from Crowley. That being said, Crowley is never shown to use this ability so either he can't or won't.
WEAKNESSES.
(Optional) Personality:
Note: Provided it either supports or doesn't explicitly contradict show canon, I use stuff from the book to fill in any gaps since we don't really get to see Crowley's inner thoughts in the show.
One of Crowley's most defining characteristics is his curiosity. It was the catalyst that got him booted out of Heaven to begin with. He's always been inquisitive, always tried to puzzle out the workings of higher powers whether or not one might consider it a safe course of action. His very first temptation, The Big One as we'd think of it, was convincing Eve to take a bite of the fruit from the tree of knowledge, and throughout the series he's shown to admire human innovation and creativity.
This isn't to say Crowley is a wide-eyed idealist. He is certainly more optimistic than pessimistic, but it's all tempered with a degree of cynicism. Crowley is quick to pick up on the seedier aspects of things. He's all too aware of the many failings of human nature, or how Heaven will hide its atrocities behind a veneer of self-righteousness. As he sees it, he's a demon, he's (technically) supposed to be horrible, and at least Hell is honest in their intentions to control and dominate.
Not that he's a big fan of Hell either. Lucifer's rebellion didn't go so great, and his grand vision just seems to be a version of the Heavenly bureaucracy with a dark coat of paint and a lot lower standards for hygiene.
But Crowley is good at being a demon. Oh, he's not so good at things like spinning heads, creepy voices and disembodied hoofbeats in the halls, but he's good at tempting people. And he's astonishingly efficient. You see, Crowley is a big-picture sort of thinker. He focuses more on tarnishing souls rather than outright corrupting them. After all, someone losing their temper once? Down the line, they're likely to do it again, and again, and again. Cut a few phone lines and he has half of London bloody furious. Move a few construction markers, and now the M-25 makes traffic literal Hell. And there isn't even any need for that vomiting pea soup mess. Though while good at concocting such widespread schemes, the devil's in the details, which is why so often his cunning schemes turn around and bite him in the ass. He never really thinks things through.
By the time Crowley had become a demon, he'd learned how to survive. He knows when to obey and when to present the face of obedience. He projects an image of a cool, calm, and disaffected individual who's caught up on modern trends and is invaluable for his insights into the human condition. He struts around brazenly, he dresses in trendy styles, and he owns a cool, modern flat, dark as a tomb and just as minimalist, just like the kind of rich and callous human he's trying to ape would. There's not a lot one could glean about Crowley's actual personality from the outside.
Because in all actuality, Crowley's kind of a mess.
He's genuinely hurt, confused and betrayed by his Fall; he doesn't actually understand what's so terrible about asking questions, about wanting to know things, or why God (whose Love is supposed to be unconditional) would hurt him for being how She made him. He's also quite terrified that Hell will discover he's not all that malicious of an individual. Oh yes, he can be a selfish coward and an opportunist; he'll run before fighting any day, and he'll gladly take commendations for human atrocities that he had no hand in (and is actually repulsed by). About the only other person's well-being he puts above his own is Aziraphale's. He is less caring about individual humans. Oh, he has nothing personal against humanity as a whole; he actually quite likes them in a general sense, and doesn't want to enact more than a bit of mischief at their expense. He has very little stomach for violence or torture (he had to get drunk for a week just to cope with what he saw going on in the Spanish Inquisition, and he's visibly upset when he finds out God intends to drown all the Mesopotamian people in The Flood). He also high-strung and has a rather short fuse when under pressure - he's prone to being snappish, ornery, and ill-tempered.
Despite his many failings and flash bastard facade, he can also be genuinely kind, compassionate, and, even when scared out of his mind, put on an air of bravado and seem quite gallant. Crowley is a pro at 'fake it until you make it' after all. He does genuinely care about Aziraphale, and enough about Earth to actually go against the forces of Heaven and Hell to try and save it (eventually). He also has a strong sense of fair play; even when tempting the mortals, he always makes sure they have a choice in the matter and aren't put between a rock and a hard place, or have the temptation planted directly in their brains (which is how Hastur and Ligur operate).
History:
- In the beginning... there was a fat lot of buggerall. God looked upon this and thought it was a bit dull and so She created the universe. This has widely been regarded as one of Her worse ideas. Among the things She created were angels, and among those angels was Crowley. He wasn't called Crowley back then -there's little he says about his brief stint as an angel beyond he helped build some stars and nebulae and that he asked a few too many questions, which got him the boot.
As a demon (at the time known as Crawly), he'd generally learned his lesson about openly questioning authority and got sent up to make some trouble from the newly minted humans while Earth still had that new planet smell. Tempting Eve to eat the apple succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and as the humans were tossed out the garden, he stopped to make conversation with the Angel of the Eastern Gate, a Principality named Aziraphale.
The rest is, quite literally, history.
That is to say, Crowley has been puttering around through the last 6000 years as Hell's operative on Earth and taking credit for the bigger human atrocities, all while instead wining and dining with his Heavenly counterpart, sworn enemy and dearest friend Aziraphale.
Around 1020 A.D. they struck up an Arrangement to generally just help each other out. For example, if one was in the area, he would simply cover the blessing or temptation that needed to be carried out there. And they generally stayed out the others way, letting each other work in relative peace, occasionally meeting up to get a bite to eat and compare notes.
As it stands, Crowley and Aziraphale had more in common with each other than their respective sides, and so a friendship began to grow between them (quite grudgingly at first on Aziraphale's end). Their visits became more social than business, and there were times where they would even help each other out when it was completely unrelated to work.
Fast forward to the mid aughts of the 21st century. The Antichrist was born, and the end of the world was just eleven years off. Both Crowley and Aziraphale are quite fond of Earth and all its pleasures, and don't really want to see it go so soon. And so they devise a plan - to act as Godfathers of sorts and help raise the child to not be either angelic or demonic, but human, and hope that he chooses Earth over Heaven or Hell.
Of course the whole thing falls apart when they find out there was a mix-up with the babies at the convent and they'd been helping to raise the wrong child for six years. Fortunately, Crowley's suggestion about raising the Antichrist as human was on the money - Adam was raised by two loving parents, had a normal childhood, and decided that the world ought to keep spinning after all.
Of course, Crowley and Aziraphale were in a great deal of trouble with Heaven and Hell, but luckily for them, a mad prophetess witch from the 17th century was looking out for them, and they managed to survive their executions via Holy Water/Hellfire by swapping bodies beforehand.
Sample(s):
TDM TL
Pestering another immortal even more goth than he is