via
https://ift.tt/3gycsCDamuseoffyre:
liquidlyrium:
cheeseanonioncrisps:
fandom-star:
junietwohundred:
Consider: Anathema is not all that interested in books. Her grandmother was an early Apple investor; she doubtless grew up with all the latest and greatest information technology at her fingertips. She has a modern university education - she does her research on JSTOR and obscure occult blogs. She can query a SQL database with just the right terms to find exactly what she needs, first try. Anathema is indifferent to books - it’s just that she’s from a family that fetishized one book.
Consider: Newt needs books. After all, if he tries to look something up on Wikipedia, the servers shut down and the smartphones of everyone in a quarter-mile radius get bricked. If he went to university, he researched his papers deep in the stacks of the library, cross-referencing dusty volume to dusty volume. (He once tried to use the microfiche reader, but the bulb began to sputter and make popping sounds, so he gave up as a precautionary measure.) Newt is the kind of person who misses card catalogs, because he needs card catalogs.
Consider: You’re writing the kind of story where the adults present at the end of the world stayed in touch, so both Anathema and Newt are available when Aziraphale needs all hands on deck to discover the secret of your story’s supernatural mcguffin. They arrive at the bookshop, ready to give it their all.
“Where’s your computer?” asks Anathema.
She is escorted to the back room, where she is confronted with Aziraphale’s Amstrad PCW. It doesn’t even run on DOS, for somebody’s sake.
Ok, fine. She has her Macbook in her bag. What’s the WiFi password?
WiFi? Aziraphale’s computer can access the internet, but only because he expects it to. There’s no WiFi network - celestial and occult beings don’t need them.
Aziraphale looks from Anathema, who once casually drew pictures on the title page of the one book of prophecy he was never able to acquire, to Newt, who, in the past five minutes, has established a base at the back room table, surrounded himself with antique tomes, and started taking notes on a scratch pad.
Aziraphale distractedly sends Anathema and Crowley across the way to fetch coffee, and then he leans over Newt’s shoulder to point out a noteworthy illustration, which Newt has already bookmarked and used to draw a parallel to a passage in another book.
Newt is hapless, anxious, and often underestimated, but he’s not stupid. And Aziraphale likes him a lot, because they have a lot in common.
OH MY GOD YES
Why has this never been mentioned anywhere before???
This makes Absolute Perfect Sense!
Especially when you consider that Newt’s old job was literally just sorting through newspaper clippings and highlighting important information. And he actually fucking rocked at it.
I mean, I feel like people really overlook the fact that Newton Pulsifer was the only character in the entire bloody book to figure out that something funny was happening in Tadfield on his own. Not the only human character, the only character full stop.
Anathema and Aziraphale had the prophecies. Crowley and Shadwell had directions from Aziraphale. Newt literally just had a scrap of newspaper showing that Tadfield had been having unusually nice weather for the time of year, for the past eleven years, and that was all he needed to send him down there.
Shadwell had him looking for signs of witchcraft by sifting through the British tabloids, which are pretty much guaranteed to bring up a lot of false positives in that regard, and yet Newt managed to find the one thing in there that was genuinely magic.
Aziraphale would love him.
Of course Aziraphale would love him. Newt is the Crowley analog. Asking questions of people who are dedicated to a rigid system. (“Don’t the churches so that sort of things these days?” And “You can’t let a 400 year old witch tell you what to do”) Right down to the whole “rebound” issue where he tries to do something and it backfires on him. (“Uh, yeah, if I wanted to improve this computers improvements all I’d have to do is open the disk defragmenter.” Vs “Call Aziraphale! ….ARRGH!”) The only real difference there is that Crowley sews the seeds of his own destruction and Newt seems to have an innate quality to him.
Anyway this is why Newt walking Crowley through an anxiety attack is on my to write list.
I was rewatching the show yesterday (because of course I bloody was) and the scene where Newt asks Anathema “don’t you ever do things just because you want to?” cuts directly into Crowley’s drunken ramble about the nature of falling and it hit me how similar they both are. (Also Anathema/Az - see a bit further on)
They both are cut off from the thing that is important to them: Crowley by Falling and Newt by his curse with machinery. They’ve both been stumbling along, making their own way. The parallel of Newt Falling from his job in the corporate agency and ending up in a grubby, grimy, smelly place with weird stuff on the walls is a subtle call back to Crowley’s own fall from the shiny corporate land of Heaven to the gloomy soggy mess that is Hell.
Their approaches to their significant others also runs a parallel course, although Newt’s version is much abridged in time: run into person from The Opposition, both quite guarded and jabbing at each other, Questions are Asked, Free Thought is encouraged and when one is melting down because he’s feeling useless the Other gives him the emotional boost he needs (”Could you? Make these machines work better” / “Do something, or I’ll never talk to you again!”)
And wow on the Az and Anathema parallels. The line where that really hit me was “I’ve spent my whole life trying to work out what Agnes wanted me to do and she’s never failed me. Sometimes, I fail her.” - is this or is this not Aziraphale’s relationship with God in a nutshell? It’s the divine plan, after all. It’s Ineffable.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}