Me Spamming My Fanfics

Yeah so I made this since I heard complaint about not hearing enough Queen in the finale 😄

I wanted to add something else that might ease — or absolutely not ease — your pain and grief over the finale.

I have the impression that, driven by the excellent writing of the first season and especially the second, most of us ended up identifying far more with Crowley than with Aziraphale. Crowley simply seemed to make more sense overall, didn’t he? The whole “we’re on our own side” philosophy was incredibly compelling. That’s exactly why so many people were devastated by Aziraphale leaving at the end of season two: how could he still believe in Heaven after everything? Was everything they went through really not enough for him to realize that there was nothing left to do except stay with Crowley, the way Gabriel and Beelzebub did?

But I think many people who disliked the finale were upset precisely because they had become so deeply absorbed into Crowley’s own worldview and flaws.

Aziraphale’s flaws are obvious and painfully transparent. He constantly makes choices that are questionable, frustrating, sometimes even absurd. Crowley, on the other hand, is selfish in a much subtler and therefore more seductive way. Completely, inevitably selfish. Aziraphale spent centuries trying to teach him selflessness in his own messy and imperfect way, but Crowley never truly understood that until the final decision.

When Crowley made that proposition, I was genuinely shocked. At first it felt completely out of character. If anything, Aziraphale should have been the one to say something like that. Instead, Aziraphale simply smiles, lets him speak, and ultimately agrees — because that is exactly what he has always been trying to do. I was mad at him but when he came back and repeatedly, desperately told Crowley “at least I had to try” I finally got it. For the first time, in those last 15 minutes, they’ve finally reach the same moral and emotional level. They understood each other and they became truly “angelic” together, only once they have both moved beyond their flaws.

(And the reason why this initially feels slightly off for Crowley is something I explained in another recent post: https://www.tumblr.com/chatgateau/816584180811038720/spoiler-good-omens-3-still-while-trying-to)

The truth is that we believed in Crowley more than we believed in Aziraphale the entire time. The show knew perfectly well that we wanted them to run away together, because we ourselves had adopted Crowley’s individualistic perspective. But the story gradually hints that Crowley is not entirely right in wanting only a peaceful private existence when his supernatural nature and powers place him in a position of responsibility that cannot simply be ignored. Aziraphale never ignored that responsibility, not even once.

This finale is the moment when they finally understand each other completely. That is the highest form of love possible — the culmination of more than 6000 years together. There is nothing beyond that. No cottage, no sex, no kiss, nothing.

I’ve been wondering whether to make this post because for almost twenty-four hours now I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the ending we got for Good Omens. One could argue that I clearly don’t have anything better to do. Fair criticism.

Still, while trying to understand my feelings about the finale, I came across a lot of comments that genuinely bothered me, so I’m here to unpack a series of thoughts that ultimately led me to believe that this was not only the ending we deserved, but also — from a certain perspective — the most coherent one possible.

Let me start with two premises.

The first: the finale very obviously suffered from the radical cuts in time and budget, which meant the narrative arcs never had enough room to fully develop in a way that would allow viewers to completely understand Crowley and Aziraphale’s final decision.

The second: this is an emotionally devastating ending. There is no happy ending here. They did not erase their memories. I’m writing this in tears, but the ending of Crowley and Aziraphale’s story is that they die. That is what happened. We can discuss later whether we want to embrace the “in every universe” trope as the “sweet” element within the bittersweet ending, but that’s another conversation entirely. Aziraphale and Crowley did not become human — they died. Period.

Now for my actual thoughts.

1. Despite how negatively I’ve seen people talk about it, this is an incredibly mature and carefully thought-out ending. What I mentioned in my first premise — the lack of time needed to properly build the arcs leading to Crowley and Aziraphale’s final choice — does not mean that their decision was impossible to foresee. Quite the opposite, actually. From what little we saw, I’m fairly convinced that the formal structure and the Christ-like trajectory of the story were always pointing toward the conclusion we ended up getting. The compressed format only gave us fragments of that direction, but I do not believe the choice to end their arc this way was caused by production issues. I think this was exactly the ending they intended from the start.

I’ve seen a lot of criticism claiming the characters felt “out of character.” Sure, compared to their season 2 selves, maybe. But they probably wouldn’t have felt that way if season 3 had actually been allowed to develop their arcs properly. In the end, choosing to sacrifice themselves for humanity is something they decide together, and that being the way their story ends feels deeply coherent to me. Their “reward” is existing in another universe.

2. Simply turning them into humans would have solved nothing especially while preserving their memories. Theyve been living for 6000 thousand years what is the point of spending 30 more years together and then die, knowing that Hell and Heaven are still there? Do you really mean to tell me you would rather have watched these supernatural beings live an ordinary absolutely boring human life when their all purpose was to live together through a non-human experience and managing somehow to love each other despite the différence which was structural to their existence? I think that would have been the easier ending, but not one worthy of the important reflection Good Omens has been developing for two seasons.

3. Here I’m going to sound radical: I know a lot of people in fandom are young, enthusiastic, and horny, which is not a crime in itself. But if I read one more comment complaining that they didn’t kiss, I genuinely have to ask: why are you watching this series? Is that really the only thing you care about? Do you honestly believe that a love story stretched across 6000 years of history can only be expressed in one singular way?

People complain that Aziraphale is out of character and then act surprised when he doesn’t throw himself at Crowley like he’s in some random pwp. To me, that reaction is genuinely incomprehensible, and if I’m honest, a lot of the comments I’m reading show a staggering amount of media illiteracy.

Maybe this slip under your understanding but Crowley and Aziraphale are NOT human. The fact They got used to behave as such has nothing to do with the fact they actually feel it. The kiss we got in season 2 was Crowley’s desperate attempt to explain — through every possible means, including the most human one imaginable — what loving someone meant. That does not mean they experience love the way humans do. It was never fan service, and there was nothing remotely erotic about it, because the eroticism of this story lies in their encounter itself, not in physicality.

The inclusion of his elderly figure is entirely negligible, and the authors know this very well too, since they keep forgetting about it. Beyond the evident technical and writing problems that many people have complained about, I would like to point out that the very soul of the story has not been understood at all. The declared intention behind the form of this series is to expand areas left in shadow by the film, perhaps in order not to step on toes or to avoid repeating what has already been written, which can be commendable—except that it must be done with a methodological criterion that takes into account the meaning of the scenes and the psychology of the characters within them.

It seems to me that the "original directions" in which the series has developed in this sense are mainly two: Salieri’s schemes and Mozart’s three-dimensionality. While in the first branch everything is accessory (it essentially provides more screen time and a slight whodunit flavor, but adds nothing to what we already know about the character), the second issue is far more complex. First of all, there is an important premise to be made: the protagonist of Amadeus is not Mozart, but Salieri. This has always been clear from 1830 onward. I’ve heard many people complain about the lack of three-dimensionality in Mozart’s character. It is necessary that Mozart is not developed for a very simple reason, namely that the narrator (Salieri) has no interest whatsoever in portraying him in any other way. Quite the opposite, I daresay. It works entirely in favor of his argument that Mozart is indeed presented to the interlocutor as an underdeveloped being. Moreover, he himself has never been interested in the man behind his own projection.

What makes the Requiem scene so memorable in the film stems precisely from this: the idea he had formed is inconsistent, but by then it is too late to fix it. For this reason, attributing a more complex psychology to Mozart in the series, in my view, completely shifts the focus: this was never an equal story, and it should not be. As a review published in 1985 wrote, Salieri’s true work of genius lies in his story, because it is told, and through words he is composing the music of his own posterity (David Thomson. Salieri, Psycho in Film Comment, January-February 1985, Vol. 21, No. 1 (January-February 1985), pp. 70-75: "If you can stand a minute of his floating disdain, it could go on forever. Talk is his music, and he knows he has no equal. It is like listening to the hilarious accounts by some old theatrical queen of all his disasters and humiliations. The longer he goes on about his own bitter pills, the more celebrated he becomes."). One could then discuss the fairly predictable and banal reasons why Mozart feels “uneasy” with his own talent (paternal trauma, how clever), but I’ll perhaps leave that to a more technical comment I’ll make later.

A Mozart who renounces music and places himself in the position of the tormented genius is nothing more than a character who accepts Salieri’s conditions of existence, namely the dichotomy between genius and mediocrity. The lesson that Forman’s Amadeus sought to give us was precisely not to trust Salieri’s idea, to free ourselves from this romantic-taste vision that sees torment in the genius and banality in the mediocre, because Salieri is not, quite simply, mediocre. He is never depicted as such, and his words are entirely inconsistent with what the camera shows us. If this imbalance in the psychological depth of the two characters—which is what makes the story compelling—is removed, then what remains is no longer Amadeus.