Mostly Good Omens hyperfixation here

They wrote their own story.

✨️some thoughts under the cut, feel free to ignore it and just enjoy the picture✨️

Louis Ralph just uploaded this Good Omens 3 concept artwork to his online portfolio.

This could have been so beautiful. It was supposed to be so beautiful.

They’re them. Under Crowley’s stars, surrounded by the attributes of their past, safely cocooned by centuries of shared memories and held by their future. Crowley haphazardly draped in his chair, Aziraphale pointing out the shooting star. A walking cane lovingly propped up against the arm of a favorite chair. The bitten apple between them. Holding hands. They’re exactly as they should be.

We could have had the most moving, most tenderly heartfelt end that didn’t fucking break so many of us while insisting that broken things cannot be fixed.

There is more warmth and intimacy in this concept art than the entire finale.

Despite the fact that Gaiman didn't write the final script, it was based on 6 finished scripts he wrote, so it feels safe to assume the core ending was his idea. Former fans of his writing said the ending's nihilism felt like something he'd do. Various facts such as director Rachel Talalay saying there was no kiss in the script and she was told she couldn’t add one, Gaiman basically saying post-s2 about the kiss that he wanted a way to give fans what they wanted without giving them what they wanted, and David Tennant telling fans at a convention back in 2024 that the ending might not be what fans wanted, indicate that Gaiman never intended to give Aziraphale and Crowley the happy, romantic ending he chose to set up. 

The question is: why would a writer do this? In response to shippers back with the first season in 2019, Gaiman could’ve simply said, “I understand fans feel very passionately about their relationship, but Terry and I didn’t write it that way and I don’t want to rewrite their dynamic without him here.” But he didn’t do that. He played a fool by twisting himself into knots to say he wrote them secretly holding hands and would comment on fan posts “confirming” their headcanons, and then went out of his way to textually change the dynamic with an explicitly romantic kiss at the end of s2, but evidently, had zero intention to make them do it again, perhaps not despite fans wanting it, but due to fans clammoring for it. But let's emphasize this: no one made him do this! He could have capitalized on fan excitement and shipper feels, written two more seasons full of subtext, and never changed the nature of their relationship. The finale’s human marriage is cute, but he must have known it was not what fans wanted with the cottage. The lack of kiss and verbal love confession, along with him killing the audience's version of the characters, feel deliberate. You have to go out of your way to squander the s2 cliffhanger and not make them kiss again, kill the version of the characters everyone loved, and screw with the cottage ending

I saw great tags about this on a post that had reblogs disabled, so I assume the OP doesn't want attention and I won't mention their url here. But they were right: Neil Gaiman simply lied to the fandom. He lied about Good Omens always having been a love story, he lied about bringing Aziraphale and Crowley together romantically being Terry Pratchett's dying wish, and he lied about fans' headcanons being true. Obligatory disclaimer: what he did in real life to women is on a different level and cannot be compared to writing choices, but this lying is not unrelated to his sinister side. He was manipulative and calculated towards his fan base (and the tumblr fan base primarily consisted of women), and knew exactly what he was doing. He got off on fans worshipping him and seeking his validation, but had enough disdain for them to openly say he didn't want to give them what they wanted even though he knew how much it meant to them. Writers aren't obligated to give fans what they want, but again: he went out of his way to pander to fans at the end of s2. You can't do that, hang around fans on tumblr to drink up their praise, and turn around and say "nah, fuck the fans" after that, unless you're actually an asshole who enjoys toying with people. I don't believe he intentionally made the ending bad—I think he's enough of a hack that he thought the retcon would be a good plot twist—but I do think he intentionally fucked with fans when he rewrote the premise of the cottage and didn’t make them kiss. Can’t you picture a real-life abuser wanting to mindfuck a bunch of women, especially when he did literally abuse some fans? Keep in mind this is the same guy who wrote a gomens movie script in the 90s out of spite, too

Nope. Nope - even if I laughed at moments, and found the ending scene sweet, because how could David and Michael not be? I enjoy an AU as much as anybody, but if anyone deserves their love confession, their kiss, their happy ever after, it’s the canon characters who've been through so much together, not a pair of stand-ins.

I know the line forms to the left. Here we go anyway.

What I got from the original book – and specifically the parts that Pratchett obviously put into it, the underlying theme, the humane perspective – is that the world’s not saved by grand heroics, by the procurement of a McGuffin like the Book of Life or the killing of an Antichrist. It’s saved, little piece by little piece, through the compounding effect of small, good things, of kindnesses performed by imperfect beings and the love of random beauty and the cherishing of the day-to-day. Aziraphale and Crowley thwart the Apocalypse not because they feel the call to be heroes, but because they’ve gotten used to humanity with all its flaws; because they love a bookshop and a car and gravlax and bebop and little restaurants where they know your name. The things that multiply and intertwine in our lives, that hold us and our world together the way roots fix the soil. The shared meals and the do-you-remembers, the problems muddled through, the arguments made up; the love of a child for his home and his friends, for a familiar wood and apples stolen from a neighbor’s tree. How does it save the world if you destroy the world?

(I’m old; I was born in the Fifities, and oh, I remember the  heavy irony of “we had to destroy the village In order to save it.” But that’s just what this story did.)

Saying “this is all broken and wrong, and the only thing to do is wipe it all out and start over from the beginning”: that’s been the recipe for some of the worst horrors of the world. That was the entire fucking message of the original book. The world is flawed, the systems we live under imperfect and even cruel in their origins, but it can be healed, bit by bit, if you love enough – even if you love in seemingly trivial ways.  Good Omens is about mending – mending the consequences of folly, mending friendships, mending the damage people inflict on one another, like an angel mending the spine of a beloved old book. Mending the error in the assumption that sides mean more than individuals, leaving two beings like Aziraphale and Crowley free to treasure all the small things about each other, as friends or lovers or however you choose to see them. The meet-cute of their human counterparts in the remade, blind-watchmaker universe is, well, cute, but it doesn't reward the characters we came to love, who evolved along with humanity, became who they are by outgrowing the artificial opposition imposed on them, and bonded through rising above it. (And neither couple ever gets a tender kiss to cancel out the angry one that left us all ravaged in 2023; more articulate voices than mine have gone to town on the way that narrative choice dilutes the queer representation that stunned us with its promise in the original TV adaptation).

So I see the whole progress of the sequel series as misbegotten – most likely, for all the usual reasons of cupidity and vanity – leaving us with a couple of pieces of tone-deaf fan fiction that literally lost the plot. Good moments here and there, clever bits of banter and comic turns; two lead actors with dazzling chemistry that most of us would pay to hear read the phone book for ninety minutes; but all in all a disjointed story compounded of fan tropes, that did not seem to love its characters or have a point beyond churning them around for ninety minutes.

Where in this story are characters comparable to everybody that made the original so rich and endearing to begin with? The bumbling, sincere romances (Anathema and Newt, Tracy and Shadwell, even the wholesome marital bond of Lesley and Maud)? The tweenage energy and candor provided by  the Them? Eleven-year-old Adam Young faced a choice and protected the world because its simple joys were enough for him; twinky Jesus Mark II goes down an elevator and survives just long enough to learn a card trick, distribute pizza, and be disintegrated without addressing any of the events unfolding around him. And where the entire hell is Agnes Nutter, and her tart wisdom?

(....Remember Agnes? Are we to accept that she wrote two books of prophecy, guiding the angel and demon who were fated to thwart Armageddon – and that her descendant burnt the second, in order to start her new life without a roadmap – only for everything to go up a few years later, not in a ball of flaming goo, but in a corny Avengers Endgame series of sfx dust devils? This story seems to be happening in an entirely different universe to the one that was built between book covers or the opening and closing credits of Season One, and it's not because God rebooted it.)

I distanced myself from the Good Omens fandom lately, and i’m sure this is not a surprise to many of you reading this post. i want to be very clear: neil gaiman had a lot to do with it. I didn’t want to show my support for a show made by an abuser. And yes, i see and hear people claiming Good Omens belonged to the people and the fans, but realistically the rights and royalties belong to ng, and participating in the promotion of it all just felt wrong to me. So, my choice was to love my favorite characters of all time from afar, and for free: reading and writing and engaging with fanworks.

That being said: I really fucking hated the fuckass movie. I wish i didn’t see it, i wish the show stopped at season 1, and if you liked it, good for you. I did not, and I want to tell you why. Feel free to ignore me.

Is that a hole in your plot?

The writing was bad. Content aside, what I wanted for this characters aside, my feelings on ng and the other writers begrudgingly aside, it was a badly written piece of television. I counted too many plot holes in the first thirty minutes aside, but i will point out what felt the biggest to me.

The opening flashback: it was hot, and that was it. Where does it fit in the timeline we already know about? It doesn’t fit with their first meeting as angels, nor with their first meeting on the wall. Why keep rewriting the first time they met? We already know how they met, twice, and besides the sexual tension, what did this new flashback bring to the story? Arguably, nothing; another case of bad wigs, maybe, nothing more. Perhaps, another instance of contradicting the book and the first ever episode: “it starts, as it will end, with a garden.” Well, apparently not.

Skipping all that nonsense in the middle (Aziraphale leaving crowley in the alley? Jesus having two lines after being promoted as the main focus of the season? The book of life burning not immediately snapping aziraphale and crowley away? Crowley having no reaction to Aziraphale confessing undying devotion to him?) let’s get to the very end. The decision the main characters come to is to erase themselves and all traces of their universe to create a new, fresh universe where angels and demons do not exist, and free will reigns above all. Two minutes after, the movie presents us two human versions of said characters meeting again, 13 something billion of years later, falling in love and all that good stuff. What we are supposed to take away from this is: they were destined to meet and fall in love in every universe, no matter the circumstances. Where is the free will in a soulmate trope? Where is the free will in this condoning of predeterminism? If they were meant to be, then free will isn’t ruling this universe. Fate is. Was it all for nothing then?

Who are these characters?

The characters fell flat. The side characters were useless at best, annoying at worst. Michael going rogue was predictable, Jesus was a nothingburger, the entire Whickber Street ensemble was just… not relevant. And the main characters were subjected to the worst character assasination my eyes have ever seen. The worst of it? That entire scene with God and Satan: Crowley never once looking at Aziraphale, not even at the most heartwrenching confession; Aziraphale talking about Crowley being amazing in the past tense; Crowley choosing something that’s not Aziraphale, after his whole entire monologue and character arc in season 2; Aziraphale accepting complete erasure after fighting 3 years in heaven against it, just because lobotomized Crowley wanted it. What the fuck?

Also, Asa and Anthony. They were cute. Adorable, really. Two cute old men (with bad hair, but i’m willing to move past this) falling in love and getting married. Cute cute cute. Who the fuck were they? They were not Aziraphale and Crowley: they were an English librarian and a Scottish professor, not the angel and demon I loved and yearned and was obsessed with for years. And again, if it were them, why weren’t they recognizable at all? In all the human AUs i enjoyed the characters were perfectly recognizable: Crowley was still moody and a bit rough around the edges, yet soft and almost overwhelming in his loveliness; Aziraphale was still witty and smart and a bit (or a lot) of a snob, yet kind and warm and loving to a fault. These two human beings were cute, but they weren’t them. Who are these characters?

The winner takes it all, the loser has to fall

The loser, in this case, being queer people everywhere. Put your daggers down and let me tell you this: it is not acephobic to think a kiss was needed in this finale.

You’re right when you say that physicality is not needed to show love and connection; in this case, however, physicality between them was already a given – they already kissed. Out of desperation, out of despair, out of sadness, but they kissed. They crossed that bridge and their relationship jumped to the other side of strictly platonic and now, for a simple rule of balance and equity in pieces of media, the ‘ugly kiss’ desperately (pardon the repetition) needed a ‘good kiss’. The finger thing could have been cute, but it lacked the depth and emotional weight to carry the conclusion of a third act.

If that was all the goobye we are going to get, it is simply not enough: they wrapped up 6000 years of history (a history they previously spend two seasons fighting tooth and nail to not erase, mind you) with a finger kiss and an awkward smile. Am i supposed to say it was good?

Also, implying that people wanted some physical intimacy between two queer characters (after it was already established) just to satisfy some sort of fetish is too disrespectful to even comment about.

A straight couple would have gotten a teary goodbye, an explicit I love you and a kiss before turning to dust. The gays get buried — or erased from existence, in this case.

Human incarnate, or the lack of it

All in all, the finale felt cheap, flat, soulless. A comedy desperately grasping onto the physycality of it but not really committing to the bit, a love story relying on the chemistry between the mains without letting them have a single meaningful conversation, a show about humanity reducing human beings to comedic reliefs, over-the-top antagonists and afterthoughts easy to erase with a snap of two fingers.

And no, no one got a second chance: Adam rewrote the universe for nothing, Aziraphale tried to fix Heaven for nothing, Crowley asked questions for nothing. It was all erased anyway, and the ones who get to live simply aren’t them. Some version of them that was paradoxically destined to meet, going against the free will they gave up everything for.

Good Omens was always about knowing your fate, and choosing your own anyway. Loving despite, loving because of, loving even if. The love between to immortal beings being what kept everything together. The characters I knew and loved would have kept choosing each other and their world, not another new one, despite everything, because of history, and even if it was the hardest thing.

They loved their world, their Earth, and deserved to live in it. On their own side. Just the two of them.

So I really didn’t like the movie, and the message it sent. I did not find it bittersweet, just bleak. And this is why.

Going forward, I’ll finish every fic I started. After, I don’t know. It may take me a while.

I’ve started a canon-compliant S3 fix-it fic that shows that what we got in the finale is only one possible iteration of how it ended:

World Without End

Summary:  Michael tries to erase the Metatron from the Book of Life. It sets off an explosion of potential alternate realities and timelines, both into the past and into the future. Here is one possibility.

Or: a canon-compliant S3 fix-it where the IRL Season 3 is only ONE potential version of what might have come from messing around with the Book of Life, and therefore everything that happens from the moment the Metatron is poofed out of existence is up to you. Choose your own Season 3. Choose your own ending.

***** I included a brief summary of my S3 thoughts in the note on this fic. I’m also going to include it here below the cut. People have very different feelings about the finale, and I think all of those feelings, good and bad and in between, are valid. No matter where you fall on that spectrum, please be kind 💕

It's official!

Portland, Oregon's Ineffable Picnic will take place on May 23rd, 11:00am, at Peninsula Park!

Potluck-style picnic, so bring a snack to share if you can, and spend the day with fandom friends!

(image text below:)

Ineffable Picnic

Saturday, May 23rd

11:00am

Peninsula Park

700 N Rosa Parks Way

Join us for an afternoon of fandom, food, and fun! We'll be meeting at the Bandstand, then finding a perfect spot to munch and discuss all things Good Omens.

Questions? Contact @between2waves on Discord or Tumblr.

🔗 Discord Thread Link

Art by @wingly-coded

The fact of the matter is, the above is what was missing: Aziraphale and Crowley deserved a proper conversation. I am not too hung up about the kiss, what I am upset about is that they never had an honest, direct conversation with each other. That conversation seemed to be starting, but then would always just stop somewhere on medium heat. That culmination of all things unspoken never came. Aziraphale mentions how Crowley was the best angel, and artist, and never says outright that he has never stopped being inquisitive and curious and that it is not about being an angel or a demon, it is about being a person. Aziraphale never tells Crowley he loves him. He sort of tells it to god, but not to Crowley. I am upset they never got a hug - just like on the image above, to at least be able to pour all those unsaid things into an embrace, into being each other's anchors.

A proper conversation, a confessoon, a hug - it would have made the ending bearable. I am ready to forget and forgive all the plotholes, all the hooks that were set up and never triggered, I get it - they had five times less time then needed. But I don't get how in those 90 minutes they could not find 20-30 seconds for a hug.

I do not agree that this kamikaze ending is a good one, or that it aligns with the overall feeling of the story, but I would have probably had an easier time accepting it if our ineffable husbands at least got closure.

They gave us Aziraphale and Crowley being all but useless in S1 and partly in S2. They should've been wrapped up in their own personal things while trying to find the Christ and Antichrist, talking about their problems and actually communicating but mostly fumbling their way through it all.

In S1 they gave us "you don't destroy the world if you want to save it; you put in the work to make it better" and then in S3 they just said "fuck it; let's burn it all to the ground."

They gave us an Antichrist powerful enough to revert the world he was more than capable of destroying. I guarantee they could've given us a Christ + Antichrist (with help from Aziraphale and Crowley) powerful enough to undo what Michael did.

And none of that even gets into the constant out of character behavior or the massive, gaping plot holes.

As he wrote, he spoke aloud:

And I also wanted to offer some of what’s kind of occurred to me over the past few days, both from what you’ve said and from trying to work through my own feelings about all of this.

Because yes. Season 3 did not deliver for a lot of us.

I had a whole wishlist before the season dropped. I made a bingo board. I had all these little hopes and moments I wanted to see happen. And then to watch none of them happen, or to watch something like the South Downs happen in this really convoluted, painful way…it hurt and it horrified me.

And look, Asa and Anthony are cute. I genuinely wish them the best. But they’re not Aziraphale and Crowley. They’re not the angel and demon we knew. They’re not the beings who carried six thousand years of memory and history and longing and trauma and devotion and complexity. And seeing these new versions receive the ending that our boys deserved felt, to me, like a slap in the face.

All of those feelings are valid.

And when people lean into the grief and say things like, “They’re gone now,” or “They never existed,” I understand where that’s coming from. Because yes, in-universe, they may be gone. And that grief is real.

But in our universe, we know them. Okay? We still know them. Nothing can undo the years we spent loving them, understanding them, creating for them, finding ourselves through them.

I was scrolling through my camera roll this morning, through old TikToks and edits and memes and theories and screenshots and fanart from before Season 3 came out, and there was just so much joy there. So much love. So much creativity. So much community. Nothing can undo that.

And honestly, I don’t think we should throw Season 2 away, either.

I know a lot of people are saying, “Season 1 is all we have now,” and if that’s how someone wants to engage with the story going forward, that’s completely fair. But Season 2 gave us something really important. It gave us validation.

There were so many people in my life who told me Aziraphale and Crowley weren’t romantic. That I was reading too much into it. That I was seeing things that weren’t there. And then Season 2 happened, and they kissed. They loved each other openly and textually and undeniably.

And I know this sounds silly to some people, but it mattered to me. It mattered to know that I was right. That I could recognize queer love when I saw it. That this thing I had understood and felt so deeply since I was nineteen was real.

Because so many queer stories go unacknowledged. So many ships stay forever trapped in subtext or ambiguity. But Aziraphale and Crowley loved each other canonically. Nothing Season 3 does can take that away from us.

That mattered. Season 2 mattered.

It mattered so much that I literally wrote a (published!) article about the legality of fanfiction and transformative works using Good Omens as an example of what happens when canon validates a fandom’s interpretation. After Season 1, something like 43,000 fics were written before Season 2 came out. Between Seasons 2 and 3, in even less time, over 31,000 more were written.

Thirty-one thousand.

That’s enormous. That’s not nothing. That’s love. That’s people seeing themselves in these characters and building something beautiful together.

And somewhere in those stories is an ending that will speak to us. Somewhere in those stories is the emotional resolution we needed. Somewhere in those stories is a version of the South Downs that feels warm and true and earned.

Because this is what fandom does.

We write fic. We make art. We analyze. We transform. We take what hurt us and make something beautiful out of it. Not because canon “doesn’t matter,” but because our connection to these characters was never passive in the first place.

At a certain point, characters stop belonging only to canon. They become part of all the people who loved them.

And Aziraphale and Crowley are loved. Deeply.

So yes, we can be angry. Honestly, I think we should be angry. I’m genuinely happy for the people who loved this ending, and I wish I was one of them. But for those of us who didn’t, I don’t think this is the end of anything.

I think this is a catalyst.

I think there is going to be an unbelievable amount of art and fic and analysis and creativity and emotion born from this pain. I think people are going to spend years lovingly reconstructing these characters in ways that honor who they were to us.

And maybe that’s part of the legacy, too.

Because we’ve already seen Aziraphale and Crowley fall in love a thousand times. We’ve seen them choose each other over and over and over again across thousands of stories written by people who cared about them deeply.

We’ve seen their happy ending before.

And we will see it again.

These characters are ours now. Your version of Aziraphale and Crowley, the ones you carry in your heart, the ones who mattered to you, the ones who helped you understand yourself or feel less alone or believe in love a little more — those versions still exist.

Only if you allow yourself to give them up will they truly disappear.

And they don’t have to.

We will heal. We will be okay. 

waittttt i think you’re on to something here. canonically we are not living in the ‘new universe’ that god created in which the angel and the demon never existed, precisely because we know they existed

anyway thank you for your thoughtful and lovely ask which is a giant love letter to fandom

We’re asking, where does the soul live?

For those who think that who we are is shaped by a life time of experiences. That we grow and change with each each heartbreak and trauma. We see the ending as something horrible. We’re witnessing the death of our beloved characters and we are grieving for them.

For those who believe in a soul, who believe that Asa and Anthony are Aziraphale and Crowley because of the something intrinsic that lives inside them, what they’re seeing is a rebirth and a second chance. In that sense the ending is beautiful. They both get exactly what they’ve always wanted. To live as humans without the pressure of heaven and hell. In that sense, the ending is a joyous one.

Sadly these beliefs are deeply held, often the roots begin as far back as our childhoods. No amount of screaming at each other about media analysis is going to change anyone’s mind. Please just accept that there are multiple ways that one can view the ending and that those who are upset are experiencing grief. This is an extremely normal and valid reaction to end of something so meaningful and should be treated with care.

That said, your grief is not an excuse to lash out and those who don’t deserve it.

THOU ART CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

*Gregorian chanting*

13.21

*leper bell ringing*

HIGH MEDIAEVAL FM

*recording of John Lackland sobbing as he signs the Magna Carta*

WHENCE COMETH NAUGHT BUT LITURGIES

LITURGIES

AND MORE LITURGIES

*Templar knights praying out loud*

THIS ISN’T THY GRANDMOTHERES STATION

Please excuse the text and let me be cringe, that ending fucked me up so bad I’ll be recovering longer than from OFMD Izzy’s death

Plus a little extra:

Also Nanny and Brother Francis didn't exist either so Warlock wouldn't be the same guy

(Sorry if this is explained I haven't watched yet and I'm not sure I will)