Yes, I know. I'm doing it wrong.

This makes me think that was what the planned ending with Terry pratchett was meant to be, resulting in them being able to retire to the South Downs and live peacefully.

Instead NG had already used that up so had to come up with some new bullshit to squeeze out the extra seasons.

So in fact only season 1 is canon and we can take it they did decide to move to the South Downs together at some point after the ending.

Anyone know the source of this? If so it's starting to make sense how it went so wrong.

And what if they'd done it again?

There was so much there to play with. You had bodyswaps, a former antichrist, a witch, the son of an American ambassador who had accidentally been raised by eldritch beings. And he used none of it, only to yank idiot plot points like the Book of Life and the Eternal Flame out of his arse at the eleventh hour.

Remember all that fevered speculation about the Metatron's motives, the coffee, the clock, the possibility that Aziraphale and Crowley had swapped during the kiss?

It was all for nothing! Nothing meant anything because it was just really, really shit writing. Like breathtakingly, eye-poppingly, holy-shit-you-should-be-fucking-studiedly bad writing. Every possible call-back abandoned, foreshadowings left hanging in tatters, characters mutilated beyond recognition, and plot points that could have gone somewhere ditched for last minute contrivances.

It has been since the very beginning.

NG (fuck NG) thought of a book plot where a demon finds himself in The Omen movie. But he screws up the baby switch. And the Antichrist grew up as a character in a Richmal Crompton novel. He didn't know what to do with it next. TP offered to buy the story. He changed the demon into a demon and an angel defying their bosses on the earth they both loved. He added his smart whimsy and gave the story a moral core far beyond a silly spoof. When the story was written, queer kids saw themselves in the angel and demon based on the subtext. Because they lived in subtext. Gender fluid and trans readers created stories about an angel and demon for whom gender was a choice depending on how or whether they decided to make an effort. The strangeness of fitting into a planet dominated by beings the angel and demon differed from spoke to neurodivergent readers.

Religious readers found healing after years of struggling to make sense of doctrine divorced from morality. Some ace and aro readers saw the deep and meaningful relationship beyond romance between a pair together over 6000 years. And tons of horny people from all walks of life poured their hearts into smut that made the most of beings whose bodies allowed for a range of sexual practice that would never be realistic for humans.

artistsuniversum: “Kathin Marchenko is a textile artist and designer known for her expressive embroidery on delicate tulle fabric.

Using a "painting with thread" technique, she creates portraits, anatomical forms, and ethereal figures that seem to float within wooden hoops, blending craft with fine art.”

Artist: @kathrin_marchenko

This is long and jumbled and speculative but I wrote it so might as well blog it, if not now then when really (maybe when I don't have 120 midterms to grade? lmao)

I seem to recall that NG is (was?) a combo plot-pantser in the sense that there would be story *events* written out but the actual way those things came about was all flying by the seat of the pants as you go. I've said it elsewhere but I have a deep suspicion that the big picture story beats probably existed in some form that is referred to as the "script" that needed to be modified, but nothing much else was actually properly written except maybe in sketchy notes. The outline was probably handed off to the 2 dudes who then likely watched S1 and 2 for a sense of the characters and what "callbacks" would make the fans feel like this was the same show and then they wrote what we saw. The memberberry crop is bountiful in S3 without any real context because what they saw as connective tissue was more a focus on catchphrase and emotional-beat-good-tv craft than a reflection on internal character development. The events of spoken words, not what they're meant to represent.

I've only read one book by Marshall Smith, and I found it to be a bit of that tedious type of writing some men are delighted by, where they are convinced that cynical atheism and flippant cliché makes them fucking hilarious. Grim stuff if you actually like to read but definitely runs forward on slick wheels with a big ol' engine.

Peter Atkins has a long history of misunderstanding what makes something good (wrote the Hellraiser sequels lmao) and his fiction is also super bleakly interested in cheap "deep" characterization that's actually a bucket of cliches masked by skidding over the interesting stuff in favour of tedious dude-nihilism. No chance in hell either were actual fans of the book and both would have missed what was could be mined from the likable bits in s2 in favour of the struggle against "doing what Heaven wants because Heaven is evil, actually and also the worst thing in the world is the unlikelihood of a libertarian conception of free will‡, also love always ultimately destroys you lol only death makes meaning"... I feel like this isn't quite my point;

this is hard to articulate because I just have met *so many" of this type of dude rolling through my classes! They love being able to say they took Philosophy 101! They have all read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, or at least pretended to, which is why I do not teach Nietzsche any longer! Not a single one of them has ever noticed the blatant homosocial subtext of Top Gun, and none of them think there is a rape scene in Bladerunner! I'm gesturing to a type of person who it sounds like I'm being rude about, but some of them are perfectly nice folks! They just...care about different parts of literature and thematic synthesis than probably we all do. I think it's crap, but I'm sure they aren't a fan of Elizabeth Bowen's work or etc so whatever takes all kinds

Anyway the point I'm making here is that the script was hacked together from big-picture story beats and, yes, rushed for screentime, but also written by cliché monster dudes with nobody able to make them dig in to the original text, a history of thinking literary torture is deep and who had no concern for the thematic movements...then was modified a bit on the fly by actors who don't do a lot of improv if the interviews are accurate and everyone on Hell's own time crunch.

The script had everyone being low key dicks to each other because that's what passes for humour for the scriptwriters; for example, Muriel is literally a fucking joke because obviously that's what they're for, to be the punching bag. They were a little daffy which means they're dumb, after all. God is laughing it up with Satan because fuck you mom and dad, we know what you think but we're so above it actually. Free will can't exist when gods exist because that's sheeple thinking (I am sooooo profoundly professionally irritated by how shallow this is, but none of you want a lecture on Kant right now!) Jesus is useless because that person is so loaded with icky evangelicalism, and stoic self sacrifice to be able to wipe the slate clean is what A Good Person Would Do (and you get to shoehorn a blatant boring jesus metaphor in there!) but they won't talk about it, actions are better than "blah blah blah" after all.

I'm sorry, but how does this work? There's a topless volleyball montage to Playing With the Boys that looks like it was sponsored by Johnson's Baby Oil, ffs.

“No. That’s worse than war.”