MrsBrandon

This is what I actually think.

Because look at Season 2! something like 80% of that was pure filler. gaiman's wrist starting cramping coming up with filler so he even farmed it out to other writers! (nowadays it would be chatgpt).

There probably was a meandering, ultimately pointless 1941 part 3 featuring Aziraphale shooting some zombies and then being made to do the sadistic I am Wrong dance. There probably was some cowboy nonsense where Aziraphale is stupid and falls off a horse and Crowley sneers at him.

I don't give a shit. It's going to be filler. Because if there was anything in those scripts that wasn't filler, they would have filmed it. There was filler in the finished movie, even.

There is NOTHING that could have been written that explains why it's good to coerce a crying person who wants to live to kill themselves. Shakespeare couldn't have done it.

None of the actually big issues with this season have to do with things being cut. Because the big issues are that the show forgot what genre it was and that it was deliberately written to go against the expectations of the only people who wanted to see it.

And they really thought they ate with this ending like it’s so crazy…

Obviously we all have different opinions/tastes/attitudes, but I am also a finale hater, and s2 is far superior to s1 for me.

S1 is lovely, but:

1) it’s not enough of an adaptation

I love the book, it’s been one of my favourites since I was a teen and I’ve read it probably 20 times. But it is a book. TV is a different medium and more changes were needed to make it work well in that format.

2) some modernisation was needed. The Them end up feeling really silly and artificial at times, because whilst it was believable that a very sheltered British child might scoff at 39 flavours of ice cream in the 80s or even the 90s, that just seems ridiculous now, when Ben and jerrys is in every supermarket. Yes the village was supposed to be held in some perfect ideal of childhood but there were a few bits that truly stretched believability.

3) some modern sensibilities were needed. The treatment of Miss Tracy, and Shadwell’s entire character, really do not age well. Their romance ends up feeling quite tragic. Newt comes off as a mild-mannered incel in our current cultural context. More thought was needed to go into all these characters to make them work for a 2019 audience.

4) there are too many characters that are not Aziraphale and Crowley. Now this one is not really a quality thing, it’s just that i fundamentally don’t care about the other characters as much as I do about a&c. When my wife and I rewatched in anticipation of the finale (🤮), we ended up fast forwarding all the sections with newt, and many of the Shadwell bits, because we were struggling to get though it otherwise.

Whereas, season 2 for me was a joy. I loved the humour, I loved the build up of their romance. Plus, the introduction of Whickber street and especially Maggie and Nina, meant a lot to me. It was so fun and interesting to see our angel and demon interacting with and engaging with normal, every day humans.

But most of all I loved the flashbacks! Job and Edinburgh in particular are some of my favourite moments in all of good omens. They deepened our understanding of our characters, and raised philosophical and theological questions that challenge the whole celestial system.

Yes, the shit kiss was shit and the finale fifteen were very painful. But as I was watching it, I expected/understood that to be a third act break up in a romance. The point where the fundamental conflict between the characters is finally articulated in full, so that it can subsequently be resolved satisfactorily. Narratively and pacing wise, that is honestly what it should have been. The fact we were left with the rubbishness of the finale is a failure to properly resolve that conflict - not a failure of the original conflict.

So here's my question:

What the fuck is wrong with you as a human being that you could take something this magical and uplifting and filled with such love and turn it into such an absolutely dark, depressing, nihilistic shitshow???

But the bookshop in my brain is still open. Only on weekends, or the occasional open stint on a quiet midweek day or two, but Whickber Street still bustles around it. It still exists, and is still tended to by a fussy, soft bookseller and his angular, hot headed, but incredibly loving husband. No one was invited to the wedding, needless to say. They just kind of showed up wearing rings one day, and no one had ever thought to ask when they tied the knot, or in fact if they ever even did.

And within its walls are a stock room, still painted yellow; a bedroom, now shared by a snoozing demon and a reading angel, on the weekend and those hazy midweek days; and a desk which never gets dusty or messy.

There’s also a cottage in the South Downs, with a large green house and vegetable plots which miraculously never deplete, and roses which bloom year round; there’s an armchair which has a worn down left arm cushion, from where a demon drapes himself over his angel more often than he sits on the matching chair across from it; a bedroom, shared, again; and the sounds of two lives well lived, infinite happiness and love beyond measure echoing within its floral, wallpapered walls.

We see throughout the series that the circumstances in their lives as Aziraphale and Crowley made living happily and having a beautiful, soft romance that much more difficult; they're fundamentally unable to have that in a conventional sense; something a lot of queer people and/or enjoyers of Will Wood can relate to. In spite of that, Aziraphale and Crowley had carved out a fragile but joyful existence for themselves, as is stated in s2, wherein they look out for each other and love each other, which may be part of so many queer fans' love of the show (aside from the queer leads): this assurance that people who aren't 'normal,' who society just doesn't account for (like hedonistic angels, kind demons, trans people, etc.) can be happy despite the pressure and expectations of those around them. I loved seeing Crowley and Aziraphale just say, 'fuck Heaven and Hell, fuck your expectations, we suck at our jobs and we're in love and we're capable of finding some kind of peace and joy in this messed up world you made.' Like, yes, fuck you, I hate being straight, I suck at it, I'm gonna go be weird and gay and happy <3

The end of s3 with Asa and Anthony living incredibly normal lives effectively negated that. The message of their story line, intentional or not, is: "look at how lovely and perfect and domestic Crowley and Aziraphale's lives would have been if we just kinda! Changed things up! Wouldn't that have been better?????"

Sometimes I think about what I'd be doing if I was cis. Not wishing I was cis, for starts. Maybe I'd be walking a dog on an autumn evening. Or making pancakes while listening to the Beatles. Or, or, or, because of the notion that, since I'm trans, all those forms of unbothered happiness and complete normalcy are simply not available to me. And maybe they are. Maybe I'll never experience joy like a cis person. But I'll experience joy like a trans person: like someone who took part in creation, like someone who fought to be themselves, like a self-made fucking man. But that's not as worth feeling as the normal, yes, so normal happiness you get to feel as a cis person, because being trans hurts, which negates the value of the whole experience. (This bit is sarcastic.)

Asa and Anthony got to experience joy like metaphorical cis people. They'd always been human, and their time as a demon/angel played no part in the way they feel, the way they went about their lives. They were happy the way they never could have been as an angel and a demon, and that is self-evidently a good thing as opposed to a neutral thing. After all, being a supernatural entity was hard. That means the joy of being themselves regardless of expectations, of beating the odds and living despite the people who wanted to tear them down, of having fucking built themselves outside of the frameworks they were given, is not at all worthwhile. (Also sarcastic.)

And if you did like the finale ao3 is still great so we all win

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