aw man, i'm all outta cash!

Okay, so I've seen people say that the new world was created with their love and that's what makes it a perfect ending for them...

But I don't see how that's different from Adam wanting to create a new world out of his love for it. Despite being the antichrist, Adam loved very strongly. That's the whole point of his story. He wanted to remake the world in his own vision of what it should be. Now, he is human incarnate, the best and worst of humanity wrapped up in one child with the power to warp reality to his bidding. Crowley and Aziraphale are divine/occult beings, so one could argue that they have a grander understanding of how to reshape the world and let it all play out, but an emphasis has always been placed on how humanity shaped the two of them, too. How humanity plays into their feelings about the world and everyone in it and how they still love it all regardless of the good and bad. So I think it is fair to say that they aren't operating from that different of a place than Adam, whose love for Tadfield - his whole world - affected Aziraphale so strongly that he had to comment on it multiple times.

The whole point of Adam's story is that no matter how broken the world is, he can't just rewrite it the way he wants it to be. Losing the worst of humanity also means losing the best of it, as well as what it means to be a part of the unfairly, but still beautiful, broken world we all live in. He can't just erase it and start over. Aziraphale and Crowley might not have been there to witness Adam's revelation, but we were. That story is for us. Adam's journey is for us.

Now, Crowley and Aziraphale's journey is also for us - and in the show especially it was always so clear to me that they were representative of 1) living a life forever changed by the trauma he endured and continues to endure on a daily basis (Crowley) and 2) living a life so entrenched in an abusive family/religious dynamic that he cannot break away from because he's both afraid to lose it and because he still hopes that maybe they'll change (Aziraphale) as ways to relate them to the audience. They have always been very human in their portrayal, even as an angel and a demon. They are perfect examples of the best and worst of humanity by being a demon who's a little bit a good person and an angel who's just enough of a bastard to be worth knowing.

So, to me, this ending where everything is erased and they start over from new, in a completely different world with completely different rules and everyone who ever walked the earth is gone from existence because it didn't work the first time, because it was too broken, reads as Crowley and Aziraphale as they are - with everything they've endured over the past 6000 years, everything they've overcome, just for the chance to live a peaceful life on earth together - being too broken to get that, too.

Because the versions of them that do get it? Did not fight for it. They did not claw their way into their happiness with burning wings and the crippling fear that their very association would destroy the person they held the most dear in all of creation. And I'm not saying they should've had to. But the fact is we know that they did. As much as Heaven and Hell both suck as institutions and are responsible for fucking so much over, their existence is an integral part of shaping the earth into what it is, as well as shaping Crowley and Aziraphale. We know that their trauma is so ingrained with who they are, it is impossible to separate it from them without completely changing them. That's what trauma does. It changes us. We can't go back to who were before it and we can't wish it away like it never happened, but that doesn't mean we give up on a chance for a peaceful existence. It doesn't mean we stop trying.

I've always been really glad that we never learned Crowley's name as an angel because that isn't who he is anymore. He can't go back to that, and he doesn't want to. He isn't that person anymore and it is tragic; it's so tragic what happened to him, but the beauty in his story is that he is still loved so much. He is still valued. He still matters. Not for who he was, but who he is. Crowley the demon is loved and deserves love just as much as Crowley the angel.

Crowley the human is Crowley the angel. He's very clearly representative of the angel he was before the fall. And I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to be loved and have happiness just because he didn't endure a torturous existence, that's not it at all. If this was just a cute, queer love story between two middle-aged men-shaped beings finding each other and falling in love where the focus isn't on how much trauma they have packed into each other, then fantastic. I'm all for more kinds of queer storytelling, I want to see it.

My problem is that Crowley and Aziraphale already existed as characters depicted and fully shaped by their trauma and finding reasons to carry-on and keep trying despite it all. That was their story. And the ending to that story isn't to let them keep trying, isn't to give them these little moments of peace that they deserve to have even if they're so broken down by systems that have always been against them, and isn't to let them love each other the way they always have and have never felt completely free to. No, their ending is to erase them from existence because who they are and what the world is won't let them have that.

And that... that is just one more story among many recent ones that says people or institutions can be too broken to carry on and their only solution is to cease to exist. That happiness is not achievable for them as they are. And when we live in a world full of mental health crises day after day, where children grow up feeling unloved as they are and too broken and are holding onto a very fragile hope for a tomorrow that is supposed to be better than their today... it doesn't feel like poetic and beautiful storytelling. It feels hollow and defeating. Inevitable, not ineffable.

They'll find each other in every universe - yes, of course. I love that for them and they deserve it, but they deserved it as themselves! In the world they loved! No one is beyond hope and happiness. These new versions of Crowley and Aziraphale get a happy ending, but as far as the actual scenes show us, they are not OUR Crowley and Aziraphale. They're the ones that get a chance, because the ones who struggled for 6000 years lost theirs. Gave it up. Sacrificed in the name of a greater good that doesn't feel greater.

It just makes me sick to my stomach in a media climate where too many stories are glorifying ending it all or starting over with nothing because the life you want for yourself is unattainable because you're too traumatized for it. And that isn't to say there isn't something beautiful in the idea of making peace with a different life than you expected, but I feel like that's more meaningful when you get to be aware of that? Crowly and Aziraphale didn't choose a human life for themselves. They chose nothingness. As far as they were aware, when they disappeared, it was for forever.

It was the greatest sacrifice they could make for humanity, but why remake it all from scratch after going to all the trouble to stop Adam from doing the same thing? Is it because Adam was influenced to? But then why go to the trouble to emphasize that he's human incarnate and not of Hell or Heaven? Was he right to want to start over this whole time and Crowley and Aziraphale just didn't see it until the end? While it can be inspiring to know we can start over and choose new lives for ourselves, we still take who we are and what we learn with us. It's never a completely clean slate because then we'd just make the same mistakes again if we never learned from them.

I don't know. I'm tired. I'm sad.

Anyway, that's where I'm at after one watch and a night of no sleep. I'll watch it again later because I want to take everything in again fully, but after that, as of right now, I'm pretty sure I won't revisit anything beyond season 1 again. Season 1 is still a perfect story to me. It never needed anything else because it resolved enough and left so much room for interpretations on how Crowley and Aziraphale would move forward on their side, but the possibilities open to them were limitless. They were getting a fresh start on their side, but as themselves. Nothing was rewritten except to put everything back in its place the way it was before Armageddon.

I don't know how many of my followers are still here that know just how important Good Omens is to me. It saved me when I was trapped in a toxic environment that was as soul-sucking as it was impossible to escape. I have cherished it for the past seven years and kept it close to my chest because I needed it so much to be my safe space. There were times I almost lost it because of outside influences, so I turned it entirely inward to protect its meaning to me. Meaning that is solely based on my interpretation of it and my history with the characters and all the fanworks that have been lovingly crafted through the years, so I get it's not going to feel the same to everyone else.

Anyway... just needed to get this all off my chest because I don't know if people who are defending the ending are fully understanding why it might be so painful for those of us that aren't satisfied. And why it just doesn't make sense to me personally to go back on the purpose of Adam's story and basically say, "well, it's alright in this case because the world was beyond fixing!" Adam believed the world was beyond fixing, but it was framed as clearly wrong for him to end it all and start over!

If you are happy with this ending, I'm happy for you. I'm glad it gave you something when we were so close to getting nothing. Maybe I could've been satisfied if they'd had more time to build up to this kind of ending. I know that was out of the production team's control and this isn't to say that they didn't do their best with what they had available to them... but I think they should've gone in a different direction if they didn't have the time to properly lay out the beats for this story in a way that didn't feel like Crowley and Aziraphale giving up on themselves.

Because our Crowley and Aziraphale had no way of knowing versions of themselves would exist in this new world order. They sacrificed themselves and their chances at a life together on earth fully believing any trace of them would be gone forever. Which is what makes it so tragic, but fuck if I'm not tired of tragic endings for traumatized characters in mainstream media in stories that weren't initially marketed as tragedies.

Good Omens was primarily described as fantasy, comedy, satire that happened to have a sprinkle of queer romantic/platonic subplot, depending on your personal reading of Crowley and Aziraphale's feelings for each other. And yes, I cried at parts in season 1, but I never felt like either Crowley or Aziraphale were in actual danger of dying/ceasing to exist forever. That was never something I considered as a possibility given the tone of the show. So the sudden tonal shift at the end just didn't feel earned or organic to the story. Again, maybe that could've been helped by more time, but that wasn't a possibility, so it really can't be held up as evidence of its true quality as a finale for me. We'll never know what it truly could've been like with more time.

And you know, maybe the human Crowley and Aziraphale get to be reincarnated over and over and have fragments of the memories of who they used to be, but that's not shown or inferred to us. It's a perfectly valid interpretation, but not a universal one and not something that can be pointed to with any clear evidence. We don't get to see our Crowley and Aziraphale - the demon and the angel - in their cottage in the South Downs on their side and living on, day by day, in a world that isn't changed in one go with a big bang, but with the tiny choices they make each day to build a future they can see themselves in.