passmetheecclescakes

First of all, I never wanted to see God. I think God has to be an offscreen character for Her to work at all because the whole POINT of God in Good Omens is that NO ONE actually knows who She is or what She wants. It’s INEFFABLE. But what makes me even more upset is that they took away the mystery behind her motivations and just made her cruel.

In S1 and the book, you get the sense that God is well-meaning, but perhaps got a bit carried away as time went on. She’s a workaholic parent that might have started off with good intentions, but is ultimately an absent parent, and her children all suffer for it. Heaven and Hell don’t actually KNOW what God wants, they’re just doing what they think God wants because she’s left them all alone at home with no instructions and no babysitter.

God is a CEO with too many projects on their plate and doesn’t check their email, and Heaven and Hell are middle managers doing their best not to become the reason she starts checking it again.

And so in S1 and the book, it’s easy to see God as more indifferent than cruel- in fact, I’d argue that’s one of the main themes of the book, that indifference is often just as harmful (or even more so) than “pure evil,” if that even exists. The whole POINT of Good Omens originally was that there’s no such thing as “pure good” or “pure evil.”

But God in the finale is undeniably cruel, because she is fully aware of what she’s been doing and what’s been going on. She’s been watching gleefully through it all. She’s not the absent parent with good intentions anymore, she’s the parent manipulating and encouraging her children to fight and hurt each other for her own amusement. It’s sick, it’s evil. It’s cartoonishly evil. There is no way to argue that it was all “ineffable,” because she explains it quite clearly: she wanted to watch them suffer.

It’s like the CEO has gone from not knowing what happens in the office when they’re gone, to a CEO purposefully hiring terrible managers and underpaying staff so they can LAUGH ABOUT IT.

Now, of course, you could have interpreted God that way all along. But the point was that you had a choice- you, the reader/viewer, got to decide if God was aware of what was going on, or fully “checked out.” You were able to argue that God isn’t fully good or bad, She just is. But a God who sits there and knowingly, gleefully watches her Creation play out just for pure entertainment? That’s intent. She did this to keep herself amused when She got bored.

God only knows what the context of this is

“Do you really think our respective offices are going to care?”

“Well, no. I’m just saying it’s not my fault. Anyway, he was a saint to his parish and a demon to his housekeeper. Makes him a double agent. So we’re both doing the right thing.”

“And both doing the wrong one.”

“Well. I suppose you could make that argument.”

“How deep do you think we need to put him?”

“I wouldn’t know, I’ve never hidden a body before. I still don’t see why we can’t miracle him away.”

“Audits, my dear. I’m not sure how your side is about it, but my side audits miracles. Unless you’re really sure about that “both doing the right thing” argument.”

1. The Nazis recognized Crowley. They had never personally encountered him before - “Mr. Anthony J. Crowley! Your fame precedes you.” But they knew him by reputation; enough to know his full name, and to recognize him on sight.

2. The Nazis obviously have some kind of grudging admiration/respect for Crowley, and yet also were immediately prepared to murder him as well. “The famous Mr. Crowley. Such a pity you must both die.”

3. Rather than pulling the trigger immediately, the Nazis hesitate and listen to Crowley when he starts telling them something Very Important - but then scoff, and immediately assume he is feeding them false information.

4. Crowley knew that the bombs that night were due to fall on the East End, and had sufficient warning of such to be able to pull off his ‘last-minute demonic intervention’ to get them to drop on the church instead.

5. Crowley knew about the gang of half-witted Nazi spies running around London blackmailing and murdering people.

6. Crowley knew down to the minute exactly when a Nazi spy deal involving Aziraphale was about to go down in that church.

believe that Crowley was involved with Actual Very Serious Wartime Intelligence Efforts, because I have a great big vulnerable spot and it is labeled, ‘Crowley and Aziraphale decide that London is their city, heavenly and infernal policy decisions be damned, and any powers that want to raze her from the maps will have them to contend with’.

My point is, most people don't bother to THINK about the implications of the ending. If the show says something is good then apparently it's not our place to critique it or demand something better. Right? It's our place to be grateful and accept what we're given. It's such an incredibly religious mindset and the irony that it's surrounding a show critical of Christianity is almost laughable.

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

In the book, Crowley was always my favorite of the pair (Crowley!!! My best friend Crowley!!), I loved Book Aziraphale too but... I really really loved Aziraphale in the Good Omens Miniseries (what is now 'GO1'). I know some people felt like he was somewhat diminished compared to his Book Counterpart, and I certainly understand where these complaints were coming from (especially post GO3.....), but for me personally, making him a little more nervous and swayed by Heaven's propaganda and 'softer' and a bit sillier just made him more compelling to me, a Blorbo I could really sink my teeth into. If he was ‘weaker’, it was in a way that made him stronger for me, if that makes sense.

I know other Autistic Good Omens fans have talked about picking up vocal stims from the show, and especially from Crowley, but the main thing I ended up mimicking from Good Omens is Aziraphale's physical mannerism, especially his proper little reverse-arm-fold walk. I still do it to this day.

And that version of the character just doesn't exist anymore.

Like, first and foremost in the sense that even if I want to comfort myself with alternative 'Good Omens' versions that don't have such a shitty depressing ending like GO3, I mean, all of them are going to have an Aziraphale, but not that specific version of Aziraphale that I loved so much. That Aziraphale is the only one who got fucking wiped from reality.

But also in the sense that I specifically loved GO1 Aziraphale, that was the version who had just the right balance of being a bit sillier and softer than the original Book version but still kept most of the important plot beats and still felt deeply nuanced and cool, just in a different way than Crowley. But GO2 and especially GO3 reduced his character so much, seemed so focused on always making him the Goofus to Crowley's Gallant, while also seeming to define his character narratively entirely as 'the Love Interest', that the version that I found so compelling and fun and good was basically already gone. The Disintegration at the end of the Finale was just the final nail in the coffin, my favorite version of the character was already gone as soon as Season 2 started.

THAT'S RIGHT I AM STILL NOT DONE BEING THE S02E01 COLD OPEN'S BIGGEST HATER!! I WILL NEVER BE DONE!!

One of the reasons I really fell in love with TV Aziraphale is because I really loved that added moment In the Beginning where Aziraphale shelters Crowley from the rain, it felt like such an important moment for this specific version of the character and this specific variant of the relationship. It doesn’t make Book or Radio Omens Aziraphale lesser for not having this moment, just different, but it’s different in a way that felt very important for TV Aziraphale….

Until the S02E01 Cold Open decided for some reason to recontextualize the whole thing, in a way that feels considerably less compelling to me. Instead of Aziraphale being willing to extend his Wing for a stranger, a Demon, despite saying that he must be Ontologically Evil, simply because he was there and it was raining and despite saying what Heaven wants him to think, he will always rebel against it through his actions, through his kindness and softness… Now he’s just returning the favor for something Crowley did first and also cooler (protecting Aziraphale from space debris versus protecting Crowley from a bit of rain).

And since 1990, Aziraphale, every version of Aziraphale, has been the kind of Angel who is willing to have a polite conversation when a random Demon starts chatting it up with him. And now TV Aziraphale… isn’t. The new implication is that he’s friendly with Crawly because he recognizes him as the cute Angel he had a crush on. A flashback should recontextualize a character’s actions in a way that feels more compelling and interesting, but to me that just felt like it removed, or at least heavily downplayed, interesting aspects of the character. And I don’t have to acknowledge it at all with Book or Radio Omens… but it is canon to TV Aziraphale, my favorite Aziraphale.

I’ve gone through a whole journey of honestly trying to engage with the implications of the S02E02 Cold Open in good faith and finding the interesting character details that are there, and into being extremely disillusioned as this trend of seeming to underplay Aziraphale’s individual character, as well as walking back on his character arc and some of his best moments of GO1 just to do it again in a more lukewarm and less compelling manner, got impossible to ignore by the time of GO3 (and whatever interesting character potential the S02E02 Cold Open did have got completely fumbled and wasted. For both characters). And it just… really sucks. My favorite version of Aziraphale didn’t just get annihilated, he got gradually retconned out of Canon and the disintegration was just the shitty icing on the bitter, poisoned cake.

I’m sure that there also people who feel similarly about GO1 Crowley (I always thought it was an intriguing possibility to, like, draw a connection between the Modernized Sin Spreading and his new TV-exclusive ‘helped to design nebulas’ backstory. Like, despite not even having a token idealogical connection to Hell in this version, he takes on projects like the M25 as the one Creative outlet he believe he’d ever be allowed as a Demon. But then GO2-3 decided to do even less with Modernized Sin Spreading as an aspect of Crowley’s character than GO1 did, cause Somebody forbids Crowley is in any way ever portrayed as even the least bit complicit in Hell’s evils…) but for me, the loss of GO1 Aziraphale hits the hardest. I just loved that Angel so much and… even though I still feel like his GO1 incarnation is just the right balance of changing and preserving what was there before, sometimes it’s hard to take some of the changes in good faith knowing what will come later (like, I always acknowledged that cutting down and downplaying the difficulty of interpreting Agnes Nutter’s prophecies felt like it was nerfing and downplaying the intelligence of both Aziraphale and Agnes, but I felt like it was done in service of giving Aziraphale more time for his juicy personal conflicts…. But now there’s a part of me that’s a lot more suspicious of this adaptational choice).

I’m very thankful for all the others in the GO fandom who like to see GO1 as its own standalone Thing now and everything past it as ‘optionally canon’ at best, although I know people are still going to be picking up some notes of characterization of what came later... but... It’s good that there are still people who can still make GO1 Aziraphale ‘exist’, that version of the Angel who used his wing to shelter a stranger from the rain, that we can still make him ‘Real’ on some level. But I do miss it when he was the Canon TV Aziraphale. And sometimes I do remember that he didn’t just die, but he was straight-up made Not Canon anymore (and THEN he died), and then I just get sad.

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

Based on this post

Well done, you absolute ar**hole of a man, you managed to drag all of us and the story down with you.

Terry Pratchett is very pro humanity but I feel like people may be putting more emphasis on that than is reasonable. He's also very pro troll, and pro dwarf, and eventually pretty much any kind of intelligent creature, including goblins, who put a lot of cultural significance into snot. Pratchett's non humans are not forced to become human to belong, and many retain their own languages and culture and ways of life, while others are free to find their own ways even if their people don't like it (see Cherry for example, the first openly female presenting dwarf in Ankh-Morpork).

If Crowley and Aziraphale showed up on the Discworld, they'd be welcomed as they were right up until Crowley started a massive traffic jam and then he'd find out why you shouldn't make Commander Vimes mad. But Vimes wouldn't yell at him for being a demon - he'd yell at him for being a little shit.

Since it is still David Tennant, this b&w turtleneck photo, which was his author’s photo on the inside of the text book Anthony wrote, still kind of does it for me.

From:

And HOLY FUCKING SHIT. NO. NO I FUCKING WOULD NOT. Yes, trauma changes you forever. Pretty much EVERYTHING changes you forever, whether suddenly and dramatically or slowly and subtly. That's called LIFE. It's the process of becoming who you are.

I can't believe I have to say this, but PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN THROUGH TRAUMA DESERVE TO LIVE. They deserve to exist and be accepted and LOVED as WHO THEY ARE. And they deserve all the support needed so that they can recover and ENJOY their life.

The Ending SUCKS because the WRITING SUCKS.

NO, I don’t find the concept of ‘tHeY FiNd eACh oThEr IN eVerY uNivErSe’ beautiful.

1) Because they don’t. There’s zero evidence that this is a recurring thing, thats 100% fandom copium- and even then they don’t have any of their memories and aren’t the same people. THATS. NOT. THEM. And it never will be because people are the sum of their experiences AND THEIR CHOICES. You don’t take a comedy Christian satire and make the solution some Buddhist-esque reincarnation philosophy that requires an entirely new suspension of disbelief no one signed up for or wanted. That’s shit writing.

2) So not only does the finale spit on every theme it had prior regarding championing human choice as miraculous and the world being worth fighting for in all its flaws as it is- you are going to sit here and tell me that actually they never had any choice at all, so they decided to toss everything down the garbage disposal for the next life. That is, frankly, terrible, and nihilistic, and not at all sensible for this series.

Aziraphale and Crowley are a wonderful love story because they were on opposite sides and they CHOSE each other, and they CHOSE to love humans. They chose to be hedonistic and compassionate and selfish and ‘human’ as they were because they knew how to make choices. Their love has always been THEIR choice.

So how can you tell me that the ending is great because they sacrificed everything for humans to have free choice- which they already had by the way- and then say the ending is beautiful because Aziraphale and Crowley are Predestined to love each other in every reality. How is that not massively hypocritical to the concept they are trying to sell us last minute out of nowhere? Is predestiny not the antithesis of what they asked for by your own definition?!

How is taking their 6000 years of choosing each other over and over again, and summing it down to a deterministic soul bond, more ‘free will’ or beautiful than them literally defying cosmic powers just to stay together and eat dinner at the Ritz on a casual Tuesday?!

People act like their life was just complete suffering, but they were perfectly happy on their own earth. Season 1 left them exactly where they wanted to be!!! Together with the Earth. It was so EASY to circle back to that, all they had to do was write it, and no one would have questioned it because that’s THEM and what they want to be doing. If Adam defied Satan for humanity, why would Jesus Christ- who’d already died once for the salvation of humanity- not tell God to be merciful?! Why not have the humans make the choice, rather than Crowley- which is another hypocritical move because he’s making choices for them just like he’s telling god not to!

How do we have any evidence this new world doesn’t have a god? Trust? In the woman who just destroyed the world after having a casual laugh with Satan? Okay. They didn’t trade their existence for freedom, they traded the apple of knowledge for ignorance.

The fact is, is that the world that championed choice and love was the one they came from, not the one they sacrificed themselves for- because choice and love doesn’t mean there are no complications, it means you take a stand and you do what you want anyways.

This dystopian nightmare of an ending where they let the universe die and don’t know each other was never a thought in anyone’s mind until it came into existence with the most shallow and contrived justifications of all time ten minutes before close, and that’s because it’s out of character nonsense.

And I’m sick of hearing ‘they were always gonna be human’ ‘it was always gonna be this way’ like there was rational grounds for it beforehand. No it wasn’t, and it certainly didn’t need to be. At most it was everyone’s joke of a worst case scenario, and that’s what they decided to give us- probably after a quick google search to find out what would piss everyone off the most.

This was Neil Gaiman and his team of horror writers, who probably didn’t even consider the source material, throwing a temper tantrum and abusing the fandom for liking Terry Pratchett’s divine optimism more than his petty ass. They designed every ridiculous contingency in this horrible script to justify their own mess.

The Ineffable Husbands were fine as they were. Even as a Demon and an Angel they were already ‘human’ enough, THATS what was funny. What the hell is so great about being mortal and not being able to have a free table whenever they want, and having to deal with real world shit like taxes, and homophobia, and Dying?

Enough Dyin’. No Maur DYIN’. It’s it’s-ITS NOT ON!!!

For a week now all I’ve pictured in my head is NG sitting in his fucking edge lord basement laughing to himself and saying “How do I give them the ending they want without giving them the ending they want.”

I’m devastated. I’m heartbroken. I sobbed for three days straight. I’m still trying to collect my thoughts into something coherent.

I’m sorry I’ve left you all on your own, that wasn’t my intention. I promise I will be back soon with a more in depth analysis. I just need to get myself together first.