Polite Anarchy

from Thief of Time:

"It was a work of art, the sword. It had imaginary velocity, negative energy, and positive cold, cold so cold that it met heat coming the other way and took on something of its nature. Burning cold. There has never been anything as cold as this since before the universe began."

Okay, it's an official pattern now.

Peter Anderson Studios is so funny for getting this into the credits. for context, BEYOND SOHO was the concept art travel agency, advertising flights to NYC. where Jesus was supposed to land by plane to give his address to the UN. so presumably we would have seen at least Crowley going to this travel agency to book a sad miracle-less flight to NYC in the full story.

ways around that ending and

they took none of them.

Okay, it's an official pattern now.

Interpretations of the Good Omens book, particularly the relationship between Aziraphale and Crowley, as being an allegory for Cold War era tensions and not a book about romance and love are funny to me because. It's both. It's both. It's ALWAYS been both. That's the POINT.

The choices made by Sir Terry when writing about Aziraphale and Crowley's relationship are extremely deliberate. All of the symbolism and metaphors have double meanings. Because they're spies. They speak in coded language. Everything is shrouded in plausible deniability. It's extremely clever, and it's a very, very loving depiction of homosexuality in a time period that was desperately cruel to queer people.

Take the excerpt about the Gavotte, for example. Aziraphale learns it in a discreet gentleman's club, aka a gay club, in the 1880's. And this is important. People who've seen the show likely know the context of the gavotte as the "kissing dance" whereby people dance with a partner and then kiss at the end, or exchange flowers. That would be the pre-19th century Gavotte. The 19th century Gavotte was more like a military-style march, and it's described as a dance used in events revolving around martial prowess and national pride.

I thought it was extremely cute that the book, when describing whether or not Angels could dance, went out of its way to be like "HYPOTHETICALLY Aziraphale CAN dance on the head of a pin... Only the Gavotte. But he'd need a partner that could also HYPOTHETICALLY fit on the head of a pin. Have we mentioned that demons love to dance and can fit on the head of a pin?"

Again, Aziraphale and Crowley act in ways around each other that exude plausible deniability. It's showing that they got together for business reasons but have a deeper desire to be with each other romantically. But because of their jobs, they can't be open about this at all. In fact, they would quite literally be destroyed. This is a DIRECT commentary on how LGBTQ people were treated at the time. Thatcher-era laws against homosexuality made tons of people retreat to the closet, lest they lose their jobs, be outed to their families and cut off, or worse. Homosexuality was technically decriminalized at the time, but the social implications of being gay were so extreme that it might as well as have been illegal still.