Good Omens and… no, that's it

If you are deeply upset about the ending, you aren't alone, and you shouldn't feel ashamed for feeling this way. You have every right. Us people of the queer community, we are tired. We are tired that our stories never are fully heard, that our queer representation in media always ends in some form of cosmic tragedy. So many queer couples or characters we see ourselves in end up dead, separated, or we were led to believe their relationship would matter only for it to be treated like bait. It's as if people keep telling us we don't deserve love, that we don't deserve joy. That we should be greatful for the crumbs they give us, and we are so tired.

Good Omens wasn't suppoused to be like this. Aziraphale and Crowley's love for each other was meant to be taken seriously, it was building up for emotional cathartic moments follwing reflective messages. This show means a lot to queer people specifically,because we barely get stories where a relationship like theirs is allowed to exist with that much complexity and sincerity without being reduced to a joke or treated like an afterthought.

And some of us really did get to see ourselves in them: in the longing, in the restraint.

There's many queer people who feel connected to Crowley, with his rebellion, with the way he exists outside of every system that tried to define him, and with how alienated he often feels while still refusing to give up on what he believes is right. It's admirable to see a character whom has been cast out, labeled as wrong but still chooses love, still strives to stand up for his personal beliefs no matter what it costs him.

A lot of people in the LGBTQ+ community know what it feels like to be made to feel “other,” to live with that distance between yourself and the systems or communities that were supposed to welcome you, and to still keep searching for a place where you can exist honestly. Crowley carried so much of that.

I personally saw myself so much in Aziraphale, his character arc meant so much to me as someone who has a complicated relationship with religion and my queerness. Watching him wrestle between duty and desire. The way he tries so hard to do “good” while loving someone he wasn’t supposed to love felt painfully real. As a queer person who grew up trying to reconcile love with systems that taught us that love was wrong, and Aziraphale embodied that conflict with so much compassion and humanity. His journey mattered so much to me, to see him unlearn fear, to see him keep trying to choose love despite everything he had been taught.

Aziraphale, to me personally, represented that deeply human conflict of wanting to believe in goodness and belonging while also trying to make peace with parts of yourself you were taught to fear.

So it hurt deeply to see how unresolved his arc felt in season 3. Because for so many of us, his story was never just about whether he and Crowley would end up together. It was about watching someone who had spent so long carrying shame and trying to earn his place finally reach a point where he could choose love without fear.

And what do we get? instead of finally giving Crowley and Aziraphale the honest emotional payoff their story had been building toward, We get half-assed conversations between Crowley and Aziraphale that don't go anwhere. After everything they had been through together, it felt like they were still being kept at a distance from the very truth the story spent so long asking us to invest in.

And then the ending asks us to accept a sacrifice where they reboot the universe into one without angels or demons, without the versions of themselves we followed and loved. It's like they straight up ripped everything we saw ourselves in and loved apart and laughed in our faces.

These two characters loved each other so much, and the story's direction was never aimed for them to just disappear. These characters suffured so much, longed so much and chose each other over and over again just for the ending to make all of this feel futile.

Not just to the characters, but to us viewers who felt emotionally invested. Especially queer viewers who found something deeply personal in their story. For a lot of us, their relationship felt safe. It felt like seeing pieces of ourselves reflected back with tenderness. And when a story spends years building that trust, asking us to care, , to believe in where these characters are headed—only to make that journey feel like it led nowhere, the hurt goes beyond simple disappointment.

And then, the political climate we are living in makes the ending even more grim. At a time when queer people are still having to defend our right to exist openly, stories like Good Omens matter in a very real way. This story become more than entertainment. They become places where people feel seen, understood, and safe.

That’s part of why this ending feels so heavy. A story about two characters who spent centuries resisting rigid systems and finding home in each other ends without that love being fully honored, instead it ends with their disappearance. With sacrifice. With the versions of them we loved no longer getting to exist at all.

And this just, adds wound to the salt. Because queer people are constantly being told, in ways both subtle and explicit, that our lives, our love, and our futures are still up for debate. So for Good Omens, a show that lets be honest, has a major queer audience, erase Aziraphale and Crowley's romantic history and the thematic messages along with it.

We were genuienly left with nothing. The alternative versions of them didn't even feel authentically like Aziraphale and Crowley, so it doesn't hit. They get married yes, but we didn't really get to see the progression of their love or get to know these new versions on a deep level, so does it matter?

Aziraphale and Crowley didn't even get to kiss. And if you read them as aroace, that’s genuinely valid—people connect to these characters in different ways, and that interpretation matters too. A lack of physical romance can feel meaningful and affirming to a lot of people, and that deserves respect.

Howeveeer: they have kissed before.

But narratively, that’s also why this feels so frustrating for many viewers, because the story itself had already crossed that line. By season 2 especially, the emotional and romantic buildup was no longer subtle implication or fandom projection. The story intentionally framed their relationship as romantic, built around confession and choices neither of them could keep avoiding.

So the frustration isn’t “they needed a kiss or the story failed.” It’s that the narrative itself spent years building up so much intimacy and love between them in a way that clearly pointed toward resolution.

Which is why ending their story without ever letting them truly reach each other feels so painful. Not because every love story needs romance expressed the same way, but because their story was written around longing and around finally crossing emotional boundaries they had spent centuries avoiding.

The only kiss we have of them is genuienly emotionally devastating. It's a desperate declaration of love. It happens in the middle of fear and the unbearable realization that they want the same thing but can’t reach each other in that moment. And that’s exactly why so many people hoped the story would eventually let them have more than that.

And then, their love doesn't necesarly need to be translated with a kiss in season 3, sure. But it's not like we got any straight forward confession that mattered, and even if we had a semblance of one, it doesn't end up being relevant BECAUSE THEIR ENTIRE EXISTENCE AND HISTORY GETS ERASED.

Also, Crowely and Aziraphale are non-binary, and in the reboot version of them that gets erased too. Which also fucking sucks.

finally, my first C/A kiss😭

They had 90 minutes. NINETY. MINUTES.

Wasted 2/3rds of it playing the most obvious whodunnit of all time, watching Jesus meander around uselessly, and bringing in some mafia group. And Aziraphale and Crowley, who should be at the center, hardly get to actually communicate, and pretty much never actually talk about their relationship. It was an agregious waste of time.

If they wanted to pull some meta shit, they should have given us a season to do it well. They had the option of doing a full season and chose not to, and the consequence of that is that you don’t get to write all of the convoluted crap you want. 10 minutes before the end of an hour and a half movie that had essentially zero constructive narrative is not the time to be pulling out world upending, genre changing, fandom rending controversial choices out of your ass.

(Especially when a quick google search could have informed anyone that 98% of the fandom agreed beforehand that getting some Human AU when you signed up for immortal shenanigans SUCKS. And on top of that they actually destroyed the entire universe and the main couple.)

The point being- if you are going to just have 90 minutes then you don’t waste that time and then pull twists out of nowhere so you can pretend to be ‘profound’ when neither the fans nor narrative demanded it up until they wrote some impulsive disaster at the very end.

You don’t start yanking on threads for fun, you wrap up the loose ends to make the fans happy and call it a day. 90 wasted minutes of answering none of the questions anyone had, not communicating, being overall rather out of character, and splitting screen time like they had time to give. You lost the chance to write story warping crap when you exchanged 6 hours for and a half.

All they had to do was sit them down at the ritz for dinner and everyone would’ve walked away fine- especially since they didn’t even bother to answer the questions we had beforehand like why the hell Crowley is so goddamned overpowered and what happened in the fall.

It was just generally poorly written. They set the Metatron up as someone who seemed malicious and then killed him ten seconds in. They started the concept of the second coming and then ditched it halfway through to start tearing chunks out of the universe. We sat and watched Jesus dawdle around the entire time to culminate in handing out pizza, and the mafia come out of nowhere to swallow up the first half and then leave. They had Aziraphale show up and get reprimanded for leaving by Mrs.Sandwhich and Crowley, only for them to pretty much passively avoid talking about anything by demanding forgiveness and then brushing off all the emotional baggage they had up until there was no time left to deal with it. All those talks of ‘Us’ and ‘to the World’ in previous seasons, and there’s essentially Zero closure from the characters who have been slow burning since the dawn of creation.

Say all you want about their long life together being fun, and ‘what ifs’, and ‘they find each other in every lifetime’ and blah blah- but sometimes people deserve to have the script actually address things and say them directly to each other and for the audience. It also sure as hell doesn’t help the transition that they had no clue they were gonna be reincarnated so they didn’t even get to toss out an ‘I’ll find you’ or something to soften the blow- they just DIED with zero resolution and we are expected to hinge our hopes and dreams on two strangers with bad haircuts that the audience has zero attachment to in a completely different universe. They didn’t consider how to even make this an effectively impactful ending, emotionally or logistically.

The first half reads like they were trying to obligatorily continue season 2, but the second half is disjointed and feels aimed at picking a new direction 180, and shutting everything down. HARD.

What I personally think the actual truth is, is that they intentionally wrote a way to end the universe (despite the fact that doing so contradicts pretty much every afore established ethical discussion driven by the series regarding the loss of life, replacing people, humans defying destiny, and free will, and is generally all around pretty out of character ), because they didn’t want to be bothered again. If you leave no open end, and a divisive fanbase, they don’t ask you for more. And that’s what I think this disaster really was: the response for having the audacity to ask for an answer to the cliff hanger they left us on in season 2, when all Amazon wants is to stop associating with Neil Gaimon.

I think it’s a hack job, and it’s a slap in the face to fans.

Most will actively hate it for upending all the world building and forcing them to suddenly grieve characters they’ve followed for decades at the last minute with absolutely Zero tact- but those that do enjoy the ending should be upset that it wasn’t written better. The set up could have been better, they didn’t make a choice to find each other, and They didn’t even do a montage of them finding each other in various lifetimes through history, people are just hinging their hopes and dreams on the song ‘time after time.’ And the reasoning behind the whole thing was beyond contrived.

Also, why does starting a new universe without heaven and hell mean they can’t exist as themselves as the sole immortals or just have their memories up until that point- she’s GOD, she can do whatever the fuck she wants and the story uses that to make a ridiculous contingency instead. They also literally had the ability to rewrite life in their hands and didn’t make any use of it. Why not have God just show up if you aren’t gonna do anything with the books? She’s God, she’s been watching, you didn’t need to manifest her, and I don’t know why you would want to.

So yeah, the ending was crap, objectively, simply because it was handled with all the grace and care of a bull in a china shop.

The fact they blatantly disregarded what the obvious emotional outcome of its massive die hard queer fanbase would be is just the cherry on top. The fans are loud and post constant content, it’s not hard to figure out most people just wanted them to wear silly outfits through time, TALK about their feelings, and play ‘a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square’ the end. There were six dozen ways they could’ve handled Heaven and Hell and leave the two alone on Earth, and they went with ‘let’s not handle it at all, the only way to solve things is extinction.’ Nobody in their right mind would have wanted them to forget a millennia and over six thousand years of love for each other, that was on no one’s bucket list or radar going into this.

I think it’s fucking intentional, and I think they were sneaky enough about it that instead of being collectively pissed they gave us half written slop we are arguing over whether or not the ending is satisfying- and the answer should be “NO!” either way, because there was about 10% consideration put into it from the second they said they were giving us a pathetic 90 minutes instead of a whole season, and then they wasted the majority of that time doing nothing constructive.

... Meaning, I'm pretty sure Neil Gaiman did it ON PURPOSE, knowing how much it would upset the fans.

Neil knew how badly we wanted Aziraphale and Crowley (OUR version of Aziraphale and Crowley---the specific version of them we met in Season 1) to be together. He knew we wanted to see them resolve their issues and ultimately choose to be with each other in the end.

Instead, Aziraphale and Crowley forgo that emotional journey in favor of unnecessary pain. Neither of them experience real character growth in the finale; they are shown to be the worst and unhappiest versions of themselves, without getting a real shot at redemption. They never fix their communication issues. They don't express their true, authentic feelings for one another (don't @ me with that bullshit hand kiss thing). They never manage to get on the same page emotionally---even when they both agree to commit suicide (which I'm pretty sure was not the "one thing" Aziraphale wanted).

"Why give me Crowley? Why make me complete and then take it away?"

EMOTIONAL WITHHOLDING is a common abuse tactic utilized by men like Neil. They enjoy creating ATTACHMENT in their victims and then "TAKING IT AWAY".

It's easy to see how much Neil enjoyed frustrating his fans in retrospect. He actively taunted us on social media with the catchphrase "WAIT AND SEE" and threatened to make Aziraphale and Crowley kiss---but in a way we "wouldn't like". He loved dangling the implied promise of a happy ending over our heads, which we now know he never planned to deliver on.

Neil was unkind to his audience. He was also unkind to his characters. Aziraphale and Crowley are treated as punching bags throughout the entire series---shown to be "messy" for the sake of entertainment, but not as a real obstacle for either of them to overcome. God herself says she enjoys seeing how much Aziraphale values his relationship with Crowley. And this turns out to be her justification for "taking it away". (Tell me THAT isn't some fucked up shit.) Aziraphale and Crowley experience real emotional pain as the result of her actions---and this is demonstrated by the incredible acting skills of Michael Sheen and David Tennant.

Neil explicitly sold this as "a love story" when he created the show. Based on the tone of the book, an eventual union between Aziraphale and Crowley would have made the most narrative sense. It would have emphasized the overarching themes of love, agency, and the futility of "choosing sides". But that would have required Neil to possess the same ethos as Terry Pratchett---meaning LOVE AND RESPECT FOR FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS.

We were never going to get a good love story out of Neil. Men like Neil get off on "PUNISHING" people for no apparent reason; he obviously did this with our beloved characters, to disastrous result. Nonetheless, we still manage to ascribe deeper meaning to Aziraphale and Crowley, thanks to the phenomenal acting team and the dedication of this fandom. Aziraphale and Crowley remain the greatest love story of all time, not because of anything Neil actually wrote, but because of everything that was projected onto them by the people who cared. We assigned their relationship a depth "Neil himself" never could have imagined---one that exemplifies our maximalist ideals of love and the decision to choose it again and again, in spite of everything. It is never going to "end" on Neil's preferred terms. In this rare instance, fan interpretation STILL MANAGES TO ECLIPSE THE SOURCE MATERIAL---and that is because LOVE is always a more powerful story than ABUSE.

cottage morning kisses

(I'm an unknown artist, please help promote my drawings. Thank you all!)

NG really said "I'll give you a kiss, but you won't want it", for season 2, and then he gave us the South Downs ending that no one wanted (though some have accepted or embraced it, happily for them).

In a story where funny twists or loopholes like "actually you're not my father" and "isn't the great plan also the ineffable plan?" saved the day before, there would have been countless different endings that could have stayed true to the ending that Pratchett allegedly wanted, without falling into NG's grim, sadistic, darkness.

To me, what was so beautiful about the relationship is that by any reasonable standard it should not have occurred. Heaven and Hell were diametrically opposed in the extreme, but through shared experiences, Aziraphale and Crowley built a deep love for each other and for humanity, growing past what was expected of them and building something truly unique all on their own. We never got to see that growth through to completion.

There were so much narrative potential there to explore: what it looks like for characters with this type of past living with this kind of expectation to come together and grieve together and grow together. I would think most of us expected that, and in my opinion, it was stolen from us.