The angel you knew is not me.

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!!!

(Even if I am very tired of all of us taking this tone with each other. I understand the frustration, but instead of being two sides of the fandom shouting at each other, we could be coexisting and enjoying the stuff we all like together, and the stuff we disagree on with only "our half" of the fandom. I hope you don't take this as a personal attack, OP, because I do get that your frustration comes from a genuine place of caring, and that's great! We all care about this fandom and that's what should unite us, not split us apart.)

I especially agree about the point about the humans Asa and Anthony being soulmates / predetermined to meet (and all the other people in the pub) undermining the entire sacrifice that Crowley and Aziraphale have made to end predetermination! That was one of the most frustrating things about that ending for me!!

Anyway, I wanted to add a few points that underline a couple of things already mentioned:

About free will:

In s1, Adam had the free will to throw away his destiny by literally making himself into not-the-Antichrist in the end. Anathema demonstrated her free will by burning the (second) book that had predetermined her entire life up until that point. And Crowley and Aziraphale showed their free will by not following their sides but fighting for the humans. That was the central theme of s1, and saying that humans had no free will in that universe is a little insulting to that story, imo.

About killing and then remaking the / a universe:

There's the scene where Adam tells the Them he's gonna kill and then remake all the people, even their parents. And the Them are horrified and tell Adam they don't want new parents, they want THEIR parents.

Parallel to that, in s2 we have Job, whose children are supposed to die. And then, if Job stays faithful to God, he gets double the children! Only not the original ones, because they're dead. Aziraphale, Sithis and Job all express their absolute horror at this because they don't want new children. They want THEIR children. I'm assuming Crowley sees the horror in that even more because not only is it HIS idea to save the children - no, he saved all the frikkin goats too, because new goats also wouldn't have been the old goats.

In the face of that, I am truly baffled that s3 then turns around and says killing everyone in the universe (and that includes Adam, Anathema, Newt, Tracy and Shadwell, who fought for the universe to be saved) and then making new people in a new universe, is a good ending.

About the kiss:

After s1, I staunchly said that I do not want Aziraphale and Crowley to kiss. Then s2 rolled around and they did kiss. We all know in what context. Now after that context, I think a kiss to resolve how they left off s2 was narratively necessary.

I see the argument that the fingers-to-lips is a mirror to Aziraphale pressing his hand to his face after Crowley kissed him. I understand. But it also gives "Amazon doesn't wanna upset the homophobes" just a little bit. At least to me.

It's not that they didn't need a kiss. They HAD a kiss. And that kiss was without consent and tragic. If they had wanted the story to be "actually, Aziraphale wanted to kiss Crowley too, it was just that the context was bad" then a kiss in s3 from Aziraphale would have cost them 2 seconds of screentime and cleared all that up.

About the ending being inevitable:

s3 tried very hard to say it was inevitable. But it definitely wasn't, even after s2. Because out of all the millions of tumblr posts, fanfics and theories, not ONE that I've seen predicted that they would kill the entire universe in the end.

If an ending was inevitable from the beginning, people would see it coming. Not everyone of course, but I would expect a good half to a quarter of the fandom to say "yeah we know how this is gonna end" beforehand.

(I'm personally not against them turning human, and I've seen this said a lot. That is not what I'm talking about. I specifically mean all of humanity and them dying.)

About nihilism:

I am, in fact, a nihilist. And yet, this ending still felt like a slap in the face. Yeah, sure, nothing matters so we might as well kill ourselves right now. But if nothing matters, then we also might as well NOT kill ourselves right now. We might have a little fun and whimsy if it doesn't matter anyway.

But the message "if there's someone more powerful than you, then the only way out is to kill yourself" is definitely not the message they wanted to send with Good Omens. And yet, that is the message that was told with s3. And THAT is the slap in the face.

(Crowley's human doppelgänger then being happy, presumably because he didn't go through Crowley's trauma from the Fall, only makes it worse. That tacks on an aftertaste of "if you're traumatised, you're not gonna be happy in this life either way". I will admit that this conclusion does not directly follow from the narrative of s3, but I have heard people argue that the reason they had to die is that it was the only way to undo Crowley's trauma. To someone arguing this, I will kindly ask: What's wrong with you? Please think about what you're saying to people before you say it. You can't tell actual, living, traumatised people that they'll never be happy unless they kill themselves.)

About Asa and Anthony:

If they "didn't die" or "died but came back", then Asa and Anthony would need to BE Aziraphale and Crowley. And I agree that that's what the writers wanted to say. Unfortunately they did not actually say it.

The only reason I know that the human doppelgänger are supposed to be A&C is that there would be absolutely no other reason to show them in the epilogue otherwise. But that's a meta reason. Actually IN the story, they're treated like Shax and Madame Tracy, like Nina and Sister Mary Loquatius, like Maggie and that other nun whose name I forgot. They're played by the same actor and are in Good Omens. Why are we supposed to believe that Shax isn't Madame Tracy in another life, but we're supposed to believe that Asa is Aziraphale, when we're not given a single nudge in that direction?

Anthony and Crowley even have distinctly different characters and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Because that must have been a deliberate choice. They chose to not make him like Crowley, and then said "We've done a good enough job establishing that this is Crowley, so we don't need anything else to show that they're the same". (And something something, even David Tennant said that Crowley was evaporated. But honestly, David Tennat's opinion on this is just as valid as everyone else's.)

Anyway, that's why I think the story fails at introducing them as a happy end for Crowley and Aziraphale instead of a replacement for Crowley and Aziraphale.

Plus, it depends on what, in your personal opinion, makes a person a person. I do think all our history shapes who we are. I also hate stories that clone a character, kill off the original one, and then say "happy end!! They've been cloned, so they're not actually dead!!" (If I had a nickel for every story that did this, I would have, like, 5 nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird it keeps happening.)

To those who liked s3:

If you liked the ending, that's great!

This post is not an attack on you or your opinion! It's just a write-up of the literary / narrative reasons why this ending, for me personally, was the absolute worst that it could have been. ("worst" not as in not-happy but as in "badly fitted to the pre-existing narrative of s1, s2 and even s3 itself")

Muriel faces Sandalphon. Crowley has a verbal standoff with Saraqael. It ends with a simple choice: Try to save Aziraphale or try save humanity? And really, Crowley’s answer was always gonna be-

Out of Time

So,I started my first fic in October 2023. It came after one of my best friends and I got lunch right after she was laid off from her market research job at a magazine. We were both women of a certain age at the start of a certain decade of our lives and were trying to figure out what to do next. She suggested we write a children's book together - she had been a fine arts minor and always wanted to do something with it and I've always been passionate about stories, going on and on about the ones that I loved with a bit too much enthusiasm and detail than your average human. So we parted ways with a "plan" - she to polish off her drawing skills and me to... acquire writing skills, somehow. Before taking a break to have kids my career was in finance. I had never took a writing class in my life and was almost forty-one-years-old. I had no idea where to begin.

So I did some online research and looked at some shitty classes, but I had also just discovered this new-to-me medium that was fanfiction. So what does one do when they have no discernible writing skills and just a passion for stories but wants to embark on this journey with their friend? They sit down to free-write Aziraphale's perspective of the final fifteen set six hours after he left Earth, of course!

Now, I had no plan. I just sat and ran through his head, as I interpreted it, based on what we saw on the screen. I left it alone and a few days later came back and turned it around to write Crowley's perspective. I want to be clear, I had no plan. None. I had actively avoided Season 3 speculation fics in an effort not to ruin the final season when it was released, and I avoided all meta on tumblr. But I enjoyed it. Thought, hey, I could maybe try this; wrote a very brief outline where i knew nothing but the ending, and kept writing. Four months, 20 chapters - whole lot of making stuff up - and 125k words later I had My Forever Season 3.

Some of you are saying, I've heard this story, and I know; I've said it on here more than once. But whenever I read other people's origin stories on writing, they tend to fall into certain buckets - I always wanted to be a writer; I studied writing in college; I wrote when I was young but grew discouraged or hit burnout; I am a creative person at heart, just never wrote; Or, I write professionally.

And everyone's journey is incredible and I adore reading them but, I AM HERE TO SHOUT FROM THE HIGHEST PEAK OF THIS HELLSITE THAT I AM NONE OF THOSE THINGS. I worked at a bank. I had no creative hobbies to speak of. I never ever wrote anything before in my life. I was just a weird introvert with a puzzling mind and an all too active imagination that's been more inconvenient than anything else. That's it.

And a desire to try.

Now, my fics aren't popular at all - I can count on one hand how many times they've appeared on any rec lists (or half of one hand, actually). Because they're plotty and they're not E rated and they've got cliffhangers and action and side characters and don't adhere to the predictable story beats that most readers are looking for. BUT, they exist. They're unique. They are loved by the readers who do find them.

And, most importantly, they're mine.

There are times when I do get sad, for how little attention my fics get given the amount of time and effort I put into them, but those are the breaks. So I won't tell you to write for yourself and not seek other people's approval, because that's just bullshit advice. So just go forward knowing that any approval is a gift, to hold it close, to cherish the readers who spend time with you through your story and give back, please. Comment when you read, reblog when you can't, and cheer them on, always.

GIVING BACK is the best thing you can do to foster this fandom we all hold so dear.

So, that was long and unnecessary. TL:DR - If you want to write, write. If you want a cheerleader, tag me. If you want a gentle push, DM me. And if you want to ask questions of someone who's fumbled her way through nearly half a million words of Good Omens stories in 2.5 years, mine are always open.