#the decision

I don't understand it. I doubt I ever will. How do you see happiness here? How do you look at our angel and not see how devastated he is? How do you reconcile this heart breaking before your eyes to claim this is a happy ending? And please think before you come at with me with "not being able to be together is part of why they chose to allow their universe to end, so that they would be free to love each other." How exactly did they choose that, then? With all that big juicy free will they don't have? At best. At the very best. Crowley has just given up. And because of that, this time, he says what he thinks Aziraphale wants to hear - "I choose the world." At worst, Crowley has just given up. And because of that, this time, he says "I don't choose you." Either way, Aziraphale hears both, loud and clear. Either way, GO3 Crowley is willing to sacrifice Aziraphale for a hypothetical. Which neither S1, S2, or Book Crowley would have ever considered in the realm of possibility. This isn't character development. This isn't a role reversal. This isn't selfless love. This is characters being written into a corner and the universe being written into oblivion.

Because they died. They aren't enjoying eternity together like they were meant to. Because they were erased.

Goodbye

From The Andalite Chronicles Chapter 29

I want to focus in here on this little bit where Elfangor starts to explain something, gets discouraged and stops himself. Then Loren encourages him to continue, explicitly showing that she is interested in what he has to say.

The Andalite Chronicles is full of these little back and forth moments of them talking about themselves, sharing bits of Earth and Andalite. I feel like it encapsulates their dynamic very succinctly. They are interested in what the other has to say and actively enjoy learning about each other.

Sadly I feel like this dynamic is largely missing from Ax’s interactions with the other Animorphs. Tobias and Cassie being the exceptions, the other kids get annoyed with Ax explaining things the second they don’t find it interesting.

Aaaaaand I reached THAT part. I didn't know it was an actual line from the books and I got totally blindsided by it... I might have screamed a bit lol

One of the central Religious concepts that Good Omens critiques is a minimization and a disregard for the material physical world we actually live in. Both in a sense of the concept of the Afterlife making people not think of the actual material consequences of their actions (“if you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive.”), but especially in terms of, like, the current physical world being seen as mostly just a temporary preamble to the Eternal world that will come after Armageddon.

Heaven and Hell only seeing the Earth as the battleground on which they have to settle their score from Before the Beginning, all of their meddling in the affairs of men being ultimately for the goal of defeating the 'other side' and creating the ‘Eternal Heaven’ or ‘Eternal Hell’ they were striving for. Crowley and Aziraphale being the counterargument for that, showcasing that even the most plain mundane pleasures and experiences of living in this material world are worth giving up on an Eternal Heaven and facing down Hell’s Wrath for. And then all of the Human characters reminding us of the unreasonable price of casualties and general Beautiful Human Mundanity that will be lost in ‘the End of the World’…

And this isn’t just about taking down the Religious mindset that sees our world as an unimportant dress rehearsal to the Real Eternal Heaven on Earth (the same mindset that makes people dismiss long-term environmental concerns because the world would obviously already end by then, right?). The clear Cold War Metaphor layer of the book is drawing a comparison between that mindset and that era’s type of warmongering, as the secular variation of this same ‘we have to destroy the world to save it’ concept. It’s asking, is either Superpower’s idea of the ‘Better World’ they’ll totally have once they defeat their rival in an all-out war worth the messing about in other countries’ affairs and betraying their own supposed ideals and the devastation of such an all-out war?

And then the first Red Flag that Adam’s Antichrist Instincts are coming to the surface, the first real Opening Shot of Armageddon, is another secular variation of that same mindset. What we might today recognize as environmental-anxiety fueled doomerism, kinda identifying that this will be the new manifestation of this mindset for future generations.

Feeling like all the environmental and political problems in the world make it irrevocably broken and the best thing you can hope for is for it to get entirely destroyed, and then you could build it back Perfect. It spirals into him just fully embracing his role as the Antichrist until the Them finally manage to snap him out of this completely, so the comparison between his mindset and Heaven & Hell’s ‘religious’ view of the Earth as disposable is clear.

So it’s basically like the whole book (and GO1 as a result) is taking down different manifestations of this sort of disregard for the world, connecting it all to this religious concept of looking at the life we have as nothing but a preamble setting up the real Abstract Perfect World that will come later, that is totally worth ignoring and undervaluing the simple joys of this imperfect and messy current reality, the lives and wellbeing of the people still living in it and the long-term consequences of our actions that will just be wiped by the cataclysm that will bring about that Better World, right?

And so the final punchline to deconstructing this whole mindset is that once Adam comes to his senses and claims his own destiny from Heaven and Hell, he decides that the world that shall come after Armageddon is… literally just the world we already had. That the prophesied eternal ‘World to Come’ after the End of the World is not Heaven’s idea of a Perfect World or Hell’s or even Adam’s, it’s just… more of the plain ol’ regular world that we already had.

This physical world is the one world we’ll ever have, forever. So we better both enjoy the good things that exist on it despite the imperfections, and treat the consequences of our actions seriously, and that’s the actual path to a real Better World.

And then, you have GO3…. Which, okay, if I am trying to take that thing in good faith, I can see what they were probably going for. Book Omens/GO1 was so set on ‘And Now Everything is Back to Normal’ and Adam not using his powers to fix the world, it could come off as maybe… complacent in a very 90’s Optimism sort of way that feels maybe ill-fitting with the current mood. Maybe it is important to emphasize the point about the importance of fixing the world, just in a more Humanistic way compared to the vision of Heaven/Hell/Antichrist Mode Adam had, and maybe it is also important to emphasize the point that Change will sometimes require Sacrifice.

So that ending was trying to work off from that angle while also being a logical continuation of that ‘after the End of the World there’s just more world’ punchline from the original narrative. What if the world does need to change… in order to become our real world we live in now? What if that idea of the world being destroyed and replaced with a ‘perfect’ version does happen… but the world that gets destroyed is this fictional Biblically Literalist World with Heaven and Hell and then it is replaced with our actual mundane physical reality? What if it was Heaven and Hell that were just the glorified set-up to the eternal (or near-eternal) existence of this world we live in now? What if this messy imperfect human life we live now is the true ‘eternal paradise’?

It’s just that the problem, or well, maybe more accurately the problems with this plot thread is… First of all, for two whole seasons, the world of Good Omens was presented as if it was our world (with the fantastical elements being hidden from everyday folks such as ourselves), with many of the same struggles and imperfections, and the fantastical problems felt like they were also analogous to problems that exist in the real world. So what that ending felt like is that it is our world (symbolically if not literally) that was being destroyed and replaced with a metaphysically ‘better’ version (espacially with how badly that whole 'Free Will' thing was explained in the text of the Show), much more than a fantastical metaphysical world being replaced with our reality.

But the even bigger problem is that even if was clear from the start (or at least since GO2) that this world only superficially resembles the real world and should be thought of as separate from it, the idea of having it destroyed and replaced with a different world built from scratch still feels so fundamentally discordant with the themes of GO1/Book Omens. Because more than then just, oh, well, it wasn’t our world that got destroyed, it feels like the point should be that it’s Wrong for any sort of world to get destroyed and get magically replaced with a “”Better”” version. That this is not something we should ever be remotely okay, or even ‘bittersweet’, about, even if it’s not ‘our’ world.

Sure, it is technically Michael, a villain, who actually destroyed the world. But we are still supposed to be happy with Crowley’s decision to refuse God’s explicit suggestion to bring it back and to instead create a new world. Remember that Adam initially didn’t think he was destroying the world, but was just thinking it would be fine if world was destroyed because it couldn’t be fixed as anything but a blank slate. Because, symbolically, that sort of doomerism and disregard for the world is one of the ways Humanity might bring about an apocalypse.

Remember that during Good Omens’ Armageddon, it was technically primarily Hell that was bringing about the world’s destruction; the Antichrist and Satanists and the Four Horsemen. The fact it was technically a devilish scheme was how Crowley roped Aziraphale into helping him in the first place. But Heaven was still complicit, because they needed the destruction in order to build their ‘Heaven on Earth’ atop it.

And why should it be okay for any sort of world filled with so many living, thinking human beings (and occult/ethereal beings) to be treated as nothing but a prolonged set-up for another more ‘real’ world? Why should these beings’ ability to enjoy the positive sides of their world and experience the long-term consequences their actions be nullified by an arbitrary expiration date set up by God? Why should the unique quirky lives and experiences of these people be considered interchangeable with some other humans who might have their ‘Souls’? Why shouldn’t such an incomprehensible amount of innocent causalities be undone if literally offered the chance to do so by God?