There's a big difference in not liking GO3 and not accepting it. Honestly, if it had been better written, if everything but the double suicide had been even remotely in character, I might have ended up accepting it before I could even think clearly about it.
The first week after GO3, I was a mess, stunned and confused. I kept trying to find a path to resolve it in my heart, for the grieving process to be able to move at all. And I kept circling back to, maybe the way through is to accept it...? But every time, just the thought of doing so felt like such an immense betrayal-- of them, of everything I knew about who they were, of the world they toasted at the Ritz, of myself and everything I've ever learned from Good Omens.
So I am grateful for this one thing that s3 gave me: it was written badly enough, and maliciously enough, to show its hand. It was clumsy enough in its rage and meanness that even when I felt like my heart was bleeding out, at my core I knew could not trust it. That whatever the way through was, it would never be through accepting that as true or legitimate.
So yeah, I don't like GO3. In fact, I fucking despise GO3 and the straight cis men who wrote it, who made those appalling decisions. And I would still hate it if I accepted it, but I'm grateful I didn't have to.
YES THIS!
You're so right on so many things, op. The grieving process is kind of stuck for me, because it feels plain WRONG to accept s3 as canon, to believe any of it. It's not peaceful or logical or anything, it just feels forced. Someone knows it'd be way easier if I could just accept it, if I could make myself believe there was an actual happy ending there. I'd love not to feel the way i feel now. But honestly? Every rational part of my mind refuses to, because there's that dissonance that makes it feel like participating in a betrayal. Because it's fucking unfair. Because Aziraphale and Crowley deserve better. They deserve us being angry on their behalf. All of us against all of them.
In fact, the actual grieving is sort of meta for me, I realize. I'm grieving the show they should have given us. I'm not grieving the characters exactly (because i cannot accept the ending. It's just… inconceivable, for all the reason you listed), but I'm grieving the ending they deserved and didn't get. I'm grieving the joyful creativity of the fandom that's now mostly dedicated to rage-fixing this gaping hole of injustice when it should've been celebrating the beauty of Aziraphale and Crowley's eternal love, much like, and in 10x intensity, they did after s1. I'm grieving the ending of s1 which btw was established as THE definitive ending and then was forcefully and violently taken from us.
But you're right, the fact that it's disingenuous, that it's purposefully built with the express aim to destroy, and that in doing so they had to force the very internal logic of the show against itself, did show its hand. Made it look every inch as fake as it was. Like, they clearly went out of their way to shoehorn in this particular ending, making s3 go againts the show's own established canon at that. And let's be honest, the only small parts that vaguely resembled the show we love exist because of those two insanely committed actors and the creative crew, who devoted their mastery to these beloved characters and understood them way better than whoever wrote this travesty.
So no, the moment I accepted it I'd be buying into their malicious half-assed attempt at destroying the thing I love, maliciously. No thanks. I'll spite my way to Alpha Centauri if I have to, but at least I'll do them justice.
