Idle layabout, trying to be a responsible adult. ADHD, ace, seks+. She/her/they. 18++ Good Omens, Sandman, random stuff. Zennui on Bluesky & X, Ashtareth on AO3. You can block #goodomens and #sandman if you're sick of my obsessions. It will get worse
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
On the matter of tags: an earnest attempt to communicate
As a random member of the Good Omens fandom community, I’d just like to toss my hat into the ring and attempt to clear up some misunderstandings. I also want to encourage some honest, good-faith dialogue in a severely fractured fandom.
This is not an attempt to convince anyone to interpret the finale a specific way. This is a practical conversation about how we discuss the finale in fan spaces.
For the purposes of this discussion, I will be focusing on tags as they are used on social media platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, Bluesky, and Instagram. AO3 tagging is considerable more complex and warrants a whole convo in its own right, so I won't focus on that here.
THIS POST INCLUDES DISCUSSION OF SUICIDE.
So, tags. Tags have become a thorny issue in the Good Omens fandom. I suspect this issue is so pertinent now, two months after the finale aired, because most of us have dropped “GO3 spoilers” tags, which people would have been filtering out if they did not wish to see anything from the finale. The finale is no longer a fresh commodity, so we are all trying to determine for ourselves what the next phase of our engagement with fandom will look like.
In fandom spaces, tags are a courtesy. No one can force anyone to use tags, of course. But tagging is a long-running standard of fandom etiquette across multiple online platforms. Tags are tools that help us find or filter out specific content. But what happens when we disagree on what tags should even be used in the first place? When tags themselves are a battleground?
I have seen assumptions that finale dislikers are demanding that all content with Asa Fell and Professor Anthony Crowley be tagged with “suicide.” It's possible that I’ve missed some significant conversations, but as someone on the disliker side, I have not seen anyone demand that Asanthony shippers use a "suicide" tag on all their posts featuring Asanthony. If anyone has asked that, I agree that it would be unreasonable! But I strongly suspect this perception comes from a game of fandom telephone in which different conversations are being conflated.
What IS being asked:
All content featuring Asa and Anthony should be tagged with their names or their ship name, Asanthony.
The "ineffable husbands" ship name should not be used for Asanthony.
Content warnings are strongly encouraged when sharing visuals of the scene where God grants Crowley and Aziraphale’s request to be removed from existence, specifically the moments as they disintegrate, as this decision is interpreted by many fans as a suicide.
Let’s address that first point now.
Tagging Asanthony as "Asanthony" makes sense. I think most people are already doing this. If you’re not doing this, well… I strongly advise you to reconsider. Tags aren’t just for those filtering out content, but for those seeking it. Someone who doesn’t want to see Asanthony can use this tool to avoid them, and someone who is specifically seeking out Asanthony content can use the tag to find them and share some appreciation.
Where we have some disagreement is the second point listed above: whether Asanthony deserve to be tagged with the general “ineffable husbands” ship name as well. I don’t think we’re ever going to agree on this one. Some people do see them as the same ship, and others do not. Personally I’m someone who does not see Asanthony as "ineffable," but I am okay to concede on someone using the general ship tag for them, as it really does boil down to one's own interpretation. In my view, so long as "Asanthony" is also used, tag them as you see fit.
Now for the third point. This is where I'll be talking about suicide.
Suicide is obviously an incredibly sensitive and distressing subject, one that is highly likely to carry a personal resonance for many fans on all sides of the GO3 debate. I understand why people are upset to have to bring this subject up in their tags when they do not see the final scene that way.
But if you do find it upsetting to even consider using that tag... that means you agree that this topic is distressing, yes? The ineffables' decision was genuinely genuinely distressing for people who interpreted their choice as a suicide. I am pleading with you to understand this: there are members of our community who struggle with suicide ideation, and that scene genuinely triggered some of these people.
You don’t like to see this tag imposed. Well, others don’t like to suddenly come across visuals that in their view shows a suicide. Not seeing Crowley and Aziraphale's decision as a suicide is just as much an interpretation as seeing it as a suicide is.
We will never agree on our interpretations of Crowley and Aziraphale's final request to God and how it played out. The fact remains that the scene where they make this choice and it is granted is triggering to a significant portion of the fandom. This is not a niche opinion.
We won't be able to reconcile our views on this. But we do have to share fandom spaces together. Blocking others who have a different approach to discussing this scene is always an option. But maybe we can also attempt to reach a middle ground in the form of a tag.
I have chatted with others about this, and an idea I have seen discussed is for the fandom to come up with a neutral term for the scene where God grants Crowley and Aziraphale's request, akin to how we settled on “the Final Fifteen” for the last fifteen minutes of season 2. This term should not favour one interpretation over another.
Some suggestions:
The Final Half Hour (or… the Final Twenty? How long is this scene? Anyone clocked it?)
The Decision
We’ve Come to a Decision (WCTOAD? Well, I do like toads)
Please chime in if you have other suggestions!
Like I said at the top, no one can force anyone to use tags. This is ultimately down to one's own discretion.
But I think it's fair to say that our fandom is currently in crisis. The community has fractured — or perhaps it is simply going through some very nasty growing pains. Maybe we can grow with it.
We will never be in a place where we all agree on GO3’s choices. Right now, we are all figuring out how we want to navigate this story and fandom we have all come to love. However we feel about the finale, we are all trying to find new ways forward.
We can argue about who’s right. We can block as we see fit. We can tag or not tag according to our own interpretation to make a point.
We can also decide to make productive choices that will help us all navigate our fandom spaces moving forward. Above all else, we can choose to be kind.
If you've read this far, thank you for hearing me out.
Also I hope everyone knows that Miette was fostered before she was adopted, and her foster mom loved that little kitten so much and always hoped she’d gone to a good home. this tweet got so popular that she recognized Miette and reached out to her current mom, and was able to share previously unseen baby pictures
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Three damn years filled with incredible breakdowns, meta-analyses of characters and events, gripping theories and speculation about where the plot would turn, how the personal Aziracrow conflict would fully unfold, what clever way out they would find again to trick the system and outmaneuver everyone, and what role the human characters from season 1 would play. Searching for symbolism and small details that could point to possible season 3 events that would explain everything and bring it all together.
There was a huge number of theories about F15. Every time I read them, I feel like I’m reading a scientific dissertation, and it’s wonderful! Everyone offered their own interpretation of what was happening, one smarter and more interesting than the previous/pos. Everyone rejected the most basic interpretation that formed in everyone’s minds after the very first viewing and were convinced that something happened there that we weren’t shown, something left unsaid, that there was something hidden and ambiguous. And I am absolutely sure that this was the case.
But the finale chose exactly that damn first and simplest interpretation of them all, showing that its own audience was smarter than a huge corporation with an army of professionals at its helm.
Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I ought to be done with this. Just quit putting my time and energy into something that's broken and done. I was fixated on it for 3 years, and like the original universe, it was all pointless and wasted in the end. I need to quit giving it so much of my own limited life. So many people being so awful about it, is not helping me keep believing this is worthwhile. I'll probably be unable to resist coming back and trying to hold on to something good from it, but I don't know. Maybe I'm just done.
Nope. Nope - even if I laughed at moments, and found the ending scene sweet, because how could David and Michael not be? I enjoy an AU as much as anybody, but if anyone deserves their love confession, their kiss, their happy ever after, it’s the canon characters who've been through so much together, not a pair of stand-ins.
I know the line forms to the left. Here we go anyway.
What I got from the original book – and specifically the parts that Pratchett obviously put into it, the underlying theme, the humane perspective – is that the world’s not saved by grand heroics, by the procurement of a McGuffin like the Book of Life or the killing of an Antichrist. It’s saved, little piece by little piece, through the compounding effect of small, good things, of kindnesses performed by imperfect beings and the love of random beauty and the cherishing of the day-to-day. Aziraphale and Crowley thwart the Apocalypse not because they feel the call to be heroes, but because they’ve gotten used to humanity with all its flaws; because they love a bookshop and a car and gravlax and bebop and little restaurants where they know your name. The things that multiply and intertwine in our lives, that hold us and our world together the way roots fix the soil. The shared meals and the do-you-remembers, the problems muddled through, the arguments made up; the love of a child for his home and his friends, for a familiar wood and apples stolen from a neighbor’s tree. How does it save the world if you destroy the world?
(I’m old; I was born in the Fifities, and oh, I remember the heavy irony of “we had to destroy the village In order to save it.” But that’s just what this story did.)
Saying “this is all broken and wrong, and the only thing to do is wipe it all out and start over from the beginning”: that’s been the recipe for some of the worst horrors of the world. That was the entire fucking message of the original book. The world is flawed, the systems we live under imperfect and even cruel in their origins, but it can be healed, bit by bit, if you love enough – even if you love in seemingly trivial ways. Good Omens is about mending – mending the consequences of folly, mending friendships, mending the damage people inflict on one another, like an angel mending the spine of a beloved old book. Mending the error in the assumption that sides mean more than individuals, leaving two beings like Aziraphale and Crowley free to treasure all the small things about each other, as friends or lovers or however you choose to see them. The meet-cute of their human counterparts in the remade, blind-watchmaker universe is, well, cute, but it doesn't reward the characters we came to love, who evolved along with humanity, became who they are by outgrowing the artificial opposition imposed on them, and bonded through rising above it. (And neither couple ever gets a tender kiss to cancel out the angry one that left us all ravaged in 2023; more articulate voices than mine have gone to town on the way that narrative choice dilutes the queer representation that stunned us with its promise in the original TV adaptation).
So I see the whole progress of the sequel series as misbegotten – most likely, for all the usual reasons of cupidity and vanity – leaving us with a couple of pieces of tone-deaf fan fiction that literally lost the plot. Good moments here and there, clever bits of banter and comic turns; two lead actors with dazzling chemistry that most of us would pay to hear read the phone book for ninety minutes; but all in all a disjointed story compounded of fan tropes, that did not seem to love its characters or have a point beyond churning them around for ninety minutes.
Where in this story are characters comparable to everybody that made the original so rich and endearing to begin with? The bumbling, sincere romances (Anathema and Newt, Tracy and Shadwell, even the wholesome marital bond of Lesley and Maud)? The tweenage energy and candor provided by the Them? Eleven-year-old Adam Young faced a choice and protected the world because its simple joys were enough for him; twinky Jesus Mark II goes down an elevator and survives just long enough to learn a card trick, distribute pizza, and be disintegrated without addressing any of the events unfolding around him. And where the entire hell is Agnes Nutter, and her tart wisdom?
(....Remember Agnes? Are we to accept that she wrote two books of prophecy, guiding the angel and demon who were fated to thwart Armageddon – and that her descendant burnt the second, in order to start her new life without a roadmap – only for everything to go up a few years later, not in a ball of flaming goo, but in a corny Avengers Endgame series of sfx dust devils? This story seems to be happening in an entirely different universe to the one that was built between book covers or the opening and closing credits of Season One, and it's not because God rebooted it.)
I'll leave you with a bit of shameless self-promo: an imagining of Agnes’ take on the sequels, and a version of what Aziraphale and Crowley themselves might have thought of the narrative malfeasance, as I view it, of season 2 (both written before any of the uglier reports about NG surfaced). I don't know if this was a case of an author deliberately jerking around his fandom, a case of "too many cooks spoil the broth" when the project had to be retooled for a briefer air time, or just lazy reliance on a wealth of incident and fan service as a substitute for a story worth telling. All I'm sure of is that we, as fan creators, should feel completely free to ignore anything that violates the promise, the message, and the perspective of the story we fell in love with. To mend what went wrong, piece by piece.
A fix-it inspired by a comment on my Tumblr rant over... whatever that was.
Everything's gone but the bookshop. Satan's just appeared.
Except... everything's not gone. Quite. Nor everyone.
God stared fixedly, for a long beat. “How did you get here?” She said. “Existence has ceased. This bookshop is all that is left of My universe.”
“I don’t know,” said the boy. “Something – the same thing’s happened before. I’m gone. And then I come back.”
“Habits are hard to break,” remarked Crowley. “I should know. Stock in trade.”
“You,” said the boy. “You taught me. How to see past what people pretend to be, to who they are. How to be gentle as doves and wise as serpents. How to turn anger into love.” He took a deep breath. “I’m angry now.”
“Who are you?” said God, low and threatening.
“Oh, Lord,” chuckled Satan, “don’t You know Your own son?” He smiled oilily. “So pleased to meet you. After Crowley’s reports, I feel as if I know you.”
Read on AO3
I'm back! It's been a while, I'll explain later, but... action was required.
Tagging in the replies as usual, let me know if you want to be added or removed on my tag list.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
However you feel is valid and everyone is entitled to process and share those feelings and manage their own experience in whatever way is necessary.
That's literally why places like Tumblr exist.
But intentionally seeking out or responding to people involved with the show to dump your displeasure is not okay.
This is, quite literally, the real life version of "don't like, don't read", except that it's real people who poured their hearts and souls into a project that almost didn't happen - if you don't like the finale, they do not need to know about it. There is nothing they can do about it. There is no next season to change anything. If you think we are all filled with high emotion and mixed feelings, they undoubtedly have experienced that ten fold.
That doesn't mean you can't vent and share your views and be angry or happy or upset or some combination of all of those things, perhaps, and it certainly doesn't mean you can't post about it all online.
But jfc, the irony of humans behaving this way over an angel and demon who gave themselves for humans to have a chance at being better - feel however you feel, express it however you need to, but let the cast and crew have their moment, something many of them have said they're proud of.
However you feel is valid and everyone is entitled to process and share those feelings and manage their own experience in whatever way is necessary.
That's literally why places like Tumblr exist.
But intentionally seeking out or responding to people involved with the show to dump your displeasure is not okay.
This is, quite literally, the real life version of "don't like, don't read", except that it's real people who poured their hearts and souls into a project that almost didn't happen - if you don't like the finale, they do not need to know about it. There is nothing they can do about it. There is no next season to change anything. If you think we are all filled with high emotion and mixed feelings, they undoubtedly have experienced that ten fold.
That doesn't mean you can't vent and share your views and be angry or happy or upset or some combination of all of those things, perhaps, and it certainly doesn't mean you can't post about it all online.
But jfc, the irony of humans behaving this way over an angel and demon who gave themselves for humans to have a chance at being better - feel however you feel, express it however you need to, but let the cast and crew have their moment, something many of them have said they're proud of.
areudirty
2087
germansingergirl
romaincrisis
dailybridgerton
ellievsbear
