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I was honored to work with the fantastically talented @samwinjester for this Aziracrow/Destiel mashup! If you aren’t already subscribed to her YouTube channel, do it! Her edits are amazing; you won’t be disappointed 🥰

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I know that some British people take umbrage at Americans calling the Great British Bake Off relaxing, but it's just because GBBO is such a different kind of stressful from American baking shows.

American baking shows will be called something like "Cupcake Knife Fight", there's horror movie lighting everywhere and dramatic stings every 5 seconds. All of the contestants are shit talking each other and fist fighting over the one single deep fryer provided by production. It will show the judges all whispering to each other at their super villain table overlooking the whole kitchen, and one will be like, "Oh my god. Everyone look at Brenda right now. She's straight tanking it." And it will cut to Brenda, who is running around covered in flour and crying and also bleeding for some reason. Then you get a clip from an interview with one of the contestants, and they're like, "I really need to win this. Without this award money, I'm gonna need to close my restaurant, sell my dad, and live out of my car. AGAIN." Then the giant digital doomsday clock overhead lets out a horrid klaxon, the judges tell half of them that their cupcakes taste disgusting, and one of them gets eliminated and sent to walk down the dramatically-lit shame hallway never to be seen again.

Meanwhile GBBO is in a lovely, brightly colored tent, there are delightful and friendly hosts/jesters there to keep everyone entertained, and all of the B Roll is of like... a bumblebee going into a flower, or a lamb running in a field. And yes, there will be moments where someone will mess up their timing or something, and they'll be looking at their bake through the oven door like, "oh gosh I don't think this will rise in time!" Then they stand up to find Paul Hollywood directly behind them ominously. His creepy whitewalker eyes will glow white, and he'll say something like "the 12th of June. 2035. Drowning." And his eyes will go back to normal and he'll walk away. Then the baker gives a playful grimace to the camera and says "that didnt sound great, did it?". Cut to a sweet looking older woman sipping tea on a stool and she says "oo I do hope that Prue enjoys the taste of my sugary, sticky baps!". Then, at the end, someone gets a gold star for doing good, and the loser of the episode gets in the middle of a giant group hug. You see all of them at the end of the series at a giant carnival with their families and the post credits informs you that all of the contestants have become a Partridge Family-style traveling band and stayed friends forever.

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Michael Sheen, who is so much better than angels, posted this today:

In response to this:

🥹🥰💓

Tweets here

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hold me close and don’t let go. please, please, please.

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Recently I’ve been in the mood for some romantic nostalgia, so editing this was inevitable 😁

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Don't mind me, going off on a tangent about Aziraphale's character.

I can't help but be continually drawn to his choice to go back to Heaven. I think it hits once again on the fundamental difference between Crowley and Aziraphale. For all the joking at his expense, I don't believe Aziraphale is naive. I don't think he sees the world as black and white anymore. He's grown and changed (thanks party to Crowley's influence, but also just by nature of being around humans for 6000 years). And it reminds me of this speech from the fantastic move Everything Everywhere All At Once:

"You think I'm weak don't you? All of those years ago when we first fell in love, your father would say I was too sweet for my own good. Maybe he was right. You tell me it's a cruel world, and we're all running around in circles. I know that. I've been on this earth just as many days as you. When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It's how I've learned to survive through everything. I know you see yourself as a fighter. Well, I see myself as one too. This is how I fight."

I see so much of Aziraphale in Waymond. His kindness is not weakness, it isn't naiveté or ignorance. It is strategic and necessary. This is how he fights. With optimism.

And Crowley is an optimist too, we are told as much:

So I don't think he's mad Aziraphale left. His angel, the strategically optimistic fighter who gave away God's gift because he saw people in need, wants to help.

It's his way of fighting.

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“Aziraphale and Crowley are so Romeo and Juliet-coded because they’re fated enemies who fell in love”

Yes!!!! But it’s also so much more than that!

(TW: Brief mentions of suicide)

One of the core aspects of Romeo and Juliet’s relationship is that Romeo represents Juliet’s desire to choose for herself, whereas Juliet represents Romeo’s desire to BE chosen. In the play, Juliet is kept isolated from her peers with no friends her own age, and the very first thing we learn about her is that her parents have arranged a marriage for her with a man she doesn’t know even though she is only 13 (a ridiculously young age to get married even in Shakespeare’s day, during which the average age for women to marry was about 26). She hasn’t been given the freedom to choose anything for herself, from her morals (aka the arbitrary hatred of the feud that older generations force upon her– one of the founding themes of the play!) to whom she spends her time with to whom she chooses to love. As such, the first independent choice she makes by herself and for herself is Romeo. 

During their scenes, the lovers often have shared lines of iambic pentameter, but they are almost always started by Juliet— an indicator that she holds the power in the relationship. She sets the pace and chooses something for herself for the very first time, finally escaping the iron grip of her parents’ rule. This also plays into the symbolism of her death— she uses a dagger, symbolizing her desire to choose something for herself throughout the play as her parents try to make all of her major life decisions for her. In her death, she must ‘choose’ to mark her territory and sink the dagger into her own body in a twisted, tragic display of strength; in this way, her death becomes her last defiant demonstration of her autonomy. Daggers were also seen as a symbolically masculine method of death, proving Juliet’s power despite her seemingly lovesick, innocent nature.

Likewise, the first thing we learn about Romeo is that he is an emotional, vulnerable person in the middle of a bloody, violent, feud-torn city. He also specifically tells Friar Lawrence that his love for Juliet is different from his infatuation with Rosaline because Juliet actually loves him back; he clearly desires somebody to actively choose to be with him. Romeo’s sensitive side is made clear from his state of melancholy upon our first introduction to the character– in a world of hatred and meaningless fighting, he simply wants to forgo violence and be loved. And unlike Rosaline, Juliet actively chooses him. Just like Juliet’s dagger, this also plays into Romeo poisoning himself at the end of the play. Not only was this a traditionally feminine way to die, death via poison involves the spreading of toxic material through one’s body, almost as though the poison claims or ‘chooses’ its victim, much like Romeo craves someone to choose him throughout the play.

Applying this dynamic to Good Omens, I think that Aziraphale serves as the Juliet of their relationship; Heaven controls every single aspect of his life and identity, forcing him to comply with their every wish and trying to break or mold him to fit their standards and bullshit morals that are really just an excuse for meaningless hatred, much like the feud between the Montagues and Capulets. In a similar vein to Romeo being the only thing that Juliet chooses because he makes her happy, not her parents, Crowley is the choice that Aziraphale consistently makes outside of Heavenly abuse (the same can be said for humanity and books and food and music etc etc, but for the sake of this post I’m talking  specifically about relationships). Juliet’s musings in scenes like Act II, Scene 2 or Act IV, Scene 3 are some of if not the wisest verse in the entire play, and it all comes from a lovesick young girl whom most people write off because she is silly and soft and innocent– much like Heaven takes advantage of Aziraphale’s kindness and his strength is often underestimated both by people on the show and even fans of it. 

Additionally, Aziraphale is similar to Juliet in that both of them, in large part, set the pace of their love stories— Juliet starts her shared lines of verse with Romeo, and Aziraphale tells Crowley to slow down and match his pace for fear of risking both of their safeties. This is a fascinating aspect of Aziraphale and Crowley’s dynamic– by all accounts, Crowley should resent Aziraphale for pushing him away and implying prejudiced things about angels vs demons throughout their relationship, but– at least until the s2 finale– there was always an unspoken understanding in which Crowley knew that Aziraphale, while misguided and sometimes unfair, was keeping them safe from Heaven and Hell combined and didn’t really mean or believe anything he said. 

This kind of power and unspoken understanding is very evocative of Romeo and Juliet, because some literary scholars and historians attribute the establishment of ‘private’ selves to Shakespeare himself: the idea that people could harbor secrets and not mean everything they directly say was a deeply uncomfortable notion in Elizabethan England, and Romeo and Juliet as a play revolutionized this concept, popularizing a whole new literary tradition and setting fictional relationships down a long path that eventually helped create the dynamic between Aziraphale and Crowley in the first place! Furthermore, in nearly every flashback in Good Omens in which we see the development of Aziraphale and Crowley’s relationship, we start with Aziraphale alone, and Crowley either finds him or ‘happens’ to be in the right place at the right time. Much like Shakespeare’s young lovers, Aziraphale starts the moment and Crowley completes it. Good Omens also parallels Romeo and Juliet as a piece of fiction because the play was among the first to highlight regular people, implicitly stating that tragedy and romance can happen to anyone, not exclusively royalty (before this, almost all famous tragedies centered around royals). This revolutionizing concept of who stories can be about leads us directly to Good Omens, in which the focus of the story is not well-known, powerful biblical figures, but two people who should, by all accounts, be Nobodies. The same can be said for how Armageddon is stopped in season one, in which embracing human nature over Heaven and Hell and choosing to be a normal human kid is what allows Adam and the Them to save the day. 

Moving on to Crowley– he spends the whole show warring being the emotional, vulnerable person he actually is versus the violent, hard demon he’s ‘supposed’ to be, much like Romeo’s struggles in feud-torn Verona. He parallels Romeo in that Aziraphale gives him the opportunity to be vulnerable and kind and, rather than admonish him for not being the picture of a violent rogue, he loves him all the more for it. After being rejected by Heaven and cast out for eternity, Crowley needs someone to welcome him in and choose him just like Romeo does. Aziraphale chooses Crowley for all his quirks, just as Juliet does Romeo. For the record, the opposite argument could easily be made, as well; Crowley loves Aziraphale because of his quirks and kindness rather than shun or abuse him for them, like Heaven does, and Aziraphale also desperately needs someone to choose him after Heaven reminds him time and time again that he’ll never be enough for the angels. Crowley chooses Aziraphale just as much as Aziraphale chooses Crowley. Overall, though, I think the parallels fit best when applied to Juliet/Aziraphale and Romeo/Crowley. 

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Unforgivable, that's what I am.

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Michael "Traveling Eyes" Sheen ✈️

🫠 dear lord...

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The cure to anxiety is completing all the tasks you have to finish for the day early and doing them phenomenally and being physically perfect and on everyone’s good side preferably even their favorite.

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Good Omens + Oscar Wilde 2/?

“I don’t want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.”

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Crowley: *sees Aziraphale carrying groceries with both hands and extends his hand towards him expectantly*

Aziraphale: *notices and switches all the groceries to one hand, then takes Crowley's hand*

Aziraphale: :)

Crowley: Wait- That's not wha- oh fuck it

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nice pair of characters who trust each other more than anyone else in the whole entire world it would sure be a shame if one of them betrayed that trust for the sake of trying to keep the other alive. it would sure be a shame to love someone so much you destroy them

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Crowley: *sees Aziraphale carrying groceries with both hands and extends his hand towards him expectantly*

Aziraphale: *notices and switches all the groceries to one hand, then takes Crowley's hand*

Aziraphale: :)

Crowley: Wait- That's not wha- oh fuck it

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Louder for the people in the back 👏🏼

Aziraphale didn't choose heaven, he chose humanity. he chose making a difference. he chose trying to fix a fucked up system that does harm by its mere existence. he chose taking the ticking clock hanging over their heads and smashing it to pieces.

and he didn't choose that over Crowley, he chose it over his own happiness, over being near the one person who truly knows him and loves him.

and he did it alone even though that was the last thing he wanted.

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