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[azirapherale]

What’s your favourite line from good omens?

The invisible and unbreakable one that joins Crowley and Aziraphale.

[azirapherale]

WAIT

WHAT IF THE BULLET CONTAINS AZIRAPHALES MEMORY OF THEIR KISS IN 1941???

AND THATS WHY AZIRAPHALE SAYS I FORGIVE YOU

BECAUSE HOW DARE YOU TAKE THIS FROM ME

AND CROWLEY SAYS DONT BOTHER BECAUSE IT WAS TOO DANGEROUS FOR AZIRAPHALE TO REMEMBER IT BACK THEN

WHAT IF CROWLEY GAVE AZIRAPHALE HIS MEMORIES BACK

WHAT IF CROWLEY PASSED AZIRAPHALE THE SAME EXACT BULLET FROM THE 1941 BULLET CATCH

[azirapherale]

Dear Neil, I am a horrible person. How to be kinder, please?

Sometimes I suspect we are all horrible people. Or at least, we are human people. Same thing. We are impatient, judgmental, irritating and irritated, grumpy, easily offended and the rest of it.

So how to be kinder if it doesn’t come naturally? 

Fake it. 

Fake it a little bit at a time. 

Because there isn’t actually any difference between doing something nice for someone because you are naturally saintly and perfect, and doing something nice for someone because you are secretly demonic and trying to cover it up. It’s still an act of kindness either way, and you still made their lives better.

Smile at people. Say hullo. Ask about their lives. Remember what they’ve told you about their lives. Do small things to try and help them. (They will not know you are horrible, do not worry. They will just perceive that you are helping.)

Give people the benefit of the doubt. Remember that it’s more often stupidity to blame than evil, that everyone can screw up (including you) and what’s important is learning from that.

Think “What would an actually kind person do now?” – and do that. Don’t beat yourself up when you fail. Just be as kind to yourself as you will be to others – even if you have to fake that.

And good luck.

[azirapherale]

Hello, Mr. Gaiman sir.

Did Amazon Prime insist that Good Omens 2 be 6 episodes like the first season? Was it a struggle for the writers to have the story meet this demand?

Asking as an aspiring film/tv maker

No, I picked six episodes for Season 1 as it felt about right, and then I did another six for season 2 because it felt right. Fates willing, Season 3 will also be 6 episodes.

[azirapherale]

New hopes for S3 just dropped!

Ok ok, so what if he also included an armadillo, those tiny bats that sleep in leaves, and an aardvark. Oh and a kinkajou and a muntjac?

The plot would be that Heaven and Hell are now a big corporate ranch called the Double H. The big bosses decide to strip the land of everything so it’ll cause another apocalyptic Dust Bowl like before the Great Depression bc they’re (still) sadistic dicks

The animals don’t stop this apocalypse, and in fact almost make it worse. The chinchillas get distracted bc they LIKE all the dust (false fluffy allies!), the anteater and armadillo are passed out from binging on ants, and the bats never woke up

Furfur (now played by exactly 574 crawdads - not to be confused with bildads - in a 1984 popped collar Members Only jacket) decides to fight god (can’t Fall twice, amirite) bc the kinkajou wearing a tiny cowboy hat rode in on the muntjac and narrowly saved him from discorporation by chinchilla dust and it’s the sole kindness he’s ever known

Hello Neil Gaiman, I hope you're doing well!

I know you probably won't see this, but I thought I might as well ask; since season 3 of Good Omens is made official will there be any new characters introduced? Also will they be played by new actors and might the auditions be made public? I ask because I would love to grow into the profession of acting and Good Omens seems like such an interesting, exciting and interactive show to work on. I would be honoured to get the opportunity to audition, even if I didn't get a role. I love your work and am constantly amazed by the magic that you create.

Thank you in advance!

There will be no new human actors. All characters in Season 3 will be played by trained animals, primarily chinchillas. They will be chosen by lot and flown directly to the set.

[azirapherale]

No, but: in the trailer we barely see Aziraphale, and when we do, he's just slightly turned or hunched over on something, so we don't really see his face, AND THEN suddenly he looks straight into the camera (preferably at Crowley too) and we're hit with the image of two of the most disturbing purple eyes in the world. Just imagen how gut-wrenching this could be… It would be so much fun. It would do irreversible damage to my mental health. I NEED IT.

[azirapherale]

give me your favourite line from good omens s2!

[azirapherale]

Aziraphale or A.Z. Fell & Co. actually has more than one phone.

And now there’s confirmation on the phone number! So that’s the number the client called when “there’s really no need for that kind of language” happened.

(These are random and short, but I like that Aziraphale’s phones are closely tied to the 1940s).

[azirapherale]

Your Shades of Gray and My Shades of Gray Mean Different Things

A Good Omens meta in defense of and analyzing Aziraphale, with the help of Granny Weatherwax, other Discworld characters, Pratchett himself, and a bit of Neil.

Note: All criticism and even the writing off of Aziraphale is valid even if I disagree with a lot of it and love Aziraphale. Also, Roland Barthes said smart things (death of the author - literally in this case, GNU Sir Terry.) That said, having the background of reading almost 20 Discworld novels at this point, and someone who is deeply obsessed with Terry Pratchett (I cry like once a month when I remember he's gone and the Discworld is complete), and based on how I view fiction in general, I don't think Aziraphale should be given up on until his story is finished. I also truly think that being familiar with Discworld gives you a different context to view the Good Omens characters in, and it's a pretty positive one, generally.

So, for anyone who may not be as familiar with Pratchett or Discworld, I want to start off with this:

He would agree with a lot of the points you make about why Aziraphale (or rather people in general) is so awful. He was angered to no end by the stupidity and complacency of most people. After Terry died, his assistant Rob Wilkins opened a letter Terry had addressed to him, which included:

"Look after the business and it will look after you. For all you have done, for all of the little things and all of the much bigger things and for the burying of the bodies … I thank you."

And of the above, Rob said:

"Just to be clear: there were no actual bodies in need of burying during my more than 20 years of working with Terry Pratchett. Terry could get quite exasperated with people sometimes, and certainly did not (as people often found themselves saying about him) suffer fools gladly. But he never got that exasperated."

Another note before we go on: Yes, there are Discworld spoilers. I don't think that seeing Discworld spoilers makes the books any less readable, as someone who had a lot spoiled for me and read about 20 books anyway so far.

Also: I don’t want to get lost in the “well Aziraphale actually did this bad thing for this reason” discussion since GO is open to so many interpretations: let’s just assume he’s deeply flawed and guilty of all the criticism I’ve seen

Terry Pratchett was a MASTER of character development. I’ve never seen anyone do it better than him. I’m gonna talk about a few of the many well-developed characters he gave us throughout his life and why they reflect his views above, and why I’m so certain Aziraphale’s redemption and finished character development will feel so well earned.

Granny Weatherwax, the inspiration for this meta. Granny is rude, arrogant, stubbon, manipulative…and extremely compassionate. A good person who does good things, yet the last thing anyone would call her is nice. In Witches Abroad, she said that because her sister Lilith chose to the bad one, Granny, by the nature of story logic, had to be the good one (even though Granny could do being bad so much better than her sister if the roles were reversed.) Her magic, headology, is where she manipulates other people with their own preconceptions, to see things the way she needs them to see it, and then reality is changed from it - and it’s also the most realistic depiction of real world magic I have ever seen.

Granny is good because she has to be. She uses questionable means, and yet, she’s really, really good, and compassionate. Many of Terry’s characters have been quoted as saying things that boil down to "goodness is in what you do." And likeable characters did good things for countless reasons, not always pristine. Despite the fact she would be better suited to being bad, and she does good out of necessity, I’d trust her with my life and I’d want to hang out with her while she basically called me stupid. (I think Terry also believed he had to be good because so many choose to be bad.)

In the Tiffany Aching series, this comes all back up and it's established that Granny prefers to let people have the choice to take their own path, then come to her once they've messed everything up and need her help to fix it, because she didn't have a choice: she had to be good and she had to make the good choices. She wants people to have choices because she didn't.

…Her sister Lilith also convinced herself she’s the good one even though she did bad deeds. (sound vaguely like someone we know? Aziraphale isn't going to end up like Lilith, though. Because despite this similarity, he's coded as one of the heroes, while Lilith was left as a vilain.)

So how do Granny and Terry define good and bad?

A conversation with with an Omnian missionary priest called Mightily Oats (Omnian is similar to Catholicsm):

"There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin. for example," said Oats. "And what do they think? Against it, are they?" said Granny Weatherwax. "It's not as simple as that. It's not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray." "Nope." "Pardon?" "There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is." "It's a lot more complicated than that--" "No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts." "Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--" "But they starts with thinking about people as things…" --from Carpe Jugulum

I've thought about the distinction between "shades of gray" and "white that's got grubby" a lot. If we look at what Terry thought of goodness (it's what you do), and the context that she's talking to a missionary in this, it appears like the point she's making is that the way Oats and his people look at shades of gray is flawed because they look at it as good reasons for doing bad things and bad reasons for doing good things, but she looks at the result: is whatever you're telling yourself allowing you to treat people as things? if yes, you're doing bad. if not, regardless of what you told yourself in order to get there, you're doing good. This is Granny's "shades of gray."

In Witches Abroad, Granny is applying story logic as magic in a very meta way. If we look at Good Omens as a story, even though Aziraphale doesn't realize it the way she does, and he's telling himself he's the good one while at times being complicit in a corrupt system and doing bad things, Aziraphale is burdened with being the "bad" one solely by design. And a bad character who makes good choices (Crowley) will always be seen in a better light than a good one who takes to sinning (Aziraphale). Aziraphale has to be the one in the darker shades of grey, while Crowley exists in the lighter, though neither recognize this in themselves. If it happened any other way, there wouldn't be a story.

"And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things."

This is what Terry Pratchett believed. Aziraphale absolutely did just this during the ball. And Neil blatantly points it out through Maggie and Nina when they confront Crowley and remind him that they're real people, with lives. That is the authors telling us that what was done to them was wrong, and Neil is drawing attention to the fact that you should find it a little upsetting. Terry often inserted morals into his stories through his characters speaking about ethics and philosophy. Maggie and Nina may as well be Terry there saying that.

And yet, Terry and Neil both loved Aziraphale. Even though he's done what is essentially the root of all sin in the most painfully literal way. (Neil did you basically write Granny's quote into Good Omens? I can't get over how obvious the parallel is now that I've seen it.)

The fact that they both love him despite him doing such a terrible thing, shows that the plans for his future development are greater than his failures.

Onto some other Discworld characters. This is mostly for flavor. Granny was the big one.

In Going Postal, Moist Von Lipwig starts off as a selfish sleazy conman. His actions prior to the main story lead to his future love interest getting fired from her job. Once you realize that, which happens after they've been aggressively flirting forever and you're incredibly invested in them getting together, and they're SO close to it, you’re like… ”oh shit…this is really, really bad. how are they ever going to get together now?” and she reacts exactly as you’d expect her to, very validly. But he completely redeems himself (I won't spoil how) in both her and the audience's eyes by the end, with grand, heartfelt gestures. Also: in the beginning of the book, before fully grasping the consequences of his actions (and falling in love), he only does things for selfish reasons, and he manipulates people. When he begins running the post office, he begins doing good while still being selfish, and by the end he isn't selfish anymore, but he has to use his old conman tricks of lying and manipulating to help fix the post office and take down the big bad.

Sam Vimes, perhaps Terry's most cherished creation, started off as a hopeless drunk cop sleeping in the gutter, and Terry took him on a trip to the stars. Every watch book jokingly ends with him getting more titles and accolades despite the fact that he already has so many, and then finally Terry was like “oh yeah now I’ve given him supernatural powers” which I find fucking hilarious, and even more hilarious because Vimes fucking hates it.

Nobby Nobs my beloved little vermin man. That's all on him.

Havelock Vetinari is a benevolent tyrant, a villain who decided it would be more interesting to make a city work properly than to simply conquer it. Even Vimes begrudgingly accepts that Vetinari has in many ways made things better for people, even minorities, and made the city work, even with things like legalized crime (in moderation, of course lol.) Vetinari also doesn’t care about poor people stealing - it’s part of the working system so it must be allowed - the problem is when the rich cheat the system. Vetinari is a dark horse and a bit complicated because he views people as chess pieces for him to place in the best spots in the city for it all to work properly…but the places he puts them (Moist the conman given a second chance as the postman instead of hanging, Vimes given countless promotions) generally leads to them growing and bettering themselves, and he seems to take enjoyment out of that aspect too.

And oh, the black ribboners. The reformed vampires. Some amazing, compassionate characters there. For instance, Otto the photographer, who transferred his obsession with blood to an obsession with capturing the perfect photograph, and who dresses in ridiculous trad vampire attire so that he looks like a complete goofball but he doesn’t scare anyone anymore and people are comfortable around him. He said it so casually to Vimes too. Looking like a joke when the joke was being played on everyone else.

Yet most of those vampires we’ve come to love were brutal murderers for maybe hundreds of years before changing, and some have only been changed for a few years. We don’t usually see that though, because by the time Sally and Maladict and Otto are in the story, they’ve renounced it and they’re doing their best to be good people. …Aziraphale, however, he’s still in the middle of this story arch, unfortunately.

The vampires still have their slip ups though. Sally sees fresh blood and then needs to bite an apple (not so bad). Maladict almost kills his love interest when someone breaks his coffee machine and he starts reverting back to his blood lust. At the last second, the crisis is averted. We still end up loving and rooting for Maladict.

And so you come to the conundrum that these hopeful stories were written by a man who was infuriated to no end by all the bullshit in the world. These funny stories with deep themes on closer inspection. Part of the reason people who are unfamiliar with Pratchett think he’s jolly. How can this be?

Let's talk about Neil Gaiman for a minute. I'm currently taking his masterclass. I'll just say one thing he's said in it which is a universal truth: stories are pretty lies delivered as the vehicles for truth. Vimes doesn’t exist, he probably can’t exist in the world as we see it today. Aziraphales who are complicit in bad systems do not often change, and most Crowley’s wouldn’t have the patience for sticking around them. Granny Weatherwax’s can’t change other people’s realities simply by believing it strongly enough and intimidating them, or we’d have so much less bigotry for starters. If I had a friend named Adora who encountered a Moist with that backstory, I’d tell her to steer clear, mostly because of his name. Impossible or unlikely situations, but if they could happen even once, maybe just maybe…

It takes people believing it could happen first, as Death once said:

Discworld recognizes itself as fantasy, but with the hope that one day fantasy can make its way into reality. Also, I’ve seen the way Terry portrays the really hopelessly selfish and complacent people, and they’re far more terrible than Aziraphale has ever been. Coded as absolute villains, while Aziraphale is being established as one of the heroes.

I want to live in a world where Granny Weatherwax’s exist and even Aziraphales. People who were selfish and foolish and harmfully complicit in a bad system, but who change, against all odds and everything we know about how people are. If “maybe some day even people like that will wake up and start to care” isn’t hopepunk, I don’t know what is. And all of Discworld and Good Omens are hopepunk.

And when Aziraphale finally reaches the end of his story, he's gonna get the loving treatment Terry has given all of his other characters, even the ones with harder redemption archs.

Some final quotes as a little send off:

"And thus we wear down mountains. Water dripping on a stone, dissolving and removing. Changing the shape of the world, one drop at a time. Water dripping on a stone, commander. Water flowing underground, bubbling up in unexpected places" --Thud

"Never promise to do the possible. Anyone could do the possible. You should promise to do the impossible, because sometimes the impossible was possible, if you could find the right way, and at least you could often extend the limits of the possible. And if you failed, well, it had been impossible.” --Going Postal

“I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible.” --The Last Hero

[azirapherale]

Worth noting that we don’t get to see the actual conversation between the Metatron and Aziraphale; we see the version of the conversation that Aziraphale chooses to share with Crowley. He chooses to share four obvious lies and a threat:

The four obvious lies:

1. Michael somehow isn’t the obvious choice to replace Gabriel - Both Crowley and Aziraphale would automatically assume that Michael would get the job.

2. Aziraphale is honest - Both Crowley and Aziraphale know that Aziraphale lies, a lot, even to God herself.

3. Aziraphale is a leader - Both Crowley and Aziraphale will remember that he refused to take up his position leading troops at Armageddon.

4. Aziraphale doesn’t just tell people what they want to hear - Both Crowley and Aziraphale know that the Arrangement is, in fact, just Aziraphale telling Heaven what it wants to hear (while also lying through his teeth).

The threat, of course, is the reveal that Heaven knows about their “de facto partnership”, aka The Arrangement. They are explicitly told that they can only continue to work together - be together - if they do it under Heaven’s terms and conditions.

It’s all bullshit, is what Aziraphale is saying. All of this is bullshit but they’re not giving either one of them any real choices. Aziraphale can’t refuse to go, Crowley can’t consent to those terms. Crowley isn’t stupid. Given five minutes to catch his breath, he’ll recognize how odd all of this is and start to figure it out for himself.

[azirapherale]

So, who was gonna tell me that ‘No Nightingales’ is a book about two ghosts preventing a war from happening, then being in a love-hate relationship and not talking to each other for 66 years in a house on Berkeley Square??

[azirapherale]

So, who was gonna tell me that ‘No Nightingales’ is a book about two ghosts preventing a war from happening, then being in a love-hate relationship and not talking to each other for 66 years in a house on Berkeley Square??

[azirapherale]

SFX Magazine Issue 372 - Designing Good Omens ❤ 😊

PRODUCTION DESIGNER MICHAEL RALPH REVEALS HOW THE SHOW’S CENTREPIECE SET, WHICKBER STREET, WAS GIVEN A DEVILISHLY CLEVER UPGRADE FOR THE SECOND SEASON

WORDS: DAVE GOLDER

Invisible Columns And Thin Walls “The new studio is Pyramid Studios in Bathgate – it used to be a furniture warehouse. And unfortunately – or fortunately, because I accept these things as not challenges but gifts – right down the middle of that studio are a series of upright columns. But you’ll never spot them on screen. I had to build them in and integrate them into the walls and still get the streets between them. And it worked.

“There’s all sorts of cheeky design values to those sets. Normally a set like this is double-skin. In other words, you do an interior wall and an exterior wall, with an airspace in between. But really, the only time a viewer notices that there’s that width is at the doors and the windows. So I cheated all that. I ended up with single walls everywhere. So the exterior wall is the interior wall, just painted. All I did was make the sash windows and entrances wider to give it some depth as you walked in.”

GOOD OMENS HAD A CHANGE of location for its second season, but hopefully you didn’t notice. Because Whickber Street in Soho upped sticks from an airfield in Hertfordshire to a furniture warehouse in Bathgate, Edinburgh. It’s the kind of nonsensical geographical shenanigans that could only make sense in the crazy world of film and TV, and production designer Michael Ralph was the man in charge of rebuilding and expanding the show’s vast central set. “I wish we could have built more in season one than we did,” says Ralph, whose previous work has included Primeval and Dickensian. “We built the ground floor of everything and the facades of all the shops. But we didn’t build anything higher than that, because we were out on an airfield in a very, very difficult terrain and weather conditions, so we really couldn’t go much higher. Visual effects created the upper levels.”

But with season two the set has gone to a whole other level… literally. “What happened was that the rest of the street became integrated into the series’s storyline,” explains Ralph. “So we needed a record shop, we needed a coffee shop that actually had an inside, we needed a magic shop, we needed the pub. To introduce those meant we had to change the street with a layout that works from a storylines point of view. In other words, things like someone standing at the counter in the record shop had to be able to eyeball somebody standing at the counter in the coffee shop. They had to be able to eyeball Aziraphale sitting in his office in the window of the bookshop. But the rest of it was a pleasure to do inside, because we could expand it and I could go up two storeys.”

For most of the set, which is around 80 metres long and 60 metres wide, the two storeys only applied to the shop frontages, but in the case of Aziraphale’s bookshop, it allowed Ralph to build the mezzanine level for real this time. According to Ralph it became one of the cast and crews’ favourite places to hang out during down time.

But while AZ Fell & Co has grown in height, it actually has a slightly smaller footprint because of the logistics of adapting it to the new studio.

“Everybody swore to me that no one would notice,” says Ralph wryly. “I walked onto it and instinctively knew there was a difference immediately, and they hated me for that. I have this innate sense about spatial awareness and an eye like a spirit level.

“It’s not a lot, though – I think we’ve lost maybe two and a half feet on the front wall internally. I think that there’s a couple of other smaller areas, but only I’d notice. So I can be really annoying to my guys, but only on those levels. Not on any other. They actually quite like me…”

Populating The Bookshop “The props in the new bookshop set were a flawless reproduction from the set decorator Bronwyn Franklin [who is also Ralph’s wife]. It was really the worst-case scenario after season one. She works off the concept art that I produce, but what she does is she adds so much more to the character of the set. She doesn’t buy anything she doesn’t love, or doesn’t fit the character.

“But the things she put a lot of work into finding for season one, they were pretty much one-offs. When we burnt the set down in the sixth episode, we lost a lot of props, many of which had been spotted and appreciated by the fans. So Bronwyn had to discover a new set decorating technique: forensic buying.

“She found it all – duplicates and replicas. It took ages. In that respect, the Covid delay was very helpful for Bron. There’s 7,000 books in there and there’s not one fake book. That’s mainly because… it’s a weird thing to say, but we wanted it to smell and feel like a bookshop to everybody that was in it, all the time.

“It affects everybody subliminally; it affects everybody’s performance – actors and crew – it raises the bar 15 to 20%. And the detail, you know… We love a lot of detail.”

(look at the description under this, they called him 'Azi' hehehehe :D <3)

Aziraphale’s Inspirational Correspondence “There’s not one single scrap of paper on Aziraphale’s desk that isn’t written specifically for Aziraphale. Every single piece is not just fodder that’s been shoved there, it has a purpose; it’s a letter of thanks, or an enquiry about a book or something.

“Michael Sheen is so submerged in his character he would get lost sitting at his own desk, reading his own correspondence between takes. I believe wholeheartedly that if you put that much care into every single piece of detail, on that desk and in that room, that everybody feels it, including the crew, and then they give that set the same respect it deserves.

“They also lift their game because they believe that they’re doing something of so much care and value. Really, it’s a domino effect of passion and care for what you’re producing.”

Alternative Music “My daughter Mickey is lead graphic designer [two of Ralph’s sons worked on the series too, one as a concept artist, the other in props]. They’re the ones that produced all of that handwritten work on the desk. She’s the one that took on the record shop and made up 80 band names so that we didn’t have to get copyright clearance from real bands. Then she produced records and sleeves that spanned 50, 60 years of their recordings, and all of the graphics on the walls.

“I remember Michael and Neil [Gaiman] getting lost following one band’s history on the wall, looking at their posters and albums desperately trying to find out whether they survived that emo period.”

It’s A Kind Of Magic One of the new shops in Whickber Street for season two was Will Goldstone’s Magic Shop, which is full of as many Easter eggs as off-the-shelf conjuring tricks, including a Matt Smith Doctor Who-style fez and a toy orang-utan that’s a nod to Discworld’s The Librarian. Ralph says that while the series is full of references to Gaiman, Pratchett and Doctor Who, Michael Sheen never complained about a lack of Masters Of Sex in-jokes. “He’d be the last person to make that sort of comment!”

Ralph also reveals that the magic shop counter was another one of his wife’s purchases, bought at a Glasgow reclamation yard.

The Anansi Boys Connection Ralph reveals that Good Omens season two used the state-of-the-art special effects tech Volume (famous for its use in The Mandalorian to create virtual backdrops) for just one sequence, but he will be using it extensively elsewhere on another Gaiman TV series being made for Prime Video.

“We used Volume on the opening sequence to create the creation of the universe. I was designing Anansi Boys in duality with this project, which seems an outrageously suicidal thing to do. But it was fantastic and Anansi Boys was all on Volume. So I designed for Volume on one show and not Volume on the other. The complexities and the psychology of both is different.”

[azirapherale]

this is in regard to @nightgoodomens post proposing the question of what Aziraphale will need to give up next after his sword and halo. https://www.tumblr.com/nightgoodomens/738958522266664960/i-wonder-what-aziraphale-will-give-up-in?source=share

I started writing this as a reblog response on that post, but this got long enough it felt like I would be colonising their post if I didn't separate it. Please go read that one for context if you haven't yet.

~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~

It's a very interesting question they're cogitating on

On inventory, of the things Aziraphale much valued (or would have said he did), he's already given up his sword, his halo, and his home. What's left?

being an angel

his access to (actual) magic powers

immortality

his faith

Crowley

his personal morality

earth itself

The last three of those things I think will prove non-negotiable. Underneath it all, GO has seemed to me to be a story of moral apostasy and Aziraphale is undergoing his own Jobian trials

So far, every minisode seems to fall under these themes: 1) Aziraphale confronts the faults-lines in his faith: God's a sadistic, murderous jerk for a lark; drowning *everyone* sinner and saint alike is "good" according to Heaven; it's also "good" that poor people "get" to take harder moral tests and more frequently with a higher probability of failing

2) Crowley demonstrates that more good can come of grey morality than rigid morality and blind obedience: lying to save lives, finding an option that didn't involve killing Adam, actively working to thwart Heaven to save children

My take is Aziraphale has been sitting in the corner, in the spotlight, all this time, losing his religion, and everything is closing in to where he's going to have to *admit* it. Losing his religion. Not his morality. Losing his religion is becoming contingent on keeping his morality. It would be a particularly satisfying ending in my opinion if he started a rebellion against Heaven knowing full-well it would cost him a Fall, and going into it with real conviction anyway

[azirapherale]

I wonder what Aziraphale will give up in Season3.

Because in a way this is his problem - he wants the best of both worlds. Date the Demon but still be loved by Heaven. So what else to do if not change the Demon into an Angel? And then they’re both perfect, angelic, doing good, and in power. It’s bullshit but this is what he believes in.

But for 6 thousand years Crowley tried to make him understand that this is not how the world works. Shades of grey.

Finally Aziraphale chose Heaven.

So what is it going to be in Season3? How will he realise that his choice was shit?

[azirapherale]

something something duality of man

[azirapherale]

Crowley was a snake: fun facts. 🐍