#or that aziraphale and ed don't pay attention to that

[bakasara]

oh, they are Addams couples. Aziraphale and Crowley, and Ed and Stede, are both a flavor of Addams-type couple. Hear me out--

We tend to associate Stede and Aziraphale, and Ed and Crowley, right?

Aesthetically, you have Stede and Aziraphale both looking like posh Blonde White Man Who's Trouble, while Crowley and Ed both got the Edgy Goth aesthetic going on.

By character traits/narrative role, Aziraphale and Stede are the Covert Bastard who can and will be a bitch; they have both long dealt with living in oppressive systems by way of painful compromises and self-repression, always teetering on the edge of desertion and, sooner or later, called to make a choice to disavow those systems for good.

Crowley and Ed are these brilliant and vibrant minds frustrated by hurt, both betrayed in life by a social system outside their control that cast them down without a choice; they take a Flint-style "this ends when I forgive the system, not the other way around" approach to it in that they openly shun the system back, but the original rejection and its cascading effects still left them traumatized and fragile around the matter.

(Then there's all four of these characters being soooo dramatic and such a Theater-Kid-type person, so they all have that in common.)

However, there is a place where the parallels switch, bringing Stede and Crowley far closer on one side, and Aziraphale and Ed closer on the other. And it has to do with the fact that in both these couples there's a character whose job often tends to be Beach, just Beach Husband, just Husband, opposing the other character who's prone to going into High Maintenance Diva / Mermaid With Melancholy modes.

Aziraphale is quite capable of taking care of himself, but he'll literally fold his arms and play princess in the castle waiting for Crowely to rescue him, because Enrichment. He'll do it in life-or-discorporation situations, like when he's about to get guillotined. He'll do it with minor inconveniences - like with the paintball stain, where it's obscenely obvious he's just waiting to be indulged, wants the satisfaction of seeing that Crowley will treat him. He'll pretend he was reading when Crowley comes back from an argument and make Crowley ring a bell to get his attention. "Pleeease, Crowley, do the bullet catch with me even though you've never used a rifle". "Let me take the Bentley while you look after the bookshop". Et cetera. And Crowley takes to all this like a bee to honey. Follows him around the neighborhood, indulges his every caprice, dreams of Alone Time at the Ritz where they can just treat themselves to brunch and, I guess, where he can watch Aziraphale eat some more, which is his idea of this Absolutely Great Activity that just makes his day.

Ed will lean on the helm and sigh like he's Ariel, yes, but it's more than that. Painting the bride cake topper in kajal to look like him sits at the (narratively fucking ingenious) intersection of "I'm making it me because I'm never there, it's never me" and "I'd really like for once for someone to treat me like I'm precious and worthy of pampering" which reflect feelings we've known about since the beginning of s1, at least since he touched the piece of cashmere in Stede's cabin. He also genuinely swings fast between energized/manic and low energy/feelings of hopelessness, and his brain goes Faster Than Yours, and he gets genius-slash-crazy ideas on the reg. When he needed to call to all of his strength he imagined it as a giant sea creature with huge, all-encompassing arms. Florence Welch Big God Behavior. It's a big personality, and you're either enamored with it or not, you're either happy to follow him around basking in it, or you're not strong enough a suitor to his heart and should abandon pursuit. But luckily Stede's also a crazy maniac whose life goal is riding or dying for that in his Boyfriend Era until he can ride or die for that in his Faithful and Realized Husband Era.

So yeah, there's a lot to the dynamic between these duos - more than this, don't get me wrong! - but I'm VERY appreciative of this facet of them that gets all tongue-in-cheek kinda

[elizmanderson]

bye I just have to talk about Good Omens for a sec since victoria and I watched S2 this weekend and I'm already rewatching it so I can pay more attention this time bc I know what happens now and am not like. desperate to find out. y'know like when you read a book the first time and you read it really fast and kinda skimmy bc you're just like WHAT HAPPENS NEXT so then the next time you read it you pick up on stuff you missed the first time simply bc you weren't reading carefully bc suspense.

okay anyway there will be spoilers so I'm gonna place a "read more" and also tag. so DO NOT keep reading if you don't want Good Omens S2 spoilers.

okay so I partly want to talk about this on a craft level? bc I was thinking the whole time about OFMD and how like. y'know, it's marketed predominantly as a ~comedy~ but it's a ROMANCE and if you know romantic beats then you recognize that bc you see the romantic beats? and GOS2 felt very much that way, where like I was seeing the romance beats and they made the brain go brrr. like obviously it's not the SAME bc Ed and Stede had never previously met whereas Crowley and Aziraphale have been running around together for millennia, but

Crowley saying to the nebula "you're gorgeous" and Aziraphale being like :D until he realizes Crowley wasn't looking at him

Aziraphale being DEVASTATED when he thinks Crowley has killed the goats and IS going to kill the kids but then being like !!!!!!!!!! when he realizes Crowley actually didn't kill the goats and isn't going to kill the kids

Crowley being the one to understand and offer Aziraphale comfort when Aziraphale thinks he's fallen

the moment you can see Aziraphale realize he's in love with Crowley in that church in 1941, there's the look on his face and ALSO the romantic music at that moment bc he has Realized

Aziraphale afterwards constantly stumbling over "my.......friend" when he has to introduce Crowley to people and isn't sure how to do it because yes they're friends but also it's something other than that to him

Crowley constantly being SO there for Aziraphale without even really realizing he's doing it (like yeah he gets >:[ about it sometimes, like when they argue about helping Jim and he initially says no and then goes back, but he always goes back anyway)

everyone—LITERALLY EVERYONE, heaven, hell, humanity—thinking they're legit a couple and just taking it as accepted fact, like it's not like it's played for a joke (I mean it is FUNNY but it's not the way it is on Supernatural when people assume Sam and Dean are a couple instead of brothers), it's just literally a thing everyone thinks. like Shax is like "I didn't used to believe it [but now I see it's true]" and Nina literally won't accept that they're NOT a thing even as Crowley is actively protesting

THE MOMENT CROWLEY REALIZES after Nina does that, where he's like. wait. WAIT. w a i t . and you can just see his whole universe turning on its axis bc he's never realized BUT NOW HE IS REALIZING AND—

there are more, obviously, but I was mostly focused on the ones BEFORE the romance became. well. I was gonna say explicit but this was all pretty explicit lmao, but I think the moment where Crowley realizes what's up is the moment it gets into territory that makes it much harder for the advertisers to say "besties :)" even though they totally still will.

BUT ALSO!! can I please just shout for a moment about how much I LOVED that like every major couple on the show mirrored Crowley and Aziraphale's relationship?? like from a craft perspective my brain was just going BRR BRR BRR BRR BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR bc I fucking loved the parallelism and especially seeing romantic couples that mirrored them where like, it's the kind of thing where if the network wouldn't LET neil make the queer romance explicit, you'd write that in intentionally to signal to queer viewers, "hey, the network is being a dick about this, but YOU will know that I DO mean for their relationship to be a romance"

but instead we got the signaling AND we got explicit queerness from the MCs (in more ways than just the romance btw which I feel is important to point out, bc while I am overjoyed that we DID get a queer romantic arc and a queer kiss onscreen, the show and these characters would not be any less queer in the absence of this romance) and I just !!!

Elspeth and Morag - you've got the one who does something bad and isn't particularly bothered about it and more importantly does it to keep food on the table (so to speak), and the one who's good and devout and can't stand by the bad thing even if it's to help them (but ultimately does in fact actually go out to help with the bad thing bc the "good" one loves the "bad" one)

Nina and Maggie - more explicit parallel that's MADE very explicit by Nina telling Crowley that he's like her, the kinda jaded cynical one and the one who believes in magic and goodness (and also the one who believes in magic is CLEARLY head over heels in love with the cynical one, while the cynical one hasn't realized how much they like the one who believes in magic lmao)

Beelzebub and Gabriel - okay I mean this one's a gimme bc it is QUITE LITERALLY Crowley and Aziraphale in that it's a demon and an angel that, as it turns out, have been working together and meeting secretly for ages and have gone from supposed enemies to reluctant allies to allies to friends to lovers, with the main difference being that it seems Beelzebub was more obviously in love first in their case lol. CAN I TELL YOU HOW I SCREAMED WHEN GABRIEL MADE THE JUKEBOX ALWAYS PLAY THAT SONG JUST BC BEELZEBUB LIKES IT

anyway 11/10 loved that no notes

okay I actually have more to say bc on the one hand YES the season ended in a DEVASTATING WAY (again a la OFMD—except that Crowley and Aziraphale got to have it out, which somehow is slightly less devastating than Crowley just waiting for an Aziraphale who never shows up—and in fact victoria sent me the below pic today lolsob)

...but I admit I'm a sucker for an angsty kiss, and there was SO MUCH explicit queerness ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE this season and I loved the romantic beats and the parallels between the other couples and Crowley/Aziraphale and the classic Good Omens humor and, well, everything else

like I'm a fan of the book and I loved S1, but S2 is like. like this season was MADE for me. like. that's the good stuff right there

but I'm gonna shut up for now and maybe my thoughts less about craft and more about devastation will be another post lmao

[sarucane]

Glorious Good Omens S2 Missable Details

I watched Good Omens S2 roughly 507 times the last few weeks (been a rough month, it kept me afloat and I'm eternally grateful), point being:

Tumblr Reader, please benefit from my wild-obsession and read on for good deep-cut bits to pay attention to on your next rewatch:

Episode 1

-Crowley has a very slightly different accent in the opening scene. It's a bit more "proper" and "angelic."

-Maggie's shop is called "The Small Back Room," and she tells Nina it started out as a corner of Aziraphale's bookshop...one of his back rooms.

-Crowley's newspaper says that voters named Tadfield the best village in England--and that the weather there remains perfect.

Episode 2

-There are crows visible and audible in the background riiiight after Crowley "smites" the goats.

-"Jim's" bendy-fan book is a Terry Pratchett's first Discworld novel "The Colour of Magic"

-Someone wrote the whole article! Apparently business at "The Resurrectionist" slowed down when "Everyday" got old, but now people are showing up just to witness the miracle.

-The fellow at the pub who Aziraphale miracles out of a chair has a newspaper that mentions Milton Keynes. Most of the article is out of focus, but Milton Keynes is a city that, in the book, both Crowley and Aziraphale took credit for.

-Job, when introduced, is leaning against a pile of steaming manure. I'm aware that I'm an idiot for not noticing this right away...

Episode 3

-Jim is using a mug that Aziraphale had in the first season. Either he or Aziraphale has added the label in the interim.

-Muriel doesn't say "cup of tea," she says "cuppatea," because she didn't properly hear what Aziraphale said.

-At some unshown point, Crowley takes over body-hauling duties for Elspeth

-Beezlebub hauls their chair horn-ed chair around to 2-3 rooms over the whole season--and is also, on reflection, clearly quite worried about Gabriel here and in episode 1.

-Aziraphale finds the surgeon's whiskey to be a step too far, smell-wise.

-Laudanum courtesy of Cut-me-own-throat-Dibbler. It's a miracle the thing had any effect on Crowley, it was probably mostly rat urine and even more questionably sourced water.

-When Crowley tells Elpeth to leave just before she exits stage left, he calls her "hen," which is what Wee Morag almost always called her.

Episode 4

-Mark Gatiss's (Nazi Male Sidekick) arm is falling off half the time because he's the one who was holding the books that Crowley demonically saved. The nazi's arm was sticking out of the rubble, holding the suitcase, to make it easy to retrieve the books. Hence it got tugged by both Crowley and the scavengers, and fell off by the end of the episode. Serves the book-thief right.

-The Nazi Zombies hang in the Dirty Donkey to spy on the fellas in the bookshop--the same pub Crowley and Aziraphale visit in E2, and the pub that the heaven elevator commanders in E4 and E5

-Aziraphale gets nervous and seems to jump to the end of his act when he asks the audience who has experience with firearms. He hasn't told Crowley that this will be the cue. So, quite reasonably, Crowley does not raise his hand when asked if he has experience with firearms.

-Listen to the credits all the way through to the end of the music here: the audio changes. I don't know music well enough to know what happened, but it's fun.

Episode 5

-The owner of "Marguerite's," the French restaurant, is in fact named Justine. When she goes into Aziraphale's shop for the ball/business meeting, her accent has changed completely.

-All the candles we see on the chandeliers, as well as the candles in the next episode, are battery-operated.

-Nina's the only one this season who gets to drop the f-bomb.

-Mrs. Sandwich and the whole sequence. Google Discworld+seamstress guild if you don't get it.

-The music shop owner took the Doctor Who manual with him when he fled the demons.

Episode 6

-When Crowley changes his clothes to look angelic, the only thing he's wearing that's ACTUALLY white are his hilariously dumbass white slippers.

-The box that Gabriel came with is now storing a bunch of books, pamphlets, and papers. Two of these are the lost Shakespeare plays mentioned in the original Good Omens novel: Golde Diggers of 1589 and The Comedie of Robin Hoode.

-Gabriel's first 2 memories appear after he goes down an orange-red tunnel. But after he and Beezlebub have their first "background" meeting, the tunnel becomes blue. The whole thing ends (after bookending, Crowley says "let there be light" in the first episode and Gabriel says it in this one) with Gabriel's eyes turning purple...blue+red.

-Background acting appreciation: 1) look at Gabriel when Beelzebub says Shax could be Grand Duke of Hell, 2) look at Aziraphale in the corner when Crowley talks to Shax about his apartment, he's nodding vaguely while staring dreamily and it's adorable, 3) also rewind and check out Martin Sheen in episode 2 when the angels come to the shop, he's in the background being terrified and it's amazing

-...I can't resist: based on episodes S01E06 and S02E06, one way or another this'll end with nightingale song