My thoughts about the Good Omens finale and the assumptions we make:
Even as I liked many things about the finale, (and have watched it three times so far) I’m angry and sad. I think a lot of the vast chasm of different experiences people are having is based on a set of assumptions that we don’t all share (I’m only covering 2 in this post).
A really big one being that Asa and Anthony *are* Aziraphale and Crowley in some essential way.
I don’t think that they are the same beings. They feel like strangers to me.
Another assumption is that there weren’t other viable options of fundamentally changing the universe and also having Aziraphale and Crowley in it as their immortal selves. I don’t believe that’s true. The options weren’t: 1. Make everything like it used to be 2. Make a new universe where demons, angels, etc don’t exist and therefore Crowley and Aziraphale had to be destroyed. There’s always at least one secret third option- usually more than one.
So both of those things together kind of make it feel like the show ends with my beloved characters needlessly being obliterated. Or “choosing annihilation”, as Michael Sheen put it. I didn’t think there was any way they would either kill them off or make them human. And I was wrong because they attempted both. 🙃🫠😭
I don’t have any problem with people having different feelings and interpretations of the finale. I expect it.
And I also see how people who more or less agree with those assumptions find it a good and/or happy ending. It *is* what many of us choose to read and write in fanfic 💕💖
But there were no ao3 tags on this finale. And, if I had to pick a single final fic to read, I wouldn’t have picked one where I saw that Aziraphale and Crowley were sacrificing themselves, having set aside the clever twist they’d already found (that they could make reality by writing in a new book of life), and instead Asa and Anthony, who bear some resemblance to them, would show up for a meet cute and a jump to their retirement in the South Downs.
I’m guessing in time I will feel better about the finale. But I’m still crying a lot. I do wish that we be kinder to each other while we sit with this dissonance 💓💗💕
Finally, just a note about the many variations I’ve seen of people’s interpretations and theories about all the ways that Aziraphale and Crowley still exist. Yes. I love your creativity so much. And. We are only having (as opposed to choosing) to come up with those theories to explain the finale because in canon we saw them dissolve. I know that they still exist in multiverses in our fics and fanart etc. But I wanted them to exist as themselves, together, making each other happy, for a length of time that more than balanced out the many centuries of being threatened with the end of their existence if they were found out to be something more than enemies, on the screen. And what we got was literally the end of their existence. We would not have or need a mountain of fix-it fics in the fandom if they gave us the happy ending that many of us were expecting (and, i would argue, were promised). We would have other kinds of fics instead.
