Narrativia Snow Globes: A Good Omens multiverse
Let’s further address this gorgeous easter egg featured in Asa and Anthony’s meeting street: Narrativia snow globes. The snow globe(s) in Good Omens are more than just decor, they quite literally are universes on their own.
Most of us know already that the significance of the snow globe in the end scene of GO means that one in one way or the other, Aziraphale and Crowley continue to exist in a universe of their own. I would love to combine this with Rachel Talalay’s words where she said:
What we have at the end of GO3 is our current, real world. Where we as humans get to choose and live life without the machinations of heaven or hell. And we get to live in this real world, this universe, because of Aziraphale and Crowley. Now, if this is “the real life” and the other was “just fantasy”, (see what I did there) that makes the Narrativia snow globe store all the better. Narrativia is of course a direct meta-easter egg to Terry Pratchett’s own production company. A place where stories are produced. And in GO, a place where infinite universes are sold.
One of them being the snow globe featured story-wise with the Bookshop and Bentley on the final scene. A question of, if Narrativia sells these globes, how many are there floating around? And in our real world: we have two versions (Bookshop and Bentley and the one on fire).
And you’d ask yourself, why preserve a universe where the bookshop burns? Because GO has always argued that love and meaning only matter because loss is possible. So if these globes are universes, then the existence of the burning one suggests something pretty profound:
and that is that even painful timelines are still preserved. They still "exist" in the narrative cosmos. Stories contain tragedy alongside comfort, alternate possibilities matter. There's also another possibility that fits the meta-layer of the finale: The Narrativia snow globe shop may imply that all versions of the story are artifacts - preserved narratives. The “happy” globe is the canon people long for, the burning globe is the canon trauma fandom cannot let go of. And the show acknowledges both.
Honestly, I think the reason the “sadder” globe exists is because the emotional rupture of the burning bookshop is foundational to Aziraphale and Crowley's relationship. Without that loss, they never fully realize what they mean to each other.
The tragedy-universe is inseparable from the love-universe. Thematically, the show keeps returning to the idea that you only recognize home once you nearly lose it. So the burning globe may not represent a "wrong" or necessarily “sad”universe. It may represent the necessary shadow version of the happy one; the world where love becomes visible because destruction briefly seemed inevitable. Paradoxically, that happens in both universes.
I think that what I'm trying to say is that humanity persists because stories persist. Aziraphale and Crowley continue to exist as long as the possibility of their story continues to matter.
A very meta reading of the ending imagery of GO may function less like a fixed-universe and more like a contained narrative space; something that can be curated and replayed, but that doesn't make it any less real. I'd like to include STP's view of fantasy in that sense and how it has shaped humanity as long as we have existed as humans.
So if universes are metaphorically snow globes, that does not make humanity meaningless or even A & C's story, it makes them the point of display. Aziraphale and Crowley survive because their story resists conclusion in the way that we as humans generate stories, thus choices, thus contradictions and thus meaning. They happen to be unresolved love stories that fuel the strongest narrative engines. Even in God's words, the predictability of that love is what we find so amusing and the multiverse does not erase individuality as seen in Asa and Anthony, but it keeps proving that love and narrative connection recur strongly enough to shape reality itself.
Something that might seem completely unrelated to this is the finale of "St. Elsewhere", which resonates with that of Good Omens and more recently, with how the Stephen Colbert Show ended. Although this St. Elsewhere review includes the appearance of a deity, it still posits the same questions about stories and the world:
That is the actual ending, a strange world-within-a-world. It seems to imply that the events of the show were all imagined by the mind of a non-verbal young boy. There’s a lot to unpack: is it simply making a statement on the show as a fictional world? Is it positing that the hopes and the fears and the suffering we endure in our lives are being watched by a deity who is interested and all-knowing but who can only gaze in at us and never interfere in our tribulations—where in all the world but an under-resourced hospital in the planet’s richest nation could the question of such a being’s love or cruelty be more pressing?
Just adding something else: that ending with the snow globe was definitely a Pratchett idea. He did something incredibly similar with the creation of Roundworld. So it is not at all a surprise that that snow globe might exist within "Narrativia".
