“we could have been us”

jackie || 20s || bi aroacespec || sideblog neil you better pay my therapy bills follows/likes with @clearskiesandmistyeyes most used account @leverage-ot3

[couldhavebeenus]

okay I don’t have screenshots of this because I’m bad at technology BUT did anyone else notice how during the hand-gesture parts of the dance crowley’s fingers automatically curled around aziraphale’s hand? because it’s making me want to eat glass

[ikribun]

The way this made me absolutely feral

[chernozemm]

S3 of good omens isn't what it could've been, and you can tell it's supposed to be a bigger story. However,

-and here be many spoilers ahead-

we got so many cool bits!

Long haired general aziraphale?! Oh baby that's juicyyyy no wonder he's so against destruction and war

Crowley not recognising him and aziraphale pretending not to?! Idk?! We always thought that that shock came for aziraphale in the garden of eden, but no. Thar makes that scene hit even harder now.

Ichor blood confirmedddddd

Aziraphale and the whole "getting the Bentley back" sequence like... Who is she?! Confident, cheeky, pulling a trickster-god- rigged-deal with a human? Centuries of doing the "wrong thing" but disguising it as the "heavenly thing" culminated here. Crowley must be so proud

Multiple silver fox crowleys 🤌🤌🤌🤌

The never ending pizza jesus gave the people

Lilac-eyed archangel aziraphale 🙏

The ending: Crowley seemingly got what he wanted, just the two of them, the bookstore, finally peace and quiet. And the realisation that it's utterly meaningless without humanity. Crowley getting god to listen to his question. Getting his wish, to get rid of the rigged, toxic system. To let his beautiful stars and nebulas unfold, governed only by the laws of the universe.

Aziraphale and Crowley finally succeeding in what they've always strived towards: protecting humanity. Their beloved earth

The "I'll find you in any lifetime" tropeeeeeeeee oh my goddddd. 💯💯💯💯 I know the fandom feared a human ending and while I get the grief, I'm like ... They got to be together, unburdened by the Sides. And it was an echo of how they met at the Beginning: someone deeply in love with the stars and someone very much charmed by that. Pulled into orbit. Oh, my heart

Seeing old queer men be so gd married and in love 🤌🤌🤌

[coleshanzo]

you mean to tell me, Crowley, the one who literally STOPPED TIME, WENT BACK TO HEAVEN (WHICH HE HATED), WENT INTO A CHURCH WHERE HE LITERALLY COULDNT STAND IN, WATCHED OVER THE MFS BOOKSHOP WHILE HE WAS GONE FOR YEARS, chose HUMANITY over AZIRAPHALE? in a moment where it was CRYSTAL CLEAR that Aziraphale was CHOOSING HIM like he ALWAYS WANTED. Crowley chose to ERASE ALL OF THEIR HISTORY TOGETHER for HUMANITY. THATS what the finale is telling me?

[theladydrgn]

Something i haven't seen discussed much on here (possibly because I've been avoiding the tags because of all the hate) is that

CROWLEY AND AZIRAPHALE AREN'T IN THE BOOK OF LIFE

Michael burns the entire book. Crowley saves a *single* page. Yet Aziraphale and Crowley persist. Even when God "makes a universe" without them in it.... They still are. They persist. Aziraphale and Crowley are as foundational to creation as God and Satan themzelves (you'll notice Satan also didn't have a page)

Aziraphale and Crowley can not be destroyed in any way that truly matters.

[fan-a-tink]

Master of Disguise | Good Omens 3

[goodbyevanny]

I just think that the versions with all the trauma, suffering and history deserved a happy ending. I don’t think the take away should be that the only way to get a happy ending is for those things to have never happened to you.

[rocksandboulders]

I really thought that Aziraphale and Crowley were going to rewrite the Book of Life.

I really thought they were going to become the Illustrator and Author.

I really thought that's why all the books in the shop were made blank.

I really thought God wasn't going to actually exist in a true form, and instead be a kind of omnipresent power of creation.

I really thought that they were going to have their forced-proximity-making-up-with-each-other as they were required to work together to write the new Book of Life.

I really thought that they were going to choose *their* humanity and not a new one.

I really thought they would still be themselves at the end.

I really thought the moral of the story was that the humanity they had was worth protecting, and that life itself (whether mortal or otherwise) was beautiful and inherently important.

I really thought this story was about a love that transcends.

I understand the path they took. However. I do think it missed the mark on what the show was really trying to say.

[crowleys-hips]

the problem isn't “they didn’t get the ship moment I wanted.” the problem is thematic incoherence.

season 1 and 2 kept hammering the idea that individual lives matter. not replaceable copies. not "close enough." actual people, with continuity and memory and history. Crowley and Aziraphale repeatedly chose imperfect, messy existence over grand cosmic plans. so ending with "the universe gets reset and everyone is replaced by alternate versions" isn't just horribly depressing. it's philosophically backwards. like the story literally abandoned its own argument in the final act.

the Job parallel especially points that out pretty cleanly. The whole emotional weight there was: replacement children are not the same children. new children (even if they had, by some chance, looked and acted Exactly The Same) doesn't fix the tragedy of losing the original children. that mattered to them. so yea, this ending feels less like "hopeful transcendence to tear down The System" and more like “congrats on your happy ending! everyone is dead, but the cottage is cute!" bold creative choice ig. like serving tea with eccles cakes after detonating reality.

my frustration is basically: the story spent years arguing that personhood matters — memory matters, continuity matters, these exact souls matter. and then solved the finale with a cosmic reset that wipes out the very identities the narrative taught us to care about. very much like the nuclear apocalypse they were trying so hard to prevent. it goes against the very thing Crowley was staunchly opposed to during The Flood. against everything they did in the Job minisode. against literally the entire Jim/Gabriel narrative, about Jim not really being Gabriel without his memories. and also, to quote Crowley, "the angel you knew is NOT me."

"but they found each other again! we got them back at the end!" no we didn't. that is NOT them. and to say that they are is kind of insulting tbh. they LOOK similar and maybe have some of the same interests, but just bc a blonde and a red head are into books and astrophysics doesn't make them THEM. their memories, their history, everything they went through together and fought for, the experiences that shaped their characters, those 6000+ years — that's all GONE.

Also. people keep saying stuff like "it was the only right choice" as if there were only two horrible choices? if the story introduces negotiation and moral choice, we'll naturally start imagining alternatives. once “God offers options” enters the chat, people will obviously ask, “wait. why was this the chosen solution?” when they could've gone for idk, literally anything else. God literally offered to put things back as they were. they could've chosen to have THAT universe, THAT world —THEIR world— put back into place and then added their own conditions to tear down Heaven and Hell. they could've chosen to keep their memories. they could've chosen to make everyone human from then on if that's what the writers were so hellbent on. they could've chosen to make God erase her own memory for all i care idfk. but this ending feels like a bad consolation prize.

after EVERYTHING they did, and everything they went through, they deserved SO much better than this. THE WHOLE WORLD did.

New Earth isn't Earth. a Michael Jackson impersonator isn't actually Michael Jackson. The Other Mother isn't the real mother. those new people aren't their original selves. and whoever those guys are at the end are not Aziraphale and Crowley.

[the-moon-loves-the-sea]

Shared here today by Matthew Boroson on Facebook. (ETA: Gaining inspiration from other authors is great. Lifting passages and avoiding giving credit isn’t.)

Tanith Lee was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award for best novel, for the second book of the Flat Earth series. She died in 2015. You can buy Tales From the Flat Earth here and here .

[alrischapisces]

Spoilers!

CW: Neil Gaiman

There is something I want to get off my chest. It has been hard to see the negativity in the immediate wake of the finale, and I do not want to join in and pile on, because there is a lot to love and appreciate about it.

However, even if I found the ending to be good and right, there is one thing that makes me so very, very angry about it, and I needed to say something. It is this line here:

I don't mind at all that Aziraphale said in front of God and everyone that Crowley was the best angel, the best thing in God's creation. There are thousands of beautiful fanfics where he says just that. It's the part that comes after.

He could have said it was because Crowley had imagination, because he was an optimist, because he was so clever, because he asked questions. Any of that would have been fine. They were drawn straight from previous depictions.

But instead, he said, "You were an artist...The rest of us, we were just characters in her book."

I think it is very suspect when a writer pens a line that suggests that writers/artists are somehow better than everybody else. I couldn't hear this line and not think that somehow Neil Gaiman (who wrote the ending) was trying to say something about himself. He actually does think that being an artist excuses him. He may be "unforgivable" but he is also the "best of us," because he is an artist who "want[s] to understand" and makes better worlds through his art. I couldn't hear those words and not think it was F*cking Gaiman granting himself grace.

He may have thought the line was a paean to Pratchett, actually, or wanted us to hear it that way; but I cannot believe that Terry Pratchett would have condoned such a line. Pratchett's most famous quote is that evil begins when we treat other people as things. Yet here is Aziraphale basically owning that he himself and everyone else in Good Omens except Crowley and God were NPCs. Not cool.

Aziraphale was emphatically NOT just a character in her book! He gave away his sword and then lied to God's face about it. Aziraphale gets thrown under the bus in S3, and when the script basically had him debase himself while praising Crowley, "I did not care for it."

Pratchett invented Aziraphale. Pratchett understood that nothing can be defined without creating its opposite. These two are necessarily bound. One doesn't get to have whatever he wants and to call all the shots and the other just smile, forgive, and go along, because one is "an artist" and the other...is....what, irrelevant?

While in general I find it in bad taste when artists talk about how special artists are, this line infuriated me precisely because of the accusations against Gaiman who allegedly has been repeatedly committing that cardinal sin in Pratchett's universe: treating people as things. And Gaiman's choice of words for putting into Aziraphale's mouth while lauding Crowley in the end really touched a nerve.

I'd love to hear your reactions to that line and my visceral reaction to it. Am I alone in seeing Gaiman haunting the script here? Can I, should I, find a way to embrace this speech for the sake of enjoying the end?

[mwagneto]

what do you mean aziraphale's final compliments to crowley are about how crowley is actually the best angel out of any of them (something crowley actively doesn't want to be. literally what 2x06 is about. like he says that out loud) and that every single person in the universe is just a purposeless rule following fictional character but he, crowley (the neil gaiman self insert) is an artist and a visionary and a creative genius. where am i

[ineffablebookgirl]

Also want to acknowledge that for so many of us, no ending was really going to be satisfying. As someone very wisely observed, even before it came out, no option was going to feel good, given the allegations against Neil Gaiman. A total cancellation would have sucked. Changing nothing would have sucked. A 90-min movie sucks.

And so, similarly, the story we did get was always going to be tainted and complicated by Neil Gaiman's actions in the real world. And that sucks. I have total respect for anyone who chose not to watch, or to leave the fandom completely, or who did watch it and feels gross about it, or who feels like the characters weren't done justice because of external factors. I think all those responses are valid and I'm sending out love to everyone tonight.

[baconmoop]

Thought it only fitting that the episode about defying god and gaining true free will get the destiel treatment

[tetrapaec]

I don't think you understand how important this kiss is.

Doing this in front of God too.

They sacrificed their love so that we, humans, could love each other and make decisions. They spent 6000 years teaching each other that humanity is not a toy. They died for us, they love us as much, if not more than they love each other. They are our deities, our creators. They are Love. We are children of Love.

[chaosandcardigans]

I want to feel happy, but I can't. Not when their only kiss was a last resort. Not when they only held hands out of necessity and then once at the very end of their lives. Not when it feels like in the end, God still won and they lost.

I'm happy they live on in another universe, but my heart breaks for the angel and demon who sacrificed everything, everything, for the sake of the greater good.

[chaosandcardigans]

Wait. So what was all the tension for at the end. When they thought they were the last two people on earth. In an empty bookshop. With nothing to do but flesh out some hidden feelings. Maybe share a kiss. SIKE NOPE WE'RE BACK TO THE PLOT. "Aziraphale you don't understand we have to kill ourselves."

[chaosandcardigans]

I think one of the biggest parts of why that ending hurts so much, for me at least, is that it didn't feel like them. Aziraphale not knowing his way around a bookshop, Crowley not even having a hint of sarcasm or sass. It was like watching two entirely different characters.

I miss them already.