Eccentric nerdy aro/ace/agender Autistic. JotunPhilosopher on AO3 (mainly Good Omens, with a bit of D&D) (https://archiveofourown.org/users/JotunPhilosopher). Check out my Redbubble shop (http://pridephages.redbubble.com) for cool products covered in Pride flag bacteriophages, and to support a starving artist! #SupportQueerArtists #SupportAutisticArtists No bigots, please
Pretty much everything here is also on my newly minted AO3 profile as well! :D
Metas:
What might evil!Aziraphale be like?
Crowley & 'Much Ado About Nothing'
Season 3 speculation playlist -- edited/expanded 18/02/2024
The Scarlet Pimpernel -- parallels and possibilities for S3
If you liked that, you might like this: Good Omens and World Of The Five Gods -- a lil' book rec to help keep you all going until S3!
Half meta, half ramble -- some random Goetic thoughts
Discworld/Good Omens parallels -- some minor thematic and character-related musings (mostly Aziraphale-flavoured)
How Aziraphale did the trick -- my guess/analysis of how Aziraphale pulled off the photo/leaflet switch in the dressing room scene
Celestial -- not quite fanfic, not quite meta, still fun thing from my brain
Good Omens & Steeleye Span -- a small analysis of how some of Terry Pratchett's favourite folk-rock songs match up with the events and themes of Good Omens
Buggre Alle This: The relevance of Ezekiel -- an analysis of a particularly funny bit of the novel, and just how much Pterry manages to say in one very short paragraph <3
Brother Aziraphale: some interesting parallels -- a just-for-fun meta noting some nice coincidental character parallels between Aziraphale and Brother Cadfael
Good Omens/BG3 Character Parallels -- I fell into the Baldur's Gate 3 rabbithole via its wiki and TVTropes section, and wound up noticing some unexpected coincidental parallels between the playable cast (barring Durge) and the Ineffable Husbands!
Fic prompts of varying degrees of derangedness:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
A Good Omens mini-ficlet to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the RNLI -- ok, technically a minific rather than a prompt, but take it as such if you like! :D
A silly little meme I made on a whim
Fun D&D idea for Good Omens-loving DMs! Edit 14/10/24: Suggested in-universe character bios and statblocks for Aziraphale and Crowley now available!
A narrative clothesline -- long bit of fic showing one of the scenarios (really the closest to a coherent narrative) my brain's cooked up in its wild hypothesising about S3
Fallen!Az story possibilities -- another longish fic, exploring ways the story might go in an 'Aziraphale Falls' scenario
Aziraphale's sweeties stash -- a short, fluffy piece inspired by my noticing that there's a sweet shop in S1 where half of Give Me Coffee is in S2
A Snek in Lancre -- a short little piece inspired by the idea that Crowley wouldn't dare sass Granny Weatherwax
Angelic lifeboat rescue -- a small piece, expanding on one of the possible story branches from later on in 'A narrative clothesline', in the form of an outsider-POV fic, the outsider POVs in this case being the crew of RNLI Eastbourne
Ineffable Visitation -- a short lil' crossover thing I wrote to help me process some stuff in Pokemon Legends: Z-A (contains spoilers for that game and Pokemon X and Y versions)
A spot of Whovian D&D homebrew -- not GO, o' course, but it was fun to write, so I'm putting it here anyway ^^
The Order of the Stick: thoughts on stats in 5th Edition -- a bit of D&D homebrew/analysis I thought up after finishing a good ol' OotS archive binge :D
FROM: DEPARTMENT OF EQUIPMENT AND AGONIZING DANCE(?) (DEAD)
O¡ YOU DISGUSTING DEMONS!
It has come to our displeasurable attention
SEVERAL of our Circle Six CHAINSAWS have
been "BORROWED!" by soME ViLe and dirty
demons!!! CHAINSAWS are precision instruments
of AGONY. specifiCALLY CALLIBRATED for
TORMENT!!!
They are NOT for competitive LIMB REMOVAL
unauthorised FUN is FORBIDDEN!!!!!
any demon found misappropriating CHAINSAW
will be reassigned to the DEPARTMENT OR PAINFUL
PAPER CUTS for no Less than 666 eternities!!
BY ORDER OF
Overseer Chopsnarl Grindl-esnatch
CHIEF OF TOOLS AND TORMENT INVENTORY
No wonder demons are bored and depressed. they are not allowed any fun! No limb removal? Really? Terrible working conditions I tell you
BTW This lovely picture was shared by Rachel earlier today
Friends, we literally jumped through a painting... that included a literal chimney... to the English countryside in a story that loves Mary Poppins almost as much as I do. I have plenty of other posts about how it's Aziraphale's Nightmare and not real and many more to go but I could really honestly stop here with just this, as where do those paintings come from in Mary Poppins? Not from Mary herself...
Bert draws them, from his memories. They're his own creations-- a world of his own making, his own dreamscape. One that doesn't actually exist but is based on places that really do to which he's really been. Mary Poppins and the kids go with Bert into a world created by his own mind and manifested by the painting. 🎶"And it's all me own work, from me own memory..." 🎶And who had a picture of a cottage on his desk in the reality of S1? Aziraphale. It's all his dream, and not the jolliest of holidays with his Mary but it ends with him waking up, so...
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
This portrait of Pterry holding the... alcoholic beverage glass... (not sure what kind it's for, maybe brandy?) initially had me thinking it was a crystal ball he was holding!
That is a brandy glass, you're right. It's most commonly called a brandy snifter but it also can be called-- wait for it lol-- a brandy balloon. That went down like a lead balloon... Lavender-scented air balloon... Also, all of the endgame of the nightmare really began with The Jane Austen-themed Ball in S2 and Jane Austen was associated with brandy earlier in the dream... in the far less chilling version of The Dirty Donkey.
Brandy is distilled from other spirits-- which we could also say to be true of Professor Anthony, though I'd say 'distilled' is a bit too strong a word there to describe the Professor. More like heavily diluted lol, as was the point. Etymologically, it's a shortening of brandywine, meaning: "burnt wine." Also appropriate... the connection to Jane Austen and brandy is interesting because it's like using brandy as a metaphor for fictional characters being distilled from real people, but especially within the world of Good Omens itself. I think the Jane Austen flashback, if we had had one, was supposed to be like this, too.
Some initial thoughts are below on the Pratchett painting & how it adds into S2's Clues about how Jane Austen was supposed to fit into all of this. Also a mention in here of the Clue about 1650 that I think they slipped into the end. I think it was @ao3cassandraic who wanted more on that so *tags in & shares coffee with you both* 😊
I saw some evidence in S2 that Gabriel was likely going to factor into the Jane Austen flashback & some suggestion that he was her inspiration for Mr. Darcy and I'll show you from where I got that below. I was pretty sure that Jane Austen was going to be a second character for Andrew O'Neill (Beloved Spouse) and had started wondering if what Aziraphale was confusing with the plot of an Austen novel in S2 was actually what he had seen between Gabriel & Beelzebub in that era.
The idea would have been that Gabriel had actually stayed for a time at the bookshop before in the Austen era, around 1810, as some of the Clues below might suggest, and which I could see easily happening because it's clear enough from, among other things, the script book scene, that Gabriel is the reason why the bookshop still exists.
The Metatron wanted it to never open because he didn't want any angels living on Earth without being easily recalled, as it diminished his control over them. As we saw in the script book, The Metatron sent Gabriel (with Sandalphon in tow, because he doesn't trust Gabriel) to go "promote" Aziraphale and get him back Up in Heaven. It was all really to make sure the embassy never opened, as they turned up right as Aziraphale was about to open the bookshop in 1800.
Gabriel seems to have figured that it would be temporary and then he could find a way to get Aziraphale back to Earth because, initially, it seems like he didn't realize what the bookshop was entirely. When he heard Crowley's hilarious one-man show outside his tailor shop, though, he realized that the place was really for Crowley, and that if they closed the bookshop or took it from Aziraphale that Crowley would not have a safe place from which he could escape Lucifer. Gabriel's a lot of things but he wasn't about to stand in the way of that so he canceled getting Aziraphale back to Heaven and, instead, fought The Metatron for the embassy as a way of helping Crowley.
But The Metatron would have always been suspicious about the embassy and Gabriel would be trying to dissuade him of that so maybe not long after? 1809, 1810? He's either assigned by The Metatron or decides himself that he's going to go stay there for a few days so he can come back and be like "see, it's fine, all Aziraphale does in there all day is pray", even though Gabriel knows the truth well enough lol. So the nightmare of Gabriel showing up at the door in 2.01?
We would have seen in this flashback that it would have been based on this time in reality that Gabriel (with his clothes on) actually did turn up in the early 1800s, wanting to have a sleepover and there to shadow Aziraphale doing his Heavenly ambassador stuff for a few days.
And Aziraphale, of course, doesn't know what to do with him lol and is all sjfwlkejlejleej but Gabriel seems game enough and is asking questions about Earth life and things so Aziraphale's like ok, I guess he just follows me around, driving me insane for a few days. And since it's Aziraphale's job to be spying on Crowley? All of this intersects with some Jane Austen Mafia shenanigans that Crowley has going on, probably that cross into a ball in the South Downs, where Austen was living irl at the time.
When Crowley reports back to Hell that The Supreme Archangel is getting involved, Beelzebub is like oh ffs on the surface (and ooh yay! beneath the surface) and makes Crowley involve them in the plot so they can be in a flashback, too, and something something now there's the Bureaucracy at a Regency-era ball, and from where am I getting this possibility?
In the opening titles for S2, there is a redheaded Gabriel in Austen-era formal wear. It's the only time that it's Gabriel's face on a Crowley or any other character, versus Crowley or Aziraphale's face on another person. Gabriel reads Pride & Prejudice in S2, is basically the thematic Darcy in the dream to Crowley & Aziraphale's Elizabeth, & has that whole flirty interaction with Beloved Spouse, who is the only one at the Austen ball that is really Austen-like. It's also to Jim that Aziraphale mentions Jane Austen during The Ball, which means his mind correlates the two.
While there is a fictional story that has what Aziraphale mistakenly thinks in S2 comes from an Austen novel-- the people dancing and then realizing they had misunderstood one another and were deeply in love? That story, as I pointed out back in the day, is The Sound of Music, which is another story Aziraphale's mind correlates with Gabriel a bit. (I think Aziraphale actually wrote The Sound of Music, passing it off as a Heavenly assignment, and Gabriel gets the joke. That "climb every mountain" line of his in S1 was dripping with understanding of the innuendo lol.)
But, yeah, the idea might be that the story that Aziraphale thinks of as the plot of a Jane Austen novel is actually something he witnessed between Gabriel and Beelzebub in the 1800s when they were both on Earth for a bit and I mean you can totally see how Jane Austen would get Darcy from Gabriel. Aziraphale would be the Bingley-- a cheerful lovebug with this haughty, mysterious, and very handsome, very rich, and very unmarried friend from out of town who doesn't dance. Aziraphale, the imp, would be trying to get Gabriel to dance, of course, even as he didn't himself. You can see and hear already the withering look and dry "None handsome enough to tempt me, Aziraphale" lololol.
This would then all be the real-life basis for The Ball in the nightmare. Perhaps Gabriel did eventually dance-- at least metaphorically but maybe also literally-- with Beelzebub and this is actually what Aziraphale was remembering as the plot of an Austen novel-- because they actually were Austen's inspiration for Darcy and Elizabeth.
This also would have meant Anna Maxwell Martin returning for the flashback & that would have also been a bit meta-amusing, since she played Elizabeth Bennet in Death Comes to Pemberley.
All of this Jane Austen/brandy/the South Downs Cottage in the Pratchett painting stuff put together in S3 makes me think that my theories that the South Downs Cottage being related to Jane Austen were likely correct. This would mean, too, that Crowley and Aziraphale probably really do own that cottage in reality, or one very much like it, and have for some time.
Because it's a nightmare and because we never got a Jane Austen flashback, it's now a question as to whether or not Jane Austen in the reality of Good Omens actually was as amazing as she sounded lol. I do think she probably was, though, as putting all of this together in this visual of the painting in the end here makes me think we probably would have had a Jane Austen flashback if there had been more time.
Instead, we get references to Jane Austen and brandy in the Bizarro Dirty Donkey in S3 that parallel the ones from S2 to at least throw something in there to follow up on the foreshadowing of that Dirty Donkey scene from S2. It's a way of showing at least what some of the Jane Austen stuff would have led to, although I think the painting image itself was planned for awhile, for reasons I'll get to in a second. It just might have hit in a different way had we had an Austen flashback & had already seen the cottage. (Not necessarily in a better way, just different.)
I think they did something similar by giving Agnes Nutter a coffee house in this same world. My ideas for 1650 were basically Agnes, banned eccles cakes, & the first coffee house in England that opened that year, called The Angel (which really existed) & all of that stuff about the history of the church banning coffee as The Devil's Drink & such would have been there in that flashback to underline why Aziraphale dreamt that the villain had brought him a coffee. I'm sure there would have been other stuff in there, too, but 'Agnes + the politicization/demonization of food via eccles cakes + the threat posed to the church by the rise of coffeehouses' was where I think that was going.
That seems like it might have been on the right track, since they tied Agnes to coffee in the end with her coffeehouse in the Asa & Anthony world. It was "annnnnd we have no time for that now, throw up a storefront sign and the internet people will figure it out" lol. There's also that the clothing in the Pratchett painting looks like it's from the 1600s, which is a whole thing I'm still mulling over.
It parallels a painting of Agnes in the Dirty Donkey in S2. There's also something about these paintings on the wall when the dream had the angels being murdered/hitting a wall/becoming shadows on a wall that is bouncing around my brain...
The painting in S3 is also paralleling Lockdown, which had the brandy next to Terry Pratchett's award-- the orange butterfly in the glass cloche. That's the parallel I mentioned above that made me think the painting image was part of the story from earlier on. The thing about the painting that's interesting is that while we look at that painting and say "that's Terry Pratchett" because that's who that is to us? Who that is within the world of Good Omens seems more complicated.
What we know to be Pratchett's hat and scarf have been hanging in the bookshop... but they were shown prominently in a shot in 1941 as being there before the Terry Pratchett we know of was even born. This means that, within the universe of Good Omens, we need another explanation for the hat and scarf, and the logical one is that they are Crowley's. The hat remains there for decades, long after Crowley stopped wearing hats, because it's Crowley literally hanging his hat in the shop, in reference to the idiom 'home is where you hang your hat'. That said...
Terry Pratchett's books also exist within the reality of the story, as well as are shown during its dream (Gabriel's "neato fan" scene). So, while the hat and scarf that were Pratchett's in our real world are Crowley's within the Good Omens universe? There is someone still in writing Discworld novels within the Good Omens universe under the name Terry Pratchett, and that's where Lockdown gives a Clue to that by adding in Pratchett's award to things.
The butterfly in the cloche seen among Aziraphale's things was an award given to Pratchett in real life but it's shown to us as among Aziraphale's belongings within the world of Good Omens. Crowley and Aziraphale's Nightingales and the wordplay within Good Omens is based off of Discworld-- Gabriel's "can make a neato fan" line about The Color of Magic, the first of the Discworld novels, in S2, is a joke about this. He's fanning the book like a literal fan but a fan is also an old type of invented cant used to sell a product. (Which is also why many characters canting Nightingales in The Ball, like Ms. Cheng and Beloved Spouse, are holding literal fans lol.)
So, if we know that Discworld exists within Good Omens and it's of the same wordplay origins as Crowley and Aziraphale's cant and Aziraphale has an award given to a writer called Terry Pratchett but the writer we know of as Terry Pratchett from our world does not seem to actually exist within the world of Good Omens, as a result of what we know from the hat/scarf situation being Crowley's things?
Then the conclusion we could draw is that, within the world of Good Omens, one of Aziraphale's pen names/nom de plumes is Terry Pratchett. All of which goes along with things like signing your name and what your name is and in what book that go along with what they're doing with Crowley, particularly in the end of S3.
In addition to this, there's also the scene in the dream of Jim finding on the bookshelf an untitled, unauthored, unpublished copy of the novel we know to be Good Omens. He reads us the "It was a nice day" and we can see the first page, even if the front matter is not there. It's just a book bound in red cloth on the shelf, the implication being that Aziraphale wrote it.
Since basically everything Frances McDormand said in the series comes from the novel that Jim finds on the shelf, it's further proof that Aziraphale is the author with that world and she is of him, just like the god in S3 that Aziraphale brought into being from *checks notes* writing her as a character in a book lol. Both God and The Voice of God are Aziraphale because we are the higher authority we seek. Our Book of Life is what we say it is, and The Metatron or anyone else has no power over us that we don't grant them.
All of this, though, then leaves us still with a question: who is that in the painting? One of the final discernment puzzles in Good Omens is seeing whether or not people will just say "oh, it's Terry Pratchett" or, instead, ask: who is the person who looks like Terry Pratchett in that painting, and why is he there?
And when we know this scene is part of Aziraphale's nightmare? It gets even more interesting because then we're looking at Aziraphale's mind having created a painting that holds the image of a person we recognize as the one who created the character of Aziraphale but who doesn't exist within Aziraphale's own world. So, who is this person to Aziraphale?
Did he really exist? Does he represent Aziraphale himself? Do the clothes from the 1600s have to do with that being when Aziraphale began buying land and starting Whickber Street? Is it more about Agnes? Why does the spot of what I think is lace in the center of his shirt-- his heart-- look just like the bit of sky visible in the last shot of S3, as Aziraphale wakes up? Why the modern brandy balloon and the old-fashioned clothes?
My first thought there is to show that it's manufactured, like this world is. The painting looks like it's really old because of how it is done and framed and hanging and the clothes of the person in it but it's really not-- the brandy snifter glass does not match the rest of the time period. The painting had to be done in an era since those glasses were invented. It's something made in modern times to look like it's from the past, as artificial as this world is.
The modern brandy balloon holds a painting of the fake South Downs Cottage but this Bizarro Dirty Donkey is a painting itself that holds a fake antique painting that holds a brandy balloon that holds a painting of the fake South Downs Cottage and it's turtles all the way down from here. 😂 (Maybe a giant tortoise, since Discworld *giggles*).
What's key, though, I think? Is that while I just described some snowglobe-like effects, the brandy balloon that he's holding in the painting is not closed like a cloche or a snow globe. It's effectively a fishbowl, which I was talking about being a thing in S3 because of Warlock's escape room wish in S1. I see the fishbowl of the dream/the Asa & Anthony world as like that-- the point is that we see them escape, and they do. The night sky is at the top of the glass in the painting and we go even higher than that with Aziraphale in the end of S3 for that last shot of him waking up.
Love, love, LOVE this analysis! I have to admit, the only thoughts I'd had about Azzy/Crowley/Jane Austen/South Downs were along the lines of, "Mr A.Z. Fell, a purveyor of rare books and gentleman of unimpeachable reputation is taking a civilised afternoon tea with Miss Jane Austen and others, the discussion turns to the remarkable things the new gardener is doing with the flowers, Mr Fell comments that he might pop along to see the gardener himself and seek some advice regarding the upkeep of his own estates, when he reaches the gardener's cottage there is some creative haranguing of plants coming from the potting shed, Azzy knocks on the door, a hand reaches out and yoinks him inside, cut to half an hour or so later and they're in the cottage's kitchen having tea, soil in their hair, looking rather dishevelled"
Boring tired disclaimer: Keep in mind that this is an introductory "drawing" "tutorial" and has some generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. Which happens to be true for everything in general. Links below so that you can research and do a nuance. Ones that were directly mentioned are bolded.
Writing a blind character 101
What to avoid etc
Video on types of white canes
Video on types of cane tips
Some more explanation on white canes + tips + other stuff
Guide animals
Video on working with a guide dog
But why are Magical White Eyes a problem
Same as above
Going blind from an accident
Video on conformers
World's most basic "what do you call someone with albinism"
The blindfold thing. No people don't wear these.
This mostly stupid trope of covering a blind character's eyes because lord forbid someone sees a disabled body part
This just stupid trope of giving a blind character some bs superpower to "see"
The echolocation thing that every other blind oc does for some reason
Just give them a cane good lord if you want a character that can see perfectly then maybe don't make them blind
Bonus: if your character has a bunch of scars or whatever else then congrats! You made a character with a facial difference. Which is also something you should research.
Behold, a rare bit of slight bitching/drama from this tired lady who didn't get her coffee today and is probably going to regret this but I just have to say, after encountering this a few times with some people in the last few days (obviously not all of you, as most of you are lovely)...
"I don't think we should have to think about it much" about a very smart story with discernment as a theme and in which three dumbass anti-intellectual fascist zombies are among the villains is truly the most 'what the actual fuck' reaction to the Good Omens finale I can imagine. 😂😭😂 What show have those of you posting this nonsense been watching?! You don't even seem to realize that comments like this make you literally the kind of people the show is satirizing, and that's sad...
In what world did you not expect to have to do some thinking and engage your brain to understand what you just watched? This isn't Real Housewives, guys... We obviously do not have to agree on what happened in the story but there should be a base level expectation that you do, indeed, need to actually think about it. And if you don't want to? That's fine, as that's your business, but your job then is to simply and politely shut up and let the rest of us who enjoy actually engaging with art have some fun.
This complaint also extends to the bigoted bitch who sent me a very brave Anon complaint *snort* about the recent Crowley's bra & tom tom garage wordplay posts. I normally don't even respond to trolls like you, as I like to keep this place friendly but, like I said? I didn't have my coffee today, and it's been a rough week, so I'll bite.
According to you, I am "using my popularity to promote Crowley wearing women's clothes and having a vag" and girl? Absolutely. Yes. 100%. I wouldn't say it's a popular blog but I thank you for the compliment, and the rest is totally true. I will absolutely, always and forever, be happy to make posts related to Crowley being a whole gender constellation and changing up their bits. I would be even if it wasn't also massively canon 😂 as I'm sorry to be the one to inform you that water is wet lol but were you on your phone for Golgotha and Ms. Ashtoreth?!
Either fix your hearts or die, as David Lynch once so eloquently put it, or, if that's too much? Just follow Gabriel's advice... you know, the character we once, in a very funny visual pun, saw with a literal box over his box and *mock clutching of pearls* oh my god not Don Draper with a pussy! Won't someone think of the children?! 😂😂😂
Alright *sigh* on that note... time to go counter all this nonsense with a cheese sandwich before I explode...
I just want you to know I appreciate all the meta work you are doing for Good Omens 3 lately. I'm taking it in and thinking about it with my own view of the story and characters and just...I am very grateful. Thank you.
Hi love 💕*chocolate cake for you* You're very welcome & thank you for reading them. You're welcome to chat on the side with me about it too, if you want. To me, Good Omens is, and always has been, about mental health and fighting personal Armageddon. That is why Aziraphale's Nightmare is exactly the kind of thing that this story would do, as literally getting into the main character's head is the perfect way to tell that story-- and it all lines up perfectly once you see it.
It makes the story so much better, actually, including S2-- and we get the fun of revisiting it all from this new perspective and taking it apart again in a different way. The "people standing in Times Square can't see America" show was always going to have a big end twist that gave us a wider perspective on what, exactly, we were watching. This is it, and this was, imho, really smart.
I feel that once you understand the final shot and see that is what this is? Everything else in S2 & S3 makes total sense and it's actually really brilliant because it's all from the perspective of what Aziraphale fears and wants and needs and is trying to make happen. There is a cosmic game of solitaire happening with everyone else as stand-ins-- but it's Aziraphale's.
This is Aziraphale's Really Big One happening in reality and shown to us through all the crisis he undergoes throughout this dream where absolutely everything goes catastrophically wrong and he ends up dead and damned to an eternity without his real, true, eternal flame of Crowley. Once you look at it that way? It's easy to see how we get all of the things happening in the story that we saw happen because they're all exactly what would happen in Aziraphale's worst nightmare. Like, for instance...
That's why it's all a mess of he and Crowley being so turned around by their own struggles that they fail to help one another find the lady in the end of S2 and disaster ensues-- because Aziraphale is terrified of that. Demons overrunning the shop, Crowley going missing at night and then attacked in the house-- all the stuff in S2 that I kept saying was "like Aziraphale's worst nightmare coming true"? I was so close lol...
That's how you get Whickber Street dying and the very Aziraphale plot of an English country house murder mystery with the archangels when what Aziraphale is wrestling with in real life is whether or not he and Crowley should just try to leave and move to their literal English country house together but then what of Heaven and Hell? What of the bookshop? That's where the rest of the dream comes in, too...
That's how you get Aziraphale's mind working through the problem of how these angels and demons are just as human as he and Crowley are and stories like Gabriel and Beelzebub and The Metatron's abuse of Michael, which is also about Aziraphale trying to reconcile that having happened to him, too. That's how you get Michael as a proxy for Aziraphale's rage, murdering their abuser in The Metatron. That's how you get Muriel's appearance in the story, as Aziraphale's mind works through how he has no one in reality to take this bookshop, no family, and Muriel the scrivener might be an option but also they were also a terrifying, if cheerful, fascist in the reality of the Job minisode so they're first there as a cop, etc...
That's how you get five different faces of Lucifer, with one of them in Brian Cameron representing the very human side of the abusive relationship story that is happening with Crowley and the complications of Lucifer also being a father. That's how you get Aziraphale fantasizing that he beats The Devil with magic words and saves his girl, the way that he genuinely has been keeping Lucifer at bay for ages, representing how this problem feels inescapable to Aziraphale. The whole dream is 'how do we liberate our Bentley for good?' It's what Jim says-- how everything would be better if Aziraphale could just be near his one, particular person.
Lucifer gets split between many characters in the nightmare, including even a whole character that is just the personification of the mental effects of the harm he's caused to Crowley and Aziraphale, which is who Harry the Fish is, as the Harry & Jesus (who is just a straight-up Aziraphale stand-in, for more, see: how he looks at Crowley lol) story? That's all about Aziraphale reconciling the existence of Lucifer in their lives & how he and Crowley have countered the harm he's caused with the humor, kindness, and love that Jesus represents.
That's how you get then Toby Jones' Satan in the end, and the God that Aziraphale made up from a book even within his own dream, showing up to act out the conflicts of Free Will vs. Determinism with a side dash of The Problem of Evil in Aziraphale's mind. The whole dream is Aziraphale having a nightmare where he fucks himself over and is played for a sucker into creating a world that is really all his eternal damnation that is inspired from what Aziraphale saw Furfur give the Nazi Zombies. (And "Nazi Zombie Flesheaters" is even written on a tv in the S3 opening credits, reminding us of this.)
I mean, Aziraphale literally dreamed a pun on 'to bite the bullet' when he bit The Bullet Catch bullet that just magically appeared in his mouth with no miracle sound under The Tree of Life and Christmas lights that had sprung up in the living room, birthed from a God who arrived after being written *by him* in a book... that did not really happen. 😂 That is exactly the stuff Aziraphale would dream, just like the rest of this was.
It's actually fascinating because you can then take bits of the dream and see where it came into his mind from things we saw in reality before. You can see how the God and Satan that Aziraphale invented in the end of his dream come from conversations like the one in Tadfield Manor that he had with Crowley-- "They wanted real guns. I gave them what they wanted."; free will & the microcosm of the universe. That's just one example-- every single thing in the dream is like this. Every detail dovetails back to something in a way that is actually really well-done and tells a great story.
Even the purposeful dream inconsistencies-- things like Crowley's knowledge of The Book of Life (and even the idea of its existence)? They're all very deliberate because they're put in parts of the story in a way to help Clue in the audience as to what is going on. Crowley actually solves the mystery of the whole thing overall with his "the book is the killer" bit in S3.
Yes, the book that, in the dream, comes down to Aziraphale's life, and so is him, is the killer-- is the one behind everything, because this is his dream. The Book of Life with pages for Aziraphale's life-- sushi, Whickber Street, rubber ducks-- I mean, that's clearly a dream. 😂 I could not believe how many people were taking all of this stuff as real when I first got online afterwards. Books are people and The Book of Life in the dream is Aziraphale's life-- he's the "real killer" of The Metatron and Sandalphon and Uriel because this is his dream and Michael in it is really him, just as much as everyone else is.
That's why the story had the scene of Crowley coming to that conclusion. To show us a dream and also to show us what Aziraphale is dealing with in reality. Why are the angels vanishing in the dream? Because they've done that in real life. Aziraphale and Crowley told Heaven and Hell to leave them alone after S1 and they did lol. Not even just Gabriel and Beelzebub who were seeking to protect them but Lucifer and The Metatron. Aziraphale's whole crisis is that he's feeling stressed about the fact that they have, even if he wants them to, because are they plotting something? Are they going to come back?
And, even scarier... what if they're just really gone from his and Crowley's lives? What if S1 was enough for them to just decide Crowley & Aziraphale were more trouble than they were worth and so this isn't even a problem anymore? Could reality just adjust to conform, as Crowley suggests in the dream, meaning: The Metatron and Lucifer just had to deal with the fact that they've left and maybe, if he and Crowley just go live their lives, they can move on and forget all about it?
Thoughts of them hang around for a little while while reality catches up but then, in the future, poof. A future where Aziraphale could go through whole days without even thinking about Heaven. Because it's not actually Aziraphale's responsibility to personally stop the war that might be coming-- that's what his whole Supreme Archangel storyline is about (which isn't even real even within his dream, as the dream has him killed in the end of S2 with the rest being his bardo and then, with the Asa & Anthony world, his damnation).
The dream is showing Aziraphale that the only power he truly has to stop anything is to help those around him, which starts with treating the angels and demons like the people they are and helping them with their own stuff. It's showing him that what he really needs to do is just go live his own life with Crowley openly and ignore the things he cannot control. The human experience is really not knowing what comes next-- so the world might still end, even if he helps the archangels through their traumas. The world might still end, no matter what he does. He and Crowley might still face dangers but is it better to deny them a full life-- a real universe-- to keep them alive, rather than the life they want to live together? No. It's not. That's what he learns here but it's really what he already knows because this is his subconscious telling him it.
All that matters is the moment, and Aziraphale's dream has shown him that it's really as simple as The Book of Life is what we say it is. Crowley can sign a marriage register under any name he says is his name, just as he has done with Aziraphale's books all these years. It's a nightmare, though, so it shows Aziraphale not fully allowing himself and the two of them that until it was too late... because that is literally his worst nightmare. Asa & Professor Anthony & Derek, the Bookshop Owner is Aziraphale's worst nightmare but it's never going to happen because Aziraphale is as Crowley said was true of The Book in the dream: too well-made. A few pages, here and there, but impossible to destroy.
Every. single. thing. in this story makes complete and total sense when you know it's Aziraphale's dream, which we do because that's what the last shot is there to help us understand. It's also a way to keep the story alive and have people think about the themes of it, more in depth and for longer. In doing it this way, it means that we look deeper at what it was saying and why, which is what you actually want to have happen with a story.
Wrap it up in a clean bow and it's forgettable... and it's impossible to do that with a circular story like this anyway, where every ending is a new beginning. Make people use their brain a bit and not spoon-feed it to everyone, which would always be the case with a Pratchett story and with discernment as a theme and anti-intellectuals like the Nazi Zombie Flesheaters as villains? Now, it has staying power. Now, it sticks to your ribs. Now, you can't get it out of your head.
That last line about sticking to ribs reminded me of (for some reason) the recipe for Mrs Whitlow's Artery-Hardening Hogswatch Pie from Nanny Ogg's Cookbook (which, iirc, was among the first official Discworld projects that Paul Kidby worked on!)
Oh, c'mon, Philosopher, now I'm hungry! 😂 And I'm having one of those 'I don't know what I want for dinner' nights. *light whine* I really need that cookbook. I will have to add that to my list. Thanks as always for reading my rambles 💕😊
In S1, Anathema couldn't find Adam when she went looking for his aura because she was standing in the middle of it. Adam's aura expanded all of England and beyond. A shot pulled back to show us the big picture she was missing, in part as a Clue to how the final shot of Good Omens in S3 would then do the same. Aura: a Greek/Latin word meaning wind, breeze, air...
The last shots of S3 are the whooshing rush of air continuing as we have consciousness rushing in behind Aziraphale's eye as he wakes up. It's not until this shot that we can fully see that this is Aziraphale's Nightmare because, as The Voice of God said in S1?
People standing in Times Square can't see America-- people in the middle of things cannot see the big picture and the path to their own liberation. Not unless they first manage to break free of the M-25s of their own making. But Aziraphale always does, and that's the last image of S3-- him waking up and returning to Earth. An echo of the visual of how he found a way back before in S1. How does he navigate this difficult but amazing world? He'll figure it out as he goes, like we all do...
I just want you to know I appreciate all the meta work you are doing for Good Omens 3 lately. I'm taking it in and thinking about it with my own view of the story and characters and just...I am very grateful. Thank you.
Hi love 💕*chocolate cake for you* You're very welcome & thank you for reading them. You're welcome to chat on the side with me about it too, if you want. To me, Good Omens is, and always has been, about mental health and fighting personal Armageddon. That is why Aziraphale's Nightmare is exactly the kind of thing that this story would do, as literally getting into the main character's head is the perfect way to tell that story-- and it all lines up perfectly once you see it.
It makes the story so much better, actually, including S2-- and we get the fun of revisiting it all from this new perspective and taking it apart again in a different way. The "people standing in Times Square can't see America" show was always going to have a big end twist that gave us a wider perspective on what, exactly, we were watching. This is it, and this was, imho, really smart.
I feel that once you understand the final shot and see that is what this is? Everything else in S2 & S3 makes total sense and it's actually really brilliant because it's all from the perspective of what Aziraphale fears and wants and needs and is trying to make happen. There is a cosmic game of solitaire happening with everyone else as stand-ins-- but it's Aziraphale's.
This is Aziraphale's Really Big One happening in reality and shown to us through all the crisis he undergoes throughout this dream where absolutely everything goes catastrophically wrong and he ends up dead and damned to an eternity without his real, true, eternal flame of Crowley. Once you look at it that way? It's easy to see how we get all of the things happening in the story that we saw happen because they're all exactly what would happen in Aziraphale's worst nightmare. Like, for instance...
That's why it's all a mess of he and Crowley being so turned around by their own struggles that they fail to help one another find the lady in the end of S2 and disaster ensues-- because Aziraphale is terrified of that. Demons overrunning the shop, Crowley going missing at night and then attacked in the house-- all the stuff in S2 that I kept saying was "like Aziraphale's worst nightmare coming true"? I was so close lol...
That's how you get Whickber Street dying and the very Aziraphale plot of an English country house murder mystery with the archangels when what Aziraphale is wrestling with in real life is whether or not he and Crowley should just try to leave and move to their literal English country house together but then what of Heaven and Hell? What of the bookshop? That's where the rest of the dream comes in, too...
That's how you get Aziraphale's mind working through the problem of how these angels and demons are just as human as he and Crowley are and stories like Gabriel and Beelzebub and The Metatron's abuse of Michael, which is also about Aziraphale trying to reconcile that having happened to him, too. That's how you get Michael as a proxy for Aziraphale's rage, murdering their abuser in The Metatron. That's how you get Muriel's appearance in the story, as Aziraphale's mind works through how he has no one in reality to take this bookshop, no family, and Muriel the scrivener might be an option but also they were also a terrifying, if cheerful, fascist in the reality of the Job minisode so they're first there as a cop, etc...
That's how you get five different faces of Lucifer, with one of them in Brian Cameron representing the very human side of the abusive relationship story that is happening with Crowley and the complications of Lucifer also being a father. That's how you get Aziraphale fantasizing that he beats The Devil with magic words and saves his girl, the way that he genuinely has been keeping Lucifer at bay for ages, representing how this problem feels inescapable to Aziraphale. The whole dream is 'how do we liberate our Bentley for good?' It's what Jim says-- how everything would be better if Aziraphale could just be near his one, particular person.
Lucifer gets split between many characters in the nightmare, including even a whole character that is just the personification of the mental effects of the harm he's caused to Crowley and Aziraphale, which is who Harry the Fish is, as the Harry & Jesus (who is just a straight-up Aziraphale stand-in, for more, see: how he looks at Crowley lol) story? That's all about Aziraphale reconciling the existence of Lucifer in their lives & how he and Crowley have countered the harm he's caused with the humor, kindness, and love that Jesus represents.
That's how you get then Toby Jones' Satan in the end, and the God that Aziraphale made up from a book even within his own dream, showing up to act out the conflicts of Free Will vs. Determinism with a side dash of The Problem of Evil in Aziraphale's mind. The whole dream is Aziraphale having a nightmare where he fucks himself over and is played for a sucker into creating a world that is really all his eternal damnation that is inspired from what Aziraphale saw Furfur give the Nazi Zombies. (And "Nazi Zombie Flesheaters" is even written on a tv in the S3 opening credits, reminding us of this.)
I mean, Aziraphale literally dreamed a pun on 'to bite the bullet' when he bit The Bullet Catch bullet that just magically appeared in his mouth with no miracle sound under The Tree of Life and Christmas lights that had sprung up in the living room, birthed from a God who arrived after being written *by him* in a book... that did not really happen. 😂 That is exactly the stuff Aziraphale would dream, just like the rest of this was.
It's actually fascinating because you can then take bits of the dream and see where it came into his mind from things we saw in reality before. You can see how the God and Satan that Aziraphale invented in the end of his dream come from conversations like the one in Tadfield Manor that he had with Crowley-- "They wanted real guns. I gave them what they wanted."; free will & the microcosm of the universe. That's just one example-- every single thing in the dream is like this. Every detail dovetails back to something in a way that is actually really well-done and tells a great story.
Even the purposeful dream inconsistencies-- things like Crowley's knowledge of The Book of Life (and even the idea of its existence)? They're all very deliberate because they're put in parts of the story in a way to help Clue in the audience as to what is going on. Crowley actually solves the mystery of the whole thing overall with his "the book is the killer" bit in S3.
Yes, the book that, in the dream, comes down to Aziraphale's life, and so is him, is the killer-- is the one behind everything, because this is his dream. The Book of Life with pages for Aziraphale's life-- sushi, Whickber Street, rubber ducks-- I mean, that's clearly a dream. 😂 I could not believe how many people were taking all of this stuff as real when I first got online afterwards. Books are people and The Book of Life in the dream is Aziraphale's life-- he's the "real killer" of The Metatron and Sandalphon and Uriel because this is his dream and Michael in it is really him, just as much as everyone else is.
That's why the story had the scene of Crowley coming to that conclusion. To show us a dream and also to show us what Aziraphale is dealing with in reality. Why are the angels vanishing in the dream? Because they've done that in real life. Aziraphale and Crowley told Heaven and Hell to leave them alone after S1 and they did lol. Not even just Gabriel and Beelzebub who were seeking to protect them but Lucifer and The Metatron. Aziraphale's whole crisis is that he's feeling stressed about the fact that they have, even if he wants them to, because are they plotting something? Are they going to come back?
And, even scarier... what if they're just really gone from his and Crowley's lives? What if S1 was enough for them to just decide Crowley & Aziraphale were more trouble than they were worth and so this isn't even a problem anymore? Could reality just adjust to conform, as Crowley suggests in the dream, meaning: The Metatron and Lucifer just had to deal with the fact that they've left and maybe, if he and Crowley just go live their lives, they can move on and forget all about it?
Thoughts of them hang around for a little while while reality catches up but then, in the future, poof. A future where Aziraphale could go through whole days without even thinking about Heaven. Because it's not actually Aziraphale's responsibility to personally stop the war that might be coming-- that's what his whole Supreme Archangel storyline is about (which isn't even real even within his dream, as the dream has him killed in the end of S2 with the rest being his bardo and then, with the Asa & Anthony world, his damnation).
The dream is showing Aziraphale that the only power he truly has to stop anything is to help those around him, which starts with treating the angels and demons like the people they are and helping them with their own stuff. It's showing him that what he really needs to do is just go live his own life with Crowley openly and ignore the things he cannot control. The human experience is really not knowing what comes next-- so the world might still end, even if he helps the archangels through their traumas. The world might still end, no matter what he does. He and Crowley might still face dangers but is it better to deny them a full life-- a real universe-- to keep them alive, rather than the life they want to live together? No. It's not. That's what he learns here but it's really what he already knows because this is his subconscious telling him it.
All that matters is the moment, and Aziraphale's dream has shown him that it's really as simple as The Book of Life is what we say it is. Crowley can sign a marriage register under any name he says is his name, just as he has done with Aziraphale's books all these years. It's a nightmare, though, so it shows Aziraphale not fully allowing himself and the two of them that until it was too late... because that is literally his worst nightmare. Asa & Professor Anthony & Derek, the Bookshop Owner is Aziraphale's worst nightmare but it's never going to happen because Aziraphale is as Crowley said was true of The Book in the dream: too well-made. A few pages, here and there, but impossible to destroy.
Every. single. thing. in this story makes complete and total sense when you know it's Aziraphale's dream, which we do because that's what the last shot is there to help us understand. It's also a way to keep the story alive and have people think about the themes of it, more in depth and for longer. In doing it this way, it means that we look deeper at what it was saying and why, which is what you actually want to have happen with a story.
Wrap it up in a clean bow and it's forgettable... and it's impossible to do that with a circular story like this anyway, where every ending is a new beginning. Make people use their brain a bit and not spoon-feed it to everyone, which would always be the case with a Pratchett story and with discernment as a theme and anti-intellectuals like the Nazi Zombie Flesheaters as villains? Now, it has staying power. Now, it sticks to your ribs. Now, you can't get it out of your head.
That last line about sticking to ribs reminded me of (for some reason) the recipe for Mrs Whitlow's Artery-Hardening Hogswatch Pie from Nanny Ogg's Cookbook (which, iirc, was among the first official Discworld projects that Paul Kidby worked on!)
alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
just saw a 'comments' tab on someones blog you know where the following and likes tabs would be if enabled and it was just showing all the replies theyve made on peoples posts. this is fascinating when did this feature come out
if you've made replies on posts there is now a tab on your blog showing every post youve replied to and your reply.
if this is not what you want, either go to your blog and click comments and disable it from there or just go to your individual blogs setting pages. just change it from blue to grey if you dont want everyone to see your replies AND the post you're replying to
PLEASE BE ADVISED that it is set to disabled for blogs that have not made any replies but it will turn ON if you reply with that blog in the future.! i just tested it with my main, which was greyed out but it turned on the moment i left a test reply
figured i'd get the word out bc i have not seen a single mention of this and i'm sure there are plenty of people who maybe comment on things they don't want on display for everyone to see on their blog lol. you can still look at your replies with it toggled off just no one else can, like locking the following and likes list
I believe it's only auto-enabled if you were already sharing your likes. If you had like sharing turned off, reply sharing should (should) also be turned off.
Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?
That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".
A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!
In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.
The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.
A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.
In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).
It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.
Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?
The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!
These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.
There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.
Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?
"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"
Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?
One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:
"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.
"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?
“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.
"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.
"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.
"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."
#ngl survival module sounds fun as fuck. maybe i gotta torture my current group a bit (via @nadaismus)
It's worth bearing in mind that tournament-style survival mode developed in the context of a version of D&D where you can create a new character and hit the ground knowing everything you need to know to effectively play them in just a couple of minutes. 5E isn't structurally terribly well-suited for the binder-full-of-backup-PCs approach, and it's definitely a recipe for disaster in 3E or Pathfinder unless your entire group consists of a very particular flavour of high-effort masochists.
given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
I think there is something to be said about Aziraphale trusting Crowley to hold the food he cannot eat at the moment. I just want this poor angel to wake up already and indulge in eccles cakes to his heart's content.
Oh, Lanza, I couldn't agree more. 😢 It makes my heart sad, and I say this as someone who actually really liked what they did with the nightmare and who counts Famine, Chow, the lavender-scented air balloon scene as some of her favorite parts of the story. The Horsepeople are clearly riding hard for Aziraphale in reality and all of that was reflected in this dream.
Aziraphale needs hot chocolate and eccles cakes and uninterrupted classical music of all kinds and cuddles and a day of just reading in peace. (Probably first: aspirin, water, and his anxiety meds, but baby steps lol.) Not to mention that food, of course, is not just literal food... look at Crowley's fingers in that S3 gif...
Aziraphale dreaming that he pulled his hand back to answer the celestial phone and he missed Crowley trying to pet him a little. He clearly likes when Crowley does that as it was in S2, too:
Aziraphale is starving himself of everything in this nightmare, even as he tries to get everyone around him what it is they might need and want. He's self-sacrificing off a cliff-- the devil takes the hindmost. The nightmare ending with The Horsepeople winning and Aziraphale essentially damning himself to an eternity of Chow was the kind of ending that my brain was so into but my heart would not have been able to take if it was real lol so thankfully it was not.
The best part of all of this, though, is that Aziraphale's dream shows that he knows this isn't the answer. He'll be alright on the other side of it in reality, it just has been a minute since there was even one major character in the dream who reflected Aziraphale's more positive attitude about consumption... Can she work her love of Jim into every post? Oh, yes she can! 😂
