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 "make better 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?
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