#ineffable husbands

[lutraslutra]

Have some Ineffable Wonderland, cause why not?

P.S even if this is marked as AI at some point please know that I NEVER use any AI tools of any kind, I’ve never used it and NEVER will. Human art is all you will find in this account.

[aziracrow-coded-song-of-the-day]

Thanks for submitting!

[avadoingart-imus]

After spending some time in the park, they went on to Monet's house in Giverny. They crossed the famous poppy field that stretched across the countryside on their way, it was all fine until Aziraphale's hat suddenly got blown away. 'Crowley, this is a vintage hat!' Aziraphale's voice echoed in the air while Crowley chuckled softly behind him.

Honestly speaking, I like painting the husbands in this style more than anything because it felt more alive and natural to me. However, my brain kept nagging at me for all those rough unrefined marks in the painting...Say, what do you guys think of this one?

[theineffablecon]

💰 AUCTION ITEM ALERT! 💰

The Ineffable Con 7's Good Omens auction runs between Friday 21 and Sunday 23 August.

All proceeds are donated to Alzheimer's Research UK in memory of Sir Terry Pratchett. 

With thanks to @mayfairnursery a bespoke pair from the Shuhite Collection!

To bid: 

bethanywindsor on eBay

Follow bethanywindsor on eBay. Buying, Selling, Collecting on eBay has never been more exciting!

[twilightofthesandwiches]

I mean, the thing is that I did use to really like the idea of God ‘shipping’ Crowley and Aziraphale, but specifically under the interpretation of their relationship not being part of the Ineffable Plan, and my Book Omens/GO1 interpretation of God as being ultimately pro-Free-Will in Their own complex Ineffable Way. Like, They nudged Adam and Eve into disobeying Them because They wanted Humanity to have Free Will because They just wanted to see what we’ll do with it. So when They saw an Angel and a Demon, who aren’t even ‘supposed’ to have Free Will, still learn to pick it up from the Humans and use it to become friends and fall in love? God was into that just from the sheer unexpected novelty of it all.

So GO3 portraying God’s idea of Free Will being just a ‘card trick’, and having Her not argue when Aziraphale insinuate that She ‘gave’ him Crowley, and then call his love ‘predictable’… that just feels like it totally goes against not just the appeal of the idea of God approving their relationship, but also of the Ineffable Husbands and their relation to the overall themes of ‘Good Omens’ in general?

And that just feels like such an unnecessary and inexplicably Bad decision? Like, there really was no reason to do it Like That. And especially because, like, the Ending of GO3 is clearly trying for a Meta angle where God is also metaphorically the Author. But most of these Meta Elements don’t really work because they mostly feel… counterproductive with the story’s more literal layers. Like, ideally in a story with a lot of Reflexive/Meta elements, the story’s ’surface level’ plot and the character arcs and themes should all work in tandem with the Meta elements. You shouldn’t be able to say something like ‘well, it doesn’t really make sense if you look at it from a literal/character perspective (or even other metaphorical perspectives the story has), but if you think about the Metafictional perspective…’, because all of these elements should work together and enhance each other. And a lot of the time in GO3 that’s just… not what happens.

But the idea of the Ineffable Husbands being unplanned by God feels like such a missed opportunity for a Metafictional through-line that actually kinda works coherently with all layers of the story. Because if God is metaphorically the writer(s) of Good Omens then… Crowley/Aziraphale was very literally not something that they planned from the start. I mean, from this angle you can say they were still ‘planned’ to be friends and work together, because ever since Crowley and Aziraphale were recognizably ‘them’ they have always been designed as a matched pair. But the idea of them being in an explicitly queer relationship, rather than the idea of Humans perceiving them as gay and/or in a relationship being just kind of a Joke, doesn’t seem to be the original creative intentions. Rather, it was the result of audience enthusiasm and the sheer chemistry and Vibes and just how compelling that Ship is that made the concept of the Ineffable Husbands make the jump into explicit canon in TV Omens.

You can pretty much say that it’s like if Crowley and Aziraphale took on a life of their own, beyond the ‘Plan’ their God-as-the-Author has planned for them, and fell in love with each other of their own Free Will (and maybe also with the help of some ordinary Humans, AKA the fans). That their love is exactly the perfect example of how a story can seem to ‘come to life’ and 'become real' and 'last past the pages of its book' in ways the creator(s) didn’t originally expect as a metaphor to the power of Free Will in the Universe of GO. And I just… can’t understand why this is not the way this very Trying So Hard to be Meta Finale tried to play it. Or, well, I can actually think of a few reasons why, it’s just that none of them are particularly charitable to GO3’s Creative Team.

[starmaker-astral]

What would you have preferred?

That GO was cancelled after S2 without a Finale

That the Finale exists

Remaining time: 2 days 16 hours

[angellilou-art]

It's cooking time 🤭🌈🔥

You can support me on Patreon to see more artworks!

[twilightofthesandwiches]

Maybe the ending of GO3 was supposed to be Crowley and Aziraphale out-tricking God, in a narrative parallel to Aziraphale ‘changing the game’ on that Mafia Boss Dude and when condensing the Season down to 90 minutes they ended up cutting out literally everything that would’ve actually showed them really outwitting God (while keeping considerably less narratively important fluff…. Like the Mafia Boss Dude).

Maybe the ending of GO3 was supposed to be that Crowley’s little speech of reheated Book Quotes and Baby’s First Atheist Philosophy was honestly so moving and mind-blowing for Her that it single-handedly convinced God that Her way of doing things was totally wrong and so She immediately turned over a new leaf to ask for Crowley’s vision for the new world 100% sincerely.

Because I guess Crowley is just the specialest little boy in the whole universe and what he said was really that novel to God. They really did solve the Unfair Systems of Power by just going to the person on top of the system and asking Her to stop doing the Bad Thing. And when Aziraphale thinks they can appeal to God to fix everything it’s framed as overly-naive reformism and trust in the System, but when Crowley does it it’s speaking truth to power because he’s the Only Real Free-Thinking Artistic Soul in a world of dupes and automatons and that’s why it’s just and right and happy that he gets to basically single-handedly decide the fate and trajectory of the entire New Universe.

…And the one other option for What the Hell is Even Supposed to Be the Ending of GO3, is that God was neither outwitted nor changed Her mind, that this was all according to Her plan. The Real Ineffable Plan all along was to end the world after 6000 years, and then have Aziraphale and Crowley heroically sacrifice themselves to create the Godless Universe, and the Ineffable Husbands carried it out just as She always planned.

This interpretation does have a lot of textual evidence and actually clears up some supposed ‘Plot Holes’ in the script (how do Crowley and Aziraphale survive after the Book of Life is burned? Same reason why Satan is still around, for the sake of God’s ‘story’), but it took me a long time to accept the possibility that it could be the authorial intent for GO3, rather than an accidental reading that was made possible through the carelessness of the script.

Because, like, the GO3 Ending clearly tries to sell itself as a Happy, or at least Bittersweet, Ending. Every tool of cinematic language used in these Finale Fifteen tells us that we’re supposed to feel happiness about what’s happening on the screen. But how could it be any sort of happy/bittersweet ending if this was just God’s plan all along? Doesn’t it just mean that our heroes lost and their sacrifice was meaningless and the ‘villain’ of the story won?

I… guess what might be going on is this GO3 was maybe still trying to do Book Omens/GO1’s take of an Ambivalent Trickster-y God Whose Ineffable Ways are, in a strange way, ultimately for the benefit of Free Will and Humanity. That the realization that the New Universe was what God wanted all along was supposed to feel to us like the discussion in Book Omens/GO1 on whatever averting Armageddon was actually part of God’s plan all along. With some Complex Feelings about what it means for the Free Will of the characters but maybe kinda optimistic that God does have Humanity’s best interest and Free Will in mind but still also kinda questioning whatever God’s method really is the right way to do it…. But still overall positive about the whole thing.

Because, well, first of all, this will suck because GO3 is already super-derivative of the original story, and the idea that it might’ve been trying to say more critical and more novel things about God was one of the few avenues where I was honestly trying to respect its intentions. If it was really just doing Literally Everything the original book/GO1 already did but worse, that just makes the whole endeavor even more pointless then it already was.

But most importantly, trying to paint God in an Ambivalent light in GO3 just really doesn’t work. In the original book and most adaptations, God is a truly unknowable force notable in Their absence from the actual text of the story. GO1 already had the potential to muddle the point a fair bit by making God the narrator with an actual voice, but She at the very least still existed outside of the narrative. Once you make God just another character who the other characters can just directly talks to, that makes it so much harder to sell the viewers on the idea that Her thinking and MO is just so cosmic and Ineffable to us.

And then when it’s also paired with the narrative making it more and more clear that God is also explicitly responsible for Heaven’s more… questionable actions in Biblical times (compare the Book which only makes it explicit that God was involved in the Garden of Eden story while not touching any other Biblical narratives, allowing the readers room to interpret them as God’s direct involvement… or just the Metatron/Heaven in general assuming they were doing God’s will, to GO1 having Aziraphale state the Flood was God’s decision, although the fact he heard it second-hand leaves some wiggle-room for interpretation, the implication is still there, and then in GO2 directly unambiguously showing us that God is the one who fucked up Job's life for shits and giggles), and it’s harder and harder to see God as anything but another very Effable authority figure in Heaven that should be ‘beaten’ or ‘outsmarted’ in some ways, and things going according to Her plan as being very not compatible with any sort of ‘Happy Ending’. An especially so when you also factor in the vast difference in what is implied to be Their plans between Book Omens/GO1 to GO3.

In the sense that, first things first and most obviously, the vast difference between implying what God planned all along being for the world’s destruction to be prevented 100% causality free, for Heaven and Hell to get totally humiliated by the power of Human Free Will and the main change to the status quo being the addition of Adam as an immensely powerful pro-Humanity player on the board…. To Her implicitly saying that yeah, She did plan to destroy the world and end the lives of 8 billion people in such a cruel and senseless way.

And like… the idea of the Universe Reset being a Good Thing is already a hard sell just from the perspective of the Husbands, as a pair of considerably less powerful beings who were not directly responsible for the actual destruction of the world and are trying their best to break out of God’s control. Looking at the Decision as something God planned, the idea that God’s plan to free Humanity from Heaven and Hell’s meddling and Her own control involved not just making our main characters sacrifice their lives, but the exact sort of destruction of the world that the story kept telling us over and over is a bad thing and the thing our protagonists kept trying to stop…

…Well, how are we supposed to see this as anything but an Evil Plot that should be stopped? How is this plan coming to fruition, freeing Humanity but only by the price of the 8 billion Humans and the 20 million Angels and Demons that came before, supposed to make us feel happy, or even ‘bittersweet’?

And then also there’s the fact that this story is trying to tell us that being part of God’s Plan is this Existential Nightmare and believing you have Free Will under these circumstances is like believing you could win a rigged game, and that’s the logic it uses to justify the Ineffable Husbands killing themselves and the Universe Reset, because Real Free Will is soooo important it will be worth the cost… so after all of this, still being like ‘ooooh maybe this was really God’s will all along, really makes you think right’ doesn’t feel cool and thought-provoking. It’s just, like, okay, so what you’re saying is that Crowley and Aziraphale died for no reason. Good to know, I guess.

But it’s also the fact that Humanity being ‘freed’ by a Universe Reset performed exclusively via God’s omnipotent powers and decided on by a pair of supernatural entities makes everything that came before feel, well…

Like, my thought was that God was playing such convoluted and esoteric games with the universe partly because She was looking at the world through such a wide cosmic lens and probably keeping a lot of different balls of cause-and-effect in the air at all times and because Her true goals are ultimately pro-Free-Will and pro-Humanity in Her own strange ways, so She’s trying to nudge certain events into motion while still making sure people being people is the central factor (like with the Baby Swap).

Like, the reason why She never just snapped Heaven and Hell out of existence or at least gave them a worldwide celestial announcement to Not Do an Armageddon is because She wanted Humans to showcase their agency by saving the world and to eventually band together to take down Heaven and Hell (and maybe even eventually Herself) by their own power. “all of Us versus all of Them” and all that. You know, kinda the same logic Adam was talking about when he was explaining why he didn’t want to magically fix the environment for Humanity.

People need to learn that if they kill a whale, all they’ll be left with is a dead whale, so they’ll put effort into saving them. People need to realize that if we quarrel between ourselves while ignoring the systems of exploitation keeping us all down, all we will be left with is a whole lot of exploitation and oppression, and that’s how mankind will be liberated.

And, like, that doesn’t have to justify God’s actions in the eyes of the audience. I think it would be a very valid viewpoint to still say that the way She went about it was callous and manipulative and immoral. But that at least gives some shadow of explanation for why She does what She does, some sense that there is method to the madness, even if it feels Ineffable, even if one still come to the conclusion that we cannot condone the moral logic that She is using.

But if this what it all leads up to is basically just God using Her Magic God Powers to replace this world with a ‘better’ one after the previous one was destroyed in a sequence of events that hardly had any Human involvement whatsoever, then yeah, it really just makes it all feel so pointless. Why would the Plan start with making a Biblically Literalist Universe that has billions and billions of sapient beings living with No Real Free Will and an unfair Afterlife system and a toxic Heaven and Hell and have it run like that for 6000 years if the plan all along was just to wipe it out completely and replace it with the Better Real UniverseTM? By this point why not just fix the world with Omnipotent God Powers directly? Or make that Better Godless World from the start? Because from where I’m standing it just seems like senseless and unnecessary cruelty.

It just seems like the only elements of the ‘Old Universe’ that would possibly actually matter for an ‘Ineffable Plan’ that culminates with the GO3 Ending are Michael’s breakdown and the Ineffable Husbands’ character arcs that led them into making the Decision. So, like, was the whole ‘point’ of the lives of every single Human who lived for the last 6000 years was just to be little puppets in God’s play that’s all for the sake of helping Crowley and Aziraphale realize that they should eventually sacrifice themselves for Humanity?

Or rather, for the sake of Crowley realizing that he should sacrifice himself for Humanity and for Aziraphale realizing that he loves Crowley and that he should do whatever he says, up to and including giving up on his own life, considering how much everything about the Decision scene went out of its way to make it clear that it was all Crowley’s idea and Aziraphale was only going along with it as an act of love. The point of all the Humans who ever lived in that No Real Free Will world, the only value they had, was just so God could teach Crowley a lesson about… the value of Humanity?

Or, you know, if this was really God’s Plan all along, then the Decision, and Crowley and Aziraphale being there at the Bookshop at the end of the universe really was pointless as well, because all they asked of Her is what She wanted them to ask, and thus something She wanted to do in the first place, right? So if Michael had destroyed everything including the Ineffable Husbands and then God just shrugged Her shoulders and went ‘well, that was a fun prelude, now to make the REAL Universe that actually matters lol’ things would’ve ended up basically the same for Humanity, wouldn’t it?

Like, basically the only reason Crowley and Aziraphale survived the destruction of the Book of Life is because God wanted them there at the Bookshop at the End of the Universe, and they only kept existing long enough to ask questions is because She decided to humor them instead of just ending the World completely, and the only reason why they got to make a ‘Decision’ is because God gave them the opportunity. If the whole point of the Ineffable Plan from the start was to make a Real Godless Universe, was the only point of Crowley and Aziraphale being at the Bookshop was because God wanted to hear Crowley ‘convince’ Her of the terrible metaphysical logic of the Universe she designed to have terrible metaphysical logic, because She wanted to see Crowley make a Big Epic Selfless Sacrifice, because She wanted that narrative that the New Real Universe She was planning on to be ‘all thanks to Crowley’, because She wanted to hear Crowley ‘admit’ that his and Aziraphale’s happiness and continued existence are fundamentally incompatible with Humanity’s best interests and Free Will?

The way I see it, there’s no way for everything that has happened in GO3 to be God’s Real Ineffable Plan without it also feeling like the sort of Evil Plan that the characters just kinda have to defeat or outwit in some way, and that whose fulfillment is fundamentally incompatible with the idea that this ending is even the least bit Bittersweet, rather than just outright dismal and depressing (in a way the cinematic storytelling around it is clearly telling us it’s not supposed to be). Without totally losing the idea of God being ambiguous or ambivalent at all, and instead just making God look like an outright evil asshole with zero actual regard for Human life or mental wellbeing and whose only clear goal when playing around with this world is to both torment Crowley specifically and construct a narrative where he is the greatest and most specialest boy in the entire universe. Which… I mean, considering how much GO3 also tries to lean into the idea of God being the Writer, I guess that’s just literally true.