Biblically Accurate Bildad: Sorry To Break It To You Job, But You Probably Had It Coming Your Way. Youre

Biblically accurate Bildad: Sorry to break it to you Job, but you probably had it coming your way. You’re not as innocent as you claim to be, are ya? And your children were real brats, anyway. Better repent, I’d say. So sorry for your loss, btw.

Crowley’s Bildad: What is good and bad anyways? Let’s just stop whacking kids (human and goat), shall we?

Gotta love Crowley for sucking at being a demon and fucking up Christian canon for the sake of humanity.

I find it so confusing to wrap my head around the fact that – in Good Omens – every single freaking demon used to be an angel??? How many hundreds and thousands of them must have fallen? How did God make that many faulty, rebellious, question-asking angels? What does that say about the dark and gross potential of all angels still in heaven (I mean it kinda shows, but still…). They are literally the most UNBALANCED creatures.

no but it's the way for aziraphale "nothing lasts forever" meant "i'm willing to give up the bookshop if it means i can be with you safely" and for crowley it meant "nothing lasts forever, not the bookshop, not earth, not us"

Why does Gabriel of all people/angels have an easier time ditching heaven than Aziraphale???

I have pondered over this for quite some time.

Why does it take Gabriel x Beelzebub only 4 years before they commit to each other once and for all? While Crowley and Aziraphale have been in love for thousands of years and still haven’t figured stuff out!?

Before dealing with Aziraphale and why he can’t or won’t ditch heaven while angel-golden-boy Gabriel is like: “So long, fuckers” - Let’s start off with something easier:

Beelzebub and Crowley both come from Hell’s side. They are both on Hell’s side because they were somehow part of the Angel revolution. So, they have questioned a system before. They have rebelled (although as we see in Crowley’s case, an active role in the rebellion was not necessary. But in a toxic system basically everything can be laid out as an “act of rebellion”, if you will, and everything can get sanctioned if it rubs the supreme cult leader off the wrong way). But it seems they have an easier starting point to leave their current system because it wouldn’t be the first time for them. You may attribute it to their somewhat antagonistic nature or simply to the life experience that leaving your old life doesn’t kill you. So, I think it makes sense that Crowley is the one who always suggests that Aziraphale and him should go off together.

But what allows Gabriel – supreme arch angel and dickhead – to ditch it all in such a short amount of consideration time (4-ish years against 6000???). I mean, maybe a lot of the other angels are hypocrites: they preach something but do they actually believe it with all their heart. I mean cult leaders are not as immersed in their own propaganda as the ones they influence, right? They are using it as a tool to control people. They just have to preach - the rest has to do the believing part. Also, the rules made by toxic leaders are not followed by toxic leaders as they see themselves above them.

BUT: but after getting to know Gabriel as Jim in Season 2, being all naïve and kind and cute do we really want to see Jim/Gabriel as the (former) toxic leader who was able to break free because he wasn’t brainwashed by Heaven’s propaganda because he was the one preaching it? Idk, maybe, but probably not.

Another (kind of hurtful) explanation is that Gabriel and Beelzebub don’t have the amount of trauma that Aziraphale and Crowley have.

Gabriel and Beelzebub both occupied leading positions in Heaven and Hell. They haven’t had to endure the amount and extent of mistreating that A&C had to endure. Gabriel & Beelzebub come from a situation of privilege and maybe, just maybe, this is also expressed by them being a “straighter”/more heteronormative looking couple – they are not, Beelzebub has they/them pronouns and angels are neither men nor women – but still.

Good Omens is queering TV/storytelling - part 1: GAZE

I would argue that part of why Good Omens is so refreshingly queer is because it does not cater to the male gaze (which centers around the preferences - aesthetic, romantic, sexual, visual, logical, emotional, political ... - of mainly white men in positions of power):

no oversexualization of groups or types of people: Women or characters that could be read as female presenting are not overly sexualized. In fact, some of them are shown to be grimy, slimy and not sexual at all. All of them are real characters and not just cardboard-cutout on-screen versions of male misogynistic fantasies. They portray real people with real people problems. They are human, or exempt from our categories when portraying angels or demons. There are no overly sexualized bodies in general (as has so far also often been the case with young gay men, PoC, etc.), no fetishization of power imbalances, and not exclusively youthful depiction of love and desire.

sex or sexual behavior is not shown directly (yet): All imagery and symbolism of sex and sexuality is used not to entice the audience but is very intimately played out between characters, which makes it almost uncomfortable to watch (e.g., Aziraphale being tempted to eat meat, Crowley watching Aziraphale eat, the whole gun imagery).

flaunting heteronormativity: Throughout GO but especially GO2, there is very little depiction of heterosexual/romantic couples; most couples are very diverse and no one is making a fuss about it. There is no fetishization of bodies or identities. Just people (and angels and demons) being their beautiful selves (or trying to).

age: Even though Neil Gaiman explained that Crowley and Aziraphale are middle-aged because the actors are, I think it is also queering the idea of romance, love and desire existing mainly within youthful contexts. Male gaze has taught us that young people falling and being in love is what we have to want to see, and any depiction of love that involves people being not exactly young anymore is either part of a fetishized power imbalance (often with an older dude using his power to prey on younger folx) or presents us with marital problems, loss of desire, etc. – all with undertones of decay and patronizing sympathy. Here, however, we get a beautifully crafted, slow-burn, and somehow super realistic love story that centers around beings older than time and presenting as humans in their 50s figuring out how to deal with love. It makes them both innocent and experienced, in a way that is refreshing and heartbreaking and unusual and real.

does not (exclusively) center around romantic/sexual love: I don’t know if this is a gaze point exactly but I feel like male gaze and resulting expectations of what a love story should look like are heavily responsible for our preoccupation with romantic/sexual love in fiction – the “boy gets girl” type of story. And even though, technically, GO seems to focus on a romantic love story in the end, it is also possible to read this relationship but also the whole show as centering around a kind of love that goes beyond the narrow confines of our conditioned boxed-in thinking. It seems to depict a love of humanity and the world and the universe and just the ineffability of existence as a whole.

disability as beautiful and innate to existence: Disability is represented amongst angels by the extremely cool Saraqael and by diversely disabled unnamed angels in the Job minisode. Representation of disability is obviously super important in its own right, but is also queers what we perceive as aesthetically and ontologically "normal". Male gaze teaches us that youth and (physical and mental) health are the desirable standard and everything else is to be seen as a deviance, a mistake. By including disability among the angels, beings that have existed before time and space, the show clearly states that disability is a beautiful and innate part of existence.

gender is optional/obsolete: Characters like Crowley, Muriel and others really undermine the (visual and aesthetic) boundaries of gender and the black-and-white thinking about gender that informs male gaze. Characters cannot be identfied simply as (binary) men or women anymore just by looking at them or by interpreting their personalities or behaviors. Most characters in GO, and especially the more genderqueer ones, display a balance of feminine and masculine traits as well as indiosyncracies that dissolve the gender binary.

Feel free to add your own thoughts on this in the comments or tags!

I wanna talk about The Angel Who Would Be Crowley.

Because I had a certain set of expectations, which got thoroughly trashed in the first five minutes of S2, and my genuine response is, "Oh, fuck, yup. You're right. That's WAY better."

Looking around at GO fandom, I'm not alone in this. So let's talk about it.

Basically, a lot of people (myself included) believed that he was a high-ranking angel, and therefore as chilly and remote as every other powerful angel we'd seen at that point. We pictured Crowley-To-Be as long-haired, regal and imposing --and the fanart at the time reflected this. I'd link some if Tumblr didn't hate links.

Something like this:

We were collectively drawing on a few things --mostly, Crawly's appearance and general bearing in the Biblical scenes of S1--

--But also scattered hints of his importance, backed up by conspicuous absences in Heaven and a few profound displays of power. That's all better covered elsewhere, so I won't reiterate the arguments here. All I'm saying is: I think our headcanons were justified.

But it turns out he was this:

!!!

With his curly little--!!

And his neat white--!!

IT TURNS OUT, he was an angel who squeaked and squealed when he was happy; who flailed his arms around and made explosion noises with his mouth to explain nebulas; who preened when told his stars were pretty. Furfur, who knew him before the Fall, says:

"You used to jump on me back, little monkey in a waistcoat..."

(The use of a diminutive there, 'little'...oh, that fascinates me.)

In a pretty huge subversion of expectations, we're given these glimpses of an angel who was sweet, and joyful, and heart-meltingly silly.

In sum...an innocent.

(Perhaps innocent to a troubling degree.

We see how he troubles Aziraphale, during their first conversation. He starts looking around and behind them, checking to make sure that no one can HEAR the blithe and reckless things coming out of this angel's mouth. This angel who talks like he's never been reprimanded in his life; like it's never occurred to him that anyone would want to hurt him.

Before the Beginning, Aziraphale understood Heaven better than he did. The danger is plainly occurring to Aziraphale.)

So now, we the viewers are in on a cruel joke that Aziraphale has known all along, which is that this --THIS-- is the angel who--

*checks notes*

--did a million lightyear freestyle dive into a boiling pool of sulphur. For asking questions.

...Imagine you are Aziraphale, and everything inside you wants to believe Heaven are the Good Guys, and God is Good and Everything She does is capital-R Right...and now try to reconcile that. Keep trying. I don't think he ever totally managed it in 6000 years.

All this gets further complicated when we learn that, despite all of the above, we were still right. That sweet excitable babby up there?

He WAS a powerful and high-ranking angel.

That much is explicitly confirmed, with significant evidence that he could have been among the mightiest of archangels...

...Who apparently accosted his fellow angels for piggyback rides. And was remembered millennia later by those (now fallen) angels as something 'little.'

What does that tell us about who he was? Is?

Hell, Aziraphale has known to be wary of the archangels (and the judgements of Heaven in general) since before the Fall even happened. He chooses to believe they are Good; he can't fool himself into thinking they are Safe.

Yet he's absolutely certain that Crowley won't hurt Job's children. Enough to stand in a burning building and say to them, "I can't save you, but don't be afraid. I won't need to."

And what reason does he give?

("I know you."

"You do not know me."

"I know the angel you were.")

What does that tell us about who he was? Is?

("The angel you knew is not me."

But how is Aziraphale supposed to believe that, when he can see him all the time?)

tl;dr --yes, this is better. I love the tragedy of it.

'Innocence died screaming' and all that.