Gos2 - Blog Posts
is it too early for thirst posts-*GUNSHOTS*
the literal definition of trying to be who I thought you'd need.
see. the issue is what maggie n nina pointed out after three days of knowing aziraphale and crowley. they don’t talk. they don’t communicate. they love each other, sure. they banter and have meals and drinks and would die for each other. but they spend so much of their relationship inferring how the other feels. assuming what the other wants. aziraphale assumed crowley wanted to be an angel again. crowley assumed aziraphale would be able to give up being one. they don’t have a middle ground bc they didn’t know one was necessary
have u guys heard of the doc going on that claims Neil wrote this season with "bad writing" on purpose and some of the flashbacks are false? cause it's the only thing they talk on twitter
gay people can never just plainly say I love you it's always gotta be shit like "I forgive you" bitch stfu your husband is leaving the house *the bookshop* do something
good omens season 2 finale is the best ending they could have give.everything seeming to work out in the end,gabriel getting his memory back,the literal duke of hell and the archangel getting together,them going off to distance stars to love each other,the significance of the song Everyday, hell and heaven stoping the fight and resigning for the foreseeable future,metatron stopping angels from hurting aziraphale,crowley realising he can say his love outloud now and he's going to goddammit,aziraphale getting recognized by heaven authorities for the first time in his existence,being offered of his dream job and he's going to refuse it in the first sight cause he wants to be with crowley no matter but the gift horse is getting bigger,including crowley in heaven by his side,CROWLEY IN HEAVEN AS AN ANGEL ONCE AGAIN LIKE HE HIMSELF INTERNALLY WANTS.but it all crambles cause they terribly misunderstood each other.crowley thought aziraphale would, *wants* to choose heaven over him INSTEAD of him and he gets defensive acting like the idealism aziraphale is showing is ridiculous and unimportant. aziraphale was never fond of hell or it's ways but it's light as feather to voice them without so much regard,without ever thinking maybe it will hurt crowley(cause when he voices hell isn't enough crowley thinks HE isn't enough) when he secured the job of being the leader of "good" they are oh so horrifyingly scared to get hurt they make one another the knife they turn inside themselves.and oh also THE KISS ofc
ALARMS WEWOWEWOOO CROWLEY WAS IN THE BOOKSHOP THAT NIGHT, THE SAME NIGHT AZIRAPHALE CAME BACK FROM EDINBURGH.THEY STAYED TOGETHER ALL NIGHT. SLEEPING ON THE COUCH TOGETHER.(cause yk Jim took the only bed and angels and demons definetely need sleep ☝️)
OH oh OK he is definitely the dom in bed alright
OK theory time:remember how in the 16th century,on the rehearsal of Shakespeare's play we learn they help each other with miracles, the last one crowley wants from aziraphale being something to do in Scotland (if I remember correctly) and the records that keep turning into "Everyday" is from a pub from Edinburgh? yes, I think it's their "shared" magic that have gotto do with this "Clue"
P.S:I just watched the first two episodes of season two so no spoilers please
literally I just saw the sneak peek 30 minutes ago how yall so fast ALSO look at how aziraphale looks guiltily at crowley under his brows aww
#This season is the best thing that happened to me
I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING AT THE NEW SNEAK PEEK 😭she asked how's your naked man with her whole chest and this is aziraphale hyperventilating and crowley going "BITCH WHO I WASN'T THERE LAST WEEK "
Thank you Neil!! You make it so exciting to be a fan of an author, usually they are just a name on a book. You grew arms and legs the moment you started interacting with your fans. In fact, you just keep growing more and more arms and legs!
I'm a little distraught!
Before season two released and you got very busy with fan reactions, I had asked you to acknowledge my existence in an Ask, giving me official bragging rights that I have been Classified as Existing by Neil Himself, and you kindly did so.
I've been searching and searching, and I can't find it anywhere. I should have screenshotted it and gotten it laminated to keep in my wallet. Perhaps my C.E.N.H pass expired with the turn of the year. Would you please renew it? It would mean the world to me, and I'll make sure to print it this time so it lasts forever!
I did send an ask or two after I noticed it was gone from this website somehow, trying to fill the hole my official acknowledgement left when it vanished, but I understand how slim the odds are that you will see and have time to respond to something. No need to tell me if you like panda king isopods or not if you see both of these!
You definitely exist. Or I do. Or both.
Me (Aziraphale) and @zaniephoenixblr-blog (Crowley) at Siouxpercon!!!
They did something to my heart physically 🥹🥹🤌🤌🫵🫶🙏
y’all season 2 of good omens was like having a nice relaxing bubble bath with scented candles and bath bombs and shit and you’re just enjoying it so euphorically that it leaves you super vulnerable for when someone throws A FUCKIN TOASTER IN
sneak peek at good omens season 3
SFX Magazine Issue 372 - Designing Good Omens ❤ 😊
PRODUCTION DESIGNER MICHAEL RALPH REVEALS HOW THE SHOW’S CENTREPIECE SET, WHICKBER STREET, WAS GIVEN A DEVILISHLY CLEVER UPGRADE FOR THE SECOND SEASON
WORDS: DAVE GOLDER
Invisible Columns And Thin Walls “The new studio is Pyramid Studios in Bathgate – it used to be a furniture warehouse. And unfortunately – or fortunately, because I accept these things as not challenges but gifts – right down the middle of that studio are a series of upright columns. But you’ll never spot them on screen. I had to build them in and integrate them into the walls and still get the streets between them. And it worked.
“There’s all sorts of cheeky design values to those sets. Normally a set like this is double-skin. In other words, you do an interior wall and an exterior wall, with an airspace in between. But really, the only time a viewer notices that there’s that width is at the doors and the windows. So I cheated all that. I ended up with single walls everywhere. So the exterior wall is the interior wall, just painted. All I did was make the sash windows and entrances wider to give it some depth as you walked in.”
GOOD OMENS HAD A CHANGE of location for its second season, but hopefully you didn’t notice. Because Whickber Street in Soho upped sticks from an airfield in Hertfordshire to a furniture warehouse in Bathgate, Edinburgh. It’s the kind of nonsensical geographical shenanigans that could only make sense in the crazy world of film and TV, and production designer Michael Ralph was the man in charge of rebuilding and expanding the show’s vast central set. “I wish we could have built more in season one than we did,” says Ralph, whose previous work has included Primeval and Dickensian. “We built the ground floor of everything and the facades of all the shops. But we didn’t build anything higher than that, because we were out on an airfield in a very, very difficult terrain and weather conditions, so we really couldn’t go much higher. Visual effects created the upper levels.”
But with season two the set has gone to a whole other level… literally. “What happened was that the rest of the street became integrated into the series’s storyline,” explains Ralph. “So we needed a record shop, we needed a coffee shop that actually had an inside, we needed a magic shop, we needed the pub. To introduce those meant we had to change the street with a layout that works from a storylines point of view. In other words, things like someone standing at the counter in the record shop had to be able to eyeball somebody standing at the counter in the coffee shop. They had to be able to eyeball Aziraphale sitting in his office in the window of the bookshop. But the rest of it was a pleasure to do inside, because we could expand it and I could go up two storeys.”
For most of the set, which is around 80 metres long and 60 metres wide, the two storeys only applied to the shop frontages, but in the case of Aziraphale’s bookshop, it allowed Ralph to build the mezzanine level for real this time. According to Ralph it became one of the cast and crews’ favourite places to hang out during down time.
But while AZ Fell & Co has grown in height, it actually has a slightly smaller footprint because of the logistics of adapting it to the new studio.
“Everybody swore to me that no one would notice,” says Ralph wryly. “I walked onto it and instinctively knew there was a difference immediately, and they hated me for that. I have this innate sense about spatial awareness and an eye like a spirit level.
“It’s not a lot, though – I think we’ve lost maybe two and a half feet on the front wall internally. I think that there’s a couple of other smaller areas, but only I’d notice. So I can be really annoying to my guys, but only on those levels. Not on any other. They actually quite like me…”
Populating The Bookshop “The props in the new bookshop set were a flawless reproduction from the set decorator Bronwyn Franklin [who is also Ralph’s wife]. It was really the worst-case scenario after season one. She works off the concept art that I produce, but what she does is she adds so much more to the character of the set. She doesn’t buy anything she doesn’t love, or doesn’t fit the character.
“But the things she put a lot of work into finding for season one, they were pretty much one-offs. When we burnt the set down in the sixth episode, we lost a lot of props, many of which had been spotted and appreciated by the fans. So Bronwyn had to discover a new set decorating technique: forensic buying.
“She found it all – duplicates and replicas. It took ages. In that respect, the Covid delay was very helpful for Bron. There’s 7,000 books in there and there’s not one fake book. That’s mainly because… it’s a weird thing to say, but we wanted it to smell and feel like a bookshop to everybody that was in it, all the time.
“It affects everybody subliminally; it affects everybody’s performance – actors and crew – it raises the bar 15 to 20%. And the detail, you know… We love a lot of detail.”
(look at the description under this, they called him 'Azi' hehehehe :D <3)
Aziraphale’s Inspirational Correspondence “There’s not one single scrap of paper on Aziraphale’s desk that isn’t written specifically for Aziraphale. Every single piece is not just fodder that’s been shoved there, it has a purpose; it’s a letter of thanks, or an enquiry about a book or something.
“Michael Sheen is so submerged in his character he would get lost sitting at his own desk, reading his own correspondence between takes. I believe wholeheartedly that if you put that much care into every single piece of detail, on that desk and in that room, that everybody feels it, including the crew, and then they give that set the same respect it deserves.
“They also lift their game because they believe that they’re doing something of so much care and value. Really, it’s a domino effect of passion and care for what you’re producing.”
Alternative Music “My daughter Mickey is lead graphic designer [two of Ralph’s sons worked on the series too, one as a concept artist, the other in props]. They’re the ones that produced all of that handwritten work on the desk. She’s the one that took on the record shop and made up 80 band names so that we didn’t have to get copyright clearance from real bands. Then she produced records and sleeves that spanned 50, 60 years of their recordings, and all of the graphics on the walls.
“I remember Michael and Neil [Gaiman] getting lost following one band’s history on the wall, looking at their posters and albums desperately trying to find out whether they survived that emo period.”
It’s A Kind Of Magic One of the new shops in Whickber Street for season two was Will Goldstone’s Magic Shop, which is full of as many Easter eggs as off-the-shelf conjuring tricks, including a Matt Smith Doctor Who-style fez and a toy orang-utan that’s a nod to Discworld’s The Librarian. Ralph says that while the series is full of references to Gaiman, Pratchett and Doctor Who, Michael Sheen never complained about a lack of Masters Of Sex in-jokes. “He’d be the last person to make that sort of comment!”
Ralph also reveals that the magic shop counter was another one of his wife’s purchases, bought at a Glasgow reclamation yard.
The Anansi Boys Connection Ralph reveals that Good Omens season two used the state-of-the-art special effects tech Volume (famous for its use in The Mandalorian to create virtual backdrops) for just one sequence, but he will be using it extensively elsewhere on another Gaiman TV series being made for Prime Video.
“We used Volume on the opening sequence to create the creation of the universe. I was designing Anansi Boys in duality with this project, which seems an outrageously suicidal thing to do. But it was fantastic and Anansi Boys was all on Volume. So I designed for Volume on one show and not Volume on the other. The complexities and the psychology of both is different.”
Neil talking about this season being inspired by Austen just hit me:
Aziraphale is like the Emma for his side of the story. He’s trying to arrange everything just so. He wants people to be happy without pausing to ask what they want. He has this perfect ideal of how everything is going to go and he’s clinging to it. He will arrange for people to fall in love and everything will be fine! Which makes Crowley his Mr. Knightley, fond but critical of Aziraphale’s schemes and entirely smitten on him without giving it voice until it’s too late.
Only he and Crowley are in different books. Crowley is the Lizzie Bennett. He’s the one who won’t do what is expected of him and asks questions and rejects the role he’s meant to be in. He misinterprets Aziraphale’s actions and intentions and in the proposal it’s very much like Darcy’s first awful “I love you against my better judgement” proposal. And likewise, he doesn’t understand that a lot of Aziraphale actions are in the name of protecting him, much like Darcy is trying to shield people from Wickham without ever explaining why.
They are running in different narratives in their own heads because they never talk to each other. They never ask what the other wants or fully understands what the other is thinking. There’s always another side to the story and neither of them is fully aware of it.
I can’t remember if this is right, but I think Neil mentioned Mansfield Park as Aziraphale’s favourite and I feel like this is prescient for the set up for season 3.
Everything Is Meant (long S2 analysis, part 3)
Part one
Part two
There's SO MUCH excellent meta out there right now, and I'm going to try not to reinvent the wheel too much, but I want to keep going with tying the episodes/ elements up together because on first watch it wasn't entirely clear how everything fit. I also strongly recommend a rewatch, no matter what you felt about the ending... if you need to stop it 10 minutes early, do that, but you pick up so much more the second time around.
So: Maggie and Nina. I spent most of my first watch wondering why we were bothering with them, honestly. Later in the season Nina, and then Maggie and Nina, gave Crowley some insightful advice, but their actual relationship didn't progress despite all the meddling, and the amount of emotional investment BOTH Aziraphale and Crowley had in making them get together was frankly strange.
I started thinking in terms of mirror couples, since that was such a big deal in S1 and that's clearly what they were set up to be, but I made the mistake that all of us made on first watch: that Nina was Crowley and Maggie was Aziraphale. It still wasn't really coming together.
Then I put the psych hat back on and started to think about displacement. Displacement is a defense mechanism, and it consists of satisfying an impulse (usually an unconscious one) with a substitute object. At the beginning of the season, Aziraphale and Crowley aren't really in a good place, and I think on some level they know that. Aziraphale is trying to SHOW Crowley that he wants to take the next step through all the casual touches and phone calls and inviting him in, and feeling frustrated because Crowley doesn't seem to be taking the bait. (I absolutely think that Aziraphale tried to get Crowley to stay with him at the bookshop instead of living in his CAR, and Crowley said no. That's a whole other meta.) Meanwhile, Crowley, I think, is waiting for a Grand Gesture. Where did he go, as soon as Aziraphale brought up trying to get two humans to fall in love? Romantic tropes. Getting caught in the rain under an awning. A dramatic kiss that opens someone's eyes. That's the sort of thing he's always done, right? Big rescues, impassioned pleas on the street, fancy dinners, "give you a lift anywhere you want to go". He's defensive and guarded and unlikely to let someone in unless he's CERTAIN he won't be rejected, and Aziraphale's approaches are just too... quiet. No one's fault, they just don't speak the same language.
Then, they're handed the opportunity to make two humans fall in love, and they're both All In immediately. Look at Crowley's face when he summons the rainstorm. This is HUGE for him. Why? Because of displacement. Look at Aziraphale arranging the ball and being borderline deranged about it. They're both desperate to demonstrate what they think it takes for two people to move past their misunderstandings and fall in love. They can't do it for each other because the stakes are too high, and if either of them shows their cards unequivocally the vulnerability feels life-shattering. They're codependent and terrified of rejection and also, importantly, have no idea what they're doing when it comes to love. "Saw it in a film", Crowley says. Aziraphale's read about it in books. But they have zero practical experience.
Instead of learning to communicate, they try to say what they want to say through the medium of Maggie and Nina, up to and including the questionable moral decision to exert control over people's actions and thoughts during the ball. If I can just make this come out right, they both think, then things between us will be alright too. It HAS to come out right. They're attempting to gain some control over their own lives, over something that feels so overwhelming and shattering they can't look directly at it.
It doesn't come out right. Nina's relationship falls apart, but that doesn't mean she's in love with Maggie. While Crowley's stress-cleaning the bookshop to the music that played when Aziraphale got his books back in 1941 (just fuck me up David Arnold), they come in and tell him so. "I don't understand", says Crowley. Because it should have worked. Why didn't it work?
They tell him, of course. "You need to talk to each other. Say what you're really thinking." But here's the thing about communication: you have to learn it. You need to get the hang of expressing your feelings without blaming your partner, and separating intent from impact, and staying away from getting defensive and lashing out. No one has ever taught Aziraphale and Crowley how to do this. It's like Maggie and Nina put Crowley in front of a loom and asked him to recreate the Bayeux Tapestry. He doesn't have the skills; he's always going to get it wrong, even if he tries his hardest.
And he does try. But that's where Maggie and Nina the mirror couple, rather than Maggie and Nina the displacement relationship or Maggie and Nina the Greek chorus, come in. Aziraphale, as Nina, has just ended an incredibly toxic, invasive relationship with Heaven. A relationship that invaded every facet of his life, isolated him, and prevented him from being close to anyone else. "Rebound mess," Nina says. Aziraphale is a rebound mess. He's transferred the responsibility for his emotional wellness to Crowley. Crowley is the person he calls when he's in trouble, or (and this is key) when he wants to report a clever/ good thing he's done, or when he's bored. (At no point did Crowley reference Aziraphale calling him for a solicitous reason-- another problem.) Crowley is meant to take care of him. He forgets, I think, that Crowley is a person with his own wants and needs, just like Maggie and Nina are people with their own wants and needs who don't appreciate being messed with. (I think things would have been much different had Aziraphale BEEN THERE for Maggie and Nina's talk with Crowley, but he wasn't.)
And Maggie-as-Crowley? Lonely. Behind on rent, at risk of being evicted (it's important to note that Aziraphale saves Maggie from losing her record shop, as he couldn't save Crowley from losing his flat). Pining. Awkward. Revolving around Nina like a planet, to the extent that we don't get much of an impression of her otherwise. They realize, there at the end, that they both need to round themselves out before jumping into a relationship. Aziraphale and Crowley need that too. They need to take time apart and learn to be healthy on their own. Unfortunately they don't have the skills to get to that conclusion in a healthy way, so it all explodes in their faces and everything falls apart.
Aziraphale tries to teach Nina and Maggie to dance as a substitute for communication. Nina and Maggie try to teach Crowley communication as a substitute for the dance they've been doing around each other. That's the reason they're a part of the plot: they exist to demonstrate the way Aziraphale and Crowley might have succeeded in forging a better dynamic. Sadly, the boys' dance is too practiced and they got sucked right back into it.
It's okay, I think, that Nina and Maggie's storyline never really went anywhere. It wasn't supposed to. It's an allegory, not something that needs to stand alone.
I'm not really getting the Aziraphale hate because even without all the pressures of religious brainwashing etc etc we've literally just seen through his eyes:
- Crowley radiating joy at the sheer wonder of the universe only to be crushed by orders from up high
- Those orders being the ONLY reason Crowley fell. Aziraphale knows (and has always known) that Crowley fell simply because no one wanted to listen to his ideas.
- 6000 of Crowley clearly aching to do good in defiance of his own nature
- Crowley admitting how desperately lonely that defiance is for him
- Crowley being BETTER than Aziraphale at morality and making Aziraphale better as a result
- Evidence that no one is ever going to be chill with Angel/Demon relationships unless they are too powerful to be stopped and/or willing to vanish
- That they are never going to escape the monitoring of heaven/hell (they literally were *stalked* by both sides the entire season) so they can't just live unnoticed among humans
- Even during their last few years of 'freedom' Crowley has still been desperately unhappy. He's at the 'what's the point of it all???' stage BEFORE anything bad happens in S2. For all he talks about the preciousness of their life, Crowley is radiating misery during his freedom whereas Aziraphale actually seems happy.
Like why WOULDN'T Aziraphale see this offer as the perfect solution? Crowley can get what he always wanted - to do good without anyone stopping him, with Aziraphale helping. It can be exactly like the nebula scene forever - only this time Aziraphale can just bask in Crowley's joy.
From his pov he is sacrificing his own life on Earth for THAT.
Oof we are in the last 20% of a very angsty slow burn, kiddos.
so we've all acknowledged that in series 1, Crowley wears glasses around everyone else (including Aziraphale!) because he's not comfortable with people seeing his eyes
and then in series 2, he makes a point of taking off his glasses in the shop, showing how he's comfortable around Aziraphale.
but it's not just that! Crowley's eyes reflect his demon status, and he's become comfortable being a demon around Aziraphale, because they're on the same side now.
and at the end, when Aziraphale rejects him, and establishes that in his mind, demons=bad, and Crowley's good because he's still an angel deep down, Crowley puts the glass back on. Not only to put the emotional barrier/safety net back on, but to hide his demon-ness once again. Because he's no longer comfortable being a demon in front of Aziraphale.
NO listen! for i have the true Crowley kiss analysis!!
He put distance as soon as Aziraphale pushed the idea of coming to heaven on him again after Crowley's confession. he already knew this was over, but when Aziraphale stops him they take second shots at explaining themselves to each other.
"we can be together!"
This is when Crowley tenses up, even if I cant for the life of me find a gif of it. Aziraphale thinks he's saying the same thing Crowley was during his speech about going off together, but he isn't.
"I don't think you understand what I'm offering you"
"I think I understand better than you do"
Crowley knows they couldn't really be together in heaven, not the way he wants. They could only be colleagues, essentially go back to the way they were working on Earth before. Sanctioned this time, but still just the same.
"you idiot. we could've been. us"
Crowley starts trying to describe exactly what the difference is. no nightingales, we could've been us, anything of their coded language that might get through to Aziraphale. but everything falls just short.
So he tries just what he did in the first episode. "just breathe, breathe and count to ten. that's what humans do"
he tries the human way.
it still doesnt work.
Funny (and kinda revealing) thing is that for years I’ve stuck to that moody picture of the Doctor walking through the clouds/smoke to the TARDIS as my lock screen wallpaper. Then I went through a couple of official posters for GO S1, then reverted to my trusted and almost monochrome Ten… and now this.
I see some parallels, so to say.
The last panel is truly frightening!
Keep it up @neil-gaiman, it will be over soon