it has taken me until today to interpret the story/moral of sodom and gomorrah within aziraphale accepting jim into the bookshop and giving him sanctuary. and in his decision to return to heaven. are you serious

What’s your favourite line from good omens?

The invisible and unbreakable one that joins Crowley and Aziraphale.

Celebrating Terry Pratchett Day.

On what would have been Terry's 76th birthday, we are filling today with Pratchett joy and invite you to join us.

We'd love to see your routes through Discworld on the #terry pratchett day tag - you can download images to share your favourite books and recommended place to start in Discworld via terrypratchett.com.

You can also find recipes from Nanny Ogg, templates to recreate your own favourite Discworld cover, and ways to get involved for all ages. Whether online or offline, we hope your day is full of Pratchett magic!

If this is not setting up a third shot in season 3 where they don't need a third person in the middle then idk maybe I should not have picked visual media analysis as one of the subjects for my art and film diploma final exam

neil gaiman, reasonably: “i dont read headcanons or fanfics of my characters, that way it doesnt accidentally make its way into my writing, also i dont feel like it”

david tennant, being Very Professional in interviews: “yeah theyre married. what about it”

michael sheen, laying on his stomach swinging his feet in the air, giggling, as he scrolls through the azicrow tag on ao3: “heheheheh >:)”

Godfather (1972) / Good Omens S2E4

Crowley: I’ll take care of you

Aziraphale: It’s rotten work

Crowley: It's just hot chocolate, angel... Go back to your book

I was shelving the books by the first letter of the first sentence. - Good Omens, 2x02

"It was a nice day. All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn't been invented yet. But clouds massing east of Eden suggested that the first thunderstorm was on its way, and it was going to be a big one." - Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

I just think that it'd be funny if, after all this speculation about how horrible Crowley's Fall was and his drunken rambling of "a million-light-year freestyle dive into a pool of boiling sulfur", it turned out he just had the longest most boring elevator ride ever down to basement Hell and then stepped in a very small puddle of warm sludge of questionable origin when the doors opened.

a thought from last night still pacing circles in my head. heaven has established that they can punish insubordinate angels, as far as the thwarting the apocalypse and 'gods plan' goes, with demotion (and possible forced amnesia but anyway). gabriel is the highest angel there is, and him saying nah to the final, final end? to the mailroom with you, my guy.

but aziraphale? full annihilation, and nothing less. just literally burn him out of existence. and when that didn't work, metatron comes along, dismisses the BOL threat, and is all 'no no, let's get him playing for the team'. metatron thinking that he can neutralise aziraphale by getting him on-side instead.

they can't kill him with hellfire, they don't want him falling and siding with hell, and the BOL is (possibly) a dud threat, so the only option to maintain the status quo is to make him voluntarily side with the team that stands to lose the most if aziraphale continues as he is. so yeah it's not news to anyone but personally i hadn't quite grasped just how fucking terrified of him heaven actually is

Remembered this exchange and it ties in so nicely to what I was saying the other day about Aziraphale being outside of the Metatron's very narrow binary experience.

In this scene, Aziraphale is convinced he's a fallen angel now, a demon, because of the actions he chose to take - lying to thwart the will of God. Crawly tells him he's not a demon and he won't tell anyone about what Aziraphale's done.

But it's enough to put the doubt in Aziraphale's mind. "What am I?"

By the time the Metatron persuades him to return to Heaven, he's not one of the obedient little automatons of the Host, doing exactly what they're told by rote. He knows he's not a 'proper' angel anymore. He's known it since this point in their shared history. He had that realisation on this beach, after he'd partaken of gross matter, defied the plans of Heaven, collaborated with a demon to perpetuate fraud and lied to his managers, all within the space of 24 hours.

He's known it from the moment he agreed to the Arrangement. He's known it in the way they both danced around the danger they were in. He knew it when he backflipped out of Heaven to possess a human, because he's realised what Heaven and Hell try to deny: angels and demons aren't all that different at all.

There's a fantastic line in the book when the armies of Heaven and Hell turned up at the airbase that points out that only an expert would be able to tell which were angels and which were demons.

Crowley's comment in 1941 about shades of grey is exactly the space that he and Aziraphale inhabit in a world surrounded by binaries. They are not one thing or the other. They're somewhere in the middle and Heaven and Hell haven't realised that yet. You separate them, they don't go back to being a Good Angel and an Evil Demon. You separate them and they are still them: going along with the powers that have authority over them as far as they can.

And we've reached the point where Heaven is about to find the limit to how far Aziraphale will go for it. And exactly how far he'll go for everything and everyone else. They've seen little glimpses of it with him arguing with the Metatron, abandoning his post and questioning the Great and/or Ineffable plans in front of the Supreme Archangel and Duke of Hell. But this is another level. This is the actual end of the world that he loves and he knows it. He's had the scrolls of Revelations for centuries. He knows what's coming.

We have reached the line in the sand, the point where Aziraphale has gone along with Heaven as far as he can. Now? Now, he has reached that line and stepped smilingly up to it, to do what he has done every step of the way, from the moment he gave his sword to the first humans to protect themselves.

Our angel is, above all else, a guardian and he will protect his world.

To the world indeed.

Mary the Bentley reference images part 1. I already shared a ton a couple of years ago, but I was visiting friends and family again earlier this week, so this time I was taking requests from the good omens reference library discord, art discord, and "in love with my car" discord (where I shared all my previous reference photos of her). So this time I've got some specific request references which I didn't think to get before. Things like driver's seat POV, 90 degrees side-on, back-on, and nose-on, the boot (including tool kit and petrol filler cap in the boot), sunroof from inside and above, and of course the back seat, because I know why you all want that one. Post 2 coming shortly.

David tennant begging neil gaiman for more scripts vs michael sheen browsing ao3

Discworld/Good Omens parallels ramble

Exactly what it says on the tin! These are some fun little Discworld/Good Omens parallels that my brain picked up on at various times (usually 3 a.m. or thereabouts... Thanks, mum, for the persistent insomnia...)

Mild-to-moderate spoilers for Wyrd Sisters, Lords And Ladies, Men At Arms and Carpe Jugulum below the cut.

In A Life With Footnotes, the official biography of Terry Pratchett, Rob Wilkins mentions that when he was in school, a young Pterry wrote for English class a story (sadly lost to the mists of time) about orcs attacking a vicarage in full Jane-Austen-spoof fashion. Now, given how the Whickber Street Shopkeepers' Ball turned out, it seems reasonable to assume one of two things: a) Neil Gaiman did not know about this story when writing S2 and the parallel is an ineffably delightful coincidence (a bit unlikely) b) Neil Gaiman *did* know about this story when writing S2, and the nod to Pterry happened to work really well with the plot (seems a bit more likely). Either way, the parallel is there and giving me all of the warm fuzzies <3

There's an idea in Discworld, forming a significant part of the moral backbone of the series, that's very succinctly summed up by Granny Weatherwax in Carpe Jugulum: "[S]in [...] is when you treat people like things. Including yourself." This is absolutely at the core of what's wrong with Heaven and Hell and God and Satan in Good Omens; the leadership and culture of both organisations/cults treat everyone -- angels, demons and humans alike -- as disposable things to be used and toyed with and discarded or destroyed if they start having the temerity to be imperfect or form opinions or thoughts of their own.

There're two characters in Discworld who parallel Aziraphale surprisingly strongly: Magrat Garlick (of the Lancre witches) and Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. -*Magrat is viewed as a bit of a soft, soppy 'wet hen' by the other witches, but she is still a witch, with all that that implies. She also has at least one scene in every book in which she appears where she does something extremely badass and witchy; for example, turning an ancient wooden door back into a tree, or (very pertinently to GO) delivering a literally iron-clad punch to the face of a villain who's mentally torturing her with her own insecurities. Likewise, Aziraphale seems to mostly be viewed as a bit dull and wimpy by the other angels we see (though Magrat still has the genuine respect of her witchy peers) but he is still an angel -- a Principality -- with all the powers, steadfast guardianship and bloody-minded stubbornness of that rank. The Metatrash might not be vulnerable to iron in the same way as Discworld elves, but you can bet that his attempt to break Aziraphale and bring him into line is going to backfire just as spectacularly! *For the parallel between Aziraphale and Captain (well, Corporal, at this point in the Discworld timeline) Carrot, the novel I have in mind is Men At Arms. At one point, Vimes is being held at crossbow-point by a villain, and has a bout of internal monologuing about how, if someone has you at their mercy, you'd better hope they're evil, because that way they'll take time to gloat and mock you so you'll have an opportunity to think of a way out; a good man will kill you with barely a word. Carrot does exactly that at the climax of the plot, putting his sword through the villain and the stone pillar behind said villain without saying a thing. Now, Aziraphale might not quite have Carrot's 'incorruptible pure pureness' tendencies, but he is -- for all his flaws -- a good person. If he knows that something needs to be done to prevent an evil outcome, he will DO it without hesitation. He knows how to use a sword, too, and if That Frickin' Elevator Smile Of Tranquil Fury is any indication, the Metatrash is in far deeper doodoo than he realises! Related to the above, The Smile also reminds me of the old adage, "beware the fury of a patient man." (Well, man-shaped being in this case...) Very appropriate for our careful, thoughtful angel -- it would not surprise me (much) if Metatron were to depart the plot of S3 with a flaming sword pinning him to one of Heaven's columns (probably won't happen, but I can dream, eh?)

Hope you enjoyed reading all that :D

NEW THINGS ABOUT SEASON 3 👀❤

“I knew where I needed them at the beginning of Season 3; that was something that I’d known for a very long time,” Gaiman told TV Insider at the Writers Guild Awards in April 2024. “I remember sitting with John Finnemore, with whom I co-wrote Season 2 and talking maybe in 2019, 2020, about the shape of the story. And John was saying, ‘Well, we need an ending. We’ve got everything planned out, but we don’t have the last 10 minutes. How is it going to end?’ And when he asked me, I knew exactly how it was going to end and I explained to him that it was going to end with a kiss and suddenly everything fell into place.”

“I’m writing it currently, so I don’t know what I can say other than I got a video message from David Tennant this morning asking me where the scripts were, because he wants to read more of them. He’s only read the first three and he’s very excited to find out what happens next,” Gaiman told TV Insider in April 2024. “It’s going to be fun. Some people that you love will be coming back; some that you expect, some that you don’t. And it’s more like the high-paced, high stakes madness of Season 1, I think, than it is like the sort of gentle, romantic, funny, sweet Season 2.”

I couldn't get this out of my head

This really ought to top every, “Best Opening Lines,” list. The 21st century reading public is sleeping on Dorothy L Sayers.