can good omens make me experience an emotion? (preamble)
Well. Okay. Not just any emotion. The Emotion that this one other cursed, haunted television program elicited in my sixteen-year-old self.
The bad, lethal, horrible emotion that compels you to join Tumblr dot com while your frontal lobe is still developing. The one that kept me invested long after the show got. Um.
In 2019, Amazon’s Good Omens, adapted from the novel Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and the late Sir Terry Pratchett, made a lot of people experience That Emotion. So I observed. On Tumblr dot com, where I was still hanging out without a fully-developed frontal lobe.
The thing you must understand about the Tumblr experience is that its sole constant over the decade I’ve been there has been the inescapable pairs of dashboard-obliterating guys (usually both white, almost always both cis) from whatever movie or TV show has just spiked in popularity that people ship. I’d say the average set lasts around two months or so, and then they get evicted — to some kind of retirement community, I imagine — to make room for the next one. They are not usually in a textually-supported romantic relationship in their media of origin, (one time it was just one guy and his nonexistent exact genetic clone) so fan content is of the essence, and that’s where the deluge of posts comes in. I’ve never seen an episode of Merlin, or Teen Wolf, but I know more about their respective famous ships by osmosis than I know about most of my acquaintances from college.
The novel Good Omens is (partially) about an odd couple (in the traditional sense) named Aziraphale and Crowley (an angel and a demon, respectively) who try to prevent the Biblical end times because they like Earth, they like the people on it, and eventually they realize they like hanging out with each other. The extent to which they like hanging out with each other has made a lot of people very intrigued and been widely regarded as a gay move.
The thing you must understand about Good Omens (the show) is that it’s a collaboration between Neil Gaiman the human guy himself, and Terry Pratchett’s Absence. Efforts to adapt the novel before Pratchett’s death did not come to fruition, and Gaiman refused to go it alone until a posthumous letter from Pratchett changed his mind. From there, Gaiman operated on a WWTD (What Would Terry Do?) principle regarding every update to the source material. And apparently one of the things Terry would do is leave the nature of the protagonists’ relationship unchanged.
I didn’t watch Good Omens when it crash-landed on my Tumblr dashboard in Summer 2019. Not because I was concerned about experiencing The Emotion, but because I was a smug little shit who spent that entire year all, “Didn’t you dumb sheeple know that they make TV with actual gay people who serenade each other with Tina Turner now?” I could get The Emotion from ethical sources. You know what that is? Growth. Or something.
And the thing you must understand about Sherlock is that in addition to wreaking Carrington Event-level havoc on my unfinished psyche, it also fundamentally altered the way that Tumblr, and by extension the internet in general, thinks about queerbaiting. See, that’s what we all thought the writers were doing. And it’s indeed what they were doing, but there was this brief detour between the eyebrow-raising events of Series Three and the insulting dumpster fire that was Series Four where quite a few people did not think it was queerbaiting. They thought it was a long game, at the end of which creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss would go down in history as the first people to portray Holmes and Watson in an explicitly romantic relationship. Literally, they said in press that the upcoming fourth series would be “television history.” And like, I swear to god I’m not biased or anything, but I think most people, given the choice between “the two main characters kiss” and “it turns out the events of the entire show have been orchestrated by the eponymous character’s secret evil genius sister that he forgot about who lives on a maximum security prison island” would select the former as the more likely outcome.
So this was kind of the last straw for havers of The Emotion. No matter what you shipped, you were not winding up in another figurative Saw trap. Everyone broadcasted total self-awareness and enlightenment. Whenever that month’s white cis guys du jour tiptoed within a ten-foot range of the line between queerbaiting and undeniable romance, most people reacted with hysterical suspicion. Nobody was ever falling for that shit again.
Except then Neil Gaiman got a lot of people to fall for that shit again.
This article is an immaculate read, and explains the situation far better than I ever could, but here’s the gist: Good Omens premieres. It’s gayer than the book, according to people who have read the book, but Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) and Crowley (David Tennant) ultimately do not end up in a romantic relationship. I thought Gaiman blamed this on his steadfast adherence to Pratchett’s wishes, because that’s what everyone was saying back then, but I wasn’t able to find a source. What he does is metaphorically pat people on the head and say a lot of cloying, noncommittal shit about how the angel and the demon can totally be gay if you want them to be. Even though they don’t do anything undeniably, irrefutably gay onscreen. All interpretations are valid, but some interpretations are harder to textually justify than others. Everyone is disappointed but not surprised. The end. I wish!
A unique… feature, let’s call it, of the Good Omens fandom is that Neil Gaiman is on Tumblr. He’s right there. He can see your posts and your M-rated fanfiction and (most horrifyingly) your criticism. He can interact with it. The result? A panopticon. So if you want to call him homophobic, he can put you on blast. On the other hand, if you defend him against allegations of homophobia, he might reblog it and thank you! And then you’ve gotten a good grade in fandom.
Remember I said no one wanted to fall for queerbaiting ever again after Sherlock? One way to achieve this is denial. If you narrow the parameters of what constitutes queerbaiting, you can make your guys into an exception. Suppose the ambiguous, homoerotic, unconsummated nature of Aziraphale and Crowley’s relationship is not cowardice, but a result of Gaiman’s earnest effort to portray a queerplatonic relationship between two male-presenting genderless beings. I mean, that’s not what it is. But we can pretend!
Unfortunately, some people pretended too close to the sun (Gaiman’s field of vision) and got their interpretation retroactively canonized in the most disingenuous manner possible. Fed up with the homophobia allegations, (and like, I don’t entirely blame him) Gaiman publicly latched onto the agender queerplatonic reading of Aziraphale and Crowley and was all, “I meant to do that!” No, he did not. You know how I know that? The show has an actual nonbinary character. A nonbinary character played by a cis actress who is a Horseperson of the Apocalypse and embodies the concept of pollution, which, you know, is its own can of worms, but a real nonbinary character who is nonbinary on purpose in the text. And they were always intended to be nonbinary in the show, (questionable implications aside) but Gaiman didn’t claim the same of Aziraphale and Crowley until he realized he could rake in kudos from the LGBT community for his nonexistent efforts.
The subsequent discourse was insane. One camp (who had Neil Gaiman on their side) was all, “Wow, tell me you don’t take queerplatonic relationships seriously without telling me you don’t take queerplatonic relationships seriously,” and the other camp was all, “The average viewer in Middle America who is not extremely online has no idea what a queerplatonic relationship is and will just assume the characters are cis men who are friends with each other, because it is at no point stated otherwise,” and the first camp was all, “Not true, my grandma who wrote Spirk zines in the ’60s thought it was pretty gay!” and the second camp was all, “But is it gay enough to disturb a homophobic grandma?” and the first camp was all, “LOOK, THEY HELD HANDS FOR 0.02 SECONDS IN AN EXTREMELY BLURRY BACKGROUND SHOT AND YOU CAN’T SEE IT AT ALL BUT TRUST ME!” and Neil Gaiman was all, “FUCK YEAH THEY DID, YOU’RE WELCOME!” and the second camp was all, “You are being played by a man who used his Goodreads account to armchair diagnose his wife with borderline personality disorder and tell her he wanted a divorce,” and the first camp was all, “HE WAS HACKED.” And this went on and on all summer until, like clockwork, a new example of Schrödinger’s queerbaiting expelled Aziraphale and Crowley from the spotlight, never to be spoken of again.
UNTIL.
See, the real takeaway here is that the chemistry between Good Omens’ two leads is potent enough to have sparked this kind of infighting, and this (the chemistry, not the infighting) made the show so popular as to merit a renewal by Amazon, and Season Two is due out next month. A trailer dropped on June 7th, the general reaction to which was, “Oh god the fucking discourse.” And having been on Tumblr for many centuries, I’ve seen several contentious shows return from hiatus with much less fanfare, and with a lens of nuanced hindsight applied. We are inoculated against the discourse. We should be inoculated against the dis-
[LINK THAT CONTAINS LEAKED SPOILERS FOR GOOD OMENS SEASON TWO. CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK.]
And I use the term leaked loosely, because Amazon did this. Of their own accord. Their official Twitter account posted a (now deleted) video containing this image, (hence the context-free text overlay) and Neil Gaiman was fucking furious. He made it clear that Amazon was solely at fault, that they took advantage of his participation in the ongoing Writers Strike to make executive decisions such as this without his input, and requested that the image not be spread. (Oops.)
His loyal Tumblr following, meanwhile, turned their ire not towards streaming giant Amazon, (of human rights violations fame) but in the direction of garden variety haters such as I. Gaiman asked them to do no such thing, but the allure of his approval remained. At least the Season One discourse was in defense of aspec and nonbinary people. This is just the panopticon again! Like yes, it’s kind of rude and inconsiderate to spoil an upcoming season of television, but the distributor of said media is the one that did it. They’re the ones that Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman basically told people to be mad at, but instead the whole debacle has just reanimated the horrible discourse monster of yore.
And once again, I took a look at this nightmarish reaction to something I do not know or care very much about, and decided I wanted in.
SO. As we bid Pride Month 2023 farewell, I am going to watch all six episodes of Good Omens Season One, and see if I can unlock the same Emotion that caused so many of my fellow Tumblrers to lose their goddamn minds and swear undying fealty to Neil Gaiman. May God have mercy on my soul.