#Brielzebub

[ineffable-romantics]

✨Good Omens Crack 3✨ Ineffable Threequel

Made a third thing!

✨Good Omens Crack✨ (for post-s2 healing💔)

✨Good Omens Crack 2✨ Celestial Boogaloo

[ineffableigh]

If I ever cosplay anyone I honestly might do s02 Beelzebub. Love their design!

[casmick-consequences]

also i apparently know that beelzebub x gabriel is called "ineffable bureaucracy" but i like brielzebub more so that's what i'm gonna call them myself

[reloha]

Yes, Gabriel was so ready to accept his fate and go to Hell, but then the Metatron said they were going to wipe his memories and everything changed.

Beelzebub's thrones

So I haven't seen anyone talking about this at all, but maybe I'm just missing posts. You can see Gabriel's & Beelzebub's plan all along was to get him kicked out of heaven and come rule hell by nope'ing Armageddon-again in the first episode!

How? It's right there when Beez calls Crowley down to chat very agitatedly in S2E1 about finding Gabriel for "us". They have actually dragged two thrones (out of the S1 judgement scene no less) into their office(?) and staged them side by side, as equals. They are sitting in one already, waiting for the second to be filled any minute by their missing fallen angel! Only they get Crowley instead. It gets even cuter/sadder when you see the same office again in S2E3 when they ask for updates on Gabriel, and this is how the thrones are looking now.

They've been slowly losing hope over Gabriel's smooth descent to hell, so they're just trying not to think about it, and have thus shoved the chair in a corner under some paperwork, trying really hard not to think about him, but still RIGHT IN FRONT, FACING THEIR THRONE. Clearly not working so well then. And then in S2E4, when they are at their lowest point, Beez has moved to a completely DIFFERENT room with only one throne, and it's all alone in a spotlight. They can't even stand being in the ROOM with both thrones anymore, it hurts too much. It's just then when Shax makes their move, and offers to bring them in by any means necessary, including absolutely f%$?ing all politics and going to war over a book store. And they say YES. Poor Beelzebub. (As an extra art direction piece of genius in this scene you can see one lone soul in a similar spotlight staring up at - earth, maybe? - looking like how beelzebub feels on the inside. T_T)

[ineffable-romantics]

I don't go here, but y'all Ineffable Bureaucracy shippers really missed the mark by not calling them Brielzebub lmao

[fagziraphale]

can you imagine if season two was released one episode a week and we had to put up with the brielzebub truthers and their overanalysis of "look at beez's face here ze's worried about gabriel" and "gabriel says the best part about using the books as fly swatters is that they don't work, it means something that he doesn't want to kill flies" and we would have been like ugh you are so annoying you can't actually believe this and then they were right

[reloha]

@mbat: #good omens#the system hurts everyone. even the people running it

@thatgeeklover: #which is why Aziraphale thinking he can fix things HURTS JUST A TINY BIT (tiny bit is large)#can he do it? should he do it?#but also back to the Ineffable Bureaucracy nonsense#there’s a counterpart of it about how Beelzebub asks if they should be told if a job is well done#when they were delighted to have given something to Gabriel#neither system works and both drain so much from them

I’ve been thinking about ineffable bureaucracy (as one does) and I’m just. It helps illustrate just how much the system heaven and hell have hurts everyone. Like, obviously Aziraphale and Crowley and Muriel have been very much traumatized and hurt by the system in place and more specifically by heaven, but it’s so, so easy to just say oh, we’ll of course they’ve been hurt by the higher ups, not necessarily the system..

but then we see Gabriel and Beelzebub interacting. And obviously I don’t think Gabriel magically became a good person when he fell in love with Beelzebub. He still was very much horrible to so many people but especially Aziraphale (shut your stupid mouth and die already etc etc).

and you start to see how even the ‘higher ups’ have been damaged. Gabriel can give, can care (regardless of how little he does it), but then he’s given something, something that to Beelzebub is probably so small it hardly matters, and he… doesn’t know how to respond. Doesn’t know what to say. “Nobody’s ever given me anything before.”

the illusion starts to slip. Gabriel lived in power, lived in, overall, comfort, and safety, but we start to see how, despite this, he has never had someone care enough to give him a gift. to give him something because they care and they want to do something nice for him.

there is no softness in heaven. There are no friends or loved ones, there is no caring. And it hurts everyone. Even the supreme archangel.

and by no means am I calling for people to be sympathetic towards Gabriel, nor am I trying to excuse his actions, but it’s undeniable that the structure of Heaven has hurt every being it’s ever been forced upon or upholded by.

I don’t know. Maybe this is all nonsense, but it was just… a detail I really appreciated.

[ineffable-suffering]

Aziraphale, I love you. But you lied. And here's why.

Okay. I’m not gonna beat around the bush for too long. It’s time now for me to also throw my try at a personal Good Omens Season 2 Magnum Opus into the mix of already existing magnum op..i? Opusses? (Smited? Smote?)

If I’m honest, it isn’t fully my own magnum opus, as I read this meta not too long ago that made me go: „Oh! My God! That’s it!“ And I’m pretty sure a lot of other people have clocked this too by now. Of course I’m not saying it’s the objective truth but after having mulled it over for many endless nights and days, wading through the onslaught of coffee theories, body swap theories, The Metatron re-writing the Book of Life theories and many, many more, this is the one I think is most plausible and, if you look closely, most obvious.

And it goes as such: Aziraphale lied.

To all of us. All of them. And most of all, to Crowley. He lied to him. Well, he sort of did and also sort of didn’t. He certainly didn’t tell the truth. At least not all of it. I hear you ask: “OP, what the fuck are you talking about”. I answer you: Let’s start from the top and under the cut.

(Small note: this meta ended up being way too large for Tumblr, which is why I will redirect you to an external doc at the end of the post, where I have written it all down nicely and accurately. It's about 35 digital A4-pages long, just in case you want to save it for later.)

(Word count: 12.831 | Approximate reading time: 50 minutes)

Let’s start with a short recap of what happens before the Metatron crashes the bookshop party and everything goes to shit. The proper visuals for this are in my Tumblr post but I am absolutely convinced that right up until when the Metatron comes to take Aziraphale away and talk to him, the angel is fully ready to get into Crowley’s Bentley-chariot and finally ride off into the sunset (or Alpha Centauri-set or whatever). You can see it in his face and body language. You can see when the penny drops for him that a) Crowley loves him b) he loves Crowley and c) they can finally start their happily ever after. Aziraphale realizes this all throughout said Brielzebub reveal in the bookshop. And he’s such a lost cause once he does. 

I mean, look at that. Look at it. This (very shitty recording, sorry, I'm not tech-savvy enough to avoid the Amazon Prime screen recording blocker) is the very second Aziraphale realizes hat Crowley loves him. When he hears him suggest Alpha bloody Centauri as a getaway for Gabriel and Beelzebub, as Crowley has done to Aziraphale for so, so many times now. He finally understands what Crowley was trying to tell him with that all those times.

Aziraphale realizes this all throughout the Brielzebub reveal in the bookshop. And he’s such a lost cause once he does.

Right when Crowley suggest Alpha Centauri as a nice getaway spot to the two, Aziraphale looks at him and he gets it. That Crowley has loved him, has been loving him for millennia. Truthfully, they've both known that for a long while now. But there's a difference between knowing, wanting, craving and actually being able to finally have something. And that's exactly what we see on Aziraphale's face here. This is it. This is where it all starts working out for Crowley and him. This is were they can start their eternity together.

So from that second on, Aziraphale only has eyes for Crowley. He keeps physically pawing at Crowley with complete heart eyes, as if to say „Look, look, that’s gonna be us too! Finally!" He’s actually so smitten that he doesn’t even hear what Crowley is saying when he asks Shax if he can have back his apartment now because he’s sick of living in his car. (Also, what way to drop that bomb right in this moment Crowley, lmao). 

Once the Metatron comes in, the first thing Aziraphale says is that they don’t need to talk because „he’s made his position quite clear“. He doesn’t even want to talk to the Metatron, because in his mind, he’s already made the choice. Actually, he made the choice way before the bookshop showdown. For starters, I’m convinced that the Jane Austen Ball actually never was for Maggie and Nina but for Crowley and him (you can read more about that here). And apart from that, for this whole season we have seen Aziraphale trying to advance his relationship with Crowley romantically and domestically and move them to the literal next base (our car!). And after everything he just witnessed with Brielzebub, the final nail in the coffin of ethereal-infernal romance being possible, his choice is absolutely crystal clear: It’s Crowley. It’s always been Crowley and it always will be Crowley. And now it can be Crowley. They can be an us.

The whole of Season 2 is such a massive learning curve for Aziraphale’s character, with him remembering all those important pivotal points of his past,  and this very moment is the peak, with him not only understanding that Crowley loves him (because he certainly knew for quite some centuries now) but accepting that love, letting himself have that love, being allowed to want that love and taking that love and starting their new and final chapter with it. Nevertheless, the plot clock ticks for them. The Metatron saunters into the bookshop, evil and stinky as Metatrons do, and urges Aziraphale to come with him with his whole Take The Coffee schtick, which I will get into later. And Aziraphale, immediately sensing there’s Something Up, does. Can’t really turn down someone as high-ranking as the the voice of God, after all. Even if you were currently already planning how you were going to elope with a certain red-haired serpent of Eden. 

he next time we see Aziraphale on screen, it’s so painfully evident on his face that he is neither happy nor excited. Not even the slightest bit. We’d know if he was, thanks to Mr. Michael master-of-microexpressions Sheen. None of the usual “Aziraphale is happy”-signs are there. No blinding eye-smile, no giddy wriggling, not giggles and gasps. No, when the Metatron tells Aziraphale to „go tell your friend the good news“, his expression looks like this:

I’m gonna go out on an entire limb here and say: That does not look like someone who’s absolutely tickety-boo hyped to tell his demon soulmate that he just got the juiciest promotion and that they can both be angels and live happily ever after in ethereal eternity now.

This, folks, looks like someone who knows exactly that the news he has to break right now, are going to be tickety-shit awful and very upsetting to said demon soulmate. And already, from that very short snippet of conversation, we can tell that Aziraphale isn’t really given a choice by the Metatron. Because while the Metatron does tell him that he doesn’t have to „answer right away“, he immediately follows it up by: „Go ahead and tell your friend the good news!“ Very distinct and definitive choice of words here. It’s “good news” because it’s already been decided. Because it’s already a done deal. There is no “yes, no, maybe”. This is the only choice he’s giving to Aziraphale. Because it’s ‘Coffee or death’. 

And he already gave him the coffee. 

***

Tumblr won't let me continue this over a certain character limit and I am not even remotely done yet – so, I feel like this is a good moment to redirect you to the continuation of this insane meta before we're in too deep. You can do so right here!

I'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions about this once you've fought your way through it. Hope you have a good time with it!

[blackbonnet]

the url brielzebub was free?! (i just took it)... this site is really dying ain't it :(

[brihemoth]

Do you have siblings named Brilial and Brielzebub?

Yup! Brilial is my older sibling and Brielzebub is my younger sibling so it goes “Brilial, Brihemoth, Brielzebub”

[reloha]

What makes me lose my shit every time I think about it is that Gabriel probably still believes that children come from ribs. RIBS. Imagine if he and Beelzebub are out somewhere and see a happy family with like eight or nine children. And then Gabriel just goes, “Wow I didn’t know humans have that many ribs.” And then he has to explain his thought process to a very bewildered Beelzebub who just facepalms and realizes they now have to give Gabriel the actual talk.

[ineffable-romantics]

Made a thing!

[fagziraphale]

ok azcrow miracles together are insanely powerful

but so are brielzebub miracles

what if its not the power of love? or if it is its the power of love specifically between an angel and demon?

the metatron wants to split them up bc theyre too powerful together. what if his offer to restore crowley wasnt just something he knew crowley would refuse but an actual win-win situation? crowley and aziraphale apart would be much less threatening, but so would them together as angels

and what if, as a contingency plan, knowing (because of his refusal) that crowley would blame aziraphale and it would further separate them, the metatron restores crowley himself?

but crowley is unpredictable. he tracks aziraphale down to yell at him about it. aziraphale, of course, doesnt know how it happened, but thats not important now anyways, theres a second coming to stop, and if they were so powerful together before even when trying not to be, surely if they just work together now they could completely avert it

the miracle doesnt work. and it hits aziraphale what the problem is. and crowley wants to be a demon again anyways, so they head on up to heaven to sort it out, but they know they have to work around the metatron now and the other archangels don't trust or like him either. turns into a bit of a heist. easy enough, just need to sign some paperwork

the paperwork doesnt work. someone above aziraphale (and there's only two people above aziraphale) has specifically granted crowley immunity. but they need this to work. so aziraphale fills out the forms a little differently. and crowley realizes too late he's signing his own damnation

[sayuri-of-the-valley]

No this is great actually. Bc Aziraphale and Crowley spent the whole s2 changing sides/positions on the screen too. And we never managed to figure out a pattern. Maybe bc there wasn't one. We assumed it meant something bad (which is fair bc of that ending), but maybe it doesn't. Maybe throughout the whole season (minus the Final Fifteen I suppose) it meant the same as it did for brielzebub.

Someone might have made this connection already but in episode 6 of s2 I noticed that Gabriel and Beelzebub are shown right from the beginning of the flashback continuously swapping sides

and I think this may have been a deliberate choice to contrast with aziracrow and highlight that ineffable bureacracy are on equal footing right from the start and had abandoned notions of "different sides". We know that aziracrow being shown on different sides of the screen is symbolic of when they have swapped sides/positions in relation to heaven and hell, good and evil, etc. So perhaps its the same for ineffable bureacracy?

[ineffable-suffering]

i think we don't talk enough about the fact that babygirl neil intended the S2 brielzebub anthem 'everyday' by our dear buddy holly to be the actual titel & intro song of S1.

like, don't get me wrong, i have nothing but adoration for the absolutely wonderful title song by david arnold (seriously, in every aspect possible, it fits like a musical glove to the entire series)– but can you imagine how entirely different and, at that, ridiculously sappy and romantic the GO intro would have looked, visually, with 'love like yours will surely come my way' playing in the background!?

instead of the current edgy, animated mass movement to the cliffs of armageddon to, that title sequence would have been an ineffable husbands top-100-most-romantic-moments diashow (held and clicked through by God Herself, probably).

click, click, click, click, "every day, it's a-getting closer, going faster than a rollercoaster–"

[easy-briezy-beautiful-blog]

The meet the artist that no one asked for but I’m still posting now even though the whole thing has died down. *sigh* oh well 😅

Catch me on twitter, where I tweet random things and sometimes art: Brie_ster