#I am going insane over the parallels between all the relationships in good omens

[nerdylittleguy]

"we're on opposite sides!"

"we're on our side!"

[nonsensical-ramblings]

Hello OP! Oh my god. I swear on my mother I am not here to ask your opinions or thoughts on anything because I am oh so familiar with the post-hyperfixation coma, and if I ask anything of you, it will be a very gentle request for you to go eat some eccles cakes and soak your brain in a warm lavender-scented bath.

What I am here to do is say that you are right!! You're right!! You're right, you're right, you're right, and I know this with frighteningly rock-solid certainty because the way you described your experience watching GO2 is, word-for-word, exactly how I felt. From the moment you said something odd was going on, and you assured us that you loved returning to the world of Good Omens and thoroughly enjoyed the new season, but at the same time you couldn't reconcile with yourself that creeping sense of strangeness. The strangeness which built and built and built, like a sound so low you couldn't hear it but you could feel it in your bones, and it was just getting LOUDER and delight turned to puzzlement turned to bewilderment turned to incredulousness and you were going INSANE, and why? What was Neil doing? You came away from it wanting to love it, but... "I felt like there was something I didn't understand about it, and so I couldn't yet understand how I felt about it either." Wow. Yeah. Are you inside my brain?

Your theory (and your theorizing, writing, organizing, and formatting skills to be honest) are just unbelievable. Genuinely. And I'm so relieved that you know that about yourself and you say it, because you deserve it. When you introduced the idea that Metatron could be going back, editing history, and manipulating Aziraphale and Crowley's relationship, I cried a little. Just a couple tears, but you actually made me cry with that revelation, because it was just so jarring how obviously true it was.

Enough gushing and rambling though, I have a point!! I'm keeping my promise and I am not going to ask you to tell me things. You've told me 16k words worth of things, and I feel like a new person now, so to give your think-machine the break it deserves, I want to tell you things! And, okay, hear me out- I am begging you to not take this next sentence the wrong way, because nearly everything about your analysis was perfect and astonishingly comprehensive and obviously it doesn't need this detail to function, but Neil came to our houses and personally handed us a big shiny ribbon cut-to-size that perfectly wraps all of this up and by god am I not going to tie it into a bow.

HOW DID YOU GLOSS OVER THE GIANT FUCKING OTHER ELEPHANT IN THIS ROOM THAT IS THE PARALLEL BETWEEN HOW AZIRAPHALE AND CROWLEY ARE MANIPULATING NINA AND MAGGIE'S RELATIONSHIP AGAINST THEIR WILL, AND HOW THE METATRON IS MANIPULATING AZIRAPHALE AND CROWLEY'S RELATIONSHIP AGAINST THEIR WILL OH MY GOD

*pant* *pant*

Okay. Okay okay okay. I'm sorry I'm just SO excited about this. because this is what tipped me off!!!! I fucking thought to myself "wow, this whole business with them trying to get Nina and Maggie together kind of feels... wrong? It's making me a tad uncomfortable. It started off cute but now it's just getting more and more complicated and it's not really working and I don't think either of them are exactly... benefitting from this? And C & A are kind of bad at creating these little scenarios to make them fall in love, Crowley is oversimplifying things into clichés like sheltering together in the rain and Aziraphale is- wait is he... okay, a ball, interesting choice, is he forcing everyone to play along with this weird little themed party? Is he literally getting into their heads and changing their thoughts and making them happy against their will, making them dance, making them speak and dress like they're in Pride & Prejudice? What the actual fuck, Aziraphale??? Man, I... y'know, he's been acting really weird for a while, I feel like I don't even know him anymore, I wonder if... Aziraphale and Crowley are being manipulated the same way they've been... trying to manipulate Nina and Maggie...?"

"NAAAH" I fucking said to myself, OP. "NAH there's no way, that's just too out there, it would be weird and wouldn't make any sense. It would be a dumb way to deus ex machina this."

LIKE I??? I SAW IT TOO! I know you're right because I saw it too, I just wasn't enough of a mad genius to actually follow through and see the light. And now that you probably have gone and figured it all out, we have the tools to make this parallel thing an open-and-shut case.

The Metatron and Aziraphale & Crowley both:

Meddle in the relationship of two people for their own personal gain

Do a pretty bad job of it

Use old and tired clichés to craft different scenarios to influence these people

Literally manipulate their minds and the minds of people around them in order to pull off their end goal, making people act out-of-character

Make everything Really Fucking Weird in the process

So yeah. The whole coffeeshop AU thing was all foreshadowing. It was a smaller-scale, more digestible dynamic to prime us for how that same situation will work between Crowley, Aziraphale, and the Metatron, and it was SO LUDICROUSLY OBVIOUS. To say I'm flabbergasted with Neil's writing is not even beginning to scratch the surface of the emotions I'm feeling right now.

Thank you, OP. Thank you and your spectacular mind for making sense out of this delightful, but supremely confusing and jumbled season. I'm going to rewatch it again tomorrow night and I cannot wait to see everything in a new light with my third eye wide fucking open. I don't know what else to say other than just... thank you. You've put my head back on my shoulders and knocked a good helping of sense into it.

P.s. A couple other things I noticed:

Not only does Crowley ignore and talk over Aziraphale when he says he has a suggestion for dealing with the demons, I found it even more egregious that Aziraphale CONTINUOUSLY ignored and dismissed Crowley's warnings about said demons as they were arriving at the bookshop. Talk about Mr. "Who Cares About Tiramisu?" Fell. It was genuinely hard to watch as he pulled Crowley onto the dance floor instead of listening to him speak, because that's not how the two of them work! Like you said. The poor angel's mind has been scrambled like an egg.

You also mention how a couple people express confusion about what's going on in the story. I'd like to add to your list: remember when the Metatron showed up to take a walk with Aziraphale, and Crowley waved them off saying something along the lines of "go ahead, this day can't get any weirder"? That line just struck me when I first heard it because I was practically shouting at the screen "YES!!! I KNOW!! Why is this all SO FUCKING WEIRD!!"

And finally I can't help but notice this season has an uncanny fixation on three things. Magic and sleight of hand of course, with the magic show, lies ("I'm a demon, I lie, It's what I do", and Aziraphale lying to the other angels in Job), and mysteries and clues (Jane Austen, and also Aziraphale and Muriel and Furfur and his zombies doing investigative work). It's like this show is hitting us over the head telling us "HEY!!! Come take a closer look!!! Please! This story is chock full of magic and mystery and clues and you need to look into that! Not everything is as it seems!!!"

The Magic Trick You Didn’t See: Being An Analysis of Good Omens Season 2

(or: Neil Gaiman, Your Brain is Gorgeous But I Have Cracked Your Sneaky Little Code And Have You Dead To Rights*) (*Maybe)

***

Soooooo I just spent the last 48 hours having a BREATHTAKING GALAXY BRAIN EPIPHANY about Good Omens Season 2 and feverishly writing a fuckin16,000 word essay about the incredible magic trick that @neil-gaiman pulled off. 

Yes, it’s long, but I PROMISE your brains will explode. Do you want to know how magic works? Do you want to know what Metatron’s deal is (I’m like 99% sure of this and it’s EXTREMELY FUCKING GOOD)? Do you want to know about the Mystery of the Vanishing Eccles Cakes and the big fat beautiful clue I found in the opening credits? Do you go through the whole inventory of Chekov’s Firearm & Heavy Artillery Discount Warehouse? 

Here is the essay, go read it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/193IXS11XN46lziHRb6eUpM17yK0BQkRqke1Wh64A_e0/ When ur done u can tell me I’m an insane crackpot, and u know what, i won’t even be offended

In case you don’t know whether you want to bother reading the whole enormous thing on google docs, I’ve put the first couple sections of it under the cut. JUST TRUST ME OKAY, HEAR ME OUT, THIS IS VERY EXTREMELY COOL, NEIL IS GOOD AT HIS JOB–

Keep reading