#also i can imagine aziraphale has no clue how to deal with a kid having a meltdown but crowley probably does

[butchtwelfthdoctor]

ok so while we can agree that aziraphale's 'dressing up as a gardener' look was pretty weird, if you think about it he a) has no clue what gardeners actually do probably, cos crowley is the plant one, and b) he probably read The Secret Garden and decided that that must be the standard average gardener ever.

cos we know he has very little sense of modernity and is still stuck in the 1800s, he likely thinks that long overgarments like that are still the norm for outdoor work, and re: the Secret Garden assumes that all gardeners are a bit strange and offputting and talk to bugs and birds and stuff. like he probably thinks he's doing just fine.

meanwhile crowley is off getting more Gender and singing lullabies about destroying the earth they probably both had a great time actually

[blkholeinfinity]

God in Good Omens: Why Her Plan is Ineffable Headcanon

I’m a polytheist so my view on gods/goddesses/deities give me a... different view on Good Omens’ God than those who grew up in Christianity and/or Judaism have (probably)? I try to reconcile it with what little I DO know of the Old and New Testaments, but God in the Good Omens miniseries in particular is a fascinating character to me.

So, time for some Good Omens God headcanon!

Disclaimer: I am unlearned in Christianity and Judaism beyond what pop culture has taught me, and what was forced at me from living in the United States. I’m not trying to offend anyone with this headcanon; I simply see the Good Omens God in the same light I see the gods and goddesses and deities of the religion(s) I follow. I am willing to learn more, but I am also unwilling to go out of my way to learn it because of how much Christianity is forced down my throat on a daily basis (‘Murica). So feel free to comment/reblog to point out inaccuracies or specific things from the mythos to support either your stance or mine, but please understand the knowledge base and personal experience I come from. If I say anything inadvertently offensive, please help me learn by pointing out what I said and why it was problematic and I promise to do better next time. As long as you’re not rude, I won’t be mad.

Tl;dr - I welcome criticism on my headcanon, but please be patient and kind with me about it and I promise I will return the favor. ❤️

This mini-essay is going to be focused on the miniseries as God is more of a character in the show vs. the book.

To start, God has an interesting character development through human history — both in real life and in Good Omens. She started off as an easily angered, violent, and vengeful deity: Satan/Lucifer and the demons rebelled (to varying degrees) and she cast them down; Adam and Eve gave into temptation and she threw them out of Eden; the whole Noah’s Ark thing; and many other (Old Testament, iirc?) examples, I’m sure. But then she chilled out, it looks like, around the time of Jesus and probably because of Jesus.

I think this was when her Armageddon Plan changed. Originally, it was absolutely going to be a war against Heaven and Hell like everyone thought. Then, she decided to make it personal against Satan instead (because she decided he was who she was really mad at, and all of her other grievances stem from his initial rebellion - for better and for worse, but she’s still salty) and started moving the pieces into place to ensure that the Antichrist would rebel against him at the crucial moment.

He needed to feel how she felt when he rebelled, was her reasoning. Because God can be petty. Just because Jesus forgave his enemies didn’t mean she needed to.

Over time, she also grew to love humanity for all our stupidity, goodness, and yes, wickedness, much in the same way as Aziraphale and Crowley albeit as a distant observer. I’ve heard Christians say that she made humans in her image, and she probably started to see that - that all of their flaws are her flaws. And maybe even started to see humans as being even better than herself. 

Then she looked at her own angels and realized that they (all but one) were dicks. And at the demons and saw that they (all but one) were also dicks but she was less surprised and disappointed about that.

So before, when she decided not to clue in anyone, not even the Metatron, to her change in plans, it was for the sake of making sure no one interfered with the Antichrist. Once she realized that all the angels and demons were assholes, she decided that they deserved a good trolling, too.

(Okay, maybe she let ONE person know her new plans: one Agnes Nutter. Because God wanted to be mostly hands-off in the affairs of humanity, because she kind of felt bad that when she did get hands on, it was only to punish them, and she was always ruthless in her punishments. She didn’t really trust herself — but also she wanted to test the humans one more time to see if they were really worthy of being saved. More on that in a bit.)

But the centuries are long and she got bored. So the plan was in part a lesson to be taught to all the immortals, in part for the lulz. (Because in my head, God is a trickster. Sort of like a mix of Odin and Loki from Norse mythology. And iirc, there is historical evidence that when Christianity came to the Nordic countries, Odin was kind of rolled into the Christian God in order to more easily convert the masses?)

Which brings us to our favorite angel and demon: Aziraphale and Crowley.

I have a few different mindsets as to why she didn’t punish Aziraphale for giving away the flaming sword. A part of me feels like she might have been particularly fond of him in that “aw look at my cute puppy, I can’t stay mad at that face” sort of way (because, I mean, look at that face). Another part of me feels that she was too exhausted from her anger at Adam and Eve, at Satan and the demons, to care anymore, like “ugh I can’t deal with this right now whatever” and then just never got around to it. I have other thoughts, too, that he was following her Ineffable Plan, but that doesn’t fit with the theory I’m presenting here... or maybe it does? That maybe she felt bad for Adam and Eve, hindsight is 20/20, and she was like, “Well, okay, I don’t feel so guilty anymore. Good job, angel. Not that I’m ever going to admit that to you.”

But outside of that, I don’t think she was paying too much attention to what Aziraphale and Crowley were doing on Earth until after Jesus, and with her now more benevolent attitude towards humans (again see: because of Jesus), she appreciated them a whole lot more and started to work her into the New and Improved Armageddon Plan.

Which is why she didn’t mind that they were, as Aziraphale infuriatingly put it, “fraternizing.” She saw in them a new potential - for humans, for Heaven and Hell, and for herself. And that’s why she let them have Agnes’s prophecy on what they needed to do to survive their respective punishments from the other angels and demons. And also yes because she still wanted to troll the angels and demons because they deserve to be trolled.

(And yes, I do prescribe to the headcanon that God ships it, too, and set the events of Armageddon into motion because she was sick of the slow burn mutual pining of these idiots like the rest of us. But for her, that was more the cherry on top than the true goal. To incorporate the two headcanons, the timing corresponds with “you go too fast for me” because I imagine shortly thereafter was when the American Air Force base near Tadfield was established, so she began moving the chess pieces from that point forward because FFS AZIRAPHALE ARE YOU KIDDING HER. Maybe Armageddon came a little earlier than originally planned, or maybe the timing was Just Right and therefore coincidental, I can get behind both.)

So, for the next Armageddon when it’s all of Heaven and Hell against all of humanity, she’s counting on Aziraphale and Crowley to fight on behalf of humanity. And also that’s why Aziraphale never became a fallen angel and never will become one; unfortunately, Crowley has to remain Fallen, because forgiving him in an official capacity isn’t in the cards for what she’s planning next... right now, anyway.

Because I think the real reason the Ineffable Plan is ineffable is because God keeps changing her mind and therefore the plan. So yeah, this is her plan right now, but give it a century or two. It might change again. And maybe that’s when Crowley would be forgiven in the official capacity because it’s necessary for God’s plan. Or something else entirely, who knows. That’s for fanfic writers to speculate.

But I mentioned about how Armageddon was also to test humanity. And that’s all tied up in Adam the Antichrist.

She wanted him to go to the wrong family. Send him to the most boring, normal family and ensure that he would receive no interference from Heaven or Hell and just... see how he turns out. If he became the prophesied Antichrist, humanity fails, time to start over. If he turned into a normal kid, “Human Incarnate,” then humanity passes. And needless to say, humanity passed the test, because without even knowing what they were doing, they transformed the embodiment of evil into the embodiment of a human child. And that’s what God wanted to see.

That and the Antichrist screaming at Satan, “YOU’RE NOT MY REAL DAD.”

Which, again, was God’s real goal with Armageddon anyway. It was always about getting back at Satan. And now she has. Everything else was a happy bonus.

But there was more to it than that. See: Agnes Nutter and her descendants, and why they were the only ones entrusted with the real Armageddon plan. Now, this makes my headcanon shaky - because if God knew that things were going to go down exactly the way that they did, even for things having little to nothing to do with Armageddon, why even bother testing anything at all? I mean, it does go back to the whole, she’s testing humanity via Adam and Adam was the one Unknown. (Which means that Agnes’ second prophecy book was always meant to be burned, but that’s a whole other theory.)

It could also be that she was going to make sure everything happened exactly the way that they did. If her plan was written out in full in Agnes’s book, maybe it was a checklist of things she intended to happen, and certain things would be left up to interpretation. After all, some prophecies were very specific (these were the ones she was absolutely sure she was going to make sure came true), and others were less so (these were the ones more up to interpretation). Which then begs the question: how much of how things went down did God actually intend? Is she just clever enough to have planned everything to the last detail? Or did she encourage things along a certain way to make sure that they happened exactly according to her plan? (For example, moving the pieces into place so that Shadwell would see Aziraphale talking to the Metatron to be sure that the prophecy “Three shall ride as two” came true.)

Who knows? It’s ineffable, after all.

And Anathema was always meant to lose the book, and Aziraphale was always meant to find it, because this was the exact moment God wanted Aziraphale and Crowley to actually become involved in the Plan. Now that the Antichrist is... well, not all grown up, but at the apparent proper age for Antichristing, now Aziraphale and Crowley can start “interfering” with the Plan. Because they can’t hurt anything anymore. Yeah, they were about to kill Adam, but that was also part of the test for humanity, I think: would Madame Tracy stop them from doing it? And she did.

As for why Agnes’s prophecy forced Anathema and Newt together, idk, I’m going with God was bored and trolling. But honestly, getting into the specifics of plot points wrt God’s Plan is beyond the scope of this essay. Maybe I’ll give my thoughts on it later. Maybe if you actually made it to the end of this essay you’ll give your thoughts?

Seriously though, if you made it to the end of this mini-essay, you win a few dozen gold stars. And thank you so much for sticking with me if you did.

Tl;dr - I think God’s plan is ineffable because she keeps changing her mind about what she wants to do, and she just... fits her new agenda in with the old somehow so she can act like she “planned it like this all along.” And she’s trolling everyone. And testing humanity. And really is fond of Aziraphale and Crowley.