#make no mistake neil i do not forgive you for all the tissues used today

[ktempestbradford]

This post is 100% a spoiler for Good Omens Season 2 finale and therefore it's going under a cut

There's a writing craft thing I wanna talk about in regards to the characters.

The thing I absolutely loved about that last bit of the last episode is how it stomps all over several annoying (and, I feel, lazy) tropes one encounters in mostly Western (not exclusively) stories about people who love each other or who realize they have a specific kind of love for each other, and that is:

Not Talking To Each Other

I remember as a kid being really frustrated with the soap operas I was forced to watch (cuz my Gramma babysat me after school) because even at 8 years old I could tell that every conflict could be solved by people having a damn conversation. I thought this was only a problem in soaps and only because they had to keep the drama going 5 days a week every week forever somehow.

Sadly, no.

So when Maggie and Nina come to the shop and tell Crowley that they can't be getting together because it's not the right time but that they did like each other and all they had needed to do was talk to each other honestly, I was screaming:

YES! YAAAS! FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT!

But then I got real nervous when Aziraphale stopped Crowley from saying what he was gonna say because I worried that Crowley then wouldn't say it. Because that's so often what happens, right? The person was gonna make that declaration, say what they feel, be truthful and lay it all out, but something interrupts them, makes them despair or distracts everyone, and then they hold in what we, the audience, know they were going to say. I was honestly prepared for that.

Then it didn't happen.

I about lost it. Even in the moment I realized the tears streaming down my face were only half for the way A and C were being torn apart just as Crowley said out loud what we all knew they both wanted and half for how effing thankful I was to @neil-gaiman for the narrative choice.

Because it's a brilliant one! It's the right one! And it doesn't cause the problem I think writers who make the tropey mistake think it will.

I think that many a writer would have thought that if Crowley said what he said then Aziraphale would have had to choose to stay on Earth with him because his feelings were just as strong, and to choose otherwise meant he didn't want to be with Crowley as badly as Crowley wanted to be with him.

But, as we saw, that is not the case at all. I will forever love Michael Sheen for how he said "Come WITH me!" 😭

With film and TV and the stage writers have to rely on the actor to be able to get this kind of scene across and not just on their own writing skills. It still takes some excellent skills. But this entire scenario could have gone down like a lead balloon if the actors hadn't been so very in tune with the material and each other.

You can accomplish this in prose as well! Because two characters can want to be with each other and also want two very different things out of life. They can talk to each other and Say The Thing, yet still not end up together (for now) if that's where you want the narrative to go.

There are so many annoying ways narratives "usually go" that are based on writers thinking that they can't have characters act in certain ways, otherwise there won't be any conflict or obstacles to move the story along. My biggest pet peeves is characters doing Stupid Things even if they aren't stupid people because the writer needs for them to be stupid to make some plot thing happen.

A recent example: Locke & Key season 1. I'm not going to go into a huge explanation. The short version is that there's a cave by the seashore which is famous in the tiny town for an incident in the pre-smartphone days where some teens went into it not knowing when the tide was going to come in. When it did, the kids were trapped and some drowned.

(This isn't what truly happened, but it's what everyone thinks happened.)

Late in the season, a character gets her friend group to go into that same cave and, lo, they realize they're about to die because the tide is coming in unexpectedly and they lose a bunch of expensive equipment. Because no one, not a one of them, checked when the tide would come in on their smartphones.

Nope. NOPE. I about turned the whole thing off right then because it was the 5th stupid thing a character had done, and it was far too egregious to ignore.

This kind of thing makes characters feel like dolls and action figures being moved around instead of actual people. You can't replace characterization with an action sequence, people.

Because I'm so annoyed with this kind of thing, I actively avoid it in my own fiction. Ruby Finley was the first time I had the space to really work it. There are several points in the story where I needed Ruby and the gang to do something that would move the narrative along, yet not in a way that ignored the realities of their lives and their personalities.

Spoilers for my book ahead.

The first time is when Ruby asks Holly to help use her drone to look in Witchypoo's windows. Holly very sensibly says that they can't go do that willy nilly because the people in the neighborhood will see them. Instead of not thinking it through, the girls formulate a plan to do the thing when they're least likely to be seen.

They get caught, not because they didn't think it through and weren't careful, but because they saw a monster bug and freaked out.

When the kids realize the giant bug is in the basement of the abandoned school, they don't rush in to find it. They formulate a plan that covers the dangers they assume they're facing. When it goes wrong it's not because they weren't prepared, but because they didn't have all the information they needed to truly assess the situation.

I find it so much more interesting and compelling when characters are thwarted even when they act wisely -- or think they're doing so. Just as I find it more compelling and heartbreaking when characters actually talk to each other and say what they need to say and they're still torn apart (if they need tearing apart! I'm also fine with them making declarations and then being happy as long as it didn't take 50 million years/pages for this to happen).

Bottom Line: Can we have more of this please? Let's have fewer stories about characters not talking, not thinking, not being smart, not doing what an actual person would do simply because the writer won't let go of their idea of how the plot is supposed to go or unwilling to add the emotional context that allows the plot thing to happen even without the Nots.