#the four horsepersons

[ngkiscool]

Next week is Hanukkah, a lovely Jewish holiday that includes lighting candles, singing and lots of Sufganiot (fried donuts). To honor the holiday, this week is dedicated to Jewish Omens. All the stories are SFW, mind the CW.

More Jewish Omens can be found in the collection with the brilliant name Good Omens is Jewish and so are we, enjoy and have happy holidays!

Next week is open for suggestions - please send recs for stories that focus on supporting characters (as in, Aziraphale and Crowley are not the main ones). Self recs are encouraged!

Black and White and Red and Blue by hapax (hapaxnym) - 597 words, rated G, focusing on the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse. Summary: Just anthropomorphic personifications of atavistic terrors, hanging out and looking at the holiday lights.

Counting Sweets by @hkblack  - 639 words, rated G, focusing on Nanny Ashtoreth, Brother Francis and Warlock Dowling. Summary: “Five,” he said finally, before his face lit up brightly. “I’m five!”    “And so you are!” Nanny laughed. Warlock smiled brightly, proud of himself for his new found math skills, and hurriedly scooped the chocolate coins to his own growing pile.

Home by Art Kosch (Koschei_B), Koschei_B - 666 words, rated G, focusing on Nanny Ashtoreth, Brother Francis and Warlock Dowling. Summary: Warlock misses his nanny and the gardener.

before some weird light comes creeping through by OrdinaryRealities -  465 words, rated G, focusing on Warlock Dowling and OC.                    Summary: Warlock tries to articulate what Hanukkah looked like when Nanny and Brother Francis celebrated it.

Apples by Deadlydollies13  - 528 words, rated G, focusing on Eve, Crowley and Aziraphale. Summary: Eve prepares for Rosh Hashanah by making every apple dish she can think of.

Four Cups of Wine by borealowl - 56K words, rated G, focusing on Crowley, Aziraphale and OC. Summary: Crowley is terrified of losing Aziraphale again, but unable to confess his feelings. He follows Aziraphale on an errand to America, where they end up invited to a seder and spend the next year being invited to other holidays and gatherings on both sides of the Atlantic. Is Crowley's pining painfully obvious to everyone but Aziraphale? (Yes.) Are the rabbi and her wife going to try and get them together? (Yes.) How many Jewish holidays will these two ineffable idiots be invited to before they finally admit their feelings to each other? (Read it and see!)

Ella Qui Guérit by Sarielle - 5.7K words, rated G, focusing on Crowley, Aziraphale and Raphael. Summary: An angel, a demon and an archangel meet up at a bookshop in SoHo to kvetch. (Just one interpretation of the Archangel Rafael.)

Chag HaAsif (Festival of Ingathering) by @5ftjewishcactus​ - 1.1K words, rated T, focusing on Warlock, The Them, Crowley and Aziraphale. Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley celebrate Sukkot with their godchildren at their cottage in the South Downs.

G-d of My Father's by Thedupshadove - 2K words, rated G, focusing on Newt, Anathema, Crowley and Aziraphale. CW - antisemitism mention, anti-black racism mention, lynching mention, holocaust allusion. Summary: An interesting fact about Newton Pulsifer comes further to light. Newt, as usual, frets.

The Hanukkah Visit by TogetherAgain - 6.4K, N/R, focusing on Aziraphale and Elijah. CW - period-typical homophobia, PTSD, child birth, panic attacks Summary: Hanukkah, 1913. Aziraphale gets a visit from the prophet Elijah. He comes with candles, latkes, conversation, advice, and a warning. Aziraphale has a lot of thinking to do.

Bonus - master list with all past recommendations!    

Authors - if you wish that your Tumblr account will be tagged, instead of the AO3, please comment or DM me the handle. Thanks :)

Thanks for reading, and remember - sharing is caring!

[peculiaritybending]

There seriously is not enough appreciation for the them and the four horsepersons in the good omens fandom for my liking.

[turnipwithatophat]

Ok, little rant here, I feel like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are so underrated! I need more content of the four. I CRAVE it. All of their designs are TOP NOTCH, and really demonstrate their corresponding sin. Like Pollution?? WAR?? Foaming at the mouth.

And, I have a question.

Did the four of them die get inconveniently discorporated during the finale of season 1? Where did they go? Knowing they’re 100% NOT going to Heaven, did they go back Hell or erased completely? I feel like they’re not dead, since Earth kinda needs them, but I just don’t know.

[hjbirthdaywishes]

September 22, 2023

Happy 48 Birthday to Mireille Enos.

[colapointo]

was reading about the mayflower pilgrims and came across this treasure trove of names

losing my mind over this list of 17th/18th century quaker names

[in-love-with-my-car-zine]

The Minor Four Horseperson’s Bikes... now, there are some bikes with a story behind them. Pigbog, Greaser, Skuzz and Big Ted were definitely causing their own kind of chaos before they decided to follow after the real Horsepersons. After all, Big Ted hid out from the law in a hotel for a while with nothing to but read a Bible left behind by some dude named Gideon. This is why he’s so well-versed in Revelation. Too bad these four didn't make it into the show. Don't ask me why three guys in this gif have the same bike, but the fourth rider's is different. I have no idea.

Sign-ups are happening now. Or you can call them applications. We don't care. We just reserve the right to refuse entrance to anyone if we feel they will not be a good fit. Click here for the form.

[kimberleyjean]

The Price of a Life: Death and Dying in Good Omens

In this meta I want to take a closer look at one of the prominent themes I’ve spotted running through Season 2 of Good Omens. While S2 has been billed as the gentle and romantic bridge towards S3, in a few ways it actually had darker tones than S1. If that’s your cup of tea - read on!

What is the value of a human life? 

This is a question which has been pondered by philosophers far back into the reaches of history. More recently, economists have attempted to put a price on human life, which is then used when justifying the various societal costs associated with governing a population (i.e. healthcare, education). These two different schools of thought are sometimes at odds. Immanuel Kant proposed that humans have invaluable dignity, but not a price - being “not merely something to be used for the ends of others, or traded on the market”[1]. In opposition, value of life calculations, by definition, put a price on the value of an individual.

What side does Good Omens S1 take?

In Good Omens Season 1, one of the significant moral dilemmas, at least for Aziraphale and Crowley, was about whether or not to kill the antichrist.

I've never actually... killed anything. I don't think I could. Not even to save everything? One life... against the universe.

Following their failed attempts to influence Adam’s childhood development, once at the airfield, Aziraphale believes it to be a foregone conclusion that Adam should be killed - eliminate one to save the many. Of course, their attempts fail and Adam faces off against Death, the Four Horsepersons and Satan himself, eventually getting his own way. However, the moral question posed about killing Adam never reaches a definite conclusion.

With the flashback scenes that S1 added to the book, we are shown this same theme when Aziraphale and Crowley attend the crucifixion. The crucifixion is shown in agonising detail here, and gives us an empathetic look at the sacrifice of one life for, presumably, the overall good of humanity. (Although, what metaphysical impact Jesus’ death had in the Good Omens universe isn’t exactly clear). We see Aziraphale and Crowley stand idly by while the Great Plan is enacted.

Does S2 do things differently?

While Good Omens S1 dabbles lightly in the philosophical question about the value of life, Season 2 picks up this thread time and time again - sometimes attaching some numbers!

One of the key mysteries of present-day S2 is the mammoth miracle performed by Aziraphale and Crowley. Registering on the scales at 25 Lazari, this is 25 times the cost of human life in Heaven's accounting system. Presumably, one Lazari is the amount used when Jesus resurrected Lazarus of Bethany four days after his death. As we'll see, this attaching of numbers to human lives is then repeated throughout each of the minisodes.

Firstly we have the flashback sequence with Job and his children. Aziraphale makes the argument that just doubling the number of new children wouldn’t adequately compensate Job and Sitis for the loss of their existing children - since they “quite like the old ones”. The value of human life is not a simple accounting exercise and one life cannot be substituted for another, in the case of the people you love - they’re priceless.

We see this same idea demonstrated again throughout the Resurrectionist minisode. We first meet Elspeth MacKinnon when she is exhuming a body to sell, in order to buy her and her partner a slightly better life worth living. However, the surgeon Dalrymple is not above haggling over human remains. To him this is a business transaction, in which dead bodies are worth no more than five pounds a pop. To Dalrymple, the cost of saving future lives is that others should risk the grave gun gathering bodies which he may then dissect.

Aziraphale is first opposed to anyone being dug up, but then is won over by Dalrymple’s argument, at least until Wee Morag is killed and suddenly for sale. As Crowley says, echoing the Job minisode, “it’s a bit different when it’s someone you know”. In opposition to Dalrymple’s accounting exercises, and, indeed, the 90 guineas with which Aziraphale buys Elspeth's life, Crowley is offering an alternative view. A life is of higher value when it is someone we, personally, know and care for.

We also witness this theme during the 1941 flashback / Nazi-zombie minisode. The magic shop owner warns Aziraphale that he is about to take on a death-defying trick - one which people have died trying, no less! “Your life is worth a lot more than seven pounds five shillings,” argues the shopkeeper. Instead, it turns out that a customer’s life is worth about 27 pounds and five shillings, since he more than willingly accepts that offer - “on your head be it!”.

As human beings, the price we are willing to place on an individual life, how much we are willing to sacrifice for that person, is all dependent on how well we know them.

“He’s just an angel I know”

But it’s the knowing that makes all the difference.

“It’s a bit different when it’s someone you know”

So, for his life, what price are you willing to pay?

What if it was “one life... against the universe”?

Lastly, death is the price that all humans must pay, no matter what. As the Metatron asks at the end of S2 - “Does anyone ever ask for Death?”. But those are thoughts worthy of a future post.

Thank you to everyone at the @ineffable-detective-agency as always, but especially @lookingatacupoftea and @embracing-the-ineffable for their feedback on this post.

[1] Nussbaum, M., & Pellegrino, E. D. (2008). Human dignity and bioethics: essays commissioned by the President's Council on Bioethics. JAMA, 300, 2922.

[marie-m-art]

A recurring feature that I like in Neil Gaiman's and Terry Pratchett's stories is the mundane and ordinary juxtaposed and blended with the extraordinary and fantastical.

There's a lot of humour derived from this, but it got me wondering if the concept also works as a theme under the surface of the humour, so I'll explore that idea a bit here with examples from Good Omens and Discworld.

First a look at the humour side, because it's fun, and so that people know what I'm referring to:

-In the opening sequence of Good Omens S1E1: an angel and a demon (fantastical beings) are conversing like ordinary people, using idioms like "Well that went down like a lead balloon", against a setting of biblical proportions.

-The Archangels' meeting in S2E6 discussing first the Second Coming ("Nah!"), and then next on the agenda is the cleaning roster.

-The visuals of heaven and hell in general - it's the subversion of expectations on what these places "should" look and function like - offices, clipboards, contracts, bureaucracy. This is humour and seems like theme/motif at the same time; the visual cues say a lot about heaven and hell and their role in this story.

-Death from the Discworld books owns an umbrella stand and a hairbrush, likes kitty cats, and rides a white horse named Binky.

-In Small Gods, the Great God Om is incarnated as a tortoise:

And it came to pass that in that time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha, the Chosen One:

'Psst!'

Next, looking at the concept's thematic or metaphorical potential.

The following excerpt gets me thinking about how people put outsized importance on mundane things, and about normalcy bias kicking in when a narrow mind is confronted with extraordinary events.

From Good Omens book (about RP Tyler):

It is a high and lonely destiny to be Chairman of the Lower Tadfield Residents' Association.

[…]

Your car is on fire.

No. Tyler just couldn't bring himself to say it. I mean, the man had to know that, didn't he? He was sitting in the middle of it. Possibly it was some kind of practical joke.

Next, a scene that makes me think about retreating into the mundane to cope, after being confronted with an extraordinary event.

From Good Omens S2E6:

Nina: Oh, God, I should've been open half an hour ago.

Maggie: How can you think about that after all this??

Nina: People need coffee, I sell coffee, it's my coffee shop.

And next, thinking about how the minutiae of the everyday distracts us from paying enough attention to big world issues (a bit of normalcy bias again too). 

From Good Omens book (when the horsepersons of the apocalypse arrive at the airbase):

No one stopped the four as they purposefully made their way into one of the long, low buildings under the forest of radio masts. No one paid any attention to them. Perhaps they saw nothing at all. Perhaps they saw what their minds were instructed to see, because the human brain is not equipped to see War, Famine, Pollution, and Death when they don't want to be seen, and has got so good at it that it often manages not to see them even when they abound on every side.

Next, two excerpts from Discworld books. At first I was thinking along the lines of needing to focus on the everyday because we can't spend all our time focusing on big existential stuff, or, how we take the wonders of nature for granted because of busy lives; but then I realized, I think it's actually a clever inversion of what we consider to be ordinary - that just being alive, against all odds, in the vast universe, is actually quite extraordinary.

From Small Gods:

And one of [the brain's] functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual.

Because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins […] And no one would do much work.

Gods don't like people not doing much work. People who aren't busy all the time might start to think.

Part of the brain exists to stop this happening. It is very efficient. It can make people experience boredom in the middle of marvels.

[more going on in the above than just the subject of the post, but I'm narrowing the focus here]

From Hogfather:

THERE IS A PLACE WHERE TWO GALAXIES HAVE BEEN COLLIDING FOR A MILLION YEARS, said Death, apropos of nothing. DON'T TRY TO TELL ME THAT'S RIGHT.

"Yes, but people don't think about that," said Susan. Somewhere there was a bed …

CORRECT. STARS EXPLODE, WORLDS COLLIDE, THERE'S HARDLY ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE WHERE HUMANS CAN LIVE WITHOUT BEING FROZEN OR FRIED, AND YET YOU BELIEVE THAT A … A BED IS A NORMAL THING. IT IS THE MOST AMAZING TALENT.

And a quote from Terry Pratchett himself, inverting ordinary/extraordinary (the whole video is great, by the way):

Within the story of evolution is a story far more interesting than any in the Bible. It teaches us amazing things: that stars are not important - there is nothing interesting about stars. Street lamps are very important, because they're so rare. As far as we know there's only a few million of them in the universe. And they were built by monkeys! Who came up with philosophy, and gods.

He also mentioned here that his impression after reading the Old Testament was: "If this is all true, then we are in the hands of a madman!" Off topic again, but relevant to some of what went into Good Omens I think.

Not sure if I've proved anything here, and that wasn't the goal, but it was fun to find some quotes for my brain to play around with!

[anthonycrowley]

human endgame is a sticky subject because a lot of people think it goes against the fundamental point of the book (or show, i guess) but i personally don't believe that. or like, i guess i do, but in a way that it kind of makes sense anyway. i think the fundamental point of the book, the reason we're all here, the reason aziraphale and crowley are the compelling characters in this story instead of, like, the four horsepersons of the apocalypse, is because you see how human they have become via their internal monologue and history. they're basically human. and i think some people are like 'well if they're basically human anyway then what's the point' the point is that there are fundamental parts of being a human that they cannot experience unless they go all in. my hashtag theory is there's going to be a choice and they're going to choose to be human. like in fucking pinocchio or some shit. and it's going to be hashtag moving and hashtag beautiful and go on to piss off soooooo many of the tumblr girlies.

[bracketsoffear]

Pollution (Good Omens) "Literal horseperson of the apocalypse and representation of things like global warming and plastics in the water and oil spills and other cataclysmic manmade change. They took over from Pestilence (who was obviously a corruption avatar) when he retired because he wasn't relevant anymore. Also their costume design slaps they literally bleed oil.

AM (I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream) "AM is a supercomputer created during the Cold War that gained sentience, ultimately using its powers to kill all of humanity except five people who it tortures for all eternity. When one of these individuals kills the other four to set them free from this torture, he is punished by being turned into a limbless, mouthless blob. While AM’s torture of the five humans touches on other fears, the main fear it represents is the complete destruction of humanity by a tool humanity itself created, which is very much the theme of extinction."

[theniftycat]

oh no, all the four horsepersons of the Fandomcalypse are upon me!

Meta, Fanfiction, Fanvideo, and Fanart.

that's it, I'm now lost to the world.

[rareomens]

Rare Omens 2024 Day 2

We can't get enough of these Good Omens characters:

The Horsepersons of the Apocalypse!

Who will feature? A pair? A trio? All four? Share your fanworks of these two and tag us.

Post to the Rare Omens AO3 collection: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Rare_Omens

[hjbirthdaywishes]

September 12, 2023

Happy 41 Birthday to Yusuf Gatewood.

[trashboatprince]

so what is exactly Good Omens?

Good Omens is the story about an angel and demon who have lived on Earth since the Garden of Eden six thousand years ago, and eleven years before the main events the demon is given the task of taking a basket to a satanic nunnery in order to start the first steps of The End of Days. The demon and angel then spend eleven years trying to raise the contents of basket, a baby, but they fucked up. They're doing this because they love Earth and don't want The War.

The story is about the Antichrist, who is destined to destroy the world during the week of his eleventh birthday. He is raised in a tiny, perfect English village with his three best friends and his dog. He doesn't know who he really is or what his destiny is, but he is going to have the most interesting week of his young life.

The story is about a witch, who calls herself an occultist, who is ruled by the only accurate book of prophesies in human history, written by her ancestor, the last true witch of England. There is also a witchfinder who can't touch electrical items without completely destroying them who is going to make her see the world a little bit off kilter from her normal straight path of seeing it.

There are also the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse, a psychic/lady of the evening, a witchfinder who takes his job too seriously but sucks at it, nuns, humans, aliens, raining fish, demons who like to lurk, a demonic prince, the voice of God, and a whole cast of other little bits and bobs of characters.

Basically, it can be summed down in a few ways:

This is a story that is about love, and how it can influence the world around you, in a sense. Be it platonic, familiar, romantic, any of the forms of love. It's hard to explain, but it's a strong element of the book, the show, and the radio version.

It is also a story about not following what is expected of you, to do what you think is truly best. Good and evil are not white and black, they are gray, they are complicated, you can't have one without the other. You can be good, you can be bad, you can be very perfectly, wonderfully human as both.

The shorter answer is: a demon, an angel, and the Antichrist walk into the Apocalypse and make it all go pear shaped.

Take it with a grain of salt, this is how I see the story, others will tell you differently, which is good, it means we all see the story in a way that makes sense to us.

[in-love-with-my-car-zine]

Nothing like a bike to carry you all over your world, from Hogback Woods to the old quarry. I remember all the places I went on my bike as a kid with my friends. It was the '80s. We were all shoved outside to run around like feral children as long as it wasn't raining. Chances are pretty good nobody would have noticed if we biked off to an airbase to battle the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse. But enough about my generation's neglectful childhood. Let's see some Them in action.

Applications are now open for In Love with My Car, a zine celebrating the vehicles of Good Omens. Click here to go to the form.

[fa1len]

CROWLEY, ON PRINCIPLE, DID NOT DO WELL IN BOOKSHOPS. he especially did not do well in bookshops when he and a certain angel were not on speaking terms, which was at the very least currently up for debate. he most especially did not do well in the bookshop of one man in particular, who liked to stock far too many copies of things like dante's inferno for what crowley could only assume was the irony of the thing. ( or maybe he didn't; maybe that was just something that happened to him, some cruel trick of asmodeus their master the father of lies, because apparently he had time for the minutiae where vespin @vchloras was concerned ... or had done for awhile there, anyway. ) this was a chore he hated, in summation. ripping his bentley across the eldritch vastness of the american southwest like he was one of the four horsepersons, only to deliver a brief that could have been done over the radio if only they'd committed one way or the other ... but who was he, besides the being that had committed the original offense when it came to asking things he shouldn't, to question how things were done? he did not speak: they'd been telling him he talked too much, to let his demonic presence speak for itself, and he wouldn't care to listen if it weren't this. asmodeus got weird about this, so crowley stood in the doorway silently and tried to affect hellish menace in the way he held his handbag, feeling rather like shax from processing. on the whole, it worked about halfway.