#this is not an aziraphale bash post so get thee behind me with that shit

[that-within]

That’s not how Jane Austen works…

There’s something deeply amusing to me about how fundamentally wrong Aziraphale is regarding the function of balls in Jane Austen’s novels:

“People would gather and do some formal dancing and then realize they had misunderstood each other and were actually deeply in love.”

No ball in any Austen novel works like this. Not one. You know how they actually work? They build tension (dramatic, romantic, sexual, and/or other). But in all of her six novels, there is not a single ball where everything suddenly clicks between two characters, all misunderstandings are cleared up with just a glance and a touch of a gloved hand, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Since Pride and Prejudice is the novel repeatedly cited in the show, let’s analyze the functions of its two main balls:

The first ball is where our protagonists meet. They lock eyes, they get introduced—and almost immediately he calls her a 5/10 and she runs off to drag him with her gal pals. Rough start. We haven’t even gotten to the plot’s true misunderstandings yet (“I meant you were tolerable in a nice way!”), but this ball is the crucial setup for how those misunderstandings will develop throughout their relationship. Tension established.

So far we’re 0/3 for dancing, clearing up misunderstandings, and deep love realizations. Bummer.

The second ball is The Big One. So how do our protagonists come together to reconcile in the candlelight? Spoiler: they don't. Instead, Darcy musters up all his introverted mettle to grind out a dance proposal and Lizzy only says yes because she can't think of a polite way to say “I’d rather eat glass.” 

And not only does the dance itself not clear up their misunderstandings, it actually cements those misunderstandings through a series of progressively passive aggressive barbs. It’s wonderfully charged, but in a HIGH-VOLTAGE FENCE: DO NOT TOUCH kind of way. 

(For those keeping score, we’re 1/6 because they did actually manage to dance this time. Woot)

And that’s it. No, literally. There are no more balls in the whole novel (at least attended by our protagonists). So how doth our heroes fall in love without the eldritch horrors making them do it delicate pluck of a fiddle in a crowded room?

Well, first there’s the catastrophic marriage proposal where Darcy basically negs Lizzy for a solid minute before Lizzy spends a solid five minutes telling him where to stick it. Divine. 

Crucially though, this is where the “realize they had misunderstood each other” stuff actually begins. It’s only when one of them is pouring their heart out to the other that the giant gaps in information, misinterpreted actions, and fundamental differences in worldviews start to make themselves known (anything here ringing a cathedral-sized bell?).

And of course, this still doesn’t magically make everything better. They both go off to lick their respective wounds for a while, but, slowly, they begin to process this paradigm shift and change their thoughts and actions accordingly. 

There are many reasons why Pride and Prejudice has lasted the test of time, and a big one is that it never pulled a “ball” deus ex machina. Lizzy and Darcy both put in actual work to improve themselves and to reconcile their differences. It’s slow, it’s imperfect, it’s messy. And, very importantly, it takes them being brutally honest with themselves and each other.

It's only after all of this that they finally get to the "were actually deeply in love" part.

Aziraphale must know this. He’s read Austen. Hell, he probably read Pride and Prejudice the year it was published. So where is he getting this bizarre idea about balls being a magical cure-all for everything? 

Maybe it's as simple as an angel who's spent 6000 years teetering on the edge of something with a demon devising a cunning plan to teeter them just a little bit closer. 

Maybe it’s as complicated as an angel who can convince himself that if a human relationship might be “fixed” by a ball, maybe a cosmic relationship might be “fixed” by undoing a fall. 

And, to quote Crowley, “now, that’s unbelievable."

[that-within]

Aziraphale and agency

Upon rewatch, I noticed a small but interesting thread running through Good Omens 2: namely, Aziraphale’s tendency to override people’s free will for the sake of what he thinks is right.

We see it first in Edinburgh when, after his protests go unheeded, he straight up destroys Elspeth’s harvested corpse, removing her (supposedly God-given) agency to choose right or wrong. After all, he's an angel and he knows best. (Crowley’s interference is far less supernaturally heavy handed since a human could have grabbed the laudanum and just not drank it.)

In the same episode, we see Crowley’s contribution to ‘Operation Make Maggie and Nina Fall in Love.’ This plan had been tipping to the wrong side of the ‘yikes’ scale since its inception, but it’s worth noting the wildly different ways our protagonists go about enacting it: Crowley manipulates the weather to try to coax the two ladies together, and it’s still conniving, it’s still interfering, but it does not remove their agency. At any point, Nina could have decided the conversation was not worth staying dry for and hoofed it back to her shop. (Let’s be real, Maggie was never going to take that option.)

In contrast, Aziraphale’s attempts at a romantic coup are far more invasive and controlling. He starts off in a grayish area by bribing people to come to his “meeting,” but eventually the human tendency to push back against Supreme Weirdness and inability to perform 18th century dances off the cuff make it necessary for him to start overthrowing their agency. We get a couple cutesy examples of this (“I’m a seamstress”), but the creep factor ramps up to eleven when Nina arrives. 

Of all the guests at the ball, Nina is both the most aware of being puppeted and the most disturbed by it—which negates the entire endeavor because this whole thing literally revolves around her feelings. But Aziraphale is too busy blindly running on the tandem highs of executing the plan and living out his fantasy of going full Lizzy Bennet to notice.

He 100% believes this is the right thing to do and ohgoodheavenswouldyoulookatthat, it just so happens to perfectly line up with something he really wants to do.

The thread finally loops back on itself in the last scene. Once again, we get Crowley coming at the problem in, frankly, a more human way. He confesses, he persuades, he pleads, he hauls his angel in by the lapels, but ultimately he accepts that he can’t force Aziraphale to choose him.

Aziraphale on the other hand has just been given the celestial power to bend the universe to his will, and he wields this like a righteous shield against Crowley's argument. He can change heaven, he can reform it into what he thinks it should be, into what is right. Not because he craves power, but because he can help people, he can protect Crowley, and (most importantly) he can correct the “mistake” of Crowley’s fall—he can finally make heaven be good enough for Crowley.

And just like Edinburgh, he believes he knows best; and just like the ball, it just so happens to perfectly line up with something he desperately desires. So he doesn’t ask what Crowley wants, what he thinks and feels about being an angel again—because this is the right thing to do and he will do it. It never even seems to occur to him that there's another course to take until Crowley (literally) shoves it in his face.