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GOOD OMENS
So! The Good Omens miniseries happened! It's only been my favorite comfort book for half my life, and I was terrified I would be disappointed -- neither the casting nor the trailer gave me that much hope. But then! OH WOW I LOVED IT.
I wouldn't say it was 100% perfect, that would be absurd, but with ... so much other recent media ... being as it is, when my biggest protests are things like "The writing and pacing of Adam coming into his power and realizing he didn't have to end the world was a lot better executed in the book, did they not trust these children to carry that scene" and "You really, really could've made the Shadwell/Madam Tracy stuff significantly less gross than it was in the book but you didn't," we're doing pretty well! Also genuinely my biggest protests with the Aziraphale and Crowley sections were "No keep doing the flashback through-the-ages section LONGER" and "How dare you not transcribe the entire dolphin conversation, you had a beautiful opportunity to have Michael Sheen say 'Sleepeth beneath the thunders of the upper deep' and did you have him say it, NO," so we're pretty golden here.
Anyway, it was all very lovely! All the departures and additions from the text made lots of sense -- cutting the other bikers of the Apocalypse was a fine call, it would have really killed the pacing on screen, I think -- and it felt so, so much like the book, and also a bit like the '80s Hitchhiker's Guide in the best possible way; God's voiceover started and I was both surprised and totally in.
Of course my biggest fear was everything about Aziraphale and Crowley. My (and tbh a lot of the internet's) casting reaction was, "Wow, David Tennant would have been such exciting casting like a decade ago." And I was ... neutral-hostile to Michael Sheen as Aziraphale. So I was pleasantly surprised -- pleasantly delighted? -- when, within the first episode, I was just 1000% on board with Sheen's Aziraphale, oh my god he was fucking perfect, the fact that he had a lot of Aziraphale-is-in-love-with-Crowley feelings and put them in his performance is so evident and it was so lovely and he somehow managed to be both an absolute sweetheart and just enough of a bastard to be worth liking, even though the text took out a lot of his more asshole moments and made all the other angels so much worse, wow all the other angels were TERRIBLE it was GREAT. Meanwhile Tennant's Crowley took me ... hmm, three episodes to be convinced? The moment it hit was "Ducks! That's what water slides off of!" in just the perfect Crowley tenor. Also all of his movements were sinuous and weird; he wasn't exactly the Crowley I've imagined for years, but he was a very, very good one.
Also: baby's first queer OTPs were Frodo/Sam, Remus/Sirius, and Aziraphale/Crowley, and we know how the other two went on screen, so I was properly braced for ... I don't know, denial when people assumed they were partners, no homo jokes, Neil being fed up enough with thirty years of fans asking him shippy questions to be very firm that they are not in love, SOMETHING -- and instead the show understood that them loving each other was the lynchpin of the whole story, and just gave them space to love each other, and it was wonderful. I do wish they'd held hands at the Ritz, but that really is the smallest of quibbles.
And everything the text did, to build from the relationship in the book, was so, so good, and also fascinating! So much of it felt like the fic, in terms of tropes that had their seeds in the book but weren't actually in the book text. The six thousand years of history! I would have watched a whole episode of that, it was like watching the excerpts of a really lovely slowburn fic. ("You go too fast for me, Crowley," is one of my favorite added lines, Sheen's delivery is fucking transcendent, I quite literally lay down flat on the floor thinking about it later.) And the leaning into Crowley's sad ambivalence about being a demon! It really is glossed in the book, and every time I would encounter a fic where Crowley had Angst About Falling it was like, shrug, okay, if that's a direction you want to go, but it's canon now?? He fell because he hung out with the wrong crowd, and then he hung out with Aziraphale for millennia and here we are! AHHHH. (I was also so tickled by the bit in the Jesus flashback section where Crowley says he showed Jesus the world, yessss lean in just give Crowley all the things the Bible attributes to Satan.) And! they actually had Heaven and Hell attempt to punish them at the end! There are so many anxious fics about that, what are we gonna do now! I loved that section, I loved the bodyswap and their hilarious impressions of each other, of course Aziraphale thinks an in-character Crowley thing to do is lounge around in a bathtub demanding things.
I'm just ... so happy, the show took a bunch of characters who are essentially symbols and vehicles for ideas in the book (which is not at all a criticism, the book very handily does the things it means to do and we all loved the angel and the demon anyway) and turned them into people. I went on an entire hilarious emotional journey in which my starting desire for Aziraphale and Crowley, as it has been for like half my life, was "they're in love, I hope that's lovely and I'm moved by it" and ended at "they're in love, what goddamn disasters, put your useless faces together at ONCE" and lololol everything old is new again, I really want to write some Aziraphale/Crowley fic and also I finally want to write them banging, it's a funny old world.
Some other stuff that the show added and which I loved:
+ I've mentioned the gift of the 6,000-year flashback, but specific shoutout to, again, "You go too fast for me, Crowley," as well as the way Aziraphale says Crowley's name in the Reign of Terror section, and the way Aziraphale v i s i b l y falls in love with Crowley when Crowley rescues his first editions in the Blitz, and ... really that entire flashback section, it was an absolute dream
+ Crowley bodily slamming Aziraphale into a wall when Aziraphale suggested he might be nice, please have your homoerotic leads slam each other into something at least once yes good but also: what a lovely trajectory for how at the end Crowley is just pleased and charmed when Aziraphale calls him a nice person
+ the breakup scene in the gazebo, I love that the show realized that it needed a specific reason for Aziraphale and Crowley to be separated for the middle of the story, and also: Crowley's "run away with me" oh my goddd, and Aziraphale's voice breaking when he says "we're not friends"
+ the THING Crowley's FACE does when he says "I lost my best friend," and also that the show came to a screeching halt and added a whole section between the bookshop burning and Crowley driving out of London for Crowley to drink sadly in a pub because he can't function in a world without Aziraphale -- frankly Crowley's lack of reaction in the book is one of the things that always felt like the biggest obstacle to being truly convinced they were in love, so thanks, Neil, good fic update, A++ -- and also that scene gives us the gift of Crowley offhandedly saying that it's too bad Aziraphale can't just possess him, but angel and demon, whoops, can't do it, I loved that
Anyway, it was ... all so much more than I was expecting, and last night I genuinely turned right around and started scrubbing through all the Crowley and Aziraphale scenes once I'd finished the first full watchthrough, and I might have to pull out my old clunky computer that has vidding software on it, and attempt to find viddable files of the show, and make the Aziraphale/Crowley Under Pressure vid immediately. And write fic. There's gonna be fic.
I wouldn't say it was 100% perfect, that would be absurd, but with ... so much other recent media ... being as it is, when my biggest protests are things like "The writing and pacing of Adam coming into his power and realizing he didn't have to end the world was a lot better executed in the book, did they not trust these children to carry that scene" and "You really, really could've made the Shadwell/Madam Tracy stuff significantly less gross than it was in the book but you didn't," we're doing pretty well! Also genuinely my biggest protests with the Aziraphale and Crowley sections were "No keep doing the flashback through-the-ages section LONGER" and "How dare you not transcribe the entire dolphin conversation, you had a beautiful opportunity to have Michael Sheen say 'Sleepeth beneath the thunders of the upper deep' and did you have him say it, NO," so we're pretty golden here.
Anyway, it was all very lovely! All the departures and additions from the text made lots of sense -- cutting the other bikers of the Apocalypse was a fine call, it would have really killed the pacing on screen, I think -- and it felt so, so much like the book, and also a bit like the '80s Hitchhiker's Guide in the best possible way; God's voiceover started and I was both surprised and totally in.
Of course my biggest fear was everything about Aziraphale and Crowley. My (and tbh a lot of the internet's) casting reaction was, "Wow, David Tennant would have been such exciting casting like a decade ago." And I was ... neutral-hostile to Michael Sheen as Aziraphale. So I was pleasantly surprised -- pleasantly delighted? -- when, within the first episode, I was just 1000% on board with Sheen's Aziraphale, oh my god he was fucking perfect, the fact that he had a lot of Aziraphale-is-in-love-with-Crowley feelings and put them in his performance is so evident and it was so lovely and he somehow managed to be both an absolute sweetheart and just enough of a bastard to be worth liking, even though the text took out a lot of his more asshole moments and made all the other angels so much worse, wow all the other angels were TERRIBLE it was GREAT. Meanwhile Tennant's Crowley took me ... hmm, three episodes to be convinced? The moment it hit was "Ducks! That's what water slides off of!" in just the perfect Crowley tenor. Also all of his movements were sinuous and weird; he wasn't exactly the Crowley I've imagined for years, but he was a very, very good one.
Also: baby's first queer OTPs were Frodo/Sam, Remus/Sirius, and Aziraphale/Crowley, and we know how the other two went on screen, so I was properly braced for ... I don't know, denial when people assumed they were partners, no homo jokes, Neil being fed up enough with thirty years of fans asking him shippy questions to be very firm that they are not in love, SOMETHING -- and instead the show understood that them loving each other was the lynchpin of the whole story, and just gave them space to love each other, and it was wonderful. I do wish they'd held hands at the Ritz, but that really is the smallest of quibbles.
And everything the text did, to build from the relationship in the book, was so, so good, and also fascinating! So much of it felt like the fic, in terms of tropes that had their seeds in the book but weren't actually in the book text. The six thousand years of history! I would have watched a whole episode of that, it was like watching the excerpts of a really lovely slowburn fic. ("You go too fast for me, Crowley," is one of my favorite added lines, Sheen's delivery is fucking transcendent, I quite literally lay down flat on the floor thinking about it later.) And the leaning into Crowley's sad ambivalence about being a demon! It really is glossed in the book, and every time I would encounter a fic where Crowley had Angst About Falling it was like, shrug, okay, if that's a direction you want to go, but it's canon now?? He fell because he hung out with the wrong crowd, and then he hung out with Aziraphale for millennia and here we are! AHHHH. (I was also so tickled by the bit in the Jesus flashback section where Crowley says he showed Jesus the world, yessss lean in just give Crowley all the things the Bible attributes to Satan.) And! they actually had Heaven and Hell attempt to punish them at the end! There are so many anxious fics about that, what are we gonna do now! I loved that section, I loved the bodyswap and their hilarious impressions of each other, of course Aziraphale thinks an in-character Crowley thing to do is lounge around in a bathtub demanding things.
I'm just ... so happy, the show took a bunch of characters who are essentially symbols and vehicles for ideas in the book (which is not at all a criticism, the book very handily does the things it means to do and we all loved the angel and the demon anyway) and turned them into people. I went on an entire hilarious emotional journey in which my starting desire for Aziraphale and Crowley, as it has been for like half my life, was "they're in love, I hope that's lovely and I'm moved by it" and ended at "they're in love, what goddamn disasters, put your useless faces together at ONCE" and lololol everything old is new again, I really want to write some Aziraphale/Crowley fic and also I finally want to write them banging, it's a funny old world.
Some other stuff that the show added and which I loved:
+ I've mentioned the gift of the 6,000-year flashback, but specific shoutout to, again, "You go too fast for me, Crowley," as well as the way Aziraphale says Crowley's name in the Reign of Terror section, and the way Aziraphale v i s i b l y falls in love with Crowley when Crowley rescues his first editions in the Blitz, and ... really that entire flashback section, it was an absolute dream
+ Crowley bodily slamming Aziraphale into a wall when Aziraphale suggested he might be nice, please have your homoerotic leads slam each other into something at least once yes good but also: what a lovely trajectory for how at the end Crowley is just pleased and charmed when Aziraphale calls him a nice person
+ the breakup scene in the gazebo, I love that the show realized that it needed a specific reason for Aziraphale and Crowley to be separated for the middle of the story, and also: Crowley's "run away with me" oh my goddd, and Aziraphale's voice breaking when he says "we're not friends"
+ the THING Crowley's FACE does when he says "I lost my best friend," and also that the show came to a screeching halt and added a whole section between the bookshop burning and Crowley driving out of London for Crowley to drink sadly in a pub because he can't function in a world without Aziraphale -- frankly Crowley's lack of reaction in the book is one of the things that always felt like the biggest obstacle to being truly convinced they were in love, so thanks, Neil, good fic update, A++ -- and also that scene gives us the gift of Crowley offhandedly saying that it's too bad Aziraphale can't just possess him, but angel and demon, whoops, can't do it, I loved that
Anyway, it was ... all so much more than I was expecting, and last night I genuinely turned right around and started scrubbing through all the Crowley and Aziraphale scenes once I'd finished the first full watchthrough, and I might have to pull out my old clunky computer that has vidding software on it, and attempt to find viddable files of the show, and make the Aziraphale/Crowley Under Pressure vid immediately. And write fic. There's gonna be fic.
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(I have so, so many vid ideas, all of them obviously to Queen songs. Desperately need the internet to collectively vid the whole of Queen’s Greatest Hits albums)
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Honestly I can barely be coherent about this, it's pretty much everything I wanted. I think the big apocalypse sequence was a bit of a mess but aside from that it really was wonderful.
I think my main issue with Tennant's performance is that he kinda slipped into Tenth Doctor mode in a couple of places, but again, it's really just a quibble. The way he kept throwing himself at Aziraphale!!!
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I actually didn't have too many "whoops Tennant did the Doctor" moments, but I can see where he got close. Also, on several days' reflection, I think my biggest Crowley protest is less about Tennant's performance than it is that I love the way book!Crowley genuinely loves and is fascinated by humans, and how it didn't really get translated into the show. Alas! but I did still really love him; the way he kept throwing himself at Aziraphale indeed.
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I can't believe they took my sweet sweet ship from 16 years ago and added even more pining and affection and love and a BODYSWAP to it, I didn't know this could even happen
Deep encouragement on the vidding and the fic writing! <3
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Thank you! <333 I haven't yet figured out how to source the footage, but fic is DEFINITELY coming :D
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I'M SO GLAD YOU ALSO WERE REMINDED OF THE 80S H2G2! That was exactly my reaction, and I LOVED that miniseries as a kid (whereas the movie fell pretty flat for me despite theoretically lots of great stuff going on in it) and considering the voiceover stuff and the similarity in tone between the source books, I suspect that was at least a little bit intentional.
I was absolutely blindsided by how much I love Aziraphale. Like. I didn't expect to dislike him, but. I am literally still reeling with how much I would discorporate for that stupid angel. And the fact that of the two of them-- not that picking favourites is really right because they're both necessary, y'know, but I EXPECTED to be super there for self-consciously evil DT, and even that was better than I expected because I really didn't expect him to show Crowley's genuinely touching religious crisis, essentially, and genuine pain at the necessity of having Fallen just for asking questions. That was GREAT. But then-- Aziraphale was the one that every time he came on screen, I had the "you, you're BACK, I LOVE YOU, OH GOD" feeling, even more so than Crowley!
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In terms of the David Tennant performance I thought the way he hopped around that church was really fantastic. Like it was funny, but I could still totally focus on the absolute romance of it all and idk, that scene was so great. I couldn't quite get over how immediately I felt like Crowley thought Aziraphale was a cool person to know and how much Aziraphale is having issues because he feels like he shouldn't be close with a demon. And then obvs he changes his mind over time.
Oh ALSO: Chekov's bodyswap. Going from hey what would happen, to then doing it. I'm still not sure how I feel about their ending exactly, but them impersonating each other to get out of being executed is doing great thing for my shipping brain.
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I need to make a vid. Must find a song. And rewatch the show while I do it.
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