come on through to luciuslives.com and find your favorite randomly generated theory! As Buttons might say, summer plausible, some ain’t. I’m still adding to it (and fixing errors) but I’m weirdly proud of my chaos gremlin child so uh, here it is.
[Image text: LUCIUS LIVES! A merchant ship rescued him. Now he’s searching every port in the Caribbean for news of Pete, in the most efficient way possible. That’s right, he’s traveling via the power of film montage.]
thr funniest part of therapy to me is when you first come in and you're exchanging niceties and they say "hello! how are you" and you say "im fine how are you :)" and then 30 seconds later they put on their therapist voice and say "so how are you doing?" and you go well lisa. believe it or not im doing Bad
Welcome to Good Omens Comics where the colors are made up and the character design doesn’t matter. Here’s the WHOLE drunk conversation. Pg61-65 in my copy of the book
View it here X on tapas for better quality
edit 9/2: it is done, no longer WIP
Under a cut because it’s about a mile long and set up for mobile.
Heyyyyyy I’d really like to talk more about the ball, who’s with me.
Because for all its glitter, the ball is dark. No, seriously, it’s dark. It’s eerie, it’s disturbing, and the narrative doesn’t shy away from showing us just how much.
As in a classic fairytale, mortals are being spirited away into another realm to dance through the night. Here, however, we see exactly who is orchestrating the dance, and why.
And we empathize with him, but watching Aziraphale has never been so painful or so unsettling.
Nina arrives distraught and is immediately hit with the realization that she doesn’t feel distraught, even though she knows she should be feeling it. She confronts Aziraphale and he just tells her: oh yes! :) no long faces tonight! And she is disturbed throughout the ball, thinks she is losing her mind, questions and fights the enchantment… but from time to time, the enchantment still takes hold.
And just—
Aziraphale. Aziraphale, you do know that manipulating people is wrong, don’t you? You… do know that? And yes, of course, neither Crowley’s nor Aziraphale’s approach to morality is human. They are eldritch, they are otherworldly. It was Crowley who changed the paintball guns into real guns in S1, though of course, the humans still had choice in using them.
But the ball is still different.
We’ve never seen Aziraphale do anything quite so disturbing before, or go so obviously deep into his own delusion. There are moments during these scenes when even Crowley, permanently frustrated, is very nearly disturbed. (“Angel! What are you doing?” or “Making it rain is one thing, but a BALL?”)
I fully think that by that point in the story, Aziraphale is not all right. He is in an anxiety spiral, denying reality fiercely, obstinately, disastrously, not listening to any of Crowley’s hissed warnings. Yes, yes, he is giddy, he is in love. It’s so very important for him that everything go RIGHT this night, the night he gets to dance with Crowley. Is he even aware of everything he is conjuring up, of the enchantment he has woven? The humans who step through the doors of the bookshop change: their clothing, their mood, their speech patterns… By this point, is Aziraphale doing this consciously at all? Or is reality conforming to his expectations, forcing everyone into a replica of the nineteenth century while Aziraphale himself, distracted and smitten, works himself up to inviting Crowley to dance?
In the first few episodes, as fear and danger grow, as Aziraphale is faced with the danger specifically to Crowley (I don’t see why he would risk his existence for you, Shax tells him in the car), Aziraphale only denies reality all the more fiercely, only holds on to his plans tighter, only puts more force into them and exerts more control (really, rather like the archangels with their Great Plan).
And the ball, beautiful and otherworldly and eerie as it is, is also a dire warning.
In the morning, it will be Crowley, not Aziraphale, who will get told off for manipulating Nina and Maggie. Aziraphale won’t reflect on this. He won’t be forced to reflect, and Metatron will manipulate him in turn.
There is a plan to follow. The show must go on.
GOD the ball is so dark.
Ooh yes I LOVE this take! Thank you!!! The Ball gets creepier the more I watch it. And Aziraphale is genuinely unsettling in that scene.
Aziraphale is single-mindedly clinging to his version of reality. I will have a ball and it will make Nina and Maggie fall in love and everyone will be happy and safe and Heaven will leave us all alone. Everything will work out exactly as I need it to.
His sheer stubbornness is on full display here. Stubbornness to the point of delusion. Stubbornness to the point of harm. (He really is “just enough of a bastard” isn’t he?). And I love his stubbornness, I love his steel, but here we see how easily he can take it too far.
And it beautifully sets up his final decision! Where he decides that he’ll take over Heaven and it will bend to his designs. It will change for the better, he will make a difference, through the sheer force of his will. (And Crowley will come with him, because Crowley always comes with him, and everything will work out exactly as he needs it to).
And when Crowley says he doesn’t want that, when he says he wants them to be an us, in an altogether different way than Aziraphale has envisioned for them, what does Aziraphale do? Shake his head, plead with Crowley, beg him to see things his way, refuse to hear what Crowley is really saying. Grips his version of reality even tighter, and he can’t force Crowley to come with him (imagine if he could? I shudder to think), so he lets Crowley go. He lets his entire world go. For the sake of this grand vision the Metatron has given him.
That unnerving smile in the elevator? That’s him forcing his own mind to its new sole purpose. Don’t think of Crowley, he’s abandoned you. Don’t think of your bookshop, taken away. Don’t think of how your entire world has just fallen apart. You’re going to Heaven now. And you will remake it, make it properly Good.
I think we’ll see even more of this dark side to Aziraphale in season 3. Aziraphale doggedly ignoring that his whole world has fallen apart, single-mindedly focused on remaking Heaven. I think he’ll eventually reach some breaking point where he absolutely can’t ignore that any longer. And then I think he’ll turn that stubbornness into strength. Into an ability to stand on his own, stand firm in his morals and convictions, and not constantly second-guess himself and agonize over whether he’s doing the Right Thing. He’ll strike a true balance, figure out how to be soft without being helpless, and how to be steely without being stubborn. In short, he’ll figure out exactly who he is.
“oh no we’re all doomed by the narrative” maybe you are. i’m the narrative’s favourite.
update: turns out this is not a good thing for me
when the chaos gremlin watches the uptight rules-follower wreak profound havoc by wielding those very rules, and is blown away and possibly a little turned on 😚🤌
I need a 3m44s looping video of just the drive/elevator shots with this over it
(Alphabet City is a real neighborhood in NYC but let’s pretend it’s a poetic term for a bookstore)
Well, hello. I usually paint portraits in oil. But now that I’ve got a tablet and PS, they open up the opportunity for artistic exploration that would normally take a long time via traditional methods. I don’t have to wait 2 days for a layer to dry for a start... so that’s encouraging.
Anyways, I like Good Omens. It also happens to be the perfect context to examine different art styles from Renaissance to Victorian times. I started this little historical Good Omens art series last month. Let’s begin with Golgotha Aziraphale and Crowley as Rembrandt style oil portraits :)
Two sweet fics about yellow being your favorite person’s color:
True Colors by seti_fan (Ghostbusters 2016, aka Ghostbusters: Answer the Call – Abby Yates & Jillian Holtzmann, could be Yatesmann if you like [I do like])
and it was all yellow by blindbatalex (Good Omens post-season-2, you’ve been warned! – Aziraphale/Crowley)
punkeduppirate
neil-gaiman
how to ask the demon you've been smitten over for 6000 years to dance: an angel's guide
bonus:
