futureevilscientist:

fishsupportgroup:

nemeankitten:

A nice little motif throughout Good Omens is like, people who are MEANT to be enemies ending up together in one way or another, platonic or otherwise. There’s Anathema and Newt, descendants of sworn enemies, Aziraphale and Crowley, weird angel and weird demon, Shadewell and Madam Tracy, a witchfinder and a medium. There’s even smaller hints of it throughout the book, right down to the KGB and MI5 references (which I like to think is a parallel for Hell and Heaven, tbh). I dunno, it’s not hugely important, but it is sweet. 

tbh tho? i think it is hugely important as a theme. 

for me, the book is about how there is no black and white morality (or black vs white morality). people aren’t good or bad they’re just,, fundamentally people??? (i would put some good crowley quotes here but i left all my copies of good omens in wales)

this is what aziraphale comes to understand and crowley comes to accept. aziraphale is a bastard and crowley is a nerd has a spark of goodness, the typical stereotypes and conventions and boundaries are overcome bc their total foundation was false and arbitrary.

it doesnt matter really that madam tracy and shadwell supposedly should be at odds with one another, because she thinks his ranting and raving is sweet and she cares for him and he relies on her; against this backdrop the artificial boundaries that are supposed to be in place crumble because of their humanity.

essentially, what all these really super sweet examples determine is that they really are all just names for sides and at the heart of all the interactions what really matters is that they are just people. 

this theme is what lies at the heart of good omens, for me, and it’s why it pisses me off when its just dismissed as a funny parody of the omen and the characters are reduced to aziraphale is holy, crowley is evil bc the entire point is that they’re not. 

this book has so many layers and such an unreliable narration that to understand the book you have to look past what it initially tells you and tbh i think its deserving of a lot more literary recognition as a novel worthy of a place in canon.

(thanks for pointing these examples out, btw, i hadn’t really thought about how the theme extended beyond aziraphale and crowley.)

(also the bolded stuff is for readability im not just being pretentious)

Shout this from the rooftops.

The central theme is the kind of pro-humanity-as-a-whole, pro-pacifist and understanding-over-conflict shit you’d more commonly see in cheesy nostalgic Sci Fi a-la Star Trek. It’s very unsurprising that it stands out as much as it does from other Western fantasy, which (the mainstream parts of it, anyway) is almost invariably about power and liberation through violence, individualism, and glorification of the individual (compare every ‘chosen one’ story ever, even in allegedly “subversive” stories like Game of Thrones). Ironically, Good Omens literally DOES have a ‘Chosen One’, but what he does with it is very different to what most characters of his archetype would do.