Snowflake Challenge: Day 6

Challenge #6

In your own space, share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much. . Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

It's no secret that I've had Good Omens on the brain since I finished watching S2. This is a gratifying surprise, because I'd initially been quite skeptical of the idea that an S2 was even necessary, let alone that I would like it. Additionally, I've always suspected that the things I like most about the novel originated with Pratchett, and that without that essential Pratchett-ness, the Gaiman-ness I do like would be outweighed by the Gaiman-ness I don't.

Here's how the first episode convinced me otherwise:

(N.B.: Spoilers for Good Omens Season 2, episode 1 "The Arrival" and The Sandman issue 6 "24 Hours".)

Gaiman doesn't so much imagine new stories as recycle elements from existing ones in interesting ways (which I like about his stuff) and he has a definite thing for body horror, frequently body horror happening to female bodies (which I very much don't like about his stuff).

The former is in evidence throughout S2, and is probably one of the reason I like it so much, and why I feel it fits so well with the OG novel. But S2 episode 1 introduces some new characters, namely the female owner of a vinyl store who has an unrequited crush on the female owner of a coffee shop. Partway through the episode, they end up getting magically trapped in the coffee shop, whose owner begins freaking out because they have no way to contact the outside world and her abusive girlfriend is not going to be happy that shes out of touch. It's at this point I started thinking Oh god, no, because lesbians, abuse, forced confinement in a food establishment? I'd seen this before.

Specifically, in "24 Hours", the sixth issue of Gaiman's Sandman, in which a sociopath uses a magical amulet to trap a group of people in a diner and toy with them until they lose their minds. One of those patrons is a lesbian who's come there after having struck her girlfriend during an argument. While trapped inside, she's sexually menaced by one of the straight patrons and it's implied that she's dubconned into having sex with one or more them. Gaiman has her stab her eyes out with a pair of skewers in the issue's climax. Hers is the most graphic death, and the only graphic nudity, in the issue.

Even back in the late '90s, when it was generally cool to use casual homophobia for shocks or "humor" in mainstream media, and when pretty much every non-straight couple's plot arc seemingly had to end in tragedy, I remember being pissed off at how Gaiman treated this character.

So I was viscerally uncomfortable when our two new Good Omens S2 characters got locked into that coffee shop, because Gaiman recycles elements from existing stories. This was Good Omens and 2024, so I knew whatever happened to them was unlikely to be as bad as what happened in "24 Hours", but whatever "it" was going to be, I didn't think it would be good.

Imagine, then, my surprise when the two characters have an awkward, but civil conversation, and work together to get out. Maybe these two scenes are completely unrelated. Maybe Gaiman wasn't even thinking about "24 Hours" when he wrote "The Arrival". But given how recycling bits of older stories is his thing, and given how much he recycles bits from older stories throughout S2, I like to think Gaiman was thinking about that scene—and consciously undoing his mistakes from 30 years ago. Either way, that's how I'm choosing to think of it unless/until I have evidence to the contrary.

And while it's by far not the only thing in that first episode that convinced me to keep watching, it was an important one.

これで以上です。