Snowflake Challenge: Day 14

[lebateleur]

Challenge #14

Try something new. 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 been a looong time since I wrote a manifesto. Here's one for why I'm so into Good Omens: Season 2.

Yup, my brain still continues to be eaten by this series since I finished watching it a month ago. I wrote a 100words drabble for it yesterday. I wrote a double drabble for it for the Snowflake Day 11 challenge, and about how the first episode convinced me to keep watching for the Snowflake Day 6 challenge. As I've said before, I was initially so skeptical of the idea of any second season at all that I didn't watch it for half a year. Here's what won me over:

• Having God narrate S1 was a great way to get the third person narrator commentary that made the novel so charming into a TV medium and I don't feel S1 would have worked as well without it. But there's no original novel for S2 and the writers wisely forwent repeating this narrative device. I'm glad they did. I think the S2 plot arc unfolds better without any omniscient 3P commentary (especially said commentary wasn't there to preview that ABSOLUTE GUT PUNCH at the end of episode 6).



• S2 is clearly the Aziraphale and Crowley Show. But since Aziraphale, Crowley, and Madame Tracy have always been my favorite things about the novel, I'm fine with this. I'm honestly fine that they didn't bring back the Them, or Shadwell or Anathema and Newt. While I like all those characters, I'm glad they get to Calvin-&-Hobbes sled off into the snowscape. I know they're out there living their lives, and that's more satisfying to me than getting a detailed update on them in S2. In particular, I would have felt very bad for Adam if S2 had involved Up- and Downstairs trying to rope him into being the Antichrist again.



• And I LOVE Nina and Maggie as new characters. (And that their S1 dopplegangers were Chattering Nuns!) Shax is great too, especially when she reincarnates as the world's most hapless military commander badass. Everything about the new characters was great, and they held their own against the Aziraphale & Crowley headliners.



• Jim-short-for-James-short-for-Gabriel sent me. You get a sense of the Archangel he might have been in the Beginning, before the Great Plan turned him into an inflexible but affable authoritarian. (And you can tell John Hamm had a blast playing this new incarnation of the character.)



• As someone who's cosplayed Beelzebub for the last three years I was pretty salty when I heard the Duke of Hell had been recast. But the snappy dialogue retcon—"New face?" / "Oh, that old thing? Thought it was time for a change."—instantly won me over. (More on this character below.)



• I loved the Pratchett homage Easter Eggs. C.M.O.T. Dibbler providing laudanum quality control in Victorian-era Edinburgh! Seamstresses being seamstresses in Ankh-Morpork and London! Jim-James-Gabriel dutifully shelving Good Omens alongside all of Aziraphale's other books that open with "In" (elephants all the way down)! So many little gems if you know what to look for. I love TV that rewards viewers for paying attention.



• Speaking of Easter Eggs, it took me until the beginning of episode 3 before I cottoned on to the fact that the title animation is previewing/showing/spoiling the entire S2 arc, and then I was fascinated. Wait, is that Crowley hauling himself up out of the pits of Hell? I thought. Very interesting. (Yes, the title animation for S1 does the same thing, but having already read the book several times I didn't think much about it. Whereas the Season 2 animation was by definition unfamiliar.)



• I've mentioned in other post that I don't care for Gaiman when he's doing body horror but I do very much like him when he's riffing on, referencing, mashing up, and remixing stories, and in Good Omens, he is doing that in spades, to great effect, and in service of writing the (official!!) Aziraphale/Crowley fanfic of my heart.
  
  
  • Did Aziraphale once raise his wing in S1 to shelter Crowley from the rain outside the Garden of Eden? Well, here's S2 Crowley doing that for Aziraphale, first, at the dawn of existence.
  
  
  
  • Did Gabriel once try to destroy Aziraphale in hellfire? Well here he is wholly at Aziraphale's mercy and Aziraphale takes him in.
  
  
  
  • I've already written about Gaiman using Maggie and Nina's arc to correct his odious narrative choices in Sandman here.
  
  
  
  • Did Aziraphale and Crowley once talk about fleeing to Alpha Centauri? Well, Beelzebub and Gabriel are going there, for real this time.
  
  
  
  • Speaking of Beelzebub and Gabriel: That plot development has been telegraphed since episode one; it's just that first-time viewers wouldn't have understood what they were seeing (just like Aziraphale and Crowley didn't). I noticed the fly in Gabriel's box in the first episode but didn't connect it to the freaking Lord of the Flies. I side-eyed Beelzebub's seemingly OOC interactions with Crowley and Furfur when she was trying to figure out where Gabriel was: You know, I really don't think Beelzubub would be this wishy-washy. But it makes sense: she's worried and distracted, and she's not actually trying to find Gabriel to get one over on Upstairs at all. There are all sorts of little hints and moments that point to this but that just didn't make sense because I didn't know what was going on.
  
  
  
  • Similarly, all the references to Jane Austen. This was just GENIUS. At first it just seems like typical Good Omens irreverence. ("Do you mean Jane Austen the cutthroat master spy?" says Crowley all the way back in episode two. "Do you mean Jane Austen the romance novelist?" Aziraphale counters.) But it's not irreverence, it's Gaiman and Finnemore telling you exactly where Aziraphale and Crowley are headed, and why they're going to hit those rocks.
    
    To whit: Crowley's idea of how love works is that some external situation forces two people to realize they're it for each other and go in for the kiss. Aziraphale thinks Jane Austen's novels are the roadmap: lots of interaction, a dance, a confession, and then happily-ever-after in love. (And in case you haven't caught on yet, "Why are we all cosplaying Pride and Prejudice?" asks Nina in episode five.)
    
    Fast-forward to episode six. Maggie and Nina give Crowley a much-deserved talking to for him and Aziraphale having tried to manipulate them into a relationship (We're not playthings. We need time. We need to talk to each other.) Then Metatron makes his move. The external situation forces Crowley to realize Aziraphale's it for him and go in for the kiss (it doesn't work). Aziraphale finds himself on the receiving end of the Jane Austen romance roadmap: after lots (like, an eternity) of interaction and a dance, Crowley delivers a confession as awkward as anything an A&E miniseries ever imagined Mr. Darcy's saying...and it doesn't work. They're both wrong. Why? Because Crowley's "exactly" does NOT mean the same thing as Aziraphale's (previewed way back in episode 1!), they need time, and they need to talk to each other.
    
    It's so freaking well done.
  
  
  
  • And let me just say how delighted I was to find that all my suppositions about where the plot was going and where the conflict would occur (Gabriel had come back to finish Aziraphale off; Crowley was going to get taken hostage in Heaven and/or Aziraphale by demons in the episode six climax; etc.) were wrong. The major conflict is on an extremely human level: Two people who need to be talking honestly to each other about all the things that matter to and for them aren't, and now must face the consequences.

This isn't to say that I think the season is perfect. It is very focused on both the Aziraphale/Crowley and Aziraphale & Crowley relationship in comparison to OG Good Omen's emphasis on its ensemble cast. And the minisodes (particularly the resurrection women and the zombies) dragged for me. But man, I am willing to forgive a lot for the rest of it having been so good. TL;DR: Exceeded expectations, have already watched again.

And for bonus content, another new thing I've tried. Namely, ginning up a master document of all the WIP fics I've started over the past two years that I have an interest in completing. I love plot bunnies and ideas. I love writing. I dislike writing and editing when I can't get things to work out by the fourth or fifth go. This means that I have a lot (and I mean a lot) of in-progress fics with potential that I just put down and...never return to.

This year, I find myself very interested in the possibility of returning to them. For better or for worse, I am very much a Meyers-Briggs intuitive: planning and orderly progressions are not my strong suit. So I found it pretty rewarding to sit down to this organizational task, planning to do a little bit, and emerge with over 3k words on stuff I know about these stories and I'm not even done.

It's really increased my enthusiasm and drive to see them through, as well highlighting what I already know about them and just have to sit down to write, and what I don't know and need to figure out in a systematic way. I'll probably never be someone who's capable of fully plotting a fic, but at least now I have a better sense of where I'm going, and that's pretty cool.

これで以上です。