“I wanted to play Aziraphel being sort of in love with Crowley,” says Sheen. “They’re both very bonded and connected anyway, because of the two of them having this relationship through history – but also because angels are beings of love, so it’s inevitable that he would love Crowley. It helped that loving David is very easy to do.”
What kind of love – platonic, romantic, erotic?
“Oh, those are human, mortal labels!” Sheen laughs. “But that was what I thought would be interesting to play with. There’s a lot of fan fiction where Aziraphale and Crowley get a bit hot and heavy towards each other, so it’ll be interesting to see how an audience reacts to what we’ve done in bringing that to the screen.”
the overlap between the pacific rim and good omens fandoms is not a coincidence. both narratives, while wildly different, center around the same central theme – people who are very different coming together and drawing on their humanity to stop the apocalypse. in this essay i will
Your headcanon is your headcanon. The characters in your mind are what they are, and nobody is trying to take them away from you. Think of the Good Omens TV series as a stage play: for six full hours, actors are going to be portraying the roles of Crowley and Aziraphale, Shadwell and Madame Tracy, Newt and Anathema, Adam, Pepper, Wensleydale and Brian and the rest. Will they look like the people in your head? The ones you’ve been drawing and writing about and imagining for (in some cases) almost 30 years?
Probably not. Which is fine.
The people in your head and your drawings are still there, and still real and still true. I’ve seen drawings of hundreds of different Aziraphales over the years, all with different faces and body-shapes, different hair and skin, and would never have thought to tell anyone who drew or loved them that that wasn’t what Aziraphale looked like. (And a couple of years after we wrote it, I was amused to realise that the Aziraphale in my head looked nothing like the Aziraphale in Terry’s head.) I’ve loved every instance of Good Omens Cosplay I’ve seen, and in no case did I ever think anyone was doing it wrong: they were all Aziraphales and Crowleys, and it was always a delight.
Good Omens has been unillustrated for 27 years, which means that each of you gets to make up your own look for the characters, your own backstories, your own ideas about how they will behave.
The TV version is being made with love and with faithfulness to the story. It’s got material and characters in it that Terry and I had discussed over the years, (some of it from what we would have done it there had been a sequel). Writing it has taken up the greater part of my last three years. You might like it – I really hope you will – but you don’t have to. You can start watching it, decide that you prefer the thing in your head, and stop watching it. (I never saw the last Lord of the Rings movie, because I liked the thing in my head too much.)
Remember we are making this with love.
And that your own personal headCrowleys and headAziraphales and headFourHorsemen and headThem and headHastur and headLigur and headSisterMary and all the rest are yours, and safe, and nobody is ever going to take them away from you.
All this Supernatural stuff and talk of Angels and Demons (one of whom is named Crowley) has reminded me of my fondness for Good Omens. Which inevitably leads me to the best/worst/most horrifically gut-wrenchingly sad fanfic ever written for the fandom:
In a nutshell, its a simple reversal where Crowley is still an Angel and Aziraphale is a Demon. But it goes so, so much darker, more twisted and more achingly beautiful than that.
If you haven’t read it and you like Good Omens, go do it now. Don’t worry, I’ll be waiting when you come back. I will even let you cry on my shoulder.
I actually love Good Omens fic! It was one of my earlier fandoms, one of my favorite fics of all time is Afrai’s “The Sacred and the Profane” (which you should read if you want to cry so hard you can’t see) so I’m stoked for the show to be good!
Avelera 