Aghhh I'm Pissed Rn.

Aghhh I'm pissed rn.

I just saw a tiktok where someone (I'm not gonna be naming any names and I will use they/them to refer to this person as to not expose who they are) was talking about how they "are chill with she/her, he/him, and they/them but with anything beyond that they're out", and it automatically pissed me off.

It is not your job (especially if you do not use those pronouns or aren't part of the community) to police people's pronouns and say what's "right" or "wrong". Let people do whatever the fuck they want and be reffered to as whatever the fuck they want.

Neopronouns and people that use neopronouns are completely valid and deserve more recognition and visibility.

Anyway, fuck this person.

(Also side note: if you do not support neopronouns, kindly get off my page ✌)

Yup, I agree with a lot of what's said in this post ⬆

I would absolutely love to read an essay about the acephobia in the Good Omens fandom bc I know nothing about it (the fandom acephobia not good omens) BUT ONLY IF you use every relevant tag you can think of, thats 100% required

(I better get an A+ bc I used literally every tag that came to mind, my friend. Also I churned this out in five hours and did not edit it, so if there are spelling errors pls forgive.)

Good Omens: An Exploration of Internalized Acephobia

The year is 2019 and the six-part adaptation of Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter has just been released on Amazon Prime and is kicking up controversy amongst Christian moms. The show is critically acclaimed and is nominated for several awards. Headlines cycle through the news for a while--everything from speculating on a season 2 to the hilarious petition Christians sent to Netflix to take the series down--but after awhile the buzz settles down and everyone moves back to scarier headlines like next year's presidential election or that worrying virus cropping up across the world. YouTube continues to monetize Ineffable Husbands compilations, but that’s the most you see of it on public social media platforms.

Except for on Tumblr.

Six episodes of David Tennant being slutty mcslutty demon slut and Michael Sheen being a refined asshole (affectionate) disguised as an innocent do-gooder is apparently enough to keep Tumblr happy for a good long while. Supernatural isn’t doing so great on that gay content, Game of Thrones just ended as terribly as the non-derranged viewers knew it would, and Doctor Who is doing kind of ok, but the fandom is winding down as it approaches the next regeneration.

Everyone goes batshit insane over Good Omens because this show has everything. Enemy to lovers, PINING, m u t u a l pining, sacrifice, EXISTENTIAL CRISISES, recontextualizing your faith, GOD IS A WOMAN, you name it and the fandom has it. Thousands of incredible fanfics on faith and religion and existence start pouring out. The ex-catholics are Thriving. Even Supernatural fans are hopping on this train. Everyone’s having a grand ol’ time with our queer metaphysical beings.

And then it happens.

As it does with every large fandom.

The acephobia is born.

Neil Gaiman Gets Canceled

Okay, to be really canceled, it has to happen on Twitter. Which is where the inciting incident started, however, the majority of the explosion was contained on Tumblr and--to an extent--Reddit. There was some backlash on Twitter, but the real shit went down here.

So everyone is going crazy over Ineffable Husbands, and of course word gets round to Neil Gaiman who has to address that there are mountains of queer subtext in the show.

“Particularly the way that Michael plays Aziraphale just as a being of pure love, I think that gave us something very special, because people of every and any sexual orientation and any and every gender looked at Crowley and Aziraphale and saw themselves in it, or saw a love story that they responded to, and that was completely unexpected.

“Things like this, you can’t manufacture, they have to happen from a fandom.”

And the fandom lost its mind.

Fandom Response and Internalized Acephobia/Transphobia

The backlash was disappointing, but unsurprising. Here are a few favorites:

“[...] IDK how to tell y'all that the complete desexualization of these characters is homophobia regardless of what you think their gender is.”

“good omens is queerbait. full stop. it is a show deliberately crafted to have just enough doublespeak and easily interpretable looks to both have plausible deniability, and appeal to the story’s largely queer audience. creator confirmation outside of canon, much less on twitter, doesn’t cut it. this show came out in 2019 on amazon prime. people had been making their interpretations of aziraphale and crowley’s relationship known for decades at this point. there was utterly no excuse not to have them clearly be in a relationship, at least by the end. but a queerbait was more profitable, and no press is bad press, so they didn’t. insisting otherwise is both disingenuous, and displaying a profound lack of ability to be critical of the media you enjoy.”

I really just can’t get over how breathtakingly bad “this person dresses like a man, uses male pronouns, and is physically exactly like the average man except they don’t have a dick and so they’re not a man” is. This is not woke nonbinary rep folks

And this is where things get really….weird. The majority of these takes are by blogs that are run by fellow ace/trans folk and yet all of these takes still reek of queerphobia.

Have another one for good measure:

“I feel like good omens takes queerbaiting a step further, what with Gaiman’s honestly excessively aggressive statements that they couldn’t possibly be gay. Like if you wanted nb characters write nb characters, writing a fairly romantic relationship between two men-as-default characters and then attacking people who read it as gay by framing us as the villains who are denying the poor nb and asexual people their representation feels like a specifically malicious type of queerbaiting.”

A truly lovely take on that last one. Apparently it's the transphobes who are the victims for bullying the non-binaries who are taking away their representation.

So to summarize, fellow greyace/greygender blogs are all up in arms because Neil Gaiman “desexualized” Crowley and Aziraphale.

They claim nonbinary characters who still use male pronouns and physically presents as a male is bad rep, the show queerbaited--even though Neil Gaiman went on record as saying it was a love story--and the poor naysayers who want to be victimized via queerbaiting throw the blame on Gaiman for the blatant homophobic takes they're spewing online.

The internalized queerphobia reveals itself once again.

Additionally, just because you are nonbinary or trans doesn't mean you speak for the whole community. Queer people are not homogeneous and there is a wide range of perspective and experiences to be taken into account.

The internalized acephobia that emerged is not surprising. Disappointing. But not surprising.

Why These Are Objectively Shitty Takes

There are plethora of takes on Tumblr that could be chosen for this part. The one's that will be addressed, however, are the previously cited quotes.

Aziraphale and Crowley Didn't Kiss

Or, to put it more eloquently, the desexualization of Good Omen's man characters is homophobia "regardless what you think of their genders."

The implication that two characters have to be sexual with each other on screen to be queer is LAUGHABLE. Why, you may ask? How about I direct everyone's attention to the C-Drama Sensation The Untamed (2019).

The Untamed features a queer story about two tragic lovers receiving a second chance at their relationship. Because the show was created and produced in China, they had to tone down certain aspects of the books to get it past censorship. This means exactly zero onscreen implications of a sexual relationship between their main characters beyond the insanely well crafted subtext.

Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are a study in desexualizing queer characters. I could write a thousand meta analysis on this show alone, but that's a different post.

The Untamed, in short, is a love story.

Good Omens, in full, is also a love story.

Both have main characters who are "desexualized" and both shows ends with both ships as explicitly canon as Milo and Kida at the end of Atlantis the Lost Empire (sorry that was the first film that came to mind that did not include a kiss between a m/f ship).

The implication that two characters can only be in a relationship if they are sexual onscreen is fucking insulting at best, homophobia at worst. Actually it is good ace rep to have your two main leads not show sexual interest in each other. Actually it is excellent queer rep to have your characters be romantically in love, but show exactly zero desire toward each other or any other character on screen.

And that last line? The "regardless of what you think of their gender"?? Yeah, that reeks of transphobia too. Because Neil Gaiman confirmed that angels/demons in his work are canonically nonbinary/genderqueer and the implication that two nonbinary persons can't be in a relationship without it being sexual is super bigoted.

Good Omens Is Queerbaiting

Queerbaiting is a marketing technique for fiction and entertainment in which creators hint at, but then do not actually depict, same-sex romance or other LGBTQ+ representation. They do so to attract ("bait") a queer or straight ally audience with the suggestion of relationships or characters that appeal to them, while at the same time attempting to avoid alienating other consumers.

-Wikpedia, Queerbaiting

The marketing for Good Omens itself gave the impression that audiences would be getting a story about two enemies who gradually become reluctant friends by the end of the series. A buddy-cop story on an inter-dimensional scale. Instead, Good Omens is about two incredibly old friends too in love with earth and each other to let the apocalypse happen.

Toting Ineffable Husbands as part of their marketing scheme didn't really start until after queer fans started coming out of the woodwork. Is this queerbaiting...eeeeeehhh. Honestly this argument is iffy.

There is also the fact that Sheen and Tennant explicitly played their characters as in love and people working on the show shared that vision. They were telling a love story, albeit a very non-conventional one.

There are several articles out there on queercoding vs queerbaiting, how queer isn't just gay, and author intent that could be cited at this point, but I'm going to go easy on this section and just say this:

“Whatever Crowley and Aziraphale are, it’s a love story.”

-Neil Gaiman

Everyone screams "death of the author" until it's inconvenient for them, and this is certainly the case for Good Omens. Suddenly, author intent matters because Neil Gaiman refused to assign a direct label to his characters.

And why should he? They're his creations. And actually they're damn good representation without the label. The fandom collectively forgot nonbinary queers existed or decided that Neil Gaiman was representing the wrong kind of nonbinary queers.

Final Thoughts

Good Omens is not the first fandom to have rampant acephobia strewn throughout nor will it be the last. Homophobia of all types will always rear it's ugly head, especially in larger fandom spaces where there are statistically more shitty people to go around.

Even if the naysayers were right, the creators of Good Omens, actors and original writers intents were...well, good. It's a charming little story about two close beings who make very little impact on the end of the world, but still somehow find their happy ending.

This is a bit of a sweeping statement, but people love to be victimized in fandom. The truly magnificent gatekeeping that happened on Tumblr circa 2019 is likely going to run a repeat when season 2 releases. Hopefully most on here will figure out how to turn their critical thinking skills on and remember that the block button exists, but it's doubtful.

Let some rep go around for the greyace/greygender queers please. It's not a competition for who's the most victimized, but we would like some solid rep every once in a while without the bigots crawling out of the woodwork.

Look the series ends with a love song playing over them on a date and telling each other how much they LIKE EACH OTHER WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME-

This was probably my favorite scene-

Bath. 

The current vibe is having Bo Burnham's "Unpaid Intern" suck in my head on repeat at 4 am. And y'know what? I'm okay with that

And let us not forget

I cannot even begin to describe how much gender envy this man gives me

Y'know who I think would make a good older looking aziraphale? John Noble. I'm not sure why I think this would work but in my head it just feels right-

Does anyone else agree?

This may also be because I loved him so much in Fringe lol (and I've been re-watching it recently so-)