This is mostly about Good Omens, but I have several other examples I’d like to briefly rant about as well. I’m not sure if this is maybe a spoiler since I didn’t actually watch it, but I just saw a clip of the kiss scene in season 2 of the Good Omens TV show and it boils my blood.
I first read Good Omens about 15 years ago and I loved it. I borrowed it from my friend and told him that I was just going to keep it because it was so good. He said that that was fine because he actually stole it from a mutual friend of ours. So that was my friend group in my 20s. Just running around robbing each other of Good Omens. It’s still one of my favorite books and I’ve read it dozens of times.
I would see the relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale as a thinly veiled Cold War analogy. It’s the US spy and the USSR spy in Ethiopia both having to deal with increasingly hysterical propaganda from their bosses and both realizing that spying is really actually boring and tedious, but the local food is great. It was published in 1990 so the Cold War was a really apt metaphor for the time. I can see how it could be read another way. Especially by younger people who weren’t alive during the Cold War. If you’d like to have a personal take that Crowley and Aziraphale get together, go for it. Like 90% of fanfic is adding romance between characters. But I think that sci-fi and (some) fantasy ought to be about building a different world in order to draw interesting conclusions about our world or human nature. Those genres shouldn’t be about building sexual tension. It’s just like the horrible version of The Hitchhikers Guide where Arthur and Trillian get together.
I don’t know. Does this drive anyone else nuts?
by myfirstnamesdanger