Hello & welcome! You'll find my masterlist & snacks in here...

Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to my Tumblr thing. I write meta analyzing Good Omens with a special emphasis on its use of language. On this blog, we've also been decoding Crowley & Aziraphale's etymology-based hidden language, which we've dubbed Ineffable Husbands Speak, for a little while now. You'll find a compendium of posts related to that, as well as other theories and analysis, below the cut.

In this post, you'll find my meta masterlist. You can go to my original welcome post here to read more about the content of my blog. This post contains links to meta on language and characters. You can find story analysis meta here, theories here, and silly stuff over here. 💕

Crowley referring to Gabriel, Michael, and the others not as "angels" but as (the honestly more accurate) "angelic entities" in front of Aziraphale is such a wonderful bit of flirt.

Crowley very deliberately not using "angel" to describe anybody else as a nod to Aziraphale that Crowley's romantic pet name for him is a word that he sees as belonging just to Aziraphale is really sweet.

Romancing his angel and shading angelic entities have always been the twin passions of Bildad the Shuhite.

Aziraphale's Eden clothes play so differently after S2.

In S2, Before the Beginning and the Job minisode show us that the angels (minus Gabriel) were all still wearing the same shapeless robe with the gold trim through even the first couple of thousand years of Earth. When you consider that? Aziraphale's clothes in Eden suddenly seem really rebellious.

In Eden, Aziraphale had thrown out the uniform that they were all expected to wear entirely and made his own look. He was abiding by certain rules of Heaven's colors but he was using his clothes to make a statement. And these choices he was making here?!

Gone was that horrible robe with the gold collar and wrist trim evocative of the angels being shackled to Heaven. Gone was any sense of a lack of individualism. He made these clothes fit his body and his own sense of style, with different shades and textures that he enjoyed. Aziraphale was even coming at Heaven's warped ideas about consumption by wearing a decorative top layer. This was all about asserting individuality and free will and, amazingly... none of these things were even the most political part.

That was the fact that the draping in the top layer was subtly creating a sash within Aziraphale's clothes... like the signature look of Lord Beelzebub and which we have seen is echoed by many of the original demons who were first cast out in The Fall, like Furfur and Dagon.

This seems like it was a protest look? Aziraphale was subtly trying to convey solidarity with the demons from whom Aziraphale was supposed to be guarding the humans and The Garden.

There's also the other layer to the sashes, as well, which is that they not only have had ties to a zillion different political movements but that they have been worn in different times in history as part of mourning.

The idea of Aziraphale's clothes in Eden being designed to reflect political protest and grief then makes the pattern on them a lot more significant. It didn't mean much of anything to us in S1 but, after S2, we might see why Aziraphale chose a scrolling pattern of intertwined circles.

The Dance/Ball of The Forty-One

In Good Omens, we see only a handful of flashbacks from Crowley and Aziraphale's past but two of them-- arguably, two of the most significant-- have something in common: the number 41.

There's the big one that we're being shown in multiple parts-- 1941-- but that is also taking place nineteen hundred years after the flashback set in the ancient Rome of 41 A.D.. The two also interconnect, with Part 2 of 1941 involving references between Crowley and Aziraphale to that night in ancient Rome.

So, why might Good Omens be repeating this number?

I think that this is a queer history reference to The Dance of The Forty-One-- also sometimes known as The Ball of The Forty One-- which was a Mexican society scandal in 1901. Basically, the police raided a private party in Mexico City that turned out to be a secret, queer, high society dance. They busted up a party that had a lot of men in drag and some sex workers in attendance and it was the height of scandal at the time. The police arrested 41 people at the party, which is how the scandal got its name in the press.

Many of the people at The Dance of The Forty-One, though, were very wealthy and very well-connected. They were more than willing to buy the silence of the police and press and did just that. While some names got out and some people were prosecuted, not everyone was. Of the 41 arrested, 12 wound up identified and went to prison but many others were able to buy their way to silence and a lack of jailtime.

It's thought that the press didn't manage to somehow get all of the information about who was at the party anyway because the government of Mexico wound up getting involved. Why did they? Because one of the attendees (and organizers lol) was apparently Ignacio de la Torre y Mier... the son-in-law of the then-President of Mexico.

The Dance/Ball of The Forty-One is thought by some to be the first time that queerness and existing queer community was openly discussed by most of the Mexican media, in large part because the nature of the story was so big that it couldn't be kept out of the normally pretty censored papers. There was plenty of the kind of hate that we might sadly expect. The group was often called (not just by the media but by people in general) "The 41 Maricones", a Spanish perjorative along the same lines of the English faggot.

This party is also responsible for a bit of one of Good Omens' favorite things-- etymology aka the history of words and their meanings. The Dance of The Forty-One is what led to the number 41 in Spanish-- cuarenta y uno-- becoming slang for a queer person across several Spanish-speaking countries.

So, on the very queer Good Omens, having some very significant years in the story contain the number 41 in a reference to The Dance of The Forty-One when this is the story of the secret romance of its queer main characters-- complete with them having a ball that goes a bit awry-- seems pretty fitting.

Other references to similar historical instances are already in Good Omens, like nods to the fate of Oscar Wilde and Aziraphale learning to gavotte in The Hundred Guineas Club, which had some ties to the eventual Cleveland Street scandal. Just as Crowley and Aziraphale have spent millennia dodging the supernatural police of their world, they've also been moving in queer circles on Earth where humans have been doing the same.

Additionally, there's a song that I don't think is being referenced here in Good Omens or anything but which goes along with this theme and is also very Crowley/Aziraphale. It's arguably the best song ever made by the Dave Matthews Band, and one which some have long interpreted as being something that is very Good Omens: a blasphemous love song queer-coded through use of etymology. Which song? The romantic pine fest 'mysteriously' 😉 entitled "#41".

At the start of the "silly question" scene, we already know about Crowley's rain plan for Maggie & Nina. This makes it likely that we might think that Crowley is only talking about literal rain and miss the metaphor he's making in asking Nina if, "in the event of a sudden, torrential downpour", she would be "likely to seek shelter under an awning."

As Nina points out? It's a silly question, alright. Pretty much anyone caught in a sudden, torrential downpour would seek shelter from it. Taken literally, it's not even really a question. Taken more metaphorically, though, it's an interesting one and Crowley reveals a moment later in the scene-- with the "for instance" and the nod in Maggie's direction-- that his silly-seeming question is really a whole canopy-themed metaphor.

A torrential downpour, sudden rain... those can also be metaphorical for outbursts of violence and its effects, especially if no shelter is secured. (Crowley's love of homophony also suggests that this is likely also 'sudden rein/reign', which would go along with this abuse metaphor.) Getting out of the metaphorical rainstorm = getting as far away as someone can from the abuse. Getting as far away as someone can from abuse = seeking shelter under a canopy.

In Crowley's metaphor, a canopy is not really a building, even if Aziraphale did build him one with the bookshop. A metaphorical canopy is safe haven in the form of a kind and loving person.

Crowley explains this to Nina by asking if she would seek shelter under an awning and then saying "for instance" and nodding towards Maggie visible across the way in The Small Back Room to explain to Nina that he means that an awning, in this metaphor, is a person-- like, potentially, Maggie. What about Record Shop, eh?, he's saying to Nina. She's lovely and she'd let you stand under her umbrella.

It's been Crowley's experience that the way out of the storm is to find safety and peace under the protection of a canopy of the person kind-- and to be a canopy for that person in return. Crowley recommends what he knows: a kind angel-- maybe, say, the one mad for Nina and currently looking her way from the record shop (which, amusingly, also has a literal awning.)

Crowley knows that he and Nina just met but also that they are both experiencing some like-recognizes-like. They both know that Crowley knows what it's like to live through the things that Nina is living through in S2. He's further down the path with all of it and gently suggesting from experience that Nina might want to think about getting under that awning-- literally, metaphorically, and euphemistically.

Crowley is trying to suggest to Nina that she won't believe how amazing it can be to love and let herself be loved in return. That there's an angel over there that wants to love her and that she should believe him when he suggests that letting her would be the best decision Nina could ever make. That she and Maggie can rescue themselves by coming to one another's emotional rescue. He knows how good it can be because it's his and Aziraphale's story.

By showing in the "silly question" scene that The Vavoom has a metaphorical layer to Crowley, it's reinforcing the idea that Crowley has come up with this metaphor because it reflects the more literal beginnings of his relationship with Aziraphale. It is yet another Clue that what he's really trying to do with Maggie and Nina's vavoom is to give them a version of his and Aziraphale's first canopy-covered kiss, had when taking shelter from some literal rain, likely thousands of years ago.

To Buy (or Have Bought) The Farm

American idiom; exact origins unknown but known to date back to the pre-Industrial Revolution times. In modern times, a general euphemism for dying (similar to "to kick the bucket") but it evolved into that from being a reference to the death of a soldier in an armed conflict.

While the idiom was used in reference to a soldier's death, it actually describes that death in terms of the action it might trigger-- the ability of the soldier's family to use the life insurance payout to gain some autonomy and independence by being able to have a more secure livelihood through ownership, like through buying a family farm.

When Crowley miscalculated his miracle in upset over Morag being shot and sent the grave guards to Hell, he knew it would likely only be a matter of time before Hell figured it out and came after him. He thought that, if they did, he might not survive it.

He kept that information to himself in hopes that maybe he'd get away with the mistake and in order to have some time with Aziraphale without him worried about it. During this time, they were helping Elspeth and had, ironically, earlier talked about farming as an occupation.

Quietly thinking that he might be about to buy the farm himself, Crowley gave Elspeth the equivalent to coming into some family money that she would not otherwise have. He told her not to dare try to buy the farm herself again-- just to buy a literal farm and some safety with their money.

Still love how Furfur's photo caught them sneaking a quick moment of holding hands in plain sight.