Ok, now you have heard the news

I have GOT to stop learning the news this way

i kind of side-eye anyone that says good omens (the episodes not the book) is queer baiting because isn’t it the opposite of queer baiting when the writer says “yes they are in love”?

like if your stance on queer baiting is “they didn’t kiss/have sex” then i don’t like you

like if your argument is “this is not a queer relationship” when someone asks you why you consider it queer baiting, my follow up question would be “by what standards?”

and if your answer is the above about kissing and sex, then you have to reevaluate your standards because there are many queer people in relationships that don’t do that (without even touching on the fact that crowley and aziraphale aren’t human so they wouldn’t have human relationship standards ANYWAY)

i still cant believe a homophobe has the last name gaiman, g-d looked at u and gave u that blessed last name + u sully her legacy by bein a piece of shit

🔫🔫🔫 hand it over idiot

lgbtrotsky charlielesbo

He’s one of the first authors to put a Trans protagonist in a mainstream comic book.

There’s a kindly elderly lesbian couple in Coraline (and he says they are lesbians). 

 The character he created for Spawn (now owned by Marvel) Angela, is a lesbian in a loving relationship with a trans woman. 

 And there’s Loki in Neil’s book on Norse Mythology.

There’s also quite a few LGBT+ characters in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, which include:

Paul and Alexander Burgess (male couple),

Judy (lesbian),

Donna AKA Foxglove (lesbian), 

Hazel (lesbian),

Cluracan (Bisexual), 

Wanda (Trans woman), 

Desire (Genderfluid and panasexual), 

The Corinthian (gay),

John Constantine (bisexual),

All Neil Gaiman has said in the matter of Crowley and Aziraphale is that fans can interpret their relationship any way they want.  Headcanons are your own. He just feels that to use human terms like gay / Straight / ect doesn’t actually fit because they aren’t human.  So let’s make up a new LGBT+ friendly term for non-humans as he allows headcanons of all kinds and will not discourage them.  How about Pan-Celestial?  These characters only have gender if they will itand they only choose to be perceived as male.  This is also true with Lucifer in the Sandman comics.

You mustn’t leap to conclusions.  Neil has been an advocate for LGBT+ causes since the 80s (if not earlier).  

Also Neil Gaiman is a MAJOR Bowie and Queen fan, so much so that his version of Lucifer (Basis for the Netflix character) was modeled after David Bowie.  

Also Neil Gaiman, himself, clicked link on a post of mine about shipping Morpheus with Daniel from Sandman.  Does that even remotely sound like a homophobe to you, kids?

When Tumblr wants to lynch someone they should REALLY learn the facts first, m’kay?

This

Get the fuck away from Neil. He is not only a supporter of fanfic writing but actually published a fucking collection of Sandman fanfic (one entry was given to him to read by the author at a book signing)

What the fuck??????

How do you go from “I will not give non-textual answers about my work” to “homophobic”?  That’s a leap with no ground on either side of the gap.

Sometimes I hate how Tumblr latched onto the word “queerbaiting” and by sometimes I mean all the time. Say it with me: media consumption is not the be-all-end-all of activism. It’s not even a big part of activism.

I also hate how in the case of Good Omens what they are saying is that a non-sexual but obviously loving relationship, what?, Doesn’t count? Isn’t “good” enough?

Azirephale and Crowley are in love. That is Canon. It isn’t even close to queerbaiting. Neil Gaiman is an ally and has been one since before that was cool.

But, yeah, Tumblr does not know what activism is.

This is exactly what I mean. Calling him homophobic is not hyperbole, it is incorrect.

Az and Crowley are in love. He has said straight up he cannot call them gay because they aren’t human, but they love each other.

It is weird to be to demand that non-human only vaguely corporeal creatures (I remember in the book they don’t/can’t even describe Az and Crowley’s real forms) kiss or have sex. That does not define a romantic or loving relationship. Let them be sexless.

Like what is up with teenage girls out there straight up glorifying m/m friendships with unspoken romantic undertones like somehow they as women benefit from it at all like… and then they start stanning the actors who play the characters even though they too have nothing to do with it, and the stanning eventually turns into weird inappropriate crushes on men not only 2-3 times older than them but who also aren’t even attractive or decent as people as well??

Like why are young girls so obsessed with ugly older men who play characters who have a bromance with other ugly older men. What’s the point of that. What do you get out of it.

These days we have more and more female-centric stories with actual well-developed characters, women of different ethnicities and orientations doing all kinds of things in all kinds of genres …. And yet you girls choose shit like GOOD OMENS to go crazy over.

That fucking show doesn’t even have good storytelling. Everyone is a shitty men and the three only female characters are poorly fleshed out stereotypes who then go on to date gross men who don’t deserve them in true needboi fantasy fashion. It reads like a children’s story that y'all are too old for but you all go crazy for it bc silly incompetent uglyboi 1 and tenth-doctor-but-meaner (a bit) chat a lot. That’s it. They CHAT a lot, that’s basically all they do, and then Neil Gaiman, in fucking JK Rowling fashion, says it was meant to be gay and you all flip out like it’s the best thing you’ve ever heard. Like what the hell?? How do you all agree to obsess over something like that?

Anyway, so long story short, after my Tumblr has been inundated with good omens stans I finally decided to give it a chance. And oh boi was it a disappointment even beyond what I, someone who’s been on this website since the days of superwholock, could have expected.

So yes, now I’m thinking about how no matter how many years pass, sad teen girls will obsess over the same type of media for the same reasons, and… It’s not even about the media being bad (which it is), but it’s about the lack of self love and being able to relate with people who have anything in similar with you, with your own gender and potential future relationships, that just makes me sad for you all.

There are so many great female characters out there, teenage or older and supernatural, often gay for each other too, and in better stories with fewer straight male author type cliches, so why are you not obsessing over those?

People who were crazy for destiel back in the day used to say you couldn’t find love stories as deep with a het couple, which is fair enough, but that was years and years ago before streaming services started catering to audiences other than straight men. This is not that world anymore. There are alternatives. Please go find them and enrich yourselves, and stop devoting all your time to drawing reblogging and headcanoning middle aged white straight men in same sex relationships. That’s not healthy.

This has been my ted talk

Shhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. 

Let people enjoy things and enjoy them how they like. 

We can tell you’re very, very smart and obviously a great literary critic. Good job. You sure told those teenage girls. Oh wait, no. All you did was condescend to them, like a lot of the people in their lives. 

What people ship and post on Tumblr is not the whole of their lives. Here’s a shocker - most of the Good Omens fans in my circle are, like me, middle aged women. Elder millennials and gen x’ers. Yep. Not teenage girls. 

I have a teenage girl. I would never shame her the way you just purported to shame teenage girls at large. You realize you just did what the patriarchy does, right? You sneered at people for their interests and told them they weren’t good enough because those interests don’t meet YOUR standards for media consumption. 

Hot take - your attitude is unhealthy. 

… i realized i skipped a lot of that rant when i saw ‘neil gaiman, in tru jk rowling fash—’ wtf op you haven’t been paying attention at all

also please compare the number of actual canon queer characters – explicitly stated in the text – in neil gaiman’s books, vs those in jk rowling’s.

we’ll be waiting here, because it’ll take some time. and not because jk wrote a lot of them. neil on the other hand…

ALSO ALSO.

if you don’t SEE that az and crowley are deep in a messy and very queer love story, you are blind.

BUT. EVEN IF IT WAS A BROMANCE.

DO YOU KNOW WHY WE WOULD CARE?

NON-TOXIC MASCULINITY. LOOK IT UP. IT’S AWESOME AND THE WORLD NEEDS INFINITELY MORE OF IT.

THANKS FOR YOUR ATTENTION and now i can stop shouting maybe.

Doesn’t know Sheen’s or Tennant’s names, claims they’re not decent people anyhow.

I have made a popular Good Omens post.  I have been periodically checking the reblogs just to see who happens to reblog the thing.

You know what I’ve seen in peoples’ bios?  A lot of they/them pronouns, the odd “nonbinary but he/him is fine,” “either she/her or they/them idk,” that sort of thing, interspersed with statements about being gay, or bi, or lesbian, or ace.

I have also written a decently popular (by my standards, anyway) Good Omens fic, with a hundred and twenty one comments to date.  Most of those comments come out to something along the lines of “my queer heart needed this.  Now I am crying.  Thank you.”

You see the pattern, right?

This is not just about those young girls you have such drippingly obvious contempt for.  This is about the queer community.  And if you don’t get why Good Omens is about queerness (among other things), that’s fine.  Maybe it’s not for you.

Exactly. Thank you. Nearly EVERY Good Omens fan I know is in their late 20s, 30s, or 40s. A handful are younger, but mostly this fandom skews much, much older than average. Likely because the book will be thirty years old next year, and many of these fans read it when it was published, or very shortly thereafter. EVERY single fan of the series I’ve met is LGBTQ+, and a huge chunk of that portion are nonbinary, transgender, genderfluid, or otherwise not cis.  But of course, a few teen girls enjoyed it, so that must mean every fan is fifteen. Imagine being this ageist, lookist, and hateful toward teen girls–especially when society hates older people, unconventionally attractive people, and, yup, teen girls.

The post is oversaturated with radfem “centering women in all aspects of your live as a moral stance” and casual misandry,  and lo and behold, first post on op’s blog is mocking a person warning against radical feminism,  second is mocking a person explaining why kinkphobia is a radfem stance. Honestly,  it’s a given that a series that has a mostly nonbinary cast would be hated by those types. 

@vergess @tenitchyfingers

Oh boy, glad I'm not wrong, because I could just feel the fucking radfem energy dripping from this post.

This just in: radfems are misogynistic as fuck in a mistaken (or deliberate) attempt to be empowering women. Shocker.

This Meta is For You, Too

When marginalized people have analyses and theories about a text - be it a show, a movie, a book, or anything - those analyses are not “closed” 

Any analysis based in the text is not a headcanon, it’s just a valid textual interpretation. And we create these interpretations, these “meta” as I’ll refer to them hereonout, not just for us. We see ourselves in the text, we see our own experience reflected back at us, and we want to share that. 

When someone says “I identify with Crowley, because he questions G-d constantly, and is wrestling with the Devine Plan,” and our response is “We clearly identify Crowley as Jewish, because Wrestling and Questioning are Extremely Jewish traits,”* 

The proper response is not to ignore that. The response is to recognize that you have something in common with the Jewish experience! 

We create these meta and these explanations not just for us. For other people, it shows what our culture is like. It shows what it’s like to be a member of X group. It is for learning, and for sharing, and for spreading. 

I see people reblogging tons of theories about characters that they’re a certain type of queer, or part of a disability community, or what have you - and those theories being spread by non-members of said communities. For example, ace headcanons, spread by non-aces. And that’s great! That’s wonderful! I partake in that (as a queer, disabled person) myself! 

But I don’t see it happen a lot with Jewish headcanons - as if there’s a reluctance on the part of non-Jews to label anyone as Jewish who isn’t explicitly said to be. And, in this day and age of extreme antisemitism, that is dangerous. It perpetuates the idea that we are “other”, that unless it’s obvious someone’s Jewish, they can’t possibly be, because they pass as a non-Jew. You are perpetuating antisemitism, in a very subtle and non-conscious way, by not treating Jewish meta the same as other meta. 

And maybe you don’t understand stuff. Isn’t that great???? Learning is AMAZING. I, personally, WELCOME every chance I get to learn something new! So you had to google what a Ketubah is, or the idea that all Jewish souls were present at Sinai. That’s amazing! Now you’ve learned something new!!! I’m so happy for you!! 

It’s not appropriation to reblog and spread these theories like you do any other meta on Good Omens, or any other fandom. It’s appreciation, and it’s allyship. Maybe not the most important allyship, but allyship nonetheless - and, certainly, enough of a low effort one that you should be able to do it. 

Partake with us, friends. Appreciate that we are able to see ourselves in the text. Celebrate our commonalities. Reblog our metas, our fanfictions, our fanarts. Engage with every interpretation of the text, even if it’s not one you subscribe to. You’ll be amazed at what you learn, what you appreciate - and how you grow as a person, from doing so. 

*Yes, I know Good Omens is about Christian mythology. We all know that. It’s kind of hard to miss. Doesn’t it say something about Good Omens that we still see it’s Jewish influence (from Neil Gaiman, who wrote it and is Jewish)? Maybe, before you bring up complaints and simple contradictions to these interpretations, consider that we have, in fact, thought of that - and wonder why we still have these theories. 

Jews and non-Jews should reblog this. That’s kind of the point. 

Why Neil Gaiman is Terrible (with receipts)

I’m mostly making this so I can link people who can’t be bothered to do their own research and constantly ask me what he’s done wrong to this post. That being said, this is effectively a more complete version of the post with links I made recently, and a post containing a sc of a tweet that was taken out of context to appear homophobic has been removed to stop people from focusing on that misinformation, so please reblog this version instead.

queerbaiting

more queerbaiting

more retroactively making characters gay after explcitly saying they weren’t for 30 years

disrespect and ignorance relating to lgbt identities

gets away with these things by pretending he intended for aziraphale and crowley to be asexual/agender representation so he looks more woke than he ever bothered to be

racism

racism in good omens

transphobia

disgusting conduct towards fans (another example is here, but the person it affected has requested they be kept anonymous, so I cannot provide concrete evidence of this happening.)

literally defending child porn (and a summation of that blog post so you don’t have to read it)

oh, and his wife is a shitty person too

Regardless of your opinion on Gaiman, please read the links and share this post. Even if you choose to go ahead and like him anyway, or just continue enjoying his work uncritically, it is important that people know what he has done wrong, both in the past and recently, and hold him up to the same standards of criticism as any content creator or public figure. This was not made in effort to “cancel” Gaiman or bandwagon hate against him, but making this information common knowledge could cause some people to think twice before they blindly defend him.

The man is married to Amanda Palmer (*violent wretching sounds*) we can’t expect too much good from him. And I *love* his work. But might as well keep it 100.

So, if we’re going to keep it 100 then I need to point out that this list of receipts is bullshit.

This is literally a receipt list of the kind of homophobia, queerphobia, transphobia, and exclusionary rhetoric that we’ve been seeing all over tumblr for the last few years. I’ll elaborate.

Keep reading

Crowley is presenting as female (or at least, not male) at the Crucifixion scene.  Everyone who noticed he was wearing feminine clothes there–it was intentional! (x)

We really out here with two canon nonbinary folks in a deeply intimate (can be read as queerplatonic/aspec) relationship on mainstream TV.

Honestly, the Good Omens discourse is 100% representative of one of the major problems with the queer community. Everyone could just be glad that other subgroups in the community feel represented and let them continue on that way even if not everyone agrees about it. Because frankly, how someone else interprets the exact gender and sexuality issues that are playing out in this fictional book/show is harmless to you personally. No one can take your own perception of it away from you. But no. Why just accept that everyone’s happy with their own take when you can instead fight about which other letter of the LGBTQIA+ acronym is apparently stealing representation from you by having a different opinion than you, or by having it be left somewhat open to interpretation by the creators? 

If you really have the energy to argue about this sort of thing, consider spending it campaigning for the creation of more diverse representation, not on trying to ensure that other people aren’t allowed to claim representation for themselves. 

On this same note: If you attack an author for being ‘homophobic’ just because he personally believes his characters are agender and asexual rather than labelling them as gay, though he’s perfectly willing for you to believe otherwise and write fanfic about it to your heart’s content, maybe your own unwillingness to acknowledge queer identities other than the ‘G’ and ‘L’ parts of the acronym is really the bigger issue to be addressed here, honestly.

You know what Good Omens does NOT get enough credit for? How it never, not once, makes gender presentation the butt of a joke.

Crowley presenting as female to be Warlock’s Nanny? The way this was filmed, acted, and written wasn’t made to be funny whatsoever. She was stunning, I loved the hat!

Pollution using they/them pronouns while the postman used the gender neutral honorific of sir for them? What’s there to make fun of? They’re royalty.

Archangel Michael, who has a traditionally male name, played by a female actress? Never questioned.

Lord Beelzebub’s androgyny? Only respect for the Lord of Hell.

Aziraphale sharing Madame Tracy’s body? Crowley recognized his angel and accepted it no problem. He was right about the dress too, it did suit him!

Crowley’s pure, unfiltered non-binary/gender-fluid energy in general? Fucking fabulous. Who could seriously make fun of this demon’s style? As someone once pointed out to me, you could swap him with Tilda Swinton and I’d see no difference. What an icon.

Good Omens is the first big show I’ve seen to basically avoid transphobia all together when the opportunity presented itself, and even say fuck you to the gender binary as a bonus. If the biggest binary in all the universe, Heaven and Hell, don’t give a damn about it then why should you? 

some people hear “they don’t experience human gender” or “they’re not men, they’re man shaped” and think that’s neil gaiman copping out but like. that just means they’re nonbinary and that’s sick as hell!! I’m gonna rub my little nonbinary hands all over good omens thank you very much 

i’m feeling the ace/nonbinary solidarity in this chili’s tonight