Good Omens (hello again)

[louiselux]

I just went back and reread the Good Omens fic I wrote in 2003-4. That was quite a weird experience. Not bad, just weird. I thought I'd finally put it on AO3 because people have asked, and upload it with the caveat that it's book canon. But actually there's very little in them that goes against TV canon. I wonder if that's partly because it was a very good adaptation? It's at least partly because I never wrote anything very long or involved in GO fandom, and my stories were often about underpants or porridge or snake babies, and other silly things. 

Yeah, now I do want to write something long an involved. My writing efforts have changed a lot in the years since then, going from always short to always long, possibly reflecting the change in why I write. Not that I have written very much in the past year, really.

Anyhoo, I have a metric shit ton of feelings about GO right now. That adaptation has pleased me a lot. As I was saying just this morning, it's really quite something to go back to an old fandom but with a shiny new set of mental imagery.

Comments

[tiggymalvern]

actually there's very little in them that goes against TV canon. I wonder if that's partly because it was a very good adaptation?

Yes. And also because the TV adaptation was controlled by one of the original authors. And also because that original author absorbed the fanon over the past 20 years.

Good Omens wasn't a book about an angel and a demon. Good Omens was a book with an ensemble cast, of which an angel and a demon between them constituted less than a sixth of the pages. Much of the book was dedicated to Anathema, and the Them and the Four Horsemen, with Shadwell and Newton Pulsifer and Madam Tracy as additional occupiers of lines and words.

But of the ensemble cast of characters, the fans latched onto the angel and the demon. Those were the two who captured the imagination, the two the readers universally fell in love with. Those were the two the authors were continually questioned about in the decades since the book was published. And maybe the authors fell in love with those two as much as the readers did, because when Neil Gaiman talked about the sequel that was never written, he talked about the angel and the demon living in the South Downs.

So when Neil wrote the TV adaptation, he made the angel and the demon the central characters in a way they never were in the book. But because that's the way everyone remembers the book, with the angel and the demon taking centre stage, the TV adaptation feels absolutely perfect.

[louiselux]

Yes, like he has had 20 years of proof of concept, and has come out the other end with the actual story that people wanted in the first place.