#if you come crawling back to good omens just bc they kissed maybe you should take that as a learning experience

[nellasbookplanet]

I'm so sorry but I'm going to talk about supernatural in the year of our lord 2023, because I just finished good omens season 2 and the way these shows occupy a very similar space in fandom attitudes is driving me insane.

In so many ways, good omens feels like what supernatural could have been, had they actually committed and not flailed around with like 15 seasons of queerbaiting and the most unintentionally funny ending imaginable. You have the demons and the angels, armageddon, team free will vs god's master plan, years of pining and repression and no personal space and small declarations of love. But good omens does it with genuine vulnerability and comittment, not as bait or comic relief or last minute bury you gays. But, because it’s big and well-known and allows itself time and nuance to get where it’s going, so many people really treated it horribly before the drop of season 2 for not immediatelyand explicitly giving them what they wanted.

Like, after the end of season 1 you could really feel the way spn damaged viewers treated them as the same thing. It’s like people were so prepared to be tricked that they came in highly on guard and defensive. Thing is, this manifested as taking anything other than the most bland, on the nose and immediate gay rep as the creators queerbaiting and trying to worm their way out of committing to 'real' queer rep. Gaiman refuses to confirm your 'they are gay men' headcanons? Clearly him being a coward and not the characters, explicitly, being neither gay nor men. Characters have a very close relationship but no kiss? Clearly queerbaiting and not an affirmation of ace/aro relationships, queerplatonic relationships, or even plain old platonic relationships.

There is so much hurt from years of stereotypes and queerbaiting and bury your gays that any attempt to tell a complex queer story - one where relationships take time, or where they don’t always happen, or where horror or tragedy strikes, become nigh on impossible. It becomes hard to distinguish subtext used to be genuine and subtle and queer-friendly from subtext used to queerbait and make fun, and rather than making the effort to tell them apart and giving stories a chance (and taking the risk of getting hurt) all rep must be distilled into the epitome of 'gay' before it’s accepted as good, because that way you cannot be tricked. Hell, just the way it’s referred to as 'rep' rather than 'characters' is telling.

This is noticeable in the way spn fan spaces talk about Cas, too; he’s always 'the gay angel', never the bisexual angel (despite having had female love interests) or the asexual angel (despite being largely uninterested in sex) or the nonbinary angel (despite not being human and on occassion using female vessels as well as male). Does Meg Masters mean nothing to you. Just. Please allow stories their nuance and their time and their right to not always cater to your ship in the exact way you want (or at all) without declaring them bait. It makes you look very silly when you come crawling back the moment a kiss happens.

#anyway i saw someone refer to goomens s2 as 'intentionally queer' and it made me want to claw the walls #is s1 a joke to you?? (judging by the disdainful way they talk of gaiman‚ yes it is) #good omens #supernatural #idk. there's just this way people approach queer rep and media as 'homophobic until proven otherwise' #that's deeply harmful to storytelling #maybe you shouldn’t treat every story as if it’s coming out of disney and marvel #if you come crawling back to good omens just bc they kissed maybe you should take that as a learning experience #in how 'on-screen kiss' isn't a valid metric on whether a story is good or not #and start actually watching and analyse them for what they are instead #(i also have so many thoughts on how this same attitude is prevalent in critrole fandom it’s not even funny) #(please stop it with the biphobia/erasure and the acephobia and the putting of romantic relationships above platonic ones im begging) #(please allow relationships to be more complicated than 'best friends to lovers' and 'married with kids forever') #anyway. I'm done talking now i need to make breakfast before i faint #nella talks #long post