Your headcanon is your headcanon. The characters in your mind are what they are, and nobody is trying to take them away from you. Think of the Good Omens TV series as a stage play: for six full hours, actors are going to be portraying the roles of Crowley and Aziraphale, Shadwell and Madame Tracy, Newt and Anathema, Adam, Pepper, Wensleydale and Brian and the rest. Will they look like the people in your head? The ones you’ve been drawing and writing about and imagining for (in some cases) almost 30 years?
Probably not. Which is fine.
The people in your head and your drawings are still there, and still real and still true. I’ve seen drawings of hundreds of different Aziraphales over the years, all with different faces and body-shapes, different hair and skin, and would never have thought to tell anyone who drew or loved them that that wasn’t what Aziraphale looked like. (And a couple of years after we wrote it, I was amused to realise that the Aziraphale in my head looked nothing like the Aziraphale in Terry’s head.) I’ve loved every instance of Good Omens Cosplay I’ve seen, and in no case did I ever think anyone was doing it wrong: they were all Aziraphales and Crowleys, and it was always a delight.
Good Omens has been unillustrated for 27 years, which means that each of you gets to make up your own look for the characters, your own backstories, your own ideas about how they will behave.
The TV version is being made with love and with faithfulness to the story. It’s got material and characters in it that Terry and I had discussed over the years, (some of it from what we would have done it there had been a sequel). Writing it has taken up the greater part of my last three years. You might like it – I really hope you will – but you don’t have to. You can start watching it, decide that you prefer the thing in your head, and stop watching it. (I never saw the last Lord of the Rings movie, because I liked the thing in my head too much.)
Remember we are making this with love.
And that your own personal headCrowleys and headAziraphales and headFourHorsemen and headThem and headHastur and headLigur and headSisterMary and all the rest are yours, and safe, and nobody is ever going to take them away from you.
Give a man a match, and he’ll be warm for a minute, but set him on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.
It’s almost as if nobody wants to admit that they might not be prepared to do the work it takes to love somebody. And it can be laborious. To be intimate with someone who is flawed (which is the standard) requires us to expose our own flaws. We don’t talk about the heavy responsibility of that. We don’t talk about how we’re too lazy or too cowardly sometimes. We instead accuse love of being elusive. It isn’t. It is omnipresent. It asks us to be better people. And sometimes we flat out refuse.
But, I do think that if there’s a sort of “moral” to Frankenstein, that who did Mary Shelley herself most identify with? Probably the creature. You know, as Joey said, the “unnamed creature.” Why? Because that’s how people responded to her. As an intellectual woman and as an unwed mother, she was called a whore. When people found out that she wrote Frankenstein they said what kind of woman would write such a book? Must be something wrong with her. There’s something perverse about a woman who would write such a book.
So later in her life she says, “I wrote it, but that’s because the idea came to me in a dream.” And we know that isn’t true because we have her notebooks. She in fact thought of the idea. She worked on it really hard. She worked on it really hard while young women around her were killing themselves. And also, incidentally, she was reading the history of slavery. So she’s dedicating herself to the ideas of social injustice and the suffering of those who are considered monstrous by their own society, herself included.
So, she sees herself as a woman who’s trying—she wants to publish and be smart in her world, as someone who’s going evoke feelings of monst— [To audience (Joey Eschrich?)] You said a feeling of monstrosity? People will react to her as though she’s a monster, and she’s saying, “Don’t do that.”
I-want-my-IWTV 