Why is Aziraphale so gay?

Analysis of Aziraphale’s characterisation in Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman.

The cover of Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, showing a winged angel curled up with a book in his lap. Image via Amazon.

This meta essay was originally written and published on Tumblr and Ao3 in 2019 — it’s silly and written as much for humour as it is for textual analysis, with curse words and sarcastic comments, and I’m afraid it’s not terribly academic, but I came across it as I was digging through other stuff and thought it’d be fun to repost.

I tried in vain to hyperlink my footnotes, but unfortunately Medium refused me at every turn, and it would be too dense to embed all my citations in the text — if you have the option of having a second tab open and you care about the footnotes, you might find it easier to swap between one tab for the footnotes and another for the meta proper.

The analysis in this is purely about book Aziraphale’s characterisation, not the television show’s ideas, and I’m publishing the text of the essay broadly as it was published before. The only real changes I’ve made are purely cosmetic — I had a bad habit at the time of italicising every other word for emphasis, and it makes it unreadable, so I’ve taken all the unnecessary italics out, and I’ve made a few other minor cosmetic changes to make it more readable.