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https://nerdist.com/article/good-omens-where-do-aziraphale-and-crowley-stand-with-heaven-and-hell-status-before-season-2/

You would think stopping the literal end of the world would earn you some serious bonus points with Heaven. That’s not what happened in Good Omens first season, though. Angels wanted to fight Satan’s army just as much as demons wanted another war with God’s. Neither side cared billions of innocent people would die as a result. Only one angel and one demon did. So what happened to our favorite supernatural beings once they helped foil Armageddon? Here’s where Crowley and Aziraphale stand with the forces of Heaven and Hell ahead of Good Omens season two.

Why Did Angels and Demons Both Want War on Good Omens?

“Wars are to be won” and “not avoided” is an obviously evil stance for anyone to take. It’s the kind of attitude we’d expect to hear only a truly evil leader say. But those were the words of Heaven’s archangels on Good Omens. Ten million celestial beings wanted to take up arms against ten million equally excited soldiers of Satan. After thousands of years of anticipation both sides were eager to finally destroy the other.

Neither Heaven nor Hell worried all humans would die in the ensuing war. Angels and demons alike certainly didn’t care about destroying Earth itself, either. If not for one single angel and one single demon Heaven and Hell would have had the Apocalypse they so desperately wanted.

Why Did Aziraphale and Crowley Want to Stop Armageddon?

Azariphale and Crowley had called Earth home since Adam and Eve resided in the Garden of Eden. Over six thousand years the two had not only grown quite fond of each other, they’d grown fond of the lives they’d built for themselves among humans. Working with little supervision, they’d been mostly free to partake in Earthly delights. Whether reading, listening to Queen, or getting drunk, they both had it good on Earth. They also both had a soft spot for humans and a general dislike of their respective kind. Hell is dreadful and full of uninteresting cretins. Heaven is sterile and full of smug elitists. But Earth is full of interesting things and people.

So once the two learned Satan was sending his son the Antichrist to trigger the Apocalypse, Aziraphale and Crowley conspired to work together and stop it entirely. Their initial plan didn’t come together as they’d hoped, but in the end they helped prevent the End Times. Good news for mankind, yes. But you don’t stop a war every other angel and demon crave without creating armies of supernatural enemies.

How Did Heaven and Hell Punish Aziraphale and Crowley

Heaven kidnapped Aziraphale and Hell kidnapped Crowley shortly after the pair stopped Armageddon. Both faced the ultimate punishment.

Despite claiming to be on the side of good, Heaven’s highest ranking officer delighted in ordering Aziraphale’s death. The Archangel Gabriel had wanted war with Hell more than anyone. Not getting to lead Heaven’s forces caused him another big problem, too. Gabriel had to deal with a lot of frustrated, bloodthirsty angels.

Meanwhile, Gabriel’s counterpart in Hell, Lord Beelzebub, served as judge over Crowley’s trial. Once Hell’s demons convicted Crowley for treason, Beelzebub sentenced “the traitor” to a painful death, too. For him that would mean bathing in Holy Water, delivered to Hell by the Archangel Michael herself. Crowley had killed a Duke of Hell the same way earlier in the season.

In Heaven a demon delivered literal Hellfire to aide Gabriel in murdering Aziraphale. But once more the duo ruined their superiors’ plans.

How Did Aziraphale and Crowley Avoid Death in Good Omens Season 1?

Angels and demons might be supernatural beings, but they’re not especially smart or competent. They were no match for their two Earth-wise counterparts with millennia of experience working as unlikely partners. Especially not when the final nice and accurate prophecy of the witch Agnes Nutter warned Aziraphale and Crowley their respective factions would come looking to punish them for stopping Armageddon.

Thanks to her warning they had planned for their death sentences by swapping bodies. That’s how Crowley was able to survive his Holy Water bath. it was really Aziraphale splashing around in a liquid that is totally harmless to angels. And in Heaven it was actually Crowley bathing in Hellfire, which couldn’t possibly hurt him.

Why Do Heaven and Hell Fear Aziraphale and Crowley?

Not only did their clever switcheroo save their lives, it also granted Aziraphale and Crowley another measure of protection. Gabriel and the other archangels couldn’t understand how Aziraphale survived Hellfire. Nor could Beelzebub and the other Dukes of Hell make sense of how Crowley could be immune to Holy Water. As a result both factions grew fearful of the two friends.

They seemed more powerful than any other angel or demon. So as “Crowley” told Beelzebub, it was probably best if they simply left the two of them alone.

That’s where the two stand before Good Omens second season. Each has been branded a traitor by their former faction. Heaven and Hell both hate Aziraphale and Crowley, but they also fear them. So as Crowley had said the night they stopped Armageddon, the two no longer have a “side.” They don’t belong to Heave on Hell. They are on their own side.

But Heaven and Hell will come calling on the two again. “They’ll leave us alone,” said Crowley. “For a bit.” Good Omens season two trailer show it won’t a very long bit.

Probably not the best news for our favorite angel and demon. But it will be for fans.We need Aziraphale and Crowley just as much as Heaven and Hell ever did.

Good Omens returns for its second season on Prime Video on July 28th.

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Twitter at  @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

The post Here’s Aziraphale and Crowley’s Status with Heaven and Hell Before GOOD OMENS Season 2 appeared first on Nerdist.

https://blackgirlnerds.com/tananarive-due-what-scares-a-luminary-of-modern-horror/

Author Tananarive Due is the winner of the American Book Award, a recipient of the NAACP Image Award, as well a multiple Bram Stoker Award finalist and a general luminary of horror literature. With a career spanning three decades and highly influential academic and fictional works in Black horror and speculative literature, her contributions to American letters are impossible to overstate. Due teaches in the writing MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles, and is an endowed Cosby chair in the humanities at Spelman College. She currently teaches a class at UCLA called “The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival, and the Black Horror Aesthetic” based in part on the work of Jordan Peele, who visited the class in its early days to express his appreciation.

With a body of work that just keeps coming — The Reformatory, a new novel about the horrors of segregation will be published by Simon and Schuster in October 2023 — her point of view on the current glow-up of horror is thoughtful, engaging, and impressive. Speaking with BGN via video chat, Due had much to share.

What keeps you going in disheartening times?

Writing has always been the thing to sustain me during hard times. That’s been true though the pandemic, but I remember it was true in 2012 when my mother passed away. I was fourteen when I had my BLM moment. Miami cops had beat a motorcyclist to death and then were acquitted, and that was when I realized we don’t matter. It blew my mind; this was the same nation to which I had been pledging allegiance.

I wasn’t naïve. My parents were civil right activists, and I knew the fight remained. But the vastness of white supremacy is the major trauma in my life. I leaned on my writing through all of that. I finished The Reformatory during COVID after working on it for seven years. The literal notion that I might die got me on a page quota, and I finished that baby.

Is it easier to write horror than stories that end happily ever after?

It is for me! Some people escape through happy stories, and a lot of people like those. Patricia Stephens, my mother, was the first horror fan in my life. She used horror and fantasy and that immersion into imaginary monsters to heal herself from the real monsters of state violence. We all like a good comedy, and that’s the other side of the coin of how I handle myself. I don’t get to show that side of myself often. I try to give that bad feeling a face and a protagonist to fight it, to confront the unknown.  

What’s the work you’d recommend to get someone new into horror?

I love that horror is getting a glow up right now. I’d say look for best of the year short story anthologies and collections. Of course, I’d recommend my own collection, The Wishing Pool and Other Stories. Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology contains works only by marginalized authors. Anthologies can be uneven, but this one is consistent. For Black readers who might not think of themselves as horror fans, the first step is to see yourself. Seek out Black authors, as well as the works of other marginalized folks.

The documentary Horror Noire, of which you were a huge part, has been out for a couple of years. What was that project like for you? What has the aftermath been like?

I was so honored to have been a part of this. The production team came to me and brought me in after the film was written, to give interviews and to lend my name and support.

Alejandro Brugués, director of the film Juan of the Dead,told me he loved it. I was fangirling him, and he came back to tell me he loved Horror Noire. Brian Fuller said the same thing to me when we walked past one another in the hallway.

And then I worked on the anthology of the same name for the horror network, Shudder — those are my first screen adaptations. I wrote the episodes “The Lake” and “Fugue State” with my husband, Stephen Barnes. That collab was a peak experience.

My only letdown was that I don’t feel like the series found its audience. That’s frustrating. You never feel like there’s enough billboards, never enough PR behind anything. But I love the short form, both in prose and scripts. I hope to be part of another anthology in the future. It is difficult but so exciting to create these pint-sized stories.

As a master of the horror genre, what kind of story still really scares you? What’s the monster you dread most?

So many stories begin with people moving into a dark house in the middle of nowhere. And they walk around the creepy house yelling, “Hello? Hello?” I wouldn’t do that, but they do. Everyone is so afraid that the house is haunted and they’ll meet a ghost. That doesn’t scare me; ghosts are simple. They want to be acknowledged, they want to tell somebody who killed them. But a demon? That’s the one that gets me. Demons can’t be placated. You can’t solve the mystery of how they died. It’s so hard to know how you pissed the demon off. Maybe you knocked a stone out of place, and now it’s an intergenerational curse.

I’m also afraid of zombies because they’re the monster who looks like a loved one. For those of us who have cared for aging parents or someone very ill, that can really hit home. They don’t know you, or they’re angry in their suffering. It’s like watching them transform into a zombie. That’s why they get under our skin so much. There’s too much truth to the zombie.

Who are you reading right now?

When I was at the L.A. Times Book Fair, I was paired with an author I didn’t know, but I was the last to find out about Leigh Bardugo. So now I’m reading Ninth House. It’s hot and I really like it.

https://blackgirlnerds.com/actor-keke-palmer-and-baby-daddy-darius-jackson-spark-debates-on-successful-women-and-relationship-insecurities/

The entire internet was taken aback when Darius Jackson, actor Keke Palmer’s boyfriend and her child’s father, took to Twitter to publicly criticize her outfit choice at an Usher concert. We all saw the video: Keke smiling and enjoying herself, in a revealing Black outfit; Usher serenading Keke, as they slow danced to a hype crowd.

Jackson took to social media to express his disapproval by stating, “It’s the outfit tho.. you a mom.” Twitter wasn’t having it and dragged him to filth. You see, you can’t come for our girl and get away with it.

It’s worthy to mention, based on what we know, Palmer and Jackson are not married, even though he refers to her as his wife in his tweets. The irony of Jackson shaming Palmer for not conforming to traditional standards becomes hard to ignore when considering he had a child outside of wedlock with her and he is not the primary breadwinner. By Jackson’s own standards, being a stay-at-home unmarried father is not that traditional either.

The truth is, patriarchy is a pay-to-play game, and some Black men do not have the appropriate bandwidth to participate in the way they may want to or in the way wealthy and white men can. This stems from decades of oppression and enduring institutional barriers that affect Black men’s earning potential. Meanwhile, the emasculation some Black men feel because they are unable to provide might cause them to displace blame and direct that frustration onto their Black women. When Black men cannot execute masculinity the way men who have power and resources can, there is this loss of power and respect that shows up in their relationships.

We absolutely adore Keke Palmer. We’ve watched her grow up, since Akeelah and the Bee, which is why we protect her at all costs. After she announced her pregnancy on Saturday Night Live, the Internet began to question who she was pregnant by. Soon after, via social media, she introduced us to Jackson. She then had the baby and quickly lost the baby weight. Keke has always been cute, but the result of pregnancy on her body has her stacked to the gods. She looks amazing, and the best part is that she’s feeling it. You can look at a woman and tell when she feels good from the inside out. Keke is glowing and in her sexy phase.

We’ve seen her show up to events with Jackson and the baby. Yet, a girls’ weekend in Vegas seemed to change everything.  

Let’s be clear. Usher and Keke are both entertainers; two entertainers entertaining the audience. Celebrity to celebrity, they were having fun and wanted the people to buy what they were selling.

We know that there is a whole universe on the internet whose greatest pleasure is dragging Black women. We are too masculine; we desire to dress inappropriately; we want Black men to protect us but we don’t want to be led; we don’t deserve protection, if we choose to dress a certain way. The list goes on.

Yes, she is a mother. But a mother can’t wear a sexy dress? Jackson chose to publicly shame Keke about his issue with her dress instead of calling her privately. He invited the entire internet to criticize her then start commenting on their relationship. After people began dragging him, he doubled down attempting to justify that he’s only being the man of his family with morals and respect. He also said, “This is my family and my representation.”

Well, sir, at best we knew you as Keke Palmer’s baby daddy. We had no idea who you were until this instance. She has mentioned in interviews that she is a very private person, which is the truth because I don’t recall knowing anyone she’s dated. Keke has never even been involved with any controversy or mess. Sir, you had one job — not to embarrass her — and you failed.

Toni Morrison once described the function of racism: “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”

The same can be said about the function of sexism and misogynoir. As Jackson continued to double-down and justify his stance, he merely proved that he has no stance at all. Married or not, Keke is a whole grown woman and can wear what she wants. I would counter his stance to say that Jackson may have had a different issue and didn’t want to publicly disclose what truly triggered him, which was probably the whole interaction with her and Usher; his arm around her, the serenade, or even the hug she gave him. Even if she had on sweat pants and a turtleneck, chances are he might have felt the same way.

I’m certain for many men, a successful and driven woman is attractive. But when the dust settles, are they really okay with not being the stereotypical bread winner? Do they feel threatened if their partner has the better paying job, or, in this case, is a successful celebrity?

I believe that every relationship has to operate in a way that’s best for them. When women are the breadwinners, however, some couples have a difficult time discussing any emotions that may rise, especially if they’ve been raised and conditioned to believe men should dutifully make more money. For some men, making more money means they have the control and power in the relationship. Jackson’s unsuccessful flex to shame Keke and police what she was wearing indicates that he desires more than being at home taking care of their child. His desire to be more and do better may have gotten the best of him, and seeing Keke comfortable in her Blackness with the Usher Raymond was his breaking point.

Once we have a better sense of where our insecurities come from and the influence it has on our relationships, we can begin to challenge it in healthy ways with our partner and avoid being dragged on Twitter.

https://blackgirlnerds.com/apple-tv-reveals-first-look-at-the-changeling-starring-lakeith-stanfield/

Apple TV+ today unveiled a first look at The Changeling, an upcoming eight-part drama series starring and executive produced by Academy Award-nominee LaKeith Stanfield and announced that the series will make its global debut with the first three episodes on Friday, September 8, 2023 on Apple TV+, followed by one episode weekly through October 13.   

Based on the acclaimed best-selling book of the same name by Victor LaValle, The Changeling is a fairytale for grown-ups. A horror story, a parenthood fable and a perilous odyssey through a New York City you didn’t know existed. In addition to Stanfield, the series stars Clark Backo, Adina Porter, Samuel T. Herring, Alexis Louder, Jared Abrahamson, and special guest star Malcolm Barrett. 

The Changeling is written and adapted by showrunner and executive producer Kelly Marcel (Cruella, Venom, Venom: Let There Be Carnage). The pilot episode was directed by Melina Matsoukas (Queen & Slim, Insecure).

The series is produced by Apple Studios and Annapurna. Megan Ellison, Patrick Chu and Ali Krug are executive producers on behalf of Annapurna. Showrunner Kelly Marcel, the book’s author Victor LaValle, David Knoller, and director Jonathan van Tulleken executive produce alongside star LaKeith Stanfield. Director Matsoukas serves as executive producer through her De La Revolución Films. Sue Naegle and David Wolkis also serve as executive producer, Khaliah Neal as co-executive producer.