This fan-made anime opening of Good Omens startled Neil Gaiman

Fantasy author Neil Gaiman has some questions for fans of Good Omens.

Well, specifically, he has one particular question for one particular fan who made an anime opening for the recent Amazon Prime series, based on the 1990 book he co-authored with Terry Pratchett.

“What the even...?” writes Gaiman in a quote tweet of the lovingly rendered video. Depicting Crowley and Aziraphale in an anime style, set to Unison Square Garden’s “Tengoku to Jigoku,” the nine second video created by Twitter user @aromarose666 finds the main duo flying around screen and other characters joining in on the action. After Gaiman retweeted the video, @aromarose666 responded with a flustered tweet.

Gaiman has a history with anime. In the late 1990s, the author wrote the English adaptation of Studio Ghibli classic Princess Mononoke, which was distributed by the Walt Disney-owned Miramax. Perhaps Gaiman never envisioned this particular novel of his being adapted as an anime.

Good Omens debuted on Amazon Prime in May, but a low-boil fandom kept the show in the conversation well beyond the typical streaming show window. The adaptation, in which an angel (played by Michael Sheen) and a demon (David Tennant) team up to stop the impending apocalypse, maintained a three month streak as the number one trend on Tumblr’s Fandometrics buzztracker. Though it lost the throne to Taylor Swift in August, Good Omens — and related ships and characters — continue to proliferate the lists week after week. It’s no surprise, though, considering the legacy that the book itself had on fandom culture.

The early 2000s saw groups of Good Omens fans populate LiveJournal, writing fanfiction about the main pairing (Crowley and Aziraphale, since the book is basically a love story between them) and rendering fan art of the characters. As with most fandoms after the LiveJournal purges, much of the Good Omens fandom migrated to Tumblr. When the Amazon series rolled around, the microblogging platform was ready to welcome a new wave of younger fans as they discovered the book and the show for the first time. The shipping name of Crowley and Aziraphale — Ineffable Husbands — that regularly makes the top three of Tumblr’s Fandom shipping list has roots from before Tumblr was even a platform.

Gaiman himself engages regularly with fans, both with the initial wave of fandom and with the new one. He regularly responds to asks on Tumblr, sometimes reblogging fan art and videos (of both Good Omens and his other works). While receptive of fanfic, he prefers not to read it, having said in 2003 a blog post: “I can just about get my head around the concept of Crowley-Aziraphale slash, and would rather not read it thanks.”

When it comes to anime fan videos, however, it appears that Gaiman might need some time to process.