Heaven in the world of Good Omens is way scarier than Hell.
Hell is…well, the thing is, Hell is obvious. The demons have all got bugs and frogs on their heads and they feed each other to hellhounds for sport and they all live in that grubby basement where your day job’s corporate records are slowly moldering to plausible deniability. They’re bad and they know it. Yeah, they might kill you, but what do you expect? They’re demons. What you see is what you get.
But Heaven…Heaven is fucking terrifying.
It is filled with things we’d recognize on Earth as signifiers of power and wealth, but they’re the kind of signifiers that are always presented in the most obnoxious, deliberately intimidating way possible. It looks like the top floor of a luxury Manhattan apartment building where all the apartments are owned by billionaires who live there two weekends a year. It’s clean, but in a sterile, featureless way. The spaces we see are almost totally empty.
The angels are schoolyard bullies who dress like oil company lawyers coming to seize a small village’s fishing waters through eminent domain. You get the sense that Aziraphale was always the weird kid they loved picking on, and they almost always travel in a pack when they go to meet him, two or three or four against one.
Demons are the kind of creatures who have sketchy informants passing information in dark alleys. Heaven has mass surveillance. And (this may seem like a small point but I think it’s important) they use mass surveillance the way repressive states use it. They don’t actively watch everyone all the time, but when they decide someone is now “suspicious,” they have more than enough passive data collection to dig up any dirt on them.
The differences are really highlighted in the two “trials” that take place in Heaven and Hell. Neither is exactly a model of jurisprudence, but there are important differences. Crowley’s is a demented show trial. There’s no defense and the standard of evidence is…not rigorous. But there’s at least some vague pantomime of it being a trial of his peers, of there being the at least theoretical possibility of multiple verdicts. Demon mob justice may not seem that great, but if nothing else, it’s witnessed. (It’s deliberately set up to be witnessed, in fact.) Someone will know it happened.
Aziraphale just gets disappeared. Gabriel calls Aziraphale’s kidnapping an extraordinary rendition and laughs about it. There isn’t even a mockery of a legal process to be had. There’s just a summary execution, already waiting for him.
But Heaven is scary not just because the angels seem to be more ruthless and more powerful than the demons. The angels are scary because they are doing all this stuff while absolutely, unwaveringly convinced that they’re the good guys, and that everything they’re doing is good and right and justified. What’s a little smiting, the drowning of a few children, the destruction of all life on Earth, when it’s For the Greater Good, when it’s all part of some grand plan they are all very confident they know the details of?
This is the logic of atrocities. The demons are two-bit gangsters and thugs. The angels are ready to commit genocide.
The point is not to avoid the war, after all. The point is to win it. Even the Voice of God says it.
