Every now and then, the internet spits out a burst of awe-inspiring incompetence of such quantity, and such thoroughness, that it can be frankly difficult to buy. “Surely,” you find yourself thinking as you traipse your way past carefully cultivated mistake after mistake after sheer, un-repentant fuck-up, “Surely, someone is pulling my leg.”
And yet, as far as we can tell, a recent petition—20,000 signatures strong!—asking Netflix to cancel Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens on the grounds of its religious impropriety (God being voiced by a woman?!!) appears to be genuine. Meandering, off-topic, and frequently inaccurate, the Return To Sender campaign against the book—which we’re not linking directly to, because a) Google exists, and b), fuck ’em—is of such committed dopery that you might almost miss its most baffling quality: Good Omens doesn’t run on Netflix; it’s a god-damned Amazon show.
The petition was, in fact, passed around by Gaiman himself today, who presumably enjoys a good piece of laser-guided buffoonery as much as the next Twitter denizen. Digging around, it appears to be the product of a group called the American Society For The Defense Of Tradition, Family, And Property, which we were legitimately gob-smacked to learn was old and established enough to have its own Wikipedia page, given that its website also hosts articles with names like “Is The Popular Video Game Fortnite Sinful?” (We’d link that one, too, but again: Google/fuck ’em.)
Being a brand on the internet in 2019, Amazon has, of course, gotten in on the jokes as well:
Anyway, congratulations to everyone involved, for officially making the Game Of Thrones thing not the dumbest or worst online TV petition of the year.