oh the brainrot

My thoughts on 13/05/26

Here’s the gist; I love the lil AU, it’s so cute. Alone, it would have been a cute rom-com. Unfortunately, it’s tied to a story that i was already attached to for 3 years (i got into the fandom a lil late in 2023) and the one where i have already been waiting for an appropriate ending for. I did not get the ending. I have waited for so long for Crowley and Aziraphale to get their happy ending, together. Throughout the film/episode, there was a sense of dread throughout the two’s decisions that led to the inevitable death of a previous universe.

There were so many questions still unanswered, now wiped from reality.

My thoughts on 16 - 18/05/26

At this stage, i actually have processed a bit on the episode and there were some things that i remembered and have been figuring out about. While my earlier stance was that the ending was devastating and bad, i now have made my peace with it. It’s an ending. I mourn the old universe. I do miss it so much and hold the potential it had close to my heart.

Though i found that the reason why AziraCrow chose to end it was because they knew; recreate and bring everyone back would eventually lead them back to an empty universe with the bookshop again. Heaven and Hell would still wanna fight, assumptions on what God and Satan wanted would still be in the minds on angels and demons. The institution that both of them were a part of was already broken from the beginning; it wasn’t sustainable. Azi for all his might could never fix what was already broken and Crowley could never run away from something that's a constant.

Sure, it could be argued that they could just pretty please ask God to just make sure that both sides don’t fight but if rebelling never occurred then there was no Hell. There would only be Heaven, everything good, prim and proper with no room to be bad, to suffer. Angels being the only one existing and expecting everyone to follow what God said? Being the prefect to existence would still defeat the purpose of why things were made real. It would still leave a sour taste in Crowley’s mouth and we had seen him reject Azi’s offer to be an angel again. And if there isn’t any fight between angels and demons, then who could question the celestial beings? Humans. And the same battle occurs. Same beings sacrificed. And them running the new universe would go against Crowley's whole core; that he wanted beings to be able to decide what to do with their lives.

Ever since the revolt happened, both sides would stop at nothing to make sure that another battle happens at the cost of humanity. Crowley adored creations; he had created whole galaxies and nebulas, it stands to reason that he would love humanity as a complex creation that can fathom a fraction of what angels and demons were able to comprehend and make sense. The idea of good and evil, so black and white that any otherness is deemed a failure from each side, something to punish. It is the greys that Crowley saw as a beautiful blend and wished others had seen. Aziraphale adored humanity as he saw their potential and the beauty in their resilience; to keep fighting against the odds thrown at them. Where both celestial sides do not go through the odds as they obeyed their commanders, humans were supposedly given ‘free will’. Crowley was mad because no one in the universe, no celestial nor mortal, had a chance to be left to make their decisions that would not inevitably bring them to Heaven or Hell. Each side wanting to prove their supremacy over how many humans they can bring over to their side. Despite all of that, Armageddon was still scheduled on a Wednesday afternoon.

So to them, it wasn’t fair that the beings that they had come to know and love was to be destroyed over a turf war, that everyone had lost sight of why creations came to be. Azi saw Crowley's love for humanity; he wanted to make the world a better place for them all.

To create a world without god, satan, heaven or hell meant creating a world that allows people to do things and face consequences without any afterlife consequences. For a just world.

“Asa and Anthony are not Aziraphale and Crowley.”

They are not Aziraphale and Crowley. The humans are Asa and Anthony. But it is for the humans like Asa and Anthony that the decision had been made. God didn't put it in for the two to still be together; it’s the fact that even with free will, there’s something bringing them together. What is it, what’s beautiful about the two humans that brought them together? The essence of AziraCrow.

Aziraphale | Asa

1. Why did Azi keep a bookshop? Books hold histories, memories, desires and fantasies. Ideas that were made real and tangible, that bore fruits to inspire more creations. How many of us wrote fanfics because of the existence of other works of fiction? Aziraphale would find us beautiful. Experience, life itself is a wonder that needs to be recorded, to let others know what it felt like. Azi lived in the present, in the moments. He lived every cumbersome moment like a human. When one gets to take a moment and just live in it, appreciating life comes naturally to those who know where to look. It took Crowley introducing food for Azi to learn how to appreciate existence, not just be a bystander that interferes occasionally [see his time during Adam and Eve]. To be able to share the experience of living and appreciating the recorded lives is a form of love.

We can see the essence in how Asa was presented; it felt as if I saw glimpses of my favourite character, whose legacy now lives in Asa. Surrounded by books with all sorts of information, he would surely be a learned person. Able to appreciate life. Now, Asa’s use of timey language is not because of lived centuries but now is because of his love of books, perhaps inherited from his mother who must’ve read these kinds of books or watched plays or shows that employ those kind of language. And older books have a romantic use of words. An example; Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series was written with a passion from John Watson’s perspective. Or how Jane Austen wrote beautiful romances while robbing people/banks [old universe canon]. It is not far to perhaps assume that Asa consume such literature that he finds it easy to use it in real conversation, it was natural to him. Perhaps, it also allowed him to appreciate life itself.

Crowley | Anthony

2. Crowley’s burning passion, visualised with his distinct bright, fiery red hair, is what brought him to humans. He saw the profound joy that humans have when they discovered something he made, how they gave no care about what is good or bad when they bring about wondrous innovations. This same passion is not only seen when creating something but also in discovery and Crowley loved learning about humans and what they could do when they didn’t think that anyone would snatch them to the Up or drag them to the Down. He got by with Hell by making things for them. Unlike other demons that engage in personal one-on-one temptation, Crowley’s way of reaching his daily quota was to invent things that at best, inspire sins in others and at worst, annoy them for the day. Why make the effort for a useless report when you can catch a whole school of fish with a net than a fishing rod. To create and learn is also a form of love.

Anthony's topic of choice for his book is interesting as we all saw; astrophysics.

Defined by University of Dundee:

Astrophysics focuses on celestial bodies and the cosmic phenomena that shape the Universe. Astrophysics applies physics principles to understand the behaviour and properties of astronomical objects. It often deals with extreme conditions and distances not found in everyday physics.

He seeks to understand not only where the planets, nebulas and galaxies were positioned but how they were made, created. There's beauty in the sky and he was fascinated by them, what it took to make a star shine so bright or how the worlds out there produce ethereal scenes. Who wouldn't fall in love with space, the final frontier? (Sorry i couldn't help myself🤭).

We do not know them but from these small essences, we can find comfort that a part of our angel and demon is within them.

Memories

Now for the memories. Yes, I too had wished that they remembered but when i look back in season 2, Gabriel's memories were still in Jim but untapped. Anytime Jim exhibited those memories, they were fleeting, randomized. It hurts him when he tries cause it was too much for him to process. I can guess that the same would be applied to Asa and Anthony except worse; they're humans. To recall takes energy but their essence is nature. Space is to Crowley just as books are to Aziraphale. From those, who they were still grows but differently this time. Plus, 6000 years worth of memories is like more than 10 TB disks, humans can only retain so much memories. It's why we forget or misremember things.

Book of Life

Azi and Crowley do not have the clearance to create a universe back up again. Crowley worked on the universe with the upstairs and is seen able to create things using divine items but since Hell does not have any divinity, he had no ability to fully conjure up an entire universe [Though he still kept the divine item, it was hidden in his Bentley]. If he did, then the previous seasons would be moot and creating a whole universe back up again meant that he had the power; he never wanted one. I could say that perhaps Crowley really did have the ability to actually conjure up a world. But that's a stretch because he doesn't have the one thing needed to fully realise it; the romantic aspect of existence. It's why he asked Azi to write down the rest of the words to summon God. And God would never let a mortal item like a book to overpower the Book of Life, even if both Azi and Crowley had the audacity and the willpower, alongside their creativity and imagination. It's that one annoying OP that made it all difficult for things to be fixed.

[18/05/26] I remembered just then that when he had his angelic abilities [see his creation of the universe and a different plane of existence as well as stopping time], he had this hand crank with him to kick start the universe twice, like trying to wind up old cars. Crowley only had the ability to start up a universe but to create is a group effort.

Listen. Listen.

Let me start off by saying I have been where you are. I’ve had beloved characters die, either because it was important to the narrative or for shock value. I’ve been there, so I’m not coming at this without empathy. I’m not an Izzy hater. I loved him as a character. I’m truly sad to see him go.

But from what I’m seeing around Twitter and tumblr, some of you do not understand the role of an antagonist in a story.

Izzy was always meant to die. The moment he said, in the first season, “the only retirement we get is death,” I knew he was meant to die in the end. The foreshadowing ran through both seasons. Izzy was the true antagonist of S1. He was there to keep Blackbeard tethered when he started pulling away, and yet he also set the plot in motion. He inadvertently introduced Blackbeard to the person who let him be just Ed. He put Ed on his own path to redemption without even knowing it.

S1 ended with Izzy getting what he wanted as Ed lost everything he had. S2 was about Izzy coming to terms with the fact that he’d gone too far, he’d turned Ed into a monster. It wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted Blackbeard back, just like old times. Instead, he got the Kraken, and it was more than he bargained for.

Especially after it cost him his leg and he realized how far gone Ed really was. The conversation that ended with Izzy’s half-assed suicide attempt was the final blow to Izzy—Ed really didn’t seem to care anymore. Where Izzy wanted him to stop giving a shit about his silly boyfriend, he instead got a Blackbeard who didn’t care about anything, and he was apparently now included in that category.

(I said half-assed suicide attempt because Izzy wasn’t meant to die then, THAT would have been an empty, pointless death. It wouldn’t have taught Ed anything—in fact, all it did was make him more self-destructive, which was Izzy’s purpose to the narrative, but not his endgame. That Ed thought Izzy killed himself pushed Ed to the brink. Ed wanted to die and take every scrap of Blackbeard with him. Had Izzy successfully killed himself, Ed and the Revenge would be at the bottom of the ocean.

It wasn’t until the crew left Izzy the unicorn leg that he realized the power of compassion, the incredible act of grace from a crew that suffered so much from Izzy’s own machinations and didn't need to forgive him. It moved him to tears, and it moved him to accept that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to let people in, to let himself be cared for. It was a foreign concept and something Izzy likely hadn’t experienced since losing his family (I fully expect a shit ton of fanfic of Izzy’s life before piracy).

Israel Hands found the capacity to let love all the way in and by god, did he pursue it.

But, again, Izzy was always meant to die, and I’m glad they stuck to the narrative they set out with instead of placating fandom and letting our influence dictate how they told this story That’s never good, trust me. Fandom should not influence a creator’s decisions regarding their own characters. It rarely if ever ends well.

[Stares in Voltron S8]

And I see a lot of people out here throwing the “bury your gays” phrase around—I beg you, please look up the definition of the trope. Izzy didn’t die because he was queer, he didn’t die because of his disability. He wasn’t one half of the only queer couple in the show fridged for shock value. He wasn’t killed off due to pressure from conservative viewers. He wasn’t the only queer, disabled character.

They didn’t kill off Lucius, or Jackie, or Wee John. Would you be as outraged if it was any of them?

Killing Eve is bury your gays. Supernatural is bury your gays. Pretty much any film, book, TV show, whatever, where a queer character dies because they’re queer, of AIDs, to further the narrative for a straight person, etc—that is burying your gays.

Izzy’s death was none of those things. Izzy’s death had meaning.

Izzy’s death freed Ed from the Blackbeard persona. It finally forced Izzy to say the things he couldn’t say until he realized it was his last chance. Izzy was also tired. I honestly think he stuck it out for Ed’s sake, because he was afraid to let Blackbeard go without making sure Ed would be ok.

He loved the idea of Blackbeard, but over time, he learned to love Ed. He finally understood what Ed tried to tell him the whole time.

“Fuck off, you twat. You’re surrounded by family.”

You’re safe. You’re loved. You don’t need me anymore. You don’t need to be reminded of who you’re capable of being, you need the people who will guide you to who you will become, and I’m not one of them.

I know a lot of Izzy fans are stung by his death, some of you are deeply upset. I get that. Like I said, I’ve been there. Sirius’s death made me throw that fucking book across the room. That Fucking Woman™ killed off my entire OTP, purely for shock value and, imho, a direct response to shippers. Trust me, I have felt betrayed by a creator for their decisions.

But I need you to understand that no, this was not a personal attack, this was not malicious, this was not “bury your gays." A show that celebrates queerness and diversity is not suddenly homophobic and ableist because your favorite character died and happened to be both of those things. But when the majority of your cast of characters is different in some way, and they’re in a show about 18th century pirates, you have to accept that one of them could, in fact, die. “Anyone Can Die” is also a trope and the more accurate one to describe E8.

If only being queer and disabled made you invincible.

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.

And no, I’m not an Izzy hater. I loved him, I loved him as an antagonist, and I loved his redemption arc. He was fascinating and Con put his whole O’Nussy into that part. I’m sorry to see him go, but as a mystery writer who often has to kill off beloved characters, I understand that he served the purpose he had from the beginning.

I swear, if some of you had your way, there’d be no conflict at all in any form of media. This what a steady diet of nothing but fanfic gets you. This is not a fluffy one-shot with magical healing dick and a happy ending where everyone sails off into the sunset. If that’s what you wanted, what you headcanoned, you did this to yourself. It’s not David et al’s fault that we took that character and babygirled him. That’s the risk we take when we decide to love a specific character, when we take a genuinely terrible person (in S1) and woobify him.

So, please stop harassing and attacking David, Alex, et al. David did not and should not change his story to placate us. The fact he went ahead with it despite the backlash I’m sure he expected makes me respect him as a creator even more.

Anyway, I’m going to revel that we have three (!) queer relationships with happy endings where one or both didn’t immediately die (again, the actual definition of “bury your gays”) and that we got at least two seasons of a little show that celebrated individualism, diversity, queerness, compassion, and love.

In the end, it all came down to love.

“There he is.”

Goodbye, Blackbeard.

We as a society tend to sort of undervalue goodness. It’s sort of seen as sort of somehow weak and a bit nimby and “oh it’s nice.” And I think to be good takes enormous reserves of courage and stamina. I mean, you have to look the dark in the face to be truly good and to be truly of the light…. The idea that goodness is somehow lesser and less interesting and not as kind of muscular and as passionate and as fierce as evil somehow and darkness, I think is nonsense. The idea of being able to portray an angel, a being of love. I love seeing the things people have put online about angels being ferocious creatures, and I love that. I think that’s a really good representation of what goodness can be, what it should be, I suppose.

I was looking forward to BAMF!Aziraphale all season long, and I think that’s what we got in the end. Remember Neil said that the Job minisode was important for Aziraphale’s story. Remember how Aziraphale sat on that rock and reconciled to himself that he MUST go to Hell, because he lied and thwarted the will of God. He believed that––truly, honestly, with the faith of a child, but the bravery of a soldier.

Aziraphale, a being of love with more goodness than all of Heaven combined, believed he needed to walk through the Gates of Hell because it was the Right Thing to do. (Like Job, he didn’t understand his sin but believed he needed to sacrifice his happiness to do the Right Thing.)

That’s why we saw Aziraphale as a soldier this season: the bookshop battle, the halo. But yes, the ending as well.

Because Aziraphale never wanted to go to Heaven, and he never wanted to go there without Crowley.

But it was Crowley who taught him that he could, even SHOULD, act when his moral heart told him something was wrong. While Crowley was willing to run away and let the world burn, it was Aziraphale (in that bandstand at the end of the world) who stood his ground and said No. We can make a difference. We can save everyone.

And Aziraphale knew he could not give up the ace up his sleeve (his position as an angel) to talk to God and make them see the truth in his heart.

I was messed up by Ineffable Bureaucracy (Boxfly) getting their happy ending when our Ineffable Husbands didn’t, but I see now that them running away served to prove something to Aziraphale. (And I am fully convinced that Gabriel and Beelzebub saw the example of the Ineffables at the Not-pocalypse and took inspiration from them for choosing to ditch their respective sides)

But my point is that Aziraphale saw them, and in some ways, they looked like him and Crowley. And he saw how Gabriel, the biggest bully in Heaven, was also like him in a way (a being capable of love) and also just a child when he wasn’t influenced by the poison of Heaven. Muriel, too, wasn’t a bad person. The Metatron also seemed to have grown more flexible with his morality (from Aziraphale's perspective). Like Earth, Heaven was shades of (light?) gray.

Aziraphale is too good an angel not to believe in hope. Or forgiveness (something he’s very good at it).

Aziraphale has been scarred by Heaven all his life. But with the cracks in Heaven’s armor (cracks he and Crowley helped create), Aziraphale is seeing something else. A chance to change them. They did terrible things to him, but he is better than them, and because of Crowley, he feels ready to face them.

(Will it work? Can Heaven change, institutionally? Probably not, but I can't blame Aziraphale for trying.)

At the cafe, the Metatron said something big was coming in the Great Plan. Aziraphale knows how trapped he had felt when he didn’t have God’s ear the first time something huge happened in the Big Plan. He can’t take a chance again to risk the world by not having a foot in the door of Heaven. That’s why we saw individual human deaths (or the threat of death) so much more this season: Elspeth, Wee Morag, Job’s children, the 1940s magician. Aziraphale almost killed a child when he couldn’t get through to God, and he’s not going through that again.

“We could make a difference.” We could save everyone.

Remember what Michael Sheen said about courage and doing good––and having to “look the dark in the face to be truly good.” That’s what happened when Aziraphale was willing to go to Hell for his actions. That’s what happened when he decided he had to go to Heaven, where he had been abused and belittled and made to feel small. He decided to willingly go into the Lion’s Den, to face his abusers and his anxiety, to make them better so that they would not try to destroy the world again.

Him, just one angel. He needed Crowley to be there with him, to help him be brave, to ask the questions that Heaven needed to hear, to tell them God was wrong. Crowley is the inspiration that drives Aziraphale’s change, Crowley is the engine that fuels Aziraphale’s courage.

But then Crowley tells him that going to Heaven is stupid. That they don’t need Heaven. And he’s right. Aziraphale knows he’s right.

Aziraphale doesn’t need Heaven; Heaven needs him. They just don’t know how much they need him, or how much humanity needs him there, too. (If everyone who ran for office was corrupt, how can the system change?)

Terry Pratchett (in the Discworld book, Small Gods) is scathing of God, organized religion, and the corrupt people religion empowers, but he is sympathetic to the individual who has real, pure faith and a good heart. In fact, the everyman protagonist of Small Gods is a better person than the god he serves, and in the end, he ends up changing the church to be better, more open-minded, and more humanist than god could ever do alone.

Aziraphale is willing to go to the darkest places to do the Right Thing, and Heaven is no exception. When Crowley says that Heaven is toxic, that’s exactly why Aziraphale knows he needs to go there. “You’re exactly is different from my exactly.”

____

In the aftermath of Trump's election in the US, Brexit happened in 2018. Michael Sheen felt compelled to figure out what was going on in his country after this shock. But he was living in Los Angeles with Sarah Silverman at the time, and she also wanted to become more politically active in the US.

Sheen: “I felt a responsibility to do something, but it [meant] coming back [to Britain] – which was difficult for us, because we were very important to each other. But we both acknowledge that each of us had to do what we needed to do.” In the end, they split up and Michael moved back to the UK.

Sometimes doing the Right Thing means sacrificing your own happiness. Sometimes it means going to Hell. Sometimes it means going to Heaven. Sometimes it means losing a relationship.

And that’s why what happened in the end was so difficult for Aziraphale. Because he loves Crowley desperately. He wants to be together. He wanted that kiss for thousands of years. He knows that taking command of Heaven means they would never again have to bow to the demands of a God they couldn’t understand, or run from a Hell who still came after them. They could change the rules of the game.

And he’s still going to do that. But it hurts him that he has to do that alone.