averageghostsenjoyer

Hi my Ghosts people, I have been momentarily captured heart and soul by some other supernatural queer beings, we'll return to our regularly scheduled programming shortly.

Major spoilers below (sorry idk how to add a cut, I tried, I promise. Hopefully this is tagged as much as necessary to avoid spoilers).

Firstly, I think the reason I was shocked and slightly disappointed by the finale was that I didn't think the ineffables dying was even on the table. I didn't even consider the possibility that they wouldn't save the world or live happily ever after to be honest, the whole "they're immortal" thing provided a sense of security that I suppose I shouldn't have trusted as much as I did. I probably would have enjoyed the choices more if I wasn't busy being horrified by the death of characters I thought would be eternal lol.

Thoughts on the overall message: I think as a standalone piece of media, the finale's conclusion could have worked, and a lot of it comes down to the argument between "the system is broken and we have to fix it" and "the system is broken so we have to destroy it". Aziraphale was decidedly in the first camp throughout the entire series, and I think he deserves recognition for it - was he misguided in his faith in heaven doing the right thing? Definitely. But he fought so hard to fix it, and was willing to sacrifice the life in Soho that he adored with the person he loved just for the chance to make things better. It frustrated me that there was so much onus on him to apologize for leaving -- I think he should have apologized for being insensitive to Crowley, but he genuinely thought he was doing something that would make them both happy. When Crowley chose secular earth over living with Aziraphale, he was being noble in his sacrifice, but when Azi did the same thing (minus literally everyone dying), he wasn't..? Justice for my boy(not a boy).

In end of season 2-season 3, Crowley was in the latter camp. Nothing could ever be fair if God, heaven, or hell existed, so it needed to be restarted or escaped. Which is a valid argument! He's right that it was a corrupt system, though it's a pretty pessimistic outlook for an optimist.

I think the reason the ending felt strange to me is that one of the most emotionally salient character arcs of the first season was Adam realizing that destroying everything and restarting (to fix climate change no less) wasn't the right thing to do, and that it was unfair to all those living on earth to pull the plug, just because things were messy. Personally, I really loved that idea. It's saying that earth is worth fighting for, and it's not a lost cause yet. It's the most realistic for us, since last time I checked, there isn't a big shut down and restart button at the North Pole, so our only options are give up or keep trying.

Here's my little addition to the all the wonderful Artemis II art people have been making. As a long time space lover -- to the point of choosing physics as a career -- it's been awesome to see people so excited about space exploration (and let's be honest, it was the kind of good news we all needed right about now). Here's to moon joy!

It was a fun little romp, and I was initially disappointed that it was so modernized since I'm a big historical accuracy fan, especially for something that markets itself as a documentary, but I ended up enjoying it as a short binge while I get over a cold.

I was interested to see what people on Tumblr had to say about it, and unsurprisingly, it wasn't much since it's a 3-episode series, but I came across a post complaining about how it painted Anne Boleyn in a good light when all she did was homewreck and quote "[use] her vagina to trap Henry".

A) Don't even want to take the time to explain why that's misogynistic because it's 2026, do you even hear yourself? and B) I think the issue with modern takes on history is that they end up removing critical historical context from the lives of those we're studying. It's easy to judge someone's actions from our worldview, but we have to be really careful not to assign modern labels to people who did not live in the 21st century. Tudor England was so entirely and completely different to what any of us have experienced that it is impossible for us to truly understand what people living at the time would have experienced.

To be clear, I think making history more appealing to young people and those outside of academia is super important for a ton of reasons, and I think programs like Blood Sex and Royalty (or Horrible Histories for that matter) play an important role in bringing people into history especially when it comes to illustrating the oppressive roles to which women have been resigned throughout history. I think the only concern here is removing the contexts from which people lived, which will inevitably encourage us to label historical figures as either good or bad. Sometimes that's okay, and some people's actions will be downright wrong no matter how you frame it, but the further back in history we go, the less we know for sure and the more thought we need to put into contextualizing a person or event.

Sure, it's easy to see 'the second wife' as a homewrecker, and judge Anne for having infringed on Henry's marriage to Katherine of Aragon, but we can't be angry with a woman who lived in the 1500s for not being a girls girl, since that concept didn't exist yet. Women have always been around for each other in different ways -- that's what oppression does-- but we can't impose a modern set of moral codes on to a woman whose thoughts and motivations we'll never know for sure. Furthermore, the royal court was extremely competitive, and let's remember that even wealthy women held no power outside of their marriages. Today we'd see something like that happen and feel sorry for the first wife, and probably side-eye the new one, but that's because women are more free than ever to choose their partners, get divorced, and make their own decisions. The upper class all relied heavily on staying in Henry's good books, so if the king of England started pursuing you romantically and you turned it down? Social disaster for you and all your loved ones (as the show outlined).

C) Actually yeah I do want to talk about how misogynistic that post was. "Used her vagina to trap Henry", are you serious dude? He was the literal King of England, and let's not forget his track record of a whopping six wives by the age of 50, not to mention the affairs he had within those marriages. I don't think he was some poor, unsuspecting little lad who was entrapped by Medusa's wiles, he was a grown man with more money than anyone else in the country and was a serial womanizer. He was the married one, and he pursued her first! The fact that people still talk about women this way is insane to me. Henry knew exactly what he was doing, and vilifying the few women who do survive in the historical record is yet another way to perpetuate misogyny. No wonder men in power are still able to abuse the women around them -- it's been happening for literal centuries and people have been consistently blaming women in vulnerable positions for those abuses for just as long.

TLDR: I don't think Anne was faultless, but neither was anyone else in that environment. It was deceitful and dangerous, and everyone was out to save their own skin, whether it meant throwing other people under the jousting horse or not. Blaming a woman for getting married to Henry the Eighth is an insane take and we need to get better at considering the historical contexts in which people lived.