Just Roll With It

season 1 and 2 kept hammering the idea that individual lives matter. not replaceable copies. not "close enough." actual people, with continuity and memory and history. Crowley and Aziraphale repeatedly chose imperfect, messy existence over grand cosmic plans. so ending with "the universe gets reset and everyone is replaced by alternate versions" isn't just horribly depressing. it's philosophically backwards. like the story literally abandoned its own argument in the final act.

the Job parallel especially points that out pretty cleanly. The whole emotional weight there was: replacement children are not the same children. new children (even if they had, by some chance, looked and acted Exactly The Same) doesn't fix the tragedy of losing the original children. that mattered to them. so yea, this ending feels less like "hopeful transcendence to tear down The System" and more like “congrats on your happy ending! everyone is dead, but the cottage is cute!" bold creative choice ig. like serving tea with eccles cakes after detonating reality.

my frustration is basically: the story spent years arguing that personhood matters — memory matters, continuity matters, these exact souls matter. and then solved the finale with a cosmic reset that wipes out the very identities the narrative taught us to care about. very much like the nuclear apocalypse they were trying so hard to prevent. it goes against the very thing Crowley was staunchly opposed to during The Flood. against everything they did in the Job minisode. against literally the entire Jim/Gabriel narrative, about Jim not really being Gabriel without his memories. and also, to quote Crowley, "the angel you knew is NOT me."

"but they found each other again! we got them back at the end!" no we didn't. that is NOT them. and to say that they are is kind of insulting tbh. they LOOK similar and maybe have some of the same interests, but just bc a blonde and a red head are into books and astrophysics doesn't make them THEM. their memories, their history, everything they went through together and fought for, the experiences that shaped their characters, those 6000+ years — that's all GONE.

Also. people keep saying stuff like "it was the only right choice" as if there were only two horrible choices? if the story introduces negotiation and moral choice, we'll naturally start imagining alternatives. once “God offers options” enters the chat, people will obviously ask, “wait. why was this the chosen solution?” when they could've gone for idk, literally anything else. God literally offered to put things back as they were. they could've chosen to have THAT universe, THAT world —THEIR world— put back into place and then added their own conditions to tear down Heaven and Hell. they could've chosen to keep their memories. they could've chosen to make everyone human from then on if that's what the writers were so hellbent on. they could've chosen to make God erase her own memory for all i care idfk. but this ending feels like a bad consolation prize.

after EVERYTHING they did, and everything they went through, they deserved SO much better than this. THE WHOLE WORLD did.

#how do yall whitewash a white woman 

And talking about how the new frizz her is her niece, allow me to do a direct side by side instead

These are STILL not the same woman. Where is the icon fashion, the earrings (the chameleon, which might be in the new show idk I haven't watched it), the prominent hooked nose, the broader shoulders, the volume to her hair, the LIFE IN HER EYES

This frizzle looks like she's been called into the school board for inappropriate behavior and dress one too many times and has been broken.

The old bus had a personality and life and fun and now it’s just… a bus.

What's important to remember is that the whitewashy approach to character design in kidvid is a backslide.

Representation in cartoons had generally been on an upswing since the 1980s, even though efforts were often minimal, clumsy, or badly executed. Diversity helped sell action figures in the lucrative US/Canadian market and it was recognized as a prosocial value on the production side.

"Prosocial messages" are a major part of kidvid TV pitches and development, nearly every show has specific prosocial lessons the narrative themes are intended to work around, even if its an action-figure ad. These range from sincere expressions of the creator's intent (Gargoyles, OG Magic Schoolbus, OG He-Man (no, for real)) to the entertainment equivalent of carbon credits.

Slight aside. Actual ink-and-paint animation tended to lock characters down into more distinct tones because there were only so many standard paint colors. Which is why Kwame from Captain Planet, Roadblock from GI-Joe, and Tim from OG magic schoolbus all use essentially the same pantone.

Ralphie gets skinny because not only fatphobia, but I suspect because he would need slightly different rigging and would add just a teensy bit to the budget adjusting his animations when they could just copy-paste from one of the other identically built kids. If they need to put them all in spacesuits or diving suits or whatever, they just make the one body and slap the heads on, eazy-pezy.

Decals on the schoolbus mean they have to be tracked, they have to use different versions of the bus in flipped shots, same with Mrs. Frizzle's clothing patterns. Wouldn't want to spend time flipping Ralphie's "R' around.

And with the marketing for everything now being global, there's an impulse to average everything down to appeal to all markets to a general degree. Making stories oversimple makes them easy to translate. Humor varies culture to culture, keep it slapstick or quick quips that can be localized easily. Everything that makes the Chinese censor boards happy also makes US reactionaries less likely to kick up a protest, the incentive is to keep everything:

ALSO: These characters have the same face. They probably use the same eye and mouth parts for character animations.

It's all to do it as cheap and broadly appealing as possible, as determined by business weirdos who know nothing about art and care nothing about kids, and they're more than willing to leverage racism (or just ignore that its happening) for the promise of a tenth of a percent more profit.

And what's galling is that this kind of animation software doesn't have to make crap. It can be used to make amazing stuff and still be vastly cheaper than traditional hand-drawn, but the same quality at 60% of the cost is never going to beat 1/2 the quality at 5% of the cost for the money-men.

Every time you ask Copilot to write you a PowerShell script to stroke your boss' ego, a city experiences a brownout.

Every time you chat with your AI "girlfriend" a farmer doesn't get to water their animals.

10,000 years ago, someone carried a baby through the rain and left their footprints in an ancient lakebed. Whether they were the baby’s mother, sibling, stranger, we can’t know. Only that they walked one way together, but the footprints on the return were alone. What separated them, we cannot know. Only that they were together for a moment. Only that in the lakebed, they’re together forever.

30,000 years ago, an infant was buried beside its identical twin, having only survived a few weeks longer than the stillborn sibling. What happened to them, we cannot know. Only that perhaps one could not stand life outside the womb without the other. Only that they were apart for a moment, Then together forever.

In 100 years when the dam breaks and the lake where we learned to swim becomes a river again, will it wash us away?

In 10,000 years I don’t think anyone will find imprints of our flip-flops Or the grooves where our little hands dug motes in pebble-sand To protect mud-drip castles.

You asked to be ashes in the sea. And so we scattered you.

If I’d had my way, we would have walked together much farther. And you’d have been tucked into the soil, waiting for me.

They would have found my footprints beside yours, both ways. They would have found a lock of my hair clutched in your hand.

Your name, they could not know.