Maybe it’s because I’m newer to this fandom, but I actually really enjoyed it. There were so so many sweet moments in the tiny time frame. Crowley keeping the bookshop clean without any miracles. The great war. Their private moment, with apples from the garden of Eden and leaves and books and birdsong all interwoven like their tapestry together. Their declarations of love. The exploration of Crowleys fall with Lucifer, which was a subject vital to his character we’d never seen details about, and helped Aziraphale (I think) connect with the side of Crowley he never really got to. God as a black woman. Jesus as a Palestinian queer person. The angst of everyone leaving after Aziraphale did. The angst at the beginning.

Of COURSE it was so sad that the Aziraphale and Crowley we know didn’t get to fully revel in their final love and acceptance of their feelings and YES it sucks from a queer representation standpoint to not have a traditionally happy ending for them.

That being said, it was an ending that genuinely surprised me. I didn’t predict it and I loved it for it. It was an imperfect happiness, where the love between two people united in their genuine faith in the value of humanity let all the beings who spent millennia polarizing themselves could sit in a restaurant together.

Angels ate alongside demons. Not just Aziraphale and Crowley. All of them.

Jesus shared food with queer people and the woman who owns the sex shop and people of color and everyone. I actually think that even in his little window, Jesus was a beautiful reminder of what Jesus actually was. He was a carpenter with rough hands. He told stories because they brought people together. He inspired community and hope. He wasn’t a puritanical leader. He wasn’t what centuries warped him to justify. He was everything scripture has told me he was and nothing like the symbol of a church of segregation taught me he was.

If anything, I find it reductive to center on the “old man yaoi didn’t kiss”. There was so much more to this story than that. It was an emphasis on the community of love needed in our current society of polarization, of us vs them.

I will forever mourn demon!Crowley and angel!Aziraphale, but honestly, I think the ending was fine.

I cried. Multiple times.

I don't care what other people think, and maybe my opinion will change once it's not so fresh, but I'll take what we get, and go to fanfiction for what we don't.

because THAT is who he is. he loves his stars and creations, he loves humanity, he loves the messiness, the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, he loves watching them. he showed jesus all the kingdoms of the world to share that love with someone who he knows already felt it.

in the end, they made that choice together. it's a choice they have made before, over and over, saving humanity over themselves. no god, no angels, no demons, no thousands of years of suffering for all the millions of eternal beings.

personally, i choose to believe that god's last gift to them was integrating them into the fabric of the new universe, so they will find each other in every lifetime. but without anyone watching, without any plan behind it, without senseless suffering, without creating stars just to destroy them.

Imagine finding out you have 90 minutes to tie up a love story that's developed over thousands of years. You create something beautifully in character and completely on point for the plot. You pay homage to the original writer's legacy in a fitting and poetic way and create an ending that not only shows the depth of two people's love for each other but the wider love they have for the thing that brought them together in the first place.

And then you go online to find the loudest outcry is that everyone hates it and "THEY DIDN'T EVEN KISS!"