hello world

it's hard to exactly articulate the connection but st5 and go3 really prove the point that writers fundamentally either don't care about their lgbtq audience or understand what they actually want.

in stranger things, will's coming out is widely considered to be an AWFUL scene. it's unrealistic and, honestly, kind of offensive to the actual queer experience in the 80s. having him be in love with mike just to crush all his hopes is just mean. and regardless of what the writer's might argue, byler was 100% a feasible endgame for the show and a lot of fans cared for it deeply, especially because queer rep in big shows like that is a big deal. but the inclusion of will's "epilogue boyfriend" at the end is a great summary of the heart of the problem. we're shown will at a bar in college (already questionable), meeting up with a guy we've never seen before, and are given no other mention of his art or his future, and we're expected to see this as his happy ending and giving the audience what they want.

good omens 3 ends with the clear, cannon fact that aziraphale and crowley are in love, unlike the previous show. but the real issue is the last few minutes. the whole world we love gets erased, and we're shown two men who are human and kind of like the characters we knew falling in love as if it's a happy ending. and yet those characters, without their memories or experiences, literally aren't the people we've been following throughout the season. yes, it's not a BAD love story to show, but it's not them. and it's what the writers think the audience wants.

in both cases, the love story is resolved by taking a relationship the audience cares about, throwing it away, and replacing it with something similar and shallow at the very end. it shows us characters we don't know, that have no part in the story we care about, and says "see! happy gay people! we're giving you what you want!".

if you have to give us an epilogue with completely different characters or circumstances to end it happily for your queer character(s), then you have essentially disregarded them as mattering within the context of the show. audiences hate time skips because we don't care as much about characters that have grown without us. it feels like meeting someone new and we don't care as much. this is the same idea.

will should've had another love interest in-show or his ending should've focused on his relationship with his friends and his passion for art. reducing him to his gayness without any plot relevance was disrespectful to his character and the audience.

aziraphale and crowley should have either gotten to be happy in the universe as it was and been able to make positive change, or they should've died to do so and that should have been the ending. showing us some alternate universe version of their story as if it was them, despite their history being the ENTIRE story, was disrespectful to their characters and the audience.

there's definitely multiple problems, but if there's one main reason that people are unsatisfied, it's this: no one likes to watch the plot be undone at the end. there's no weaker premise than "it was all a dream" or "we went back in time and it never happened" or in this case "we erased the universe completely but heres a new one". it makes your audience feel cheated because the characters you see at the end aren't the same characters you just watched because they haven't had the same experiences. character growth is driven by experiences, and undoing the events is undoing the very characters we love. it was an insult to the audience to show us two different people named Anthony and Asa with completely different experiences and personalities fall in love and act like it mattered. if they wanted to destroy the universe in the name of a better humanity, fine. erase Aziraphale and Crowley. kill them off and let us watch a beautiful saying goodbye. give us a beautiful last scene and then end it. maybe give us a scene on new earth where everyone is happy and we see the things and people they cared about for a moment, and maybe we see a black item and white item next to each other and have it be this idea that their love is the fundamental base of that universe, blah blah blah whatever. but destroying them and cheapening their story to essentially an AU was, at heart, an insult to the audiences relationship with the characters.

they wonder why people shipped byler?? because we SAW them together. we SAW that relationship and saw them caring for each other and saw the ways they fit together. and if that was intended to be platonic that’s fine, but in the absence of actual romance with Mike and El, of COURSE people saw it with Mike and Will. Because we actually got to SEE him care about Will.