I’ve been more than two decades (20+years) reading Terry Pratchett. I’ve read the whole Discworld series several times. But not only that, I’ve read other series and solo books (Good Omens among them). If there is something that Terry Pratchett's books leave behind when you finish them is a feeling of fairness and hope. There’s always a satisfying ending. Even when tragedy happens sometimes (Spoiler: when Granny Weatherwax died I cried my eyes out for two days) there’s always a motive for it and it leaves hope behind (after Granny’s death, Tiffany Aching will lead the witches to a new future). There is always fairness in the end. The weak ones always get justice, even if they don't always get everything they want. The powerful don’t get away with their evil plans, but get thwarted. Don’t get me wrong, his books are not all happiness and flowers. He writes about hard topics (misogyny, trans rights, discrimination, racism, death, corruption…), his characters are in many cases troubled (Sam Vimes, Death). But there is always hope in the end. Things get better and, at the very least, there is fairness. And that fairness is a big part of the satisfying sensation you get after reading his books. Another thing to be said about his books is that they are always charged with big doses of morality hidden frequently behind a thin veil of misanthropy (humans will be humans).
I’ve also been reading Neil Gaiman’s books for more than 20 years (btw, fuck Neil Gaiman to alpha centauri and back). The sensation they leave behind in most cases is not a pleasant one, but of unease. There’s injustice, frustration or heartbreak in many of his books. They are much darker and unfair. And the morality in them is more nuanced.
That unfairness is the reason why I know the ending we got in go3 had nothing to do with Terry Pratchett. Nothing short of Terry Pratchett himself coming back from the dead, walking back the black sands of the Dark Desert to tell me personally that this was his desired ending, would convince me of the contrary. Suposedly gos2 and go3 were made to finish the story as Terry Pratchett had wanted, they were doing it for him and for the fans, but they couldn't have made anything less in common with Terry Pratchett.
This was no tribute to Terry Pratchett. This didn’t honour his legacy. To have his story, 75% of it written by Terry Pratchett, butchered and emptied of meaning, fairness and sense in this way is outrageous. Because not only it doesn’t make any sense, it negates everything the book and s1 teach us. The fate the characters, that Terry Pratchett created and loved, suffered was worse than anything we could have imagined (consensual murder-suicide is still murder-suicide). Not to talk about the fact that the universe created by Pratchett has not only been destroyed, no, it has been erased and it has never existed. They tried to erase Terry’s work.
I recon I’ve been played for a sucker. I wholeheartedly believed it was going to be okay. It never crossed my mind, even for a second, that Aziraphale and Crowley were not having their happy ending. Back in 2005 the authors said that Aziraphale and Crowley were in the South Downs. They had been talking about their whereabouts and had come to that realisation. When asked what were they doing in the South Downs NG answered simply that they were sharing a cottage. And some of you may argue that is exactly what happened in go3, but no. Two very nice, I'm sure, and physically similar men got to spend their retirement married sharing a cottage in the South Downs. And I’m very happy for that sweet couple, and that scene is so beautiful and warm and nice I want to cry remembering it. But those weren't Aziraphale and Crowley. Period. Aziraphale and Crowley were evaporated along with their whole universe and they have never existed. Their 6000+ years of love and pining and hiding and fighting for humanity just disappeared into nothing. And that, my friends, is not fair. As it’s not fair the fact that the abusers, Gabriel and Beelzebub*, got to live their happy ending and their love for a few years at least, while Aziraphale and Crowley never could (they had been 6000 years dancing around each other while Gabriel and Beelzebub just what? About 4 years). And it isn’t fair that god herself, the ultimate responsible for the abuse they had to endure, is the one cornering them to decide to agree to a murder-suicide and execute it too. While it’s not fair that the meaning of s1 was completely turned around and humanity, the world and the universe were suddenly not worth saving, too broken to fix.
And you know what else is not fair? To spend years (20 years more or less) saying that this story has a happy ending, a very specific happy ending, and then not only not delivering it but killing the main characters in the most OOC decission ever seen and destroying the whole universe. To have a comedy, turn it into a rom-com, and then a drama without any warning.
Terry must be turning in his grave. What a horrible “tribute” to his work.
*As cute as we want to make that couple be, we can't forget that both Gabriel and Beelzebub abused Aziraphale and Crowley their whole existence and were the ones judging them and sentencing them to death in s1. Have we forgotten the "Shut your stupid mouth and die already”?
Nothing else today. Just be kind to each other.
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