rainbow-brigayde

I saw Love, Simon in theaters when it came out my senior year in high school. I saw it three times, once with my friends/parents on opening night, once with my brother over spring break, and once with my grandparents.

On opening night, the air in the room was electric. It was palpable. Half the heads in there were dyed various colors. Queer kids were holding hands. We were all crying and laughing and cheering as a group. My friends grabbed my hands at the part where Simon was outed and didn't let go until his parents were saying that they accepted him. My friend came out to me as non-binary. Another person in our group admitted that she had feelings for girls. It was incredible. I left shaking. This was the first mainstream queer romance movie that had ever been produced by one of the main five studios, and I know that sounds like another "first queer character from Disney" bit but you have to understand that even in 2018 this was groundbreaking. Getting to have a sweet queer rom-com where the main character was told that he got "to breathe now" after coming out meant so much to me and my friends.

But also, from a designed-for-straight-people POV (which, to be frank, it was written by a bisexual author and directed by a gay man, this was not designed for straight audiences), why is it a bad thing that it appealed to the widest possible audience? That it could make my parents and grandparents see things in a new light? My stepdad wasn't at all interested in rom-coms but he saw it with me because it was something I cared about and he hugged me when we came out of the theater. My very Catholic grandparents watched it with me and though my grandpa said he still didn't quite understand the whole 'gay thing,' all he wanted was for me to be happy and to have a happy ending like Simon did. My Nana actually cried when Simon came out and squeeze my hand when his mother told him he could breathe.

And when Martin blackmailed Simon, my mom, badass ally that she is, literally hissed "Dropkick him. Dropkick him in the balls" leading to multiple queer kids in the audience to laugh or smile. Having my parents there- the only parents, by the way, out of my group of queer and questioning friends- made multiple people realize that supportive adults were out there. That parents like those in Love, Simon do exist in real life.

When people complain about Heartstopper not being realistic or Love, Simon being too cutesy, I remember seeing Love, Simon on opening night. I remember my friend coming out and my stepdad hugging me and my mom defending us through this character. I remember the cheers that went through the audience when Bram and Simon kissed and the chatter in the foyer after the movie was over and the way that this movie made me understand that happy endings do exist.

it forgets that the christian cosmology was the setting, told through corporate satire, not the villain. even God wasn’t an active tyrant; she was an absent CEO, leaving individual contributors like Aziraphale and Crowley to realize their job descriptions were irrelevant to the company's bottom line anyway, so they coasted by on minimum effort

But you know what? I just saw pictures of angelCrowley and 'Anthony' back to back, and maybe this is me being stupid and in denial, but I’m only realizing now that this 'Anthony' is, in fact, a "reincarnation" or whatever of angelCrowley and NOT demonCrowley, the being we spent the story with, the being he became after millennia of experience on Earth - I mean THE Crowley, our Crowley, Aziraphale’s Crowley, and I just...

It makes me even more furious than I already am. They erased nearly everything that was making this character interesting. After showing us time and again how terrible Heaven was, how free will is important, and why labels shouldn’t matter as long as you stay true to who you are deep down ("just a little bit a good person", "just enough of a bastard", "just an angel/a demon who goes along with Heaven/Hell as far as he can"), they told us that a fallen angel was a bad thing, that it shouldn’t exist after all. They ended with two 'angels' falling for each other.

I wonder, what happened to shades of grey?

I fell in love with those two because they were are far more complex than what it says on the tin. I don’t give a damn about the purest of angels. I care about characters who ask questions, who doubt, who evolve, who fight for what they believe in, who love unconditionally, despite the odds.

And to think about all the other narrative decisions made in that finale...

The Ending SUCKS because the WRITING SUCKS.

NO, I don’t find the concept of ‘tHeY FiNd eACh oThEr IN eVerY uNivErSe’ beautiful.

1) Because they don’t. There’s zero evidence that this is a recurring thing, thats 100% fandom copium- and even then they don’t have any of their memories and aren’t the same people. THATS. NOT. THEM. And it never will be because people are the sum of their experiences AND THEIR CHOICES. You don’t take a comedy Christian satire and make the solution some Buddhist-esque reincarnation philosophy that requires an entirely new suspension of disbelief no one signed up for or wanted. That’s shit writing.

2) So not only does the finale spit on every theme it had prior regarding championing human choice as miraculous and the world being worth fighting for in all its flaws as it is- you are going to sit here and tell me that actually they never had any choice at all, so they decided to toss everything down the garbage disposal for the next life. That is, frankly, terrible, and nihilistic, and not at all sensible for this series.

Aziraphale and Crowley are a wonderful love story because they were on opposite sides and they CHOSE each other, and they CHOSE to love humans. They chose to be hedonistic and compassionate and selfish and ‘human’ as they were because they knew how to make choices. Their love has always been THEIR choice.

So how can you tell me that the ending is great because they sacrificed everything for humans to have free choice- which they already had by the way- and then say the ending is beautiful because Aziraphale and Crowley are Predestined to love each other in every reality. How is that not massively hypocritical to the concept they are trying to sell us last minute out of nowhere? Is predestiny not the antithesis of what they asked for by your own definition?!

How is taking their 6000 years of choosing each other over and over again, and summing it down to a deterministic soul bond, more ‘free will’ or beautiful than them literally defying cosmic powers just to stay together and eat dinner at the Ritz on a casual Tuesday?!

People act like their life was just complete suffering, but they were perfectly happy on their own earth. Season 1 left them exactly where they wanted to be!!! Together with the Earth. It was so EASY to circle back to that, all they had to do was write it, and no one would have questioned it because that’s THEM and what they want to be doing. If Adam defied Satan for humanity, why would Jesus Christ- who’d already died once for the salvation of humanity- not tell God to be merciful?! Why not have the humans make the choice, rather than Crowley- which is another hypocritical move because he’s making choices for them just like he’s telling god not to!

How do we have any evidence this new world doesn’t have a god? Trust? In the woman who just destroyed the world after having a casual laugh with Satan? Okay. They didn’t trade their existence for freedom, they traded the apple of knowledge for ignorance.

The fact is, is that the world that championed choice and love was the one they came from, not the one they sacrificed themselves for- because choice and love doesn’t mean there are no complications, it means you take a stand and you do what you want anyways.

This dystopian nightmare of an ending where they let the universe die and don’t know each other was never a thought in anyone’s mind until it came into existence with the most shallow and contrived justifications of all time ten minutes before close, and that’s because it’s out of character nonsense.

And I’m sick of hearing ‘they were always gonna be human’ ‘it was always gonna be this way’ like there was rational grounds for it beforehand. No it wasn’t, and it certainly didn’t need to be. At most it was everyone’s joke of a worst case scenario, and that’s what they decided to give us- probably after a quick google search to find out what would piss everyone off the most.

This was Neil Gaiman and his team of horror writers, who probably didn’t even consider the source material, throwing a temper tantrum and abusing the fandom for liking Terry Pratchett’s divine optimism more than his petty ass. They designed every ridiculous contingency in this horrible script to justify their own mess.

The Ineffable Husbands were fine as they were. Even as a Demon and an Angel they were already ‘human’ enough, THATS what was funny. What the hell is so great about being mortal and not being able to have a free table whenever they want, and having to deal with real world shit like taxes, and homophobia, and Dying?

Enough Dyin’. No Maur DYIN’. It’s it’s-ITS NOT ON!!!

to be clear, I don't think that NG (a bad man!) is Crowley, or even all that analagous to him. but his admissions, however coy, are interesting to me given what we now know: despite being revealed as a sexual predator, regardless of the fact that fans were told he'd not be involved in S3, NG fathered the "finale" with the help of his little horror pals. (notably, those very pals protest his innocence in the face of blindingly awful allegations of sexual abuse.)

the significance, for me, is that so much of the finale felt unbalanced. the push-and-pull between Aziraphale and Crowley, the playfulness and pettiness and overwhelming care, are absent. instead, we get an Aziraphale who is cold, removed, cowardly. Crowley, meanwhile, is something of a martyr: disgraced, publicly humiliated, stripped of his powers, yet somehow still the only really noble personality. it turns out, S3 tells us, Crowley wasn't just the Serpent of Eden who shepherded mankind toward knowledge. he was the best angel ever, and he's been right all along, and now he gets to decide what happens with the universe! spoiler alert: he wipes out everything, including himself and Aziraphale--his best friend.

so much here is inconsistent with the established story as to be ridiculous, and at first I attributed this purely to bad and lazy writing. but now I lean toward another reading: NG is using Crowley as proxy.

Okay, but Disney movies literally do it all the time in 90 minutes. That's the norm for most animated films. It's ABSOLUTELY possible to use a ninety minute runtime wisely and make it feel like a satisfying story. You just have to make it focused and trim away the side quests unless they contribute in an important way to our understanding of theme or character.

What exactly did the subplot about Crowley losing the Bentley actually contribute? I'm not just trying to be snide here, I am actually truly wondering, what was the POINT?

(My point is, dolphins)

Obviously the answer is, it was probably one of the original six episodes that comprised Season 3, so they kept it in despite having to trim so much of it away that might have given it relevance. But why keep it in at all??

That entire sequence with the crime boss wasted SO MUCH of the precious runtime, time that could have been spent better elsewhere. Like, I dunno, maybe having Crowley and Aziraphale actually reconciling?? Or actually developing Michael's motivation as a villain?? Or giving poor Jesus an actual conclusion to his arc instead of Thanos-snapping him away before he ever "finds the lady"?

I just. I went into the finale feeling SO easy to please. I could have forgiven a rushed plot, bad special effects, some mysteries from S2 never being solved because there wasn't time. I could've even forgiven the fact that some major characters didn't make an appearance again, due to budget constraints and actors not wanting to return.

It didn't need to be Objectively Good for me to enjoy it! Truly!

I would've hand-waved it all away...if they had only given me the one thing I wanted in the end: Crowley and Aziraphale living in peace together for eternity.

I don't care, I just want you in this one.