SORRY BABY

That was the point of their stories. Him.

It isn't common for older women in US pop culture to get depicted as people who are capable of rebirth. Of lives, desires, hopes and dreams that matter beyond solely being a mother. It rarely happens, and it didn't happen here.

It's rare for stories to deal metaphorically with real things - like women who get clean or make positive change in their 40s or 50s. Women who find each other and aren't alone and "forgotten" anymore. These things happen -- yes, sisterhood is sometimes a lie and sometimes "people never change." Sure, those things happen. But sometimes sisterhood isn't a lie; sometimes people make change in their lives.

You don't see these stories when they're women though, especially not older women, especially not gay women.

I'm glad for Jen. She doesn't have a community, though. A witch needs a coven they told us, over and over again. They showed us them getting one small taste of the joy they could share together, in their scene of flight. But that was just for Billy too. And now everyone else is dead. To serve the male character's journey, give him some angst.

Agatha is forever spiritually dead--not experiencing any kind of emotional breakthrough or change--because she's not the lead, so she's static so she can serve as a device within the true lead's journey.

She can't even be allowed the growth I pictured as the worst case scenario - where she dies for *the coven*--so they can live and have community and spiritual rebirth together--and makes enough peace to go with Rio. She doesn't even get that much, to get to have a real death that matters and has a sense of completion to it, where we can imagine her reunited with her child and/or at peace with Rio. She can't have that because she has to be Billy's amusing sidekick, his Jarvis, his moral warning lesson about his powers and the witches he got killed and his angst. Because his story matters and theirs didn't.

I was talking to a friend the other day about how love stories often have a "point of symbolic death, when all hope seems lost" (concept from Pamela Regis's study of romance novel structure) and with mf couples they get to rise again from that, into rebirth, into new life. Ff canon couples in stories often, due to a bunch of reasons, aren't allowed that narrative power. They remain trapped in tragedy and despair. I thought surely Agatha herself though, as the lead character, would get to have some kind of change or rebirth as part of a community of women, given that her core wound is betrayal by community -- but she, as a character, doesn't get to go into the symbolic underworld and change and be reborn, because she was never the lead character to begin with.

Sapphic love remains broken once it breaks, the "point of symbolic death" is literal death or a shattering end, there is no rebirth. We, I guess, lack the symbolic potency to come back, in the eyes of the world? We are not generative. "Which one's the man?" "How do they even have sex?" "Your marriage isn't real because you can't make babies." (Kudos for subverting that one, though, show! Except... a child born of women, without a man, cannot live a full life I guess?) And specifically, as a 30something queer woman, people who call my wife, after I've described her as my wife, my "girlfriend" and are shocked by how long we've been together. That we're grown women and our commitment is right down to the bone, that it has blood in its veins. We are not little girls playing dress up. But that is how a ton of nice people see us; we exist but we are spiritually empty, lacking potency. And the stories reflect that. That energy, that core belief that we are the juvenile, non-generative form of love and relationships. And this woman too, she remains in a kind of eternal spiritual death.

That's why people are mentioning the Hayes Code, they're feeling how that aligns with larger cultural prejudice against us and our humanity and capacity to have the kind of power of living and loving that is ascribed to mf love and that more (though not always, misogyny is a hell of a thing) straight women get in stories.

The idea that it's GOOD for a story to do this, because "sometimes sisterhood is a lie" and "sometimes people don't change" ignores that context of who precisely this narrative "subversion," this spiritual aridity is given to. And who gets to live and grow and be reborn and strive and learn and become in stories, to be allowed to connect with the transformative potential inside themselves and each other.

The show did give us a lot -- I think it's important to recognize that. The canon ff love; I would have never expected that. The canon kiss. They put a lot into that and I honor that. This wasn't a classic "bury your gays" and I'm not mad at them. They did their best. A lot of the issues I have are probably due to the problems of the mcu overall and how static it is. But the deeper themes are also just incredibly disappointing to me, and I wanted to outline why.