#complex queerness

This final 90 minute episode arrived with so much baggage, hope, expectations, and the knowledge we nearly didn't get anything at all. 

These characters and their story mean so much to all of us - and when something comes with such weight attached, I'm aware it can be hard for it to deliver on the promise of everything that's been theorised and imagined and hoped for.

We're also in a situation where 6 episodes of content needed to be condensed into just 90 minutes and I went in with this firmly in mind. I really did. I told myself side characters and cameos would be missing, there wouldn't be time for many quieter character driven moments or historical flashbacks (my favourite element of the show), and location/scope would be a lot more limited. This proved to be the case but I can definitely live with all that. We still got so many good moments and the 'feel' of the show.

But what I'm really struggling to process is the complete erasure of the meaningful, slow-burn, complex (to me; ace/queer platonic) relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale - these stylish, cool, ridiculous, genderless, gender-fluid, complexly queer characters - leaving us with nothing more than a meet-get-married-settle-down relationship between two vaguely familiar men we know nothing about and have no investment in.

I don't mind that we didn't get another kiss as I think their relationship has always been about so much more than just that, and I don't inherently mind them being turned human either (I was mentally prepared for this) but Crowley and Aziraphale needed to retain their memories of who they were and what they'd experienced and everything it had ever cost them to always come back to each other. And we needed more fall out, realisation and resolution to the final 15. Aziraphale in particular has been working up to this huge realisation - there are no sides, there's only shades of grey, everything's complex and messy - for two whole seasons and it felt we never quite got there, at least not with depth or meaning.

But most importantly...

As an ace person, a probably almost gender fluid person, I was left feeling erased.*

Stories and characters that can be interpreted as asexual or aromantic or demi/grey or queer platonic are very few and far between, especially those that don't sit within YA. 

And I just can't embrace the reduction of Crowley and Aziraphale's complex queer relationship (the kind we basically never see represented anywhere), that could be read in so many different ways to different people, down to just two men getting married.

It boxes off something 'other', almost unidentifiable, into a much more run of the mill meet-get-married love story. 

All queer stories are hugely underrepresented and at risk - and I'm really glad to have any positive portrayal or ending for LGBTQIA+ characters on my screen right now - but for me, it feels like the erasure of another kind of queerness. The sort that's harder to define - certainly harder to express when you're someone who moves through the world feeling like nothing you see, or watch, or read actually reflects who you are or how you feel. When you feel you want different things to almost everyone else...

"That sounds umm..." 

"Lonely? Yeah." 

"But you said it wasn't?" 

"I'm a demon... I lied." 

Aziraphale and Crowley's story was a tiny light that gradually grew brighter and brighter saying, "actually what you feel is valid, there isn't only one way to tread the path through life". 

And now it's feels like it's gone, like - dare I say it? - it was all a dream. And I'm tired of ace or aro or queer platonic or gender-fluid or genderless or all those other less represented, less understood identities being reduced to only existing in dream worlds that are far too difficult and messy to ever be allowed to be real.