#milesrambles

-SEBASTIAN-

the fish, the myth, the legend. a character with so much potential, handled in just about the worst possible way. let’s talk about him.

the way his ethnicity was handled was lazy and quite honestly insulting. as a white individual i can’t comment on the experience of being chilean-american, but nearly every recent post i’ve seen from chilean fans (and more largely hispanic fans in general) has been negative, and with good reason. sebastian being chilean felt like a complete afterthought. it never came up in the game at all despite zerum’s claims that he was entirely fluent in spanish and spoke it all the time prior to his arrest (and that, despite speaking in english 100% of the time, he “thinks entirely in spanish”??) and essentially it’s only ever mentioned with the fact that he,, likes empanadas. obviously, a character’s ethnicity does not need to be a large part of their personality, but it feels like zerum reduced him to a stereotype while conveniently avoiding any actual effort or work that could’ve been put in to flesh it out even slightly.

extending my previous point, half of sebastian’s lore and other facts about him were not present in the game. if you didn’t go searching on the pressure wiki, you would not know that he was chilean-american, or that he had a younger brother, or where his ring came from (more on that later), or any of the dozens of other “fun facts” shoehorned into the official wiki by zerum. this is a problem i have with more games than just pressure, but they took it to the extreme.

speaking of the ring… oh god, the ring. for those unaware, “zerum” is both the screen name of sebastian’s “creator” (whether she actually created sebastian is currently being disputed and it’s not looking good for her, but i digress) and the name of her original character, a bunny-humanoid who we know absolutely nothing about. i will refer to the oc as “OC!zerum” to avoid confusion. there was originally no lore between OC!zerum and sebastian in the game, but as people started shipping themselves with sebastian and creating ocxcanon content, zerum became upset and announced that he had been married (or engaged, it’s unclear) to OC!zerum the whole time, so any ocxcanon content was invalid and banned from the discord server and other places she could see it. this was supposedly only enforced in the discord server (which would’ve been fine on its own, it’s her server ig) but it was enforced everywhere else, too, just not officially. there was an onslaught of posts from her that were a mess of passive-aggressive rants about ocxcanon/selfshippers despite both zerum and zeal claiming they were “fine with selfshippers outside of discord”. now, if she genuinely wanted to create a romance subplot for sebastian, it would’ve been at least somewhat more manageable, but it didn’t seem like that was the intent at all. the whole OC!zerum situation wasn’t treated like a plot point, it was treated like a “fuck you” to anyone who made any ship content with sebastian outside of shipping him with OC!zerum… despite the fact that nobody knew anything about her and she was not a character in the game. A ring was added to sebastian’s character model as a “reminder”, and every so often zerum would once again vaguepost about her frustrations towards people not “respecting her boundaries” which would send her fans hunting for anyone posting any non sebastianxOC!zerum content. people were doxxed, sent threats, and insulted. it was extremely ugly and unprofessional on zerum’s part.

this brings me to another point: zerum, and to an extent many of the other devs and writers including zeal, not understanding the concept of a fictional character being public. when you put your oc into a video game or any other piece of public content, you are losing your ability to have full control over them. it sucks, but you have to learn to live with it. people are going to create things that don’t align with the way you see your characters, and you have to accept that. the fact that sebastian was “zerum’s oc” and “belonged to her” was reiterated over and over again to the point where you’d thing you were looking at an adoptables page, not the page for a video game played by millions of people.

with every recent update, sebastian became more cruel, mean-spirited, and inhumane. this directly went against everything zerum and zeal said about his character outside of the game, and it was pretty explicit that it was done solely to make players stop shipping themselves with him. i wouldn’t be surprised if adding an actual animation of him during the death scenes instead of just the light from his eyes was another attempt at that. (quick note, i hated that they did that. it took away the spook factor completely and just made it goofy and aggravating, which i suppose makes sense if they wanted people to like him less. that may just be my personal preference, though). i shouldn’t need to explain why this is a shitty and weird thing to do, not to mention a horrible strategy for game development in general.

-P.AI.NTER-

so much potential, so little time. (except there was a lot of time, actually. it just wasn’t used properly.)

my first gripe with the way painter was handled was that members of the team repeatedly told off anyone who asked about their pronouns or identity (they are a computer, it was a reasonable question) because it “wasn’t relevant to their character” all while giving a hundred fun facts about sebastian that were completely irrelevant to the game but were all added to the official wiki. it was handled super weirdly and even just “painter doesn’t really have a concept of gender” would’ve been an acceptable answer. instead, people were shut down and borderline made fun of for asking.

sebpainter, the ship between sebastian and painter, was very popular for a period of time. now, to the best of my knowledge, pretty much everyone who enjoyed that ship would have had absolutely no problem with the ship not being canon. what was strange was that it was only after this ship started becoming popular that zerum started insisting that they saw each other as siblings. again, if it had ended there, it maybe would have been a little borderline on her part, but still basically okay. and then it got worse. zerum and her fans would harass anyone who enjoyed the ship, all but directly calling it incest despite the fact that in the game there is no reason to infer that they see each other as siblings. players were just expected to have read all of zerum’s twitter page and gathered information about their relationship there. it was really weird and i can’t imagine anyone involved on any side of the argument felt comfortable about it. (and this is coming from someone who personally saw them as sibling figures. the harassment towards shippers was fucked up and completely unjustified.)

-ISSUES WITH THE DEVS IN GENERAL-

the ring incident, the sebpainter discourse, and a lot of the other discourse surrounding the characters in pressure boiled down to a certain type of unprofessionalism on the part of zerum, zeal, and some other members of the team. they saw themselves as being on the same level as the fans to an unhealthy and overall negative extent. things like expressing dislike towards sebpainter or jokingly telling people to “cope” because your ocxcanon is better than everyone else’s are things that are perfectly acceptable to do as a fan, but unprofessional and potentially dangerous to do as one of the creators. this applies especially when you’re the creator of a roblox game where a lot of the fandom is younger and lacks nuance. entire hoards of people would attack each other online because of statements casually thrown around by the development team, and zerum in particular had a habit of treating sebastian like he was still her personal oc and not a character in a video game. again, you can have your own personal version of a character you create! that’s perfectly fine! but when you put them into a public game, you are giving up your ability to make that the widely accepted version of them.

almost every interaction, and i mean, like, 95% of them, that we have seen zeal have with fans has been negative, hostile, and strangely defensive. he has threatened to sell the game on multiple occasions when completely valid criticism was brought up, victimized himself in every possible situation, and never acted mature or like he fully understood the extent to which his actions were reaching people. his suicide threats now are a repetition of behavior he’s had for a long time. any time someone would accuse him of something, he would guilt-trip them, bring up his autism and poor mental health, and refuse to actually acknowledge what he was being accused of. if his first half-joking threat to sell the game had been a one-and-done, whatever. everyone freaks out sometimes, it happens. but instead of getting better, zeal got worse. it happened multiple times to the point where everyone was walking on eggshells posting any sort of constructive criticism or bringing up anything he’d done wrong. i can’t imagine how it must have felt to work on the team during that time. as we now know, he would only get worse.

what i liked:

- people are going to hate me for this, but for the most part, i actually liked the finale. i laughed, i cried. granted, david tennant and michael sheen’s chemistry is ridiculous and i think if they played bella and edward in twilight they’d somehow manage to sell me those two being compatible, but i digress.

- aziraphale and crowley becoming human. it was a hard pill to swallow because i love them as ethereal/occult beings but it was worth it for me. i do wish there was a hint of them recognizing each other a little bit just to cement that it really is them, but that may just be coming from a place of personal trope preference.

- god and satan laughing and getting along with each other when crowley and aziraphale re-enter the room, and the former demons and angels at the end mingling and getting along as humans. i think it really drives home the point that they only hated each other because of the corrupt system of heaven and hell and without that in place they actually share a lot of values.

- the little bickering about the nightingale at the end was so sweet and very very them

- LOVE the little bits and pieces about crowley and jesus’s previous interactions!! this was something i’d always loved seeing in fics (i read an amazing one the other day i’ll have to find it) and i love that it came up. jesus’s actor did so incredibly well i loved him, i wish we’d gotten more time with him but condensing everything down to 90 minutes must’ve been hell no pun intended

- speaking of which, the pacing was actually pretty good considering it was supposed to be a six-episode season! it wasn’t perfect but it worked for me

what i would’ve done differently:

- okay, this is the big one: completely, 100% starting the universe over was a Decision and i’ve gone back and forth on it a few times. i’ve seen good arguments from both sides: that the conclusion goes against the original message, which is that giving up and trying to erase everything just because there’s some evil in the world won’t ultimately solve anything, vs the idea that it worked as an ending because the system itself was broken and could not be fixed from the inside; it needed to be dismantled. i don’t think either of these arguments are wrong; i think the real problem lies in the way it was framed in the finale. i don’t think they needed to get rid of the universe, just heaven and hell. i think it would’ve made more sense if it was put back to exactly where it was before, except heaven and hell and demons and angels never existed. that’s how the book of life works, right? if you erase something, reality alters itself so that thing never existed to begin with. they didn’t need to create an entire new reality. the fact that everything would be pretty much the same without heaven and hell would also play into the idea that demons and angels never really interfered with humanity, because they didn’t have to. all the good and evil in the world comes from the humans themselves. now, i think that’s the idea they were trying to get across, but because they decided to completely restart everything from the beginning and (in their words) make an entirely new world the way it read was more like the debacle with job’s children: “here, take this new and better universe because the old one sucked!” i would’ve liked it a lot better if it was more along the lines of “let’s dismantle this dysfunctional system that we created and let humanity exist without meddling and trying to make everything completely good or completely evil from now on”. the sacrifice remains, all the angels and demons can still become human and the ending would be roughly the same, but it would be the same universe aziraphale and crowley have been fighting for this whole time. everything in season 2 and especially season 1 would actually mean something instead of being essentially retconned because the old world wasn’t good enough. anathema and newt would still have the not-apocalypse that brought them together and the burning of the second prophecy book. The Them would still have their coming-of-age armageddon. maybe someday they’d forget because of reality shifting those things out of existence, but the end results are still there. they still happened.

- EDIT TO THE FOLLOWING POINT: ty to comments for pointing out that i should clarify! i wish crowley had apologized too. i think both of them messed up and there was a lot of baggage that never got acknowledged. the reason i singled out aziraphale specifically is because it’s strange to me for plot reasons that there’s a long scene where crowley forgives him when he never apologized, so the forgiveness kinda feels like it comes out of nowhere. even if he had nothing to apologize for, this would still strike me as weird just for like,, the way it was framed? however it’s absolutely fair to point out that crowley did just as much to cause the problems that arose in their relationship and it’s not fair to pin that on aziraphale any more than him. idk man i wish they just talked to each other, season 2 set that up so well and then it kinda just Didn’t Happen

- UNEDITED POINT: i wish aziraphale actually apologized to crowley. like, properly. TO BE CLEAR i adore aziraphale and i understand his decision, but the scene where he’s asking crowley to forgive him was a little confusing because he just,, never really apologized?? it’s like he was supposed to have a moment of realization that he wasn’t going to be able to improve a broken system, that bravery and good intentions can still be unjust, etc. but that was cut for time and so we’re sorta just left with him asking to be forgiven without acknowledging what he’s being forgiven for. i will say it’s entirely possible i missed something as i’ve only seen the finale once and it was on a piracy site that opened ads every time i tried to pause so i wasn’t as locked in as i’d have liked to be, but if i’m remembering correctly my point stands.

LYRICAL ANALYSIS

You and I are friends of empty graves, black air and black, black lungs — Both Simon and Grace’s graves will be empty as their bodies will never return home again, and most of humanity in Simon’s case was wiped out with no chance for burial or grief. “Black air” is the sky (or, in the case of PHM, what the sky is rapidly becoming)—a black void devoid of stars and light. “Black lungs” is the stale air of the ship and submarine, Simon’s radiation poisoning, and a literal reference to the Iron Lung itself.

Am I the only thing that keeps you safe when the light is gone? — Simon and Grace are the last hope for humanity, the last thing they have after the light (the stars) have all gone out.

But I still hold out hope that maybe someday, I'll be worth more than all the silence left in my wake — Both Simon and Grace are hoping there is more to their lives than the sacrifice they’ve been forced to make against their will; their deaths, however meaningful, will still end in silence.

Feed me promises, keep my heart well, I'll sing you songs until the darkness does recede — This line is Eva giving Grace meaning, promising he’s doing something brave and important for the world. Talking to him on the rooftop. Singing at karaoke. Trying to convince him so she doesn’t have to hurt him against his will. It’s Ava apologizing to Simon, learning his name. Promising to free him.

But if in the end I lose my voice, will you forget about your love for me? — When Eva sends Grace on the mission against his will, when Ava gets killed before she can help Simon, resulting in both of them going back on their word, did their connection still mean anything?

But I still hold out hope that maybe someday, I'll be worth more than all the silence left in my wake

And when you break the surface, oh, without me, please don't return me to the dark of all the memories — This is the black box rising to the surface of the blood ocean in the lifejacket, the Taumoeba arriving on earth. Simon and Grace don’t want to be remembered as their darkest moments.

Let the dirt hang heavy in your chest, drag me deeper down the long, dark ground — An expression of anger at the betrayal and empathy towards the betrayers as they’re both pulled deeper into their respective missions.

Know that all my love will be your breath, I will save you when your lights go out — The song ends with an acknowledgment that they’re continuing out of love—for humanity, for life, for hope. They will be the saviors they wish for.