[anna]

please try this on for size:

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

It's This. Beelzebub isn't even looking at the man next to her. That's not the person who is their hell and happiness. He's not in there. He's where his memories are -- in the fly.

In the finale ending we were given, I can see the power of Crowley's Choice, the incredible love for humanity in their sacrifice, and the beauty of Aziraphale's willingness to disappear into Nothingness with the one Being that makes him feel complete. And my little ace/grey heart is satified without a big show of physical affection, so I'm not sulking over the absence of a Kiss.

But this world, this story, told us that memories are what makes you You. That shiney new children can't just replace the children you already love. That other couples lives might mirror your story, but aren't actually You. That we build off of what is broken, and work to fix it as best we can. That brokenness is still lovable, deserves love and can find love.

Crowley told us the rules of the Book of Life, that what gets erased will have never existed. God contributed another worldbuilding rule, a coldly finite and absolute statement, in Her response to Crowley and Aziraphale's decision -- a Hobson's Choice, btw.

Eventually there'll be humans and life, in all of its mundane glory. Something that both of you will neither know or experience, though.

This is what many of us are struggling with. As much as we love this show and respect Sir Terry, this finale only gives Our Ineffables a happy human ending if the show unravels nearly every rule they ever told us -- including the last words God spoke moments before Asa and Anthony meet.

According to everything we were told, Aziraphale and Crowley are gone. It's a beautiful love story echoing throughout time and space, but it's not theirs anymore. What made them.. Them... is gone.

It's okay if you see it differently.

But many of us are stuck here, trapped in a limbo where our minds and hearts are faced with our own Hobson's Choice. Unexpected. Impossible. Heartbreaking.

Please be kind. We have a lot to lose.

We love this beautiful world too.

if terry were here the ending wouldn't have felt so disappointing. because he would've built up the world and the importance of humanity up in a way that would've deserved aziracrow's sacrifice. he would've NEVER let aziraphale or crowley become the main characters so fundamental to the story that humanity took a backseat, because remember, in the book they were never the main characters. it would've been satisfying to see it end, more worth it. instead we got derailed to a fanservice romance between an angel and a demon and spent so much time on their relationship while letting the human core of it become a setting for their romance.

which is fine but you can't do that and try to steer back to the original idea behind the ending as if you haven't neglected the worldbuilding and the development of humanity in general. why should I care about jesus and him reconnecting with humans? why should I care about the human philosophy? why spend 90% of your story on the romance which terry would have never let become so integral to the plot only to disregard it for the humanity you never explored to begin with?

Saying we have a low opinion on being human and human love when that's not the issue at hand. All the humans falling in love around a+c since season 1 are precious to me. But that is not aziracrow's story. There are thousands and thousands of stories of humans falling in love but how many are there about an angel and a demon falling in love? two beings who are shown to be complete opposites to each other, forming an unlikely alliance and creating their own side in defiance of their respective head offices? them making a small paradise of their own in a world which can never be perfect. Why can't we get that story for a change in a sea of numerous human love stories? why do supernatural beings HAVE to turn human to achieve happiness? and if they absolutely have to be reincarnated as humans to be happy then why not give them flashes of their past life to hammer in the point they will find each in evey universe. A simple "found you again angel" would have sufficed. But the canon human reincarnations are devoid of anything that truly makes them, them.

"found you again angel"

season 1 and 2 kept hammering the idea that individual lives matter. not replaceable copies. not "close enough." actual people, with continuity and memory and history. Crowley and Aziraphale repeatedly chose imperfect, messy existence over grand cosmic plans. so ending with "the universe gets reset and everyone is replaced by alternate versions" isn't just horribly depressing. it's philosophically backwards. like the story literally abandoned its own argument in the final act.

the Job parallel especially points that out pretty cleanly. The whole emotional weight there was: replacement children are not the same children. new children (even if they had, by some chance, looked and acted Exactly The Same) doesn't fix the tragedy of losing the original children. that mattered to them. so yea, this ending feels less like "hopeful transcendence to tear down The System" and more like “congrats on your happy ending! everyone is dead, but the cottage is cute!" bold creative choice ig. like serving tea with eccles cakes after detonating reality.

my frustration is basically: the story spent years arguing that personhood matters — memory matters, continuity matters, these exact souls matter. and then solved the finale with a cosmic reset that wipes out the very identities the narrative taught us to care about. very much like the nuclear apocalypse they were trying so hard to prevent. it goes against the very thing Crowley was staunchly opposed to during The Flood. against everything they did in the Job minisode. against literally the entire Jim/Gabriel narrative, about Jim not really being Gabriel without his memories. and also, to quote Crowley, "the angel you knew is NOT me."

"but they found each other again! we got them back at the end!" no we didn't. that is NOT them. and to say that they are is kind of insulting tbh. they LOOK similar and maybe have some of the same interests, but just bc a blonde and a red head are into books and astrophysics doesn't make them THEM. their memories, their history, everything they went through together and fought for, the experiences that shaped their characters, those 6000+ years — that's all GONE.

Also. people keep saying stuff like "it was the only right choice" as if there were only two horrible choices? if the story introduces negotiation and moral choice, we'll naturally start imagining alternatives. once “God offers options” enters the chat, people will obviously ask, “wait. why was this the chosen solution?” when they could've gone for idk, literally anything else. God literally offered to put things back as they were. they could've chosen to have THAT universe, THAT world —THEIR world— put back into place and then added their own conditions to tear down Heaven and Hell. they could've chosen to keep their memories. they could've chosen to make everyone human from then on if that's what the writers were so hellbent on. they could've chosen to make God erase her own memory for all i care idfk. but this ending feels like a bad consolation prize.

after EVERYTHING they did, and everything they went through, they deserved SO much better than this. THE WHOLE WORLD did.