Glück ist ein verhexter Ort

downsides of being super ill for a few days are being ill, plus sides are i finally sat down and watched the 2003 clone wars cartoon!

the phantom menace is the first in the prequel trilogy, and by necessity for the overall three part story structure, it is childish, bright and whimsical, sweet and hopeful with an underlying malice that will only grow. anakin is still just a boy, a kind and generous and playful boy, who lives in a galaxy that is not yet twisted by war. the movie communicates this in a variety of ways, through the color story of the film, through the music, through jokes, through jar jar.

remove jar jar and you have a different film entirely, you know? he is an essential part of the mixture. he lightens every scene he's in, a necessary clown, with slapstick and low humor, to adulterate the high drama of the political world. his role gets smaller and smaller over the course of the trilogy, as the world dives into suffering and strife. he's forced into a respectable position, forced to play along with the adults, unfit for his position but doing his best, but his innocent clownery in phantom menace is essential first.

Sorry, his commands are in French.

but then it doesn’t work. the arena doesn’t break and haymitch doesn’t die and the world and the games go on. and the personal consequences are dire.

I think part of why the S3 ending works for me, despite how painful it is, is that Aziraphale and Crowley never actually had free will in the original universe.

Not really.

We, as the audience, experienced their relationship through a very human lens, so we kept imagining they could eventually just “run away together” and finally be happy as an angel and demon. But the finale reveals something much darker: their entire existence existed inside an authored system.

God admits She kept putting them together because their love amused Her. Crowley was “given” to Aziraphale. Their meetings across history were not random. Their longing was observed, nudged, cultivated, but never actually allowed to fully resolve.

That’s horrific.

Not because their love wasn’t real. Their love was probably the most real thing in the universe. But the framework surrounding it was fundamentally manipulative.

They were never safe. Never free. Never truly allowed to choose each other completely.

Which is why the ending ultimately requires a new universe.

Not because Aziraphale and Crowley “failed” to make it work. Because the original cosmology itself was abusive.

The tragedy is not that they loved each other and lost. The tragedy is that they finally realized the game itself was rigged.