And Baru cast the first dart at hand, the words that set the coopers and the fishmongers and the bannermen of Lyxaxu and Oathsfire and Unuxekome roaring: “Show them who should rule Aurdwynn, and why.”
Vultjag! the poorer parts of the crowd screamed, a raw astonished sound. Vultjag!
i genuinely think that physically it’s easier to have hard conversations when you’re both facing forward, not having to look at each other. the catholic church knew this also
I don’t really want to wade into discourse too much today because I know everyone is extremely miserable online rn but I think if you want to give people genuine advice on what to do politically, “join a union/get involved in your current union/organise your workplace” or “join ACORN/a tenant union/etc” is much more actionable advice than like “build community.”
the problem with “community” is that it doesn’t have the same formal infrastructure / resources / political connections / organising capacity that allows your hard work to have reach far beyond your immediate circle (which is what a union has), and also because like, “community” is an extremely vague and abstract concept that can mean anything from a local restaurant run by your neighbour to a church to your dnd friend group. Reaching out and helping your neighbours is a good thing, lots of people are having a really tough time and helping people around you pay rent or take care of their family or etc is a good thing and you should feel good doing that, but in response to the complete institutional and political failure of electoral liberalism I think the next best option is to turn towards already existing national infrastructure that can mobilise people without requiring you to individually maintain dedicated personal relationships with everyone around you. In my experience + the experience of many long-time activists that I know, relying on interpersonal connections to organise and get things done leads to highly sectarian, disorganised, toxic, and unpleasant organising conditions. The cold impersonal bureaucracy of union membership is legitimately a good solution to this problem.
there are many little positions of power available in these organisation that become open to you for as low a cost as showing up to zoom meetings. I have personally been elected to positions in various unions/orgs literally because I was someone who showed up to meetings! Nobody goes to committee meetings! You get annual budgets! You get to pass votes, organise events, spend money on organising materials! You get to buy food for people! Organising is so much easier in these spaces.
And of course, you are going to face the same ideological resistance, apathy, ignorance, incompetence, and bigotry that you would at your local queer meet-up or community neighbourhood council, and I have no illusions about the institutional limits of unions (which can also be reactionary, bigoted, highly disorganised, incompetent, toxic, and so on), but if you want to avoid completely exhausting yourself and resenting everyone around you, you don’t need to build “community” from the ground up, there are already structures out there where you can do good work. For all the resistance there is to unions and union activity, you will face that same level of resistance with local organising but have none of the power, resources, or institutional legitimacy already secured by unions
Hey, also, all the anarchist shit aside, tomorrow I want you to make something.
I forced myself to draw something after the 2016 election. I forced myself to draw something when my mother died in 2018. I forced myself to draw something when my spouse was hospitalized for multiple organ failure in 2021.
When you are miserable, make something. Add a row to your project, bake a box cake, draw on a sheet of lined paper, write a poem on a napkin, fold an origami shirt out of a dollar bill, make your favorite recipe for dinner, but make something with your hands, something that you can hold and look at engage your senses in.
It won't fix the world, but it will change the world. You will have made something that didn't exist before. You will have impacted your reality, even in a very small way. And it is going to be something you made *after.* Something bad happened, something shook you, and you made something after, in spite of it.
Recontextualisng the Ballad and Road with the Con and the Hex
I know some folks are upset or disappointed that the Witches' Road here was revealed as the product of Agatha's long con and Billy's Hex magic – that this seems to devalue or invalidate what was being explored about covenhood and sisterhood, or maybe "made it all about a guy".
Here's how I've processed it:
The heart of a good con is a story that rings true
The first version of the Witches' Ballad that Nicky performs for others already has a certain darkness to it. Because even though it was born from their love, the song was used to con and kill witches.
After Nicky's death, Agatha further expands the Ballad for her new deadly long con, adding more flourishes to it, including the mention of "death's hand in mine". It's dark, enticing, powerful, magical. Very much on brand for Agatha Harkness.
What's interesting are the changes between this version and the Sacred Chant version we got in Episode 2. And it's these more recent changes that seem to trip up Agatha with the coven.
For example, the version Agatha used across many years (the one overlaid with her killing witches) does not contain the lines mentioning:
"wake thy power earthly and divine"
"a coven true / two"
" fire, water, earth, and air" – Agatha's earlier version does contain spirit however
I think this speaks to how the Ballad and legend of the Road have gotten away from Agatha. At the heart of the con is a story, and this story has out in the world for centuries.
And it's not like Agatha would have stopped it: For the con to work, the story has to spread. The more witches who know about the Road and the Ballad, the more witches Agatha can target.
But people tend to change the stories they come in contact with, making it their own.
Consider that the story under the long con didn't even come from Agatha: a random witch interpreted the Ballad as a way to get to the Witches' Road, and the Road as an actual place. The con worked because Agatha saw what people wanted, a Road to what they want.
People infuse stories with their own dreams and desires, interpret and transform them to fit with their own lens. That there are apparently multiple versions of the Ballad in the show (more than we see as they mention Lorna's version being the most popular) speaks to this, I think.
The Sacred Chant version of the Ballad is probably a relatively recent attempt by Agatha to update the song she uses given the more modern interpretations of it. She knew about Lorna's version and how popular it is, so I wouldn't be surprised if she pulled elements from that.
So Nicky and Agatha created the Ballad, and Agatha developed it as as a killer con, but over the centuries, I'd say that the Witches' Road has become something bigger than two people.
This lore and ballad has become part of this world's witchy history and culture, reflecting the community's hopes and dreams, beliefs and fears: First with its promise of glory and reward – because that's Agatha's hook – and then thanks to artists like Lorna, with the promise of love that never dies, love that cannot be turned.
So what if the Road doesn't really exist? There are stories that are true that never happened. That doesn't make them less true or important.
It was probably... not helpful that we only get Agatha in full asshole mode addressing this reveal. Her dismissing the song as not meaning anything might be the biggest outright lie she’s ever told, given that the song began with Nicky.
Remember Agatha lies. The Road is not just a con and the song actually means everything, especially to her.
And it is significant that it is the Lorna Wu version of the Ballad – the version Billy is shown listening to – that the Hex Road is built around. It is this version that brings the Ballad back to a place of undying love and family and hope, promising "I'll see you at the end".
We probably wouldn't have gotten the Road we did get if it wasn't for Lorna Wu’s selfless love and sacrifice for her daughter. Because that’s the version Billy connected with. Not the ones Agatha used for her long con.
What's real is what you make of it
So Jac Schaeffer has mentioned that this twist was inspired by The Usual Suspects movie. Not just how the reveal was done – with Agatha framed as the mastermind figure who knew all along (camera wink) and Billy piecing the revelation together from clues with growing horror – but more importantly, how it didn’t detract from how the viewer felt about the characters and what they went through:
When you learn it was all a made-up story, it doesn’t undermine your experience of the movie. You still care about Gabriel Byrne’s character, you still care about Edie, and you care that Fenster died.
Does the Witches' Road being a creation of Billy's chaos magic, led by his subconscious invalidate what the coven went through, what these women and this boy did together?
I don't think it does. Because the experience this coven had was real. Their emotions, decisions, triumphs, lessons learnt, the moments of connection they had with each other — all of it was real to them.
Schaeffer wrote for the Black Widow movie and I'm reminded of the scene where Yelena rejects the idea that her family wasn't real because it was rooted in them being deep undercover:
That wasn't real – who cares.
Don't say that. Please don't say that, it was real. It was real to me.
With the exception of Agatha (and Rio at least by Episode 8) who were aware that the Road was a hex, there was no filter on what the coven took away from the Road.
After all, chaos magic bends reality and creates.
Consider Jen at the end of this journey. She may never know the Road was conjured by Billy and rooted in a con of Agatha's but she did have her arc and incredible growth – to the point where she was committed to saving Agatha as part of her coven in the earth trial.
Jen got her power back and embraces being a witch again, as a sister in the craft, because of their shared experience on the Road.
For Lilia, her divination magic didn't care where the Road came from or what conjured it. Outside the hex, she still had the vision to place a sigil on Billy, and later the vision of her coven – the coven she needed – and their destiny together.
Lilia's beautiful journey, her remembering herself and her power, is still intact.
For Alice, she still discovered the truth about her mother's quest to keep her safe from her curse. And with the help of her coven, Alice did lift her curse. She did let go of her anger and found new peace in with a coven.
All of that is still real and still happened.
Agatha is more complicated because she knew from the start that the Road was a Hex. But this is also a deeply hurt love-starved person who also allowed herself to believe for a brief period that Billy might be Nicky despite all evidence to the contrary, until Rio made it clear otherwise.
Did Agatha genuinely find herself caring about this coven by the end of Episode 4? I think she did. I think the fear of losing Billy that episode was genuine too, as was her regret and remorse for killing Alice, because she did feel the loss of that coven relationship that had just started to form.
Agatha's knowledge of the Hex further explains why she lashes out at Billy after Alice's death, aside from his moralising. The spirit trial was a product of his subconscious after all. It was just set up for tragedy because of how the Hex worked (more on that below).
Ultimately, the bonds these witches did make with each other, them coming together as a coven even for a limited time, did matter I think. Jennifer, Alice, and Lilia had their arcs.
Agatha's is more of a mess – and that's a whole other discussion to go into – but I'd say that she's made progress on her arc. With Jen healing Billy, Alice stepping up to protect her, the earth trial moving her towards acknowledging the indiscriminate nature of death. She did see and feel what a coven could be for her, and she does remember them, and what could have been.
The magic of the Road
I think part of the magic of the Road was how it seemed to have purpose in bringing a coven together. How "the Road changes for the coven". Well uh it still did... just with different mechanics behind the curtain.
As a reference point: Why did Wanda create her Hex? To get a reality where she could have a happy family. Why did Billy create the Road? He immediately needed somewhere to escape the Salem Seven, but ultimately he wanted a way to find Tommy.
Note that it's not like Billy made up a version of Tommy just waiting at the Road. His Hex doesn't have a solution or answer, his Hex manifests a Road to find a way forward.
It helps to contextualise the Road as not only the product of out-of-control magic, this Road is also a manifestation of:
a genuine love and curiosity for witchcraft, including its culture and history (let's not forget Billy is a witch who doesn't have a coven)
a need for family and community
a desire to help others find personal growth or what they are looking for (Billy is a good kid that's been raised by a loving family)
Most importantly, as a telepath Billy isn't creating the Road only for himself or using only his own thoughts: with his mind-reading his subconscious is pulling from the coven members around him.
That's why the trials are designed for the coven members, with the spirit trial being so weird because Billy has trouble reading Agatha's mind. And what does Billy learn at the start of Episode 5 with the Salem Seven reappearing? Agatha killed her own coven and doesn't seem remorseful about it at all.
Safe to say Billy's subconscious did not like that.
I hear Schaeffer has confirmed this thinking in a recent interview with House of R, saying there were deleted lines in Episode 9 with Agatha explaining that the trials were informed by Billy's subconscious mind-reading. Agatha was not a fan of how Billy's subconscious wanted personal growth and team-bonding.
So while we were joking about the Road forcing these witches to get therapy, it actually closer to what was happening than we realised. It just wasn't driven by some mysterious cosmic force or divine entity, but by a kid subconsciously who meant well.
There's perhaps something to be said about how there isn't a magical Road already existing out there for Witches to find themselves.
Unlike sorcerers in the MCU who pull magic from the universe or other dimensions, the magic of witches comes from within.
So I've just watched the finale and I'm feeling... Weird. I think part of it is because this show started with everything I like in a story (cool badass ladies, a queer romance, found family, redemption, etc etc) and ended up being... Not all that (most characters die, the romance is doomed, and I guess the redemption mostly happened but wasn't entirely satisfactory to me). Also, I'm someone who as Trauma (tm) with death so, I guess my brain's first reaction is "fuck that I just want them all happy and safe" and it takes me a while to accept when stories take these paths, however well written they might be.
Still, I thought it all went a bit fast in the last 2 eps, with parts of the show ringing just a little bit more hollow than I would have expected? I'm left feeling like the characters of Alice, Mrs Hart and Jen were treated a bit superficially (Lillia's story felt more complete). I also wished we had seen more of Agatha's past because spending centuries just conning witches then killing them is... a bit boring? (maybe we learn more about her in WandaVision, I haven't seen it). And obviously I wished we had seen more of Agatha and Rio. It's like the show couldn't decide if it was about Agatha or about Billy (partly because, I'm guessing it's setting up a 3rd show about him?), and with this short format we ended losing a bit on Agatha's part.
Anyway, curious of what you think of all that because your analysis are always super interesting, and like I said my own brain might be a bit biased towards resistance with this one. And obviously would love to read your fanfic(s) should you write any!
So, I've started and restarted a reply to this a few times, but I think what my answer boils down to is: we're meant to have multilayered responses to this finale. We're meant to sit with it. It's meant to change our experience of the show we've had to this point.
I think the best metaphor for this is the fact the revelation that Rio is Death. Bear with me, because I know this got spoiled for us way early on and we all knew it and were all just waiting for the revelation to drop - but imagine for a second that we didn't know that Rio, Agatha's ex-girlfriend and spooky fun vaguely-a-psychopath as played by the delightful Aubrey Plaza, is death. Your perception of Rio would have been turned on its head. Your perception of Agatha would have been turned on its head. Your perception of the Witches' Road and what we're even doing here with Death walking alongside us as a tourist would have been turned on its head.
Now, we all had an incredibly fun time even with the knowledge that Rio is death before we should have had it. But I think some of the power for what it meant for the story - and our perception of what was really happening - was muted.
Jen, at the beginning of 1.08, says, "She told us who she was from the very beginning."
Sit with that - because the same is true of this story.
---
It turns out that the Road is a metaphor for death. This isn't fully illustrated for us until Nicky, the author of the Ballad, walks down the road with Death's hand in his, and we go, oh. Oh.
Agatha tells us in the beginning that the Road doesn't exist, a rare instance of her giving anyone unbridled truth. And sure - the Road that our coven walked down doesn't exist. The Road that all the witches Agatha lured to the deaths believed in doesn't exist. It's a fiction. But it's significant that Agatha lured them all to the Road and killed them. They wanted to walk the Road. They died. Not "they died instead" - it's a two-fold statement. They wanted to walk the Road and they died. In a gruesome way, Agatha's been taking witches on the Witches' Road since the 1750s.
I don't think the significance of that is lost on Agatha, either, especially where we pick up at the beginning of 1.08. Lilia's dead, and everybody's reeling.
Perhaps Agatha more than anybody.
---
I also want to quickly take a look at Rio's accusation of Agatha regarding Billy.
"The bodies are really piling up."
"Did you doubt me?"
"Yeah, I did. I thought there'd be a trick in there somewhere. And there was! You were distracting me from him."
Because this is a revelation about Agatha's actions toward not just Rio, but any audience watching her - i.e., us the viewers. She's been distracting us! Not from who Billy is, we know that of course, but with regard to what the Road itself is. Agatha's known the Road isn't real the entire time. She's been protecting Billy from that knowledge. She's been protecting Billy from Rio. She's been protecting the coven itself from disintegrating. And, the biggest con woman move of them all, she's been distracting us - with less and less success as the show goes on - from the fact that she is not even the slightest bit in control.
---
So I definitely want to circle back to what you said about how the show started out with everything you like in a story, because oof, yeah, I felt that. I felt that hard in the finale. Coming off the impact of the incredible storytelling in 1.07, and the queer jokes and campy Wicked cosplay balancing out the sad, I think many of us spent the next week expecting some kind of emotional resolution that probably involved the remaining coven banding together in some more of that found family we've felt them becoming along the way.
Here's where things starts going wrong, right off the bat: they don't. Instead, they splinter. Not only are you aware of just how few of them are left (Jen, Billy, Agatha), but Jen and Agatha can't handle Lilia's death. Jen's distraught. The close up on Agatha running away out of the trial and back onto the Road, alone, shows her looking hunted and wild in her guilt. Everything that follows has its seeds in that moment of rending that began with Lilia's death.
From the beginning, the point has been that Agatha Harkness is a covenless witch. It's something we've seen her revel in - maybe simply because she has no choice but to own it. But the fact is that here, for the first time in centuries, she had a coven. She didn't intend to have one - she intended to kill them all in her basement and not think twice about them again. But events transpired the way they did. They became her coven. And one by one, they all died on the Road.
Rio, of course, has the words to cut right to the quick: "Your coven is shrinking," she teases Agatha cruelly. Agatha looks wild - because she's right. The worst thing is that she killed Alice - and she didn't mean to. She didn't want to. But she did, and in exactly the same way she'd intended to kill her at the beginning, the same way she's been killing witches for hundreds of years. "Your coven is shrinking," and it's Agatha's fault. It's Agatha's coven. It's Agatha's coven.
Hold on to that, too.
---
One of the things that I've been mulling over most is Agatha's character. She's so much fun in the beginning. We're all fucking charmed by her. We also don't have the full context of just how much of a serial killer she is.
So for me, at least, watching 1.08 and not only not getting found family, but getting an Agatha so far away from a "redemption" story that she only just barely is willing to not sacrifice Billy for herself, was kind of a rude awakening. Agatha's a lot more of a villain that I was prepared for. Surprise!
Agatha's so far away from "redemption", in fact, that she's only just barely starting to feel empathy for other witches. She's just starting to be affected by people who aren't #1. And that's a trauma response. And it's so, so, so deeply rooted in her that she's only just starting to be able to conceive of the idea of people who care for her. Of the possibility of being able to live in community. She's not ready for a redemption arc. There was no way that the kind of redemption arc she'd need could fit into nine episodes, because so much of it would for her be predicated on a mental shift that Agatha just hasn't arrived at yet. She's still so angry. She's still so traumatized. She's done almost none of the work. And even at the end, even with the final gesture of sacrificing herself for Billy, that's not a final act of redemption, oh Agatha's now a good person/forgiven/insert word frame of choice.
What this show did in terms of redemption for Agatha was set her up to be in a place where she might want it - where she might want to do and be better for Billy, and someday, for Nicky.
And it's significant that that point comes for Agatha in dying… and after death.
---
This show is about death. The Road is about death. Death is a character on the show.
Like, okay, you're saying. Fine. But what about my gay fun times? What about my queer romance, my found family?
And please know that I'm there with you.
I'm not hugely in touch with what the larger fandom is saying and how they're reacting because I have my little echo chamber here on tumblr and a few friends who have actual social media, but even here I get the sense that we're all kind of :/ for fairly similar reasons. What happened to the show I fell in love with?
And for me, the last few days, I think it's been important to realize that the fact that the show I fell in love with didn't suddenly become a different show. It didn't pull a bait and switch. No twists were in bad faith. Everything has been right here in the text of the show from the very beginning.
And I think it's important to see the story that Jac Schaeffer et al. were actually telling vs. our expectations of what they were telling, or worse, what we wanted them to tell. For just one example, I was convinced we were going to see Alice again - maybe Lorna Wu, too. I wasn't expecting it to be for the sole purpose of recognizing that not only is she dead, but to give Alice herself the space to say that it wasn't fair, that she wasn't ready, that she'd just broken her family's curse, that now she can really do something with her life! Because, ugh, yeah! It's not fair, for all those reasons! But that's also death. Likewise, Sharon's just dead, and worse, her death was pretty much meaningless. Lilia rediscovered herself again, and she chose her death to save everyone else - extremely meaningful. But at the end - she's just dead. We don't see her again. She's gone. She, like the others, walked the Road and away with Death.
I loved these covenless witches. I loved them finding themselves together. I loved them bonding around the campfire and discovering community. I miss them all, so so much. But they told us from the beginning how haunted by death all of them were: Alice and her mom, Lilia and her coven in Sicily, Billy and William Kaplan, Agatha and her son and her ex-lover. And of course, Death herself. Forget haunting these individuals - she came to actually join the temporary coven. Like, fuck. They told us what this show was about.
---
This show is about death, but it's more complicated than that: we'll take our cue from Rio again, who, in being Death, is also the original Green Witch. In short, this show is about Green Craft, "growth and decay in constant flow."
So yes - almost every single witch in the coven dies. Yes, it's permanent. No, the queer romance isn't resolved happily. No, Agatha doesn't have a redemption, satisfying or otherwise. And no, none of it follows what we've come to expect from found family story trajectories.
But the focus shouldn't be solely on the decay. There's a whole cycle of growth coming up after it, even now, and it's being made possible by the death and decay that we just witnessed. And most importantly, it's confirmed that this isn't the end of the story - just the end of "Agatha All Along."
---
I'll finish by actually answering your question - I've been sitting with the finale for a few days, because I also felt weird about it. And I think that's the right word: "Weird." Very spooky season-esque, first of all, but also not tipping all the way right into "bad".
The first thing to acknowledge is that no story is perfect - they were limited by nine episodes by what they had the space to show, and finales are really hard to get just right. The second is that you're allowed to not like any or all of it, especially when something happens that asks you to change your entire understanding of the story thus far, i.e. the Road isn't real, or when you have a particular trauma around death and it turns out that that's what the whole show is about in ways we hadn't fully realized. The third is that it's worth sitting with stories sometimes and seeing how they marinate and develop in your brain and your soul over time. All of these things can and should coexist.
This isn't my first go-round with a series finale that initially made me ???, so I was fortunate in that I felt like I had a cheat sheet. I've still got some marinating to do to see how this continues to change for me. But it's helped me to realize that my ??? reaction is what the story wanted me to have - that the characters are reeling right along with me. Not just Alice in shock about her death, but also Billy at the implications of his creation of the Road regarding his responsiblity for what happened on it. We're meant to feel this way… and then we're meant to reconsider the journey we've been on, the Road we've walked with all of them and the death we've died alongside them, and see it anew for what it really is.
So now we've seen the finale, now we've seen how Rio chose to present to first Agatha before everything went wrong (coming for Nicky at his birth), and then to Nicky, while Agatha was sleeping - that gorgeous green dress, holding the green flame aloft. It's very different from the way she showed herself to Lilia.
It's also wildly different than how she chooses to appear to Agatha in the end. Rio's wild with grief. She's been pining for centuries. Agatha has just given her the most final, definitive, insulting no she could muster. There is no future here. There is no past to hold on to. There is only Agatha telling her she doesn't want her. That even in the end, she doesn't want the comfort of passing into a lover's embrace - she wants Rio masked. She wants Rio, essentially, to roleplay anonymity, strangeness, distance.
Now. Given what actually happens - and their moments of tenderness and Agatha's part in them throughout the rest of the show - I don't think we can take Agatha at face value here. But it is the first time Rio's heard Agatha's "no" when it comes to their relationship's viability.... and believed it.
To Agatha, in the moment immediately before everything went wrong, Death appeared as a beautiful woman, bedecked in green, expensive, well-made clothes. She appears the same way to Nicky. She's familiar, she's non-threatening. She tells him to come with her and he goes. She tells him no, kiss your mother, and he does. She extends her hand to him, and he takes it, and they walk together through the darkness. He knows her.
I wonder if she could ever be that version of herself again - or if it went with Nicky. I think there's a subtextual reading of what's going on in Agatha/Rio's relationship where Rio's grieving, too, but Agatha will never be able to see it, for so many reasons - where Rio's angry because she knows she'll never stop being invisible in this way. Where all she wants is for Agatha to see her.
okay. hear me out. the actual Witches' Road? is death (the state of being, not the person.)
Ever since it became basically common knowledge that Rio is Death (the person), and ever since I saw the subtitles capitalize the relevant line of the Ballad ("I hold Death's hand in mine"), I'd been waiting for it to show up as an episode title. And of course we got it last week, with Lilia.
And yet, in the entirety of the show, the only person to hold Death's hand? Is Nicky. Nicky, walking away with Rio into the night... and down the road.
The line doesn't show up in his version of the Ballad - i.e., the original Ballad. We don't hear Agatha make the modification afterwards. It's anyone's guess where and when and under what circumstances that actually happens.
But in a show where every single one of the witches ends up dead except for Jen... forget Billy conjuring the Road. What the Ballad is talking about? It's death. And I have a lot of feelings about Agatha singing it both pre- and post-modification. And a lot of feelings about her insistence that it doesn't exist, in the exact same way she insists that Tarot is just another con. And even in the end, dead, she's a ghost! She has yet to go down the Road herself! She tells Billy that she's not ready because she can't face Nicky - but there's someone else waiting for her on the Road, the one that does exist, and she's the one Agatha's not ready to face first.
annaxmalina
dededos
blakekathryn
stormborns
germansingergirl
izzy806
baratheonpilled
