If the story goes in the direction I think it’s heading, a tragic "they can't be together" ending would actually be pretty hard to justify narratively. Not impossible, sure, but definitely harder.
And the reason for that has less to do with the romance itself and more to do with the story's core argument. From how I see it, the pilot isn't setting up a "Will Tanrak choose God or Barth?" dilemma. It’s setting up a much bigger question: "Can a person be fully known and still belong?" Those are completely different stories.
In the first version, romance and faith are pitted against each other: one has to win, and the other has to lose. In the second version, the narrative is arguing that making people choose between love, authenticity, belonging, and faith is exactly what's wrong. That's why that opening verse is so crucial to my interpretation. A story that kicks off with radical hospitality frames the moral conflict in a whole new light. It shifts the question from whether outsiders deserve to be included, to how communities actually treat them.
Along those same lines, I think that scene with the fallen Jesus statue is so important. A lot of queer religious stories tend to use symbolism where Christ Himself is the obstacle. But by having both boys catch the statue, the pilot’s visual grammar suggests something else. That's not an image of "faith versus love," it's more like an image of faith being held jointly between two people.
Now, could the writers still end things with a separation? Absolutely. There are a few ways that could play out.
Ending 1: They separate, but they remain faithful.
This is the ending I absolutely detest as a Catholic myself. Tanrak becomes a priest. Barth leaves. They love each other, but they never act on it. The problem isn't that this ending is impossible. The problem is the message it sends. If the emotional climax of a queer religious story boils down to, "The institution stays unchanged and the queer character loses the relationship," a lot of queer viewers are understandably going to see that as a statement, even if the writers insist it's just a character choice. Stories don't exist in a vacuum, especially not for an audience carrying religious trauma.
Ending 2: They separate, but they both become whole.
Honestly, this feels artistically stronger than Ending 1. Even though the romance doesn't survive, both characters complete their arcs. Tanrak finally figures out who he is outside of institutional expectations, and Barth finds belonging outside of his history with institutional rejection. This can definitely work dramatically, but only if the story’s primary theme is individual growth rather than relational belonging. The pilot suggests the exact opposite. The symbolism consistently points to the relationship itself as the ultimate catalyst for transformation.
Ending 3: They stay together, and their faith survives.
Honestly? This feels the most consistent with my reading. Not because it's the happiest ending, but because it's the ending that actually resolves the pilot's central contradiction. Barth has selfhood without belonging. Tanrak has belonging without selfhood. If that's the wound, then the ideal resolution isn't Barth learning selfhood and Tanrak learning belonging. They already have those. The resolution is: Barth gains belonging, and Tanrak gains selfhood. And the most elegant way to dramatize that is through each other. In that version, neither boy abandons God. Neither boy abandons himself. Neither boy abandons the other. The story becomes an argument that these things never needed to be mutually exclusive in the first place.
What I find most interesting is that the creator seems to want to offer hope rather than make a theological argument. That's a really important distinction. A lot of viewers assume stories like this are trying to settle doctrinal debates, but most storytellers aren't trying to do that at all. They're looking for emotional truth. And the emotional truth for a lot of queer people raised in religious environments is: "I want to stop feeling like I have to choose." To stop choosing between faith and authenticity, family and honesty, belonging and selfhood, or love and God. If the pilot is genuinely exploring those tensions, then forcing the characters to pick a side at the end would feel like a betrayal of the question the story spent all its time asking.
Also, the pilot takes care to separate God, religious institutions, and individual believers. I noticed moments where those categories are clearly pulled apart rather than lumped together. The story seems less interested in condemning faith itself, and more interested in examining what happens when people weaponize faith while failing to live out the values they preach.
The pilot doesn't start with a rule, it starts with a responsibility. If that's truly the foundation of this story, then my guess is that the ending, whether romantic or not, is going to hinge entirely on belonging. Not on whether Barth deserves love, or whether Tanrak deserves faith, but on whether the community (and the characters themselves) can imagine a version of belonging big enough to hold both truth and love at the same time. If the writers can pull that off, then the ending most consistent with the pilot is that the choice itself was a false premise from the start.
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