Friendly reminder that "bury your gays" doesn't necessarily occur every time a gay character is killed off.
Bury Your gays as a trope has been noted in media since the late 1800s, and it was often employed by queer authors looking to write queer stories and still have them published while also avoiding being arrested themselves. Execution of the trope frequently involved one party dying or being pushed to the fringes of society, and the other turning to heterosexuality (x). For instance, consider Spring Fire (1952). Of course, language can expand and change over time, so the definition might look a bit different today.
By positioning Crowley and Aziraphale's destruction as nothing but an incidence of "bury your gays", we're denying the idea that queer characters can have complex, multifaceted stories which may sometimes, yes, involve death. For instance, consider Bill and Frank in HBO's The Last of Us. They both died, but they died together at the end of a long and happy life. Context matters.
In the case of Crowley and Aziraphale, the writers were trying to convey the message that a violent, oppressive system that is grounded in cruelty cannot be reformed. Rather, it has to be fundamentally uprooted and reimagined. This is the basis of much radical leftist theory and praxis.
Good representation doesn't just mean "perfect happily ever after wholesome uwu ending". It doesn't mean that every story has to end the same. In fact, demanding that every queer story eschew death would deny the intricacies inherent to queer experience, thereby collapsing us into a bland, uni-dimensional monolith. Which is not a vibe, honestly.
Also, we literally got them back at the end. WE GOT THEM BACK.
