after that agatha finale i have many thoughts about rio as death and all the symbolism behind her actions so beware of spoilers for the whole series also in no particular order its gonna be stuff i remember so I'll be jumping around
I'm going to start with the last agathario scene that we gays were hoping The Kiss™️ which is kinda obvious about a kiss from death which is very common in literature and it symbolizes dying so that part was very direct, idk if this means they never kissed before or not but in that moment agatha had a clear goal of getting rio's power for herself and they both knew it would kill her as she said in the first ep... this does imply that she probably tried to do this before but rio stopped her when they were in love all those centuries ago
which kinda goes into a theory that maybe their first entanglement (whatever that implies) created nicky, cause agatha says she didn't do a spell or incantation to create him, he was made from scratch, and rio being The green witch™️ deals not only with death and decay but the cycle of life and death, creation and destruction, so it makes sense that he is their child, created from their love, which is why it hurt them both when she had to take him away, he was also something that challenged the balance of the universe, like billy, and rio allowed agatha to keep him with a timetable that nobody knew
and that takes me into the witches death that agatha killed to keep her son alive, she knew that giving bodies to death would allow rio to turn a blind eye to her child, and it makes for great symbolism with the sentence "death follows wherever they go" because it wasn't that agatha wanted to kill people, she had to so nicholas could survive, because death *was* following her wherever she went, they fell in love and rio had to make the tough decision of leaving her so she wouldn't take away agatha's most prized possession, their kid, and once she did have to do it she still kept following agatha because now she was actually killing witches just to have power and stay alive, she was grieving and murder became her go to (not a good thing) but death kept following wherever she went
and that is possibly why rio never got over her, she was always pursuing agatha and she didn't have time to let go, so at the end when agatha makes the deal to give up billy in exchange of rio letting go of her it had both the meaning of allowing her to be immortal and to forget about agatha, she was tired of having death follow her and they both knew the only way that could happen was for rio to give up her feelings and stop wanting to be with her
another thing is the whole tarot symbolism of death, as a major arcana in most decks death means the closing of a cycle, it isn't a bad card even though people see death as a bad thing, but the whole lilia ep was about showing how her cycle was about to finish (not necessarily meaning her death btw) and through all of the road each of them had their cycles closed, alice managed to get rid of her curse, jen got her power back, lilia finally understood her timeline and organized her thoughts to save her coven, billy found more power and possibly where his twin could be, agatha got the power she wanted for a bit and rio finally put agatha on the ground
also i could talk about how lilia might still be alive but that's a different rant that will come some other time
anyway i just really loved all the death symbolism throughout the whole show and how well they portrayed everything, aubrey did an amazing job as rio and i do hope they use her again in the mcu since we've had so many deaths and there will be more and how she deals with some of the things that don't necessarily follow the natural order of things (just please don't make it comic death cause rio is a lesbian she would never fall in love with thanos)
