#simone x chidi

[nocontextgoodplace]

[lena-oleanderson]

sometimes a family is a reformed demon and his five adopted children who are all dating each other

[nausikaaa]

i still want the good place’s endgame to be janet x jason x tahani x eleanor x chidi x simone with michael off to the side being a confused but supportive aro icon

[katoska]

Ok, so I’m still not happy about the Chidi Simone breakup, but:

Chidi decision to break up with Simone was the most purely selfless thing we ever saw him actually go through with in this show, and he didn’t seem to need to angst about it at all.

Like, Chidi didn’t just land himself in the Bad Place because his indecision and compulsive honesty made the people around him miserable. He went to the Bad Place because he coped with that indecision and honesty by picking a set of very strict rules to follow which validated his own POV; and when following the rules happened to get the people around him hurt, he still felt justified for following them because Ethics say he was supposed to be always honest and to be doubting his decisions.  But “Kant said it’s ok” is no excuse for hurting people, especially as Chidi is not acting out of good will when he follows Kantian Ethics , but because they validate his brain-weirdness.

But after his near-death experience he finally sought help. Simone told him that his brain washealthy and able to make decisions  - which I still believe to be a lie; dude nearly fainted when asked to pick a colour. But it was a helpful lie and it worked in pretty much the same way as Eleanor’s Best Person Sash and Tiara worked for her in Attempt 2, or when Simone told her that she was acting like a toddler, stuck in an earlier stage of psychological evolution, and was really just kind of a dick: It cut through layers of bullshit defence mechanisms and self-imposed rules and made him hold himself to a higher standard. And that was a powerful experience and he loved her for it and also because she’s gorgeous and smart and likes that he is weird.

Seriously, the probability that Simone has anything but a crazy high score is extremely low (unless she’s an angel, as I still believe), and even lower is the chance that she would believe him even if Chidi did slip up about the truth of the universe. If simple belief even dooms you, that is. Plus, there’s always Michael’s backup plan of killing people before their score gets too low...

But Chidi wasn’t going to take any chances. He knows that he is a pathological truther, he knows that it’s a problem and that he had been using ethics as an excuse to not deal with it. 

Plus, Chidi has a pretty good track record of making people miserable without any supernatural stuff, so I guess that might have been another factor. That’s also why he practised that break-up on fake!Simone first, putting himself through a anxiety-inducing, awkward situation again and again and again. 

He was trying so, so hard to spare her pain. That had been his only motive.

So he gave her up.

Not because of moral duty, or so he could feel good about himself or because he made a list and the pros outweighted the cons. 

Just because he loved her.

[zalrb]

I’m twelve minutes into The Good Place and I know the writers are saying that Chidi will be weird around Simone because she’s his ex and it’s weird but my headcanon is that he never truly got over her, he “let her go” because it was the right thing, but the feelings didn’t disappear so it’s torture because he also loves Eleanor.