I can’t lie, I was sort of surprised to see how upset everyone is about the finale.
Maybe it’s because I’m newer to this fandom, but I actually really enjoyed it. There were so so many sweet moments in the tiny time frame. Crowley keeping the bookshop clean without any miracles. The great war. Their private moment, with apples from the garden of Eden and leaves and books and birdsong all interwoven like their tapestry together. Their declarations of love. The exploration of Crowleys fall with Lucifer, which was a subject vital to his character we’d never seen details about, and helped Aziraphale (I think) connect with the side of Crowley he never really got to. God as a black woman. Jesus as a Palestinian queer person. The angst of everyone leaving after Aziraphale did. The angst at the beginning.
Of COURSE it was so sad that the Aziraphale and Crowley we know didn’t get to fully revel in their final love and acceptance of their feelings and YES it sucks from a queer representation standpoint to not have a traditionally happy ending for them.
That being said, it was an ending that genuinely surprised me. I didn’t predict it and I loved it for it. It was an imperfect happiness, where the love between two people united in their genuine faith in the value of humanity let all the beings who spent millennia polarizing themselves could sit in a restaurant together.
Angels ate alongside demons. Not just Aziraphale and Crowley. All of them.
Jesus shared food with queer people and the woman who owns the sex shop and people of color and everyone. I actually think that even in his little window, Jesus was a beautiful reminder of what Jesus actually was. He was a carpenter with rough hands. He told stories because they brought people together. He inspired community and hope. He wasn’t a puritanical leader. He wasn’t what centuries warped him to justify. He was everything scripture has told me he was and nothing like the symbol of a church of segregation taught me he was.
If anything, I find it reductive to center on the “old man yaoi didn’t kiss”. There was so much more to this story than that. It was an emphasis on the community of love needed in our current society of polarization, of us vs them.
It was not ideal, for certain, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I laughed. I cried. I smiled and giggled and kicked my feet. It was beautiful not in every way, but in the ways I think mattered to me.