#im already reading some but they're mostly from ray vecchios pov because theyre about the post-vegas Feelings

[variousqueerthings]

read those last four pages of the earlier draft of the due south ending and wild how much it aligns with my overall predictions of how the show was going to end, so clearly i was seeing what some of those earlier intentions were (and it makes me wonder why they changed it)

to be honest, it could've pretty much ended that way with very few other changes -- the major two being meg saying she wouldn't move north, although she could still say that and be seen in a cushy office. it's the discomfort of fraser's general lifestyle/being a wild man of nature that she doesn't necessarily want, not canada itself, she canonically misses ottawa. and the other one perhaps being ray's and stella's relationship, but that could still be a thing that's dangled without needing to put too much of a line beneath what it may or may not become post-credits

it's really just the epilogue -- which felt oddly tacked-on to me -- that changes the ending, and im coming at that with a mix of "well, since most of it is making jokes about the characters i can ignore it" and "ray vecchio and stella elope and divorce almost immediately (due to ray's post-undercover ptsd)"

beyond that i wasn't totally sold on ray kowalski going up north at the end -- at least not for the longhaul, although i really do quite like the openness of him and fraser going to look for franklin's hand, so that wasn't the bit of the epilogue i was really scratching my head over, although, there are things about it that suggest that it's not the place either of them really need to be/would choose to be for too long moving forwards (also lol, ray you're wearing a thin coat and you hated most of your journey in canada so far, sir your rose-tinted glasses are blowing right off your face with the first blizzard -- but that's a part of him, he's not a hugely practical guy outside of the things he Knows How To Do, that is, he'll wear a thin coat in northern canada and eat smarties for breakfast and forget to clean his apartment and stalk his ex-wife but not out of malice and she doesn't feel threatened by it and he'll get himself beaten up in a boxing match he shouldn't be in and he'll smack computers, etc)

im still musing on how i read rayk's character, but a Big Big thing that is explored in canon is that he's someone who needs someone to tell him who to be, and that used to be stella until she correctly identified the amount of emotional labour that was being required by her vis a vis his various unexamined issues (and i believe she probably started at least some of the arguments, but at its core this is a solid lady and an unsolid man, it's easy to see where the issue lay), and now it's fraser, and all the while ray is asking, with some self-awareness: when he's not around other people (a single other person) telling him who to be, who is he? and we never do find out and nor does he, which is interesting -- it makes the franklin's hand ending quite melancholy to me, that alongside how it pertains to fraser himself

it suggests that him leaving with fraser is more about needing fraser as a crutch (like he needed stella). i was thinking there'd be some openness to the ending (people aren't at their final destination just because the story has ended), but ray doesn't need a yes-man like fraser (who sucks at boundaries), he needs... well ray vecchio, i think. and ray vecchio needs him, because of their very unique shared experience. there's an implicit understanding between them that's obvious in just the short amount of time they're together in the finale and that's really one of the main interesting things i want to think about/explore more moving forwards

the other thing that i'm circling back to in terms of the ending, is that fraser started the story very much alone, sans diefenbaker (whom one can say many things about in terms of what he represents -- friend, brother, same soul, metaphor, spirit). he ends the story with a community -- ray'n'ray, meg, maggie, turnbull to an extent, the whole precinct really, arguably parts of chicago itself, and i think that original ending makes that much clearer

the end of the story onscreen had a melancholy to it, as i said -- the epilogue puts both ray vecchio and meg far away (for no real reason that i could gather/sorta out of character for them both), effectively splitting up the community that had formed around fraser, and the northwest passage isn't the happiest of songs to end on. its story is that of a journey that is futile and circular, that to go out there is to ultimately try and find a way back home. so there's a lot of ambiguity to the onscreen ending that i am enjoying reading along the lines of how that community can come back together again afterwards, whilst still allowing fraser to fundamentally be who he is, which is wild and fairytale-like and other

the expression on his face when he first returns to the snow and the wild -- that fraser balanced with people anchoring him and telling him that whenever he wishes, they will be there for him (whilst knowing that there is, fundamentally, something about him that is of the wild and therefore untameable and also shouldn't be tamed, because then he wouldn't be fraser)

i think the main things im interested in right now are: 1. the rayk and rayv dynamic in a million different ways 2. exploring meg and maggie (apart, but also together in the same space in some way or other) 3. fraser and the balance of his two selves (the part that is always called by the wild and the part that has People whom he cares about, who are His People, not just people as an ideal) 4. also fraser and how he feels post-knowing-all-of-that-about-his-past-now-and-aftershocks-thereof 5. rayv and vegas and the aftermath of that, and including stella in that because the finale puts her in an interesting place to develop alongside both the rays 6. rayk and trying to find out who he is, because this too has been my big [?] whilst watching him. who are you sir? what do you want? (you want to know who you are, that's what you want. you want to feel real in your own skin. i want to explore what that journey looks like for him) 7. permutations of ray'n'ray and fraser either staying in or leaving law enforcement -- am fascinated by the fact that this is played with across both versions, so clearly it was a questionmark for the writing as well (my favourite idea of post-canon this is ray'n'ray open up a detective agency in some way or other)

so yeah. questions about the onscreen epilogue. what prompted it and when did it change, but im pretty chill about it, im just scooting it mildly to the left to bring all the characters back into frame a little more so i can ask the questions i want to ask of them