#then ylfa didnt pick her up as the wolf

[chompe-diem]

great season you guys, truly

but let’s just pour one out for mira, little miss muffet, and the itsy bitsy spider

o7

[olreid]

ej olreid i know were mad at neverafter but as someone who did not watch at all and has only been reading ur takes n all. pls tell me they didnt ruin ylfa in the finale please tell me we have continued the thread of emily supremacy please

cc the other person who asked about ylfa's ending, more detailed spoilers follow but here's what happened: first something SO sexy which is that emily described accepting her new role as Death yet trying to preserve some 'girlish sweetness' in her demeanor or something to that effect and then promptly rolled like shit, which she took to mean that trying to preserve anything of her former self was the wrong strategy so she pivoted to completely letting go of ylfa and fully embracing the wolf and death. then gerard died (<3) and emily as death picked gerard up and put him over her shoulder to take him into whatever comes after life because that way he would at least have a friend bringing him over. all of this i thought RULED; it was a culmination of ylfa's season-long journey to explore and understand and come to terms with death and with the death-like parts of herself, and it was fitting that gerard who most of anyone in the party had been trying to help her with that would now need her help to pass over.

THEN pib stole back the party's sacrifices from the baba yaga which meant that death got her name back and became ylfa once more, gerard came back to life, and everything i discussed above got essentially un-done. it's sort of unclear whether this would have happened anyway what with the party gaining authorial powers and the ability to reset their stories? but either way naturally i thought this sucked. emily's epilogue/new and improved story for ylfa was basically that she went in the complete opposite direction of her original moral; since her story was originally about respecting your elders, ylfa used her author powers to write a new story about teenage rebellion and experimentation. and then the last scene of the show was her and pinocchio having a horrible awkward teen date and kissing. all of that i feel neutral about, some of it was funny and it was clearly being played for laughs so whatever.

but overall i think it's a cop-out to go through an entire 20 episode journey of becoming death and giving up your selfhood only to have it all be undone at the end... and even though that was more pib/zac's decision than ylfa or emily's i do think there is a world in which death declines to reclaim her former identity when it's offered to her because she's already too far gone, which would have been my preference. oh well