The Good Place

Transcript

Courtney: Hello everyone, and welcome back. My name is Courtney, I’m here with my spouse Royce. Together we are The Ace Couple, and today we’re talking about what is surely one of my top 10 favorite shows.

Courtney: It also happens to be a bit of spiritual, perhaps unconventional, asexual representation. Some of you are going to fight me on this, But... bite me, I’m right and you’re wrong. I love it so much. I’m feisty today, I don’t know why I’m picking fights with people, uh, weeks before this podcast will even be released.

Courtney: But I love The Good Place. I absolutely adore this show. I think season one is maybe one of the most solid seasons of television for, like, A half-hour timeslot show that I can think of in recent or distant memory. And I remember when we were watching it way back when, saying this was such a phenomenal season of television, and it ended with such a delicious twist that I can’t wait to find out what happens, but I was also really nervous because I wasn’t sure where they were going to take it from here. And I just hoped upon hope that they had a plan to see it through to the end in a satisfactory way.

Royce: Yeah, this is a really interesting show, and we did do a rewatch of it pretty recently, and one of the notes was just how nice it is to have a well-paced show that fits into a standard 30-minute TV block. So the episodes are like a little over 20.

Courtney: I just care about pacing in general because way too often, and seemingly increasingly so, regardless of if it’s a 30-minute TV show or an hour-long TV show, it either feels like they’re trying to pack too much into too little time and nothing has room to breathe, or in— sometimes in hour-long shows, it’s like, you didn’t actually fill that with an hour of content, there was too much filler. So the pacing in this show is Really, really refreshing.

Royce: There are a lot of— there are some streaming shows that make good use of the ambiguous runtime of each episode where they don’t all need to line up. Some, uh, directors do a good job of making things exactly the length they need to be. But yeah, there are a lot of cases where shows, individual episodes of shows, are longer than they needed to be, or show creators get, you know, the standard 10-season episode package and try to do a massive ensemble cast and don’t give anyone Or any plotline the time they need.

Courtney: Yes. So this is going to be a rare episode where not only are we talking about the ace rep, arguably ace rep, I’m going to argue that there is ace rep. I will be the one arguing, yes.

Courtney: Where I genuinely adore the show and I would love this show whether or not there were any ace vibes, anything spiritually aspec in it. I would still love this show, so that is always a joy to me.

Courtney: Now, caveats. There’s one main character, sort of two characters, that I will make the argument fit into ace rep vibes here.

Courtney: Primarily Janet. Oh my god, we love her.

Royce: Secondarily, Michael.

Courtney: Also love. Brilliant characters. Genius writing.

Courtney: To preempt those who will disagree with me, the reason I foresee these being contentious in the conversation about whether or not they can qualify as ace rep is that neither are human. So I’m gonna preface this by saying, a lot of people in the aspec community are justifiably Very leery of allowing anything non-human to be considered proper ace rep because, and we have talked about these studies in real life, aces and aros are very often seen socially as being less human than people of other sexual orientations. And there are studies that show it actually, like, almost counterintuitively, Negatively goes both ways.

Courtney: We’re seen as more robotic, more machine-like, but also somehow more like animals.

Royce: Anything other than human.

Courtney: Anything other than human. And I take dehumanization extremely seriously, even when done in a joking or meme fashion. If there’s ever a situation where you’re trying to Define humanity or equate humanity to being one thing or the other. Like, for example, how often do we see, like, sex and sexuality being equated to humanity, or love, romantic love especially, being equated to humanity?

Courtney: All of that is bullshit. Throw it all out anytime you see that.

Courtney: And even if it’s not geared towards someone in our community, if there’s ever a situation where someone is trying too hard to define humanity, think— I want everyone to try to get in the habit of thinking about who is excluded from this conversation, who is not being considered in this metaphor, in this meme, because that is the group of people who is passively, if not actively, being dehumanized. And dehumanization is— The root of hate crimes, genocide.

Courtney: It’s very similar. If you haven’t trained yourself to start thinking about this yet in dehumanization, think about it in all of the, like, trans conversations from a few years ago especially.

Courtney: It was all like, what is a woman? You know, Matt Walsh, that jerk, and whatnot, trying to define what is a woman. Just about any single criteria that someone is trying to find for what is a woman is probably going to exclude even some percentage of cis women. So any of these rigid definitions or— what they are are qualifiers. Like, you have to experience this or have this or look like that in order to be considered And none of it is respectful. So given the fact that the ace-spec community especially deals with dehumanization, I want to mention and honor that because it’s a very real problem. And I suspect most people who would argue this doesn’t count as ace rep are coming from that place of hurt. And I see that and I understand that.

Courtney: And I want everyone to know that I take that into consideration Each and every time I’m looking at a non-human character in a piece of media, I take that into consideration, and I actually have, in some ways, a much higher standard for non-human characters than I do human characters before I would consider, yes, this is good ace rep. And in my opinion, Janet and Michael Hit those concerns I have for non-human characters.

Courtney: It meets them beautifully. It does what I want them to do. So let’s get into that.

Courtney: Roy, since you are much better than I at summarizing things without tangenting for an hour, would you do us the kindness of giving everyone a brief overview of what The Good Place is before we get into key points about the representation therein.

Royce: Yeah, spoiler alert for a 10-year-old series which is hitting the threshold for not needing that anymore.

Courtney: Is it really 10 years old?

Royce: It first aired in 2016.

Courtney: Oh man.

Royce: I mean, it did run for four seasons. I think each season was 13-ish episodes, but like we said earlier, the episodes are very short.

Royce: It’s a good show. The thing is, there are a few twists here and there, and so if you haven’t seen it, you might want to watch it.

Courtney: It’s very twisty.

Royce: As it is named, The Good Place is about the afterlife. It’s about— it’s pretty heavy in philosophy. It’s also a comedy. I was just looking it up.

Royce: It touches on a lot of very serious topics, but it does so often in a very mild or humorous way. Uh, it’s actually rated PG, which is even lower than I thought it would be.

Courtney: Well, they don’t even curse.

Royce: Well, sometimes they curse, but when they’re in the Good Place cursing is automatically censored. Like, the—

Courtney: Bullshit!

Royce: The wrong word comes out. There are also just mentions of— because it’s the afterlife, and I’m gonna use more commonly understood terminology, but it’s very quickly established that the afterlife is not what humans think it is. Concepts of heaven and hell aren’t really exact. There is a good place and a bad place, and the good place is supposed to be like this sort of paradise, and the bad place is a lot of torture.

Royce: But I believe immediately in episode one mentioned that every religion got things a little bit right, but no one came even close except for this one guy who did magic mushrooms a few decades ago who got like 92% correct.

Courtney: Todd Forsyth, my man.

Royce: But even in describing, like, it comes up often enough as a joke, here’s a form of torture in the Bad Place. And they mention things that if you think about them are scary, but they always just kind of skirt over it. And it’s always something kinda weird, like bears with chainsaws, or bees with teeth, or—

Courtney: Butthole spiders.

Royce: Butthole spiders, or penis flatteners. But anyway, we have a central cast of four characters who are living in the Good Place, which is just kind of a quaint afterlife neighborhood where most of their needs are mostly met. But our protagonist realizes, I’m not the person they think I am.

Royce: There has been a mix-up. She is told that basically someone else with her same name died at basically the same point, but this person did every great world-changing thing imaginable, possibly. So she goes into this with Eleanor— Eleanor— Eleanor goes into this with like extreme— I guess I don’t even want to call it imposter syndrome. She is an imposter.

Courtney: Yeah, she’s an Arizona trash bag.

Royce: By her own definition. Which again, this is a comedy. Comically bad person here. And finds that there are a few other people in the neighborhood who also don’t fit. Things start to spiral out of control as seemingly her presence here in the Good Place is causing the whole system to break down. And while trying to figure out how to fix this, how to learn to be a better person in the afterlife.

Royce: Season one ends with the reveal that this isn’t actually the Good Place. It’s a new form of torture cooked up by the Bad Place where humans are brought in and put into an environment where they will torture each other.

Courtney: Yes. So there are only four humans in this entire neighborhood, and they are our four, like, main cast of characters.

Courtney: It’s Eleanor, the Arizona trash bag. It’s, uh, Chidi, a moral philosophy professor. Tahani, a name-dropping pseudo-nobility wealthy heiress type.

Courtney: And Jason, who’s from Florida.

Royce: I just laughed because I feel like I read an article many years ago after watching this show where the character’s name is Eleanor.

Courtney: Eleanor.

Royce: Ted Danson mispronounced it for the entire season without realizing— for the entire show until someone told him he’s been mispronouncing her name the whole time.

Courtney: But see, when I think of the word Eleanor, the voice in my head is Ted Danson’s.

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: The guy is just so charismatic. So Eleanor is the one who eventually finds out this is the Bad Place, we are getting tortured. And the two characters that I would like to, uh, present to the committee— it’s me, I’m the committee— uh, as ace rep: Janet and Michael. Michael is the one who greets Eleanor in the very first episode and says, you died, you are in the Good Place, let me show you around.

Courtney: He is serving as like the He’s— they call him the Architect. He’s the Architect of the Neighborhood. So he’s the one who’s in charge of making this place perfect for the people who live here.

Royce: There, as I mentioned, sometimes it’s easier to use terminology most familiar to most people, but the afterlife is— it has some common things that most people would recognize, There is a good place, there is a bad place. They’re loosely modeled off of what people— most people would think of when they would imagine like a heaven or a hell. There is some kind of creator or creators of the entire universe.

Royce: They’re not depicted or shown or spoken to or anything like that. All otherworldly beings have basically a human suit that they wear.

Courtney: Human suit, yes.

Royce: Michael is described as an architect, which is different from a demon.

Courtney: Well, the architect’s like a job title. They show him in flashbacks after it’s revealed that he’s, he’s not a Good Place architect.

Courtney: This is the Bad Place. They’re actually in hell. They’re being tortured now. He goes from being like, oh, this was our angel-like figure, to, oh no, this is a literal demon, um, and he is torturing us. He is a Bad Place architect. designing not paradise, but the perfect cocktail of mayhem with which to torture us. And we see in a flashback at one point he gets like promoted to architect, like he was just an under-employee at one point.

Royce: But— Yeah, yeah, that’s correct. Uh, my mistake.

Courtney: So I know how bad it sounds when I’m like, this literal demon is asexual, but bear with me. Because also the robot is asexual. Not a robot.

Royce: Yeah, that’s what I was going to get to. We’ve been trying to explain the types of creatures.

Courtney: Janet is her own type of creature.

Royce: Janets are a robot-like species that basically do all of the work in the afterlife.

Courtney: Not a robot.

Royce: They have a lot of powers to manipulate space. They don’t exist in time as regular creatures, but Personality-wise and functioning-wise, they, they are very robotic, but they are also very individual.

Royce: And we see throughout the show that if a Janet is rebooted frequently, they start to become more intelligent and more advanced and more individual.

Courtney: And that is why I think she works, because the key here, as we talk about these character trajectories is going to be humanization. We’re starting with two things that are objectively not human.

Courtney: We have a demon who— I mean, Michael is, uh, told to be a fire squid in a human suit. Extremely tall, extremely molten, smells bad, I guess, leaks. We, we only hear it described, we don’t actually see what a fire squid looks like, but Uh, for our purposes, he looks like Ted Danson.

Royce: six,000-foot-tall giant fire squid covered in teeth.

Courtney: Teeth. So many teeth.

Courtney: And Janet, at first as we meet her, is sort of like, yeah, she is a secretary and an assistant and a library and a Google search. She knows everything. She can bring you anything you want. So when we think this is paradise Uh, she’s introduced as like, she can tell you anything, she can give you anything, she can conjure anything up. And her whole purpose is just like, make humans happy. So you literally say, hey Janet, can I have a puppy? She goes, ding, conjures one out of thin air, here’s your puppy.

Courtney: You ask, hey, on Earth, that guy I knew 10 years ago who lived in such-and-so place, uh, was he gay? And she says, no, he just didn’t like you. Like, Brutal truths, but she knows everything about the universe. And at least at first doesn’t really have any of her own personal intentions. Now she and Michael both have lines that had me laughing out loud throughout the run of the four seasons, honestly.

Courtney: They, they pop up from time to time because to me as an asexual person, And to me, as a sex-repulsed person, a lot of them are very relatable. Like, Michael, as a fire squid demon, at one point is trying to explain how weird kissing is and how weird humans are for doing it, and he gets all riled up and says, you just mush your food holes together!

Courtney: That’s not what they’re for! Hilarious! Really funny.

Courtney: There’s a line at one point where— I mean, Elinor as a character is extremely horny and makes a lot of comments about the physical attractiveness of people and whatnot. And Michael and Janet both at various times have lines about how like, I don’t have any ability whatsoever to gauge the physical attractiveness of humans. And that line really got me because I was like, hey, same.

Courtney: Now Janet, I would like to also present for the case quite agender, which is also going to be very relatable to a lot of people in the ace-spec community. She has a very, like, flight attendant appearance, like the sort of skirt suit that she wears. And I believe most people do refer to her with like, she/her pronouns. They don’t use they or anything.

Courtney: But she explicitly rejects any time someone calls her a girl, and she’ll always interject, not a girl. Same with robot. If anyone calls her a robot, not a robot. Not a robot, not a girl.

Courtney: The writing is funny and clever and creative and relatable enough to me That I think if they ended it there, I would still have very mixed feelings, because I enjoy watching it, I enjoy hearing these lines spoken on my television. But what really puts this over the edge for me to, oh yes, this is actually done really, really well, is the fact that both Janet and Michael go through a process of personal growth and humanization.

Royce: Mm-hmm.

Courtney: Yet they don’t lose those characteristics about themselves. Janet never decides to identify as a girl the more human she gets, the more time she’s rebooted. She gains the ability to lie at one point, she couldn’t lie before. She gains her own motivations where now she has friendships and she wants to protect her friends, and— She does end up falling in love with Jason at one point. Yet she never gains any sort of sexual attraction or sexuality. I would still consider the ability to gain a romantic connection as a means of showing humanization to be problematic for the aromantic community.

Courtney: But in the greater context of the show, it’s not done lazily. It’s not, this is the one thing, or this is the big thing, or this is the last final thing. It is one of many things.

Courtney: And Michael, who also becomes more human, also never gains a sexuality, and we never see him having any sort of romantic interest in anyone. So we sort of do have two characters in much the same boat.

Courtney: They do not have a human sexuality, they never gain it. And only one sort of seems to gain, um, any sort of romantic interest.

Courtney: So for me, that comparison and contrast between the two characters is really important in my analysis of this.

Royce: And in both cases, the Janet that takes center stage in the main cast is not the only Janet we see. Michael is not the only demon we see.

Royce: So they are both shown as outliers in their groups.

Courtney: There is a moment where Janet and Jason get married. Everything about it is at first very funny and only becomes actually sort of like emotionally meaningful later on down the road.

Courtney: But you know, you get married, you go on a honeymoon, what do you do at the honeymoon? You have sex.

Courtney: Turns out Janet literally has no capability to do that. And there is a Wonderfully comedic moment that I love where they’re trying to figure out how to have sex, and we see Jason’s like illustrations of stick figures in just incomprehensible positions where they’re like, we’re trying to figure out how we can do this. And later on Jason has a line where he’s like, we did a bunch of awesome stuff that Almost turned out to be sex. And for as much as it is played up for comedy, and obviously very fictionalized, there is a little nugget in there where it’s like, okay, two people in a relationship have different abilities, different wants, different needs, there’s some amount of trying to compromise and trying to figure something out, but, you know, it is what it is, and the relationship does not ever suffer because Janet literally cannot have sex.

Royce: So to finish up the trajectory of the show, we mentioned season one was landing in the afterlife, realizing something was wrong, and then feeling like something was wrong, and then realizing that it’s all, you know, an elaborate lie. Season two is Michael desperately trying to get his experiment to torture people in this new way to work, basically erasing everyone’s memories and restarting the experiment over and over again, only to find that there is Something he can’t control that keeps drawing them all together hundreds of times, like some underlying aspect of the human spirit or fate.

Royce: They dance around the topics of soulmates here and there.

Courtney: Oh, I have a whole lot of thoughts about the soulmates. I love the way they handled the concept of soulmates, and we’re gonna get to that.

Royce: Grounding all of this is one of the four of them being an ethics professor and trying to learn and understand what it actually means to be a good person. So that is a central theme. But that’s season one— or that’s— that was season two, is Michael trying to get this experiment to work and failing repeatedly and getting frustrated.

Royce: They figure out at some point every time that they are actually in the Bad Place. Things get more complicated as other demons start to come in. Michael’s boss starts to show up.

Royce: There’s rivalries and issues in the Bad Place in general. But I believe season two ends with everyone trying to escape capture and eternal torture in the Bad Place, and they end up restarting their lives on Earth as an experiment to see if humans can actually improve if given the right circumstances. Season three kind of ends with the revelation that the entire system for choosing where people go in the afterlife is broken and has been for many centuries. The world is so complicated now that you can inadvertently add to something bad, some sort of consequence on Earth, without really knowing or understanding what you’re doing.

Courtney: The social commentary within this show, for as funny as it is, is devastating. It is biting, it is dead on, it is so good.

Royce: And so season four starts up with a new experiment where the protagonists of this series are trying to prove that they can set up an environment where people or human souls, or however you want to think about it, can improve after death in the afterlife, thus demonstrating that the current system of being sentenced to one eternal afterlife is fundamentally flawed and that a new method is needed. They succeed in doing that, and the latter half of the final season is the characters themselves devising a new afterlife.

Courtney: And the new afterlife actually becomes more like a, I guess, purgatory if we’re using heaven and hell, where much like the original neighborhood, it’s designed to not torture you per se, but it’s designed to really hold a mirror up to you and show you your deepest flaws that you had on Earth. To test you then and see if, when confronted dead-on with these, in a place where you have all of your basic needs met, you don’t need to, like, work for money, you have shelter, you have food, you have all of your basic needs met. Now you’re confronted with all of your biggest flaws. Are you going to change and improve? For the sake of becoming a better person. Not for selfish reasons, not because you want moral dessert, not because you are afraid of going to hell, but just to improve for the sake of improvement.

Courtney: And of course, by the time they are devising this, not only have all four of the humans consistently started improving themselves and becoming better people, but Michael also has. He is no longer on the side of the demons. He is pro-human now. He is understanding and empathizing with where they’re coming from, and he is actively working with them to try to make this happen. Janet, too, after being rebooted so many times, is actively trying to help the humans, and sometimes breaking the rules to do it. Which is never something she was supposed to be able to do.

Courtney: And it really is— they don’t directly discuss capitalism, but they do still have social commentary on capitalism. Because when they find out that nobody has actually gotten into the Good Place for over 500 years, Michael’s trying to figure out why, and he’s pulling all these points totals, ’cause that’s how they figure it out, whether you go to the Good Place or the Bad Place. Every single action you take on Earth has a certain point value, whether it’s positive or negative. Was this a morally good thing or a morally bad thing?

Courtney: And at the end of your life when you die, how many points you have basically determines whether or not you’ll get into the Good Place. And he’s like, well, over 500 years ago, this guy here picked flowers for his grandmother, and he picked them himself off the side of the road and brought them to her, and she was happy. And he got a positive point total for doing that small action to make his grandmother happy. Meanwhile, someone this year also got his grandmother flowers for her birthday, but he got negative points because he ordered the flowers online and the flowers came from, like, unethical farming practices and the, you know, pollution of the shipping and, like, all of these—

Royce: Horrible things.

Courtney: things where it’s like, this, this human literally just went to the store and bought an apple, and that was a negative point total.

Royce: There’s a point Eleanor in a rush is trying to explain this to someone who isn’t a human and is like, Earth is really complicated. There’s this chicken sandwich and it’s really good, but if you buy it, it means you hate gay people. Yes.

Courtney: And there’s such an extremely good balance of that too, because you have people who just genuinely could not care less on Earth. Like Eleanor was was one of them. She could not care less on Earth. She’s like, I’m just gonna do what I want. I’m gonna look out for number one.

Courtney: And that’s part of how she had to improve in the afterlife during this process. Chidi, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. I relate so heavily to Chidi. He’s the one who will obsessively research things to the point where all of his friends are frustrated with him because he can’t even like decide where to go out to eat.

Royce: This is taken to such an extreme that it shows him like going up to a food truck and taking an hour to make a decision on what to eat.

Courtney: Yes. And so that was one of his flaws, is that he can never make decisions. But one of the underlying motivations is that he wants to make the most ethical decision, and it’s extremely hard to do that because of all of these underlying factors. And one thing I think is really funny Um, first of all, I think if there was one critique I was ever going to give about this show, it’s that they should have made Chidi a vegan.

Courtney: Because his whole thing is doing the most ethical thing at all times. And consistently, when he finds out he’s in the bad place, his go-to is, it’s because I drank almond milk. He’s like, I knew the negative environmental impact of almond milk, and yet I still had almond milk with my breakfast. Every morning.

Courtney: And you’re telling me a guy who thinks like that isn’t going to be a vegan? Give me a break. That’s the one flaw in the entire show. Everything else is perfect.

Courtney: But even then, like, it’s not posed as it’s wrong to try to do your research and make ethical decisions. It was that he took it to such an extent that his, like, immediately friends and family, people immediately around him, Were all like, they were burdened by the fact that they just could not hang out with him without it becoming a, like, moral quandary. And he’d make a really minor promise to an acquaintance that he’d help him with something on one day, but then his mother gets put in the hospital and he’s like, well, I made a promise, so I have to do this. I can’t go see my mother in the hospital.

Courtney: ’Cause he was treating every single thing as having equal weight. And that is very much to the detriment of the people closest to him. And so for a lot of the discussion of moral philosophy in the first three seasons, it’s a lot of talking about like Immanuel Kant, it’s a lot of things that the average viewer would at least be passingly familiar with, like the trolley problem.

Royce: Names you’d recognize, yeah, even if you haven’t really dug into philosophy.

Courtney: But one thing they do that I think is so cool is that since they devised this entirely new system to save all of humanity, give everyone a fighting chance at getting into the Good Place, the like, immortal judge of the universe who is originally the one who’s like, just make better decisions, just do your research and pick a more ethical apple at the grocery store. They send her down to Earth. They’re like, you genuinely have no idea. And so she goes to Earth and comes back and she’s like, oh, it’s a hot mess down there.

Courtney: And I mean, ethics and philosophy is already so very much up my alley. But when our main four humans finally do make it into the Good Place, as does Michael, he wants to now become a proper Good Place architect. Turns out even the Good Place is a hot mess. Nobody has been new in over 500 years, so everybody here has for hundreds if not thousands upon thousands of years just been in this perfect paradise with no stress, no confrontation, no problems whatsoever. And they all are just coasting. Everything got old. They are not excited by anything anymore. Their brains are turning to goop. Because they aren’t needing to be challenged at all.

Royce: They’re described as zombie-like to some degree.

Courtney: Just malaise. And all the Good Place architects, which by the way, also the Good Place architects, like, talk about social commentary. When we finally do meet them, they’re so obsessed with just making everyone else happy that it is to their own detriment 100% of the time.

Courtney: Like, a Good Place architect negotiating with a Bad Place architect is literally like, how about you get nothing you want and I get to torture everyone for all of eternity? And The Good Place people are like, well, if that would make you happy.

Courtney: It shows the problems of the extremes in a way that I don’t think is fundamentally middle ground, if that makes sense. It’s not like, both ways of being are wrong, you have to be in the middle. It’s not— Doing anything in like a libertarian kind of a way or an independent kind of a way. It’s acknowledging the flaws of the extremes and finding important and nuanced reasons to strive to be better, knowing that perfect doesn’t exist. And I think it is just beautifully nuanced for like a comedy sitcom. about an afterlife, talking about ethics. But they realize things are wrong.

Courtney: As soon as Michael gets there, all the other Good Place architects are like, hey, so you’re in charge now. We out. You fix this, we tried. So all of a sudden they have a brand new problem.

Courtney: What do we do? Everyone— They’re about to start letting new people into the Good Place, and this is not a positive thing if this is the end result for everybody. And so they actually pull in— this entire show, everything leading up to this show, was actually really heavily based around a relatively short and very readable for, you know, moral philosophy, but a book called Death by Todd May. I have read this book and I actually do recommend it to anyone who is interested in How the knowledge of mortality shapes the way we live, and what they ultimately come to the conclusion of is everything only has meaning because it’s temporary, because it’s fleeting. A vacation is only fun because you don’t get to do it all the time, it eventually ends and you go back to your life. Life itself is so precious because it will One day end.

Courtney: And they’re like, once you get here and you’re in an eternal paradise, it’s never-ending. So eventually, it’s going to lose all meaning and purpose. So based on this, they devise a new system for the Good Place where they create a door that once you’re ready, you can walk through and just cease to be.

Royce: That’s what they describe it as. At the same time, they say, well, we don’t actually know what happens when you cross the door. That’s how we’re describing it, but it’s sort of beyond all of our knowledge.

Courtney: But that’s the point. The point is that you don’t know, and it’s amazing and beautiful.

Courtney: And I do want to talk about the concept of soulmates in this show, because even if we didn’t have Janet and Michael Who were very asexual. In the very first run of this Good Place experiment that is actually the Bad Place designed to torture, they put Chidi and Eleanor together as soulmates. They tell them right off the bat, everyone in the universe has soulmates, and here you are.

Courtney: And that’s primarily to try to torture Chidi, because once he learns that Eleanor isn’t supposed to be here, He has an entire ethical crisis about like, do I help this person? I promised to help her, but is she actually a good person? And should that matter whether or not I help her? And is she actually my soulmate or not?

Courtney: And they put Tahani and Jason together as soulmates also, but they tell Jason that he’s a monk who took a vow of silence named Jianyu. ’Cause the moment he opens his mouth, He’s the very like, airheaded sitcom character who just says the most baffling things. So they just, they try to keep him quiet, and since he’s just confused and doesn’t know what’s going on, he just does that for a while.

Courtney: And that tortures Tahani because she likes to talk, and she’s like, but my soulmate won’t even talk to me. And in different iterations of this, they ask Michael about soulmates or their soulmate, and Michael specifically says like, soulmates don’t exist, I made that up To torture you.

Courtney: That is not actually a real thing. And it actually is very, very interesting because part of the torture of being told you have a soulmate but your soulmate is not actually perfect, or you wish something was different, like that in itself was the torture. It’s because you were promised that soulmates are a concept. ’Cause they, like, Chidi’s like, did I just not get a soulmate? Is my soulmate the other Eleanor? who died at the same time? Is she supposed to be here? Is that my actual soulmate? Tahani’s like, you know, he’s supposed to be my soulmate, but I’m just not happy. I’m not having a good time. These are major, major pain points.

Courtney: Which wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if this wasn’t the false narrative they were told. And I think that is also an incredibly human thing that speaks a lot to aspec experiences. We are so often told That to have a happy life, here’s what you need. You need to have X, Y, and Z.

Courtney: Very often we are told that needs to be a romantic and sexual partner. You need to have a spouse, and this is what that relationship should look like.

Courtney: And for a lot of us, we buy into that narrative for a time. And when we find that we personally don’t fit into it, some of us may try to force ourselves, like— Square peg into a round hole, like I’ll just play along because this is what everyone’s telling me this is supposed to be and this is supposed to be what I need to be happy, or you opt out of it. And for some of us, opting out of it itself can cause a lot of grief and can be, at least for a time until we find our own ways to exist and our own ways to be happy. So many of us, time and time again, I’ve seen fellow aces and aros who just lament the fact that I will never have a life that looks like this, and so therefore I don’t know if I will be happy or if I can be happy.

Courtney: Certainly not all of us. There are some of us who are very confident and very self-assured in who we are and what we want and, equally important, what we don’t want.

Courtney: But the fact that part of the torture Is being told you have a soulmate, and your soulmate not being what you thought you were promised, is kind of brilliant. Because I think that very strongly echoes what common society believes and how we talk and how we prescribe life advice to one another.

Courtney: And in fact, Tahani being one who was Very much wanting a soulmate. And at times when she thought, maybe I don’t have a soulmate, this was devastating for her. When they finally do get to the Good Place, and they have fixed the system, and now she has as much time as she wants or needs to better herself, to learn new skills, to do all the things she never got to do on Earth, and— In fact, form a better relationship with her family. That was a big point of her own flaws, was that she didn’t have the relationship she should have had with her sister because of the trauma their parents brought upon the family. She never actually ends in a romantic relationship with anybody. Even in The Good Place.

Courtney: Her entire thing is rekindling the relationship with her blood family, but when she finally does decide, like, you know, I have done everything I wanted to do. And she thinks, maybe I’m gonna go ahead and walk through the door now, ’cause I am at peace. I am done.

Courtney: She’s like, my last day on Earth, I just wanna spend with my best friends. And she gets the original gang together from the original Good Place experiment, and Michael and Janet.

Courtney: And so, even someone who is allo in every sense that we know, and desperately wants a soulmate, when she thinks that that is a real thing, And feels like she’s missing out if she doesn’t have it. She prioritizes her friendships above all else, and she finds a way to be happy without that soulmate romantic relationship.

Courtney: And I think that’s beautiful. I think that’s really, really beautiful.

Courtney: And that’s another point, like, credit that I will give to the show. Because I have said when we’ve talked about other shows at times where things that are sort of like Spiritually ace or aro, even if they don’t literally have a character who identifies or is highly likely to be one of these identities. I would almost rather see something that’s giving a big sweeping social commentary about amatonormativity, allonormativity, all of these big concepts that make our lives as aspecs here on Earth harder. I’d rather see a show unraveling those than giving us a PSA, here’s an asexual character, This exists and it’s valid. You know, not too long ago we talked about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Courtney: That was a very allo show, but the ending flipped the script on the allo narrative. And that’s something I really, really appreciate in a show. And that’s something that— This show not only gave us two characters who have no interest in sex or sexuality at all, but they also weren’t just to be there or tokens. They were in the context of a show that was demonstrating life isn’t what you think it is.

Courtney: It’s never going to be how you expect it to be. And here are different ways to achieve happiness, different ways to achieve peace.

Courtney: And that I really appreciate because we also very often get one asexual character who seems to be plopped into the middle of a sex show. Where the entire concept of the show is talking about sex, talking about sexuality, everyone is really, really sexual. But oh, we better put in an ace character just to show that, you know, not everyone is this way. But that’s when it can start to feel very tokenistic when we get multiple shows doing that. Because the show itself doesn’t feel like it is made for ace people or to really prioritize an ace perspective. It’s just saying, hey, aces are here also.

Courtney: So, I love this show for that, and for that concept of soulmates. Chidi and Eleanor, despite not being like cosmic soulmates, do always find their way back to one another. They do end up together in their good place before deciding to go through the door on their own time. They don’t have the same impetus for going to the door, so— When Chidi goes first, Eleanor experiences a lot of grief About that. And I almost think that’s more beautiful, in a way. Like, soulmates do not exist, but despite the fact they don’t exist, we still choose each other.

Courtney: Now, Michael also has an extremely cool ending. Tahani, by the way, she does not end up going through the door because she wants to be helpful, she wants to be self-sufficient, she wants to— like, a lot of the things in the afterlife are like, I want to learn how to—

Royce: Help people.

Courtney: carve wood and do a lot of like, manual labor things. Like, I want my own skills and I want to be able to do things for myself.

Courtney: So instead of going through the door, she’s like, I’ve had enough of paradise, but I also don’t want to return my essence to the universe or whatever’s happening here. So she actually asks, can I become an architect? And at first they’re like, well, of course you can’t. And they’re like, well, actually, maybe, sure. So she becomes an architect.

Courtney: And I think that’s awesome. Like, any show— obviously this is very fictionalized, afterworld types of thing— but any show that in a beautiful, clever, creative way and emotional way— I sob every time I watch the finale of this, uh, of this show— Anytime you come away seeing different ways of being, different ways of living, different types of endings that all feel Equally meaningful and impactful, I think that story did a beautiful thing, and this is one of those shows. Michael becoming the like ultimate Good Place architect who fixed the very concept of the Good Place to make it properly a good place again, and helped devise this system for allowing more humans to enter into the Good Place to begin with, He, over the span of the show, develops an intense love for humans. And at first, that was just sort of his character he was putting on when he was still a demon trying to torture them.

Courtney: He was like, I love, you know, paperclips. What a cool invention you humans came up with. And he’ll say like, you know, humans are great. He’s like, if I were on Earth, I’d get a rewards card.

Courtney: And I just, I just want once to say goodbye to someone and say, take it sleazy. Like, really corny, corny things.

Courtney: But as he starts to actually develop a love for humans and actually go down to Earth for a brief little blip here and there to try to interfere with things when the humans get, you know, reinstated into life on Earth for a period of time, He genuinely starts to fall in love with Earth and humans. And so when he gets restless in his place as a Good Place architect, and all of his friends now are going through the door, you know, Jason goes through the door, Tahani becomes an architect, Chidi goes through the door, he’s like, I’m done.

Courtney: I, like, am I just supposed to sit here and see every human I form a relationship with cease to be? What else is there for me?

Courtney: They decide to allow him to become a human for real. And they put him on Earth as a real, living human, with blood, even! And let him experience actually living, actually dying, actually going through the same system that all these humans are now going through to confront his own flaws and Maybe actually get into the Good Place as a human and experience what it means to be mortal. And when we see little glimpses of him down on Earth, we see he like, gets a dog, he burns himself on a microwave dinner, he gets a friend that he, you know, doesn’t like that much, so is kind of saying like, yeah, I’m five minutes away, when he hasn’t even left his apartment yet, and— And it never once shows him being at all interested in dating anyone. It doesn’t show him with any sort of sexual or romantic attraction.

Courtney: And in fact, the way the show ends is like, the perfect ending to a perfect show. Eleanor finally decides to go through the door. And I’m crying. Ugh, I cry every time I see this show, and now apparently I cry when I’m talking about this show.

Courtney: She just like dissolves into like molecules of light that fly all over the universe. And it shows a guy who like got the wrong person’s mail throwing the mail into a garbage can, and one of these little specks of light from Eleanor like lands on his shoulder, and he goes, eh, takes it out of the trash and like walks to go deliver the mail to the person it actually belongs to, and it’s Michael! And Michael gets this mail and he gets so excited, he opens it up, it’s his rewards card. That’s such a silly little nonsense thing, but he’s so elated because he’s wanted a rewards card for so long, ’cause he’s like, this is such a human experience. And so he’s just over the moon getting this mail that almost didn’t get delivered to him. And this guy who— it parallels Eleanor’s own life too, because she was so selfish, she’d never go out of her way just to do something because it was kind to someone else.

Courtney: So not only was this spec like looking out for her friend Michael and making sure he gets what he needs, but that was like a little moral philosophy, like a little voice in your head moment for this guy. Like, I can take a couple extra minutes to go deliver this to the right person.

Courtney: And this guy’s like, oh wow, okay, you’re really excited about this rewards card. Like, okay man, take it easy. And Michael’s like— I’ll do you one better. I’ll take it sleazy. And it’s like, oh, he’s been wanting to say that line for so long. What a goober.

Courtney: I love him so much and I love this show so much. So here’s why, despite these two characters not being human, why I think they are a net positive for asexual representation being in the world. They did not magically gain sexuality as they became humanized.

Courtney: And that is the key. Because there are so many other pieces of media out there where characters gain sexuality as a lazy shorthand to show they’re becoming more human, they’re becoming more empathetic. And we’ve talked about some of those pieces of media on this podcast, which if you haven’t listened to those, you can always go back to see the contrast as well. Uh, one of them we talked about was Bicentennial Man, a literal robot who, once he became human, once he started, like, actually appearing like a human, getting skin, being able to blink, being able to eat food, goes on an entire monologue about how sex is like the ultimate human experience and he wants to experience it. And yeah, as soon as he is capable of doing that, he goes and immediately has sex and is like, yup, this is what it’s like to be human.

Courtney: Horrible. Sexuality should never be equated with humanity. Dexter, a human character but a serial killer. Very first episode of that show, one of the aces characters to be on TV at the time when that premiered, he was like, ugh, sex is so undignified.

Courtney: I don’t understand why people do this.

Royce: Ugh.

Courtney: I don’t.

Royce: And—

Courtney: but as the show went on, it seemed like the writers decided like, oh, this completely emotionless character who doesn’t experience any love or positive emotions, like, this is getting a little old. We have to make him a little more human. We need to be able to do a little more with him. They started showing, oh, maybe he does feel a little bit of love. And now all of a sudden he’s having a lot of sex. And that all coincided with him becoming a little more human, humanized.

Courtney: We see this all the time. Sex and/or romance being used as a lazy shorthand for gained humanity. So when a show does the opposite of that, I think that’s defying tropes.

Courtney: And that is not falling into the trap of what I consider to be lazy writing. And allonormative writing at that.

Courtney: This show has a lot of commentary on what it means to be human, and never once does it posit that romantic love or sex and sexuality are what makes us human. And that is key. That is fundamental. That’s what makes it such a brilliant show. And why Yeah, I’m gonna call Janet and Michael ace icons. I will do it all day long because they are in exactly the right show for that type of character to actually work without being problematic.

Courtney: And like Janet too, she never gains a concept of gender no matter how humanized she gets. In fact, when someone, you know, kidnaps her and trades places with her, one of the bad Janets— There are Good Place Janets and Bad Place Janets. And a neutral place Janet, and—

Royce: A few oddities here and there. I was searching.

Royce: There are a number of different unique types of Janets mentioned, but they aren’t really explored much. We mostly see Good Place and Bad Place Janets.

Courtney: And our Janet, like the Janet, was a Good Place Janet that Michael as a demon stole before his experiment, because using an actual Bad Place Janet would have immediately given away the game. And so when a Bad Place Janet pretends to be our Good Place Janet and puts on her clothes and kidnaps her, Jason, who’s like always— as someone from Florida, he’s always calling someone like, girl. And so he, he called her girl and she didn’t immediately go, not a girl. And so he, as the one who loves Janet, is like, that’s not my Janet. That’s not her. And he’s the one to figure that out. He’s like, I called her girl and she didn’t say, not a girl. And I think even in the very last episode, as he’s saying goodbye to Janet before he goes through the door, he even calls her like, not a girl. Like, he starts changing his vocabulary.

Courtney: Like, thanks, not a girl, or you’re the best not a girlfriend ever. And so yeah, there are things like that where this show could have gone very, very wrong if Janet all of a sudden is like, yeah, I am a girl now. If she all of a sudden gained the ability to have sex because she’s been rebooted all these times and she’s like, yeah, this is great, this is awesome, this is what it means to be human, glad I can do this now. Or if Michael did the same thing, if they showed that while he actually literally became a human and went to Earth. All of that would have been horribly problematic.

Courtney: And in a show where they’re talking so much about what it means to be human and what an actual human experience is, the fact that they’re getting into these complicated, messy nuances of ethics and the way humans learn about ethics and make choices in such a complicated world, that’s one of the only things ever that I can look at and say, yeah, that is an experience all humans share. We all live in a complicated world, and we are all to some extent shaped by The environment around us. These I believe to be true.

Courtney: So if a show like this did say like, yeah, you know, at the end of the day, actually everybody does love or need love, actually everyone does get soulmates in the actual good place, that would ruin a lot of the very important commentary of this show for me. And it just never does. They did everything right.

Courtney: Therefore, Janet and Michael get to forevermore be ace icons. And with that, I am going to leave you all off, as usual, with today’s featured Marketplace vendor, Celtic Dragoness Arts, where you can find artwork and merchandise designed by a disabled, biromantic tattoo artist. If you are a lover of animals and/or dinosaurs, I very much recommend you check out this shop. Right off the bat scrolling through, we’ve got some really awesome rainbow dinosaur artwork. We’ve got a rainbow Stegosaurus. Uh, we’ve got a rainbow Liopleurodon! Who doesn’t want a rainbow Liopleurodon on their shirt?

Courtney: We have some animals that are in fact still alive, such as snakes, a really gorgeous bluebird. Oh, we’ve got a pansexual pride dragonfly. Love that one.

Courtney: And I actually got one of these designs that just says, be bold, in very bold print, because I agree that we should all be bold. You can get any number of these designs on a sticker, t-shirt, other various merchandise, prints, whatever floats your root beer.

Courtney: Definitely recommend checking out Celtic Dragoness Arts.

Courtney: So as always, I am going to put the links to this shop in the show notes on our website as well as the description box if you happen to be listening on YouTube. So as always, thank you all so much for being here, and don’t forget to take it sleazy.