Saying that people who dislike AHS: 13 just don’t understand it is the most tired, trite, and lazy excuse in the book. People are not mad that their “headcanon” was ruined, or that this wasn’t the conclusion to the series they imagined (it’s not even the conclusion to the series unfortunately). People are mad that numerous beloved characters who were brought back this year had their backstories and original arcs, or the conclusions thereof, completely desecrated for no apparent reason. They are mad that the actual canon of the series was thrown out the window with nothing of substance left to stand in its place and there was no resolution to what was billed as a consequential culmination to 15 years of world-building.
There is a world in which every ridiculous “twist” or retcon they introduced could have actually served the story they were telling or at least had a serviceable narrative justification. They could have established a broader raison d’être for actors playing different roles that co-exist or are tied together. They could have taken the characters we know and love in wild new directions as a consequence of time travel being introduced in Apocalypse. They could have done something as simple as having Satan revive past characters and their unresolved desires as pawns in his revenge tour or in service of a grand master plan. But that’s not what we got.
What we got instead was a potpourri of member berries and questionable fancam fodder, somehow unsatisfyingly short and drawn out far too long all at once. We got a Satan with no follow-through and no baseline motivation to drive the conflict (which was the whole reason we were supposed to revisit past characters in the first place). We got mushy approximations of some of TV’s sharpest and edgiest characters, many of them boiled down into puddles of old costumes and one-liners. Aside from maybe Venable and debatably Mallory, every returning character could have been completely excised from the season without meaningfully changing anything about it. It doesn’t take a prescriptive diagram to recognize, or at least feel, that truth.
I have love for the first eleven seasons of American Horror Story and I appreciate aspects of the twelfth. AHS: 13 even has some of the show’s strongest production value to date. I think the fanbase’s biggest issue has always been its inability to engage with a season for what it is, and what its intentions are, as opposed to imposing their own ideas about what they wanted it to be. With AHS: 13, that’s not what’s going on at all. We are seeing people who are passionate about the rich history of the show and all of its depths and contours, reacting to those depths and contours being painted over haphazardly, with not even an attempt at a justification being offered.