#gaiman

[sweetiguessso]

I warned you, you just never cared as I was abused and oppressed and your worshiped a pedo.

I’m not naming names because I’m not trying to start anything but I’m seeing several mutuals claiming they always knew Gaiman was a bad egg and it was so obvious, as though they didn’t make me stand in line with them to get his signature and kept their signed copies of his books on a special shelf akin to a shrine.

And like, listen, you don’t need to pretend.

This isn’t the devil’s sacrament. You’re not tainted by association. You’re not morally bad for not immediately knowing when someone is being charming and persuasive to hide something they don’t want you to know.

Abusers don’t just groom their victims. They groom their witnesses too. You were never supposed to know something was wrong because it was intentionally hidden. It’s okay you didn’t know. You don’t need to act like you never liked him or his work. You don’t need to pretend. But you do need to stop being shitty to other people who also didn’t know because it reeks of victim blaming.

“Well I knew, so how come others didn’t?”

His victims were fans. Are you blaming them for not knowing?

Christ alive, I hope not.

[dyke-will-graham]

Sometimes I get weird about labeling my gender then I remember Crowley exists and I’m like omg gender doesn’t even fucking matter I can go through life as Crowley would and then I’m fine again

[fox-bright]

Today I'm working myself into a proper tizzy because all of a sudden that everyone hates him, people have Realized that Gaiman badly ripped much of The Sandman off of Tanith Lee's glorious Tales From the Flat Earth.

She's dead now and it's too late to give her justice.

Twenty-year-old Gen, reading Sandman for the first time, knew that he was just a poor copy of Azhrarn the Beautiful, Lord of Wickedness, and that Death was Azhriaz, and Delirium was very like Chuuz, Lord of Delusion, and that Destiny was nearly a one-to-one copy of Lee's Destiny, and that aesthetically and structurally the Sandman just...stole, hand over hand, from Lee's masterwork. It was obvious.

I just figured nobody cared.

I have loved a lot of Gaiman's work. I won't pretend I always hated him, even if for the last fifteen or twenty years I've thought he was largely up his own butt. I'll probably have some of his poetry memorized for the rest of my life. But it galls me that now that everyone is taking up pitchforks and torches, NOW he's being called out for stealing from a woman who deserved much better, when it was obvious to me when I was barely out of childhood, more than twenty years ago.

[sweetiguessso]

They worship greasy pedos 'cause their perverse material makes their panties wet.

hate whenever some famous guy is found out to be an evil predator and immediately people are like "at least we still have x, he could never disappoint me" like now with neil gaiman and terry pratchett. like girl you do not know these men

[postmariannizm]

I love how silent you all are about Neil Geiman ❤️ you were riding his dick like what, 6 months ago? He was your feminist icon? I want to vomit on you

Tw rape, sexual assault

[narwhalsdisguised]

Let's be clear: there can be no separation of art from artist here. Neil Gaiman is alive and will directly benefit from people buying, renting, streaming, fanfic-ing, and otherwise giving attention to his creations. It won't matter if you post a performative piece about how awful he is while watching his shows or reading his books - you'll still be supporting him. Don't read or watch his stuff. Don't even pirate it. All forms of attention will benefit him and hurt his victims.

I'm saying this as a former fan. The first time I ever saw my partner was across a convention hall where she was dressed as Crowley, and I thought she was the hottest thing to ever walk this earth. Good Omens has always meant a great deal to us (and I've loved many of his other books too). It hurts to learn that a creator you had respected is capable of such evil, and you should give yourself space to grieve the loss of something you've enjoyed - but the loss is nothing compared to what the victims have gone through, and will continue to go through because people will continue to support him. Don't be one of them.

[elspethdixon]

I’ve been deeply disappointed by things I’ve learned about people whose creative work I loved before (MZB, Johnny Depp, Vic Mignona, Sophie from Mars, plus a long list of writers and artists and actors who went off the MAGA deep end or who revealed themselves as homophobes or transphobes or racists or abusers), but the information that’s come put over the past month about Neil Gaiman has been especially distressing because Neil has been present in so many different internal social circles I’ve been on the edges of. It feels more personal than previous discoveries because his creative work and that of people adjacent to him or inspired by him has shaped so much of my adult fannish life. I’m a “death of the author”/“separate the artist from the art” type when it comes to fiction, so unlike many this doesn’t ruin Sandman or American Gods or Good Omens for me, just as MZB’s Sword and Sorceress anthologies and Darkover books remain beloved teenage memories of mine, but I’ll never be able to look at Gaiman’s interactions with fandom in the same way again. No more reblogging his tumblr posts or following his blog or any other parasocial interaction. Not now that I know how he’s treated people in his personal life.

I think this tweet says it best:

That’s the best case scenario, and the actual truth is likely much worse:

[adinelleggreeo]

I'm honestly surprised that Gaiman isn't being talked about as much on here.

No, actually I'm not. He's on here isn't he? So he probably has a fan mob here as well.

I'm not on Twitter, so I have no idea what's happening there. I found out through a random video popping up on my YouTube.

I'm not surprised tbh. Wasn't he a male feminist? An oxymoron if I ever heard one. A man that truly supports women won't put a label on it, because it's called 'being a decent human being'.

This has me side eyeing other well known/popular white male authors 👀 👀👀👀👀

[thegaygrimreaper]

y’all, I’ve been sitting on the news abt Neil Gaiman for a few days and I wanted to vent to the void.

I believe the victims. That is a hard rule, I don’t want to say anything that comes off as these women are lying. But all the news has been copy pasted from one article written by a vocal transphobe, poorly summarizing a four episode podcast, on a media site I have never heard of before in my life and was founded by a former BBC head to make ‘slow, fully researched news’ which is not evident in this article. It repeats descriptive phrases, it does not give the full story, and I feel that if it was meant as a summary of a more indepth podcast, it should at least be a full summary. I watched a brief trailer for the podcast (which, in my opinion, is a really weird thing for a media site to push. These are not movies, it is news. Why are we publishing trailers with sensational words and phrases), and that still did not provide what sources they used for research, there are no sources other than a victims name, an extremely general term of ‘New Zealand Police’ what station? What officers? What town? The whole country? And any quote from Gaiman is not “stated” by Gaiman, the writers simply “understand” what his stance is. Did you interview him?

Until someone with actual new information comes in, rather than every news station rephrasing one article over and over again, I am not going to jump on the train of Neil Gaiman being a horrible person. We do not know that. We have gotten no information other than one article from a bigot. I believe the victims, not the news. No one close to Gaiman has even spoken on this, it is simply news repeating each other.

I understand other people are hurt by this, and I get that. But please, do not jump to conclusions when all we have to go on is unsourced research from a Rowling apologist.

Anyway. Please don’t be angry with me, I’m trying to process all of this too. I just want to enjoy my books without feeling like I’ve killed someone.

Feeling crazy, thanks for reading (or not, idk, this was a self soothing method, if anything)

[ghost-nugget-11]

BILDAD THE SHUHITE!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111!!!!!!!

this was like a 20sec sketch ignore the fact that i did david tennant DIRTY

anyway!

BILDAD! THE SHUHITE!

[thewindowofthesummerhouse]

Carlos Dearmas

[khepiari]

My mood since yesterday after reading that Vulture Piece is this screenshot.

I have read his books since the age of 18. And I have actively followed his career because as a former book editor and publisher, I found this person’s work choices fascinating.

At 18 I used to save my allowance each month to get a copy of the Sandman volumes. Thanks to him, I learned a lot about the craft of writing, scripting, editing and comics creation. Thanks to him, I also made lifelong friends who loved his books, I hosted discussions about his books in my bookclub more importantly made more people read his works. In my late 20s, I gifted my nieces, nephews and kids of my friends their copy of Coraline, Chu’s Day Out and The Graveyard Book. Even my favourite Doctor Who episode is written by him.

This author has been part of my bookshelf for more than a decade.

Again, I never bought into the whole, he is the nicest person ever who can do no wrong. Because my background as a former book editor and publisher washed away all my dreamy ideas about the industry, so I know how we create author personas and use PR to push what we want to sell.

Yet, until the age of 31, I genuinely thought this was a decent person who had basic humanity in him.

And I have every right to be angry and feel upset. With fellow fans, we should show our anger in support for the victims and for the money we gave him which made it possible for him to get away with this predatory behaviour for decades.

This is another reason why I always say, don’t put people on a pedestal and worship them blindly. No matter how much an author/creator/artist is your mentally emotional support person. You don’t know jackshit about who they are in reality.

I hope the victims get justice and peaceful nights of sleep in future, I am sure speaking out openly must’ve taken a lot of courage. Thank you for the courage shown.

[snitling]

Hiiiii I just want to say Edwin was so brave, for real someone told him he was in love with Charles and immediately he was like I have to tell that boy even if it costs me everything, even if I have to do it on the staircase on the way back up from hell, I haven't been so proud since Crowley's hmmm

[seapiglet]

lmaoooo not the sentence tacked on at the end. shut the fuck up. please PLEASE shut the fuck up. just keep your self-pitying on discord or in the priv gc or something.

[unrighteousbooks]

Be Warned: An Impostor is Among Us

I recently finished reading Oliver Darkshire's book Once Upon a Tome. Mr. Darkshire is an antiquarian bookseller at Sotheran's Rare Books in London. While I greatly enjoyed the book, I was deeply disturbed to read this passage:

"Of all the nice letters I've ever received, the ones I hold particularly close to my heart were sent from a mysterious stranger masquerading as the bookshop-owning angel Aziraphale from the novel Good Omens."

I do not understand why Mr. Darkshire describes me as being "from the novel Good Omens," as though I were some sort of fictional character. Setting that aside, however, it is unnerving to realize that a complete stranger is wandering the streets of London, writing letters and pretending to be me.

I can offer no proof, but I believe that the likely suspects can be narrowed down to a very short list.

A few years ago -- well, I suppose it was actually many years ago -- there was a book called History of New York. It was subsequently revealed that the author of this book, one Diedrich Knickerbocker, did not in fact exist. Perhaps "Mr. Knickerbocker" has moved on from creating fictional personas, and is now hijacking the identity of legitimate booksellers such as myself. (Regular readers will recall that I have previously commented on Mr. Knickerbocker: https://www.aziraphale.com/post/143753123162/a-curious-bit-of-satire-in-an-unvisited-corner-of)

Meanwhile, I have also been informed that there is a man named Buster Poindexter who is notorious for falsifying his identity. I have it on good authority that Mr. Poindexter has openly confessed that he is suffering from a personality crisis. It should also be noted that the name "poindexter" is often used to refer to someone who is enamored of books. Coincidence? I think not.

Another likely suspect -- or possibly "suspects," plural -- is a person or persons going by the name Pratchett Gaiman, or possibly Gaiman Pratchett. Again, I have no proof, but I have lost count of the times someone in the shop has asked me about so-and-so Gaiman or such-and-such Pratchett.

Finally, I cannot completely discount the possibility that my friend Crowley might be playing some sort of elaborate prank. He insists that this is not his doing, but it is just the sort of device that he would employ to rile me. He knows that pranks are anathema to me.