#which is what i get for thinking Neil Gaiman was going to be a normal human for 5 minutes

[thistaletasty]

👀👀

NEIL

😂🤣😂🤣😂

Hello Neil, how do you feel about being 4th in the tumblr review 2023?

I suspect there are worse places to be than sandwiched between David Tennant and Michael Sheen.

[demontobee]

Good Omens is queering TV/storytelling - part 1: GAZE

I would argue that part of why Good Omens is so refreshingly queer is because it does not cater to the male gaze (which centers around the preferences - aesthetic, romantic, sexual, visual, logical, emotional, political ... - of mainly white men in positions of power):

no oversexualization of groups or types of people: Women or characters that could be read as female presenting are not overly sexualized. In fact, some of them are shown to be grimy, slimy and not sexual at all. All of them are real characters and not just cardboard-cutout on-screen versions of male misogynistic fantasies. They portray real people with real people problems. They are human, or exempt from our categories when portraying angels or demons. There are no overly sexualized bodies in general (as has so far also often been the case with young gay men, PoC, etc.), no fetishization of power imbalances, and not exclusively youthful depiction of love and desire.

sex or sexual behavior is not shown directly (yet): All imagery and symbolism of sex and sexuality is used not to entice the audience but is very intimately played out between characters, which makes it almost uncomfortable to watch (e.g., Aziraphale being tempted to eat meat, Crowley watching Aziraphale eat, the whole gun imagery).

flaunting heteronormativity: Throughout GO but especially GO2, there is very little depiction of heterosexual/romantic couples; most couples are very diverse and no one is making a fuss about it. There is no fetishization of bodies or identities. Just people (and angels and demons) being their beautiful selves (or trying to).

age: Even though Neil Gaiman explained that Crowley and Aziraphale are middle-aged because the actors are, I think it is also queering the idea of romance, love and desire existing mainly within youthful contexts. Male gaze has taught us that young people falling and being in love is what we have to want to see, and any depiction of love that involves people being not exactly young anymore is either part of a fetishized power imbalance (often with an older dude using his power to prey on younger folx) or presents us with marital problems, loss of desire, etc. – all with undertones of decay and patronizing sympathy. Here, however, we get a beautifully crafted, slow-burn, and somehow super realistic love story that centers around beings older than time and presenting as humans in their 50s figuring out how to deal with love. It makes them both innocent and experienced, in a way that is refreshing and heartbreaking and unusual and real.

does not (exclusively) center around romantic/sexual love: I don’t know if this is a gaze point exactly but I feel like male gaze and resulting expectations of what a love story should look like are heavily responsible for our preoccupation with romantic/sexual love in fiction – the “boy gets girl” type of story. And even though, technically, GO seems to focus on a romantic love story in the end, it is also possible to read this relationship but also the whole show as centering around a kind of love that goes beyond the narrow confines of our conditioned boxed-in thinking. It seems to depict a love of humanity and the world and the universe and just the ineffability of existence as a whole.

disability as beautiful and innate to existence: Disability is represented amongst angels by the extremely cool Saraqael and by diversely disabled unnamed angels in the Job minisode. Representation of disability is obviously super important in its own right, but is also queers what we perceive as aesthetically and ontologically "normal". Male gaze teaches us that youth and (physical and mental) health are the desirable standard and everything else is to be seen as a deviance, a mistake. By including disability among the angels, beings that have existed before time and space, the show clearly states that disability is a beautiful and innate part of existence.

gender is optional/obsolete: Characters like Crowley, Muriel and others really undermine the (visual and aesthetic) boundaries of gender and the black-and-white thinking about gender that informs male gaze. Characters cannot be identfied simply as (binary) men or women anymore just by looking at them or by interpreting their personalities or behaviors. Most characters in GO, and especially the more genderqueer ones, display a balance of feminine and masculine traits as well as indiosyncracies that dissolve the gender binary.

Feel free to add your own thoughts on this in the comments or tags!

[maddyjones2]

On not idolising creative people

In the wake of the various recent allegations involving Neil Gaiman, people have been both very sad that someone who they looked up to as an inspiration has, allegedly, turned out to be something less than entirely admirable, and are now looking to see who is now left that they can rotate into the spot of “the good dude,” i.e., that one successful creative guy who they think or at least hope isn’t hiding a cellar full of awful actions. One name I see brought up is mine, in ways ranging from “Well, at least we still have Scalzi,” to “Oh, God, please don’t let Scalzi be a fucking creep too.” Which, uhhhh, yeah? Thanks?

I have many thoughts about this and I’m going to try to make sense of them here, as much for myself as anyone else, so this may be messy and discursive and long (seriously, 3600 words, y’all), but, well, welcome to me. So, ordered by how these things come out of my head:

1. Stop Idolizing Creative People. Creative people are easy to idolize because they create the art you love, and that gives you permission to feel things, and to see yourself and your desires reflected in that art. That is a powerful thing, and from the outside, it can feel like magic, and that the people who do it are tapped into something otherworldly and admirable. Plus, they often get to have cool lives and get to know other cool creative people. They do things that are removed from the day-to-day aspect of a “normal” life, and they’ll even post about them on social media where you can see them. Sometimes, independent of their art directly, they’ll speak about their life, or life in general, and they’ll seem wise and considered and kind. I mean, what’s not to like?

But please consider that this is all an extremely mediated experience of this person. The art is the edited and massaged result of hours and days and weeks and months of work, into which the work of many others is also added. My novels originate from me, but it’s not just me in there, nor is the final form of the novel an accurate statement of who I am as a person, not least of all for the simple reason that I am not trying to tell my story in my novels. I’m creating fictional characters, and the world in which they make sense, for the purpose of the story.

Despite how it might look from the outside, this is not sorcery. It’s years of experience at a craft. It’s not magic, just work. A completed novel (or any other piece of art) won’t tell you much about the specific, day-to-day life and inclinations of the individual who made it, other than a general nod toward their competence, and the competence of their collaborators. Likewise what you see of their lives, even from the illusorily close vantage of social media, is deeply mediated. Lives always look admirable at a distance, when you can only see the lofty peaks and not the rubble at the base — especially when your attention by design is pointed at those lofty peaks. There’s much you don’t see and that you’re not meant to see. The vast majority of what you’re not meant to see isn’t nefarious. It’s just not your business.

Now, before I was a professional creative person, I was an entertainment journalist who spent years interviewing writers, directors, movie stars, musicians, authors and other creative folks. Since I’ve been on the other side of the rope, I’ve likewise met a huge range of creative people from all walks of life. Please believe me when I assure you that creative people are just people. Richer and/or more famous? Sometimes (less often than you might think, though). Prettier and/or more charismatic? Especially if they’re actors or pop stars, often yes! But at the end of the day they are just folks, and they run the whole range of how people are. By and large, the day-to-day experience of getting through their life is the same as yours. Outside of their own specific field of work, they don’t know any more about life, have no more facility for dealing with the world, and have just as few clues about what’s going on in their own head, as anyone else.

They’re just people. Whose work is making the stuff you like! And that’s great, but that’s not a substantive basis for idolizing them. It makes no more sense to idolize them than to idolize a baker who makes cookies you like, or the guy who comes and trims your hedges the way you want them to be trimmed, or the plumber who fixes your clogged drain. You can appreciate what they do, and even admire they skill they have. But holding them up as a life model might be a bit much. Which is the point! If you’re not willing to idolize a plumber, then you shouldn’t idolize a creative person.

(“But a plumber doesn’t make me feel like a creative person does,” you say, to which I say, are you sure about that? Because I will tell you what, when my sump pump stopped working and the plumber got in there, replaced the pump and started draining out my basement which had an inch of standing water in it, that man was the focus of all my emotions and was my goddamned hero that day. My plumber that day did more for me than easily 90% of the great art I’ve ever experienced.)

Enjoy the art creative people do. Enjoy the experience of them in the mediated version of them you get online and elsewhere, if such is your joy. But remember that the art is from the artist, not the artist themselves, and the version of their life you see is usually just the version they choose to show. There is so much you don’t see, and so much you’re not meant to see. At the end of the day, you don’t have all the information about who they are that you would need to make them your idol, or someone you might choose to, in some significant way, pattern some fraction of your life on. And anyway creative people aren’t any better at life than anyone else.

Which brings up the next point:

2. Fuck idols anyway! People are complicated and contradictory and you don’t know everything about them! You don’t know everything even about your parents or siblings or best friends or your partner! People are hypocrites and liars and fail to live up to their own standards for themselves, much less yours! Your version of them in your head will always be different than the version that actually exists in the world! Because you’re not them! Stop pretending people won’t be fuck ups! They will! Always!

This sounds more pessimistic about humans than perhaps it should be. When I say, for example, that people are hypocrites and liars, I don’t mean that people take every single opportunity to be hypocrites and liars. Most people are decent in the moment. But none of us — not one! — has always lived up to our own standard of behavior, and all of us have had the moment where, when confronted with a situation that would become an immense pain in the ass if we stuck to our guns, or demanded the inconvenient truth, decided to just bail instead, because the situation wasn’t worth the drama, or we had somewhere else to be, or whatever. We all choose battles and we all make the call in the moment, and sometimes the call is, fuck this, I’m out.

Every person you’ve ever admired has fucked up, sometimes really badly. Everyone you’ve ever looked up to has secrets, and it’s possible some of those secrets would materially change how you think about them, not always for the better. Everyone you’ve ever known has things about them you don’t know, many of which aren’t even secrets, they’re just things you don’t engage with in your day-to-day experience of them. Nevertheless it’s possible if you were aware of them, it would change how you feel about them, for better or for worse. And now let’s flip that around! You have things about you that even your best friends don’t know, and might be surprised to learn! You have secrets you don’t wish to share with the class! You have fucked up, and lied, and have been a hypocrite too!

You are, in short, a human, as is everyone you know and every one you will know (pets and gregarious wild animals excepted). And all humans are, charitably, a mess. This doesn’t mean there aren’t good people or even exemplary people out there, since there are, along with the ones that are, charitably, a real shit show. What I am saying is that even the good or exemplary people out there are a mess, have been morally compromised at some point in their lives, and have not lived up to their own standards for themselves, independent of anyone else’s standard for them.

One of the aspects of being an “idol,” I think, is that higher standard that other people expect of you — that in every situation where the aspect they idolize you for is in play, you will act in a manner that is right and correct by their standard, which of course you will likely not know about because you don’t actually know them (or often know that they exist). This is, by definition, an impossible standard to be held to — you didn’t agree to it, or to engage with it — and an impossible standard to hold other people to without their direct consultation. Every human made to be an idol is destined to fail at the job. You don’t even have to have feet of clay! You just didn’t know you were on a pedestal to begin with.

(This does not excuse shitty action. The fact people should not be idols in the first place is not exculpatory for the choices one makes on one’s own. If you’re sexually assaulting people, or being a racist or sexist or homophobe or other flavor of bigot, or using your situational power coercively (as just a few examples), then hell yes you are going to be called out on it. And to be clear, it is not unreasonable, to put it mildly, to expect people not to sexually assault other people, or not to denigrate other humans for being who they are, etc. But this only adds to the point about idols, now, doesn’t it. You don’t know what you don’t see, and you don’t know what you’re not seeing, until it is hauled out into the light one way or the other. If it is hauled out into the light at all.)

I don’t think anyone should idolize anyone, ever. It’s not great for them, and it’s not great for you, they probably didn’t ask to be idolized (and if they did, holy shit, fucking run), and in the end unless you’re so completely wrapped up in their lives that they have no secrets from you — which is never — you don’t know enough to make that call. People do it anyway, and then disappointment happens, but they shouldn’t have done it in the first place. Stop idolizing people. It’s not fair for anyone.

What to do instead? Enjoy their work, if they’re a creative person. Appreciate the kind and good aspects of their life that you can see, and the decent actions they undertake in public, with the knowledge that what you see of them is a mediated and elided version. Understand that we all have a different version of ourself for every person we meet, and that every person we meet has a different vision of ourselves in their head, and very often, those two versions are not the same. Like them, based on what you know of them! Love them, if it comes to that. And when and if you learn something new about them that you didn’t know before, let empathy guide you to a new understanding of them and what they mean to you.

And now, taking all of the above into consideration:

3. Absolutely 100% do not idolize me. I don’t deserve to be idolized because no one deserves to be idolized, but also, holy fuck, I do know me and I’m a mess. There have been lots of things in my life that I’ve done that have not been admirable or kind. I can be petty and shitty and competitive and cruel. I am lazy and inattentive and when I let things slide (which is often), I end up jammed up on my responsibilities, which makes me irritable and no fun to be around. I have a temper which goes from zero to sixty almost instantaneously; if I’m not actively paying attention to it, I can become a sudden, unreasonable rage monster, which is a burden to people I love, and I hate that fact about myself (pro tip: don’t travel with me, the rage monster comes out a lot then).

I can be controlling and demanding but I want other people to handle the details, i.e., executive asshole. I am strategic in a way that can be bloodless. When I’m insecure I brag a lot, which is unflattering. If you cross me, I won’t go out of my way to make your life miserable (that would require effort on my part), but I will absolutely enjoy when you take a literal or metaphorical tumble down the stairs. God knows I’ve enjoyed the failures of the people who have spoken ill of me, almost as much as I’ve enjoyed the fuming, spittling rage they’ve felt when I’ve succeeded. I spent years cultivating a snarky persona online and while that was fun (for me), I’m increasingly aware that when the tally is added up for Who Ruined the Internet, I’m not necessarily going to be where I want to be on that particular ledger.

And these are only the bad qualities of mine I wish to admit to you at the moment. There are others, I assure you.

So, yes: Who wants to idolize me now?

“But you seemed so nice when I chatted with you online/met you at the convention/saw you at that one place that one time.” Well, thank you, I’ve been in the public eye in one manner or another for three and a half decades now and I understand my assignment; my public persona is friendly and engaging and sociable and mostly fun to be with. It’s not a fake version of me — I am all those things! Honest! — but, again, it’s a mediated version of me designed not only to be a positive experience for the people who meet me but also to get my actually introverted ass through a whole day of events at a convention/festival/book tour/whatever. When I’m done I collapse into an introverted hole. When I came back from Worldcon this week, I slept for 15 hours the first day I was home. It wasn’t just because of jet lag or con crud.

I rather famously call my public face “performance monkey mode,” and likewise what I say about my (current) online mode is that I’m cosplaying as a better version of myself, one that is kinder than I used to be online, and more patient than I am in the real world. If you meet me when I am “off” then you will find that, again, these versions of me are me, just with some things dialed up and other things dialed down. But even that is still a different version of me than, say, the version of me which is at home (which is in fact extremely boring; that version of me doesn’t talk much and mostly stays in my office).

Many of you who have followed me over the years are familiar with me saying things like this, of course, and are likewise familiar with me pointing out that there are a number of things about my life that I don’t mention in public, for whatever reasons I choose. But it’s also true that I’ve been actively online for 30+ years now, and people feel reasonably confident that they have a good bead on me and that there’s not much about me that will surprise them or change their understanding of me. So to bring home the point there are indeed things you don’t know, allow me to surface just one previously unaired fun fact:

I have a concealed carry license.

(Or did; it expired this year and I didn’t renew it, because Ohio changed its laws so that you no longer need a permit to conceal carry in the state. These days in Ohio you can just wander about with a handgun stuffed down your trousers without training or licensing because that’s a real good idea, now, isn’t it. Nevertheless, the license is not necessary anymore so there was not much point in renewing it, although if the law had not changed, I probably would have renewed.)

Why did I have a concealed carry license? Well, ultimately that’s not important. The point is I had one. I didn’t talk about it before because, among other things, the point of a concealed carry license (to me, anyway) is that its existence is not meant to be known by anyone other than that great state of Ohio itself. I am aware, and this is a dramatic understatement, that I am not a person most people would expect to have had such a thing. That the fact I had one will cause a number of people to reconsider what they know about me, for better or for worse. Which is also my point. All y’all have just learned this thing about me! Think about all the other things you don’t know!

Oh, God, this is where Scalzi starts admitting to terrible, terrible things. No. I feel pretty confident I live a tolerably ethical life. Part of the reason for this is that I have what I think is a decent operating principle, which is: If I’m thinking of doing something, and Krissy called me right then and asked “what are you doing?” and I would be tempted to lie to her about it, then I don’t do that thing. Because Krissy is the most important person in my life, and I don’t want to lie to her about what I’m doing (I have lied to her exactly once. She knew instantly. I haven’t bothered lying to her since). This is not replacing Krissy’s ethics with my own; it’s me knowing whether by my own ethics, I would be ashamed to tell to her what I am up to. It works very well. As such, the Krissy Test is an operating principle I highly suggest to others, although I’d suggest replacing Krissy with whomever your life is most important to you.

Be that as it may, my ethics are not universal and some others might not find them sufficient, for whatever reason. I am well aware I still disappoint many people, and that there are people who find my life choices, known positions or public statements (or lack of them, as the case may be) problematic, or who simply wish I would be other than what I am. I can’t help them with this, but again, this is the point. Given the fact that I am a fallible human who has an entire stratum of his life not visible to the world — and the strata of his life that are visible cause significant numbers of people to be irritated and exasperated — is it not better just to not hold me up as an ideal person, or the “good dude,” much less an idol of any sort?

I mean, shit. What Would John Scalzi Do? Solidly half the time, I have no fucking idea. I have to think about it, whatever it is. I have to think about whether I know enough to do or say something about it. I have to decide whether it’s something I want to engage with at all, and whether my engagement with it is something that would be of value to anyone, me included. I have to decide whether engaging with it is worth the shit I will get for it. And then I have to figure out what it means that I am engaging with it, since like it or not I’m a Dude of Reasonable Significance in My Field. I try to be a decent human, when people are looking at me and especially when they are not. But I also know me, and all my flaws and weaknesses and compromises.

What Would John Scalzi Do? The best he can, in the moment. Is that sufficient? For me, yes, most of the time. Is that sufficient for you? That’s up to you.

The point to this all is that people are just a big fucking mess, including the ones you might for whatever reason find admirable. I am no different than anyone else, and you should not be under the illusion that I am anything other than a shambling collection of flaws embedded inside a human form, which also, in its defense, has some pretty excellent qualities as well. We’re all this way! You too!

And while I want you to like my work, and to enjoy the version of me that you see here and elsewhere, don’t put me, or any other person, on a pedestal. Pedestals are wobbly and and don’t give actual humans a lot of room to move. We will inevitably fall off. Keep us with our feet on the ground. That way, when we stumble, there’s a chance we can get back up, and keep going.

— JS

[auntie-social-acab]

Two more women have come forward accusing Neil Gaiman of sexual assault.

It is very difficult for anyone to come forward about sexual assault. It can ruin your life to say “this person assaulted me” when you’re both just normal citizens. When you accuse a celebrity, you’re put under a proton microscope rather than just a regular one.

Anyone who comes forward about sexual assault is disbelieved from the get go. You are suddenly guilty until proven innocent. Different things are said about women than are said about men, but at the core it is all about disbelief and the court of public opinion just doesn’t think you were actually harmed.

Victims are also forced to tell their story over and over again, and often must undergo painful and intrusive examinations, all of which only causes more trauma.

A few weeks ago, I found this comment on reddit while looking at a thread for celebrity rumors:

Screenshot discussing one user being happy that Neil Gaiman is writing for Doctor Who. Another user expresses concern about seeing Neil’s name because they believed he would be accused of sexual assault, and then the final comment by u/elliegriezler: unfortunately, yes, him too. A friend of a friend stay d overnight in his house and he warned her he may wander on Ambien (note: a sleep drug that does cause actual sleepwalking, sleep eating, and sleep impulse buying in a lot of people). She woke up to find him in her room and she didn’t go into specifics, but she was upset and implied that he was groping her. She didn’t want to hurt her career so she didn’t share it publicly. I’m just waiting for something worse to eventually come out about him. Don’t pin your hopes on him being a squeaky clean guy. There’s another comment about his ex wife Amanda Palmer who is also known for odd behavior and liking very young looking “boys” around her. This thread is 184 days old.

This situation is very sad and very upsetting. I hadn’t held out much hope after the initial reporting, even if the podcast it was reported on may have their own agenda. I said to my bff @goblynn whom I’ve known for over two decades, that even if Gaiman isn’t guilty of rape, there’s no way to have him come out of this looking good. He preys on young women and uses his celebrity and friendships with other celebrities to get what he wants.

We’ve discussed how now, in light of these accusations, there are parts of his books that I’ve read and at the time said to myself, “wow, that’s an odd way to write that.” Of course at the time, I figured it was a way he wanted us to see things and not how he feels. Ha! Yes, that’s a sarcastic ha!

Anyway, I feel like this is just the beginning. I would HOPE that Gaiman makes a more complete statement and offers some sort of recompense to his victims. I would hope that he gets the help he needs. I hope this isn’t swept under the rug and forgotten about just because we actually do like his work.

It’s a sad day. It’s okay to be upset. You can be upset and still support the victims at the same time.

[tallerthantale]

On False Memories

There is another moment around Scarlett's allegations I want to expand on. It does come from bits where Tortoise is doing the pseudo attribution thing, so keep in mind we don't have the exact wording used by Gaiman or his lawyers, we have Tortoise's characterization of what has been said. I am going to go forward on the working assumption that it is a generally accurate representation of what was said to Tortoise.

"Rachel Johnson: Neil Gaiman’s account suggests we should treat Scarlett’s allegations with caution, as they first surfaced when she was hospitalized, he says, for the treatment of a condition that’s associated with false memories. But we know her allegations pre-date her admission to hospital. Scarlett’s medical records also show us that Neil Gaiman’s claim that Scarlett has a serious preexisting medical condition to be false. According to her records, she presented as a genuinely high risk of suicide and was discharged after recovering overnight.

Rachel Johnson: There’s no mention, even in her previous medical history, of any condition like the one Neil Gaiman claimed in his account. The only medication she was on was the sleeping pill Zopiclone."

The things about this series of claims that jump out at me might be a bit different than what other people would be paying attention to, so I want to explain what stands out to me and why. But we are going to need to do a little bit of background first. Getting into this is a big ass can of worms, but I'm going to see if I can do a bit of a cliff notes version.

The underlying issue is that a propensity to develop 'false memories' is a disposition that all humans have. That's just normal brain functioning. It isn't a condition you will find in diagnostic manuals because it is the condition of being a human. It's hard for people to process and accept that knowledge, because everyone hates it. Doesn't make it any less true. Functionally everything you consciously remember is a post hoc reconstruction to suit the needs of your current situation.

Under normal circumstances this does not account for things like spontaneously constructing major sexual assaults into existence. That's not a thing, but not having the memory in the front of your conscious experience for years, and then remembering that you have that memory later when it's triggered is a thing.

For most people, most of the time, the shifts of constructed memories are things like your brain not bothering to pay attention to what color someone's shirt was, and making it up later to have a cohesive memory. It would account for something like a person thinking they said no louder than they did, which shouldn't be relevant anyway. It could account for thinking you stated a boundary very clearly, but when you look at the message later it's actually ambiguous.

Ideally, the needs of the current situation are to remember what actually did happen. Unfortunately memory can be highly vulnerable to suggestion in the name of preserving continuity. This why police will do things like shouting "stop resisting" while beating up someone who isn't resisting. People absolutely will form a memory of the person resisting to make it make sense. Not because they have a specific condition, because that's how brains work. The counter to this is for the general public to understand that it 'makes sense' for the police to engage in that deceptive strategy. Once that is widely known bystanders will be more likely to remember the events for what they were.

In moments of high emotional distress people's minds generally prioritize 'making myself feel better' as the main need of the current situation. What it makes a person feel better to remember is going to be very context dependent. One day it might be what validates seeing themselves as a victim, the next it might make them feel better to frame themselves as in control of the situation by seeing themselves as a villain. Both genuine victims and genuine perpetrators can cycle through both perceptions. Shifting reframing of memory to form a narrative can occur to all sorts of things in all sorts of scenarios. These are examples of what's called cognitive distortions. Learning about how they work does not prevent them from happening. They exist in all people. Yes, even you, yes, even me.

However, if a person's emotional regulation is shit, and / or they are stuck in a childlike mode of emotional development, these mechanisms can be more dramatic and reaching. One of the most common folk psychology (popularly believed psychology misinformation) things I run into is people attributing cognitive distortions solely and specifically to people with Cluster B personality disorders.

I see a lot of people start learning about Cluster B and then very quickly start seeing signs of Cluster B everywhere. I think that is because they are largely learning from people who fixate on 'warning about of the dangers of Cluster B people,' describe Cluster B mostly in terms of cognitive distortions, and then frame those cognitive distortions as more or less 'the thing Cluster B people do.' People who get their information from that sort of content start looking IRL and immediately see them everywhere, but it's because literally everyone has cognitive distortions all the time.

My first impression of the "condition associated with false memories" line was that it looked to me like Gaiman was trying to claim that Scarlett was a narcissist and / or borderline off of a poor understanding of those conditions. If Gaiman thinks false memories are 'the thing Cluster B people do,' Gaiman using that narrative fits with claiming she was hospitalized on suicide risk due to the condition and him associating the condition with false memories.

I didn't see anything in the fake therapist's videos or ramblings that looked like he was in the dark triad fandom, (my name for people with strong folk psychology attitudes about Cluster B personality disorders) but it is certainly possible he is. The book that conspicuously popped up on Neil's... amazon reading list? something like that? a while back was a book about getting out of relationships with narcissists.

The other side of the false memories issue is that certain types of hypnotherapists claim to be able to recover memories of childhood abuse through hypnotism. This is a very bad idea to try to do for multiple reasons. While there is evidence that these hypnotherapies result in a person having more memories after than they did before, those memories are post hoc reconstructions, because that is what all memories are. And those post hoc reconstructions are vulnerable to suggestion, particularly surrounding the needs of the immediate situation and continuity.

If the explicit goal of the therapy is to hypnotize a person into a heightened state of vulnerability to suggestion specifically so that they can remember a specific thing, there is little reason to believe any particular memory 'recovered' by a hypnotherapist has anything to do with reality. What ads another layer to the horrifying is that since there is no neurological difference between a false memory and a real one, a hypnotherapist 'recovering' false memories of trauma will create trauma that is just a real as if those things did actually happen.

Neil's fake therapist and the communities he is connected to might have some overlap with the people who still think hypnotherapists doing traumatic memory recovery is a good idea. it's the flavor of pseudoscience they seem to be running on. It is also possible he is more aware of the dangers of hypnotherapists because he has encountered them and bothered to do a bit of reading.

Since he is not actually a real mental health professional and is in community with pseudoscientists, he could have ended up with an overinflated sense of how common hypnotherapist nonsense is, and he may not realize how much policy and training and best practices go into preventing real mental health professionals that work at hospitals from planting suggested memories.

From his own message to Scarlett, he was wildly reckless as to the risk that he might be planting suggestions himself, (assuming that wasn't the intention) in ways a trained professional would know not to do. While many things about him set off red flags, this point was the biggest, and what made me immediately inclined to prompt a license review, which started the 'he doesn't actually have one' rabbit hole.

"A condition associated with false memories" sounds to me like they are trying to diagnose her with a Cluster B personality disorder. Trying to time the origin of the claims to the hospitalization could be an argument that Scarlett was implanted with false memories of the content of the allegations by irresponsible crisis workers. It looks to me like the reasoning of a person who read a few bits and pieces of real things in isolation and put them together into a dangerously inaccurate mess. Which is the sort of thing that can happen when unqualified people LARP as therapists. Or as Cluster B experts.

If the "condition associated with false memories" claim is referring to Cluster B and tracks back to Wayne and his phone call with Scarlett, that would be very gross on a lot of levels. Wayne is not qualified to do that, you really can't diagnose personality disorders off a single session even if you are qualified, Wayne had a preexisting investment in the situation before talking to Scarlett, Wayne did not have her as a proper client, Wayne would have been passing information about his opinions on Scarlett to a different person after claiming to be speaking in confidence, ect.... I can't say if that's what happened, but if it did happen I would have some choice words to say to him about that. On top of the ones I already have.

There is a conversation between a civil lawyer and a psychologist about a lot of these topics on youtube from when they were looking at the Marylin Manson case. It goes over a lot of the issues around false memories if people want to listen through it. It's a bit over an hour. I have mixed feelings about the lawyer in question, (and you probably don't want to look at the chat) but the psychologist is very qualified and knows what he's talking about.

[flameraven]

Very thoughtful commentary about artists, Neil Gaiman in particular, and parasocial relationships more generally. Excerpt:

1. Stop Idolizing Creative People. Creative people are easy to idolize because they create the art you love, and that gives you permission to feel things, and to see yourself and your desires reflected in that art. That is a powerful thing, and from the outside, it can feel like magic, and that the people who do it are tapped into something otherworldly and admirable. Plus, they often get to have cool lives and get to know other cool creative people. They do things that are removed from the day-to-day aspect of a “normal” life, and they’ll even post about them on social media where you can see them. Sometimes, independent of their art directly, they’ll speak about their life, or life in general, and they’ll seem wise and considered and kind. I mean, what’s not to like?

But please consider that this is all an extremely mediated experience of this person. The art is the edited and massaged result of hours and days and weeks and months of work, into which the work of many others is also added. My novels originate from me, but it’s not just me in there, nor is the final form of the novel an accurate statement of who I am as a person, not least of all for the simple reason that I am not trying to tell my story in my novels. I’m creating fictional characters, and the world in which they make sense, for the purpose of the story.

Despite how it might look from the outside, this is not sorcery. It’s years of experience at a craft. It’s not magic, just work. A completed novel (or any other piece of art) won’t tell you much about the specific, day-to-day life and inclinations of the individual who made it, other than a general nod toward their competence, and the competence of their collaborators. Likewise what you see of their lives, even from the illusorily close vantage of social media, is deeply mediated. Lives always look admirable at a distance, when you can only see the lofty peaks and not the rubble at the base — especially when your attention by design is pointed at those lofty peaks. There’s much you don’t see and that you’re not meant to see. The vast majority of what you’re not meant to see isn’t nefarious. It’s just not your business.

Now, before I was a professional creative person, I was an entertainment journalist who spent years interviewing writers, directors, movie stars, musicians, authors and other creative folks. Since I’ve been on the other side of the rope, I’ve likewise met a huge range of creative people from all walks of life. Please believe me when I assure you that creative people are just people. Richer and/or more famous? Sometimes (less often than you might think, though). Prettier and/or more charismatic? Especially if they’re actors or pop stars, often yes! But at the end of the day they are just folks, and they run the whole range of how people are. By and large, the day-to-day experience of getting through their life is the same as yours. Outside of their own specific field of work, they don’t know any more about life, have no more facility for dealing with the world, and have just as few clues about what’s going on in their own head, as anyone else.

They’re just people. Whose work is making the stuff you like! And that’s great, but that’s not a substantive basis for idolizing them. It makes no more sense to idolize them than to idolize a baker who makes cookies you like, or the guy who comes and trims your hedges the way you want them to be trimmed, or the plumber who fixes your clogged drain. You can appreciate what they do, and even admire the skill they have. But holding them up as a life model might be a bit much. Which is the point! If you’re not willing to idolize a plumber, then you shouldn’t idolize a creative person.

(“But a plumber doesn’t make me feel like a creative person does,” you say, to which I say, are you sure about that? Because I will tell you what, when my sump pump stopped working and the plumber got in there, replaced the pump and started draining out my basement which had an inch of standing water in it, that man was the focus of all my emotions and was my goddamned hero that day. My plumber that day did more for me than easily 90% of the great art I’ve ever experienced.)

Enjoy the art creative people do. Enjoy the experience of them in the mediated version of them you get online and elsewhere, if such is your joy. But remember that the art is from the artist, not the artist themselves, and the version of their life you see is usually just the version they choose to show. There is so much you don’t see, and so much you’re not meant to see. At the end of the day, you don’t have all the information about who they are that you would need to make them your idol, or someone you might choose to, in some significant way, pattern some fraction of your life on. And anyway creative people aren’t any better at life than anyone else.

Which brings up the next point:

2. Fuck idols anyway! People are complicated and contradictory and you don’t know everything about them! You don’t know everything even about your parents or siblings or best friends or your partner! People are hypocrites and liars and fail to live up to their own standards for themselves, much less yours! Your version of them in your head will always be different than the version that actually exists in the world! Because you’re not them! Stop pretending people won’t be fuck ups! They will! Always!

This sounds more pessimistic about humans than perhaps it should be. When I say, for example, that people are hypocrites and liars, I don’t mean that people take every single opportunity to be hypocrites and liars. Most people are decent in the moment. But none of us — not one! — has always lived up to our own standard of behavior, and all of us have had the moment where, when confronted with a situation that would become an immense pain in the ass if we stuck to our guns, or demanded the inconvenient truth, decided to just bail instead, because the situation wasn’t worth the drama, or we had somewhere else to be, or whatever. We all choose battles and we all make the call in the moment, and sometimes the call is, fuck this, I’m out.

Every person you’ve ever admired has fucked up, sometimes really badly. Everyone you’ve ever looked up to has secrets, and it’s possible some of those secrets would materially change how you think about them, not always for the better. Everyone you’ve ever known has things about them you don’t know, many of which aren’t even secrets, they’re just things you don’t engage with in your day-to-day experience of them. Nevertheless it’s possible if you were aware of them, it would change how you feel about them, for better or for worse. And now let’s flip that around! You have things about you that even your best friends don’t know, and might be surprised to learn! You have secrets you don’t wish to share with the class! You have fucked up, and lied, and have been a hypocrite too!

You are, in short, a human, as is everyone you know and every one you will know (pets and gregarious wild animals excepted). And all humans are, charitably, a mess. This doesn’t mean there aren’t good people or even exemplary people out there, since there are, along with the ones that are, charitably, a real shit show. What I am saying is that even the good or exemplary people out there are a mess, have been morally compromised at some point in their lives, and have not lived up to their own standards for themselves, independent of anyone else’s standard for them.

[orangepanic]

I'm probably going to regret this later.

I had a good friend say to me recently that she's not reading any more books by white men. Clearly she was looking for congratulations. Instead, all I could feel was sadness.

To me, the point of pushing for diversity and representation in media is exactly that. Diversity, and not just to put points on a scoreboard or get kudos from your socially-minded friends but because you actually care about broadening your mind. For too long, too few people's perspectives and experiences have been overrepresented in history and popular culture, which limits our thinking and perpetuates the kinds of marginalization and discrimination that hurt society as a whole. We need to actively, aggressively correct that. But to me that means a process that is additive, not subtractive.

Add books to your reading list by people from different backgrounds and cultures, or that center characters who aren't like you. And "aren't like you" should be broad. Read a different genre than you'd normally pick up. Read about somebody older or younger than you, someone whose brain works differently, or someone who grew up in a different part of the country, even if they might look like you on the outside. Do this, but don't only do this to the point that reading becomes a chore or a performative action, or to the point where you're now cutting out other perspectives entirely. I hear so many sad stories these days about how little people read, and I think part of that is because there's been a push for reading as a requirement, as education, and that only certain kinds of books are okay to read because they contribute to this goal. That's such crap. Read what you want because it is fun! But then also add to that experience with new, different books. You never know what else you might like (looking at you, native Hawaiian vampire story). Growing your reading pie isn't about "no more of this" but "yes, more of that."

And the same can be said for fandom. Fandom has always been as space for people to explore different kinds of characterizations and relationships that aren't heavily reflected in popular culture. That's largely why we have transformative works. But lately I see this almost puritanical push in fandom for everything to check certain boxes when the whole point of fandom and fan creations is to make shit up. Don't see enough hairy-chested mlm werewolves on screen? Draw your favs as hairy gay werewolves who kiss! And if you've never thought about your OTP as werewolves, be open-minded enough to explore it, or to read someone else exploring it just to see how it is and stretch your brain a bit. Maybe you'll like it, or learn about werewolves. Maybe you'll hate it. Either way, support each other.

And like the books, this process should be additive. Push yourself to be open to more ships and interpretations of characters and canon. Also, curate your fandom experience, and if you explore something and it isn't for you, that's okay. It's for somebody else. And the fact that it contains no werewolves doesn't make it wrong, or boring, or toxic, or anti-werewolf, or something you need to tell the creator not to make anymore because you want to be seen in online spaces as coming out against what is unpopular so that you, by reflection, will look popular. If you do this you're looking for the fandom equivalent of kudos for saying you'll never read a book by a white man, leaving everything from Neil Gaiman to Tolkien on the table and thinking that makes you look progressive instead of sad and small and like you're trying desperately to sit at the right table in middle school. In short, fandom isn't a zero sum game any more than reading is. And real diversity in fandom means adding in the content and perspectives and characters we're missing, both on and off-screen, (and not just the ones you like, but the ones you might not) as well as not weeding out the ones that we already have. We can have more together, not less.

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

Nina and Maggie interview with Caitlin Tyrrell for Screenrant :)❤

Screen Rant: I love this show so much! Season two is amazing and you both are phenomenal in it!

Maggie Service: Oh, thank you so much. Nina Sosanya: Thank you.

Can you talk to me a little bit about playing the human story in this largely Celestial series?

Maggie Service: Yeah, I think they're quite good grounding I think for the audience. It's almost like they're a connector between the Celestial world and the audience. I think that's been set up really well in season two. Nina Sosanya: Yeah, they kind of magnify the themes in a kind of human way that we find sort of quite relatable. The themes of good and bad. The themes of when and if to trust another person with your vulnerabilities, which is what's going on with Heaven, Hell, Crowley, Aziraphale, and, you know, everyone. Maggie Service: Everyone.

I love your characters' dynamics with Crowley and Aziraphale. Can you talk to me a little bit about working with David and Michael to create those relationships?

Maggie Service: Yeah, well by this point, their portrayals of Aziraphale and Crowley are just iconic. But my character didn't get to have anything to do with them really in season one. So it was lovely to actually meet Aziraphale and Crowley in season two and go, "Ah, yeah. This is, okay, that's who you guys are." Nina Sosanya: You know what's actually quite nice is also because they're so iconic that you read the book, you know the characters, then you see season one, and then as human characters, we get to treat them [as] they're just these normal blokes. So these characters don't know about their iconic status at all and don't care, really. They're just taking them at face value. Two quite kooky odd guys to be either suspicious or to be in awe of. Maggie Service: Just they're the loveliest men in the world. Yeah.

What was it like collaborating with Neil Gaiman this season on an original story versus season one where it was an adaptation?

Maggie Service: Well, his focus was very, very clear for what the story was going to be. [He] and Terry Pratchett had spoken about what the sequel would be. Season Two might be a bridge to a possible thing that may or may not happen. Who knows. We have to see how much people love Season Two first, but he was very clear on what it was. So actually, the scripts hardly changed at all. Quite often, you'll get so many different versions of a shooting script, but really, when they landed that's what we shot and that's the story we told. Nina Sosanya: But he was lovely. He was very happy being on set and watching his work comes to life. He likes actors and he likes that process. He likes watching the process of his words being owned by other people. He's very generous in that way. He sort of gives his work away to the actor. Maggie Service: Yeah, he likes writing for specific people, I think because he feels safe in that he can probably hear how it's gonna sound. So when it does I think he quite likes that too. Makes him feel quite clever and makes us feel like we've done a good job. It's good for everyone.

[rathiman]

"Neil Gaiman publicly funded the defense of a guy who was charged with possessing child porn"

I really really do not want to be saying anything positive about this man, it is crystal clear that at the very least he massively exploited the power he had over two women half his age and guess what, that itself is enough to understand that he was very predatory with these women. That being said, I fully believe the victims who came forward and hope that there is some accountability and justice dispensed.

But, what is an extremely irrelevant tangent that several of these discussions are taking are talking about him funding the defense of a man who was being prosecuted fo possessing lolicon manga.

Firstly, yes he did do that and I'll link the article that Neil Gaiman wrote about this here. Tbh, I agree with some points he makes here, though his writing is very meandering and not very concise.

Possessing lolicon is possessing some material where a character is/looks like they are underage/preteen and they are written to be in/drawn to be in sexually explicit situations. In other words, it's a fictional depiction of fictional minor characters in an explicit manner. Now, child porn as defined in several jurisdictions entails a real child/minor being exploited sexually for pornography or a real human child/minor being written about/portrayed in a sexual manner. Essentially, lolicon is a fictional and explicit depiction of children/people who are perceived as children, who DO NOT exist while child porn, arguably, involves real children being abused.

For the morality based disagreements surrounding lolicon itself, firstly, yes, creeps might get off to lolicon and that is disgusting. Yes, sometimes lolicon might help foster the sickening motives some people have against children and that is also disgusting. But, do you really believe banning something like lolicon on a principle level is going to actually reduce the chances of a child being abused? Lolicon is not going to magically vanish from the face of the earth, it's still going to be circulated through illegal means, just like actual child porn is. But you know what banning lolicon will actually do?

Threaten actual exploration of uncomfortable themes like child abuse, exploitation and rape and meaningful themes like sex and sexuality in adolescents. Which depiction of a child/minor is obscene or not obscene, morally wrong or correct, will not be decided by you or me but by some old powerful men, probably conservative.

Another important consideration is that lolicon does not always have characters that are explicitly underage. It can also just contain characters with "childlike bodies" and it could be called lolicon. And who will decide what a normal body should look like as opposed to a child's body anyway? What about people with small body frames and flat chests? Because their bodies do not align with a conventional adult body, these bodies will be banned from being portrayed explicitly because someone on the internet has decided a body like that can only belong to a child? Do you see why what should be drawn/written and how it should be perceived cannot and should not be regulated with laws?

So yes, he did fund the defense of a guy who was being prosecuted for possessing lolicon manga. If you think that made him a sexual predator, please ask yourself If you should be drawing a common standard for writing about fictional underage characters and sexually abusing real women.

Focus on listening to the victims, withdrawing any support you have been extending to him and please please believe the victims. Speaking out against a powerful man is not easy and these women are very brave for coming out with their experiences.

[stupidphototricks]

Quotes from Mort:

He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe. Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one. The Creator had a lot of remarkably good ideas when he put the world together, but making it understandable hadn't been one of them. Terry Pratchett, Mort

Even the hot meat pie man had stopped crying his wares and, with no regard for personal safety, was eating one. Terry Pratchett, Mort (proto-C.M.O.T. Dibbler)

"Well, ----me," he said. "A ----ing wizard. I hate ----ing wizards!" "You shouldn't ---- them, then," muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes. Terry Pratchett, Mort (Old joke but not quite so old at the time) (This expurgated writing style didn't carry over to any later books, I think)

"We give him trouble, you see. Priests don't, so he likes priests." "He's never said," said Mort. "Ah. They're always telling folk how much better it's going to be when they're dead. We tell them it could be pretty good right here if only they'd put their minds to it." Terry Pratchett, Mort (Also partly the message of Good Omens, per Neil Gaiman)

With royal self-control, Keli said, "This is the fourth floor. It's a lady's bedroom. You'd be amazed how many horses we don't get up here." Terry Pratchett, Mort

SLEEP? SLEEP? I NEVER SLEEP. I'M WOSSNAME, PROVERBIAL FOR IT. Terry Pratchett, Mort

It struck Mort with sudden, terrible poignancy that Death must be the loneliest creature in the universe. In the great party of Creation, he was always in the kitchen. Terry Pratchett, Mort

"Sodomy non sapiens," said Albert under his breath. "What does that mean?" "Means I'm buggered if I know." Terry Pratchett, Mort

"You can help?" said Mort. "No," said Ysabell. She blew her nose. "What do you mean, no?" growled Albert. "This is too important for any flighty--" "I mean," said Ysabell, in razor tones, "that I can do them and you can help." Terry Pratchett, Mort

YOU WILL DO AS YOU ARE TOLD. "I will not." YOU'RE MAKING THIS VERY DIFFICULT. "Good." Terry Pratchett, Mort (Death vs. teenager) (I love when Death says normal-person things in the DEATH voice, like especially when he's talking to the little kids in Hogfather)

"Is it a pearl?" he said. THE PRESSURE OF THIS REALITY KEEPS IT COMPRESSED. THERE MAY COME A TIME WHEN THE UNIVERSE ENDS AND REALITY DIES, AND THEN THIS ONE WILL EXPLODE AND... WHO KNOWS? KEEP IT SAFE. IT'S A FUTURE AS WELL AS A PRESENT. Death put his skull on one side. IT'S A SMALL THING, he added. YOU COULD HAVE HAD ETERNITY. "I know," said Mort. "I've been very lucky." Terry Pratchett, Mort (Unfired Chekov's gun of the series? I don't remember this ever coming up again)

[rollforjackass]

okay so i reread the good omens script book trying to look up a quote i remembered and i kept writing down the things that i absolutely loved about it, so here's just a list of all the quotes and moments that rewired my brain chemistry

aziraphale sasses the hell out of crowley about his antichrist birth organization skills

aziraphale saying “oh sugar” instead of oh shit...

first appearance of everyday by buddy holly, we all know how that turned out

aziraphale doesn’t know how an ansaphone works. this was in the book too, but it’s still funny, especially considering how in radio omens he at least knows about caller id

aziraphale brought shortbread for the drive to the convent. did he think it was a date? please say yes

crowley asked aziraphale if heaven wouldn’t give him (crowley) asylum and aziraphale was going to ask him the same about hell

aziraphale says “what the hell” after pointedly not swearing earlier. hypocrite ass

aziraphale is fine with killing the antichrist himself but gets upset about the humans killing each other at tadfield manor....more tasty hypocrisy. he thinks he can only ever do the Right Thing but he knows it's Wrong when anyone else does it

“aziraphale is rather enjoying having the upper hand in the ideas department for once”

crowley says “dude. chill.”

“for a moment his noble better nature rejects the idea out of hand. THEN HE FALLS...”

“aziraphale is softening. they haven’t spoken in a hundred years: he’s realizing they are still friends.” gets me every time i look at it

why was shadwell in prison?? america explain

“i work in soho, i hear things” patron saint of soho confirmed

i still think that the neon halo blinking on and off above aziraphale’s head is the HARDEST that neil gaiman has ever gone and that we deserved to see it in the final cut

"michael: when your cause is just you do not hesitate to smite the foe, aziraphale." i'm thinking thoughts about the s2 finale under this lens; when your cause is just (saving the love of your life) you do not hesitate to suffer for pursuing it

“crowley looks back. he looks at aziraphale. above them, a beautiful starry sky. and crowley softens.”   jesus janthony christ.

“aziraphale is looking for someone. he spies a human statue dressed as an angel, with wings. it’s not him.”   GOD

gabriel about aziraphale: “i’m disappointed in him. not thinking like an angel.”

crowley “looks up, and talks to god, in the classical fashion.” see i really want a script book for s2 because i want to see aziraphale's expressions of faith plucked out a little bit more

crowley in the cinema: “he’s waiting for the end of the world. out of time. out of hope.”

the fact that crowley saw aziraphale walking down the street and left dagon on read is priceless

aziraphale looks hurt after crowley says he won’t even think about him

the music for the gavotte scene was recommended to be “i am a courtier grave and serious” from gilbert and sullivan’s the gondoliers which is PERFECT

“aziraphale is heading down the street, looking harried and as if he is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. which he is.”

sandalphon says “you know how we treat traitors in wartime?” to aziraphale and there was meant to be blood on aziraphale’s lips after sandalphon punches him. death to sandalphon

“why would you do this? we’re the good guys.”

aziraphale (resolutely not swearing): you. you B…AD angels.

“seducing women to do your evil will!” “i think perhaps you’ve got the wrong shop.” still the campiest line delivery i've ever seen

we don't need to speculate about crowley being in tears in the burning bookshop because according to the script he is canonically right on the verge of it

“right. i’m done. i’ve had it. i don’t care about any bloody angels or humans or anyone. i hate you all. somebody killed my best friend, and i don’t even care who did it. bastards, all of you.”   😭

when aziraphale is discorporated, his heavenly appearance is all his normal clothes but gleaming white

aziraphale: i have no intention of fighting in any war. “all angels on the floor turn and look at the angel who has said the unsayable.”

aziraphale can’t actually see crowley in the bar scene…he has no idea how wrecked his best friend is

aziraphale doesn’t take sugar with his tea. bastard

aziraphale crosses his fingers under the table when answering shadwell’s nipple question

aziraphale is wearing madame tracy’s pink motorbike helmet in the mirror of her scooter

they describe crowley’s suit in the burning bentley as “interestingly ripped”...........we were robbed of a crowley boob window moment and i'll never forget

aziraphale introduces crowley to madame tracy as “he’s…well, we’re sort of business associates.” you know, like a liar

aziraphale was fully about to murder adam. i don’t think i can stress this enough

aziraphale pokes himself to make sure he’s solid once he’s separated from madame tracy

aziraphale isn’t threatening crowley with the sword, “just making his point that he can do dangerous out-of-character things if he needs to.”

crowley: what if the almighty planned it this way all along? from the very beginning aziraphale: takes a drink from the bottle of wine

aziraphale looks like he’s going to cry when crowley reminds him that the bookshop burnt down 😭

aziraphale-as-crowley looks depressed 😭 he still thinks his bookshop is gone

the angels kidnapping crowley-as-aziraphale zip-tied his hands those dickheads

aziraphale-as-crowley: my friend! they’re kidnapping my friend!

the hit hastur gives aziraphale-as-crowley would have killed a human 0/10 wahoos

“the van with [crowley-as-]aziraphale in it drives away, and [aziraphale-as-]crowley tries to crawl after it.”   HEY NEIL I JUST WANT TO TALK

crowley-as-aziraphale says “what fun. i love a barbecue.”

i am literally ENRAGED that sandalphon was like “hell yeah you can hit aziraphale” to the minor demon who brought the hellfire i WILL throw hands

uriel calls it a barbecue too those fuckers

in the script uriel and sandalphon have their flaming swords drawn, so it wasn't going to be as insidious as expecting aziraphale to walk into the flame of his own volition. but they didn’t end up including it in the show, so it is that insidious after all

aziraphale-as-crowley keeping his socks on for the bath was such a choice

“he doesn’t actually have a newspaper and a cigar, but damn, he’s enjoying himself in his bath” 

i've seen so little talk about how absolutely ice cold aziraphale is in the bath scene with the whole “so you’re probably thinking, ‘if he can do this, i wonder what else he can do’? and very, very soon, you’re all going to get the chance to find out.” BECAUSE THAT SHIT IS TERRIFYING

aziraphale-as-crowley: michael. duude.

crowley and aziraphale both get out of their own elevators and meet up to walk out together which is poetic cinema

PIGBOG AND THE OTHER MOTORCYCLE IDIOTS THAT HUNG OUT WITH DEATH WERE GOING TO BE INCLUDED i miss them

[penig]

I feel a little creepy bringing this up, but I also think it's important for people to realize it. Especially people who work out their issues through fandom a lot - cheaper than therapy, often more effective, been going on for millennia, go forth and do what you need to do.

Authors engage with their fiction at a personal level, too. Authors work on their own issues in fiction, and don't necessarily understand that they're doing it until afterward.

I have a writer friend who was in an abusive relationship. She got out of it about the same time I had a personal crisis that deeply involved my marriage. We were able to talk about these things to each other in a productive way. One of the things she said was: "When you reread what you wrote during X time later, you'll see that you were already telling yourself about this."

Most of this author's mid-career was spent writing thrillers, about being trapped, misled, and harmed; about making mistakes and taking responsibility; about choosing options that other people think are bad for you, because for you they are the safe options. Once you know some details of her experience, you can see exactly where the abusive relationship began and roughly how it played out, and how all of the stories she wrote during this time, and during the long period of her recovery, had him for a villain, until she was finally able to kill him off the way she needed to. Since then, she's written a joyful celebration of art and community; she's written a medievalist fantasy of self-discovery; she's done the work she had to do and gone on with her life at last. But it wasn't until she was safe that she could even admit to herself that she'd been writing about her abuse the whole time she was being abused.

Lots of people have engaged with her thrillers at the surface level; we will never know how many people engaged with them to do the same kind of work she was doing; or how many engaged with them to do different work on different issues; or what qualitative difference it makes to all those processes to know how her personal history shaped her work. This is the nature of the beast.

One of the ways people work on their issues with art is through creating for themselves - fanfiction, meta, formal litcrit, adaptation to other forms of media. This is normal. Usually it's healthy. But it doesn't have to be. This is not something that can be judged from outside. Sometimes people who really, really ought to have therapy cling to a fandom instead and this...is not always productive. And sometimes people get into parasocial relationships with creators in which their own real issues get all mixed up with their imaginary construct of the creator.

So that's enough vagueblogging. It's time to talk about Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Who were two very different people who were best friends forever. Who were both writers doing what writers do. Who early in their careers collaborated on a religious satire in which their work got so mixed up together that they couldn't always tell who had written what in its final form, and which featured major themes about friendship, including two best friends forever collaborating, not particularly effectually, to save the world. Who had fun identifying themselves with those two characters. Who liked the idea of a film adaptation, who actively wanted a film adaptation, but couldn't find an acceptable way to do it within the industry. Who verbally worked out the details of a sequel, but never could actually sit down to write it together, but who continued to influence each other's work in ways that anyone reading both of them could see easily if they cared to look.

(Coraline and The Wee Free Men were written and published almost at the same time. I read them one after the other. The two books are very different reads, in different genres, but at the high concept level, they are the same story. Tell me that's a coincidence and I'll shake my head and say "Bless your heart, child.")

And then one of those friends got a debilitating disease and died.

And the survivor became determined to bring about the film adaptation and to get the sequel made, explicitly for his friend's sake.

Even though his friend would never see it, and it meant new collaboration with new people.

Good Omens (TV) is the best film adaptation of a text work I have ever seen in a longish life of being disappointed by film adaptations. S1 made me happy; S2 made me happy and sad and ultimately (perhaps inevitably) dissatisfied; I hope that S3 will make me happy and satisfied. But there is a level at which that doesn't matter. Gaiman has repeatedly expressed gratification over the way people have embraced it; but he's not doing this for us. And he's not only doing it for Pratchett.

He's doing it because he needs to process what happened when his best friend got Alzheimer's and died. Maybe he doesn't know that's what he's doing - but he clearly is.

Pratchett's illness and death are all over the adaptation. We saw it even in S1, we talked about it, the difference between Crowley and the Bookshop Fire in the book and in the show, and people openly recognized that the difference was between a young artist working with his best friend and an older artist whose best friend had died. That was simple; we all got it. Some of us didn't like it, but we got it.

But it's all over S2, too, and here it's not simple, it's a big complicated mess. The villain of S1, who wasn't in the book at all, shows up sporting the most noticeable symptoms of the disease that killed the member of the creative team identified with the character the villain goes to for refuge. The original creative team's avatars are suddenly working at cross-purposes when they seem to be allying where before they were allying when they appeared to be working at cross purposes. Mirrors function in the plot again but they're confusing. Memory is a huge theme but it doesn't resolve. And the character who is the avatar of the creator who died goes off to a Heaven it knows is a horrible place and leaves the avatar of the creator who survived angry and miserable on Earth. All in the service of setting up that long-deferred sequel.

And the thousands of people who are in a parasocial relationship with the survivor and are livid, or feel betrayed, or otherwise take this personally - really need to accept and remember that.

[onedappercat]

Tag Game

I was tagged by @adverbian so I’ll give it a go! I’m going to subtract the data from the fic I’m listed as co-creator on though, because I only provided art for it. ❤️

How many works to you have on ao3?

11

What’s your total ao3 word count?

356,295 - I’m a long fic person. 🫠

What fandoms do you write for?

Good Omens

Top five fics by kudos:

Queen of Hell - Crowley becomes the Queen of Hell to avert the second coming. Explores his past relationship as Lucifer’s lover.

The Last Dance - A 1941 speculative piece of Aziraphale’s apology dance.

Why Does the Ortolan Sing? - Human AU where Crowley is a busker at the coffee shop that Azira falls in love with. Crowley is already in a toxic relationship with a mobster.

One Vision - My first fic and my take on the Second Coming. Ends in South Down with a cat.

The Devil’s Love - Pre-fall Crowley doesn’t realize Lucifer’s plans for him, and Aziraphale has a crush.

Do you respond to comment?

I try to. Sometimes it takes me a couple days to work up the spoons for it, but I love receiving comments! I try and say more than just a thank you, but at the very least I try and do that.

What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

I’ve written so much angst, I can’t really say what someone else would consider the angstiest ending.

I have two pre-fall fics: The Devil’s Love and The Queen’s Fall, so obviously that is going to end in angst. I’ve had the most people comment that The Last Dance broke their hearts. Technically Do It Again is a hopeful ending, but… Well, archive warnings exist for a reason. 🙃

What is the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Probably my first fic, One Vision. It was how I dealt with the end of s2, so it was pretty positive. I’ve since embraced the angst, although I still tend to end things positively.

Do you get hate on fics?

Not yet…

Do you write smut?

I’ve written smut scenes in very plot-heavy fics. Still rather new to it, but my latest has really pushed me further into it. I can only write it when I’m dead tired, for some reason…

Craziest crossover:

I’ve been quite taken with Red Sonja Crowley… I posted Battle Raiments and Camping Gear, but didn’t list Red Sonja as a fandom because it’s just clothes. 😅 They are crack art posts, but I guess they are crossovers.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Doubt it.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

No, but that would be cool!

Have you ever co-written a fic?

I’m listed as co-creator on Tale of the Sea Bucca, but I only did art. I joined the Drabble for the GOAD Writer’s Guild celebration, so that was a kind of mini co-writing thing.

All-time favorite ship?

Aziraphale/Crowley for life. They’re the only reason I’m writing fics. I enjoy writing Crowley/Lucifer simply because it’s rife with angst.

What a WIP you want to finish, but probably won’t?

I usually only write one thing at a time, with the exception of Queen of Hell, which I wrote outlined all three parts at the same time.

What are your writing strengths?

I’ve been told recently that I’m great at presenting the mental effect a toxic relationship has on someone without it devolving into torture porn. That means a lot, because I’ve tried handling it with fineness. I’ve also been asked if I was Neil Gaiman because I made someone hate God and feel for Satan. 😆

What are your writing weaknesses?

I feel like my smut could be better. Honestly, don’t get me started on my weaknesses or I won’t stop.

Thoughts on dialog in another language.

Cool! I’m not confident enough to do it myself, but big props to those who have.

First fandom you wrote for:

As a kid, I think I wrote X Files fan fics during study hall, but never posted anywhere. Mostly about John Doggett dying and Mulder coming back. 🙃

Favorite fics you’ve written:

Even though I don’t normally read human AU, I’m really enjoying writing Why Does the Ortolan Sing? because of the depth to the story itself. I adore my Crowley in the Queen of Hell series and the dynamic between Lucifer and Aziraphale. I want to write them again, but I don’t have a story yet.

I haven’t re-read it for a while, but I was really proud of The Last Dance. It’s also the only fic I’ve written that I’ve seen recommended to others, which is an honor.

I have no one to tag, because everyone I know has probably already been tagged. 😅

[sophiesbookishthings]

July Reads

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

I read this like 2 days before the allegations against Neil Gaiman came out 🫤. And since now it feels too weird to talk too much about anything regarding him right now, I'm not gonna fully review this book. I considered not putting this here at all, but I want an honest chronicle of the books I've read. And I feel like this little non-review isnt gonna cause anyone to go read his books or support him in any way. So, I will just say that I did enjoy this book, and it's one of my favorites I've read from him, but I'll leave it at that.

5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Pale Dreamer by Samantha Shannon

This is a little prequel novella to The Bone Season. I enjoyed seeing the dynamic of Paige and her seven dials gang before she gets thrown into the whole main plot of the series. It also gives a bit of interesting insight into why she and the other 6 act the way they do in The Bone Season.

4/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Bone Season (author's preferred text) by Samantha Shannon

This is a really interesting dystopian book. This is the first book in a seven book series and I'm intrigued to see where it goes. The main character Paige has really interesting psychic powers that I think are going to get really badass as the series goes on. There's also the rephaim and I really want to know more about their whole thing. Can't wait to keep reading these. I went and got the authors preferred text editions when they came out cause Samantha Shannon is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.

4/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

I got an absolutely gorgeous edition of this book from litjoy, and I think I read it like a day or two after I got it in the mail. I remember watching the movie when I was a kid, but I'd never read the book. Sometimes, it's better to watch the movie first, I think. Because I liked the movie, but it's not a lot like the book, and had I known that I probably would've liked the movie less. Anyway! I loved the love story in this book. Ella and Char match each other’s energy and quirkiness so perfectly. And the fantasy element of the book is really cool. There's centaurs, fairies, giants, and elves, and the way they were done felt like an old fairy tale, which I feel like doesn't get done too much anymore.

5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

I'm going to do a single review for these two novellas because I basically read them as one continuous book and I don't know how well I can deferentiate between the events that occur in each one. This book is very philosophical but also very cozy and sweet. There were some ideas and quotes in these two books that I will probably be thinking about for a long time. The friendship between the main characters (a tea monk and a robot) was incredibly well done and I really liked both of them. These books ultimately hold such kindness at their heart and I think we need more of that. I highly recommend these books.

5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Secrets of Blackthorn Hall by Cassandra Clare

I read this before when it was being released on tumblr but I received the Kickstarter hardback edition and it's absolutely gorgeous. Shadowhunters is always a comfort series to me, especially anything involving the Blackthorns and Malec.

4/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson

As per the Stormlight Archive, so much happened in this book, dear lord... So much happened in the last like 300ish pages alone (which i guess is the length of a normal book). This is also the longest book I've ever read, so that's fun. For a lot of this book, I was really thinking that Kaladin/Shallan/Adolin all have two hands, and Sanderson should stop being a coward lol. But anyway... I loved reading from the perspective of bridge 4 through the book and seeing what they're doing outside of kaladin. I need to know more about like all of the singers because I've been lowkey rooting for them since the first book. Which is really a testament to Sanderson's writing because I could tell that they really weren't the bad guys, and that there was something deeper going on, and some of that was revealed in this book.

5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Chlorine by Jade Song

I didn't love this book. I think it was the fact I really didn't like a single one of the characters and there was very little dialog to the point it almost felt just like stating of events and the narrators (usually all negative) feelings about the events and the people involved. I will give it that it had the first scene I've ever read to make me actually physically uncomfortable. It was gay but in a very messy pining way that never really felt like it went anywhere. I think that there are people that would really like this book cause it did have potential, but it just didn't worj for me. I will admit I have been thinking about it a lot, though, so there's that anyway.

3/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I haven't watched the Amazon series of this, and I'm mad that they changed the songs for it from the ones in the book. I wanted to listen to those ☹️. I feel like I shouldn't like that it was so obviously based on Fleetwood Mac, but I kinda did. I've always found their whole extremely messy deal fascinating, and this was basically the fictional version of that.

5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

This was really interesting to read after having read the whole lotr trilogy first. This reads like a children's book (because it is) which was a bit surprising because of the much different tone I was expecting after lotr and the Hobbit movies. Also, it basically says the elves are fae. It refers to the Undying Lands as Faerie. Why do people not talk about that more??? It makes so much sense. They act like fae. They're whole vibe and lore is so fae like. It makes sense. Regular elves are little guys! Tolkien elves are fae! Anyway, lol, I really liked this book. I do think I liked lotr more just cause I love books/series that are lore heavy and also Samwise Gamgee.

5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[bellinitini]

tag nine (9) people you’d like to know better.

thanus for the tag @hastyhobbit <3

last song: spotify is telling me it was i wish - tom misch, which i have no recollection of listening to so i can only assume i was listening to a random mix while cooking and it came on, but i do like his songs so he can stay

currently reading: anthony bourdain's kitchen confidential (loving, very unlike anything id normally read, very informative) and neil gaiman's norse mythology which i have enjoyed but for some reason im losing interest the closer i get to the end </3

currently watching: top boy (started with summerhouse ofc) which is unreal and i wish more people were obsessed with it, and the wire which im still finding my feet with. also im watching the vampire diaries in spanish lmao

current obsession: god... im on such a cooking kick all i think about is what to cook and how to cook better and ways to improve. its quite literally taken over my life... all i do is post pictures and videos of my cooking and then show them to everyone who will let me, so im sure people are getting sick of it LMAO also absolutely cannot get enough of top boy rn. find myself wanting to sit and watch it all in one go (but im being so brave and pacing myself)

no pressure tag: @drabbles-mc @t0maru @nishinoya-me @when-did-this-become-difficult @hausofmamadas @uldren-sov pretend i tagged 3 more people etc etc

[tallerthantale]

ppl don't tag random posts with neil gaiman's name, that tag should be reserved for his sexual abuse of 5+ women

As I commented on the top of the post, you might want to jump to the end note. It was not a random post. But I'll copy the end note here for more efficient visibility.

Due to a series of unfortunate events (or two), there was a considerable delay between the bulk of my "What does Aziraphale Actually Believe" series and the last instalment. While I initially felt very negatively about that, it also presented a particular opportunity, as I found myself reviewing the final draft details of The Metatron's manipulation tactics and how they messed with Aziraphale's mind at the same time as I was following the allegations against Neil Gaimen.

As things currently stand I find the allegations against Neil Gaimen very credible and very damning. Information is still coming out, but the odds of something being reviled that would change the gist of my opinion are very unlikely. I don't consider that to be cause to stop engaging with the fandom and analyzing the story. A lot of people who take that position frame it as separating the art from the artist. That is not the framing I use.

Typically I try to keep considerable distance between myself and anything that looks like psychoanalysing public figures. This because of a psychology ethics rule that I take on a broad interpretation of. The gist of it is to not form professional opinions about the psychology of specific people based on their public statements / works. Because what follows is skirting the edges of the spirit of those rules, I want to emphasise that it is my personal opinion, and I am coming at it more from literary analysis than any kind of Sherlockian attempt at deductive reasoning about the workings of a particular person's mind.

The narrative arc of Aziraphale's religious trauma, the way it plays out, the way his opinions bend and reform, the way he gaslights himself in the presence of The Metatron, the way The Metatron wields his power imbalance with a friendly disposition, the way the threats that are never framed as a threat mess with Aziraphale's mind, the way he convinces himself to be happy about what he is being forced into, the way his mind flips back and fourth based on the pressures of the people around him, the particular ways he is vulnerable to being subtly manipulated into appearing complicit in his own exploitation, the detail in how that plays out, these things were all written very well.

Or I should say, they were written very accurately.

The motivation I had to write the "What does Aziraphale Actually Believe" series was that a lot of the ways those features of exploitation were accurately depicted weren't picked up on by the general audience. Because they rang so true to life to me, but were not followed by so many, I sought to explain my understanding of Aziraphale's behaviour to people who weren't sure what to make of it. These mechanisms are often very counter intuitive, not understanding them is pretty normal, and the Final 15 stood out to me as having been written with a very unusually high level of understanding of how exploitative power dynamics operate in real life.

Which is to say…

If the author of Aziraphale's Season 2 narrative arc came to me, and told me that he just didn't realize how power disparities impact people, that he was trying his best and he just didn't understand, I would tell him to go fuck himself with a rake. I can get behind wanting more to be investigated, wanting more information to be corroborated, wanting to see the actual screenshots and emails. I have respect for people who still want more documentation. What I want to push back against is arguments from people who believe the conduct happened, but either think that it wasn't a big deal, that Gaimen could not have been expected to know better, or that he made an unfortunate mistake. Someone that oblivious would not have been able to write the story of Season 2. Someone getting called out for their abuse of power absolutely would claim they didn't know any better as an excuse, it's the most obvious excuse to make.

People who abuse power knowingly are often still able to create a pocket fantasy universe, conjuring sections of time during which they can believe their own lies. They can sit better with themselves and their own actions that way. That isn't the same as not knowing better, it is the most willful of all willful ignorance, and it can flip on and off like a switch. I haven't read Sandman, but the people who have may be able to say if it seems like the work was written by a person who understands that people can create their own pocket realities to live in, and jump into and out of.

One of the common things expressed by those coming forward is that they want people to know that they are absolutely confident Gaimen understood what he was doing. There was a moment in the "Am I Broken" podcast where the survivor made that point, and the host either didn't process what they were being told or dismissed it at the speed of light, pivoting to hoping this would be a learning opportunity for other clumsy people in power who are probably making the same mistakes. It was a very frustrating moment.

I understand it is confusing that the people who engage in serial predatory behavior can rationalize themselves into their fantasy narrative of events while simultaneously engaging in an intentional strategy. But it is what people do. Getting to believe they aren't doing the very thing they planed to do is part of the strategy, and part of how they are able to gaslight people so effectively. The answer to "do serial predators believe they are innocent or do they do it as a honed deliberate tactic?" is yes. Knowing that is key to spotting these patterns in real life.