i-am-having-a-moment-here

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

AAAAAAAAAAA NEW AZIRASHEEN PIC DROPPED

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

Tl;dr how you can personally make Neil Gaiman lose money (and not be a jerk to others.)

I see a lot of folks upset that NG will financially benefit from residuals and other compensation surrounding his involvement in the adaptation of Sandman and Good Omens (and he will.) But the answer isn’t “rage at the fans who are so emotionally attached to their blorbos because they grieve differently, and then somehow NG will be financially punished.” That’s lower-class/middle-class thinking. NG is too rich and financially diversified to really be hurt by little boycott or a couple of show cancellations (though said cancellations can cause life-changing poverty to the little guys who signed contracts and turned down other opportunities before all of this came out. Boy does NG love women in poverty 🤮)

So if you want to substantially reduce the wealth of someone at NG’s financial level—you need to do it with professional services fees.

Details below the cut:

The firm that NG has apparently engaged for online reputation management (ORM), called edendale, was once paid for their professional testimony in an unrelated slander lawsuit, which was delivered in the form of a report (2) outlining the strategy ORM firms use and (2) just how ludicrously expensive those professional services cost. (Credit to horrornobody77 for digging up the report.) We’re talking hundred of thousands of dollars for a small potatoes case, where NG’s could easily get into the millions for ORM and associated legal fees.

It’s not that long of a read, but to summarize the key action items you can take:

📆 -ORMs wait for the discourse to die down, because active discourse is much more expensive to counter. Wanna cost NG money? Talk about the accusations over time. Set a quarterly calendar event in your phone to remind yourself to post (and otherwise engage on other people’s posts) about the Vulture article. This needs to happens for years, so that NG has to pay for more comprehensive ORM and for longer.

✅-Make discourse that is Google-friendly. Use the words edendale will find concerning (they’re already running fluff pieces with the terms Neil Gaiman Uncovered to try and bury the similarly named subreddit.) If you just post a link without much comment, it’s not gonna be prioritized by search engines. Similarly, if you make a low effort post and then no one else engages with it—it’s not going to make it to the top ten search results. Engage with each other, for heaven’s sake!

🦾-Don’t let the fluff sit unaddressed. If you see random bot posts sharing NG quotes captioning random fantasy art (possibly AI or misattributed /stolen) with the comments turned on? Respond! Make it hard for the bots to understand your comment but easy for humans. “Nice quote! Mega bummer about what NG did, I used to really like him,” is hard for a bot to auto-delete. “Fuck NG,” is practically doing the bot’s autodelete command for it.

✍️ -If/when you post fan works for properties strongly related to Neil Gaiman, leave a lil callout in the author’s notes. Nothing that will get you sued, just a few words like: “I would definitely personally choose to not ever meet Neil Gaiman at a comic con.” Maybe throw in a link to your fav tumblr summary.

Anyway, to the person being paid hundreds or thousands of dollars per hour by Neil Gaiman for professional services—you’re welcome for the extra billable hours 😘

Also Edendale sounds like a law firm in a Good Omens legal AU fic, and I can’t believe it’s real.

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

anyway so if i'd realised that post would get a quarter of the reblogs it's got, i would have written it better. i would have linked to the our own side fundraiser and Katherine Kendall ("claire")'s friends of calliope fundraiser. i would have acknowledged i oversimplified.

i would most have all pointed out that while reblogging here is great (and i've seen more than one reblog from someone who hadn't heard about it at all, so good job tumblr!) the main point is to do the work IRL. to make sure people outside the bubble of tumblr dot com know about it.

I would have said that if you want rid of his books to donate them, so people who want to read can do so without supporting him. i would have said that if you DO want to read his books, don't buy them new or get them from the library; these things benefit him. i might even have suggested putting notes in your fanfic: "I love the show and the characters but the author is a piece of shit and I don't support him and want to make sure everyone knows".

it's got a life of its own now and i'm pretty sure that if i reblogged with this stuff it would still just be the main post that was shared. so i'm writing this, which i'm presuming will get ten or so reblogs, and i'm ok with that but i wish i'd done better yesterday. (but maybe it got so much attention because it didn't contain any of that. who knows)

a lot of the really big accounts haven't reblogged it. i'm really sad about that too.

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

How very depressing that Neil Gaiman had trended not even a tiny bit for demonstrating what a fucking horrific person he is.

As a reminder, he's suing Caroline Wallner, one of his accusers, for breaking her NDA. Not for libel. He's saying she shouldn't have told anyone about it, not that she lied.

He doesn't need the money. He's risking the Streisand effect. He is punishing Caroline, he's trying to intimidate other victims who have signed NDAs to scare them into continued silence.

He is no friend to women, to the LGBTQIA+ community, to anyone quite frankly unless he thinks they are of value to him.

Share the story. Put it on Facebook and bluesky and whatever else you're on. Make it clear what a horrifying person he is. Tell your friends. He's paying Edendale a fortune to try and cover this up. Make this hard for him. Make it cost him money.

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

This is now my new favorite best friend duo

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

Oh, god, I can't believe I only now just realized that Crowley had a license to kill. 😂

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

I just found a DIAMOND from Good Omens BTS photo!!! 💖💖💖🔥🔥🔥

😌

THIS IS SLEEPING CROWLEY UPSIDE DOWN!!!!

Stunt double: Bjorn De Klerk

(it's not David 😄)

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

the director of the Good Omens Finale :)

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

The whole BAFTA 2025 intro with the skit and song :)

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

"…a one off special which will finish the story and tell us where Aziraphale and Crowley are going to spend eternity or not together." 🥺❤

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

im obsessed OBSESSED with adult cosette recognizing eponine. the expression on her face when marius mentions her name and she sees eponine in front of her and then the moment of realization!!! and the way eponine looks at her in acknowledgement of cosette's realisation!!! they know each other, they were children together!!! it's such a small but yet poignant detail god i literally cannot stop thinking about it, thank you lily kerhoas and shan ako for including it in the show!!!

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

How have I never seen this photo before??? 😍

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

There was an interesting thread on Bluesky dissecting Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's relationship

TL:DR - It seems like Gaiman has been exaggerating the level of closeness between them for YEARS

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

if you're aware of the Vulture article on Neil Gaiman, there's not much i can add; if you aren't and you go looking, my only advice is that if you hit a point where you're wondering if you should bail, do so, because the details of his behavior only get more vile as it goes along.

however, one thing i WILL say is to be on the lookout for smear campaigns against the sources and/or the journalist, Lila Shapiro, in the coming weeks and months. i cannot stress enough how brave this article is. if there's one thing more hazardous to your reputation than blowing up a rich and influential serial predator in the entertainment industry, it's making the church of scientology look bad, and she's managed to do both in one stroke. remember Lila Shapiro's name, and be extremely skeptical if it suddenly turns up later this year as the target of some slimy allegation.

[i-am-having-a-moment-here]

I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."

You didn't, loves, you didn't.

We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.

I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"

No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?

Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.

That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.

It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.