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Just a reminder that you can and should sail the high seas to watch Sandman season 2. You-know-who does not deserve to profit off that show.

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I can't believe it's been a year since the N*il G*iman allegations came out.

Thank you again to all the brave women who saved who-knows-how-many others by sharing their stories.

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Netflix released Sandman 2 on the one year anniversary of the Tortoise podcast containing the first allegations against Gaiman being released?

That's certainly a very "screw the victims" choice they made there.

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This is the r*pe crisis charity N*il G*iman promised one of his victims he would make a "hefty donation" to and then didn't.

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Arbitration for breaking the NDA but not filing a defamation suit? Am I wrong to read this as a acknowledgment of what was done?

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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.

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TW: SEXUAL ASSAULT AND ABUSE

so apparently Neil Gaiman has tried to use his autism as an excuse to not understand consent and/or power dynamics on a few different occasions and as an autistic woman I just wanna explain how absolutely ridiculous that is. Because first of all, and most obviously, autism does not make people incapable of understanding consent? The things Neil Gaiman is trying to imply with his claims are crazy, and it sets a bad precedent for all autistic people. But more importantly, there are several documented examples of Neil Gaiman understanding both consent and how power dynamics can create toxic relationships. For the consent thing, I would point to the entire arc in Sandman where a struggling writer named Richard Madoc continuously rapes a muse in order to get inspiration for his writing, all while pretending to be a feminist in front of the camera. This article does a good job explaining it. But the point is that essentially Neil Gaiman was clearly able to understand what consent is well before he did any of the horrible things he did to the women he hurt, and chose to do it anyway. As for his understanding of power dynamics, I’d like to point out one particular post on his tumblr blog. Before all the news came out about him I followed him for a couple years, and I distinctly remembered seeing a post that was applicable to this whole situation. After a couple minutes of digging I was able to find it again:

A user asked Neil gaiman for advice on how to court an English professor, and his response was “If this is YOUR English professor, DO NOT ask them out, and even if you must then at the very least wait until they are no longer YOUR English professor”. So if he can understand that trying to date your teacher is bad because there’s an unfair power imbalance there, then I feel like he should have been able to understand that he shouldn’t be having relations with his employees. The two situations are very similar, meaning the logical leap one would have to take in order to understand it should really be more of a logical skip. so yeah, in conclusion autism doesn’t make you incapable of understanding consent and Neil gaiman is a liar for implying that these concepts are beyond him.

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Why Good Omens season 1 has already fulfilled Sir Terry Pratchett's wish

Neil Gaiman said he wouldn't make a sequel to Good Omens

Neil Gaiman at SXSW in Austin, Texas in 2019:

[Gaiman also confirmed the series will only be six episodes, with no intention of trying to go for another season if successful. "The lovely thing about Good Omens is it has a beginning, it has a middle, and it has an end," he said to appreciative applause. "Season 1 of Good Omens is Good Omens. It's brilliant. It finishes. You have six episodes and we're done. We won't try to build in all these things to try to let it continue indefinitely."]

Source: Entertainment Weekly (2019)

2018 - Neil Gaiman on X- Twitter

Tweet link here

Also Neil Gaiman in 2023:

["It won't be confirmed unless enough people watch Season 2 to make Amazon happy...

...But obviously Season 3 is all planned and plotted and, if I get to make it, will take the story and the people in it we care about to a satisfying end."]

What happened?

Were the profits and ratings high enough to create two more seasons out of thin air? At this point, seasons 2 and 3 seem more like a greedy stretching of a beloved story already told in its entirety in the first season.

Has the first season already fulfilled Sir Terry Pratchett's wish?

As read above, Neil Gaiman himself said: "Season 1 of Good Omens is Good Omens."

Gaiman was very opened about how pleased he was with Season 1 and how he made it having Sir Terry Pratchett's wish in mind.

Interview for The Verge (May 30, 2019)

Link : Neil Gaiman had one rule for the Good Omens adaptation: making Terry Pratchett happy

Interviewer: Do you feel pressure from knowing this has to be the definitive best adaptation it could be?

Gaiman: No. All I wanted to do was to make something Terry would have liked. It wasn’t like, “Make the best thing.”...

...Gaiman: The lovely thing about Good Omens [the miniseries] is that it’s still Good Omens. If you loved the book, this is that thing that you loved. And I will make you fall in love even more with Sergeant Shadwell. I will make you fall even more in love with Newt than you thought you could, I hope. It does demonstrate that I do kind of know what I’m talking about, which is a nice thing to know.

...Gaiman: So with Good Omens, I feel like what I got to do was put the thing I made with Terry on the screen and then buttress it. What I added isn’t completely different from the original. It’s not out of left field.

Neil Gaiman on an interview for The Guardian in 2019.

Link: Neil Gaiman: ‘Good Omens feels more apt now than it did 30 years ago’

There are times, he insists, when “you make something you like so much that you don’t really care what anyone else thinks of it.” There’s a clue to this, perhaps, in the show’s final frame, which reads “For Terry”. “He didn’t believe in heaven or hell or anything like that,” Gaiman says, “so there wasn’t even a hope that there was a ghostly Terry around to watch it. He would have been grumpy if there was. But I made it for him.”

Why was Good Omens season 1 so good and you could really feel Sir Terry Pratchett's contributions?

Gaiman himself has already told us the answer:

...Gaiman: So with Good Omens, I feel like what I got to do was put the thing I made with Terry on the screen and then buttress it. What I added isn’t completely different from the original. It’s not out of left field.

Neil Gaiman for The Verge (2019).

There was original material to work with (Good Omens, published in 1990), on which we certainly know that Sir Terry Pratchett himself actively worked from start to finish.

Is there a proper sequel to Good Omens the book on which to base 2 more seasons of the series?

Neil Gaiman says the following on an interview for GQ in 2019.

Link: Neil Gaiman Says No to Adapting His Own Books—Except This Time

...But with this, it was like: Okay. Terry is gone. He wanted me to do this. He wanted me to do it for him. And that gave me a kind of weird impetus. And it meant that I felt very much at liberty to take every conversation that Terry and I had ever had about Good Omens. Not just the book, as written, but everything beyond it. We planned a sequel, never written, so I got to steal the angels from the sequel. I got to steal from every conversation Terry and I had about how we would do this. It felt very personal, and I guess kind of… holy. If that doesn’t sound too ridiculous. But it was a mission.

Two conclusions can be drawn:

1) Informal conversations about the plot of a sequel do not equate to an officially written sequel.

2) Neil Gaiman has already used many of the ideas he and Terry Pratchett had planned for a never-written sequel to Good Omens and those ideas were largely added to and executed in the TV adaptation of Good Omens (2019).

Why keep stretching those ideas if the co-writer is no longer able to actively contribute and help to create a proper sequel?

If Gaiman were the sole creator of Good Omens we'd have a different conversation, but that's not the case. The first season of Good Omens was already a beautiful homage to Good Omens and Sir Terry Pratchett's work on the book.

Did Terry Pratchett write around 75% of Good Omens?

Link for the post here.

Link for the post talking about the video and sharing the video here.

Edit: I wanted to bring this point up to point out Terry Pratchett's important contribution to the making of the book, not to highlight it as an excuse to distance Gaiman from the novel. We will have to accept that he also contributed to the creation of the book.

Sir Terry Pratchett's last wish

2017 - Rob Wilkins on Twitter (X)

Terry Pratchett’s Unpublished Work Crushed by Steamroller

By Sophie Haigney - The New York Times

Terry Pratchett, the well-known British fantasy author, had a wish fulfilled two years after his death: A hard drive containing his unpublished work was destroyed by steamroller.

Mr. Pratchett, a wildly popular fantasy novelist who wrote more than 70 books, including the “Discworld” series, died at 66 in 2015. That year his friend, the writer Neil Gaiman, told The Times of London that Mr. Pratchett had wanted “whatever he was working on at the time of his death to be taken out along with his computers, to be put in the middle of a road and for a steamroller to steamroll over them all.” Mr. Gaiman added at the time that he was glad this hadn’t happened.

Now, though, it has. Mr. Pratchett’s estate manager and close friend, Rob Wilkins, posted a picture of a hard drive and a steamroller on Aug. 25 on an official Twitter account they shared.

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Wilkins wrote that the deed was done.

I have not been able to find the exact reasons why Sir Terry Pratchet wanted his unfinished and unpublished works destroyed, but we can respect his last wish as a way for him to have control over what he felt he was ready to share with the world and what he was not.

Is Good Omens the exception?

With all that has been presented so far, I can only conjecture, but not be sure. I can believe that there was Terry Pratchett's permission and desire to make an adaptation of Good Omens, the original book published in 1990, but to my mind, creating two more seasons of a never-written sequel doesn't fit as part of Terry Pratchett's desire.

He is not among us to actively participate in a sequel and if his last wish was to destroy his unfinished works, I can't believe that he would have wanted to give his approval to something new published under his name and without his supervision.

Sir Terry Pratchett talking about a never-written sequel to Good Omens

“Neil and I thought about a sequel an awful lot initially. We talked about it on tour. And I think it was a big relief to both of us, when one day we looked one another in the eye and said, 'I thought you wanted to do a sequel.'..

Interview for the Magazine Locus. Locusmag archive page

This is me speculating, but I don't think there was real enthusiasm for creating a sequel until Gaiman alone saw profitable potential in the TV adaptation....

Good Omens also belongs to the those who love the story

I think it's okay to still love the story of Good Omens. Personally, I will always be grateful with the story and the characters for giving me confort in troubling times, but I find seasons 2 and 3 as some kind of excuse from Gaiman to keep profiting and benefiting from the story (more now than ever due to the SA allegations*).

Aziraphale and Crowley will always live happily in a lovely cottage as long as we want to. Even before season 2 was announced, many of us had already accepted that. Many artists have imagined lovely endings for our innefable husbands and in my eyes their works won't be any less valuable than whatever Gaiman had planned.

Note:

I don't like talking about Season 3 of GO without mentioning the current SA allegations against Neil Gaiman (Main writer of seasons 2 and 3 and showrunner), so in case you want to know more about the allegations against Neil Gaiman. Here there's a great Round Up link (Podcasts links, transcripts, etc.)

Credits for the Round Up link to Muccamukk. Thanks a lot!

*more thoughts on supporting season 3

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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.

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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.

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https://archive.ph/nbPf3

🤮

@staff Can y'all ban this asshole already? He still has an account on here and there are tons of impressionable users for him to prey on.

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TW: rape, sexual assault, child abuse

https://archive.is/HJtxW

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Reminder that the finale of Good Omens still profits Gaiman. Even if Pratchett’s estate pretends to be self righteous about it they are still using ideas Gaiman wrote for this finale, his name is still embedded in this thing and until the day he dies he will make millions from this finale existing and all merchandise sells.

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There's a new episode of Tortoise describing Scarlett Pavlovich's lawsuit against NG.

You can listen at their website for free (and just for the record, all their episodes have always been freely available on their website and Spotify and I believe apple podcasts, despite the constant early reports that their podcast and therefore the allegations were paywalled).

It's good to hear Scarlett and Caroline talk. As the victims who were reliant on him for housing they have always felt particularly vulnerable.

Interesting to hear Rachel Johnson do another episode though given that Jon Ronson published an interview with her on Substack on 31 January in which she said:

It looks like he’s been canceled, and how do I not feel kind of responsible for that? I've got to say, I’m uncomfortable with #metooing people. Is that all right to say? I don't believe in cancel culture. We all do bad stuff and we all do good stuff and he's done good stuff and he's done bad stuff and he is now regarded as an evil monster. I think the women who accuse him would say he hurt them, but that’s a female-male dynamic that unfortunately happens to be incredibly common.

Ok Rachel.

31 Jan: i feel responsible for him being cancelled 😭

18 Feb: anyway let me tell you all about the lawsuit Scarlett is bringing against him!! 🙃

Also: given the way Edendale Strategies are attempting to drown out the allegations online, I find it EXTREMELY interesting that Jon Ronson is the author of So You've Been Publicly Shamed which, as described by Wikipedia:

".... includes a long section about how people can "hide" their negative Google Search results via legal and creative IT mechanics."

I first heard of this tactic years ago in an episode of Reply All in which the hosts interviewed Jon Ronson and the woman he engineered SEO for.

Anyone else feel like the juxtaposition is interesting? Just me???

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Master: the allegations against Neil Gaiman Ep 7 | The lawsuit

Neil Gaiman now faces a lawsuit in the United States. The first woman to come forward and accuse the best-selling author of sexual assault has filed a complaint against him and his estranged wife, Amanda Palmer. In this episode she explains why she’s taking action. Neil Gaiman denies the allegations and says he has ‘never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.’

Spotify link Length: 28 min

Podcast episode dated February 17, 2025.

Unedited transcript

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To any new Good Omens fans:

5-second version: Neil Gaiman is gross, pirate his work, don't give him money, think twice before being in a room with him if you can avoid it, kgreatthxbye.

Full version: We want to let you know, if you hadn't heard, that series creator Neil Gaiman has been accused of sexual harassment, ab*se, and as*ault, up to and including r*pe, by eight women.

The allegations against him are some of the most horrific we've ever read. They're so disturbing, in fact, that we normally censor his name in our posts because it makes us physically sick to even read it. (Just spelling it out in full here for clarity).

He (*allegedly*) usually selected his victims from among his fans. We want everyone to be armed with this information so you can make an informed decision about whether he is someone you would feel safe interacting with (he has been keeping a low profile since the initial allegations came out, but powerful men accused of this kind of behavior have a pattern of trying to reboot their careers after a couple years have passed) and supporting the work of.

According to Amazon, he is no longer involved with the creation of the Good Omens finale, but unfortunately he will continue to make money from royalties every time someone streams it or Seasons 1 and 2.

It's up to you what to do with this information. Personally, he isn't someone any of us would feel safe being in a room with. We'd also STRONGLY encourage everybody to pirate the finale rather than supporting him (or Amazon, come to think of it).

Best wishes,

The mods

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With the release of Vulture magazine's feature (un-paywalled) expanding on the stories of the women abused by Neil Gaiman who had previously come forward, now more than ever it's important to continue to keep the PR machine from trying to bury the stories.

LINKS

updated transcript of the Tortoise Media podcast to include episodes 5 & 6.

Am I Broken- Survivor Stories Episode 4-2 Complete Unofficial Transcript

Katherine Kendall's Friends of Calliope post about how you can support her and fellow survivors.

Courtnee Fallon Rex's account of ending their friendship with Neil Gaiman

muccamukk's link round-up of Neil Gaiman Assault Allegations

Reddit's r/neilgaimanuncovered forum

Legal filing from 3 February 2025 naming Gaiman and Palmer defendants in a civil lawsuit for the Human Trafficking, Assault, Battery, Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress, Negligence, and Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress against Scarlett Pavlovich.

IMPORTANT REMINDER

Individuals providing testimonies of abuse is evidence.

When people say 'so we are just supposed to take her at her word?' the answer is YES.

If the only reason you take his word over hers is because you want to believe that someone whose work you admire isn't capable of such actions, then this is a reality check. You can never know what is it another person's heart and mind. You cannot judge them solely by their words. You can only truly take their measure by their actions.

Examine your internal biases and ask yourself why would someone come forward and share stories of abuse by someone with significantly more power at great personal risk if they weren't true? They have everything to lose, and yet they came forward anyway to try to prevent Neil Gaiman from harming any other vulnerable women the way that he harmed them.

Only 2-8% of sexual assault allegations are found to be false.

The myth of accusing the innocent of sexual assault as some kind of revenge is exactly that: a myth perpetuated by rape culture that persists because when one cares for or admires the accused, people want it to be true.

That fence that you believe that you are standing on is an invisible line drawn in the sand.

Believe survivors. Amplify their voices. Share their stories. Hold people accountable. Actions have consequences.

THINGS WE CAN DO AS INDIVIDUALS

Repost articles and transcripts as they appear in the trades and the mainstream press, and tag them with the appropriate trigger warnings and content warnings.

Keep amplifying the voices of the survivors, and showing up with compassion and empathy and support for the untold numbers who have yet to come forward.

Keep talking about the allegations of abuse and sexual assault levelled at Neil Gaiman. Do not let it fade into the background, or be drowned out by vigorous promotion of his upcoming works. Boost the signal, particularly to raise awareness across fandoms so fans can do their best to protect themselves from potential abuse in the future.

Make donations to RAINN and The Survivors Trust, and find out what you can do on a local level to support survivors of sexual assault and abuse.

Do not tag fan works such as fanfic, fan art, quotes, gifsets, and meta discussions about Gaiman's work or live-action adaptations of Gaiman's work with #Neil Gaiman so that you are not doing the expensive PR team's work for them by helping to bury the story of Neil Gaiman's abuse of vulnerable women on social media.

Do not bully Neil Gaiman's peers in the industry, friends and family, or actors currently involved in live action adaptations of his work for not immediately making any kind of public statements.

Do not bully fellow fans. Everyone is working through their very complex feelings and relationships with both the text and the man at their own speed. Please give them the space to grieve that loss, but continue to center the stories of the survivors and express sympathy and empathy for all of the survivors who have yet to come forward.

As others have noted, The Tortoise Media Slow News podcast that initially broke the story is run by a group of well-respected journalists, and Ms Johnson is not a full-time member of the staff but was only given a shared byline on the story because one of the survivors contacted her privately which is what kicked off the year long investigation.

Filter out noise such as kink-shaming, anti-BDSM discourse, and other editorial comments and instead focus on the actual words of survivors recounting their experiences.

Remember that despite using the language of BDSM, what the survivors have recounted is in fact examples of coercive control and abuse cloaked in the language of kink. It's very important to note that BDSM nearly always includes extensive negotiation of consent to specific acts and partners check in with one another constantly, establish safe words, and engage in aftercare. That is absolutely not what was described by the survivors thus far.

Sexual assault is not about sex so much as it is about power. In every instance reported thus far, the common thread has been predatory behaviour toward vulnerable women. In more than one case, women who were employed in Neil Gaiman's households and were reliant on him for their housing and livelihood.

Do not guilt trip or shame people who are attempting to separate the art from the artist. allow people to love what they love about the novels, comics, and media adaptations, value the friendships that they have made because of them, and keep the joy that those projects brought them. Do not let Neil Gaiman's behaviour rob generations of fans of the stories that meant so much to them. He has already taken so much from so many; don't help him take more from you or others than he already has.

Do not invite him as a guest speaker to your events, a guest of honour at your conventions, or a guest lecturer at your institutions. without jeopardizing the financial future of your institution or theater, do not book speaking tours, book signings, launch parties, etc. as these events have proved to be a fertile hunting ground and provide ongoing income directly to Neil Gaiman.

If you reblog (and I sincerely hope that you will) please keep the tags intact. The goal is to continue centering the voices of survivors and attempt to limit Neil Gaiman's access to vulnerable women, particularly those in fandom.