#do not harass Neil Gaiman

[stepheniemeyer]

Hello Mrs. Meyer,

Neil Gaiman won’t answer, but will you please tell us your thoughts on Goncharov?

Hello!

Goncharov is one of my dads favorite movies and he showed me when I was maybe a bit too young. But I do love it!

I’ve spoken extensively about the way that everything from literary classics like Wuthering Heights to music like My Chemical Romance inspired my work. However, I’ve always shied away from publicly talking about Goncharov because it means so much to me, but some of the themes in The Twilight Saga — especially the bits set in Volterra in New Moon with the clock tower — were loosely inspired by Goncharov. Scorsese is a genius and I hope that when you go back and look at The Twilight Saga you can see the little Easter eggs and various ways I’ve been inspired by that masterpiece.

[shhhhimwatchingthis]

theres gonna be something that takes this whole goncharov thing too far and absolutly kill it and at the speed in which things are happening it'll probably be a day or two at most

as a reminder, this stops being funny when you force/harass people about it. stop bothering Neil gaiman. stop editing the Wikipedia and making life hell for their team. tag your posts unreality and don't push the "oh its real" angel too far, the whole fun is everyone knows it isn't

we got like 48 hours by my guess, someone's gonna screw this up, I guess just try not to be that person, don't take a fun joke too far

[captainjonnitkessler]

“Haha isn’t it funny that Neil Gaiman is the only celebrity we haven’t run off this site?” Actually no, it isn’t funny that tumblr has repeatedly launched harassment campaigns against every vaguely popular person who dared to be accessible and no, we didn’t “decide to let Neil stay”, he’s received a metric shitton of harassment he just refuses to be bullied off of social media by a bunch of teenagers with nothing better to do than to be shitty to people online just because they’re there

[spacelazarwolf]

1. The source that person has for Neil Gaiman being a Zionist is a tweet from 2015. Not a good source of his current opinions imo. 2. This person has accused Gaiman of sending his fans after them for… reblogging a post in which she accuses him of being something he doesn’t consider himself. He is known to respond to posts about him. Replying to a direct mention of his name on a public platform is not “sending your hordes of fans” after someone

right like this is literally the neil gaiman responds to people website why is she shocked that neil gaiman responded to her making an incredibly serious accusation that could invite antisemitic harassment. also the “his wife performed in israel” do u all fucking know what the word zionist means.

[fandomtrumpshate]

Please don't break containment

Yes, we saw! Neil Gaiman posted about us!

That is going to make a LOT more people on Tumblr aware of the auction. The prospect of reaching a wider swath of fandom is great, and we appreciate the good intentions in asking Mr. Gaiman to boost us.

However.

That's on Tumblr. People following Neil Gaiman on Tumblr. Which is going to be mostly fandom people to start with.

Please do not contact celebrities or media creators about FTH on Twitter/X or any other social media.

Why? Don't we want all the publicity we can get?

Well, within fandom spaces, yes. The problem is that if we get too much attention outside of fandom spaces, that's going to attract trolls. People who think it's hilarious that anyone writes fic in the first place, people who look at some of our listings for explicit content and pass judgment, possibly people who are bigoted and just look at the fact that we have so many people offering queer ships and pass judgment.

That could result in abuse of our system and harassment of our creators and mods.

So please, please. Keep your FTH love within fandom spaces. Yes, there are fandom communities on other social media - that's why we have Twitter and Bluesky accounts! But there are also comparatively more non-fandom communities in those spaces as well, and a tweet that gets a celebrity's attention can spread so, so quickly to people whose attention we'd rather not have.

We super appreciate Mr. Gaiman's support for the amazing non-profits we feature, who are doing great work! And thank you to the greater FTH community for caring so passionately about our causes.

But our main priority — yes, even more important to us than raising money for good causes — is connecting and supporting the folks who are already participating. That’s all of you who are already here, and the fandom friends whom you recruit. And when someone very famous starts boosting us, there is the real potential for the scope of the auction to expand well beyond that circle of care very quickly.

[scottishmushroom]

I truly love being a part of a fandom, really I do. The sense of community and knowing you’re in a group with likeminded individuals is so overwhelmingly joyful, especially ones that are so full of queer people (such as GO and OFMD).

With that being said, the level of entitlement I’ve come across since immersing myself in both the Good Omens fandom, as well as the OFMD fandom, is alarming. It’s a small number of people within the fandoms, but it bleeds over into the community as a whole, and does more damage than good.

With Good Omens, I’ve seen it in the form of demanding answers from Neil Gaiman. Posting on creators social media accounts pressing them for information about the exit of Douglas McKinnon from the show.

With OFMD, the same thing is happening over the death of Izzy Hands. This uproar and outrage over a single (implicitly suggested) queer character and the condemnation of the show’s creators is unacceptable.

Creators, artists, writers, do not owe us anything. Yes, these shows mean a great deal to us. Yes, we’ve invested a lot of our emotional energy into loving these stories, into these characters. Yes, we want to know what’s going on behind the scenes. But that doesn’t mean we have a right to this information, nor do we have the right to harass or threaten.

Love your fandom, but don’t get lost in it.

And remember, be kind to each other.

[fdelopera]

Hey Gentiles!

I think some of you really need to know what antisemitic language and Jew-hatred looks like online.

I've been seeing way too many people here on Tumblr (some of them people I used to follow) posting antisemitic, Nazi rhetoric celebrating and trying to justify the murders of Jewish civilians.

This Jew-hatred ONLY EMBOLDENS NAZIS AND WHITE SUPREMACISTS TO ATTACK JEWS. It does NOT help the Palestinian people.

Now, I am about to say some things that will be hard for you to hear, but I need you to listen.

Here's some of the Nazi rhetoric that I've been seeing on my dash:

When you say shit like this: "Most Israelis secretly support the Israeli government."

What you are REALLY saying is this: "ALL JEWS secretly support the Israeli government." (Just like this idiot accused Neil Gaiman of today.)

And you are emboldening Nazis, who think this: "All Jews are part of a secret international conspiracy to take over the world."

YOU ARE SUPPORTING NAZIS.

When you say shit like this: "What Hamas did was brutal but justified."

What you are REALLY saying is this: "What Hamas did was brutal but justified WHEN THEY TORTURED AND MURDERED JEWISH CIVILIANS."

And you are emboldening Nazis, who think this: "I think it is brutal but justified to torture and murder Jews."

YOU ARE SUPPORTING NAZIS.

When you you say shit like this: "Those Israelis got what they deserved."

What you are REALLY saying is this: "THOSE JEWS got what they deserved."

And you are emboldening Nazis, who think this: "I think we should kill the Jews. That's what they deserve."

YOU ARE SUPPORTING NAZIS.

When you say shit like this: "This is just what decolonization looks like."

What you are REALLY saying is this: "MURDERING JEWS is what decolonization looks like."

And you are emboldening Nazis, who think this: "I think that Jews in Israel, the US, and everywhere around the world need to be rounded up and exterminated."

YOU ARE SUPPORTING NAZIS.

I shouldn't have to fucking spell this out for some of you, but apparently you need to hear it:

The solution to this conflict is NOT mass murdering Jews! The solution to this conflict is NOT another Holocaust!

To make this even more crystal clear:

1. You are spewing Nazi ideology, and you are MAKING IT EASIER FOR NAZIS TO ATTACK JEWISH PEOPLE. Your words are putting Jews around the world in danger.

2. It should NOT be hard to condemn a group that spouts literal Nazi ideology, murders Jewish people, and wants to murder MORE Jewish people!

3. It doesn't fucking matter if it is Nazis or Hamas, antisemitism is antisemitism, and an attack on Jewish civilians is an attack on Jewish civilians. When you post Nazi rhetoric, all you are doing is emboldening Nazis and white supremacists, and making your Jewish followers feel afraid of you.

4. And if you cannot bring yourself to condemn Jew-hatred, you will have it on YOUR conscience the next time a Nazi attacks a synagogue and murders Jewish people. If you spread antisemitism, that blood will be on YOUR hands.

So...

If you are a gentile, and you see other gentiles repeating these kinds of white supremacist dogwhistles about Jewish people, here's how you can help:

1. MOST IMPORTANTLY: Help people direct their focus away from making antisemitic statements and harassing Jews, and towards helping Palestinians.

Actions that people can take right now are contributing to verified charities and relief organizations that help the people of Gaza. Some organizations that are verified by CharityNavigator.org and CharityWatch.org are:

Anera (92% rating on Charity Navigator)

Palestine Children's Relief Fund (97% rating on Charity Navigator)

Doctors Without Borders (98% rating on Charity Navigator)

2. Call that shit out. Tell people that they're being antisemitic, and explain that Jew-hatred is dangerous to Jewish people. Antisemitism gets Jews attacked and it gets Jews killed. In the US, many synagogues require round the clock security to protect against white supremacists who want to murder Jews. In Pittsburgh, my old home town, a group of Nazis from north of the city planned the murder of Jewish congregants at Tree of Life Synagogue, and so far only one of them (the gunman) has been arrested and convicted of the murders. The others are still at large.

3. Explain to them that it is antisemitic to celebrate someone's death *because* they're Jewish. ALSO, it is antisemitic to blame a random Jewish person for the actions of ANY government, whether that be the Israeli Government or the US Government.

4. Explain to people that they're not going to solve this conflict by posting antisemitic statements and memes online. All they will do is alienate the Jewish people in their lives and make those Jews feel scared and unsafe. And they will contribute to this current wave of antisemitism.

Once again: Antisemitic hatred doesn't help Palestinians. All it does is put Jewish people around the world in danger.

[ineffable-attached-birdbrains]

Remember folks when season two drops don't harass Neil Gaiman about:

If relationships aren't shown exactly a specific way and scream about Queer baiting.

Especially Crowley and Aziraphale... I remember... I was there...

Him reading fanfics written about Good Omens, he's been very clear many times that's a no no for him

And God forbid don't be putting in your fics "Hey lol, please link to Neil,maybe can get him to read it 🥺 if enough folks do! 😱🫣 LOL"

I've seen it, I've never clicked off a fic so fast before in my life.

Probably a bunch of other stuff I'll remember later I'll add

I was here for season one, there are things I remember and many lurking under the surface

Not just Neil but just don't be harassing anyone and just be cool folks

[locuas642]

I am beating a dead horse I know. but I thought of something else about James Somerton.

Because it recently came to my attention that, right around when the video that destroyed his career came out, Somerton had been fishing for Neil Gaiman to like his Good Omens video.

Now, this in an of itself is nothing weird. youtubers fish for people to share their stuff all the time, sometimes it is reasonable, other times it is rude. and other times is like "Please dont force creators to interact with you". but it is nothing weird or uncommon for what is Youtubers.

Neil Gaiman being associated with Queer content is also nothing weird. The guy was the "Thor god of Lesbians" before Thor was a thing. He is such an ally there is a whole section of the community ready to explain to people the context of Wanda in the Sandman comic. So Somerton trying (excuse the expression) "to get Gaiman-Senpai to notice him" (Yes, go ahead shoot me i deserve it) is also not weird.

but I cant help but see it as part of a certain pattern.

Because we all saw the video, and how Hbomberguy points out the inherent misogyny in a lot of Somerton's views and how he erase people's gender and orientation in order to shit on women (and how that also ties him to transphobia, biphobia, and a lot of other things). And also how he will dismiss criticisms by claiming it is white straight women harassing him.

Except between that video and Todd in the shadows, I did find one particular instance of him talking positively of a woman. Jo Rowling. A Cis Straight Woman who nowadays is defined by the transphobia she constantly tries to rules-lawyer deny she ever expressed.

Obviously, the video wasnt about him Defending Rowling, but it was a weird video in which he tried to claim Rowling was more progressive than she actually was, at one point even claiming when the books were written she was pro-trans folk. Which is a lie. There was this need of him trying to sell Rowling as this tragic figure, this person who changed for the worse. And this was from the guy who was quick to dismiss the intentions of any woman or GNC person.

And then I remembered his weird claims about Bob Iger. This... honestly revisionism of the fight of Gay Marriage (the thing he also dismisses in importance in a different video) as Iger pressuring Obama into making it law among other things that tried to elevate Iger, a Cis Straight Man, into an important role in queer history.

And then there is the "Stupid Sexy Nazi" stuff I wont even go into detail.

My point is, there was this weird trend in his videos that I noticed. That he would rather elevate straight and their participation in queer history at the same time he dismissed plenty of non-cis gay men. Sometimes even doing revisionism to describe a version of history that did not happen, but which weirdly feels like the version of history he would want.

And again, Neil Gaiman is an ally and there is nothing weird in and of itself for him to want Gaiman to like his stuff. But when taken into context with everything else, both his antagonism with actual queer people, and his elevation of non-queer people, I feel that says something.

[wordsinhaled]

for the love of... i don’t even know what to invoke??? don’t send neil gaiman asks about ships and don’t drag him into fandom purity culture bullshit oh my god

HE DOESN’T WANT TO BE INVOLVED IN FANDOM why is that so hard for people to understand???

listen neil gaiman is a queer ally but that doesn’t mean he signed up to be the fucking arbiter of whether or not you are allowed to ship dream and the corinthian, or any other characters, for that matter

the actual truth is if you want to you can and absolutely no one should stop you, least of all the author himself, who already gives us not only loads of canon queer representation but also full carte blanche to interpret his work any way we see fit and leave him out of it (as is his right)

if you lack the contextual comprehension to understand that dream’s creations are only his metaphorical children, the endless are siblings but are probably only loosely related (because they’re all personifications of concepts after all), and also people are allowed to have kinks without personally harming you, then like... perhaps figure all of that out before you harass shippers to the point where they feel the need to go to authors for validation

and on top of that the same people who are purportedly so concerned with stuff like boundaries and barriers and comfort and whatever are making some fans feel so needlessly harassed that they in turn cross an author’s very reasonable boundary of wanting to be minimally involved in the interpretation of his own work

on top of all of that it is wild to me that the queer community has become so overtaken with this moralizing rhetoric that neil, of all people, is now being called on to enforce purity culture by members of our own family??? i am not calling him flawless by any means but this is the same neil gaiman who has been under fire since the literal 1980s from right-wing groups that felt that the sandman was too queer or too radical or too generally threatening to the conservative status quo, yet he still stood fast to his creative vision and to including representation of our community in the comics

like. the same neil who wrote “death talks about life” and was working to normalize and destigmatize queerness before some of the folks imposing purity culture on his works were even born???

it’s just like... abundantly clear from some of this Discourse that some of the folks putting forth this vitriol toward shippers and now unnecessarily extending the discussion to him do not have an understanding of our history. these are the same people who try to tell people the labels they’ve been using for themselves for 20, 30, 40 years are wrong or offensive, who try to isolate groups within the community and create barriers between queer elders and queer youth because of perceived predatoriness that simply isn’t there. and i wish these folks would gain a little understanding of the context, touch some grass, meet some queer folks out in the world and stop acting like this

[feathered-serpents]

Three days till Good Omens 2! Here’s a throwback to the wildest exclusionist arguments I’ve seen over the years

- Neil Gaiman saying Aziraphale and Crowley are not cis men in the way humanity would define it so he wouldn’t describe them as gay men but you do you and someone deciding that meant he hated any and all interpretations of them as gay men and was in your walls right now if you liked that idea

- The person who said Crowley presenting as female during the crucifixion was bad because he presented as a male other times and you were basically saying that a man wearing women’s clothing once in his life makes him No Longer A Man (I know that’s confusing I SWEAR that’s how it was worded)

- Artists who occasionally drew (usually Crowley but sometimes Aziraphale) as female presenting alongside a masculine presenting Aziraphale/Crowley and then receiving angry anons that this was homophonic because if Aziraphale or Crowley presented as female the other would not love them anymore

- NSFW artists being harassed for drawing the duo with different genitals between pieces because this was somehow fetishizing trans people (note: these artists were usually trans)

- Aces who liked to imagine Aziraphale and Crowley didn’t have sex or didn’t have bodily sex but might’ve had spiritual intimacy of some sort being told they were homophobic and against gay men having sex

- This isn’t an exclusionist argument but I’m throwing the people fighting to the DEATH over top/bottom discourse in here at the end because seriously what was up with that

I cannot wait for season 2. Also I am drinking straight everclear out of a porcelain teacup as we speak

[magicalmanhattanproject]

Quick PSA on Fanfic Etiquette

Since it’s apparently not common knowledge that we do not tell creators about our fics, it’s probably worth a brief explanation as to why. 

1) Legal concerns. This is less of a concern in MCYT fandoms but this why you can’t send your fanfic to, for example, Neil Gaiman. If he reads your fanfic and then publishes something with a similar premise, you now have grounds to sue him for plagiarism. Even if he had the idea before he read your fic, he can’t prove that, so he would have to scrap that idea. It’s better for him to just return all fanfics sent to him without reading them to cover his own ass. 

2) Fanfics are just more intimate and weird to engage with than fanart for the person they’re about. A picture of Doc standing there looking cool doesn’t assume anything about Doc’s inner world or thought processes. Fanfics may put characters in stressful situations that people might not want to ponder how they, personally, might actually react to. It might also be weird or uncomfortable if they’re wildly out of character to see themselves profoundly misunderstood.

 Now, it might not be. Doc may not mind people assuming things about his inner world or thought processes or those of his character. But we shouldn’t assume automatically that everyone would be. This is doubly true in a fandom where a lot of characters have a lot of self inserty elements to them. 

3) Protecting fanfic authors from mockery and harassment. Putting our work on a larger platform, especially a platform of people who don’t engage with the media in the same way that we do, is going to open us up to scrutiny that we don’t want. Someone who watches Etho just to see what kind of redstone contraptions he comes up with is not gonna understand why we’re writing elaborate tales of him murdering a bunch of people in revenger for killing his sorta-husband Bdubs. That doesn’t mean either way of engaging wiht the content is wrong, it just means that they don’t do well when put right next to each other unexpectedly.

So let us have our own weird little corner of the internet to write our fics in. If creators want to see it, they know how to find it. It absolutely sucks that we can’t share the hard work we do with the people that inspired us to do it, but that doens’t make our work less valuable to the people we do get to share it with.

[callmearcturus]

what do you mean by TC is a black box? what does that mean?

/pops gum loudly.

Sure, I've been avoiding this landmine a while lemme shove my foot onto it.

TC doesn't do serious interviews. He barely does press. everything out of him is a soundbite, and that's obviously a very deliberate choice on his part that probably has a few motives behind it. He consciously, actively avoids sharing anything beyond his enthusiasm for cinema and his work.

As someone who clearly has found a Problematic Fave in McQuarrie-era Cruise, I have thought about all that a lot.

One. I think that TC had to work consistently and deliberately to rehab his image after everything, and I think he's damn careful not to endanger the tentative equilibrium he's managed to build over literally about twenty fucking years.

Two. I'm old enough to remember Tom Cruise Crazy era, and one of the things that's... interesting to me with the maturity and hindsight of sitting here in 2023 is that, yes, a lot of TC's actions and associations were concerning back in that period, back when he was in the news. But the world didn't react with concern. The world, broadly speaking, called him a fag and a freak in a way that I hope we wouldn't today. I hope that "hey this huge star is part of a cult and is acting erratically" would cause even superficial concern today and not... what it did back then. Because I def remember songs and memes about that shit, and my family made jokes about him being a lunatic. Classmates talked about him being a closet case. It's what everyone did. I didn't realize that was fucked up for a long time.

I do genuinely wonder what TC's relationship with his audience and with the media would be if there was literally an ounce of compassion in the coverage about him. But we'll never know.

Three. TC has been literally world famous since 1983. Forty years. I....... literally cannot fathom that. What that does to someone. The very idea of it hits me with existential terror.

Four. I don't know anything about his life today. I don't really want to know because I've always been of the opinion that... I don't want to know shit about celebrities major or minor. I don't need to know, and I think it's weird that we accept that people must forfeit their privacy for even minuscule fame.

(The disgusting hounding and harassment of Jonny Sims, writer of The Magnus Archives, comes to mind. This is why I don't follow anyone like Neil Gaiman on Tumblr either, it feels invasive to me personally.)

Like, I know this cuts both ways. I am relieved when a famous person is a cool person. But also I would rather know nothing about them, because that inherent demand that they present their self for scrutiny and entertainment seems like bullshit to me. I don't think any of us are entitled to that. I think the fact so many entertainment industries demand that is repulsive and I wish that was a bell that could be unrung.

Point is: I don't know shit about TC's personal life. My genuine hope is that in this part of his life, as he's surrounded himself with people who seem passionate and supportive, i hope he's found his way out of the turmoil of the CoS (or is in the process of doing so). But while that is my hope, I don't think the details are any of my fucking business. And frankly, I think its obvious that he agrees.

Hence, he is a black box. Which I respect, as I'm a big fan of boundaries.

[miraclesabound]

Faithful to the End

Summary: Morpheus’s wife has a nightmare - or more accurately, a Nightmare tries to have her.

Pairing(s): Morpheus/F!Reader, one-sided Corinthian/F!Reader

Notes: Set post-Season 1. I’m using the show’s continuity, along with Neil Gaiman’s statement that the version of the Corinthian in the show is pansexual. Also available at AO3.

Warnings: Sexual harassment, unwanted kissing, threat of sexual assault, nightmares, suggestions of smut. Reader is never in any true danger, but she doesn’t know that at first.

Tag List - @writeforfandoms, @insomniamamma, @darklingveracruz, @morpheus-helm, @bowieandqueen11, @mylifeisactuallyamess​, @whovianayesha​, @blueeyesatnight​​

“Beautiful weather, isn’t it?” your driver asks. “You made the right decision asking for the convertible today, Your Grace.”

You smile, your eyes half-closed against the sun. “I thought so too,” you say. “Thank you, Corinthian.”

“Not at all,” the blond Nightmare says. If he’s squinting as well, you can’t tell – he’s wearing his usual black sunglasses. “Now, where did you want to go?”

“Hmmm…OH!” You sit up higher in your passenger seat. “Over there!” You’ve been driving through rolling hills, and on the next ridge, you see a large tree. “That’s perfect!”

“You got it.” When he’s close enough, the Corinthian drives the car under the tree’s shade. Cutting the engine, he steps out and around, opening your door and offering his hand. You smile and take it, using the extra support to stand up.

Getting a closer look at the tree, you’re glad you stopped. There are blossoms here that you’ve never seen before in the Dreaming, and they glitter like spun sugar. “Oh, they’re wonderful!” you say, and start to walk forward to the tree.

However, you’re stopped by the Corinthian’s hand - it’s still gripping yours tightly. Looking back, you ask him, “Is something wrong?” To your shock and horror, he turns your hand over, bringing it to his lips and kissing the palm.

“What are you doing!?” you shriek, yanking yourself free from him. “Are you trying to enrage my Morpheus?”

“No, my queen – if I wanted to do that, this is what I would do.” Before you can stop him, he pulls you into his arms and kisses you deeply. You push and shove at his chest, but he’s too strong. Without breaking his lips from yours, he backs you against the tree, pressing his body against your curves.

For a few awful seconds, he has you at his complete mercy, pinning your hands above your head while he explores your mouth with his own. Just when you’re about to pass out from lack of air, he pulls away, smiling at you. “I’ve wanted to do that for years,” he says.

You can’t break his grip, so instead, you spit, managing to hit his glasses. “You’re going to pay for this insult,” you hiss. “When my husband gets here –”

“Your husband is pathetic,” the Corinthian interrupts, his smile turning even more frightening than usual. “You deserve someone strong, someone who knows what to do for such a fine woman, someone who won’t abandon you for a century.” Letting your wrists go, he removes his sunglasses, exposing those horrific eye-sockets. “Say you’ll be mine, and we’ll rule the Dreaming for ourselves.”

Instead of answering him, you let out a scream. When your shriek pierces the air, a crack in the ground opens, pulling you out of his reach. “You’re the pathetic one here, Corinthian,” you say. The tree he’d used to trap you lowers a branch for you to sit on, and you lean into it as if you’re settling into a hammock. “Do you really think I need your help to shape the Dreaming? I am the Dream King’s bride – this land loves me as much as he does.”

The Corinthian sinks to his knees, and for a moment he looks almost wounded. “My queen, please…I’ve been in love with you for so long – do you truly feel nothing for me?”

Your branch carries you gently across the chasm, and you land on your feet in front of him. “You were my friend until now, and I treasure that – but no. I don’t love you.”

His look of pain becomes a snarl. “Then you’ll pay.” He begins to pull a blade out from within his blazer.

“NO.” Morpheus’ voice echoes all around, and you feel him appear behind you. “This ends now.” He pulls you close and whispers in your ear. “Darling, you need to wake up.” You blink – and the meadow around you disappears, along with the Corinthian himself.

--

When you return to yourself, you recognize your and Morpheus’ shared chambers in the Palace. The two of you are still in bed, and he strokes your cheek to make sure you’re fully awake. “Are you all right?” he asks. “I could sense everything that was happening.”

“I think so…” You scoot in close to him, feeling the solidness of his body. “Is the Corinthian back?”

Morpheus kisses your forehead. “He’s safely in the vault until I can figure out what to do with him,” he promises. “The being you saw is a scrap of memory.”

“A false memory, then,” you say. “He certainly wasn’t in love with me, I would have remembered.”

Your husband has never been especially talkative, but his silence after your statement is concerning. “…he wasn’t, surely?” you ask.

“It…wouldn’t be impossible.” Morpheus tilts your chin up, and you see the concern in his beautiful eyes. “You’re right that the Dreaming looks after you because it’s part of me. But the Corinthian had part of me too. If he inherited any of my affection for you, he would have thought you the queen of his heart.”

You shudder, remembering the mania on the Corinthian’s face in your dream. “And with his tendencies…”

Morpheus strokes a finger down your spine. “That’s half of why I was so angry when he began rampaging among the mortals. You’d been friends with a beast that I had created. How many times had I accidentally put you in danger? And while I was locked up…” He shakes his head. “I worried what would happen if he decided to come back and find you.”

“And now you know,” you tell him. “I would have fought him, even if the Dreaming was weakened.” You’re more awake now, and you kiss the curve of his jaw. “I would never have forgotten who I belong to.”

Morpheus senses your intent, and he kisses you properly. The two of you don’t get out of bed for several hours, not until he reminds you who he belongs to as well.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Title: Good Omens

Author: Neil Gaiman

Rating: 1/5 stars

I picked this book up at the library because I remembered seeing a few positive reviews, but then I saw a bunch of negative reviews, and the implication that these books are somehow the shibboleth by which one may judge one's literary taste (or, indeed, that all right-thinking people must like these books) set me against them. (When I was in high school in the early '00s, for instance, I was harassed and threatened because my taste in books and music didn't conform to my peers' ideas of what people like me are supposed to like. I'm still quite sensitive about it.)

After a bit of procrastination I picked up Good Omens, having heard that it was odd in a good way. As it turned out, it was both good and odd, but it wasn't the kind of odd that I like.

What is it like? Well, it reminded me a bit of Turtle Diary -- that is, it has a great deal of odd detail, all used with an eye towards creating a vivid image. But where Turtle Diary managed this with a deft, artful touch, Good Omens is obsessive. In Turtle Diary you get "Four different forms of religious sign and symbol": the cross, the Star of David, a crescent moon, and a life raft. In Good Omens you get plant symbols and animal symbols and religious symbolism and religious symbolism based on every ancient and forgotten pantheon there ever was, and the name of every seraph and cherub and angel and demon to ever be mentioned in the Bible, and everything else. You get a whole list of band names that look like gibberish, because if there's one thing a demon ought to be named after, it's a band. Needless to say, this casts a long shadow, and every single line, and even every single sentence, is supposed to be not only vivid but also full of meaning and with some sort of cultural reference, even if the reference itself is nonsensical. And often, as in this example, it means that the line will be awfully goofy, no matter what the ostensible subject matter is.

I don't mind when the vivid detail is organized and aiming toward a particular effect, but there are a lot of minor quirks in the book's prose, without any discernible pattern. Sometimes it seems to be going for a style of Victorian dialogue, and then it'll go off on some digression about something that's supposed to be modern or some-or-other, or it'll switch to the conventions of head-hopping in modern fiction (the book's two protagonists, angel and demon, each get "perspective chapters" not just about their own thoughts but their own bodies and feelings), and then it'll jump back to a dialogue with no word-order changes and different sentence structure from the rest of the book, or to a form of prose that is clearly supposed to be a pastiche of classic literature, and then back to modern head-hopping, to make sure that you keep track of who's doing what to whom and what they're saying.

I kept waiting for the effect to reveal itself, and it never did. On the one hand, I can see that Gaiman was trying to do something like Anna Karenina, in which a cast of vivid and realistic characters is put through a sort of symbolic dance in a circus ring of the author's devising. A lot of people like Anna Karenina, and I think this is because Tolstoy gives his characters a lot of interiority and their relationships a lot of psychological weight. Gaiman also does this in one regard, but . . . well, what's the opposite of "psychological weight"? I think it would be "unreliable narrator," and Gaiman doesn't quite give that, but a lot of his characters seem unreliable, both in terms of their self-deception and in terms of his self-deception in painting a picture of them and their interactions. Gaiman has some skills as a writer (for instance, creating a sense of humor without playing for laughs), but those skills simply aren't enough to make him a good writer of the kinds of things that people like about his books.

More vexing, in a sense, than Gaiman's creative approach is his creative attitude. He seems to have no interest in coming up with original ideas about anything, except in the most superficial sense -- as a result, the book feels like a literary junkyard, filled with patches from books and myths and musicals and films and whatever else, unconnected to one another except by the fact that all of them come from the same junkyard.

This might be a lot more acceptable if it didn't run into the problem that one of the book's main characters is a woman who runs a bookshop, and this woman -- the owner of the world's single most well-stocked used bookstore, it seems -- talks in a weirdly specialized way about books that she read and enjoyed when she was 11, but, on the off-chance that her audience includes someone in her same age bracket, has to talk in the sort of generic awe- and wonder-pilled, "cool literature" style you might expect from the social media of a 13 year old who has never encountered anyone who doesn't appreciate literature.

There are two things about this that bothered me, one more than the other. The first is obviously an unnatural over-familiarity with these authors and their works, just as would be the case with the 13 year old in the example I gave. The other is the way Gaiman presents a woman as having read in depth and gotten something from a book in her past, even though she only actually mentions a couple of chapters, the plot of the book in question, and a general atmosphere -- which is more or less how I would talk about those books, if I had to talk about them at all. Oh, and I mentioned earlier the way Gaiman uses pop culture terms to refer to things from the past and the present. The strange thing is that he doesn't show any interest in the actual thing -- like, it's hard to imagine that anyone who actually knew anything about them would have said "Oh, you mean she's reading Colette and Poirot! How very stereotypical and appropriate of a woman!" -- which, I can't stress enough, is how Gaiman mentions these books.

I have no idea why this bothers me as much as it does, or why Gaiman seems to be inviting this kind of questioning in the first place.

[forgiveness-in-the-misery]

People genuinely need to understand this;

Your favorite celebrity or social media person is not your friend, you do not know them personally, they are adults who do not need you to protect and defend and coddle them.

Neil Gaiman is worth millions of dollars, he’s going to be fine. Stop attacking people in honor of some old man you do not know and genuinely making yourselves physically ill over how he’s doing. He’s rich and successful he’s fine.

This isn’t the end of the world.

A billion dollar corporation spliced together a promo video that included two characters kissing, that’s it. Two middle aged men kissed and I am seeing people saying they have been vomiting and having anxiety attacks and crying and are in physical pain over this. I have seen countless people tell anybody who doesn’t take this as seriously as a tragedy to go to Hell and claiming fandom exist solely to coddle and protect each other from bad things.

My fandom experience is mine. My experience enjoying literally any show or film should not include refusing to talk about things or post about things because it might upset some random stranger I don’t even know at all.

If you don’t like seeing literally anything from a show before it comes out then just avoid all promotional content. If you don’t like spoilers, fine, but also like find a way to cope with your own bull shit instead of fucking harassing people who God forbid are fucking happy for a second.

Like shit act like fucking adults.