#they're not that close thematically but it's interesting to compare and contrast

[vapidlemon]

something something the friend that summer took away something something look only at me something something i want to be possessed by you so bad

i happened to get really into shoujo rei just before i started reading so i did a quick study with them when i was a few chapters in. bc the song wouldn't leave my head

[lancrewizzard]

Please tell me you’re not a gaiman fan because it seems like you have issues with him and goddd me too

Okay this is a complicated question to answer and has got both more and less so in the last couple of weeks. Since there's still information coming out about the sexual assault allegations, I don't want to say too much now and then have to backtrack hugely, but even the very best case scenario makes his behaviour scummy as all hell. And I don't believe it will turn out to have been the best case scenario. So we'll just bundle the whole thing up with "yikes" and move on to things I've had a long enough time to think about and put proper thoughts around.

A month ago I'd have said that he seems like a decent bloke, but seems to have real trouble understanding experiences he can't relate to. The foreword to his short story collection Trigger Warning is a great example of this. He spent a while wittering on about his misgivings about trigger warnings as a concept, then remembered he knew someone with a severe phobia of tentacles and conceded that they had their place. He then proceeded to give a very dumb non-warning which completely failed to mention how something like one in three of the collected stories involved sexual violence. Great job Neil.

I already mentioned in the tags of that previous post my issues with his obvious lies to TV Omens fans who don't know any better. It's just annoying and stupid to lie about something that unimportant, unless it was actually an attempt to get disillusioned Book Omens fans back on side (in which case, wow that failed spectacularly).

And now I realise that everything else is about specific works of his, so I've stuck it under a cut if you don't want to see me bitch about Good Omens adaptational changes changes for the umpteenth time or go on a short heartfelt ramble about what was almost a perfectly crafted short story.

I'll be blunt, I only saw S1 of Good Omens, and while I enjoyed it, it was an incompetent adaptation. The fucking radio play managed to tell the same story with greater faithfulness and more elegance without a 3rd person narrator (and had the brilliant idea of having the opening and closing credits performed by Agnes Nutter's voice actress). Compare and contrast the show making God the 3rd person narrator and exposition dump, and how that changes the whole story from a humanist tale where people are all people and whose choices matter, where God's grand plan night not even exist, to a story where everything implicitly or explicitly is going to God's plan under God's watchful eye.

And I will never comprehend how Gaiman successfully argued to have a whole set built to film Agnes Nutter's death, but then said that for practical reasons they couldn't have Crowley revive the dove. The angel accidentally killed a dove and the demon intentionally revived it! It's so thematically important! Neil why are you like this? Do you understand your own works or was Pterry the only one of you who put actual thought into things' meanings?! HOW DO YOU FUCK THIS UP NEIL? I UNDERSTOOD ITS IMPORTANCE WHEN I WAS 15 NEIL!

Ahem. Moving on.

Neverwhere is the most recent Gaiman book I've read and it's a good showcase of all the issues I have with his writing. The protagonists are dragged along by the plot, they're Special TM by birth or fate, not by the choices they make. The world they inhabit is wonderful, detailed, and vibrant, but I found that far more interesting than the protagonists inhabiting it. We got a random rape backstory for a girl whose main role was to die so the male protagonist feels bad. The way Gaiman described every female character bar one in terms of their attractiveness made me unsure if it was him or the protagonist who was weird about women (although I guess I have the answer to that now). Funny how Gaiman didn't shy away from things and people smelling bad right up until a hot woman who had been fighting, running, and falling over in a swamp apparently smelled not of sweat and stagnant water, but "musk". Really normal, that. There were wonderful descriptions and great moments, but after that first SA moment I couldn't relax and enjoy the ride because I was always on edge waiting for the next time Neil felt the need to be Like That.

Then there's my beloved, hated The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains. It's almost the perfect neat fairy-fable where every little detail is paid off later. It's a story of grief and vengeance and greed. It's about the price of fairy magic. And it has a pointless scene stuck in of marital rape. It has no purpose. It does nothing for the pacing or themes or characters. It never comes up again. I hate it.

Stuff can be horny or harrowing or both, I don't care, but Gaiman just drops SA into things for no clear reason as a generic Bad Thing Happen, Make Tone Dark. It's distasteful and inelegant. It cheapens the rest of the writing by its presence.

The simple truth is that Neil Gaiman seems to have a near pathological urge to shove sexual violence into places it has no need or right to be. It's disgusting but sadly not shocking that this apparently includes his personal life.

[medievalcat]

saw x spoilers under cut i guess im gonna start talking about the Details of the filme now lol

John throwing out his plans for the rack when he was "cured" implies he was going to stop being Jigsaw once he got his own second chance on life..................................there's so much to think about there...

Amanda asking John if he wanted to stop the game..........thinking about that too ....

Ok......I kind of thought Henry being in on the scam...was a little far fetched and I know the series can get far fetched but I feel like him being another "fake cured person" was kind of redundant given Parker's whole deal and ig also Gabriela (rip queen we all wanted you to be the final girl!!!).....the final scene with him made no sense and was not narratively coherent I kind of think it would have been interesting if after the "happy ending" we saw Amanda going back to the building to finally kill Cecilia for real would have been such a Moment. Which. I guess no one in Saw is dead unless you see them die but. Cecilia's ending ?? I kind of thought both her and Parker would die in a thematic plot twist sort compare and contrast to the fatal five, they're both so selfish that they hear "only one can survive" and end up just both dying

Joking that Cecilia and Parker are evil straight chain shipping

Cecilia dragging Valentina's corpse, cutting her open, and using her intestines as a rope to retrieve her cell phone has to be one of the most insane moments in the whole series. (Valentina's trap was way more brutal than I imagined. shudders and she was SO CLOSE TO LIVING) I knew she was going to be BAD but she was just so next level evil every time she did everything I was stunned

Amanda covering Carlos' eyes so he wouldn't see the last trap ;_; this puts her trying to help Corbett (and the cut scene of her singing to her to calm her down) in a new perspective, and of course Daniel, I don't think she ever agreed to involving kids in the traps and always tried to protect them :( (ig the ending was a weirdly happy ending because for the first time John and Amanda genuinely did save someone's life?) I know people are theorizing Carlos might become a Jigsaw copycat/apprentice in the future but I would like him to just live the rest of his life in peace (I love that the scam money went to him and his family though like his family was exploited by Cecilia, Parker, the scam, and now he gets everything they made back <3)

Amanda was tested three times but if the "plan b" happened that John anticipated, and she got put in the blood board with him, she would have been tested FOUR TIMES????

was this the first saw movie where we saw a group of cute puppies?