Preach

Preach

With truly all the love and empathy in my heart: crying daily over the sexual assault allegations again at Gaiman isn’t healthy. I’ve seen multiple people –especially fans of GO – saying this since they came out, and it’s really fucking concerning me.

I wonder if it has to do with the insidious ideas that 1) people are either Bad or Good, 2) Bad people can only do Bad things, and 3) liking Bad things or Bad people makes you Bad.

None of these things are true.

People are mixed up and incredibly complicated. Someone can be an incredible artist/chef/ally against racism/drag queen and still be predatory/homophobic/antisemitic/never tips their wait staff. People do things that harm others in big and small ways all the time. You do too. I promise.

(Also the idea of dehumanizing anyone, even people who do genuinely insurmountable harm, as somehow less than human is an inherently fascist ideology)

The fact that you (yes, you!!) do harmful things doesn’t immediately make you Bad. There are certainly things that someone might do that causes more harm (say, assault) versus less, but, perhaps unfortunately, that doesn’t somehow infect all the things they’ve done in the past with their Badness. Gaiman helped write Good Omens. There’s no way now to say “I was wrong and this book was Bad all along” or even “oh, all the parts I like were written by Pratchett, the Bad parts must have been Gaiman.” You didn’t miss an inherent evil by liking the book in the past. It doesn’t make you Bad for liking it now.

(It also doesn’t mean that people associated with Gaiman, like David Tennant, are also Tainted by Badness. This is also a slippery slope argument into dehumanization and fascist ideas)

By all means: stop giving Gaiman your money. Stop tagging him in your Azi/Crowley fanart. But do this as a way to disentangle yourself from parasocial relationships that are actively causing you grief and to vote with your wallet, not because unlinking yourself from Bad Art and Bad People will somehow absolve you and make you Good again. If you already have a copy of Good Omens or Sandman, whether you reread it is between you and your gods. Interacting with a text you find important doesn’t make you Bad or Good. It’s just reading. What you do with the stories is what matters (ironically, that’s the message of a lot of both Gaiman and Pratchett’s work).

Maybe take a peek at Good Omens and re familiarize yourself with its other core message: People are not Bad or Good. People do bad and good things.

Then maybe drink a cup of tea. You need to rehydrate.

I liked Villeneuve’s Chani so much better and now I know why. He portrayed her a someone who questioned everything instead of blindly following Paul like she does in the books. I hope he writes a similar arc for Irulan too

I want to talk a little bit about Frank Herbert and the Bene Gesserits, because it’s something that’s been on my mind for a while and I haven’t seen anyone looking at these characters from this perspective yet (not that I looked very hard, but I check the tags occasionally and just haven’t seen it, and this would be the first place I’d expect to).

It’s strange in a good way seeing Dune become popular, and people actually reading the books, and it being cool to do so, not it being a niche and nerdy thing. But what’s equally weird is to see all the praise Frank Herbert’s getting, especially from women readers 😂

Because at any point between, I think, the 80s and the 2000s, if a guy said he liked Frank Herbert that was considered by women to be a red flag. I remember women chatting about this in online forums back in the day. It was the equivalent of a guy saying he likes Jordan Peterson now.

Keep reading

Aziraphale doesn’t need to be saved. He never has. He gave away his flaming sword and lied to God's face. He tricked Heaven once again to save three kids. He claims to be soft, but he is anything but. He stood with his flaming sword facing Satan. He stood with a dumb candelabra facing a horde of demons to save his bookshop and protect humans. He is absolutely capable of getting out of any situation. But oh, how Crowley loves to save him.

Thinking of Michael Sheen and his tartan socks and "To our world," and thinking that maybe he wasn't talking about Aziraphale and Crowley (or not exclusively) but about all of us. About all of the people whose love and passion has made Good Omens more than just a book/show for 30+ years.

He was a fan long before he was Aziraphale. He's loved this world the way so many of us have. And he, and other passionate, love filled people have been able to bring it to life and bring it to new audiences, who have fallen in love with it.

"To our world" means all the people with battered paperbacks with suspicious stains, or third copies because the previous copies were "loaned" to a friend and never returned.

"To our world" means everyone who's kindly argued over meaning and shared theories and provided historical context and found a deeper understanding.

"To our world" means all the artists who have imagined these characters in so many ways and shared their visions over the decades.

"To our world" means all the writers who have taken the source material and ran with it, expanding the world and bringing new meaning and new understanding to it.

"To our world" means all the cosplayers who transform themselves into the characters, who love them so much they need to become them, if only for a few hours.

"To our world" means the hundreds of lucky professionals who have gotten to do those things to turn a beloved book into a beloved show.

"To our world" means all of us and the friendships and love that has bloomed because of this thing we have co-created. Our world.

Spotted in St James' Park...

The invisible and unbreakable line that joins Aziraphale and Crowley (for always).