There Is No Safe Word: How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades.
There Is No Safe Word: How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades.
There Is No Safe Word: How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades.
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One sad question has been going through my head since hearing the details, and I really hope the answer is genuinely "nothing at all", but given how close they were, it's one that needs to be asked:
How much did Terry Pratchett know about this?
I always got a creep vibe with Gaiman that I don't with Pratchett, so hopefully that isn't coloring my thinking about this, but...it seems like what I've read about their collaboration was mostly email and sending each other floppy disks in the 90s, and at that point NG hadn't won all these awards and TP was well established, I wouldn't be surprised if NG presented a version of himself to TP that he thought would be most endearing. By the time NG's assaults seemed to ramp up in the late aughts and tens, TP already was dealing with Alzheimers. It seems possible that Sir Terry didn't know what a shitbird Gaiman was capable of being.
But then again what the hell do I know, just some thoughts.
I dearly hope so.
Same. I get the same unease with Pratchetts apparent love of violence that is very similar to Gaimans, he kind of revels in the meanness in a similar fashion. It's like the author makes these types almost into heroes of a sort (teatime is an example).
And, his treatment of womens bodies tends to always be very pathriarchal. I despise the way he makes points of women being only of interest to men if they are thin and conventionally hot (young). I get it was different times, but once you start noticing it, it's everywhere. I still listen to the stories every night as my audhd sleep aid, but certain books I will not touch anymore and almost all have parts that make me feel very uneasy.
Another one I've been concerned about is Haruki Murakami. One can fairly argue that some nuances are lost in translation from Japanese to English. But his later books have a lot of red flags to me. "Killing Commendatore" is particularly worrying.
I used to love his work, it's my kind of weird. But now I wonder.