I’m glad of that too; it occurred to me that Pterry may have had to fulfill his duty as a knight and that probably wouldn’t have gone over well.
Initially I was ready to just dump all of Gaiman’s books into the recycling and be done with it. My nesting partner, a professional librarian, talked me out of that. As she put it, he’s less than scum, but many of those stories still have personal meaning to her and she’s not going to let anyone, even the author, take that away from her. He’s already done enough harm.
We talked a bit about various authors, poets, singers, and other creators, their relative views and actions as people, and those parts of them color their works. In both our home and public library we have Ogden Nash, Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, Sid Vicious, and a host of others that were also, frankly, pretty detestable people that made things many people enjoy anyway. (Well, okay, many not Sid, but still …) I was reminded of my reactions to book challenges about not only content, but about the character of the author in question.
Well fuck, she’s right. Hoisted by my own petard, I guess. I left the books and graphic novels where they were, although I did delete albums and stories from my own music collection. (The original CDs are still in the household collection.) I’ll never be able to read those again, but I have to agree that acting out in anger and having my own personal book ban probably isn’t consistent with my more rational stance. Dammit.
As I started to look on our shelves I noticed quite a few of the books that I had mentally classed as “Gaiman” were not his alone. Honestly that made me feel better, even if I do still consider them at least a little tainted. Obviously Good Omens is very much not his alone, neither the book nor the television show. (I was actually relieve to find that he was only a co-editor on When We Were Sick, as apparently that’s a very limited edition!)
All this lead to me giving some reassurance to someone on a different forum last night. They’re non-binary, fairly young, and had gotten so much joy out of one of the very rare instances of gender nonconformity and other queer representation in the tv version of Good Omens. They were sickened over this not only because of the events, but because of the shadow those cast across the work. They additionally expect a backlash over anything connected with it due to Gaiman. (I wish I could argue with that: thanks Neil, that’s fucking great. Anything else you’d like to harm on your way out?)
I could at least say that they were still free to enjoy Good Omens – Gaiman did not create that alone. Hell, he didn’t even write the book alone. Enjoy it despite him; enjoy it to spite him. Give credit to everyone but Gaiman and be public about how all the others involved help save the show from his involvement.
Whew. Okay, so maybe I have a few feelings about this, huh?
