anyone keep finding their brain going back and finding dumb shit he said/wrote/etc and thinking "oh that explains that"

even though it DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY

you cannot just retroactively decide someone's an obvious rapist because they wrote a woman horribly a bunch of times

but yet my brain insists on this

I'm going to say this and I hope nobody takes this the wrong way

I always hated how Neil Gaiman wrote women

Because he did that nerd sexism thing which was basically about really cool girls who were strong and self-actualised who basically still existed as weird pets for nebbishy dudes narrativewise

just a kind of bleak toe-licking simping dressed up as female empowerment

Steven Moffat did a similar thing but nowhere near as bad and people got way madder at him for it

Joss Whedon did have people getting mad at him for it. and look how that turned out. l. m. a. into space

I liked Good Omens a lot (book) and part of that I believe is Terry's influence (he can genuinely write GREAT female characters)

even when Pratchett is going into stuff that is often weird like witches and caricatures of foreign cultures he always writes the women fundamentally as people first, and everything else as makes sense. I don't think he has ever written a bad female character at all

I think this is a natural way to feel since I mainly only know Gaiman through his work

so naturally my brain must try to decode the work even though, again, that's not how it is and it's not what writing is for - people use writing to work their shit out, sometimes we use it to purge ourselves of things society put in us

I really find it frustrating that the women accusing Gaiman are absolutely terrible people

since it makes it easier to dismiss the allegations which are all very plausible

it's easy for me to throw Gaiman out because I never particularly liked him. but I mean for god's sake I can't exactly be like that and be like "well my current fandom is absolutely full of people who have no issues with women whatsoever - HIP HOP"

but honestly at this point I feel safer around overt misogyny because at least it tells me that the guy saying it is a prick in all caps

smarmy nerd cryptomisogyny gives me way more creeps because it's someone who isn't willing to look directly at it, someone who is disgusting and lying about their emotions

I had this issue with Howling Dogs as well when everyone was talking that up

it's basically a story about being a sad nerd shutin who is saved by a really cool girl

unsurprisingly Porpentine was outed as a serial abuser and a general piece of shit in basically every way of living her life

but she dressed it up uwu-wise so nobody noticed

i always hated how gaiman wrote women too so my kneejerk was also 'that tracks'

ugh same