Freckles & Doubt

There is an, on the whole, surprisingly small surge of posts on Tumblr about Neil Gaiman, who has been accused of less than savoury sexual activities with much younger women in positions of comparatively less power than he has. The initial article focused on one victim has brought half a dozen others out of the woodwork, so it's a pattern. There's what seems to be a fairly balanced reflection on the situation at https://politicsdancingxyz.substack.com/p/manufacturing-consent.

This has come completely out of left field: of all the potential items on my 2024 Bingo card "Neil Gaiman sex scandal" would absolutely never have been an option. I love his writing and his social media presence - Tumblr particularly, where he is sane, enlightened, snarky, and surprisingly in tune with Tumblr's propensity for idiosyncratic off-the-wall playfulness. He seemed, on all fronts, like one of the good ones, and a part of me was desperately hoping his accusers would be revealed as chancers, drama-seekers or severely disturbed, and the whole thing manufactured in bad faith. But his response has been to make noises that "it was consensual" in various articles, and then to disappear from sight since the whole thing blew up and hire marketing firms, so that's obviously wishful thinking on my part, and I am sternly suppressing it. It seems fairly clear that he was awful to women across the span of his life, and he clearly caused horrible pain and degredation to his victims, and they have my absolute sympathy, support and admiration for their strength in coming forward with this in the teeth of his reputation and status. But the fact that their pain is clearly the important thing here doesn't actually stop me - stop many of us - from feeling our own pain and loss at a destroyed relationship with a writer and creator who felt like one of our own.

I think, on the whole, the comparative silence on Tumblr is an echo of what I'm feeling myself - shock and grief, to an extent which makes it hard to process. He has been an icon in the sf/fantasy community for as long as I've been reading sf and fantasy. His work is warm and human and compelling, his treatment of female characters and queer identities and the like seemed to be enlightened and supportive, this simply doesn't fit. But I have to make it fit, and it's doing my head in - as it is, I think, for a large swathe of his readers.

It also stings paricularly because grief is partly anger, because what's been revealed about his personal proclivities for abusive sex with comparatively powerless women means that his public persona is a carefully crafted lie, designed to cover and enable his activities. I am angry because I feel stupid, as though I should have known. (I mean, I always hated his relationship with Amanda Palmer, who I intensely dislike for not particularly rational reasons beyond the age discrepancy and her brashness, but I blamed her for its dissonances, not him. He got me. Bastard.)

A lot of the discussions on social media from betrayed fans circle around the perennial problem of what the hell you do with your relationship with the art when the creator turns out to be a problematical dickhead. Sometimes this easy - I ditched Orson Scott Card and wossname, John C Wright (had to look him up) without a blink when I became aware of their respective frothing homophobias, their work never really mean that much to me. And the China Mieville jerking women around thing simply allowed me to admit how pretentiously intellectualised his work can be, despite its undoubted quality and originality. While I was fond of Harry Potter, I have always been aware of the books' flaws as literary works, and been frustrated by their conservative moral framework; JK's rampant TERFism was not a shock, and it has cost me absolutely nothing to boycott anything further from which she might profit, and retreat into HP fan fiction. Joss Wedon was a betrayal, but Buffy and Firefly were in the past, their loss is not as immediate. I have a harder time with Arcade Fire and Win Butler's sexual misconduct allegations, I love Arcade Fire, and I can't really listen to it any more without a sense of unease, so I listen to them a hell of a lot less than I used to. But I have bought and read, multiple times, pretty much everything Gaiman ever wrote, book-wise, and a fair chunk of his graphic novels. I have the giant Absolute Sandman tomes, for heaven's sake. I have Good Omens on DVD. I have written academic papers on him. Any way you slice it, that's a loss.

I don't know if it's possible to separate the art from the artist. I know it's far more likely, in our modern media age, that the relentless glare of the media spotlight will sooner or later discover horrible things about large numbers of our respected creators. No-one is perfect, and media - and humanity in general - love to dish the dirt, and the reality is that if the internet existed a hundred years ago we'd be cancelling cherished literary icons left, right and centre. And there may be an argument for trying to make that separation in order to still enjoy the work, but I can't. I cannot read or watch or listen without suspicion when I know the sordid details, and the suspicion, and consequent re-analysis of the work, spoils my enjoyment. TERFism is implicit in Harry Potter if you read it with the knowledge of JK's current frothings, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to find that Gaiman's female characters are rife with problems if I revisit them now, in the same way that Buffy is if you use the lens of Dickhead Joss. And that'll hurt.

So I have actually found Brandon Taylor's article about Alice Munroe to be strangely consoling, because he talks about precisely this betrayal in terms which mirror my own. And two of his comments really stay with me: one, "Being a brilliant writer does not elevate one above the common smallness of being a person." And two, "For myself, I will never read Alice Munro the same way again." This encapsulates it: three equal but competing truths. Brilliant writer. Dickhead. Tainted work.

My so far favourite response to this whole debacle, and the writer/cherished work relationship, is this tweet:



Part of me is also angry because this is such a waste. Gaiman had it all: respected body of work, iconic status among the fandom, a guaranteed market for Good Omens and Sandman and Dead Boy Detectives, the high-budget cinematic adaptations which are in process at the moment, and which will unavoidably see less success than they could have because so many of us have a bad taste in our mouths. He was talking about working on a new book, which I will now not buy if he ever does publish it. He pissed all that away by being a dickhead and pretending he wasn't. He must have thought the structure of his achievements and his place in the fandom were unassailable. Now that it's all out in the open, they were - not precisely a lie, but an ill-built edifice threatening to totter, because we're looking at it harder, and bits of it are illusion over ugly gaps, and this is an ugly wind.

... in re Pandy, loss of: do not try to play Stray for a bit, it doesn't go well.



So Stray is a wonderful little game, in which your avatar is a cat, and you guide it through a post-apocalyptic, vaguely cyberpunky cityscape that's utterly devoid of people, although full of their empty homes and businesses and artifacts, and instead houses a fairly sparse population of robots all going peaceably about their business. It's mostly exploration and route-finding, at least to date, with a bit of puzzle-solving and questing as you gradually construct the backstory narrative of the city and its weird, giant-cylindrical, abandoned environs (it's some kind of artificial habitat, I haven't got far enough to work out what, but the city's ceiling is circular and dotted with lights). You start out in a much more sylvan and beautiful environment, all overgrown vegetation and water and your happy cat colony, which seems to be inside the wall of the city. You then accidentally fall into the city and have to try and find your way back to your family, hence all the puzzle-solving and route-finding. You're not quite a standard cat, there is some kind of assumption of augmented intelligence in the puzzles you have to solve, but the little animations when you interact with bits of the city, drinking from puddles and scratching random bits of furniture and sleeping on cushions, are very feline and very adorable.

The game has the most amazing atmosphere - not just because you're playing a kitty, but in the gentle, wistful, slightly surreal flavour of the environment itself. The robots are enormously endearing, both your own little floating sidekick, and the angular, ungainly, slightly sad and vulnerable personas of the larger npc robots you encounter. My favourite so far is one little mini-quest where you can find bits of sheet music scattered throughout the world and bring them back to the guitar-playing robot, and he'll play them for you - lovely, gentle, jazzy, bluesy tunes (mostly), and you can either sit and listen, or curl up on the cushion next to him and sleep while he plays.



But. The minimal sense of threat in the game (at least so far, I'm fairly early on) comes from the zurks, which are horrible little red-eyed robot crab things that occur in swarms and will chase and eat anything living - which, so far, is only your kitty self. (My current theory is that the zurks ate all the people, leaving only robots, and cats.) If you don't evade them (which is tricky, memo to anyone else inspired to try this, don't try to play on PC with a keyboard, it's optimised for controller and the keyboard interface is horrible and will make you fail to outrun zurks inevitably and repeatedly) you are swarmed, and your poor little kitty is eaten. It's not graphic, you are simply piled by zurks, but I cannot, it transpires, handle even the minor glimpses of the little recumbent dead kitty-form amid the swarm at this stage of my personal cat journey, it's deeply traumatic even though you immediately reload at the last save point absolutely fine.

So, yes. I love this game, but it's on temporary hold, despite my jonesing for a kitty-fix, until I am not likely to be traumatised by losing my feline avatar. Which is a pity, because I'm dying to see how it turns out, and to deepen my acquaintance with the world. Ace game design, ten out of ten, would recommend. Just not when grieving a cat.