I want to talk about Neil Gaiman from the perspective of a survivor of SA.
I am a trans/ gender fluid person, a survivor of R*pe, and a diehard Good Omens fan. And I have been struggling to cope with and process the horrific things that Neil Gaiman has done. I don’t get a lot of engagement from the Good Omens fandom. I’m mostly a lurker here, TikTok, Twitter, and BlueSky and AO3. But I feel like I need to say something, and Im saying it here so I can share without a character limit. And then I’m going to take a break for a while because my mental health can’t handle the chaos anymore.
I read the Vulture article and I was of course horrified and disgusted and repulsed. The things he did to those women made me absolutely sick. But I’ll tell you what, as a survivor, I have been way more triggered by the online reaction to these allegations than I ever expected to be.
I am struggling, because while I unquestioningly stand with his victims and hope they get the full weight of justice they deserve, I am grieving. I am not reacting the way I would have expected myself to react to this news, and I haven’t since July when the story first broke. I would have expected to react the same way I did when JK Rowling exposed her horrific transphobia. I took a pretty hardline stance that any engagement with Harry Potter, even through fandom and etsy purchases, kept her relevant and sent the message that you too were transphobic. As a gender queer person, I now have an extremely hard time enjoying Harry Potter anymore even thought it was overwhelmingly influential on my life. I would not have met my husband without HP!
So why don’t I feel the same way about Good Omens? I am a victim of R*pe, myself, so why haven’t these allegations made it difficult to enjoy this story? In fact, all I want to do right now is actually watch the show! Or read the book, or fanfiction, or watch my favorite fan edits. I’m actually reaching out to it more. My instinct ever since July has been to clutch the story to my chest, white knuckled, and crying to myself in the shower, “No, no, no, no. Please, please, please. Not this. Not this too. Please don’t go.”
The answer is I don’t know. I… I don’t know why I’m reacting this way. It is something I will have to work through with my therapist for sure. And I feel absolutely horrible for it. But I do know that folks on Twitter and TikTok telling me that nobody cares about my feeling and saying that nothing matters at all except his victims has been extremely triggering - more so than any discussion of his acts. And I know that I will need a long time to work through it, and that I may never get over it.
I also know that two things can be true at once. We can be supportive of his victims and understand that what Neil Gaiman’s fans are going through is ALSO a collective trauma that deserves time and space to process. Because he violated us too. He violated our trust and our perceptions of reality, and that is much more traumatic than people give it credit for. Demanding that his fans just give up the stories and communities that may have been the only thing keeping some of these people alive at one point completely cold turkey is cruel and heartless. Some people may be able to do that. They may be able to not care for a while and may even need that. People deserve time and grace to grieve and come to terms with what is going on in their own ways.
I know that some of these folks mean well, but the argument that nobody cares about fans feelings is not looking at the whole picture and feels like just a way to discredit and belittle fandoms in a new way. Because this is NOT breaking news! This story originally broke back in July, and the fandom rallied behind his victims en mass! They have recently raised thousands of dollars to donate to Take Back The Night, which is amazing! This most recent article and fandom meltdown is just rehashing everything that we said last summer. So my then questions are:
When CAN we grieve? When CAN we talk about how we are feeling? When CAN we reach out to our community and collectively heal from the trauma that we are facing as well? And not fear that some self righteous ass hole on the internet is going to bully them for not being a good enough feminist. And do NOT sit there on your performative high horse and tell us that what we are going through is not as bad as R*pe. We fucking know that. I certainly fucking know that. But it is still bad, and it does deserve recognition too. It is extremely unhealthy to pretend that this news is not also a noteworthy trauma to his fans. And gaslighting them by telling them that their heartbreak and grief is problematic is just fucking mean.
Neil’s fans deserve grace and compassion too.
