Out of curiosity as a GO but particularly terry fan, could u explain more about how you think War is a gaiman creation?
This is hard to articulate, because I’ve been so immersed in Terry’s writing for so long that I think I could pick out his authorial voice out of a lineup with no context whatsoever. Dissecting how it’s distinct to me is like trying to explain how I can recognize my mother or my father in a crowd, but… I’ll give it a go.
The degree of sexuality she’s written with is uh… not very Pratchett-ian. Pretty much any time any of Sir Terry’s characters were written as sexual, it was immediately followed up with a disarming joke, or was just clearly satirical from the outset (see: Ptraci in Pyramids, that scene where Angua and Sally end up in a strip club, every time the seamstress’s guild shows up, Adora Belle Dearheart’s introduction- that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head). After Moving Pictures he stopped writing characters where the ‘joke’ was that they were sexy ladies, and just started writing… characters who happened to be female. In his later works even just the jokes about sex were more wry and sprinkled more sparingly.
Neil, on the other hand, writes sexy characters that don’t immediately become a punchline, and just… are sexy, as a major trait of their character. Maybe he does this in a self-aware ironic tone, but the sexuality is there to be sexy- his writing doesn’t metaphorically diffuse the sexual tension with an awkward chuckle and a pun like Sir Terry’s does.
