So please bear with me, I promise this was written with love and empathy for both the victims and the fans.
I’m not telling anyone what to do with their time or money. (If I did, I would say that you should donate to the myriad of Palestinian Go Fund Me’s that are floating around Tumblr if you can afford it.) But I say this with kindness: anyone who thinks they can separate the art from the artist is deluding themselves.
That’s not how life works, and it’s certainly not how art works. A good artist is willing to rip themselves open for the sake of their art, because hiding in the dark messiness are unspoken truths that will give your work authenticity. The reason that some art feels vapid or like a soulless cash grab is almost always that the artist did not dig deep enough into themselves to find a truth worth sharing. Neil Gaiman absolutely understands this, and he is particularly skilled at finding beauty in his own darkness.
There are a lot of responses you can have to the people who have come forward with accusations. Some of those options are detrimental to your sense of empathy and critical thinking skills, but they might assuage any guilt you feel about enjoying Neil Gaiman’s work. Burning all his books and moving on is another option, which is easiest for people who are not that invested in his work to begin with. Some fans need to do this so they can sleep at night, and I would never argue that they should change their minds.
But for those who are undecided and still struggling, there is at least one option for processing your feelings: dialectics, which is a philosophical method for engaging with life’s messy contradictions.
Summing up the inner conflict of a Gaiman fan might look like this:
You like Neil Gaiman’s work.
Neil Gaiman is a bad person.
If you like Neil Gaiman’s work, you are a bad person.
That feels rudimentary, but on a gut level I'm sure this feels true to a lot of fans. Good and bad are vague words that create an unhelpful dichotomy, so let’s be more specific.
You do not support predatory behavior.
You enjoy Good Omens, a story that means a lot to you.
Neil Gaiman is a co-author of Good Omens and the show runner for the TV series.
He has also admitted to predatory behavior.
So how do we reconcile those two truths?
First, you need to accept the truth.
Live in that discomfort for a bit. So many people never learn to embrace their emotions, and we end up hiding unpleasant thoughts under the rug instead of dealing with them. “Separate the art from the artist” is a rug under which we hide unpleasant emotions.
Second, let’s think about the victims, and why they chose to speak up.
From what I gathered from the podcasts, some of the victims spoke up because they wanted their truth to be heard. Neil Gaiman silenced them with sketchy NDAs, allowing him to twist the narrative in a way that protected him and left his victims powerless to defend themselves.
In Claire’s case she lamented that Scarlett had searched for previous victims and found none. Had she decided to do the podcast sooner, Scarlett would have found her story. Neither of them would have been alone. They have a shared trauma, and together they can find support, validation, and possibly even justice.
We should honor all of those things. They deserve to have support, validation, and justice, and the easiest way for us to help them is to amplify their voices. Amplifying their voices not only makes space for other victims to speak up, it is a warning to the vulnerable people around him to protect themselves.
He preys on his fans. We are a pool of potential victims for him.
My personal belief is that if you choose to stay in the fandom, you have a moral obligation to keep talking about the victims. Neil Gaiman’s work is still gaining fans, and those fans might not know he’s been accused of predatory behavior. If you stay in the fandom but never speak about it (or worse, defend him), you are simply feeding the machine that gave Gaiman the power to assault his fans and silence the employees he abused. If those who stay in the fandom keep talking about it, then every new fan has a better chance of hearing the testimonies of Scarlett, K, Claire, Caroline Wallner and Julia Hobsbawm.
Finally, Crowley and Aziraphale are not people; they are a collection of ideas crafted into the shape of people, and with every new piece of fan art those ideas mutate just a little to become something new. Head canons get shared and become fanon. Thousands of people create more art inspired by fanon. That inspires more head canons that become fanon, and so on. Frankly Death of The Author is more than just a way to analyze art; it’s figuratively and literally the end result of mythology.
My favorite thing about Good Omens is that it is essentially about dialectics. Their love is a messy and confusing contradiction to those who still exist in the false dichotomy, but it’s their truth. Embrace the truth, find empathy, and make choices that help you sleep at night.
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