No Grove, No Dance, No Sound

I am at a genuine loss about why everyone is constantly set on celebrating Terry Pratchett as most Liberal White Male Author ever.. he’s one of my favorite sci-fi fantasy authors and he’s definitely capable of writing good characters who are otherwise underrepresented in the genre like women (and supposedly gay characters? Haven’t gotten that far in discworld her) but like... I remember reading wyrd sisters which everyone cites as like his Feminist Masterpiece and it’s a really good book with really good female characters but there’s still an entire running joke about how small one of the main female characters tits are...he wasn’t perfect is what I’m saying and neither is Neil Gaiman (though he’s like literally one of my favorite authors and he’s also capable of writing good minority characters, including more POC than Pratchett.)

Idk I’m not trying to say like good omens is cancelled or whatever but I keep on seeing people write these like long metas about how gaiman and pratchett put a lot of clues in good omens to suggest that Crowley and Aziraphale were like culturally gay and in love or whatnot and I don’t want to shit on anybody’s parade Bc I’m having fun with the good omens revival too and if I’m going to reveal my inner 13 year old self I was also rooting for them to be a couple but there’s a word for that sort of coding and it’s called queer baiting and we have to recognize that a lot of those bits were played for laughs- the punchline of the joke being of course Crowley and Aziraphale aren’t gay how could they be gay that’s ridiculous! It’s 2019 it was definitively a thing that could’ve happened on tv that Gaiman chose not to do for like narrative reasons (which is fine on its own) but chose to continue to use as a punchline (less fine). We shouldn’t be picking up the scraps and calling them progressive.

Idk i know this is incoherent but I think what I’m saying is we shouldn’t bend over backwards to kiss any fantasy author’s ass for giving us the bare minimum just because everything else sucks, and that we should continue to demand better even if we enjoy what we have rn. There were a lot of good things both from a narrative perspective and from like a representation perspective in the good omens tv show brought that the books didn’t, just don’t rush to either extremes I think.

Also fuck that one anorexia joke from good omens the book that was really in poor taste and it did not do my recently in recovery 15 yr old ass any favors when I first read it.