[ SECRET POST #6491 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6491 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 31 secrets from Secret Submission Post #928.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

04. https://i.imgur.com/Y6kU01x.png

[(Anonymous)]

I liked Good Omens a lot, but yeah, I feel I would've liked it more if it was all Pratchett.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I preferred Gaiman works myself, although I'm guessing we won't see much more of them in future.

[(Anonymous)]

I liked it better than either of them alone. Discworld feels too flippant for me, and too whiplashy when it suddenly wants to be Super Serious About The World. Gaiman's writing is so constantly up its own ass about the ~power of stories~ that it often makes the actual story he's telling loose stakes, because hey, it's a story, so the power to do anything is always there, isn't it so meta and clever.

Good Omens manages to mix them together in a way that actually balances the light-hearted zaniness and the big moral questions in a way that holds together instead of going off the rails. (never finished the TV show tho, just remembering why I liked the book. didn't dislike the TV show, just not great at keeping up with TV)

[(Anonymous)]

I am going to say blasphemous thing that sadly I prefer Gaiman as an author. So for me good Pratchett's ideas wrapped into mess is actually fun. So I did enjoy Good Omens (the show, it's fans and the whole Gaiman situation made me dislike it)

[(Anonymous)]

I think if they had written separate books, both of the separate books would have been better off.

same

[(Anonymous)]

I have always wanted to like Prachett more, but it just has never clicked with me.

Re: same

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT
yup, his writing just isn't clicking with me :(

[(Anonymous)]

That's an excellent way to put into words exactly what I was thinking. Thanks!

[(Anonymous)]

We don't know what parts of Good Omens were Terry's and which parts were Neil's. It's tempting to just decide that we can know that all the stuff that you like is Terry and the rest is Neil but we don't actually know that. They wrote it together.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think that's necessarily true, especially if the OP in question has read both authors extensively.

Like if two musicians you're familiar with who usually write music that's pretty different in tone happen to collab and release a song, do you find it impossible to determine whose influence went where in the final product? If you have absolutely no idea, I think that's more unusual than usual.

[(Anonymous)]

IDK if it's necessarily true in all collaborations - actually, I think there are probably plenty of collaborations where you can tell who wrote what.

But I do think it's true for Good Omens and I've read a lot of both Pratchett and Gaiman.

[(Anonymous)]

"I can't tell, so definitely nobody else can tell, it cannot possibly be just me" isn't really a good argument, gotta say. I'm not even speaking for myself here, seems like lots of people in this thread can tell?

[(Anonymous)]

Yep. Pratchett in particular has a very distinctive style, and makes very easy to spot narrative choices. If you're familiar with his work, it's not hard to spot elsewhere.

But IME, not everyone's good at picking up on this stuff, so I can see why someone who isn't might sincerely believe that oh no, figuring it out just isn't possible for anyone. I mean. There are people who can't taste the difference between regular vs. Diet Coke, but to others, it's obvious.

[(Anonymous)]

Ehhhh. I mean, if you read Good Omens without being familiar with both Gaiman and Pratchett's solo works, then sure. And certainly Gaiman claims even he no longer recalls which parts are his and which parts were Pratchett's because the collaboration was so multi-layered.

But. You look at Pratchett's solo work, his style, the themes he tends to choose, the characters he tends to create, etc. and you can see patterns. Ditto Gaiman and his solo work. And when you look at Good Omens, you should also be able to identify patterns, and then it's not that hard to make an educated guess. It's like eating a bowl of ice cream that's both chocolate and raspberry butter flavors swirled together. There'll be parts that are very mixed together where it's hard to discern one individual flavor, but there'll be parts where you can taste mostly-chocolate or mostly-raspberry.

[(Anonymous)]

You can maybe identify thematic elements that originally came from one or the other, but I'm pretty sure they passed it back and forth enough times in the process of writing the thing that it all got mixed up. And I think that's true for *every* part of the book.

[(Anonymous)]

Okay.

[(Anonymous)]

OK!

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT, I haven't commented in this thread before, I'm a way bigger Pratchett/Discworld fan than a Gaiman one going back a few decades now, and Gaiman is a rapist shitbag, but iirc Pratchett also said before he died or even fell ill that he didn't recall which bits were by which author and that there were parts that each swore the other wrote. And also that they were deliberately writing pastiches of each other's styles.

I don't really think it matters who wrote what; Pratchett is dead and Gaiman is the one that stands to benefit from further adaptations of it.

Much as I'm curious about Pratchett and Gaiman's original sequel plans that Gaiman claimed would show up in (the probably now cancelled) GO season 3, it's not worth it unless Gaiman goes to jail and all his current and future assets go to RAINN or Alzheimers charities or something.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't really think the authors saying they can't remember which parts were whose is all that telling, fwiw. Especially as the creator of a work, and a work that's long novel length and has been through a ton of revisions and passed back and forth. Lots of writers stare at a piece of writing and go over it so many times and through so many revisions that they lose perspective and it often takes third parties to be like 'oh look, you did the theme you always do again, and you repeated this phrase you tend to use, and here's that character archetype popping up as usual.'

Not that I think either author was lying when they claimed that they've forgotten or can't tell. But it's also true that what can be pretty obvious to outsiders can be blind spots for creators themselves.

[(Anonymous)]

I feel like the repeated insistence of the authors that they passed it back and forth and that it's impossible for them to tell which parts are which is a pretty big thing to just airily wave off as irrelevant.

Especially when the only thing you're going off of is vibes.

[(Anonymous)]

While much of the book isn't clearly by one or the other, as someone who's read all of Discworld, I do think there are some parts that are very distinctly Pratchettian and others that Are Not (I'm convinved the call center scene with the maggots was Gaiman's).

I feel it's also a little bit telling which parts the first season of the TV show preserved verbatim, even when it might've been better served by doing it differently. The narration exists to read clever passages straight from the book and is no longer there in S2. "Sauntered vaguely downwards" was shoehorned in as a really kinda forced bit of dialogue, because there was no other way to include it. It felt like Gaiman was afraid of erasing too much of Pratchett's contributions.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I've thought that for years and I enjoy the book. But IMO, the best parts of it are more Pratchett than Gaiman.

[(Anonymous)]

I have a copy of Good Omens signed by Terry Pratchett, and I always wanted to get it signed by Neil Gaiman as well. Not anymore!

[(Anonymous)]

There's a short breakdown here that pulls together what each author has said about the process: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/163819/what-did-each-of-gaiman-and-pratchett-contribute-to-good-omens

Linked in the above is also this: https://www.elizabethcallaway.net/good-omens-stylometry which I thought was quite interesting. Mostly for the add-on by Gaiman that he had a contribution to Moving Pictures, but also the fact that there is hardly any section of the novel that is purely attributable to one author - they were editing, suggesting, and rewriting each other's parts.

I purchased Good Omens on kindle last year, because my OG copy was long gone, and it has a few bonus interviews at the end. This is taken from one of them: "The point they both realized the text had wandered into its own world was in the basement of the old Gollancz books, where they’d got together to proofread the final copy, and Neil congratulated Terry on a line that Terry knew he hadn’t written, and Neil was certain he hadn’t written either. They both privately suspect that at some point the book had started to generate text on its own, but neither of them will actually admit this publicly for fear of being thought odd."