[ 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

[(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)]

I mean yeah, but is the person who can't taste the difference between regular and Diet Coke, posting that it's impossible in a thread where multiple other people have stated they can tell, informing them that they're all wrong? lol

It's one thing to say "I can't tell" and another to tell other people who have stated they can tell, that they cannot since you know better.

[(Anonymous)]

But there are also all kinds of things where people think they can tell the difference, and really can't! It's entirely plausible that you can think that the difference is obvious and still be wrong about it.

With Coke and Diet Coke, or Coke and Pepsi, or red wine and white wine, or whatever, we can do blindfold taste tests at least to sort out who can actually distinguish the taste and who can't. We can't do that in this case, though, because we do not actually know the underlying facts of who wrote what so we have nothing to compare against. So it's a terrible analogy.

[(Anonymous)]

Some people can tell the difference, some people can't. That makes it a pretty good analogy, IMO. I'll grant you there's no way to test it in this specific case, but it's not that far-fetched to say that some people might be able to tell.

For the record, *I* can always tell the difference between regular and diet pop because artificial sweeteners taste very saccharine and like chemicals to me. I can also taste alcohol even in fruity cocktails, while many profess that they can't tell. I won't claim this is a common ability, but it exists.

[(Anonymous)]

It's not impossible that some people might be able to tell.

But just because it seems obvious to you, that doesn't actually mean that you are in fact able to tell. Which is the logic that people are using here - "it seems obvious to me, therefore it IS obvious." That's not how it works!

[meadowphoenix]

I'm with you anon. There's a lot of fallacious logic going on here. Even if we could be certain that you could tell the distinct styles from one another (questionable! and something human beings are actually very bad at knowing about themselves!), that's not actually proof of who wrote it. The idea that they could not possibly have adopted the style of other for a part of the book is odd.

[(Anonymous)]

da and yeah, exactly. I'm a fan translator who sometimes collabs with a friend of mine for translations, and when we do that we purposefully try to sync our styles so that you can't tell that different parts were done by two different translators because we want it to be seamless. Like, that's the whole point.

[(Anonymous)]

I am not bad at picking up on this stuff and I have read a lot of Terry Pratchett.

I just disagree with you. It's not because I'm an idiot who doesn't know how to read, it's because I don't think you're right.

[(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)]

I mean, if you're going to dismiss the comment with actual content and rationale about the writing and editing process and the sometimes limited creator perspective on their own work as "airily wav[ing this] off as irrelevant" then... no conversation to be had here.

Sure.

[(Anonymous)]

That's only if you assume that the authors are infallible in being self-aware of their own writing tics and tells and therefore if they say they can't tell, then nobody can. I don't think that's an ironclad assumption. If authors were that infallible, they wouldn't need editors.

[(Anonymous)]

Of course, secret!OP was saying that they could tell that Pratchett came up with the whole idea and then Gaiman ruined it all with his Gaiman-ness, not that there are random writing tics in certain sections. But ignore that!

[(Anonymous)]

...no?

The secret said Pratchett had "some good ideas" in the book that got warped by Gaiman into Gaiman-ness, with the implication that maybe those ideas would have been better off as a standalone book. Nobody said the whole thing was Pratchett's idea, or that Gaiman didn't add ideas of his own.

The only mention of "whole idea" in this thread or the secret is you.

[(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.