Why does /lit/ has such a low opinion of Neil Gainman?

[Anonymous No.14299808]

Almost all the fantasy recomendations that you can find here recomend that you avoid him like the plague .

[Anonymous No.14299844]

He wrote one good book and is somehow able to live off his writing. He makes me seethe.

[Anonymous No.14299854]

>>14299808
Because he's not a particularly good writer, but normies still love him and think he's great.

[Anonymous No.14299870]

Lol gayman

[Anonymous No.14299878]

/lit/ generally has an aversion to anything liked by dumbass reddit proles who would like anything that made them "feel good." Sometimes if you go out into normie spheres of discourse they will say things like "Ummm? You can't say this game is bad :S I had fun playing it. Are you saying having fun is bad? Lmao!!!" because their primitive libidinally hypertrophied and oversocialized brains can't conceive of Good/Bad as expressing anything other than "duhhhh but did I ernjoy it? Hyuck!" This is similar to Piaget's stadial theory of moral development, where the externalization of morality into an objective, self-standing order is a relatively mature stage beyond mere hedonic calculus, punishment-aversion, and even shame-aversion or fear of "loss of face," a stage not reached by every person or even every culture, and even this relatively mature stage is still just a prelude to the fully developed view of morality as the cosmic order itself, as in ṛta or dharma, or Plato's description of the moral Good as coterminous with the aesthetically/sensuously Beautiful and the epistemically True. Normies are essentially at a seriously defective child's level of moral development, innately. This is worsened by institutions promoting their retardation (in both senses of the term), and further worsened by the belief of (now merely ossified) bourgeois culture that the only moral value is the subjective happiness of individual experiencers, represented most vulgarly by hedonic utilitarianism. The innate tendency of the normie to go "NNRNRGH? GRUGG LIKE? IT AM GOOD BECAUSE ME LIKE? ME LIKE EAT BAG OF SUGAR... ME LIKE WHEN MOVIE AND MUSIC IS SUGAR IN VISUAL FORM... YOU CANNOT SAY BAD IF ME LIKE! MORE SUGAR FOR GRUGG!" is thus reinforced by institutions which have a vested interest in deepening this state of arrested development, and the old bourgeois myth of utilitarianism and worldview of "everybody is equal :^) there is no such thing as aristoracy, let alone arete :^) the be reasonable and rational is to enjoy watchin' a good movie ;) pass the sugar my friend" is easily operationalized for this purpose.

>One must rid oneself of the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one’s neighbour utters it. And how could there even be a "common good"! That expression contradicts itself: what can be common always has only little value. In the end things must stand as they stand and have always stood: great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and shudders for the refined, and, to sum up all this in brief, everything rare for the rare.

Neil Gaiman may not be intrinsically bad, but he stinks with the stink of those who justify things by going URRGHH? ME LIKE IT? IT MAKE ME FEEL GOOD WHEN ME READ IT WHILE WORKING AT IPHONE STORE?? WHY YOU CRITICIZE AND MAKE GRUGG FEEL BAD?

[Anonymous No.14299928]

>>14299808
He's a literal cuckold. Look it up.

[Anonymous No.14299971]

(((Gaiman)))

[Anonymous No.14299981]

Contrarianism.

[Anonymous No.14299983]

>>14299928
ad hominem

[Anonymous No.14299984]

>>14299808
because /lit/ hates what's popular with normies. /lit/ can't stand Harry Potter because normies like it even tho it is a perfectly fine kids to ya fantasy series. They hate Ice and Fire because HBO normified it with GoT. They hate Gaiman because he also has a large mainstream audience.
/lit/ wants authors that when they mention it at their imaginary high school reunion, everyone goes "What? Never heard of that one, but I really liked Hunger games".
Because most of /lit/ doesn't actually like reading. They like feeling superior with what they read. And no one feels superior casually enjoying "American Gods".

[Anonymous No.14300011]

>>14299808
I don't like his work in literature but his Sandman comics are good.

[Anonymous No.14300083]

>>14299808
It's like reading something by sixth graders, for sixth graders.

Occasionally you might find something amusing, but generally it'll miss the mark because you aren't in the target demographic.

The same people who like him are the sad adults who obsess over Harry Potter minutae.

[Anonymous No.14300098]

>>14299808
I read like 200 pages of American Gods and it felt like it was a screenplay masquerading as a novel, which is was.

Not read anything else by him and don't plan to.

[Anonymous No.14300100]

>>14299984
I could find a way to feel superior reading American Gods. I could feel superior doing anything. /lit/ needs to get on my level. That said, reading in general is gay.

[Anonymous No.14300347]

He is a bad version of Lord Dunsany.

[Anonymous No.14300362]

Coraline isn't too bad. I haven't read anything else by him.

[Anonymous No.14300369]

/lit/ thinks it could do better, despite never writing, let alone publishing. As a result, his success feels unearned. Basically, /lit/'s unearned ego is to blame.

[Anonymous No.14300428]

>>14300369

>Go to restaurant
>Order lasagna
>Get lasagna
>There's shit in it
"Exuse me waiter there appears to be some excrement in my lasagna."
>Waiter goes to tell the chef.
>Chef comes out of kitchen red faced and raging
>"How dare you insult my cooking. I made that lasagna from scratch. I'm sure you don't even know how to make fresh pasta, I bet you buy frozen lasagna at home. Have you ever worked in a restaurant buddy? I'm considered to be at the top of my profession I'll have you know.

This is how retarded you sound.

[Anonymous No.14300431]

>>14300369
>/lit/
>never writing
>let alone publishing
How new.

[Anonymous No.14300482]

>>14299984
Basically this.

Also, Gaiman isn't bad, but there are better overlooked fantasy writers out there.

[Anonymous No.14300523]

>>14300482
I find him enjoyable. I think reading gaiman is a bit like watching a Tarantino movie. You know it's not "high art", but It's really good at what it does.

[Anonymous No.14300567]

>>14300428
You and I both know it's more like
>Go to restaurant
>Order lasagna
>It's lasagna, no more, no less
>"Excuse me waiter, this lasagna is shit."
>"What's wrong with it, sir?"
>"I-I j-just know I could do better."
>Waiter rolls his eyes at you
>You stand, red faced and flustered
>"I'll have you know I've heard I could be a Michelin Star chef if I wanted! Let me into the kitchen!

It's well and fine to dislike lasagna. Just remember the fact that you don't like it, doesn't mean it's shit.

[Anonymous No.14300573]

>>14300567

No I like lasagna, otherwise I wouldn't have ordered it. I just like it with mince instead of doodoo.

[Anonymous No.14300584]

>>14299984
Why was infinite jest such a meme book then when it's arguably normiecore?

[Anonymous No.14300646]

>kneel to the gay man

[Anonymous No.14301164]

>>14299878
This is sincerely one of the best posts on /lit/ this month

[Anonymous No.14301188]

>>14299808
He seems like a good friend and a man with solid taste
But his literature is garbage

[Anonymous No.14301197]

>>14301188
He's like the Marylin Manson of writers.

[Anonymous No.14301202]

>>14299984
Honest question, do you have any hobbies? I don’t understand how difficult it is to grasp that Harry Potter, Gaiman, and George RR Martin are trash authors. It’s ok to like them but surely you realise it isn’t out of intellectual posturing that they are ridiculed. I get that you may like them, my favourite place to eat is Burger King but yet I am self aware enough that if my cousin who lives in Manhattan is taking me out to a Thai restaurant and I am eating the food, even if I’d RATHER have a double whopper, I can understand that if you have developed tastebuds this saffron infused chicken satay is a fundamentally better dish. It has better ingredients, it’s made by a better chef, it has more flavours etc. I don’t sit there thinking “wow I bet she’d rather have a whopper, what a nerd pretending to like this fancy food” because my reality does not begin and end with popular = good. Why then can you not do the same for books? When you read a lot you prefer different things, better things. This is true of literally every medium and even sub genres within mediums.

[Anonymous No.14301240]

>>14300428
>food analogy

[Anonymous No.14301242]

>>14301202

>Harry Potter is a trash author

Today I learned

[Anonymous No.14301270]

>>14301242
I wonder if any fantasy author has ever written a book that is from the fantasy world itself. i.e one of the characters in the world wrote the book

[Anonymous No.14301275]

>>14301202
based

[Anonymous No.14301287]

>>14301270

There's a book called 'Land of Stone Flowers'

It's like a collection of studies by fairy anthropologists that study humans including our culture, biology, history etc.

It's not /lit/ but it's pretty creative, lots of pictures, I remember one that was supposed to be human anatomy but it was all fucked. Pretty funny.

[Anonymous No.14301333]

>>14301270
Of course
There are a lot of books that the author claims to have translated from a fictional author residing in the fantasy world

[Anonymous No.14301339]

>>14299878
>>14301202
so based I saved to my lit favourites collection

[Anonymous No.14301361]

>>14301240
Can anyone explain to me what is wrong with food analogies? Is it because they are facile and overused? Is it because it's something an obese person might say? Or an association to another website? I don't understand this meme.

[Anonymous No.14301372]

>>14301361

Food and sports analogies are overused and lazy. Doesn't mean they are wrong though.

[Anonymous No.14301410]

>>14299878
Fantastic post my brother. This is perfect.

[Anonymous No.14301443]

He still hasn't republished all of RA Lafferty's books even though he has had the rights to them for a decade, that shit is way too hard to find

[Anonymous No.14301462]

>>14301270
Isn’t that the premise of Book of the New Sun?

[Anonymous No.14301487]

>>14299878
holy based

[Anonymous No.14302676]

>>14299878
This in its entirety.

[Anonymous No.14302704]

I enjoyed Sandman quite a bit when I was 19/20.

Heard he's much better writing for comics, his prose is just to wanky and low-level to bother with his novels.

[Anonymous No.14302758]

>>14299808
His Physiognomy

[Anonymous No.14302773]

>>14301202
It's even more of a posture to write a lengthy spiel asserting works are bad without providing any textual evidence or argumentation.

[Anonymous No.14302804]

>>14299878
Nice.

[Anonymous No.14302850]

>>14299808
Lit are knee-jerk contrarians. Gaiman is a great comics author and a fine YA author. Once his SJW-Queen wife deserts him and he returns to the thread of his earlier work he may start producing literature. He definitely has the potential for worthy work in the future.

[Anonymous No.14302858]

>>14299808
His prose is childish.

[Anonymous No.14302920]

>>14299878
You could've saved yourself the effort and just wrote: "Neil Gaiman is Reddit"

[Anonymous No.14302955]

>>14299878
Well played, but Sandman is still nice, my man. Kek

[Anonymous No.14303014]

>>14299878
thanks Nietzsche

[Anonymous No.14303027]

>>14301270
It's implied that A Song of Ice and Fire, at least in part, is written by Samwell Tarly as an account of the events that transpired after he becomes a maester at the Citadel.

[Anonymous No.14303086]

>>14299808
I like him, but for fuck's sake he should go back to write comics and short stories, he's better at that than writing novels.

[Anonymous No.14303582]

>>14299808
I find his writing annoying, he puts too much of his cuck personality into his characters.

[Anonymous No.14304372]

>>14301202
Pretty much this.
There is little that is challenging in a Neil Gaiman book. He borrows heavily from old tropes and synthesizes well. Stardust and the Graveyard book are pretty decent. His prose isn't awful. He has some decent characterization. He's well read. He seems to lack pretension. I can understand why he has broad appeal.
But more refined tastes has always been for an elite not the masses. John Connolly's Book of Lost Things or Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake imo is a superior fantasy book along the lines of what Neil Gaiman writes but I can also understand why one is less popular than the other.

[Anonymous No.14304387]

>>14300584
It's normie to have it on your bookshelf but it's patrician to have lots of autistic post-it-notes and stained pages from your sweaty palms

[Anonymous No.14304816]

>>14301242
Of course, but in contrast Anna Karenina is my favorite Russian writer.

[Anonymous No.14304836]

>>14299984

We used to love Ice and Fire here at one point

[Anonymous No.14305013]

>>14299878
more like this but with less gruggposting

[Anonymous No.14305318]

Why bother with something mediocre when there's still plenty of comfy fantasy classics to read?

[Anonymous No.14305419]

>>14299878
i unironically dont understand this post, can someone translate it without the abstract nouns without writing me off as a brainlet please? thanks

[Anonymous No.14305460]

>>14299878
Absolutely BASED

[Anonymous No.14305547]

>>14305419
Normies parrot popular opinion in order to get by. These parroters talk about art and literature as if they've thought really hard, but they haven't. They just repeat a popular opinion, usually given by a professional pr person. In reality, they just recognize if they like something, and look for a PR stance to justify their feeling. They misuse analytical tools and have no understanding or built up knowledge from reading books or whatever activity they do. If you disagree with them on some intellectual point, they won't respond to your disagreement with an answer, they will get mad, stereotype your argument, and throw out some factoid which they think will hurt you, because in their mind, all you've done is try to hurt them with your reasoning. They can't see arguments as legitimate intellectual discourse(objective), only personal disagreement (subjective). They are annoying, sycophantic, adult children, who pollute most literary circles, and Neil Gaiman is one of their favorite authors. I got sidetracked but that's the gist

[Anonymous No.14305617]

>>14300369
Shall I compare thee to a winter's night?

[Anonymous No.14305618]

>>14299878
>tfw you are the hedonic subhuman talked about in this post

[Anonymous No.14305658]

>>14305547
thanks a lot anon i appreciate your effort in helping me.
i now get the gist of the post i think..
ill be honest though, ill use the example of capeshit as like the zenith of brainless shitty pop culture, i used to be frustrated that garbage like that was popular (and i can call it garbage pretty confidently even though thats not an objective fact but my opinion, i can bet you whatever argument I have for it being garbage is going to be a lot better than what some retard counters it with)....anyway I used to care about the majority of people liking shit like this and then when you brought it up theyd spit out some retarded argument like "shhhhh let people enjoy things xD", but eventually i realized its not worth spending energy or time on getting frustrated about stuff like this. There's nothing you can do to change the public taste, just spend the energy instead finding/building communities of others with a similar more "developed" taste like yourself. Bread and circus has been around and will remain around until the end of times, its a fact of life. Another thing as I got a bit older is i realized no matter how shit some people's taste is, its not worth dehumanizing them over. Even what you think are the most simplistic people are often more complex than they let on. So I don't think it's worth writing off people for their shitty tastes because 1) you can come off like an arrogant dick 2) it reinforces an attitude of automatically underestimating and writing people off, which can bit you on the ass in many ways

[Anonymous No.14305968]

>>14299878
/lit/ is making me hate philosophy more and more. You're not wrong but you could've driven your point without sounding like a massive tryhard faggot

[Anonymous No.14306130]

>>14305968
agreed there was no point for that word salad. i dont get why people feel the need to write like this, good writing gets the point across clearly and doesn't sound like it was written with the help of a thesaurus. people that (you)'d are just jerking themselves off to """understanding""" that post

[Anonymous No.14306151]

>>14299878
I don't even disagree with the point, but this is legit one of the most pretentious things I have read on the internet

[Anonymous No.14306168]

>>14299984
>/lit/ can't stand Harry Potter because normies like it even tho it is a perfectly fine kids to ya fantasy series.
I was a kid while reading the series and I thought the last book was lazy. I hated how they found and destroyed 5 of the Horcrux in just one book and how Voldemort decided to keep using the same spell that failed 3 or 4 times on the same guy.

[Anonymous No.14306206]

>>14304372
>but I can also understand why one is less popular than the other.
I really don't know why Gormenghast is less popular. Care to explain?

[Anonymous No.14306263]

>>14299984
I hated ASoIaF way before GoT.

[Anonymous No.14306274]

>>14300098
I didn't like Hamerican Gods either, but Sandman is dope.

[Anonymous No.14306312]

>>14301270
Book of the New Sun.

[Anonymous No.14306370]

>>14302773
Because quality becomes self evident through exposure. This is only a point of contention for those adamantly REFUSING to invest the time to experience more and asserting that their narrow window of knowledge is vast. It’s amazing because the very people who accuse you of pretension in your hobbies will themselves be extremely selective in theirs. The nerdy gamers people who defend Harry Potter can probably rant as nauseum about the sorry state of video games, and watch hour long video essays about why some obscure Japanese video game was far and away better than some more mainstream game. The lack of self awareness these people have is astounding. It’s almost obscene to demand someone explain why GRRM is a bad author because the point would be self evident of the apologist simply READ MORE. It’s like if I said “explain to me in words why McDonalds isnt as good as a Michelin star restaurant” except it’s even worse because these people have the gall to accuse earnest lovers of the medium of posturing.

[Anonymous No.14306392]

>>14299844
>He wrote one good book
Which one?

[Anonymous No.14306481]

>>14306392
He's probably referring to American gods. But bad omens is also pretty comfy read.

[Anonymous No.14306516]

>>14306206
Probably a combination of insanely dense prose, a very high sociolectic register, painstaking attention to detail, and a first book that prides itself on its slow pace.

By the way, none of these are bad things, and I personally have not found a fantasy book that tops Gormenghast in themes and style. But they definitely do not contribute to mass appeal or popularity.

[Anonymous No.14307256]

>>14306481
it's good omens, and the fact that it was a collab with terry pratchett probably helped

[Anonymous No.14307265]

>why is shit writer rated so low?

Gosh, OP. What a fucking mystery.

[Anonymous No.14307379]

>>14306370
>>14301202
One of my favorite professors, a literature PhD from the University of Cambridge, loved most of the /lit/ canon and also loved Neil Gaiman. We read The Sandman: Season of Mists for one assignment and I enjoyed it. He's great at introducing normies to literature and appreciates the mainstream works too. I'm a musician and music enthusiast. I enjoy classical and jazz about as much as I enjoy pop music. I'm pretty sure your cousin also eats Burger King when he feels like it, and the Patrician guys at /tv/ watch Tranatino flicks every now and then. Developing taste is about expanding your appreciation, not diminishing it or restricting it. Just because there are authors of better quality, caliber etc. doesn't mean easy pop literature can't be enjoyed and is automatically shit

[Anonymous No.14307430]

>>14306481
American Gods starts out with some edgy guy thinking about his wife in prison, It was so bad I put it down in like a chapter.

[Anonymous No.14308453]

>>14307379
most mature guy in the thread, i can tell you have some life experience anon