Oh, those wacky kids!
Okay, half of you have probably seen this by now, but in the interests of posterity:

In his blog, Neil Gaiman posts a letter he got from a sixteen-year-old girl named Angie, chastising him for putting (oh noes) a sex scene in his book Stardust, along with his characteristically civil and sensible response.

And the LJ feed explodes!


blackbutterfli: curses that I don't have time to read the whole fascinating and squee worthy post, but fuck you angie!

geca: ACK! That Angie is making me see red. I'm 17, and if there's one thing I hate it's censorship. He's perfectly free to write a book, and not worry about "OHMYGAWSH, a 10-year-old might stumble on it and find out, you know, Where Babies Come From." UGH! It's not even a children's book. If she wants books that are sex-free read Children's books, or Christan books. DEFINATELY not YA books and not most adult books either. It'd be one thing if Stardust was advertised as a book to teach kids about the Birds and the Bees and Dunstan and the fairy are boinking wildly, or having an orgie or something like that!

weemadharold: Any 16 year old who doesn't already know about sex has serious fucking problems. The age of consent is 16 or less throughout most of the world, for Cthulhu's sake.



gosparkygo:
One upon a time I sent out letters written just as stiffly as that precisely because underneath the cloak of self-righteousness, I was uncertain. Unless you're really lucky or really lying, you probably did too.

mrpata: Neil handled that letter with the utmost grace.

It's a shame that his enlightened and open-minded readers couldn't do the same.


Blissfully unaware of all this brouhaha (OR IS HE?!) Gaiman posts a follow-up the next day, in which "Liz" writes:

Hey Neil, I really liked your response to Angie's email about the "scene" in Stardust. Although I have yet to read that book, I had similar questions regarding American Gods. I understand that it is an adult book and so not many children are likely to be reading it, but as a sixteen year old high school student I was rather surprised at how much sex was in just the first half of the novel. Personaly, I justified the acts of sex in American Gods with symbolization rather than actual sexual intercourse, and I was wondering if you were going in the same direction.

And here it gets really fun, as in one corner saltsweetbitter waxes vitriolic about book burners omg! and in the other, redlion1904 whinges: Good to know that the Gestapo that reads this LJ don't think girls have the right to be embarassed by something they read. Hate to respect her freedom of thought or anything.

Obviously somebody's being oppressed here, but whether it's Neil Gaiman or his more delicate fangirls remains to be proven.

(I hear tell that syndicated feed posts expire at some point, so here are furls for those coming late to the party: part one and part deux.)