How to Talk to Girls at Parties

[laughing_tree]

Comments

[thezmage]

Oh, wow. That’s the best I’ve ever found Neil Gaiman

[alschroeder3]

Beautiful. I love how Gaiman combines the everyday and the transcendent, effortlessly.

[burkeonthesly]

He really has a gift for it, doesn't he?

[zachbeacon]

I first read this as the original short story and it didn't make a huge impact. The thing that jumps out at me when reading the comic is just how long it takes for these guys to realize they're in ... well...a Neil Gaiman story.

(Granted that's more common than it should be. American Gods and Anansi Boys are among my favorites and it took Shadow and Fat Charlie forever to notice the obvious)

[locuatico]

To be fair, it's not clear when Shadow realized what was going on, since it is stated he mostly doesn't care about anything after discovering his wife had an affair with his best friend.

[dejadrew]

To be fair, I think that's actually the point. That the two boys are so laser focused on getting laid, and so invested in the idea that girls are so WEIIIRD and MYSTEEEEERIOUS and ALIEEEN that they are incapable of recognizing the fact that they are dealing with actual goddamn aliens.

That being the case... this story has never done much for me, specifically because of the dumbass PoV characters. I think Gaiman views them as sort of... ruefully relateable? Like, remember being a horny teenaged boy, readers? Man, we were dumb, haha. But as one of the inscrutable alien creatures known as girls, I just found them obnoxious.

[wizardru]

Am I interpreting correctly that his friend nearly raped Stella?
I'm not sure what to think on how this is presented.

(Although if that is what's happening here, you might want to add a trigger warning to the post).

[locuatico]

I...don't think... so? I took it as him rejecting her after she revealed her "true form" or something like that... but now tyhat you mention it, and him going on that vague "you had be the person who had done THAT" I am not so certain anymore...

[zachbeacon]

I always interpreted it as "I nearly had sex with Cthulhu*"

*Or whatever the "girls" really are.

[laughing_tree]

He brushed up against things beyond mortal ken and flinched, is my reading.

And I think the girls aren't all supposed to be one thing but a bunch of different things, all hanging out together. The first girl's an insectoid alien, the second's some sort of non-corporeal entity, the third's a living poem.

[janegray]

I don't get Gaiman.

Everybody always says his stories are beautiful, poetic, evocative.

And I'm just... confused.

It's not that I dislike them, it's that I have no clue what I'm looking at. I feel like a colour-blind person listening to people debate whether green or yellow is the prettier colour.

[laughing_tree]

I used to kind of feel that way, but it eventually clicked for me. The trick, I think, is to see his stories more as extended vignettes than as traditional stories. More about mood and atmosphere than clear conflicts and their resolutions. In this story, for example, there's no conflict to speak of really; it's all about the atmosphere of an encounter with the otherworldly and mysterious, which haunts a young boy the rest of his life.

For a more traditionally-told Gaiman story, I did recently post "A Study of Emerald." Curious to see what you'd make of that.