Why does Good Omens 3 exist?

They really should have just scrapped everything and started over with a different writer instead of, I guess, trying to edit it.

Why keep Gaiman's shit?

Even if he's not being paid royalties for it (thank fuck), it's still got the obvious problems with his evil (and clear unwillingness to actually atone for it), even if he did somehow write well.

And it turns out that he actually can't write well when he isn't copying off others (there's a whole thing with Tanith Lee's works, apparently; I've read some of hers, but not the things Gaiman wrote associated with that). Or else people are doing what others have noted is a thing with the Harry Potter films (where the adaptation removes a lot of the warts and people mentally replace the books with the adaptations in their minds). Or another writer is involved and doing a lot of the heavy-lifting (ie Good Omens itself).

The finale failed utterly, based on the grumblings of people who finished the thing. It sounds like it's a thematic trash fire and that Pratchett was the heart of the original narrative being good in the first place. Which tracks given what I have read of both their works. Pratchett's well-written and adds the right amount of whimsy and light-heartedness, though I really need to read more of his work.

Gaiman... eugh. My experience with Gaiman's work is reading American Gods in college because a friend of mine adored the fact that a landmark in Wisconsin was featured in it. Then "A Study in Emerald" after getting into the Cthulhu Mythos. I tried to read Good Omens and stopped at a passage that was clearly Gaiman's because something about its flow jarred me entirely out of the story. Pratchett had a way with how he used language that was quite pleasant.

Then I was rereading American Gods during the beginning of Covid lockdowns and realizing how unmemorable it was. I decided not to read any more of his work afterward. With American Gods, that realization specifically had to do with how I only remembered the opener until Shadow meets Odin distinctly. So as I was rereading the book, I kept going "oh, I did actually read this whole book the first time, instead of dropping it early in" as each new plot beat happened.

(This is not normal for me, mind you. I still remember most works I've read, and whether or not I finished them or dropped them.)

This was before it came out he was a serial rapist, mind you. This isn't me going "oh I knew he was a shit person." I didn't know and I won't pretend I did. My assumption was that he was kind of bleh and maybe not to my taste. Indeed, one thing that annoyed me about "A Study in Emerald" is that, while the twist mechanically works, the twist and other aspects of the setup have much broader implications that are much more worth exploring than a short story, and the twist also brings in a distinctly weird anthropocentristic moralizing that I found distasteful.