 is not one of my favorites. You saw a falling star and then you was like, hey Charles, the illustrator for me. He's also not very interesting. So that was how a stardust was born. Stardust by Neil Gaiman is not one of my favorites. Reading these in publication order is making me realize how much I personally feel he has improved over time because his earlier books are my least favorites. I just never really thought about it in timeline-wise. I just, these are just Neil Gaiman books. So yeah, looking at when I laid him out in publication order, I already kind of noticed that I was like, ah, the early ones are the ones I don't like as much. So Stardust, I am on record as things is one of my, if not my least favorite, than one of my least favorite gaming books. And I'm happy to report that I did like it better the second time. But is it a new favorite? So I want to talk about a few things related to Stardust. Obviously like, you know, just a review, like how I felt about it this time. But I kind of want to talk about the origin of it, what led Gaiman to write it. And the reason I want to talk about that is for similar reasons that I kind of talked about that with Neverware because I think it informs the type of story that it ends up being like what we get in Stardust. And it also, I think, is helpful to know that when you are going to read it and when you are yourself assessing it. I think it's helpful to know how something came to be and with all the baggage that comes with that potentially, as well as what the project of something was initially, I always think it's very important to know. That doesn't mean that you have to like something. You can dislike the project of something. But I still think it's important to know what that project is, so you can judge it more fairly. Judgment is always subjective. But criticizing a romance novel for not having enough grim dark action in it is pretty unfair because a romance novel is not really like, that's not the project of a romance novel, if you see what I mean. So I don't personally like romance novels very much because they don't have a lot of grim dark action. But I can't really hold out against a romance novel because it's not trying to do that. It's all about to say, that's what I kind of want to go over with Stardust. Because again, I think it's important to know what it's set out to be and whether or not it succeeds at that. So if you don't know, Stardust was originally published by DC Comics as an illustrated book. Neil Gaiman was chatting with an illustrator friend of his, Charles Vess I believe. Yes, Charles Vess. Check my notes. And the two of them worked together on it, not just Gaiman writing it and then saying, hey, dude, illustrate it. Like, they worked on it together and some of the text was even changed to fit the illustrations that Charles was producing. And so this was published by DC Comics, but almost concurrently because Gaiman still retained the rights to the prose and he was also approached about publishing a prose version of it. So then he also did that because he had the rights to it as well. So I've only ever read the prose version and now I have also listened to the audiobook version of it. I have never read the DC comic version of it. So that's sort of like, I don't know, more structurally, more like brass tacks, how it came to be. But how the story of Stardust came to be was there was a couple different things that inspired Neil Gaiman. Really three things that inspired Neil Gaiman. First, he was interested in writing a fairytale for adults akin to other pre-Tolkienian fantasy, specifically such as Let in the Mist by Hope Merleys. There is other pre-Tolkienian fantasy that he was influenced by, but that's a big one. Number two, he saw a wall in a field in rural England, just like in the middle of the field. And, you know, Gaiman being Gaiman looked at that wall and was like, what if Fairy was on the other side of that wall? Maybe I should write something about that. Maybe I should write a book called Wall. So he had that in the back of his mind. And then the third thing is that he saw a falling star and he thought to himself, what if, when that star fell, it was a person? And then he put together that that star falling should be connected with wall, that she would fall into the fairy realm beyond the other side of wall and put those ideas together and decided to write a pre-Tolkienian-esque fantasy story about a star falling on the other side of the wall in Fairyland. And he was like, hey, Charles, illustrate it for me. So that was how a stardust was born. So approaching reading the text, as I said, I have never read the illustrated version of it. I kind of want to. But again, stardust isn't one of my favorites, which is another one big reason why I haven't because it wasn't like, I love this so much, I want more. Let me get the illustrated version. It was like, okay, that was fine. I'm sure the illustrated one is nice, if I'm honest. If it was illustrated by Chris Riddell, I would have read it by now. But so what this book very much is not, is the movie. Now I saw the stardust movie when it came out. I'm not sure that I knew Neil Gaiman existed other than like possibly his name, like coming across my awareness at some point. Like I can't say I had literally never heard of Neil Gaiman, but I didn't really know who Neil Gaiman was when the movie came out. In fact, I probably became more aware that Neil Gaiman existed because like the credits of stardust are like based on the novel by Neil Gaiman. And I was like, oh, and I really, really love the movie stardust. And so I wasn't like immediately after it was years after the movie came out. And I'd seen it many, many times that I finally sat down to read stardust. But still I went into it going, oh, like I love that movie so much. I'm excited to read a book, like or the book that it was based on. It must be great. And the movie has been compared to I've compared it. I think I compared it to that before I heard anyone else compare it to that. Not to say that like I coined that comparison. I'm just saying I think anyone watching the movie would independently arrive at this comparison. It is very much like The Prince's Bride, which is also based on a book. And the book The Prince's Bride, I also don't care for very much. But the book The Prince's Bride is a lot more like the movie The Prince's Bride. There's a lot more of like a one-to-one, like these are similar in tone and style. And so I did kind of, I didn't really like Prince's Bride the book, like I said. So picking up stardust the book, I was like, well, hopefully this is better than Prince's Bride. But I'm still expecting it to be like pretty much like the movie. Which obviously there will be changes. It will be different. They're seldom the same. And I was quite surprised when I read stardust at how not like the movie it is. It's really, really different from the movie. The plot is pretty much the same. They haven't really changed much about the plot. That's not what's different. The movie, as I say, isn't like The Prince's Bride, the movie, in tone, in humor, in the types of like action and adventure. Like those things aren't really in the book stardust. So the broad strokes, you know, there's a young man in the town called Wall, named Wall because it's next to the wall that separates them from Maryland. A star falls from the sky and he tells the girl that he's in love with, that he's going to go get that star for her. So he goes into fairy and the star is a girl named Evane. And, you know, adventure ensues. There's other people who are trying to find the star as well. So those are the same plot beats in the book and in the movie. That's that remains the same. So it's kind of amazing how different that you can be given. It's pretty much the same plot. And again, it's all just down to tone, really. The film has a lot of adventure. The film has a lot of humor. The film has a lot of romance. It's just more emotive and grand and funnier. The book wasn't really trying to be any of those things. The book is a lot more akin to Let in the Mist by Hope Murley's, which I very recently read. So having read Let in the Mist and now reading Stardust, I gained a new appreciation both because I haven't watched the movie Stardust in a long time. I have read Stardust before, so I know what not to expect. And now I also had read Let in the Mist, which heavily inspired it. So picking up Stardust now, it was a very, very different experience because, again, I knew what to expect and could judge it more on its own, merits on its own terms, and see what it was trying to do, as opposed to being upset at it, not trying to do the things that I was expecting to try to do. It's not just the tone and the style of the story that's similar to Let in the Mist. He makes some direct references to Let in the Mist. For example, The Debatable Hills, which are prominently featured in Let in the Mist. There's a reference to, uh, there's a point where someone asks Tristrin either what is in that direction or which direction they would need to go to get to The Debatable Hills. And, like, it's not really part of the plot at all, so I'm fairly certain it was literally just put in there because Neil wanted to nod to Let in the Mist. So if one has read Pre-Tolkenean Fantasy, I think one would, in picking up Stardust, particularly, again, Let in the Mist, if you pick it up, I think instead of being like, What the heck is this? This is not like normal fantasy. This is not like the movie Stardust. Your reaction would be like, Oh, this is like Let in the Mist. I know what we're doing. So it's a quite different experience if you know what you're getting yourself into. So Stardust is, like I said, it's not my favorite and it still is not my favorite, but I do think it has some definite strengths. The film is very humorous, which isn't to say that the book is not humorous at all. It is humorous more in the way that Let in the Mist is, where it's more satirical. It's more sardonic. It's more sort of social commentary, as opposed to like slapstick adventure situation comedy, which is what the movie does. So we get more sort of like commentary on the hypocrisy of polite society. We get jabs at cultural norms and a generally sardonic tone about everything. So it's not wondrous and magical. It's not like, Oh wow, it's more like, Oh, isn't this strange? And our main character is a bit of a twat. There is a like a mocking undertone to almost everything. So rather than heroic and epic battles and epic climactic sequences and things like that, we have tricks. We have cleverness. We have coincidences. We have technicalities, things like that, which is again very reminiscent of the way the plot unfolds, the way that villains are interacted with in Let in the Mist. So I really disliked that the first time I read Stardust because I was expecting the bigger, the more heroic, the more adventurous. And it's not doing that. I was never trying to do that. It having that kind of a tone is something that I actually do really enjoy the second time around knowing what to expect. And it does have some clever barbs and witticisms. And it's, it's charming and quirky. And it's kind of hard to put into the words what the tone is like, because it's not like constantly ripping things to shreds and it's not constantly like sarcastic and cruel, but it's not like pleasant and nice either. So really the only comparison I can make is that it's like reading Let in the Mist. Or also I compared Let in the Mist in our live show to Jonathan Strange and Mr. and Oral. So the only thing that's like that, that I've read that's more modern is Jonathan Strange and Mr. and Oral. Stardust is more like that in tone. So why don't I love Stardust even now with the benefit of knowing what it was trying to be and what it was inspired by, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? Well, I do think Let in the Mist is a much more successful version of this type of story. While Stardust does include social commentary, it does include strangeness and fairy tricks and all that. I don't feel that there's a cohesive theme, a cohesive kind of like overall criticism that it's trying to levy at society or at the culture or any one particular thing. It's just kind of like a scattering of sardonic wit, leveled at no one in particular. Which is also strange because the plot of Stardust, which I briefly outlined, it's kind of strange to approach that plot with this sort of tone. Let in the Mist, it doesn't have any like heroic figures. It doesn't really have a chosen one. It doesn't really have like a good versus evil even setup where you could explore, where you would expect it to unfold in that way. Whereas Stardust is. Stardust does have a chosen one. Tristrand is a chosen one. Evane is a love interest. There are evil witches who are villains. Just it feels much more like an adventure story with a that should have like a hero's arc and a climax and all this sort of thing. Like that is the story arc that is present in it in the bones of the story. It's just being told instead in the style of something like Red and the Mist. Whereas the film Stardust does lean into this having a hero, making Tristrand a hero, making Evane more of a love interest and having her become more human over time even though she's a star. In the book, Evane just kind of stays inhuman and star-like and kind of grumpy and never like becomes more human, never changes over time. Her and Tristrand's relationship doesn't really change over time. So the movie leans into sort of like humanizing them and making them grow and making them kind of grow up over the course of the adventure. It leans into the adventure side of this because we have a series of quests or a general quest and a series of adventures on that quest in the book. But it's kind of like passed over in this like hand-wavy sardonic way. The film is like, no, let's like let's really do some adventure. Like let's have them do adventurous things and like really like have the score be like, let's do adventure. And the book, like it's just like, no, we're not doing adventures even though technically this is a book about an adventure. And then again, the ending of the book kind of ends in this more sort of like not grand, more satirical, more kind of like and that was the ending. It's not like perfectly quite happy and no one's really learned anything. And that's just the ending, ta-da! Which kind of even let in the mist had a little more of like a cohesive conclusion to the theme of the story that still wasn't like a happy fairytale ending but it felt more like I see the point was made. And then again, the film of Stardust, it does, it's leaned into making him heroic and making her love interest and making the villain's villainess and having him grow and learn and overcome these odds and everything then it leans into making the conclusion also quite grand and epic and like a big ta-da-da-da kind of like ending. And the ending of the film again, it's not a satirical ending. It's a truly happy ending. And the ending in the book, I mean it's more or less a happy ending but it's just kind of like cold and satirical. So you don't kind of like leave the book with this kind of like warm glow the way you do it, at least I do, in watching the film. The character of Tristron, who is the main chosen one hero type character, like I say in the beginning of the film and in the beginning of the book, they're quite similar. But then the book doesn't really have him grow or change that much whereas the film really makes him change a lot so that by the time he comes back there's words about this lip services page of this in the book where he comes back and he's unrecognizable because he's been on so many adventures and he's tanned and he's been through so much that they're like oh my gosh that can't be the same Tristron that left to go find the star. So which really comes across as he's dirty and tan and he's been roughing it as opposed to when he comes back in the movie and he looks physically different like his hair looks different and he's tanner but he's also matured a lot in how he's caring himself how he's engaging with people it's just an entire like a marked difference in the entirety of his person and Tristron not being that way in the book isn't necessarily a problem like he can stay not being a heroic cool interesting person like he doesn't have to become the heroic great guy that's fine but in the book not only is Tristron not really a great guy he's also not very interesting like he's not interesting to read about and the stuff that's happening around him is also not that interesting to read about because it's not really like all tied to this overall theme or overall message because there isn't one so in conclusion Stardust is fun it's good it's it's written well the prose is very good as usual there are some fun quirks fun jokes there's a charm to it undoubtedly and because this pre-Tolkenean style of fantasy has fallen out of favor than Stardust by emulating it does kind of stand out from the pack now unfortunately in my opinion Stardust is a rather pale limitation of pre-Tolkenean fantasy let in the mist is much better but the book does have clever bits of prose typical of Gaiman the gentle witticisms and sardonic observations kind of trickle by as the book weaves its little spell but while I appreciate the book more now I do maintain that the movie Stardust is better and certainly the book Let in the Mist is better than the book Stardust but if it's your fave let me know why and what is it that I'm missing what is it that I'm not getting what is it you get out of it that I'm not I'd love to know let me know in the comments down below your thoughts and feelings I post videos on Saturdays other random times well definitely Saturdays so like and subscribe join my patreon if you feel so inclined and I'll see you when I see you