A follow-up, now that there's so much other awful context out there for anything involving this or other Gaiman works: I'll add to the chorus of recommendations for Elisabeth Sandifer's long(*) biographical/critical/psychological essay about Gaiman, "The Cuddled Little Vice", which I think does a particularly good job of talking about how a person can 1. be intentionally and unforgivably cruel, 2. have a traumatic background that probably contributed to that, which can be worth understanding not to excuse anything but to work toward a world where others don't go down the same road, and 3. still be able to recognize and make true ethical statements about other people's cruelty that overlaps with their own unacknowledged shit. That last point is the one that's most related to what I was writing about here, although Sandifer looks at it mostly in the context of the character Richard Madoc, who's a popular subject for obvious reasons. I wrote a comment there with some later thoughts I had about why Philip Sitz is in the story, and the complicated (intentionally or not) implications of the whole "Collectors" plot.

Of course, I sure do understand if no one wants to read more about any of that. What I wrote here, I think still makes sense on its own terms since it's more about the experiences of encountering various things as a reader. My last paragraph before the footnotes just reads a lot differently to me now.

(* And I do mean long—it's a full career study, with the personal stuff about the author woven through a deep dive into the works. This is part of what seems to be a staggeringly thorough book in progress about a whole generation of British comics writers who are tangentially connected to Alan Moore and Grant Morrison; I've only gotten through maybe 10% of that so far, and it's fascinating to me, but it's a lot.)