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   Trivial Einstein (intransitivelie@beige.party)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 14:30:54 JST Trivial Einstein

   As the Gaiman stuff is going 'round again (and hopefully reaching more people this time) I'm thinking again about the need for a way to mourn the loss of something without condoning the actions of the creator. Gaiman wasn't a formative influence of mine, but I've had similar losses. And they are losses, even were I to decide that one can separate art and artist. I will never be able to experience certain things again without a voice in the back of my head reminding me that there be monsters.

   But all too often, mourning those losses centers ourselves at the expense of the actual victims of great men (and yes, sometimes not men, though unfortunately we must acknowledge that men are the foremost) who have caused great harm. We blame the victims for coming forward, because if they hadn't, this terrible knowledge that we can't escape would never have burdened our enjoyment of things, would never overshadow our childhoods, our joys, our first experiences of being known by someone outside ourselves.

   Some people go further, unable to handle the loss at all. They refuse to believe. They go on as if nothing has happened. I think it's whistling in the dark, myself, as it often seems like they are too quick to jump to the defense. They know, deep down, but they can't let that knowledge out.

   And there are those who, unfortunately, view anyone who was taken in by a monster as monstrous. Oh, you loved those books? Why didn't you see that it was all artifice? Why didn't you hate him from the start? It was clear all along that he was no good. So to attempt to mourn is, to them, an admission of one's own guilt.

   But just as our society has a problem with death, so too we have a problem with the loss of innocence. We're all holding on to childhood so tightly that we can't cope when the edifice shatters. We don't know how to talk about death, or loss, or failures, or human imperfections.

   And so, yet again, there are only two ways to be. Either you must cast down the Devil and his works, or you must be consumed by them. No middle ground. No acknowledgement that the man was great even as he was monstrous. No mourning, because to mourn is to admit that it was worth mourning.

   Until the next one. And the next. Until finally we grow so cynical that we can never have an experience of artistic connection again, or we become so crushed by loss that we can't bear another and we sell our souls and stop believing the victims.

   If you loved Neil Gaiman and his work, you're not a bad person. His actions are his own. Don't carry his weight for him. And you should be allowed to mourn that this man has taken so much from you. Not his victims. Not "cancel culture" or "political correctness" or whatever bullshit buzzwords the people who refuse to believe in consequences are peddling these days. Neil Gaiman stole his work from you. It's okay to be angry about that too, even as you're angry at him for being a horrible person.

   And it's okay to still be shaped by his work. You can't stop that. You didn't seek him out knowing he was a horrible person. His work was and is worthy of acknowledgement, even as we can't avoid that it was created by a horrible person. It's up to you as individuals how that asterisk affects your relationship with his work, but however you decide, the work exists and you can't remove it from your life any more than you can remove trauma, grief, loss, or any other negative or positive influence.

   And it's not selfish to have feelings about this. You may have never met the man, you may have had no idea until just now that anything was amiss, you may have previously been skeptical but now convinced, whatever. No, you shouldn't center yourself in others' discussions of the harm he caused. But in your own life, it's okay to be affected. It's okay to feel that loss.

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     Trivial Einstein (intransitivelie@beige.party)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 14:30:51 JST Trivial Einstein

     in reply to

     As a tangent and I guess an opposing example, I never liked Harry Potter. I've never read the books or seen the movies and I never thought much of Jowling Kowling even before she exposed her true colors. And it would be very tempting of me to bring that up when people talk about how much her work meant to them and how her reveal has affected them. It would be gratifying to say, "See, told ya so, I knew it all along."

     But I didn't. I didn't read the books because I was too old to get into them as a child but not old enough to get into them as an adult. I rejected them because they were popular and I was tired of hearing about them. Had things been just a little different, I could easily have been very into Harry Potter and find myself in the position that others do. I'm not special, I'm not smarter, I'm just lucky and perhaps a bit too contrary for my own good, really.

     I'm not going to exhaustively enumerate my failures, but Bill Cosby's standup was formative to my sense of humor. I used to joke that, if I were forced to pick a male movie star to have sex with, I'd go with Kevin Spacey (and I didn't even know he was gay at the time). I love Firefly even though I wasn't an early adopter. I enjoyed Louis CK's comedy. I've read and enjoyed all manner of books by problematic authors, some of them after those authors' problems were widely known. Believe me when I say that I'm no wizard when it comes to avoiding art by terrible artists.

     That's part of this too. You can't beat yourself up about enjoying something if you didn't know. And yes, that includes if you could probably have known if you looked into it. Cosby has been an open secret for way, way too long, for example. I could plead all sorts of extenuating circumstances, but at the end of the day, the best thing to do is take the knowledge and act on it, then try to be more aware in the future.

     Even with the internet making everything everywhere all at once, a lot, I mean a LOT of people don't hear about things. The terminally-online are no exception. And the system is designed to let these assholes get away with it by memory-holing their crimes. Never forget that either.

     I guess all I'm saying is that you can strive to do better without either being a joyless cynic or beating yourself up about your failures to the point that you stop learning from them.

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     Trivial Einstein (intransitivelie@beige.party)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Jan-2025 14:30:53 JST Trivial Einstein

     in reply to

     Personally, I will say that I liked what of Neil Gaiman I knew. He took me in, if one can say that. I'm not sure, honestly. There will be people who say that he was playing a feminist and a nice guy to fool people, to make it easier to be monstrous behind the scenes, but if so, he played the part extremely well. At some point it will probably come out that he's stopped pretending and has shown his true colors. Scratch him and maybe he'll bleed fascist, for instance

     But there's always the chance that he contains multitudes. How can he rationalize his private actions with his public statements? People are good at rationalization. If he's simply a soulless pursuer of power, he'll jump ship to whatever will get him that, but as hard as it may be to admit, there are plenty of people who truly believe that they're good people, truly believe their statements which we understand to be good, and yet are flawed? That seems dismissive. They're not good people, but they're not entirely bad?

     Gaiman's sexual proclivities might be entirely squared in his mind with feminism. After all, feminism is about a woman's right to choose, and he may think that these women chose. I won't go into details here; you can read about them easily if you want. But a failure to understand consent isn't unique to awful people, and a failure to understand power imbalances isn't either. Maybe Gaiman genuinely thinks that he's done nothing wrong. Maybe he feels bad that these women obviously didn't have a good time, but that's the end of it.

     That in no way excuses his actions. Period, full stop. But it might explain the trajectory. And it might explain how he could have been so convincing. I say all this not to make you feel better about him but about yourself if you feel taken in by him. You weren't a sucker. It's not your fault.

     But it's just as likely that he was just a really good liar. The Scientology stuff, which hasn't been as widely circulated, suggests a more sinister Neil Gaiman. And that's not your fault either.

     I suspect that it's a mixture of the two, really. He can contain multitudes, and some of them can be horrible. I was taken in. I can't help but feel a little bad about that, but such is life.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.