Harry Potter is so ubiquitous that most people who consume it do so without really knowing much about the author beyond their name and then there’s a decent chunk that don’t care because it doesn’t affect them and they think it’s culture war stuff that doesn’t matter.
Making people care about things that don’t directly affect them is always the hardest task.
hp was a big part of my pre transition life when i was in the closet. i hate jk so i dont buy new things but i still do reread my existing books. leaky, pottercast, and starkid were the first places i fit in.
but i dont actively seek out pro rowling hp fandom tho. fuck rowling.
I think a lot of us trans girls are in the same situation. I learned to read on HP books, and Hermoine was a deeply important character to me growing up 😅 It’s hard for me, but I have gradually moved away from the series as it increasingly becomes associated with Britain’s Top Transphobe.
same! i also got into chris colfers land of stories which is infinitely better too (and he’s a better person too!)
Dunno if you know dimension 20 and their Misfits & Magic mini-series, but it was basically a satire of Harry Potter, really attacking some of the unquestioned tropes in that series.
Anyway, this is a beautiful clip of Erika Ishii, who is NB, at the start of the series, saying what they think of TERFs:
i LOVE d20 and erika! they’re amazing <3
evan kelmp
Yayyyyyy Erika my beloved 🥰
Doesn’t season 2 of the sandman come out in a couple weeks? Doesnt really seem like he’s being boycotted.
I can’t tell if I’m allowed to be excited about it because I love Sandman but Gaiman is a creep.
I love the sandman. I have yearned for an adaptation for years. Then we get one and it’s actually good. Not good for comic book TV. Actually GOOD good.
And then the show goes and gets himself and the show cancelled because he’d a fucking sex creep. Fuck you Neil.
Also, fuck you Amanda fucking Palmer. It took a while before we found out, but you’ve been complicit in this fucking stuff for ages.
Honestly, I’m developing massive trust issues, I’m starting to reflexively fear liking stuff because I’m pretty sure one of the people involved with it is going to turn out to be a massive predator any minute now.
As someone who loves the graphic novels, the show just didn’t do it for me. I don’t think any show could do it justice.
It wasn’t bad or anything, but it was lacking something that made the books so special imo
it’s easy to complain about death of the author when you don’t care about their work.
but even you do, even just enjoying it a bit, it’s a bit harder.
you can pirate it, you get to enjoy it and they get no revenue from it. but then engaging with the content is free advertising, so just watch it and keep it to yourself.
i’m a believer that we should just consider the works forfeited to the public domain and let the author’s name be forgotten to time, let the future think of it as we think about german fairytales.
we should bring back old copyright limits of 14 years. or probably less, like 5 years.
then it wouldn’t matter at all what an author says.
Kudos for Tom Lether for putting all his songs into the public domain so it doesn’t get bounced around for 70 years after his death.
While still a bad person, what Gaiman did limited to a number of people, not a number of countries, also his work is actually good, not half-baked garbage only held up by nostalgia.
The 2nd season was already in production when the allegations/proof came out, and I guess Netflix did not want to just burn all that money for nothing. But they did cancel the 3rd season
Not defending him in any way, but has there been more proof released? Last I saw he was investigated by authorities and there wasn’t enough evidence to prove a criminal case. And I get not enough to prove a criminal case doesn’t mean he didn’t do it, but it also means there isn’t much evidence. Again, not defending him. This kind of behavior is gross and unacceptable.
I get that, but I tend to think the burden of proof in a criminal case is much higher than the burden of proof to believe a victim outside of a courtroom.
In this case I don’t think there is any reason to doubt the victims, and the pressure and evidence points to victims tending to not come forward, the fact that there are multiple accusations from multiple victims indicates to me a much higher probability that Gaiman is guilty of some sexual crimes than not. Luckily my opinion or assessment of Gaiman’s behavior doesn’t have consequences like jail time, so my beliefs do not demand the same scrutiny as a judge’s or a jury’s.
Not that it’s wrong to think about the evidence, but culturally I think we tend to discount survivors and victims more than we validate them, and that can make questions about evidence really difficult, even harmful. Still, we obviously can’t ignore the problem of evidence, but luckily that’s primarily a concern for the courts (not that being cancelled doesn’t have consequences, and “cancel culture” can be reactive, essentializing, and unfair - that’s probably something we should collectively think about more).
A fair breakdown, and logically thought out opinion. Rare these days. Looking at the evidence you provided makes me lean heavily in the same direction as yourself. The reactivity of online “cancel culture” is what had me second guessing, especially since the authorities dropped it. Thanks for taking the time to help me better understand the situation and get the full picture.
He was investigated by the New Zealand authorities. What has happened with the other women has not been investigated as far as I know.
The New Zealand case became a civil lawsuit.
With the UK woman who accused him of pressuring her to give him oral when she could no longer pay her rent, Gaiman has sued her for breaking a nondisclosure agreement.
I’m not sure what has happened with the other women. Gaiman’s own statements on it have not endeared him to people.
Thank you for the updated information. Absolutely abhorrent behavior. I Google’d around a bit myself but most of the articles focused more on his TV show cancellations…
here are the things I’ve read:
overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gaiman#Sexual_assault_and_misconduct_allegations
some reporting: https://www.vulture.com/article/neil-gaiman-allegations-controversy-amanda-palmer-sandman-madoc.html
note: content warning, NSFL
Yeah, that’s just what Netflix does. They cancel shows. I’m skeptical that the cancelation decision was made because of gaiman’s allegations. If it was I don’t see how continuing production on season 2 after the fact makes any sense.
From what I’ve read, they did cancel the 3rd season - maybe not directly because of what Gaiman did, but for sure because it’s not very cash money to do productions with him right now
Notice how a lot of folks aren’t aware of the disgusting things Gaiman did, specifically BECAUSE he went quiet. Rowling doesn’t want to go quiet because she’s a crusader: discriminating against trans people is a goal for her.
yes, she sees herself as a kind of martyr and victim of a witch-hunt, which does change how she responds to the cultural backlash she receives for her behavior.
Yeah its a deliberate strategy by Gaiman, while in the background he goes after his victims that settled previously for breaching NDAs. Even if he doesn’t win its money well spent to stop more accusations from coming out. He’s going to wait this out and try to rehabilitate himself in a few years.
I thought NDAs couldn’t be used to cover criminal behaviour?
Doesnt that only apply if it when to court as a criminal case? At the moment this is people talking to the press and it hasnt gone to criminal court.
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Yeah, Gaiman keeps a low profile because he wants people to forget what he did. Rowling is proud of being a hateful cunt and invests time and money in proliferating hate.
Also I actually have less of an issue with other people buying Gaiman’s work. I have no love for the man and won’t buy anything myself again, but if you buy something of his, the money goes to him, and stops there. Rowling directly funds bigotry; the money people spend on Harry Potter is in a direct pipeline to funding the suffering of innocent people.
At the very least, before everything happened with Gaiman, he was known for having positive philanthropic ventures. Even if you gave him money, a sizable portion went to him, another portion went on to better the world. I’d presume he still supports these trusts and charities too.
You see, the difference is… Supporting Gaiman makes you seem like a rape enabler… And anything related to rape is bad.
You want to discriminate against gay/trans/black/brown people? It might be distasteful, but it’s not universally considered bad. There’s lots of people out there willing to vote a Nazi into the white house and cheer him on as he breaks the law to deport anyone and everyone he wants to just because they’re “not from here” (or they think they’re “not from here”).
See, they’re
notthe same thing.Yeah but Agent Orange was convicted of sexual assault too, so that argument doesn’t hold.
Maybe, but he had already spun the fake news narrative to his deciples, so it was easy for them to hand wave all of the convictions away as fake news based on absolutely no evidence.
Given the relative intelligence of each set of followers, I’m not surprised that they could do the mental gymnastics to disregard such a verdict.
Meanwhile, I’m not even sure Gaiman has been convicted, but he’s being treated like he’s guilty by the public, so here we are.
I just haven’t bothered to keep up to date with his situation because, though I previously enjoyed things with his name attached, I’ve never been “a fan” so to speak, of the man himself. I neither liked, nor disliked him. Now I have reasons to dislike him. IDK. I’m just some guy.
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The worst of us ruin it for everyone else. It’s just like how everyone reasonable hates microtransactions in gaming, but enough unreasonable people love them that microtransactions are still more profitable than traditional income streams so they’re shoved into every game.
Reasonable people didn’t want to pay for the deeply mediocre Hogwarts Legacy, but enough dumb motherfuckers ruined it for the rest of us by making it one of the most popular games the year it released.
Note: I only know it’s deeply mediocre because I pirated it so I could critique how bad of a fucking game it is without putting money into JK Rowlings pockets. Seriously, I do no understand the love for that fucking game, it’s narratively and gameplay-wise a pile of shit for real.
Pure nostalgia injected into the first parts of it from what I heard. It was many people’s fantasy to travel to that world, from both casuals and terminally online people alike. Mediocrity doesn’t matter when the presentation fully exploits deep personal connections people have with the material.
Thing is Gaiman pissed off all feminists with the SA allegations so of course he has disappeared from the online world because the cross over between Neil Gaiman readers and SA-appologists is very small.
Whereas a sect of the feminists support her gatekeeping opinion that the only thing that can describe if you’re a woman is being born with a cunt. This one very vocal audience is not unified.
On top of that Rowling is more mainstream than Gaiman is and the general public is more willing to ignore the mudslinging world of gender politics and not get involved if it means more content from a popular mediocre scribe.
GERM’s is a better term I’ve seen around lately, stands for Gender Exclusionary
RadicalRegressive Misogynists.Edit: thank you for the correction!
I believe it was coined by Kate Nash for her song - https://youtu.be/q2MoQJP-PhA
I’ve also seen FART being used. Feminism Appropriating Ridiculous Transphobes
oo, I didn’t know about this, thank you - GERM is much better than TERF, lol
Irk? Keeps them nicely sectioned off from being associated with feminism too.
I prefer the term “Genital Worrier” or more accurately because they only really worry about one type of transgender person “Penis Panickers”.
I’ve heard the R standing for Regressive since there’s nothing rad about being a bigot
You’re right, that’s what I’ve seen too, and I’ve seen ‘reactionary’ used as well.
Lmao, in my haste to share the new thing I confused the ‘R’ with the one in the original acronym.
yeah, agreed - Gaiman’s fans are far less willing to tolerate his SA, HP fans are more general public and transphobia is more socially acceptable than SA.
Basically this post is essentially saying, “it’s a shame transphobia is so acceptable to people”
Also, I think that the fact that Harry Potter was a big part of people’s childhoods made them more reluctant to abandon it when the creator turned out to be garbage. See: Nintendo.
Bigotry, rape, and stick drift. Yup, totally comparable.
If you’re an adult and you’re still a fan of Harry Potter, you should try reading some novels written for adults.
I know this sounds snarky, and I guess it kind of is, but it is true…
You’re obsessed with books written for literal children.
A) many harry potter adults are still proud that they read a book once when they were kids, they haven’t read much since.
B) “Kids” literature can be for everyone, just because they are kids, doesn’t mean it has to be shit. The Hobbit was written for kids and it is among my favourite books. And the little prince is still amazing and a must read for every adult who never read it.
I really hate when “Stuff made for kids” is an excuse to make shitty slop. kids deserve and need quality literature.
Ever since I can (abusive ex didn’t allow it), I’m reading my kids at night, and we’re reading good stuff, we done: The Hobbit, Psalm for the Wildbuilt (not aimed at kids, but I think everyone needs to read it, even children), the Wild Robot series… and they love it.
PS: I really hate when children are treated as a target for slop.
Why do people literally only say this about Harry potter lol. “Read an adult book!” OK sure but why aren’t we saying the same thing about the millions of Anime fans, bronies, Stephen Universe, Gravity Falls, or other kids cartoon fans? It’s just disingenuous
Put Marvel and most of Star Wars also in the same category.
Alan Moore agrees:
“I haven’t seen a superhero movie since the first Tim Burton ‘Batman’ film. They have blighted cinema, and also blighted culture to a degree,” Moore said. “Several years ago I said I thought it was a really worrying sign, that hundreds of thousands of adults were queuing up to see characters that were created 50 years ago to entertain 12-year-old boys. That seemed to speak to some kind of longing to escape from the complexities of the modern world, and go back to a nostalgic, remembered childhood. That seemed dangerous, it was infantilizing the population.”
Yeah, it’s not wrong. Escapism is a way to hide from reality, even if only for an evening.
I mean, I am. Bronies are an embarrassment.
Harry Potter wasn’t very good, but if you read it as a kid and got invested in the setting it’s easy to forget that the writing was kinda shit. The argument that it’s “for children” is a (possibly unintentional) misdirection, but following it up with a recommendation to actually good fiction is valid and worthwhile.
Meanwhile, I’m a grown ass man and watched Gravity Falls a few weeks back, and it was fucking good. Good fiction is still good even if you’re not the target age range.
I think I’m agreeing with you.
I disagree, I liked harry potter a lot. I think they’re good books. I don’t think we have to pretend like this is about literary taste and not the author’s political views. I think people should be up front with what the real message is: “I think that the authors views are abhorrent and therefore you should not support her financially”. The age appropriateness of the books or their quality is just a disingenuous personal attack on the fans and is just childish
I stand by my position of the harry potter books being bad, but I will concede on two points:
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it’s an opinion not a fact.
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it’s not that important to the larger discussion of rowling being a shitty person who’s shittiness shouldn’t be supported.
I would also like to say that my criticism of the quality of the books is NOT an attack on the fans of the work (at least it’s not when I do it, can’t speak for anyone else). It is ok to like bad writing, it would be hypocritical of me to say otherwise as I do enjoy reading a lot of amateur writing from time to time. To further this point, I’d like to say that there are aspects of rowling’s creation that I actually do like. The setting of the wizarding world is quite interesting, and I’d love to dig through lore regarding the characters and the history and just how the setting got to where it is by the timeframe of the books.
Actually, speaking of the wizarding world and of crappy amateur writing, I think imma go read Thinking in Little Green Boxes again.
I like you, you’re a good person
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Supporting Gaiman is supporting a rapist; it will negatively impact a couple people directly.
Supporting Rowling is much worse.
such incredible insight, Rowling as an anti-trans activist is engaged in a genocidal movement which has of course a much larger scale of both number of people harmed and the severity of that harm
I hate Rowlings and her stupid and dangerous ideas, but I don’t think it is genocide? Or is it some pro iseaeli stance that makes you say that?
I’m asking because I think it’s important to not use genocide for eveything bad because it just waters down the words meaning, and in the end when there is a “real” genocide people will compare it to lesser evils.
Not saying you’re wrong, but I would like to know the reason behind you saying it!
Genocide is technically a process and a sliding scale. It exists by degrees. It may seem hyperbolic to classify some actions as genocidal particularly when they are slow or the number of deaths do not seem absolute but it is still genocide.
What defines a genocide via international Convention is any of five acts intended to diminish the population of a cultural community. None of these have to be a totality of the group it can be only in part. The important thing is victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly. The five acts of genocide are :
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Killing members of the group
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Causing them serious bodily or mental harm
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Imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group
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Preventing births
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Forcibly transferring children out of the group
While a number of countries are full five for five in regards to trans people you only really need one to qualify. Things like the lack of reporting of Trans deaths, the removal of services needed by the group including medical care or critical mental health resources as is happening with the closure of LGBTQIA+ specific crisis support in the US, the labelling of Trans people as pedophiles or removal of children from the custody of supportive parents into state custody by labelling gender affirming attitudes as “child abuse”, the forcing of trans people to endure security risks because of laws that often get them arrested for following them such as bathroom bills… All of these are genocidal measures they just aren’t fast acting.
While it may seem like the point of the word is to be splashy and attention grabbing that need not be the point of it. The cultural expectations that genocide need only be wartime type measures of systematic elimination is a disservice to a lot of other genocides that are happening globally.
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First of all, yes, I think some people find it controversial to use the term “genocide” to refer to what’s happening to trans people. Part of the debate about the term “genocide” is whether it can apply to non-ethnic groups, for example. I would argue the spirit of the term does apply to any group, but some people disagree. I’m not sure why it’s so important for the term to be limited to ethnicity, I tend to think these arguments are not in the spirit of validating or recognizing very real oppression and violence intended to completely eliminate a certain group.
The motivation to use the term “genocide” is that the anti-trans movement has explicitly stated as their goal the total erasure of trans people:
During his speech on Saturday, Knowles told the crowd, “For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”
Knowles subsequently claimed that “eradicating” “transgenderism” is not a call for eradicating transgender people and demanded retractions from numerous publications, including Rolling Stone.
Erin Reed, a transgender rights activist and writer, tells Rolling Stone that it’s an absurd distinction. There is no difference between a ban on “transgenderism” and an attack on transgender people, she says: “They are one and the same, and there’s no separation between them.”
“We are not gonna rest until every child is protected, until trans ideology is entirely erased from the earth. That’s what we’re fighting for, and we will not stop until we achieve it,” he said.
Specifically, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has described the anti-trans movement as genocidal:
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security condemns the anti-trans agenda of the second Trump Administration and warns Americans that the recent spate of executive orders, which are in line with a genocidal process against the transgender community that has been emerging in the United States for over a decade, are meant to pave the way for greater state repression against all individuals and other groups in the future.
…
The Lemkin Institute believes that current anti-trans hysteria within the government is meant to serve three purposes within a wider genocidal process. First, the Executive Orders constitute the paper marginalization and ‘paper persecution’ of an identity group that has recently gained rights and greater acceptance in order to lock in evangelical support for the Trump administration. Second, the executive orders create a fictitious ‘cosmic enemy’ that will justify radicalization of government in general, leading to ever-more power for the executive branch; and third, the executive orders, over time, aim to normalize the destruction of identity groups by desensitizing the public to state-sponsored persecution of people based solely on their identities.
Taken together, the Trump Administration’s executive orders related to trans people would effectively destroy, if fully implemented, trans people as a group, in whole, to summarize the text of the Genocide Convention. The orders begin the process of removing a trans presence from collective life and preventing trans people from existing as themselves, forcing them back into invisibility and isolation. This attack on trans identity is reminiscent in the US context of the Native American Boarding Schools, where the goal was to “kill the Indian … and save the man.” Not only would the effort to deprive trans Americans of gender affirming care constitute a form of torture (and medical malpractice) with terrible mental health repercussions, but also such measures are a common phase in genocidal processes and generally lead to ever greater persecution.
Trans people in Florida prisons are being forcefully detransitioned and forced into pseudo-science conversion “therapy”, I don’t think it’s hyperbolic at this point in time to say the intentions of the anti-trans movement are genocidal, and I think the movement is largely succeeding in their goals.
So far necessary medical care has been denied to trans youth in many states, and the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that discrimination against people on the basis of “gender dysphoria” is legal. We already have data that the ban of gender affirming care (and in some cases, forcing physicians to detransition trans youth) has significantly increased the rate of suicide attempts among those trans youth.
We are also seeing tools used in previous genocides, such as “social death” where the concept of being trans is eliminated from the law and thus on a social and legal level trans people cannot “exist”. Laws in some states have already achieved this (which results in trans people never being able to fix their birth certificates or update their legal documents, for example), and now the federal government is operating under executive orders that establish the same (making it impossible for trans people to have accurate passports or federal documents, for example - but the policies impact much more, including forcing male TSA agents to pat down trans women and vice versa).
So the methods and goals are all genocidal, the only problem is that trans people as a group are not a national or ethnic group, so this would fail a narrow definition of genocide that way.
It’s just utilitarianism. Utilitarian generally seems to piss off a lot of lemmites though; I thought people would have a more negative reaction to it here.
(Btw I agree the number of people harmed is larger but I think it’s debatable whether or not the (per-person) severity of the harm is larger.)
utilitarianism: for when you need the worst possible take delivered in the most insufferable manner using the least amount of critical faculty to answer the questions nobody asked.
All that true and it works ™
Now we just need people to listen to our hot takes and we’re set.
funny thing is the last time i bothered thinking about utilitarianism was when i was reading about the zizians using it to justify murdering just whoever they pleased. i’m not convinced it works, it’s a school of philosophy for stupid pedants who want to feel smart and justified in whatever they already think.
well the zizians were obviously insane, nobody likes them. The rationalists disowned them, just like they disowned FTX.
As a moral philosophy, I am not certain about utilitarianism. But outside of morality, if you’re going to have preferences, you might as well do the math.
the anti-trans movement’s achievements like taking away gender-affirming care have directly been shown to result in increased suicides, as far as I know Gaiman’s actions have not directly killed anyone, while Rowling’s advocacy does directly support a movement that results in deaths - I think the per-person severity of harm when a trans person self harms, attempts suicide, or succeeds in suicide (not to mention when anti-trans bigots rape, torture, and murder trans people) are all worse AFAIK
It’s true that Gaiman’s actions haven’t directly killed anyone, but I’m not sure there are enough victims to definitively say that getting raped by Gaiman would cause less propensity for suicide than Rowling’s advocacy against trans people. But… I suspect you are right.
yeah, I agree with you - the harm is severe, it’s just with such a small population we can’t show the concrete harm the way we can with a trans population where deaths are already happening (but that doesn’t diminish the actual harm to Gaiman’s victims, which I would say is extreme).
Does buying Gaiman’s work after he’s dead still benefit him or can I separate him from the art at that point? I don’t wanna support him, but I do wanna read his work someday
Just dont buy it… his work is great but why give any more money to him OR his estate when there are way simoler options.
Just pirate the books and read them now if you want to read them but don’t want to give him money. Don’t feel like you need to pass a purity test when it comes to your reading list, even more so when it comes to books he only co wrote like Good Omens.
pay someone to print you an “illegal” copy, or to get you a DRM-free e-book copy.
Or just buy his books used, he sees no money from that
I would say so, yes. The only issue then being, can you enjoy reading their work knowing what you know ?
I wonder if I am unusual in that I am able to read good books by bad people without feeling gross. (I’m not claiming that I would support a bad person, just that reading their books doesn’t generally cause me particular anguish.) Is this something that is unusual about me, or do people just assume that it should be difficult to read books like that, but most people aren’t bothered? Same with movies and music. Listening to Michael Jackson or David Bowie from my personal archives, I don’t feel any particular difficulty despite the allegations against them.
Anecdotal, but I read the Mists of Avalon years ago and enjoyed it enough to want to read more. Then I found out about the author (and her husband) sexually abusing children, including her own daughter, and I absolutely cannot bring myself to read any more of her books.
Fuck abusers. I’m glad she’s dead and I don’t give two shits what she had to say about anything when she was alive.
i was unaware of any actual incidents with her until now. i read fall of atlantis as a kid and literally cried when it was over because i loved it so much. re-read it as an adult and the pedophile apologia is so blatant that i immediately stopped reading it and stopped mentioning her name at all.
Sail the high seas.
Buying Gaiman’s work after he’s dead won’t benefit him, but it could have the second-order effect of giving the impression to people that people broadly don’t care about boycotting rapists. It’s a lesser sin than supporting him now.
“Being a rapist is better than being a transphobe”
lemmy.ml everyone
You have scope insensitivity. What’s worse, one person being raped or one million transgender people being denied civil rights? A typical bigot is less harmful than a typical rapist, but JK Rowling is not a typical transphobe; she’s many orders of magnitude worse.
Or maybe I just don’t agree with you
you seem like the kind of person who would let the trolley run over five people.
So you just take it as a given that there are obvious solutions to complicated moral issues?
If you’re going to be deontologist about it, I can understand why you’d think you don’t need to multiply the scope of JK Rowling’s impact. And I can understand why you’re ok with letting the trolley kill 4 more people than it needs to. Your morality is self-consistent, merely anathema to me. So, yeah, “I just don’t agree with you.”
But – maybe you don’t need to mock me as though my common and standard understanding of the trolley problem is somehow idiotic. “Lemmy.ml everyone! A place where they’d willingly choose to kill 1 person to save 5 others.”
I don’t mock your ethics, I mock your self righteousness
some googling later
Well, shit. Glad I buy secondhand books at every opportunity, otherwise I would have given money to a human sized pile of shit.
yeah learning about gaiman was hard, his work meant so much to me.
The work didn’t do anything wrong
it’s tainted by the knowledge that the creator is a disgusting monster who convinced me that he was just the coolest dude, so i can’t enjoy it anymore.
this is why i think what’s needed is for people to wholesale rewrite things, let the people with emotional investment rip out the good bits and make them their own, it’s both therapy for the new author and rehabilitation for the work.
The Sound of Her Wings was an incredibly important story for me. It still is. But goddammit, Gaiman certainly tainted that memory.
i pity anyone who was named after a Neil gaiman character, like caroline
At least Caroline was already a name before the book and movie. Coraline on the other hand…
Oof for anyone named Hermione.
The Sandman books were a massive part of my teenage years, one thing my sister and I agreed on back then and a source of endless conversation with my crush. Really gutted that I can’t look forward to introducing my teenagers to them.
this is actually the main sadness I have re Gaiman, I never finished the Sandman series and I just never will now.
I know there’s plenty to be said about separating the work of art from the moral judgement of the artist, but tbh it’s just like a taboo, psychologically the association turns me off whether there is a rational justification for it or not.
check out Night’s Master by Tanith Lee
I’ve heard Gaiman lifted a lot of Sandman directly from it
i still love stardust and own the movie/still watch it but i wouldnt buy it now </3
Fuck these fuckers. Also thanks for their contribution to our culture. But again: fuck them
I wonder if there is any real relationship between influence and immorality, or if it’s just a salience error (those with influence are more likely to be scrutinized and immorality brought to everyone’s attention, and we just don’t notice the people who aren’t a problem while we do notice those who are).
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no thanks for their contributions, take the contributions but don’t thank them for it.
You made this? nope, you’ve forfeited your right to claim authorship of it, it’s ours now, get fuckedgaiman is at least actually brilliant and well-studied. rowling is a hack and her work sucks.
but yes, fuck them both. they are monsters.
Am I going to get rid of his works that I own? No, probably not. I love them. Which is why it sucks so much to never recommend them again, but that’s the reality.
I think my cognitive dissonance was too strong, I got rid of my Gaiman. :-(
But I feel you - his works were important in my life before, I’ve just been downsizing and even though it wasn’t the best, I decided to get rid of mine (not because it’s “right” but just because I don’t like being reminded of him).
I love HP and they were a big part of my life, made me enjoy reading and helped me a lot with English (and British) vocabulary. I still enjoy the books and movies that I already own from time to time but I cannot see myself consuming anything new knowing that it will give money directly to Rowling’s pockets to fund his trans hating organizations
I get what you’re saying, but why not recommend them with the caveat that the other person should pirate them?
This is a good moral compromise in that it allows you to enjoy the art without the moral complications of commercially supporting a rapist, but I think some people might argue that it doesn’t go far enough and that we should essentially culturally boycott the art as well, that an artist’s reputation rests partially on how their art is perceived, and by continuing to enjoy that art and share it with others, you continue to support the artist in some sense.
Not sure I know how I feel about that argument, but I think it’s an intuition some folks have or an argument they make.
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That’s fair. I think because in Gaiman’s case it’s still fresh for me, and really came out of nowhere, so I don’t like to talk about them much.
With JK, it’s so evident in her writing that she had some prejudice that it really didn’t surprise me much, so I internalized that quickly and moved on.
I don’t provide either with my money, and pirate them whenever I want something.
Shitty people can make good art. Death of the author.
Just never give them money.
Death of the author
People here keep using the term as basically a synonym of “separating art from artist” but I always thought death of the author was a different thing. Analyzing the meaning of a book while ignoring what the author says they meant.
It is the latter, kind of
It’s also (i think) separating it from the context of the author and their life/identity (so, for example, m&m using the n word being different from some other rapper doing the same).
So functions well as shorthand for the former. Or in the case of an author like rowling, as a wish.
My 2c tho, the Harry Potter novels legitimately suck. This has been my opinion of them since I was in 8th grade when the first one came out. At the time I described Sorcerer’s / Philosopher’s Stone as a failed attempt at ripping off Roald Dahl (British author who wrote mean-spirited children’s books that stereotyped characters with funny-sounding names based on their physical descriptions). I was frequently urged to and attempted to give the books a second chance, never got more than 20 pages back into any of them before I put them down in exasperation because to me they always felt very petty and derivative. I was not very surprised when JK started to peel off her mask to the public.
Why do you think they’re so popular then?
Children have less reading comprehension, wizards and magic are cool to kids, and nostalgia appears to be my generation’s (millennials) lead poisoning.
Okay, so why specifically that series among the many other wizards and magic series? I think Rowling is a piece of shit as any sane person should, but let’s not warp reality. The books may not be your cup of tea and of course they’re not perfect, but they’re definitely good books, otherwise they wouldn’t have gained the popularity they did.
popular =/= good though.
in fact awful things get popular all the time.
Because they became a cultural phenomenon and were lots of kids first novels. If youve never read anything else youre not going to see the massive flaws.
Well, you just replied to the question “why are they popular?” with “because they became popular”. Okay, so why did they become popular? Because despite the flaws they definitely have, they’re simply good stories with good world building that suck people in (not just kids btw, plenty of people got into them as adults).
Not everyone’s experience mirrors mine? 🤷
Looks like that 🤷
Older guy told me he read Dahl (Matilda?) to his grandkid & passed the lesson that you gotta be careful who you trust… are his works viewed negatively?
I don’t think universally. Similar to Rowling, his stuff is beloved and can certainly still be enjoyed but contains some totally wack bits. Even as a kid I picked up on how mean-spirited his writing was. But I think that’s also what makes it interesting to some people, it’s got this macabe Grimm’s quality to it.
Abolitionism is literally a running gag; the idea that someone might want it.
The stories aren’t good.
Jfc I missed this one. Is it bc we glorify them? Or do they get where they are bc they’re always like this deep down?
Partially it’s that we glorify them, which gives them opportunity. Plus, decades of fame goes to their heads.
Partially, it’s also that average nobodies are abusive shit heads too, we just don’t write articles about them.
Yeah… I think this is just the water we swim in now.
Is what’s new, just visibility? Like all these Gen x and boomer rock gods and comedians that have aged poorly… If David Gilmour was never on social media, I’d never know Roger Waters is a Nazi. If victims weren’t connected in community, would we know about Diddy et al?
I feel like visibility yeah but also the way we label behavior is in the middle of being updated. Aside from legit sex pests, you might have people like Louis CK who genuinely believed they were creepy yet ultimately benign.
40 years ago they would have been, if not right, then less out of line with the general morality.
I don’t know… I think we’re in a weird time right now. And I feel like fundamentally our thinking on sexuality and consent are missing some revolutionary thinker. Like we should not have progressed to this point historically without figuring this shit out but coincidentally all the people who could have captured that zeitgeist diet off in potato famines or something.
Anyway. Just a feeling. Not real.