Extremely depressing thoughts about…. popular artists who turn out to be terrible people. (if you know you know). Ugh.

Personal rant. Feel free to ignore, it’s probably healthier.

I’m usually pretty good at separating the art from the artist.

But Neil Gaiman has long since crossed into “I can’t really look at the art anymore without SOME uncomfortable feelings about the worst side of who the artist was.”

And it’s beginning to cross into “this is no longer even mitigated at all by the presence of Terry Pratchett as co-author.”

(In fact Pratchett himself might be on kinda thin ice by now, having been close enough friends with Gaiman that it’s possible he knew more than he should have been keeping quiet about. I don’t trust anyone anymore.)

And I’m not saying everyone should swear off enjoying all art by anyone who could have horrible secrets like this. Even the worst people can create something that has some value in it. I actually think it can be outright dangerous if someone has contributed a whole lot of valuable ideas to progressive worldviews and then turns out to be a monster and our response is to start systematically cutting out everything they contributed from our whole ideology.

…Honestly I wish I COULD more often still enjoy the good parts of someone’s work even when I know or suspect they did horrible shit.

But…. there’s a point where it’s just too tainted for my brain to get any pleasure from it anymore.

After the election I even had a pretty strong moment of feeling this way about enjoying Tron– because of how high Disney is on the list of shitty too-powerful corporations whose financial influence over politics (and social influence on the electorate through the ways they censor their popular art) has contributed to this kind of election results.

And honestly I still have qualms about this. And I can’t shake the feeling that it’s disingenuous to say “Disney movies get a pass because there are good people working on them” –when there are other corporations as bad as Disney where we’ve decided that even working for them at any level makes you NOT a good person.

But at the same time, pretty much every corporation these days is in the same boat. I already feel scummy about working in a pharmacy. I’m not an insurance CEO… and yet, when I tell a patient that their insurance won’t pay for a lifesaving medicine, while reminding myself that I can’t just hand it to them free without losing my job, it feels unsettlingly like a “just following orders” defense.

But what other options are there? Every job that actually does something necessary will have the same problem– demanding money for something necessary. And jobs that don’t do something necessary are damn hard to find right now.

…fuck.

…I didn’t mean for this rant to spiral outward beyond one shitty individual into the whole systemic shittiness of society, and the despair of being unable to remove oneself from association with such shittiness.

But that’s how my thoughts often go these days.