There’s a lot of thoughts I’m having some trouble articulating, but that I think are probably important
about a tangle of concepts including…. parasocial celebrity admiration, separation of art and artist, fandom purity moralizing…. guilt by association as judged by the court of public opinion… the desperation to be as much of a good person as possible, in a world where every possible thing you can do has at least some horrifically unethical consequences… and the increasing realization that any public figure could be secretly evil in ways we can’t even imagine
the only coherent thoughts I’ve formed out of this mess are something along the lines of, “we’re scared to love anything new, because if the maker of it turned out to be a bad person, we’d be required to stop loving it, and we don’t trust that we’d be able to”
intertwined with something along the lines of, “probably this is part of why fans get so defensive and unwilling to admit their hero actually did the bad thing”
but this has not solidified to the point of actually making any ethical pronouncement on the subject. not that i necessarily even want to make ethical pronouncements.
the thoughts just feel somehow important.