Creators' feet of clay and fannish hurt
When the people who wrote your best-beloved books betray you by being awful
This is the only tweet of mine to ever go viral:1
For six months after I posted it, it served as a kind of personal barometer for how shitty J.K. Rowling was being about trans people and trans rights – every time she opened her mouth again, it would get a sudden flurry of retweets.
It also accidentally informed a whole bunch of people that Orson Scott Card was not, in fact, just the beloved author of one of their favourite books from high school. And then people in the replies brought up a whole host of other writers, most notably Marion Zimmer Bradley, and, well, there was a lot of shock to go around, because not everybody has heard everything.
Of course, this is on my mind now because of the (most recent) revelations about Joss Whedon’s behaviour. If you’re reading this in six months or a year, it can just as easily be about [FILL IN THE BLANK].
It is definitely for the best that we hold people in positions of power and influence, even the soft power and influence of culture industries, to account when they have abused, harassed, or mistreated others, or when they put their name to the cause of bigotry. It is an absolute good that the truth is known. It is better that the victims are able to be heard and believed, rather than remain silent out of fear or shame.
It is also, I think, okay to talk about the pain felt by fans when this happens.
One of the most popular responses to fans, every time any writer or showrunner or musician turns out to have been an abuser/harasser/racist/homophobe/general shitbird is to loudly declaim “Well, I didn’t like them ANYWAY, and I ALWAYS KNEW that they weren’t REALLY as good and progressive as they seemed!”2
I guess all those 15-year-olds who started watching Buffy roundhouse kick a bunch of demons back in 1997 should have been more knowledgeable about feminist theory, and those nine-year-olds yelling “Expelliarmus!” at one another on the playground should have done a really close reading and noted that not only did she use too many adverbs, Rowling’s ideas about gender and race were pretty dubious, eh?
The other argument is to dismiss the impact the new knowledge has on fans. We have two choices, neither great – keep going back to read or watch the old stuff, now tainted to varying degrees by our knowledge of what the creator did, or excise from our lives something that once mattered very much. But hey, some would say, who cares? What does it matter? It’s just stories, right?
Saying something is just a story is about as stupid and reductive as saying grief is just a chemical reaction in your brain, get over it.
Stories aren’t interchangeable, not when they’ve become part of us. Whether it’s Ender’s Game or Harry Potter or The X-Men or Star Wars, the stuff that burrows deep into our brains is never just entertainment, especially not the stuff that gets to us young. We identify with it, we hurt when the heroes hurt, we exult when they are victorious, we carry them with us, and often, we take away moral lessons. We credit them with our courage and our kindness and with giving us hope when our real lives are filled with crushing despair.
Sure, there are other stories, just as good. But we didn’t love those ones, not at the same age, not in the same way.
And rightly or wrongly, we identify the creators of our important fictions with the qualities of their stories. Which is why it can be so crushing a betrayal when they fail to live up to those standards.
On the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast, Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz, with guest Cecelia Tan, recently talked about how many queer and trans people who had grown up with the Harry Potter books found the courage to express themselves and come out thanks to both the fan community, and the messages of courage and friendship they had found in the books themselves. I can’t even begin to imagine how painful it has been for some of them to see what’s happened with Rowling in the last few years.
So… why does this happen? Why does this keep happening? Why don’t we spot these shitty creators earlier?
The only answer I have is that creators write with more empathy than they live.
Let’s go back to one of the ur-examples in English literature.
William Shakespeare was a pretty typical late-Elizabethan/early-Tudor guy. It’s unknown if he’d even ever met a Jewish person; the Jews had been expelled from England in 1290 and the edict banning them from English soil wouldn’t be officially lifted until Cromwell’s era, decades after Shakespeare’s death. There was a strong background radiation of antisemitism throughout Shakespeare’s day, and there’s no indication he had some magical burst of progressivism. And so when he wrote The Merchant of Venice, you wouldn’t expect much of its portrayal of Jewish characters.
Early in play, Shylock is presented as a broad stereotype. And the play ends with Shylock defeated as the villain, and the shallow, pretty young heroes having a good laugh about the whole thing.
But in the middle of the play, we famously get this:
Shylock: He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.
Shakespeare steps into Shylock’s shoes and exposes the hypocrisy and bigotry his character lives with every day. And then he steps right back out again and goes back to being a standard-issue antisemitic Elizabethan.
The same playwright who could have a furious Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing defend her slandered cousin Hero with “O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place!” could also write Kate putting her hands meekly under Petruchio’s boot.
What makes writing connect with people is empathy – empathy between the writer and the character, and between the character and the audience.
But the empathy that a writer shows on the page is not necessarily how they are in life.
It seems like it should be, though, doesn’t it? Especially in this age when we often can’t help but have some kind of parasocial relationships with the creators of our favourite works? The mechanisms of media promotion mean that we are inundated with Twitter accounts and interviews and podcasts and commentary tracks and magazine profiles; we think we know them. They’re asked about the creations that touched and shaped us, and they reveal their influences and their hopes and we see the character entwined ever more strongly with the creator.
And it’s just not true, or not always true. (Maybe it’s true about Terry Pratchett. Please, if Terry ate babies, just don’t tell me.)
Empathetic writing connects with us, and it becomes aspirational. A brave character can make us feel brave, a kind one can teach us kindness.
It’s often aspirational for the creators, too.
These asshole creators are not hypocrites in the classical sense. They are not usually pre-meditated con artists, cackling “Bwah ha ha, I’ll write a feminist character but actually I’ll use my position of power to be shitty to women!” They’re flawed, fucked up people, who can imagine being better, but whether through weakness or cowardice or spite or self-delusion, can’t live up to their own standards.
Don’t mistake this for any kind of apologia for any creator who has harmed people – what you do to actual humans is always more consequential than what you create. People matter more than words.
The way forward for dealing with creators is obvious, if not easy – try to hold people to account, try to ensure that the next generation of creators knows better. Dismantle the systems of hierarchy and concentrated power that make abuse easier.3
For fans of already-existing stuff, those of us who were shaped, often as children, by books and movies and TV shows that not only had problematic creators, but which may be problematic narratives now thanks to the march of time and changing values (and all the stuff we didn’t notice when we were eleven), where do we go?
There are plenty of people (especially those who always hated the stuff you liked, AHEM) who will tell you that stuff never should have mattered to you in the first place.
Or, you can exercise some empathy for your younger self, and remember that loving something that made you feel deeply was not a sin or a failing.
A flawed messenger does not mean a corrupted message.
People matter more than words. If the words you read made you a better person, then you got the right message. And if the creator who inspired you and made you stronger turned out to have feet of clay – I’m sorry, and I know it hurt, because I’ve been there too.
Too many times, now.
*slams down glass*
Further Reading
Ty Schalter put a lot of thought into these issues in his defence of Ender’s Game as a book that teaches empathy, despite it’s creator’s wretched intentions over the last few decades, and you should give it a read.
Yes, I am aware that I misspelled millennial. Sigh.
Congratulations on your bitter nihilism. I hope you find it comforting.
Super easy. Not difficult at all.