Cancellations

For the past two weeks my YouTube feed has featured quite a number of links to various folks sounding off about some allegations made against the writer Neil Gaiman. From what I can gather a number of serious complaints have been made about him taking sexual advantage of women and these complaints, though not yet proven, have enough weight to lead to the folks I referred to making a good deal of noise, not usually favourable to the writer, about these in public. Not sure if that's a great idea in itself since I would have thought the best thing would be to let these things play out in court, or, at least, in a methodical investigation of what has been taking place.

But let's imagine the man has his dark side, and it's very dark indeed. Does that mean that the fine work he's done, like the Sandman series or Coraline, to name two pretty obvious examples, should now be put to one side and deemed not worthy of public consumption? I just don't see how this makes sense. There's a pretty obvious gap in all cases between the creator and what is created. Of course, it's easy to imagine that those actually suffering abuse from a writer, artist, musician, might find it impossible to engage or respond in any way to their work again, but I don't see how this can extend beyond those genuinely impacted. After that, if the work has something to offer that means it's worth engaging in then I can't see how the flaws of its creator compromise it in any deep way.

By the by, one of the folks who's been commenting on the allegations sounds as if he's very much enjoying making plenty of noise about the scandal, and, I presume, building a bit of an audience around this. He claims to be a writer of speculative fiction himself, though I haven't heard of him, and is so obviously envious of Gaiman's success that it's a bit embarrassing. It's this kind of thing that gives righteousness such a bad name.