I think there’s a difference between enjoying the media of a problematic person vs continuing to financially support said person and give their media continued relevance, thereby continuing to give them a platform with which to spew bigotry and hate.
(This comment is about she who shall not be named)
I think Kevin Spacey may be one of the best (most skilled) actors of his generation, and among the best across several generations. A true peer of Dustin Hoffman.
I was shocked by the allegations, and crushed when it became evident (to me) that it wasn’t a smear campaign.
In a way it’s crazy that I can be so emotionally engaged with someone I’ve never met, likely never will, and who has no idea I exist. OTOH, it’s not surprising when people we respect, or even idolize, turn out to be not only merely human, but morally flawed in particularly inexcusable ways.
I still feel sad and betrayed by Spacey, and it’ll forever taint my ability to enjoy his incredible performances.
Yeah man, that one hurt for sure…
I’d make a Woody Allen joke but it just feels too soon… yi.
Just…too soon, and too close to home, you know? 😉
I see what you did there
Willem Dafoe?
Oh no! Time to retroactively pretend the thing I liked was always bad.
Oh boy, time to point out the show that was made by a creeper had warning signs all along, but was shutdown when I previously criticized the show.
BTW, the people who wrote Transformers 4 should be investigated.
Right? Like you can still enjoy their shit but not them personally. You can be a talented shit waffle
Yeah, that’s completely true. It’s up to each person to decide what their standards are and where they draw the line. Like Roman Polanski anally raping a 13 year old and using his money and fame to leave the country and avoid the prison time may be across one person’s line while another person says, “Eh, what can you do? It was almost 50 years ago.” Also true, but that piece of shit is still alive and making money–from people who like his work at least enough to keep consuming it.
Yeah you’re on the ball. You got to draw lines somewhere. I’m not going to listen to a band whose bit is to run over baby rabbits with a lawn mower on stage. If you’re just a general fuck stick, though I’m more willing to accept that to a degree
I don’t understand the obsession with moralizing people. Artists don’t have to be role models.
It’s a side effect of the commercialization of art.
Artists that don’t offend anyone sell better and selling as much as possible has become all that matters to all the people who enable artists to continue making art and experience more tangible and real forms of artistic success
Eventually everyone internalized it all so much that it’s a common misconception that every artist has a duty to be as commercial as possible and as such to be a role model. But only in ways that doesn’t offend anyone who’s in the target demographics.
It sucks big floppy donkey dick, but that’s how the boring dystopia that is the real world works 😮💨
Yay capitalism! We did it!
or arguably more annoying - time to pretend me not liking that person’s work was always justified!
as if people weren’t allowed to dislike things unless it was somehow morally justified
People always say, “only the good die young.” But that made me think. What if long-lived people are just more likely to do bad stuff over the course of their lives? Because everyone does good and bad stuff.
IMHO whether or not a person will ever be a domestic abuser or rapist is pretty much determined by the time they reach adulthood. It’s not like a good man suddenly decides to start beating his wife or raping teenagers.
The only counter I have to that is how sensitive our brains are to chemical, mental, and physical trauma.
Drugs, injury, and environmental stress cause easily observable behavior changes, but also changes on the brain measurable in medical imaging. And there’s a lot of acknowledgement that these changes can occur in childhood and persist.
I don’t think anyone chooses to be cruel, I think it’s forced on them in ways they can’t do anything about, and as a society we owe it to them to do better and help them.
That you know of. That seems like a pretty broad brush to be painting with. It may be generally true but I’d be extremely surprised if there were no exceptions.
Moral piracy
The copium in some of these comments… Keep giving your money to terrible people so they feel rewarded for their acts and can continue to abuse others. I’m sure that will work out for the best.
I agree, there is a difference between separating the art from the artist and straight up sticking your head in the sand so you can feel good about yourself.
That’s why I pirate all media I engage in. That way I never support horrible people.
Yeah, it’s better to just not support anything, good or bad.
Yes. Widespread nihilism certainly will not have any negative consequences
Every good person is actually a bad person trying to atone for something horrible they did.
Not sure this is true … But mainly due to nuance.
I think everyone who has reached adulthood has done bad things worthy of atonement (not because minors can’t be bad, just to set a line), regardless of whether that’s because they’re a bad person or because they made poor decisions. I think of myself as a good person - because I try to better the lives of those around me - but I can think of plenty of bad things I’ve done (primarily out of ignorance or foolishness - I don’t think I’ve ever acted with the intent of hurting someone).
I’m not trying to atone for those things; once I realized they were bad things, I did my best to fix them and once I did everything I could, I moved on (and hoped the other participants did as well). In some cases, continuing to try to atone for bad acts would have exacerbated the consequences if the other party just wanted to move on.
My mom, who was a big fan of aphorisms, used to say “if you mess up, apologize if you should, fix it if you can, and move on.” I try to live by this.
So, to reiterate the nuance: I try to fix bad things I’ve done if I can; I try to learn from them so I don’t do them again; but I don’t live my life trying to atone for them.
I do like the sentiment behind your post, in case you think us philosophically opposed.
Fuck me, who told you my secret?
Exactly, imagine separate the book from the writer? Or the software from the developer?
Or painter from the painting(that one is OK actually) Like whaat, who does that?! Message VS messanger ? Pff mumbo jumboLol one of the last things I did on Reddit was get banned for mentioning “death of the author”
right on point. i wonder why people keep believing that any work they enjoy/like/happily consume is made by a good person
There are issues when the artist puts their problematic views into the media, but people were previously not paying attention. Harry Potter is a good example. Most people didn’t really read too much into a children book series, but when JK started talking politics, people started looking more into the subtext of her books and realized all the libertarian politics in them. I personally bailed around book 4 or so because they were annoying me and now I understand why.
Parasocial relationships go brrr
I was gonna say the same thing elsewhere in this post, it’s even worse now that social media has made everybody’s lives so much more public
though it’s still strange because not all of our friends are perfect either. We’re all people and we all fuck up, some more than others of course, but let’s not forget being famous makes you the perfect target for false allegations & sensitisation of your actions that’ll spread like wide fire because patience or fact checking doesn’t get clicks
Is that a belief you’ve seen expressed though? Because I have a theory that Social Justice Warriors, and Snooty Moralists in general are somewhat extinct, and more than likely never existed at all.
They’re the imagined enemy conjured by the right wing to make everyone have a feeling of having been judged, without any actual judges or judgements having been expressed.
A construct made of whole clothe , with no actual person present underneath, just propaganda pages and a feeling of having been wronged.
Because I have a theory that Social Justice Warriors, and Snooty Moralists in general are somewhat extinct, and more than likely never existed at all.
The loudest, unironic SJWs I know are all performative. The most productive activists/volunteers I know don’t make much noise on social media. The performers love saying “separating the art from the artist” type shit. One got really pissed off at me when I pushed him to drop WoW over the suicide and censoring of that tournament winner when he agreed that it was wrong of Blizzard to have done those thing.
The SJW types are absolutely over represented by the anti-Woke crowd. Ragebait all the way down.
oh, they exist. but unfortunately they fail to see that the problem is not that the star rhey looked up to is acually a bad person (and therefor their work invalid) but that the very ideal of super-human like stars is the very mechanism that make those people get away with their behavior in the first place.
things wouldn’t be half as bad if sexual misconduct of a beloved actor was tried as soon as it happened - and not swept under the carpet for some decades while the behavior continued to happen
