Charlie: Out of curiosity: When you enjoy an artist's work before learning they're awful... can you still enjoy the work as much? Like... I used to really like Kevin Spacey, and the Harry Potter books. But I'm not too interested in revisiting LA Confidential or watching the new Potter series.

inevitably people are popping up to tell me that it's unfair to talk about Asimov's misogyny and other writers' racism because it was The Time In Which They Lived. This is always the defense of racism and other bigotries. It's really boring and tiresome, and says a lot about you.

Like, I'm still a fan of Tolkien, but he was hella problematic on gender and race and biological destiny and shit like that. I won't defend him on those grounds! I think it's important to read every story with clear eyes and head.

My attitude about this is, if you like works/creators that are problematic the solution is to go in clear eyed and with understanding. Being in denial or excusing it makes it a bigger problem, not less of one… (And of course we all have our hard limits and that’s fine)

yeah my limits are definitely mine. I won't read Asimov ever again, for instance.

I hear Orson Scott Card wrote one of the best science fiction novels ever, but I'll just have to take other people's word on that

I absolutely loved Ender's Game as a teen and I am happy to leave that and the rest of his work in the past where it belongs (a weird thing about Card specifically is that he had an incredibly wide range, some of his stuff was really good and some was unreadable, which is rare in my experience)

Out of curiosity: When you enjoy an artist's work before learning they're awful... can you still enjoy the work as much? Like... I used to really like Kevin Spacey, and the Harry Potter books. But I'm not too interested in revisiting LA Confidential or watching the new Potter series.

I think it depends on the author and the degree of awful and how much it seeps into their work in retrospect Rowling is, for example, a hard no because she's so active in her awfulness I have a hard time with Warren Ellis because the way in which he was shitty is very present in his work, etc

I think the amount of time between the death of the artist and the audience experiencing the art is the most universal factor that helps with this When JKR dies, the money made by HP won’t as readily go towards hurting trans folk

Nobody wants to enable a hateful person So the simplest way to appreciate something when the artist is shitty is to wait until they no longer can hurt others

For me, some of the stuff in Harry Potter was eyebrow raising before she came out as God of TERFs so if anything the reveal answered a lot of questions

Yeah, in retrospect that's true. I can't claim to have much of it as a reader - would like to think I've become more aware of such things since then. (I'm trying, anyway.)

yeah I loved the series (with reservations) but was definitely getting over it by the final volume. A lot of the harmful stuff in them definitely makes more sense now.

I mean... it's a fairly by-the-numbers hero's journey story. It's formulaic. But it works.

I think "are they dead" also plays into it a bit. There's a tendency to handwave someone's awfulness if they've departed, often saying "sure he was awful, but such was the time in which he lived" even if his time was not like that and even if he was particularly awful even for his time.

Part of it is also that dead people can't spend their royalties & cultural relevance on furthering their bigotries.

Like, there's a comedian whose death I'm anticipating so I can enjoy some their routines; I can't tolerate MZB's writing anymore; but I still read Thurber with enjoyment.

There's also an element of "am I actively funding abuse"? Because like if I buy a Kanye album that money is going to go towards some bullshit, compared to if I'm grabbing an album from someone who's been dead for 20 years

As someone who tried to absorb as much Transmetropolitan in his veins as a late teen, it's never not rough now.

I missed the Warren Ellis stuff so glad he was brought up.

holy shit, I was not aware

So Many of Us: Recognizing Abuses of Powerwww.somanyofus.com We are a collective of people from across the world who were targeted by Warren Ellis, a comics and television writer from the UK.

I was on the various fora in the day, and so many fond memories of that time. The works I have reread because they were great. I haven't even looked into new works, though, because there's no attachment and no reason to even look.

my personal take: it really does depend on what the awfulness is, and whether they're still alive and awful. JKR has not only shat the bed but keeps doing it and flinging the products at everyone, so it's easy for me to say "nope nope nope".

Yeah, same. She's especially committed to letting everyone know just how strongly she feels about her bigotry.

“Monsters” by Claire Dederer deals with this dilemma in a thoughtful way. It is memoir-ish, and I really enjoyed it

For me, it’s about not financially rewarding awful people. Kevin Spacey, for instance, has a truly great body of work like HOUSE OF CARDS, BABY DRIVER and L.A. CONFIDENTIAL that will always love but if you ask me for pay for his *new* movie? Hard pass. JKR is another good example. No more HP for me.

This is the approach I took towards Ryan Adams. I’ll enjoy the stuff I have, but I’m not consuming new music or buying tickets, etc.

Hell even without the bigotry the whole "people shitting on the floor and making it disappear" was just, yeah no the whole series seems too stupid now

that's just garden-variety stupid. Worse stuff: "if you don't find the love of your life in high school, you die alone"; "Dumbledore is the only gay character and him being in love with Grindelwald is his tragic flaw"; antisemitism, bullying, internalized sexism, and defense of torture.

And all that stuff came about before she decided to make her entire personality hating on trans folks.

Don't forget the fatphobia! So much to dislike about those books.

Oh, and the belittling of slavery. F her.

For me it’s not a calculation, it’s a feeling. Miles Davis was not a good person but I don’t hear that in his music. I can’t listen to R Kelly though because he’s basically singing about his crimes. Authors are tricky because it’s hard to disentangle their worldview from their approach to fiction.

Like Agatha Christie books will have a light sprinkling of passages that are openly, explicitly racist or antisemitic or sexist (she really hated women). But I also feel like an editor could fix all that in a day, and have a good mystery left over. Plus she’s dead so I don’t care what she thinks.

Orson Scott Card, though, his homophobia is more entangled in the characters, it’s in the glue of the book. I can’t effortlessly imagine my own better version as I’m reading.

It's more that I don't wish to be influenced in ways I don't intend. I can promise myself that I won't let the racism, antisemitism, or sexism change my values, but I also recognize that I am susceptible to other people's thoughts, whether I consciously realize it or not.

You don’t want to be “steeped” in it. We get enough of that just living in this country.

Sometimes I'll eat a Twix bar, even though its nutritional value is compromised. I can have a little poison, as a treat. I eat tofu way more often.

oh yeah that's a great example. (And of course it does help that Miles is dead but R Kelly is not)

Richard Wagner was a pre-Nazi, but I love his music. It helps that I don't speak German. With authors, if I know them to have bad politics, I try going into a book with clear eyes. I don't want to unintentionally pick up odious perspectives. You've got to be careful with your diet.

Something I try to be careful with, as a writer who tries to be a good person but enjoys writing some fucked up narrators now and then.

At a bare minimum: authors who turn out to be awful become "only obtain from used book sales for the rest of time" for me. But even then, there's a limit to just how awful I can swallow even via this route.

Same!! I refuse to buy anything related to JKR firsthand because it puts more money in her pockets, empowering her to keep spreading hate. Recently came across two HP shirts in the dregs of my closet… but I won’t wear them because I don’t want anyone to think that I support her agenda.

She already has my money, so burning them won’t change that… but burning them would mean two fewer bits of HP merchandise in the world.

I had similar thoughts years ago about all my Orson Scott Card books. I didn’t want to re-sell them or give them away for others to discover and “enjoy”. So I tossed them in the recycling bin so that they might eventually do some good.

Maybe I’ll rip them up and use them for cleaning rags??

In Card's case, when I learned of his issues it tainted his work because going back, you can see how it informed much of his writing the whole time. The same thing happened with Doug Tennapel. I was a huge fan of his GNs, until they got recontextualized so dramatically by learning about him.

I remember enjoying Ender's Game and have no interest in reading anything of his ever again.

I am all over the map on this and I haven't managed to come up with a consistent throughline for my decisions, it ends up just being purely vibes based. For that reason I try to give other people grace if I can when their red lines are different than mine.

More than fair, and I'm probably the same. I probably judge Eric Clapton more harshly than other musicians that have said/done awful things because I was never a particularly big fan of his in the first place.

The sort of shittiness matters, and how it bleeds into their books. Orson Scott Card was really important to me growing up as a bullied kid. Finding out he was homophobic made him untouchable for me, because it meant he'd be on the side of my bullies.

Conversely, I've read plenty of "classic" works with overt racism/sexism/homophobia and been able to enjoy them, maybe because it wasn't a surprise?

John Scalzi wrote a good essay on this. Lots of factors to consider. I think I could still enjoy LA Confidential, because Spacey's character and performance aren't central to the movie. House of Cards, not so much.

Reader Request Week 2014 #6: Enjoying Problematic Thingswhatever.scalzi.com H. Savinean asks: I would like to hear your thoughts on liking problematic things, e.g. media with historically accurate but objectionable portrayals of gender/race/etc., media with no historical e…

no, not even close in theory, I believe in separating art from the artist, but in practice I can't do it

I still have Bill Cosby records. Kanye has some tracks I will always like. Eric Clapton is a good musician and a huge piece of shit. I guess for me it's "yeah I can appreciate the art, but they aren't getting a dime out of me" I have a folder of torrented Weinstein movies.

I have 15+ Clapton-related albums and skip his songs when they come up on Pandora now; Van Morrison as well.

I'm okay with movies (generally) since they're collaborative? Like, fuck Woody Allen, but I'll watch Pirates of the Caribbean even though Johnny Depp sucks? However, as someone who didn't learn that Marion Zimmer Bradley was a monster until I was an adult... No. Her works are dead to me

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