Seeing a lot of people feeling very defensive about not knowing/not wanting to know about problems with their faves until they became too topical to ignore.
They keep saying things like "no one had any problem with this person except not liking their work/their vibe before now".
That's not true.
With Gaiman, the reality is I at least was part of conversations on social media about actual harmful attitudes and behaviors from him nearly a decade ago and most recently again in 2022.
People didn't want to know.
I just found a long thread and somewhat rambly thread I did in 2022 about Gaiman and Trigger Warning and TW/CW/CNs and most of it is whatever but I did find something intriguing toward the end.
I'm going to put it in the next couple of posts.
And I get why. At first because it was almost unthinkable to give up him/his work. He was very much the same as Joss Whedon in terms of how beloved and foundational his creative output is/was.
People name pets after his characters and get tattoos and make his work a permanent part of their lives.
Also, because things like cultural appropriation and sanist ableism in the form of being anti-TW/CW/CN aren't so galvanizing against someone on that high of a pedestal.
And MeToo hadn't yet happened.
I didn't pick fights with people who liked Gaiman or go trying to convince them he was a problem, because I honestly didn't think I had a chance of getting my point across to people who didn't want to hear it and I didn't want to alienate, like, everyone.
But that's different from not knowing.
And the defensiveness and anger and mischaracterization and "saying you knew he was trash is unfair to his former fans' feelings" is... I get why people are doing that, too.
It's better than admitting there were signs you overlooked because you didn't want to see them.
It's easier to be angry at people who didn't manage to convince you that things you didn't want to care about mattered than it is to accept that you screwed up and weren't as good a judge of character as you thought you were.
Also this is not a condemnation. Everyone has things to learn.
Personally I loved Sandman and American Gods and even Anansi Boys and reread them all many times (the latter two on audiobook mostly) before I started having problems with Gaiman's cultural appropriation specifically in Anansi Boys but also to some extent in American Gods.
And then the stuff with Trigger Warning happened and it was just... enough.
Especially in the face of the other things happening around 2015, including gamergate and the way "triggered" had been corrupted into an insult.
Again, the thing here is just... I get a lot of people are hurting and grieving right now. I don't want to dismiss that as irrelevant because it isn't.
But I also don't want false narratives about a spotless record to erase reality.
