Never meet your heroes, etc.

[mousme]

I am not particularly given to hero-worship, luckily for me, but there has been more than one artist whose work I admired a lot in the past who turned out to be a pretty terrible person later on. Orson Scott Card, J. K. Rowling, and Joss Whedon spring to mind, along with any number of others.

An article came out in Vulture either late yesterday or early today about the accusations of sexual assault against Neil Gaiman. I'm going to put the rest of this post behind a cut just in case, because the article itself gets into some gruesome subject matter, but for what it's worth I don't plan on providing any graphic details or anything like that.

If you haven't read the article and find such subject matter triggering, I recommend staying away from it entirely. I started reading it and thought "oh, wow, this is dark," and then it got progressively worse until the end. It is truly horrific by any measure.

It was honestly shocking to realize that the bumbling, soft-spoken, good-natured goth geek was mostly a façade. Long-time readers of this LJ will remember that I met Gaiman at Worldcon in 2009, where he was the Guest of Honour. I even won a little mini-lottery that allowed me to be one of 15 people who got to attend a "tea with Neil Gaiman" event, during which we drank terrible tea out of styrofoam cups and he talked to us excitedly about his latest project. Up until last summer, this was one of the highlights of my life. He spent the whole hour being witty, charming, a little self-deprecating, and utterly delightful. I had the time of my life. A friend of mine told me that Neil Gaiman could spend a few minutes talking to you about lint and that you'd leave the conversation convinced that lint was the most fascinating thing in the world and was now your life's passion, and she was right. The man oozes charisma from every pore.

Like many of the men who've "fallen" in the past decade, Neil made a name for himself as a champion of the vulnerable, a feminist ally who also understood what it was like to be a lonely geek boy. He was supposed to be a role model for gentle, creative men, and he made self-effacing jokes whenever female fans made passes at him, or so we were meant to believe.

Parasocial relationships are weird. We saw only what he wanted us to see, and he cultivated his presence online extremely skillfully. I still have the habit of referring to him as "Neil," because that's how he referred to himself online. I don't do that with many creators--I tend to stick to the convention of referring to them by their last names, even the ones I admire a lot. But Neil (much like Joss Whedon, actually) was instantly recognizable by his first name as much as his last. He was one of the first to understand and use the power of blogs, then Twitter and Tumblr to good effect, interacting with fans in a way that we'd never really had before. The era of Access(TM) to artists, authors, actors, writers, showrunners, etc. was in many ways the era of Neil Gaiman. Was he around and famous before? Of course. But I think he went from popular author to "Superstar of the S.F. World" in large part thanks to his internet persona.

There's a lot of talk right now gently chiding all of us fans for idolizing people, and I think that's unfair. Humans are hard-wired for connection, to the point that we will anthropomorphize inanimate objects and pack-bond with them (just look at the Mars Rover), so of course we're going to create parasocial relationships with the people who've granted us a glimpse behind the curtain into their lives, even if it's a carefully curated version of their lives. We've been doing it with anyone who gives interviews for years, and having an internet presence has only emphasized that. So I think it's normal and fine for us to admire the artists whose work affects us, who make us feel things, who have a significant impact on our lives. I read American Gods during a formative time in my life, and even though the author has turned out to be a POS rapist, that story is going to live on inside me regardless. I won't be supporting his work going forward, but that doesn't erase the effect it had on me in the past.

Anyway, if the past decade or so has taught us anything, it's that he's unlikely to face long-term consequences for this. Nine women have come forward, there might be a court case, and it's likely a few contracts will get dropped in the short term. He'll lie low for a couple of years until this "blows over," and then like most men who've been on the receiving end of accusations, he'll make a comeback and a good portion of his fans (the ones who aren't "terminally online" or don't keep up with culture news, as well as the ones who have currently decided that the accusers are all attention-seeking liars) will welcome him back with open arms. It's really unfortunate, but history has borne this out.

This will be a quiet test of integrity for most of us. How we handle his art going forward will say a lot about us as individuals and as a society.