A few years ago, I wrote a blog here, Neil Gaiman and the Lie of Purity. This was mostly about how he, and I, have an ethos about adaptations that does not at all resemble being a ‘purist’, but it did start with the following passage, which has aged not merely like milk but like diseased milk painted onto a clown’s corpse:

Gaiman occupies an unusual place, to me. He’s a middle-aged white British celebrity, which these days puts him in a demographic practically guaranteed to be hostile, but by all accounts he’s a good guy. Like, properly a good guy, of the understands-his-privilege and now supports the liberation of all minorities…

Of course he fooled me. I’m pretty sure he fooled virtually everyone who wasn’t in the actual circles in which he traveled (eg. high up in the convention circuit), and a pretty good chunk of the ones who were. It’s been months since this all started coming out, and former fans are still trying to figure out how to deal with it; the new even more horrifying exposé that came out today has touched off a new round of soul-searching and cynicism, so let’s talk about the two questions I encountered today that seem to sum it up.

Do Only Bad People Make Good Art?

On Bluesky, user @kvoxsky.bsky.app posted:

The thing that troubles me is it seems that only bad people – and not just bad, but monumentally awful, complete monsters – can make good art

(… which ironically echoes one of Gaiman’s most famous bite-sized works, the ‘Make Good Art’ speech.)

This is not even a little bit true… but I can see how you get to this opinion, because it looks that way. There’s a good reason for that, and it’s basically a sort of availability bias.

We can only judge the art we see, by definition. So barring a few acquaintances or niche things, we’re talking not just about art that was made, but art that was published. In the mainstream. Whatever else art needs to be published, it needs to be greenlit by publishers and producers.
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That means every bit of art we get to see, has passed through that process… which means it was championed by someone capable of schmoozing, networking, making contacts… and who, statistically speaking, probably started from a pretty privileged place to even start that process. Add on top of that that once art has had any sort of mainstream success – once we’re seeing someone’s second or third TV show, or their tenth bestseller, or what-have-you – at least a good chunk of the proceeds from that have come back to the champion, who might not be the artist, but often is.
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Thus, the more successful an artist is, the more likely they are, statistically, to be wealthy and influential and privileged. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned in this hellscape, it’s that people who are wealthy and influential and privileged (and especially the men) are exactly the people most likely to feel superior to others and entitled to be served, with their time, their work, and their bodies.

So there is no correlation between good art and entitled, monstrous behavior… but there is a hell of a correlation between successful art and entitled, monstrous behavior.

Who Are You If You Loved A Predator’s Work?

And on another, currently more horrible and getting worse, social media site, user @canadiancontent (the BC-based writer Ian Boothby) wrote a post that said in part:

People like the art and it seems unbelievable that someone with that much empathy and heart in their work that connects so directly to them could do something like that. How could you connect to the work of a predator? What does it say about you?

… which is exactly what’s hurting all of us who tried sincerely to be decent but had Gaiman’s work, or Whedon’s, or any of the painfully many other examples, in our heads as inspiration. In our souls*. And what it says about you is: you believed they were who they claimed to be.

A lot of people will call that gullible. I understand that framing, and the impulse to use it, but I reject it. It’s easy to make people believe something they want to believe, and in this case that means believing that someone who creates good art – inspiring art – is a good person. It means believing that someone will do or say the right thing because it is the right thing, not merely as a shield to hide bad behavior.

It means, in short, being willing to believe the best of someone.

Do. Not. Lose. That.

That is a kindness.

We have to be willing to believe the best of others, to give them a chance, or else we’re sunk. We’ll have nothing to build any sort of community or world on, and the very people who are TELLING us ‘all virtue is virtue signalling’, who would mock us for gullibility, are the ones who are eating the supports out from under the world right now.

So what it says about you is you were willing to believe someone was good, that you connected to the fictional non-predatory version of themselves they portrayed in public. But that’s okay, isn’t it? We all connect to fiction; that’s what starts all of this – and we can’t not. As an even more beloved British writer said, “Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.”**. One of those fantasies is that we can be… better. Take your inspiration for that wherever you can, and if that source turned out to be a lie… well, fiction is inspiring too.

So divest yourself of them if you can, but don’t feel guilty. In fact, the opposite: if you can, it’s time to step up and try to follow the example of the version of them that didn’t really exist, but was what you really aspired to in the first place. Keep being willing to believe the best of others and keep trying to be the best version of you because we didn’t and never will get the best version of them.

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* Don’t make a thing of it, skeptics. I’m being poetic.

** Terry Pratchett, “Hogfather”