Article by Anime Feminist: “How do you react when you find out one of the main creative forces behind something you love is, to not mince words, a completely shit person?”
Article by Anime Feminist: “How do you react when you find out one of the main creative forces behind something you love is, to not mince words, a completely shit person?”
If I stopped liking everything made by someone that was a douche to a significant degree, half of all music made in the last seventy years would be gone. A good ten + percent of literature would be. And movies would be right out the window because you can’t make a movie without a dozen or more people being involved in the core creation process, and there’s always going to be one douche in the mix.
Idgaf. Van gogh was a stalker, and he’s still one of the most amazing painters ever.
If I hate the living artist enough to not be willing to pay them for their work, that’s why living in the digital piracy era is so awesome. You don’t have to go hunt down remaindered books, you don’t have to dub tapes or whatever. I’m one of the rare writers that doesn’t object to piracy of my own stuff to begin with, so I have zero compunction about it for anything else.
While I agree that pirating stuff is A-okay under such circumstances, consuming certain stuff is - IMO - also sending a message to other people and that’s something I personally care about. YMMV
I think a lot of it depends on what ‘aspect’ of their person features most strongly in their work.
To pick a specific example: Ronald Dahl was a virulent anti-semite. And yet he was also clearly someone with a significant degree of empathy for children, after he himself suffered abuse at boarding school. His works come from this angle, seeking to provide children with the catharsis of seeing retributive justice done to evil adults. He also shows class conscience in books like “Danny, the champion of the world”.
I would argue that it is the ideas conveyed in a work that make it worthy, or unworthy, of consumption, rather than the author themselves.
As an aside, you may be interested in the works of the writer/philosopher Iris Murdoch, who does have something to say on this topic, around ‘can bad people produce good art’.