Terrible person = terrible at job

[Binglebong]

I've noticed recently that when someone is being recognised as a person you don't like/accused of terrible things (trying not to get sued here!) they are immediately labeled as being rubbish at their job. It's come up here with both David Tennant and now Neil Gaiman who, whatever you think of them as people, are good at what they do. Maybe not to your taste, but still good.

I think denying that is disingenuous but more than that I think it clouds the issue. They are getting away with what they are because they are good at what they do - it's given them a stage, freedom, and adoring fans who will tell then that they can do no wrong. And because they get away with it boundaries are reduced which makes it easier for other, non famous people.

There is also the matter of separating a person from what they produce which is a massive subject that I don't know where to start with, but that's not really the point of this thread. To be honest I'm not sure what is, other than to say that we too must be careful to not rewrite things because we don't like the people involved. I will say though that I'm finding rereads of NG and watching DT no longer provide the same escapism.

I haven't seen this with DT or NG tbh. Most people seem to be saying either 'I was a fan. I'm disappointed in his behaviour', 'I like his work but always thought he was an arse/potentially dodgy' or 'I was never a fan of his work and am not surprised he's turned out to be an arse/dodgy'.

I've seen it with both on here. Reading different threads at a guess.

I liked 'Good Omens', which NG wrote with T. Pratchett. I also have NG's Greek myths, which are well told. He is good at those things. As OP says it is being good at something that allows transgression.
David Tenant is not a bad actor.

I heard a phrase, 'decent (insert role or job), indecent person' which I tend to apply to people like DT and NG. So, seperate their 'day job' which as you say, they may be good at, from the person's belief system which I may not agree with.
Especially if an actor has played a part I really enjoyed it sympathised with: I need to remind myself; they are playing a part, they are not my pal.

I think there is a difference between presenting someone else's ideas (actor) and presenting stuff from in your own head (author).
An actor can believe anything they choose, although I don't understand why any one gives more credence to their views than they do to the greengrocer.

This is a really interesting subject. If we judge art by the morals of its creators we risk losing a lot of good stuff AND we risk making artists afraid to think or behave independently of the establishment. But it's also true what you say, that success in the arts gives people moral licence that can cause other people to be hurt and also erode necessary norms.

I think Gaiman is a good writer but years before his behaviour seemed bad I found I steered away from his books. I'd begun to read Fragile Things and found the misogyny in it really disturbing - gratuitous and vicious. I loved Good Omens as a book but barely made it to the end of the screen adaptation, the absence of Pratchett was very noticeable. I do find it interesting that NG fell so heavily for transactivism when it's so reminiscent of the Other Mother in Coraline and Pratchett's Fairy Queen in The Wee Free Men - seems like glamour and kindness at first and is really a very dark unhealthy thing.

Tennant can be very good - eg Hamlet - but he has become a caricature of himself - eg Crowley.

Gaiman has written some excellent books. Tennant has been great in a number of roles.

I can love what they do and still think they are being twats in other spheres of their lives.

I think when someone in the arts is revealed as holding particular views or behaving badly, it is natural to look for tells in their work.

I certainly found myself looking back at the sandman comics and thinking were there signs. Writing is so personal. It must be well nigh impossible to write without revealing parts of yourself. There are certainly a few authors I've read where I've felt the writer is taking way too much pleasure in their descriptions of torture or nonconsensual sexual things and would not be at all surprised if things came out.

I've seen TRAs do it about Rowling too, sometimes with a "I'm a better writer than her" which is hilarious. They are /desperate/ to find transphobia in the Strike books. Where in fact she doesn't shy away from era appropriate representation but also doesn't express much interest. Robin reacts in character as Robin would, Strike reacts as Strike would. Move on. Just one suspect of many.

Interesting. The entirely black and white all good or all bad splitting of people into two groups (and you're all good until you do something the person disliked, at which point you are in the bad camp and everything you've ever said or done will now be re interpreted through the lens of you're bad and it was obviously with malicious intent) is a known feature of dysfunctional thinking. In extremes it's often part of a personality disorder.

Think you put it very well, OP. The number of formerly rabid HP fan TRAs asserting that JKR is a rubbish writer... Yeah luv, that's why you got those tattoos then?

I loved Gaiman's books, and Joanne Harris's. I no longer believe in them as decent human beings but I can't deny their talent.

I can't fully enjoy it any more, though. Their awfulness is the poo in the pool for me.

I like fantasy and enjoyed the first Neil Gaiman novel I read, with only slight misgivings. But the more I read the more I noticed a level of coldness, even cruelty, that put me off. It makes sense to me now, knowing his attitude to women.

I try to separate my feelings about a work (book, artwork, film etc) from what I think of its creator. But I don’t want to support people who have deliberately caused harm, eg those authors calling for a boycott of gender-critical writers, so I don’t buy any of their books. That is a small but practical action. Anyone calling for an unfair boycott deserves to be boycotted themselves.

I loved Neil Gaiman when I was a teen (was a massive sandman fan) and I still think he’s a very talented writer. I do think it’s pretty natural to view work more cynically/ critically when you discover someone is an awful person but I agree it does cloud the issue.

I liked David Tenant very much in several things especially There She Goes and The Escape Artist but now I know his views I can’t watch him anymore which is a shame.
A bit like Michael Jackson although obviously for a very different reason.
Both are/were still talented people though.

Well the classic case is Michael Jackson.

Incredible talent. Singer, songwriter and dancer.

As a human being, repulsive.

Does it change the way I feel about his work?

Yes it does. I can still say some of his work is technically incredible but I don't enjoy in the same way I used to, simply because his treatment of vulnerable young men is the first thing it reminds me of.

Same with DT and NG now.

Their views/actions don't make them less talented but for some people (including myself) I simply can't enjoy that talent anymore.

To be crystal clear I am not suggesting DT or NG abused young men.

Sorry my post be been seen to infer that.

Well said OP. I've seen in it in countless threads here, sometimes when someone who has been feted for being believed to know what a woman is says something that proves they've drunk the TRA Kool-Aid, and immediately everything they've ever done and any skill they've ever displayed is rubbished.

Tennant is a misogynistic arse in thrall to his wife's child-harming stupidity. Nevertheless, the original incarnation of his Doctor Who is still one of my favourites, and his portrayal of Dennis Nilsen in Des is brilliantly chilling.

(I've never read any Gaiman, despite loving Terry Pratchett, so I can't comment on his skill as a writer.)

Knowing what idiots the TRA crowd looks when they criticise JKR's writing unfairly because they disagree with her views (when they were prior fans), I try to be mindful of knee jerk criticism just because an author etc has said something I disagree with.

I have liked DTs acting but I'm not as familiar with NG's work (mainly through Good Omens and Pratchett).

I'm a huge Harry Potter fan, but coming in a close second are His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (who has expressed some pro TWAW views). I find his blindness on this issue fascinating and ridiculous because if he had deliberately written a warning about the types of seemingly good/kind people who want to "protect" children from puberty then he couldn't have done it better.

However, having seen him make scathing comments about JKR and the popularity of the Potter books prior to all of this, I reckon if she had shown up on the TWAW side then he would have taken the GC side. He's sees himself as a better writer because his work is more literary and I think he's jealous of her success.

I can still enjoy the worlds and characters he has created whilst thinking he's pompous and wrong about JKR and trans stuff. I hope he has the courage and self awareness to realise how bad it all is and can see how his own work calls it out one of these days.

When it gets to people who have actually done wrong like John Lassiter (Pixar) I think it's easy to see the male centric culture in the output of the studio long before his behaviour was widely known. I think your female characters are always going to seem generic, token and paperthin if the work culture doesn't value the voice of women. Pixar as it was couldn't have made Turning Red.

I suppose that misogynists can have good observation skills, but their work is going to be limited by those views in some way.

These days I just keep in mind that any male whose creative output I've enjoyed is probably a wrongun in private and we're just waiting for the full scale of his depravity to be revealed.

It's like in GC circles when I see all the fangirling of Graham Linehan and the like and I think, yeah just wait and see. Actually he's already out as an abrasive dickhead who says horrible things to women he doesn't like so no need to even wonder there.

It's funny really. In my case , I'd already started to get fed up with David' Tennant's "chewing the scenery" style of acting long before I heard his views.
And I grew out of Gaiman's work years ago. I re read some of it and it just seemed juvenile to me as an adult. And yes, the misogyny was never far below the surface.

The test case for me would be Jamila Jameel. I still love her as Tahani in The Good Place despite thinking she's an absolute imbecile irl.

I agree OP.

I still love His Dark Materials trilogy despite disappointment in Philip Pullman's belief in trans ideology. A stance that is utterly at odds with the messages in his books too. But I can get lost in the books without thinking about him.

Someone like Alice Roberts is more difficult, because her actual job is to communicate science to ordinary people; her luxury beliefs are more dangerous in this capacity.

As a side issue, there was also a lot of chat about DT's weedy appearance. I know it was funny in the context of the t-shirt. But I have personal (playful, not traumatic) experience of the fact fit, muscley women are not automatically stronger than stringy skinny lightweight men. The difference in muscle fibres and lung capacity between the sexes really does count for a lot.

I think it's because people feel an emotional connection to books, films, music, art etc that they enjoy, and by extension an emotional connection to the creators. No one ever says of an accountant accused of abuse, "well, I never thought much of his adding up anyway."

So I think part of denouncing their work is to show that you don't identify with them in any way, you have nothing in common with an abuser, no connection.

Also there's a bit of superiority. "While everyone else was taken in by him, I could tell from his books he was a wrong 'un and always thought they were all crap."

And I think an element of self-protection. One of my favourite books as a child was Earthfasts by William Mayne. I loved it, read it repeatedly. Then in my early twenties I read in the paper that Mayne had been convicted of historic child abuse offences. And it hurt, even though I knew I had no right to be hurt. Something that meant so much to me came from the imagination of an abuser. And I wished I could say I never liked it anyway. But I can't. It's a beautifully written, magical story that was just what I needed when I first found it, and it's hard to square that in my mind with the person that Mayne turned out to be. And if I could lie to myself and pretend it was never any good my conscience would feel better.

I lived/loved/inhaled Sandman at the time and I'm really grateful to have had that experienced unsullied.
Luckily it's been many years since I read it and so whilst I enjoyed it then, I don't feel sad not going back there, and I never enjoyed his novels as much as the comics and gave up reading him around 8 years ago.

So I've been thinking about how it feels now to view all this through the lens of today, this minute.
It's not raw to me to let go of his work like it might be for someone who eat/pray/loves NG now. It's not a conflict in my heart. For a while now he's been awful, just awful on social media, so disrespectful to women that I just lost all respect for him.

Sandman was a great dark and wild party back in the day, it was also the work of a host of illustrators and the very talented Dave McKean.

But like all parties it ended. And now it seems that one of the guys at the party was preying on girls. When he would go to work with those other creatives in that team he was doing a job of crafting a commercial story with them. He's a good writer. He was attractive. He can use words to manipulate emotions and cause reactions.

The same skills to make those stories resonate was how he crafted his public persona.

The visual image of him violently assaulting young women until they scream or pass out is so vile that there's not really any coming back from that.

When I see his name across the spine of a book on my shelf now I can hear his voice, a voice that now turns from being soft and undulating and comforting to something hard and brutal and ugly. The spell is broken. Instead of being a wise wizard he's a gnashing Cenobite.

I don't need that kind of writer guy on my shelf and his work is a drop in the ocean given all the other writers out there yet to be discovered.

The King is dead, Long live the Queen.

I couldn't watch Jessica Jones because DT was terrifying. He was TOO good at his job...

Thinking about this, I realised that although I have never said anyone is bad at their job just because I found them personally disappointing, I have stopped liking their work. I wonder if, for some people, not liking their work any more turns into being "labeled as being rubbish at their job".

To explain - two comedians I used to find funny were Frankie Boyle and Joe Lycett. After Boyle's jibes about Katie Price's son Harvey, listening to him just left me cold. Lycett's routine 'Samantha Peterson & The Private Investigator' did the same. Yes I know it's probably a complete fiction, but the idea of him finding fun in making a female office manager's working days a misery just flicked that switch in my head and now seeing him onscreen irritates me.

So, two comedians who can no longer make me laugh. Does that mean that they are "rubbish at their job"? No, other people still find them funny. But they are rubbish at their job of making me laugh now. I wonder if some people generalise that, so that 'being rubbish at their job for me' turns into 'being rubbish at their job full stop'.

@WhereYouLeftIt I've had that experience with Marilyn Manson and Till Lindemann. Can't listen to their music anymore. I also went right off Adam Savage when the allegations his sister made came out.

I like David Tennant as an actor, not so much as a person. Of NG's work I've only read Stardust and I <whispers it> thought the film was better.

I always feel like women are held to a higher standard than men, hence the sheer amount of vitriol directed at JK Rowling. Haven't seen anything like that directed at these men.