I can understand that. There’s been others where the idea of no longer supporting them has been a sound idea, as is not wanting them to continue to profit off of what they did.
Kevin Spacey said a month or two ago that he’s been having to move from place to place as his money runs out and he’s just about homeless. If you search for a recent picture of Harvey Weinstein and adult film actor Ron Jeremy, they look awful, a combination of age and time spent in jail. Gaiman may get to a similar financial point fairly soon as his publishing deals have been canceled, and moreso if jail is in his future.
The question I have is, if I treat everything Gaiman’s written as being bad because he’s bad, where do I stop?
He and Terry Pratchett wrote Good Omens together, with Gaiman estimating Pratchett writing more of it than he did. Does that make Terry Pratchett bad by working with Gaiman? Do I avoid Discworld and everything else Pratchett wrote, or just Good Omens?
The Laika film studio made a stop-motion animated movie based on Gaiman’s book Coraline. Is Laika now bad because their first film came from Gaiman?
Here’s a different example. Anne McCaffrey wrote that her short story, The Thorns of Barevi, was her attempt to break into the soft- and hard-core pr0n market of the 1960s and it has a “rape-fantasy component” that was later removed when it was developed into the “Freedom series”/“Catteni Sequence” books. If someone objects to anything having to do with pr0n or rape, do they avoid just that short story and the books that came from it, or is everything McCaffrey wrote to be avoided?
The obvious answer is no, it’s not practical or reasonable to make that kind of blanket judgment. But if someone has that kind of thinking, we’d have to start ripping up the U.S. Interstate Highway System because its creation can be traced back to Adolph Hitler.
The short history of that is Germany had the idea for a national highway system in the 1920s but it didn’t get much traction. After the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, Hitler thought it was a great idea, got it going, and it turned into the Reichsautobahn, the network of “Streßen des Führers” (Roads of the Führer). While leading the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower saw how useful they were, and when he became President of the U.S., he based the U.S. Interstate Highway System off of them, and included long, straight sections that can be used as emergency runways for military aircraft.
That’s a very concrete and literal example of how the idea of “the person is bad so everything they’ve ever done is bad and there cannot be any good in anything they’ve ever done” falls apart.
Does it become condoning and/or excusing the bad behavior by reading stories Gaiman wrote after the bad things he did became known, or is it a case of being pragmatic and seeing if there might be anything good, interesting or useful in what he wrote (and the things that were adapted from them) instead of going with “there cannot be anything good because he’s bad”?
What if it turns out to be a situation like what happened with Garrison Keillor, where an accusation caused Minnesota Public Radio to sever ties with him but was resolved in his favor five months later and he started touring and doing more shows of A Prairie Home Companion not long after? If what Gaiman’s accused of gets resolved and he’s cleared of wrongdoing, does it make it okay to start reading his stories even if someone was resolutely against them because of the accusations in the past? Or is it forever “there cannot be anything good because he had been accused of being bad”?
