I used to love Joss Whedon from everything he made. I grew up watching Buffy, and loved Firefly, then Marvel got him for Avengers and I was excited for him to be getting such a big break. He later Agents of Shield which I also loved. But then it came out that he was an abuser. His whole persona of championing strong women was merely a facade to hide this.
Learning that Michelle Trachtenberg (RIP) had a clause in her contract while working in Buffy (2000-3) at age 15 that she was not to ever be in the same room as Whedon alone opened my eyes to just how bad things are. Not just how bad he was, but how well it was known that he was an abuser and no one did anything about it. That’s just how things were.
I have a hard time watching Buffy or any of his works anymore, just knowing now that he was behind these things.
Yeah, it also gives me some closure with firefly being cancelled… like I the fox executive cancelled Firefly because he didn’t like Whedon, now I know why he didn’t like him. Or at least a probable reason.
And it didn’t give him a chance to be weird and creepy with Summer Glau.
Any more than he already had been.
Lest we forget she was introduced to the show naked in a box.
The man was big into the ‘born sexy yesterday’ trope.
God, the entirely of Dollhouse was the most problematic thing I’ve ever seen in retrospect (regarding the born sexy yesterday trope) and I can’t believe that past me didn’t see how messed up everything about it was. That the dolls were turned into helpless blanks between jobs and constantly sexualized in that state was so messed up.
Bill fucking Cosby. That guy was a generational idol.
Back in the '00s, he used to give speeches down at college campuses around the country that supposedly promoted ethics and social values for young men. The most famous of these, the Pound Cake Speech, was given out during the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision at an NAACP Legal Defense dinner, ffs.
He was this pinnacle of Respectibility Politics. This Model Minority. The quintessential American father figure. An intellectual. A charismatic icon. A pillar of the community.
Oops. Fuck. Oh well…
JK Rowling
I literally learned to read so I could read Harry Potter books so I didn’t have to wait for bedtime for my dad to read them to me; even though I was a “boy” I badly wanted to be Hermione Granger when I grew up
it’s really heart-breaking that she became so deranged and hateful, a lot of us loved her books growing up
Yeah me too. I literally started to read because I couldn’t wait for mum to start reading and wanted to read past when she stopped.
I was literally sneaking away to read. My parents knew and turned a blind eye, not believing their luck that their son was rebelling by reading haha. I’ll always thank JK for my love of reading. But fuck her politics.
I started reading for the same reason, except it was he Narnia books and my gramma 🫡
Your hero as a child was the author and not the character?
I used to think Musk was ok.
I didn’t know anything about him other than he was investing in EV’s which I felt the world desperately needed, at a time when it felt like big oil was squashing the uptake.
Same, I thought he was out to try and save the world from climate change. For me the illusion shattered when he tried to kill California HSR because he would make less in cars. It was never about the environment, it was about being “cool” and then cornering the market.
Yeah for me it was the Thai kid submarine fiasco. He offered a dumb idea in a life threatening situation and when it was rejected by professional underwater cave diver rescue guy Musk accused the guy of being a pedo.
That one was full mask off. Couldn’t be explained by someone trolling. Couldn’t even be explained by a profit motive. Just an attention seeking child.
The way he smeared that teacher reputation… Disgusting.Talk about projecting…
If HSR isn’t “high-speed rail”, it may be fun to once-again dereference your initialisms on first use.
I feel like I was fortunate that as soon as I came to understand there was alot of buzz about this guy I wanted to understand why, did some research, and found out that he got lucky twice with corporate mergers making him alot of money.
Kevin Sorbo as Hercules©®™.
And I used to listen to the lost profits as a teenager. ultra sigh
Lucy Lawless on the other hand is a fantastic lady and I love how she calls out Kevin Sorbo
As a teenager I loved to read Lovecraft. It was a way to learn English as a nice side effect because it isn’t my native language but that also obscured the appalling racism from me which lead to disappointment when I found out later.
Lovecraft deserves some redemption. First of all he wasn’t especially racist, just the “normal” amount for his time (take with a grain of salt please!). More importantly he significantly mellowed out in his later years primarily due to exposure to talented black writers which made him realize the error of his ways.
But yeah, I wouldn’t ask him to name my void cat.
No, he was really really racist for the time. But he did get better at the end.
Lovecraft was especially racist by the standards of his time, though. https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/1897rk2/was_lovecraft_racist_even_by_the_standards_of_his/
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Other people have already confirmed he was a racist, but think Clinical Xenophobe is a more apt distinction. He was a unconformable around minorities, but he was also unconformable about the ocean and the color violet. And he wrote about his discomfort. He didn’t write political manifests. This isn’t a case of separating the art from the artist, but seeing the art to see the broken person behind it.
Neil Gaiman. I fucking loved Sandman and damn near everything else he wrote. Finding out he’s a total scumbag has basically ruined a lot of very dear memories.
Yeah, this one hurt.
Good Omens too. Can I pretend it was written entirely by Pratchett?
Been looking for this.
Back in the day I scored a ticket to an Amanda Palmer show, was absolutely floored when he showed up mid-act, completely unannounced. He was one of my favourite writers, a friend to Sir Terry Pratchett (RIP) , and on top of that, someone who seemed like a genuine force for good in the world. I remember that show made my year, I felt so incredibly lucky, like finding a bike under the tree when you’re 4.
Then Good Omens happened, then Sandman, and I was just genuinely happy to see him getting the accolades and recognition.
Not mincing words here, once the allegations started floating up, I felt so angry and personally betrayed. For every book or show recommendation, for every conversation where I brought him up as one of my personal heroes. I was almost in mourning, I realise that now, and I’m pretty sure my cynicism levelled up as a direct consequence of that experience.
Fast forward to last week or so, where my RSS feed pings with an article from his blog, the first since the scandal began. He’s pointing to a journalist investigation that seems to say the whole thing was a hatchet job. He tries to explain, and this being Neil, the words line up and do his bidding. And I want to fucking believe him, I do. But I can’t.
The absolute worst thing? In spite of everything, I hope he’s really telling the truth. How does that make any fucking sense?
My childhood heros were the cartoon heros of the 80’s. And they all turned out to be lieing to us the whole time. Saying things like “evil never wins”, “crime doesn’t pay”, and all that. They were really just trying to reduce the competition.
Neil fuckin Gaiman.
The monster went from my favorite author to a name that elicits rage and disgust.
Shit, like half of 'em. The other half just died, like decent folk.
Hulk Hogan. I was such a huge Hulkamaniac as a kid, brother.
Same. I remember thinking he was such a hero when I was like 8. What a douche canoe.
I reserve ‘cunt’ and ‘dumb bitch’ as especially strong, disrespectful expletives to call a woman.
When I say “Fuck that dumb bitch TERF cunt JK Rowling” it carries the hurt and ire of a broken childhood love of Harry Potter. The series itself was incredibly important to me and provided a world I could escape to when the real world was overwhelming. The hate and bigotry that cunt has shown breaks my heart and sullies too many childhood memories to describe.
I was deeply inspired to pursue engineering after watching the first Falcon 9 boosters land themselves. I was enamored by the idea of using my little blip in humanity’s timeline to assist our expansion to another planet. I wanted to contribute to something important, something that turned many brilliant minds towards an achievement that would eventually benefit the entirety of mankind.
I even hopped on the Tesla train; I recognized the existential threat that carbon emissions bore as well as the damaging, restrictive nature of building a society that scorns public transportation and promotes individual car ownership.
I didn’t worship Elon so much as admired the causes he was advancing. That admiration withered over the years but my dream of contributing to the colonization of Mars helped me push through the ten years it took to earn my four year engineering degree. As details of his derangement came out, as he acquired twitter and more overtly spread his billionaire propaganda, that dream started to fade. The fascist salutes at Trump’s inauguration crushed those dreams and ground them into a dust too fine to even attempt a rebuild.
My jaded ass still wants to benefit humanity so I’ve set my eyes on climate science, even as the country I was born in denies the havoc and damage our relentless consumption has wrought. Not just denial, but outright derision and contempt for the future of our world. Thus I hope to take my dreams elsewhere, hoping to find a culture with a clearer view of the consequences we must face and the changes we must make to preserve our planet.
I love watching Harry Potter fans get mad over JK Rowling.
It was always trash and they always had no standards. It’s nice to see that crowd have to separate mediocre art from mediocre artists.
She wrote books for children. 500 million+ copies have been sold globally. It’s obviously not trash, and she’s obviously very talented author in that genre. I get that some people have an irrational hatred towards her, but denying reality that strongly is certainly going to cause some psychological damage.
I wouldn’t say horrible, but the shine definitely faded off Will Smith.
He’s made some poor choices over the years.
My buddy worked in an area that Will Smith occasionally worked.
At every opportunity, will Smith would go out of his way to meet the people around where he was working, talk with them, get selfies, etc, when there was absolutely no need to do it. This was even later in his career when he was really well-known: he’d be walking down a hallway chatting about electrical stuff with a maintenance guy for no reason. I do believe will smith would also return a shopping cart if tested.
The thing where he assaulted someone else on live TV was either out of character, or every appearance from the years before was out of character; exclusively so.
I refuse to believe Will Smith is irredeemable yet.
He laughed at Chris Rock’s joke until he saw Jada’s reaction. Not in any way excusable for him to assault him, but it’s easy to see what the actual reason for it was.
Being all wrapped up with another person emotionally and romantically can sometimes push us to do things otherwise out of character. I think it’s pretty easy to see and understand in that particular case.
Wayne Gretzky.
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turned conservative
He’s from Alberta, he didn’t turn, just stopped hiding it.
Except he’s not.
My bad, I was a kid during his Oilers days and I mean, look at him…
Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, George Soros. I had a period where I appreciated people who played the system to get rich. Before I understood the system itself is the problem.
Bill Gates
I remember him as being a scumbag going back to the 80’s. Ripping off the Mac GUI, and then going on to bully, absorb and run out of business countless smaller enterprises through strong-arm legal / financial tactics.
Amazing how many things the Simpsons got right, yet it didn’t matter.
What I find most interesting is that Warren Buffet has come right out said it’s weird that society will reward people into being billionaires and has publicly stated that there’s is for sure a class war going on and billionaires are winning.
I think it’s nice he’s giving most of his fortune away but disappointing he hasn’t called for the system that made his fortune to be dismantled.
because he benefited from that system that gave billionaires that advantage, of courses hes not go to bite the hand that feeds him.
Of all the wealthy people I’ve ever read about, Buffet seems to actually care about money the least. Like’s he’s in love with the process in the way that an autistic person loves their hyper focus but if he lost everything, it wouldn’t faze him.
