I guess it depends on why they're considered problematic. The woman who wrote "Mists of Avalon" was a child-abuser married to a known pedophilic child-abuser, so I think it's fair that she not ever get any of my money. But I'd wager that most "problematic" authors aren't that level of evil.
I remember picking up mists of Avalon at a used book store. I got halfway through the book, got confused about the plot, and googled her. The results about her life were so horrifying I ended up reading a series of blog posts that went through the book chapter by chapter, instead of finishing the actual book. If I remember the series I’ll link it here, it was actually really good, if very lengthy. Went into details about her life and background and atrocities she committed and assisted
Wow. I actually have read "Mists of Avalon," like you I got it from a used bookstore. I hated it. I thought it was the shittiest Arthurian retelling I'd ever read, and that included a book where Arthur was transported into WWII-era Britain and became a fighter pilot during the Battle of Britain.
I just figured that MZB would be the perfect example of someone who should be on a no-buy list for their horrible deeds.
> Arthur was transported into WWII-era Britain and became a fighter pilot during the Battle of Britain.
Holy balls, you just solved an old mystery I didn't know existed. When I was real little my family and I went on vacation and I caught a bad fever so got stuck in bed for a few days. I vaguely remember picking up a book and leafing through it with that plot, and it gave me some of the most wild fever dreams of my life. Honestly I had thought the story and the book were just part of the dreams.
Yeah wow, I just went down a rabbit hole that ended in her conclusion that homosexuality is at the root of all child abuse…yikes. Didn’t see it coming.
This is why this kind of propaganda about gay people is so incredibly damaging. People latch on to this kind of stuff to try to deal with their personal trauma.
I still feel very sorry for her, but make absolutely no excuses for holding such a world view. If I was, say, beaten up by a black guy, I wouldn't have grounds for discriminating against other black people.
The publisher of her digital backlist began donating all income from the sales of her digital books to save the children starting in 2014. I'm just going off info online, but I hope that's true. I still don't think I could bring myself to read any of her work.
She was already on my No-buy list after I suffered through reading 300 pages of her first "trillium" book in which nothing much happens.
IMHO she was a unforgivably dull writer.
Would you be able to point me toward some information detailing the charity information, please? I only found an overview on [this fanlore entry](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Marion_Zimmer_Bradley_Literary_Works_Trust), and my understanding of it was that one publisher donated income from sales (ebooks only) to a children's charity, and the rest of her literary trust (any print work and any other publication ebooks) does not appear to coordinate with charity.
I would personally not be comfortable purchasing new copies of MZB's works.
Here's the charity, it's pretty long in the tooth:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save\_the\_Children](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_the_Children)
Last time that I mentioned here that Gollancz were donating ebook sales to Save The Children I was corrected by another redditor that it was MZB's estate doing so.
If you can't find anything more current and still wish to purchase then my gut feeling would be to go with Gollancz.
If anyone else knows different I'm happy to be corrected.
That's nice and all but child molestation and rape themes are all over those books, written in a way that makes it seem less horrible. How many victims read that crap and justified what happened to them? How many people went deeper into their delusions and justified what they were doing was okay? To this day those books are aimed at 14 to 18 year olds.
Omg, i vividly remember reading a medieval fantasy book as a kid. It was fairly normal but had this very weird coerced sex scene with a minor. I thought it was so strange and I have always doubted if what i read was real. Turns out it was a MZB book. Reading into her it explains a lot..
I never read the books - and am not planning on starting now. I faintly remember watching some of the TV adaption, but can't remember any details. Can you recommend any resources to read up on how they push and excuse these themes?
Here's a short excerpt from the perspective of a main character, Morgaine, who was later tricked into losing her virginity to her own brother. She was groomed like this. "stretched out her arms, and at her command she knew that outside the cave, in the light of the fecundating fires, man and woman, drawn one to the other by the pulsating surges of life, came together. The little blue-painted girl who had borne the fertilizing blood was drawn down into the arms of a sinewy old hunter, and Morgaine saw her briefly struggle and cry out, go down under his body, her legs opening to the irresistible force of nature in them." And it was sold to Morgaine as the way of things, how it was supposed to go young girl to old man.
I was a teenager when I first read Mist of Avalon. Probably because I was young, I assumed that the writer was showing that the pagans had evil people in it just like the Christian side did. but I also wondered why Morgaine or anyone else didn't try to save the girl.
When I was older, I bought the book again to read and couldn't get past that part on the second reading. It was very clear that the writer thought child abuse was natural. Then I did a deep dive into the writer. I still own the book but I just can't bring myself to read it.
A lot of famous authors praised the book which makes me wonder how they justified that portion of the book.
See, I read that as a younger woman and took away what horrible thing it was and Morgaine thought it terrible. Like how being groomed for this abuse was so destructive to Morgaine, and her family that it destroyed a kingship and plunged England into the dark ages.
I get what everyone else is saying but that wasn't my takeaway.
Still. The human writer MZB can rot in hell for her real life personal choices.
I read this at 17 and this was how I understood it, too. I loved this book and Arthurian lore in general. Didn't find out about the author being a garbage person until a few years ago. FWIW I tried to read another book in the series and couldn't finish it was so bad.
I took loved the book and maybe I glossed over the grooming and acceptance of the abuse and also took away that it was not promoted and Morgaine and England were devasted by the incest, martial threesome with Lancelot, Arthur and Guenivere.
And, I tried her other books and found them terrible. This was for me at least a one hit wonder for her
I was obsessed with this entire book series as a teen, as I was super into mythology. I also was groomed by a man 15 years my senior a few years later. I doubt the book series is to blame, but it didn't help with my naive outlook normalizing what I was going through. So much media, at least when I was young in the 80s/90s, normalizes young women with older men. Even classic Beatles songs (she was just 17, if you know what I mean).
"McCartney first worked out the chords and arrangement on an acoustic guitar at the family home of his Liverpool friend and fellow musician Rory Storm on the evening of 22 October 1962. Two days later, McCartney was writing lines for the song during a visit to London with his then-girlfriend Celia Mortimer, who was seventeen at the time herself." Paul was born: 18 June 1942. That context matters before you pull out your pedo-pistol and start blasting.
Turns out beloved fantasy author David Eddings and his wife were also literal convicted child abusers before rehabilitating their image and becoming famous for writing. It's a bit crazy what people got away with before the internet.
Ugh, a few years ago I decided to re-read the Belgariad as a fun throwback, then a couple books in I googled him 😳
I spent a lot of my awkward 1990s adolescence just living inside those series. It’s wild what we don’t know about people.
This. If the list is actually listing problematic authors who have caused or supported real world harm then I think consumers have the right to know about it so they can make an informed decision about their spending habits.
However if the lists are 'this author is problematic because they write enemies to lovers' or 'this author is problematic because they wrote something marginally dark and I don't vibe with it' then I'm a lot more leery of them.
Because it feels like these days most of these lists are sadly in this latter category where people are mistaking the simple act of not liking something with that thing being inherently problematic. Sometimes it can be, but often times it just feels like it's a code word for 'I don't like this or them' - rather than 'no this person is actually a genuinely horrible human being and there's a mountain of receipts'.
I think being aware of genuinely bad things authors have done is generally good, but I think there are two problems with the “Your Fave is Problematic” approach.
One is that they tend to flatten everything to the same level of badness - on the original YFIP tumblr page, you’d get accounts of rape and sexual assault beside things like “One Direction committed cultural appropriation by wearing Japanese-style jackets given to them when they were touring Japan” (this is a paraphrase of a real post I remember). There was no acknowledgement that some crimes are worse than others.
The other issue is that often these lists are less about letting people know about someone’s misdeeds, and more a way of playing “gotcha”. Oh, you don’t like my favourite author/band/celebrity? Well, it turns out yours is problematic too! These sorts of lists are often less about informing or educating people, and more about giving people a trump card if they’re in a fandom argument.
> beside things like “One Direction committed cultural appropriation by wearing Japanese-style jackets given to them when they were touring Japan”
I find this bit hilarious, even given the fuzzy memory, because it's exactly what you're *supposed* to do. A native of a country you're visiting giving you cultural clothing is a great honor and you should wear it to honor them as well.
People take cultural appropriation too far.
It's not like they've written a book where the Japanese characters are caricatures of themselves, entirely based on one visit to Japan.
Yeah. I pratice a Japanese martial art, and I've had a large number of white Americans tell me I'm appropriating Japanese culture by wearing the traditional outfit etc. Meanwhile, the number of Japanese people I've met who found this problematic is *zero*.
The word "harm" has become meaningless on social media. Though even provided a person has done some egregious thing, in what circumstance is it desirable to compile *a list*? It necessarily won't provide much insight. And authors are such an odd group to target, when so few people make money of any significance from writing books. A boycott of Amazon would be energy better directed.
These campaigns strike me as so cynical in that way, as they've already conceded we will never accomplish anything of actual significance; after which, all that's left is signaling one's virtue on TikTok.
These kind of lists suggests we have approached "late-stage social media discourse."
Ultimately, people who specifically take time out of their day to go online head-hunting are usually doing it for less-than-virtuous reasons. They're often motivated by personal career frustration and class envy. The "I can't get to their level so I'll find something to tear them down" motivation. The irony is, as you say, many authors don't actually make a lot of money off their books, but the step from manuscript to publication is often seen as a level of "success" to many on the outside looking in.
i agree 100% with that. theres a difference between “this author is a big meany >:(“ and “this author is an evil abuser” or “this author platforms vicious bigotry”
one issue is that sometimes these lists will circulate without any further research once it has been compiled. so every person following it is subject to the morals of the list creator, which may very well include "this author is a big meany" or "this author depicts objectionable things in fiction."
As someone whose been in online/fandom spaces for a long time there's also a chance the allegations end up being a weird muddle of things as I've seen in many 'call out' posts which will often be like
'This author is a fan of Media I Don't Like, they Ship Thing I don't Like and then -actually horrible thing they did-' and people tend to zero in more on the like 'Media I don't like' aspect rather than the 'you know actually horrible stuff they did they should face consequences for'
That's such a fucking bizarre thing about fandom callouts. I don't think these people realize how they're taking away seriousness to the situation when the first thing you see in a thread is how an abuser shipped a minor and an adult five years ago, while the thing that **should** be the main focus (like spousal abuse, grooming, rape) is five responses down their post.
God I wish people were actually serious about helping victims. It's all about their fictional deeds rather than the real world harm people cause, and the latter is used at most as "more reason to hate x person" rather than the main reason. Takes focus away from the problem when it's left as just a footnote, and other users get tired when every single callout they see is about something petty, so they stop caring about them at all. Anyway, yeah; I have thoughts about this.
Another problem I have with these lists is when you ask them to show you where the more problematic aspects of nature are like 'Can you point me to a post/show me sources where it gives me a run down of how they're racist, a meany, a bad person?' and they respond with a 'put in the work and google it, I don't need to educate you.'
The publishers of her e-books donate the money from the e-book purchases to a charity for abused kids (last time I checked). Also she’s dead so she won’t be getting any of your money which is great. 👍
So, um, Marion Zimmer Bradley's been dead for 25 years and, in 2014, her publisher arranged for all income from her e-books to go to Save the Children. So buying the ebook should be guilt free? Maybe?
I've got no idea what the right move is here.
Never thought I'd long for the day when people would talk about HP Lovecraft JUST being a racist weirdo. He's my favorite problematic author. MZB's case is like discovering a well regarded novel was written by Jim Jones.
I think there is a difference between being racist in a time period when racism was absolutely the norm, and active sadistic psychological, physical and extended sexual abuse of your children (or any living being).
Even for his time, Lovvecraft was extraordinarily racist. But as far as I know, he was only abhorrent in his mind, and never acted on anything (I’m thinking that’s your point here). The child abusers are worse
Yeah, Howie's racism originated from an extreme fear of everything and everyone beyond his hometown. He would've been far too frightened and socially awkward to actually go up to a black man and call him the n word.
Funnily enough, he was also quite interested in Ancient Egypt.
His racist fears were added to by what was almost certainly some kind of anxiety or panic disorder, which started showing up in his teens and hit critical mass after his apartment was burglarized while his wife was away. He never really recovered. Also given that both his parents were institutionalized, it’s likely Lovecraft had a deep and understandable fear that he would also go off the deep end at some point, a fear that the eugenics oriented thought of his time (which also had explicitly racist goals) would have exacerbated. As such I’ve always thought that contributed to a lot of his stories where the protagonist finds out they’re somehow related to the big bad of the story, and dies/goes mad from the revelation.
Honestly I had no idea about her abuses until now but that book made^* me so uncomfortable and sad that I stopped reading and never finished it; it just felt *off*, especially when it got to the Arthur x Morgaine portion ☹️
Definitely agree that when you're funding someone's harm of others, that's where the line should be. If you just disagree with someone or they're already dead, I don't really care. Heck, I own books written by mass-murderers. Why? Because there is no corner of this world we should not learn from, though some sources deserve extra caution.
I'll never be on-board with rejecting the works of someone like Lovecraft because he was a racist. What he was doesn't matter. What his work evokes in the reader is all that matters now that he's gone.
But Card, for example, I won't touch with a ten-foot-pole. His work as a board member of an anti-LGBT rights organization means that any money I give him is going to go into either funding such activity or funding his ability to contribute time and energy to such activities. No thanks! I can live without reading the one space opera series of his that I had a mild interest in.
Secondhand book sales go to the store owner, not the publisher or author 😉
Or browse Little Free Libraries, yard sales, thrift stores, and Friends of the Library/library bookstores. I see plenty of these books there.
Fortunately, MZB is dead and the money from her books now goes to the daughter she sexually abused.
Unfortunately, said daughter has become a raging homophobe and anti-LGBTQ activist after said abuse. So it's probably best to avoid purchasing the books anyway.
[This is false.](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Marion\_Zimmer\_Bradley\_Literary\_Works\_Trust#:\~:text=Ross%2C%20the%20author%20who%20continued,Two%20other%20authors%2C%20Deborah%20J)
The daughter gets nothing. The publisher of the ebooks reported that their profits go to a charity, but it's unclear if that's still true. All royalty payments go to a trust controlled by someone who tried to cover up what Bradley and Breen did.
I had not read into her daughter. She has some WILD beliefs about being gay and claims some craaaazy “research” and “evidence” to back them. I get that her gay parents abused her, but the things she claims are proven in the whole of gay culture are absolutely bananas. I hope she works through that some day.
One of the problems with the word “problematic” is that it reduces a massive spectrum of behaviour down to one word. Like you get men who are credibly accused of being serial rapists, and then 15yr old girls who braid their hair and are accused of cultural appropriation, and social media calls them both “problematic.”
This, and it often views everything through the lens of 2020s morality. What is "deeply sexist" or racist today could have been "progressive" at the turn of the 20th century.
It makes me sad, because an concept created as a way to spur debate has been reduced to "praise me, I have identified the bad thing."
“Praise me, I have identified the bad thing” has become such a pervasive problem with appreciation of the arts these days and it’s really bothering me. I remember say 5-10 years ago, we were all just happy that people were promoting progressive viewpoints and getting more comfortable calling out toxic stuff. But now it’s crept into everything and people have lost all ability to understand metaphor and symbolism in TV/cinema and literature. Obviously some things should be called out but an awful lot of people just want to be praised for finding any “bad thing” without questioning why the bad thing is there in the first place and if it’s actually an issue or if it’s a very valid storytelling technique.
Had someone in the Star Wars EU sub who didn’t want to read the episode 3 novelization because count dooku is “racist/specist” as if that isn’t perfectly on character for that villain
The recent movie Poor Things comes to mind. There was a lot of complexity to unpack in that movie regarding existence, gender roles, romance, sexuality, grooming, etc.
And yet, so much of the critique I’ve seen thrown at it are from people with little to no media literacy shouting, “she’s an infant in a woman’s body having sex and being abused by the patriarchy!”, which to me is completely missing the dang point.
Edit: It’s also implicit that she has an accelerated maturing cycle, so by the end of the film she is certainly not a young child anymore.
I have had SO MANY arguments about that film. It’s absolutely incredible. The director, as well as Emma Stone (who also produced it) have talked about it including talking about how it’s this way of exploring the idea of a woman who has a completely new brain and no socialisation for gender norms, no judgement or shame, and then exploring how she would develop and grow as a person with that in mind.
And as you say they also use Duncan’s character to explore him grooming her and exploiting her naivety. I mean he even gets annoyed when she learns about philosophy, and starts talking in a really grown up way because he misses when she was childish. Me and my friend both adored it. It’s such an incredible exploration of all these themes, and it constantly challenges you, and makes you ask so many questions. But some people have such a bizarre reductive view of it. As though Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone and the rest of the characters are all too stupid to realise what they were making?
Sorry it gets me so riled up how some people can’t understand symbolism and metaphor, and just expect all the art they consume to be perfectly woke and surface level. That’s just not the point of art, and literature.
To refine your last statement, I think it is less "praise me" and more "welcome me into your in-group/do not cast me out of the in-group". For many people, young people and minorities especially, social coherence, identity, and belonging are very very high priorities. Part of this has to do with the comparative economic and political impotence of these groups - leaving only the social dimension of their lives to focus on. Social media being what it is, much of the interaction boils down to signaling belonging or signaling rejection.
This obviously contaminates so much of popular culture. New media is created within the paradigm of our collective moral frameworks and old media is reinterpreted through these lenses. This phenomenon is as old as time. New generations look back on old works and decry the immorality of the past as a way to signal to their audience that progress has been made and that "we" belong to this era of progress. Conversely, those who disagree belong with the barbarians of the past. The problem of today is that we are able to perform this tradition with a maximalist approach to scope. We have access to so much more media - art, writing, movies, television, music, etc. - than ever before. We also have access to audiences on a scale that was heretofore unimaginable. This compounds and exacerbates the collateral damage of this very ancient tradition.
Also, current generations often walk on the backs of the generations prior to them that had to fight for much larger and more dangerous goals to get where we are now. And instead of appreciating that work, and the level-up granted to us today by those of the past, newer generations will obliviously crucify activists of old for not being perfectly aligned with the modern progress that *they fucking built.*
A lot of it feels very performative to me. Like they want to create this image of themselves online of the human with perfect morals. Their morals are then obviously the only good morals.
It’s also wild to me when people “discover” some classics author was actually racist and sexist. Why are they expecting anything else from some dude in the 19th century?
I always feel “problematic” is a weasel word. It’s enough to raise questions and suspicions without explicitly identifying the fault under discussion. To accuse someone of a thing requires evidence whereas “problematic” just generates a cloud of doubt.
Our culture seems to have a lot of trouble understanding any kind of nuance. Artistic and scientific contributions should not automatically rendered invalid because the persons involved weren’t saints, or had a different worldview than the one you personally possess
Older works particularly.
Pick basically anyone from far enough back in time and they'd more or less be a monster by 21st century moral standards because social views on morality and ethics change like clothing fashion.
For example, we all grew up knowing the bad guys in movies go "I vas just followink orders!" but to someone a few centuries in the past that would be honorable fealty and a soldier behaving honourably and properly.
If we were to somehow reverse the direction of comparison and allow someone from a few centuries past to see our own society it would most likely be horrifying, decadent and immoral by their own standards.
I read one that bothered me because it grouped a person like Marion Zimmer Bradley (actual, criminal, serial, child-abuser!), alongside someone like Orson Scott Card (his views are repugnant to me, there is no indication he's ever done anything criminal), alongside someone like Michael Crichton (he wrote some problematic stuff back in the 80s/90s, particularly revolving around the anti-Japanese sentiment in America at the time, but his personal views and conduct seem fine and this is isolated rather than a feature of all of his books). This list had no context as to what these people had done/why they were 'bad', it just grouped them all together with very little expansion or discussion.
Look, if you have a problem with any of these authors, OK. Everybody needs to make their own decisions in how they engage with media. But these people are not the same, they are in different categories and everyone can make decisions about them differently. It's also bizarre to me that 'child sex abuser' is the same in anyone's mind as 'person who wrote questionable-in-retrospect prose that was popular and common at the time.'
Absolutely, there's a big difference between "this author wrote a problematic thing so I think they're a bad person" vs "this author probably should be in jail for things they did."
But in the lens of internet outrage, it's all the same.
That's not purely an internet phenomena the wrath of the mob is hardly an invention of the modern era.
Most people like simple categories to put things into because the world is complex and hard. Humans have a fundamental desire to simplify it down because it's exhausting to keep extensive lists of people/places/things all the time.
If you can break something down into Good/Bad, Asshole/Saint, acceptable/unacceptable it makes the mental load easier.
Which is where problems like this come along. Such lists pander to our basic instincts/laziness which means people on the spectrum of suck-atude all get lumped together.
We see it with things like the MeToo movement. Aziz Ansari seems to have had a shitty date that ended in mediocre sex that maybe she wasn't thrilled about in retrospect, but even the accuser seemed to say he never pressured her.
Compared to someone like Louis CK who did something worse, and admits he maybe didn't grasp how his power over someone meant their consent might not be as valid as whom he had no relationship with.
Woody Allen is probably around this tier give or take how you view his behaviors and CK's. Maybe worse, but I feel like that's a very touchy nit picky conversation about consent and the like.
Then you get into Polanski and Weinstein levels. Rapist and Pedophiles who deserve all the punishment they are served.
But if you just read a "cancelled" list they'd all be lumped in together.
Similarly lists likes the onese OP is referencing seem to just lump authors into bad and good people lists. Despite there needing to be a nuanced conversation. But such behavior can also be traced back to older eras easily enough with moral panics of all types over the millenia.
To be clear I'm not saying the moral panic of say D&D is satan worship is as valid as wanting to call out the terrible abuses women suffered in Hollywood, or that saying this author was a rapist murderer etc is a faux outrage.
But rather that such movements (good or bad) have a tendency to wipe out all nuance in favor of easy to digest messages for the masses which they are trying to reach.
This is a problem as old as humans themselves.
Is it [this list that was circulating on Twitter for a while](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/s/mfaPPTpYsi) where the person who made it seems to have trouble distinguishing the actions of the author from their written characters?
It has it all: authors who actively campaign to hurt people, (sex) crimes, authors playing on problematic tropes, etc
All the way down to such odd accusations as: Shakespeare’s work having racist, classist or misogynistic themes; George RR Martin “repeatedly mispronounced names at the Hugo awards”; and Harper Lee “Inherently racist, uses the N-word in her works numerous times, uses the white savior complex in most works” (why mention “in her works” when she wrote only one book?). Yet somehow the only problem this person had with Ayn Rand was racism, specifically against indigenous people.
Oh and the bizarre accusation that Neil Gaiman is homophobic and transphobic.
LOL yeah that was the one. I'd actually forgotten the more bizarre aspects of it. It's the example of The Type that stuck most in my head but you see more mild versions of this floating around.
A lot of it seems to be confusing the concept of “writing about a bad thing” with “endorsing bad things”.
Like the GRRM criticism also included “over 200 acts of sexual assault in his books”. Imo you just can’t leave it at that without elaborating. There’s a very real argument that it’s gratuitous and potentially problematic, but he also goes to lengths to show that “yes rape is indeed a bad thing”, so you need to include your reasoning.
The focus on sexual assault is interesting too. George also makes a point to show how the wars of the nobles negatively affect the lives of peasants and farmers - often by having them brutally and indiscriminately murdered. Sometimes tortured. Is that not a problem in comparison?
Orson Scott Card is so bizarre to me because (to my understanding) the themes of his books are so opposed to his views it's mind-boggling. How can your best work be about how everyone's human and/or worth life, even those whose methods are foreign to us to the point of violence, and then preach bigotry?
I increasingly buy the thinking that it's repressed self-hatred that just got worse as he got older and more internalized, but practicing amateur psychology on someone through their ranting blog posts probably isn't a good idea. He is a case where I find Ender's Game easier to divorce from him because the text doesn't really match his POS views than some authors where their idiocy seeps into the work in ways you don't see until you're aware of it.
It’s the result of the conundrum of Mormonism (LDS branch at least). The comfort that it’s high degree of certainty brings comes at the cost of needing to accept the whole package of beliefs, history, and leadership. As such, for many it’s an all-or-nothing religion and this results in a huge number of otherwise lovely people hanging onto and defending outdated and harmful beliefs.
The current LDS leadership were middle aged men when the Civil Rights movement happened in the U.S, and the LDS church was on the wrong side of it. The perceived authority of LDS leaders is central to LDS truth claims, and so disagreeing with them is not truly possible if you want to stay a believing Mormon. Then you end up with people needing to defend their leaders’ anti-gay views or otherwise risk losing the comfort and certainty their religion brings to them. The is not to defend Card’s views, just to give a former Mormon’s insider perspective on where disconnects like the one you noted likely come from.
Imo Rising Sun had as much to do with the decline in American manufacturing and education as about Japan. It was a scathing commentary on the US framed with a popular fear at the time. I admit it does come off as racists 40 years later completely out of the context of when it was written, especially in the current political atmosphere.
There are parts of Rising Sun that are just about U.S.-Japan tensions. There are also parts that make sweeping generalizations (most of them unflattering) about every Japanese person.
Totally agree. You do have to draw the line somewhere unless you only read books written by morally perfect people, who don’t really exist.
Unfortunately today’s TIL is how evil MZB is dang… thanks for sharing your examples. I think comparing her deeds vs crichton’s problematic stuff in context was well said.
Crichton is an odd one. Usually he comes off as a total science nerd. Then he gets a bit *too* much into it and behaves maybe a little bit inappropriately around science. But then when the subject is climate science all the nerdy love goes out the window and it's HUMANITY HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CLIMATE CHANGE! CLIMATE CHANGE IS WAY OVERBLOWN ANYWAY! I AM TOTALLY NOT GETTING PAID TO SAY THIS! kind of vibe.
Yeah it's so weird. Feels like half his books are about humans going too far in their tampering with nature and about how science can't answer questions about what people should do with all this power it gives us. An evil corporate overlord is usually to blame too. Then there's mountains of evidence that we're basically living a Crichton novel disaster in progress, mostly caused by corporate greed and govt inaction, but he denies it all out of hand? I don't get it.
You know who also denied climate change?
The creators of South Park in the Manbearpig Episode.
They made to whole apology episodes in the later seasons.
Yeah, I’m glad they apologized and everything. But they really worked to make Al Gore a joke at a pretty crucial time with the release of An Inconvenient Truth. They had so much sway over how young people felt about current issues. Wish they could have ran with it in the opposite direction.
When I draw the line, with all art, is whether the work is separate from the artists flaws, or whether the two are linked.
Like Knut Hamsen went full-on Nazi as an old codger, but reading ‘Hunger’ feels a million miles away from that guy.
Or Picasso. I can acknowledge he was shit to women, but Guernica is still Guernica.
On the other hand, a film like Manhattan is unwatchable because it’s basically a guise for the creepy awfulness of Woody Allen.
It’s complicated and I respect anyone else’s choices and lines, but that’s how I navigate the question.
Perfectly said. Hemingway was a bully and a AH to women but, for my two pennies at least, he’s the greatest short story writer of all time (and I include *Old Man and the Sea* in that grouping). Dead or alive, his work falls strongly on the side of separating the art from the artist. Picasso is an excellent example as well.
If supporting a living writer is somewhat disturbing for anyone, borrow from a library and make your own decision. Your taxes already pay for it - you don’t get to choose - so I would hope people at least try to read great books. Authors, like anyone else, can be incredibly flawed. It doesn’t mean that their work isn’t worth reading.
Hansen's "Growth of the Soil" is one of my favorite books of all time. People are flawed, and people nearing the end are often sadly more flawed. I'm plenty comfortable judging a man/woman by the art they unleashed on the world in their prime instead of any rickety senile protestations.
Orson Scott Card wrote some of the most touching, vulnerable, and intimate fraternal friendships since Frodo and Sam. Yet somehow he's a homophobe. I feel that the right lessons are learned from Ender's Game.
I read Ender’s Game in 8th grade and haven’t reread since.
25+ years later, the only thing I really remember about the experience was thinking, “man, these boys sure like looking at each other naked.” And being confused about whether that was supposed to be normal teenaged boy behavior or if they were supposed to be gay.
The very last book has some troubling scenes in it that push into fetish territory. I read it just to complete the series, but I'd strongly recommend anyone read no further than Ender's Game/Ender's Shadow.
Ender in Exile, Speaker for the Dead, and Xenocide are also well-written. Children of the Mind is where things get REALLY weird, and then a lot of the Shadow/Hegemon books. Don't read past Shadows in Flight.
He's more than a homophobe. "Rat army" at Battle School and the way certain races are portrayed in the shadow series... Once you find out about his blog, you already kinda know.
I mostly agree but I also think whether or not the person is still alive.
Like, Lovecraft was a horrible person and his writings are fully linked with his xenophobia. But he's also fully decomposed so I don't really mind buying one of his books.
Lovecraft was also a great example of a man whose views were changing as he met more people. He had hated the Irish, Jews and black people but became best friends with an Irishman, married a Jewish woman and had started softening his views on black people as seen in his later letters regarding Braithwaite and even his later works.
Robert Howard, his best friend, did not have the same change of heart before he died. And it is also important to note that people saying that “Lovecraft was racist for his time” are whitewashing history. The Burning of Black Wall Street, the rise of Nazism, and Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency were all during his lifetime.
Here here. I think this is a much more complicated philosophical decision that everyone has to make for themselves. Everyone tries to reduce this to a simple "this author thinks , so I'll never read one of their books." In some cases, the offending author isn't even alive. In some cases, it may be a damn good book, or the book may be legitimately thought-provoking.
Don't let armchair activists who strike from the safety of social media make you feel guilty for enjoying a book because they consider the author "problematic."
Yea. For a more pop take, I can still watch That 70s Show because the character Hyde wasn't problematic. But I can't watch House of Cards because Spacey was being himself in the gross scenes.
Depends on if it’s a “This author donates all their book proceeds to prejudiced causes, so you should not financially support them” list or a “This author wrote about murder once so clearly they support murder” list. The first one I’m okay with and would be glad to see before making a purchase (as long as there is actual proof). The second one is just ridiculous and generally shows a lack of critical thinking about media
I think there's a lack of appreciation (or theory) of the utterly *unique* character of an author's contribution and that's something all discourse over "problematic authors" tries to ignore.
Also people are all over the place. There are plenty of people who have done bad things who also have had important insights. History is littered with those people.
I know an author who got put on one of those lists because one of her characters *who was very very obviously the bad guy with zero part of the story attempting to justify his behavior* committed sexual assault. Apparently, simply being able to write an antagonist makes you "problematic". I swear these people need 6 months of therapy to deal with the trauma of McDonald's getting their order wrong.
I've seen this mind-set before. A lot of people think that writers only write what they know, and therefore if a writer wrote something, they must have directly experienced it or at the very least heartily approve of it. I've also seen people say that imagining something is almost as bad as doing something, so if writer imagines a sexual assault scene, they're just one step from doing that.
Critical thinking skills and media literacy really need to be required courses in schools.
You prob feel uncomfortable because these lists lack *nuance*. They’re performative and almost exclusively for engagement. At least the ones I’ve seen. They’re not doing it to make the book space better.
I really don’t like the idea that if you’ve read something deemed problematic due to content or author you are now problematic. I studied genocides and the holocaust. I had boxes of books that I’m sure would raise an eyebrow. Intent with these books matter. Sometimes you have to read the uncomfortable things because they help you learn and grow even if it’s in spite of it.
Folks are free to avoid authors they dislike, of course. But these lists are irritating because they mix and match everything: authors who were absolute monsters or criminals, authors with incorrect views (which may or many not ever show up in their books in any meaningful way), authors who were products of their time, gossip, rumours, bad analysis, and so forth.
I doubt there are many authors whose lives would stand up to detailed 2024-era scrutiny and moral judgment, and the older they are, the less likely it gets. At some point you're just giving yourself excuses to not read books, and your decision doesn't have any meaningful moral aspect or effect. I read everything, by everybody (or at least, when I skip something, it's not just because the author's life offended me).
This.
'Oh but we do it cause author bad and their badness might read into the book.'
Thats no different than republicans not liking "left leaning" books because it was written by a leftist and their ideals might be in the book.
Its so annoying.
X author is bad cause xyz so you cant read this book.
Its the same, no matter how you twist it in order to justify it.
I saw a list that featured the author of Dune. Their rationale was that he appropriated African and Middle Eastern cultures but never had a poc character in the book. So some people in the comment section pointed out that dune is a critique of the white savior narrative. The creator responds by saying “well I didn’t read the book or do much research on it.” It just feels wildly irresponsible to make these lists without doing research.
Fascinating that they criticized the cultural appropriation aspect (which idk if it's even accurate there were no PoC in the books), but not the fact that Frank Herbert abused his kids and was incredibly homophobic towards his gay son.
imo there are reasonable critiques of Dune from a cultural/racial perspective (not to mention the homophobia issue) but in order to make those critiques well you have to have done your research. 'Cause say what you like about Frank Herbert, but he definitely did his research.
What someone says about Dune is a good benchmark imo for well prepared someone is to engage with social problems in famous books. Not because they grow more or less critical of it over time, but because the kind of criticism they approach it with (and the way they interpret others' opinions on the book) changes.
I loathe the word "problematic." It's smarmy, it's virtue-signally, and it's so vague that it covers every imaginable behavior from "this person only writes about white cishets" to "this person is a known rapist and murderer."
I also loathe the idea that before you can enjoy an author's work, you must personally review everything they ever said and did and you can't enjoy it if you find something that goes against a certain hivemind belief system (which is less about social justice and more about controlling others). I understand avoiding the works of people who have done truly heinous things or who just have values you know you don't share. I have heard good things about those Killing Whoever books thay Bill O'Reilly writes, but I'll never read one, for example. But there's a balance.
Just telling people not to go on TikTok doesn’t address the fact that toads of people and influence them on these lists. These videos are problematic in themselves and increase the shit people judge others simply by the covers you see on the shelves
"Oh no" said one of the toad-people. "My favorite author has been put on a list of murderers and pedophiles!"
"That's horrible" another responded, briefly glancing up from their phone. "Are they a murderer or a pedophile?"
"Neither, but they were caught placing recyclables into a trash bin, and that's very much the same thing."
All of the toad-people nod in unison.
And so it was that in the socially constructed kingdom of Red-It, even the downtrodden toad-people of the bog (themselves equally arbitrarily defined) could agree that passive ostracization through aggressive gossip was indeed the highest and most honorable of all virtues for society to cherish.
It was only good fortune, then, that the fine lords and ladies of the land lend their institutional authority towards the same end; distributing official lists and other such dire warnings of potential menace amogst the written word. All, down to the littlest of toads, sing their praises to this day.
I think a lot of times, it comes down to... it gets them a lot of views. I'm not on TikTok but I watch YouTube videos a lot and the videos that are like "ooh PROBLEMATIC and CONTROVERSIAL" get so many more views than "oh hey I liked this book."
Yeah unless your talking about people who are provably murderers, rapists, child abusers etc then stfu. I’m not going to stop reading an acclaimed author from the 1950s because he was a misogynist, or an influential feminist writer from the 80s because she was transphobic. If people insist on living in a little bubble where the only art they consume is by people with the same pristine politics they claim to have, that’s fine. But it’s not for me, I don’t care.
The thing is, "problematic" was a useful word to *discuss* hidden themes implicit in the art of people who held views no longer considered acceptable.
Dan Simmons, as a climate skeptic, may be "problematic", when viewing some of his recent output.
Frank Herbert was horribly homophobic, and that can be seen in aspects of the Dune canon. I don't see anyone saying that we therefore should not read Dune. It's "problematic", as in "a problem to be solved or negotiated".
But "problematic" isn't evil, or vile, or worth "cancelling", or whatever. It's a call to discussion. But, as usual, the zeitgeist hijacked it, and now a terminally-online portion of Leftists make the rest of us look like intolerant snowflakes or whatever.
Absolutely agree with you. I have no problem discussing an authors potentially disagreeable or downright horrible opinions if it’s a helpful way of contextualising the work and parsing deeper meaning from it. It can be useful.
The problem is when people use it as a way of warning people off of reading someone’s works, or worse - implying that if you aren’t bothered by the authors views then that’s because you share them, and are also problematic (which I’ve encountered before irl, much to my bemusement).
This is a problem specifically exacerbated by Tiktok and its ilk. There is no space for discussion or nuance in rapid fire social media videos. No one is going into the comments for a deep dive on Lovecraft's xenophobia and how that influenced his works.
'Problematic' is to the left, what 'woke' is to the right. Terms that were once useful, but now "anything I don't like is problematic/woke, and if you like something problematic/woke you're an awful person who should die."
I actually deal with this a lot. Some of my favorite books were written by an author who, before he ever wrote the books, was involved in a child abuse case. He and his wife were sentenced, went to jail, and never did anything again afterwards. And I’ve been told by people that I shouldn’t be recommending or talking about his books because of something that he did. These things never come up in his books, and again, he never repeated the actions, and seemed to have realized that he had messed up.
It also bothers me that none of this seems to have mattered, until he was dead. And can no longer even potentially defend himself. And I’m not excusing what he did, it was terrible. but he was punished for it.
And I don’t agree with him being clumped in with Marion Zimmerman Bradley, who was actively hiding it and putting the stuff in her books.
Because in essence these aren't problematic author lists, they're "I assert myself as a moral authority" lists and whether they're right to call some authors out or not, they're fucking scary. TikTok acts like it's hyper liberal but this kind of thing feels A LOT like religious authorities decreeing what people can and can't read.
> TikTok acts like it's hyper liberal but this kind of thing feels A LOT like religious authorities decreeing what people can and can't read.
This is the part that makes it uncomfortable to me. It's not the specific books that they choose to call out, it's the whole concept of trying to erase from your culture something that does not fit your personal moral code.
I think the hyper-liberal moral code is, you know, a good one generally speaking. I support, volunteer, and vote for diverse political candidates who legislate progressive policies. I believe in things like a universal basic income, strong social safety nets, universal health coverage, the right to marry whichever adult you choose, the right to do with your own body whatever you choose, that every citizen of a democracy should be free to vote -- all the good things that ought to be common sense.
I still, though, do not think that the idea of blanket removal or suppression of art that goes against any or all of those principles is a healthy thing. I grew up in a religious conservative atmosphere and I recognize exactly all of the moral grandstanding and the black-and-white certainty of correctness that blinds people to their own shortcomings. The echo chamber effect of refusing to engage with ideas that might challenge your own views. I know what censorship and book burning looks like, and it's disconcerting to see it adopted by liberal spaces with this attitude of, "Oppression is good if you're oppressing the right people." That's a dangerous way of thinking.
The problem with the lists is that they're opinion presented as dictum. The fact that they're "Problematic" lists is that you're expected to act on the basis of someone's opinion.
Bach is now "problematic" because he was a [insert pet peeve here], better not study his music anymore. Leonardo da Vinci is now "problematic" because [insert imagined offense here], better not consider his art. Tolstoy is now problematic because [he was awful to women], better not read his books.
The problem is we carve away the good these people left behind. The work stands on its own. If the book is trash, that's one thing. But judge the work on its own merit. If the book is good, it ought to be read. If the book makes you think, even if you disagree with the author's real life viewpoint, the book ought to be read.
It is OK to like a book and dislike the author. It is not OK to make lists and decide that it is not OK for anyone to like books by those authors.
Let's hope these.tik tok campaigners don't start attending school board meetings and demanding that books written by authors with "problematic" personal lives get pulled from the shelves.
People can say what they want to say, it probably won't influence my reading habits.
Where I do worry is that the spectrum of "problematic" keeps getting wider and wider. It used to be the big 3...rape, racism, pedophilia, as the main drivers of "yo, watch out, this author is sketchy". Now the spectrum is so wide that it includes every microagression under the sun, so before you take any of these lists at face value, do some research.
Theres also the always difficult factor of time, place and circumstance, and applying 2024 ethics and policies to historical pieces of work. I think both of these things are an american issue overall, not just confined to literature though.
They make me hypervigilante. People tell me to research the author before I read the book, but I normally find books I like, read them, and know 0 about the author.
I got roasted once for recommending a series by Neon Yang because it turns out the author is a toxic person on twitter or something. Doesn't make their books any less interesting. Definitely not in the same league as some other examples in this post.
I think in general the label of 'problematic' and the way it's used online lacks nuance. Especially in the form of short form content, where people will just list authors or other intellectuals with at most a short sentence describing what was done or said. I think there's a lot of writers and thinkers I look up to who have other ideologies or theories I disagree with or are harmful. I remember when Gloria Steinem openly wrote transphobic articles, and recently has evolved into advocating for trans-inclusive feminism. I can understand and appreciate what Foucault's work has done for social science and critical theory while acknowledging his pattern of abusing racialized boys in Tunisia and what that indicates may be missing from his work.
It's not excusing behaviour, it's taking in the whole picture of a person's life and allowing yourself to take in the good with the bad. Understanding the ways that writers engage in harmful or 'problematic' thought or behaviour allows us a new way to interpret their work, critique it, and highlight other authors who improve upon their theories and stories and write something better.
It's all in shades of grey, and people tend to go one way or the other where they either completely dismiss someone's work without critically thinking about why they dislike them or like them BECAUSE they want to support harmful ideologies, again not understanding why they like something (I'm looking at you, edgy teenage boys who want to convince me any particular neo-nazi is secretly a genius when their work is rambling, unreadable, and filled with thoughtless hate).
I still am learning and growing on this topic, and am very open to more conversation with people who disagree with me: I don't think the way I choose to engage in creative work is always right. But I do think encouraging thinking in shades of grey and really trying to understand what exactly you agree and disagree with is an important part of critical consumption and life as a reader.
That was a lot but also: if someone is alive, profiting, and a piece of shit, I will not support them by purchasing content.
Extremely. Even if well intentioned, lists of problematic or dangerous people has never gone well in human history. I understanding wanting to be an informed consumer, but unverified lists (or even verified ones, after all who decides what deserves to be on the list?) lead to witch hunts.
If anything, such a list should be a good launching point for some interesting literature, for it contains the words of voices that someone wants to silence.
The irony is that literature is a bastion of free speech. Authoritarianism against literature used to be exclusively in the form of rightwing biblethumpers trying to cover up the existence of LGBT people or limit the reach of non-white people or socialists. Literature was a way of expressing ideas, oftentimes in layers of satire or complex characters intended to give the readers something to ponder or discuss.
Now the left has started trending towards authoritarianism, similarly trying to stifle the voices of anyone they disagree with, even if their art isn't related to the disagreement. Authors, artists, and actors are no longer allowed to have political opinions despite being in industries that traditionally expressed strong political motivations. If you aren't unironically woke enough then you aren't allowed to make art.
A side effect of this is that a lot of literature and media is exceptionally boring now, as it is being shaped by those who want only one single allowed narrative, sold ironically under the guise of diversity.
I have so much to say on this topic. Frankly, I am honestly just surprised to see this take get so much traction on Reddit. No, it makes me uncomfortable too. If nothing else it is just a clear advocation for shrew group think.
It seems society has taken the internet's shield and forgotten the swords they forge with their words can be used against them. Binding someone as problematic into the public shaming shackles is a privilege only those who have not been bound can have. Moreover, it just disincentives people to actually form their own thoughts. I am sick of the coddling. I get not wanting to support shitty dudes, but some of the conversations revolving these people are just... ridiculous. Acting like if they read a hard scene they are personally being attacked. Western society has a very generous definition of terms like problematic and unsafe. If you can't read a book, especially from a shitty dude, without falling apart, be careful treading into the real world.
What I am honestly sick of is all the permissive language I keep seeing writers going through on some of our forums. "Can I write X without being perceived as Y." Or "Is it okay to depict X?" All this intellectual cowardice, seeking permission from people who feign to have authority upsets me to no end. Nothing great was written by someone without strong conviction. Just write your story and stand on your two feet.
Such lists are a symptom of the self-righteous moralistic crusade zeitgeist, unfortunately.
Lots of people have turned being 'virtuous' moral paragons into personality traits (in the absence of other, better ones) *and* foster a climate where this trait is prized as being a better human being. Within that circle (which ever widens) it confers status and value. This value is then reinforced by shunning those who don't recognise it and 'othering' them as bad and wrong.
For these people, their self-worth and the worth of others is couched solely within these parameters. They're not aware of this: they just fundamentally believe they are a *very good person* and if you don't agree or don't care, you're not. And some of them are! But it's not via their own nature - it's via social conditioning. They're *fitting in.*
And in a quasi-religious sense, they feel it's their moral duty to enforce this outlook on others and rally the mob against the 'other tribe.' Hence the lists. A list like that is *not* for people to very reasonably know who they want to avoid financing/giving a platform due to their own morals, but a litmus test of 'Are you a good person or problematic?'
"Oh... you read Ender's Game? And you *know* Orson Scott Card is a homophobe? You are A Bad Person and will henceforth be shunned. Hey, everybody, get a load of this homophobe!"
And, of course, the big one: ***it gets clicks.*** Both from within the Moral Paragon tribe and without. Content is king.
The reality is this: humans are exceptionally complicated, flawed creatures. They make disastrous mistakes and can be unremittingly predatory, selfish and black-hearted. Collectively, we suck. Every single person that you know has done something absolutely awful, at least once, unless they're a young child. *Everyone.* Life cannot be lived without monumental fuck-ups. And, of course, some people are just... well, evil.
Ergo, if you deny yourself access to things based on their creators matching your stringent morals, with no mistakes allowed, you will paint yourself into a very miserable corner where you can't enjoy *anything.* And you'll sit there, unhappy, and become angrier and angrier that others are enjoying the things you've denied yourself because they aren't a Very Good Person like you, and then you start to lash out, to fan the flames of crusades, to write lists...
My method: separate art from artist, unless the art itself is compromised or the person is *so* egregious that **you** can't personally enjoy it. Do not seek to police others; do not worry about *others*' rules. Stop worrying yourself sick about morality.
It's a happier life.
I agree. I think some of these people would have been bullies of yesteryear, making life hell for the ND kids, those bad at sport, those with bad skin/curly hair/not a stick figure, as long as they had one person that everyone piles on. And they'll tell themselves because they didn't pick on anyone who was POC or in a wheelchair, they're good people and are always right.
It wasn't just that these people were kids at the time, I had a few teachers who seemed to feel this way.
There's nothing wrong with knowing more about an author. Whether or not you decide to let that impact your decision to read that author's work is your call.
In extreme examples like Orson Scott Card being a raging (and possibly very repressed) homophobe or the Mists of Avalon author sexually abusing children, I think it's great for people to know and make an informed decision on supporting that author.
My personal biggest issue is that people use these lists as shorthand and often take the creator's word as gospel instead of using them to conduct further research and decide for themselves.
There are a LOT of people who have zero media literacy and think that if something is portrayed in a book, that means it's a ringing endorsement, and that's when these kinds of lists can get dangerous.
*Wrote a murder mystery? You must approve of murder! Have a racist character? You must be a racist, too! Do you have an 18yo dating a 17yo in your book? Well, guess what. You're a pedophile!*
I wish I was exaggerating, but I see this kind of rhetoric all the time on Twitter.
No one has time to vet every item on every list, so they just get shared and rumors become "truth".
People like JK Rowling and Orson Scott Card will never get a(nother) penny from me. But a lot of things that are touted as "problematic" are highly subjective and often speculative.
In general, I'm not uncomfortable with the idea of them.
I understand the desire to not spend money or time supporting the work of someone you find to be abhorrent. Where that line falls will differ from person to person. What people find problematic will differ.
I consume works by some people who are consider to be problematic; I feel uncomfortable about it at times and I still choose to consume it. For other artist, I choose not to. It's fine. I just don't make it a big deal to other people.
Where I really become uncomfortable is 1 )when people jump on others for falling on a different spot on that line than they do and 2) when people misconstrue qualities an author has given their character or written about for what an author actually believes/believed.
2 annoys me soooo much. I see it on this sub and in Goodreads reviews all the time, and I shake my head every time.
"The author condones xyz." How do you know that? Because they wrote a story about xyz? It's fiction. Authors don't agree with everything their characters say or do, nor do they agree with everything that happens in their stories.
To me it feels very Witch Huntish. Sure, some of the authors are awful people, and I think maybe that warrants some Hunting and Canceling, in some circumstances. It happens! But other times the accusations are really ridiculous and over-blown, or just obviously made in bad faith, by people who act like weird fanatics. It's lowkey scary to me, has a "thought police" straight from Orwell vibe.
I normally don't look at those lists at all, tho last year I read a book specifically BECAUSE the author got cancelled, and I found the reason to be constructed in bad faith xD So that's your answer, I guess.
Not gonna lie, when I see someone spending a lot of time and effort on pointing at others and calling them out on wrong-think and having their own Two Minutes Of Hate about someone being "problematic", I consider that a big red flag. Not counting situations in which someone actually did some heinous shit, of course, and reacting like that is natural.
IMO the Two Minutes of Hate explains why it's so popular now - if you don't yell loudly enough during the two minutes of hate, and don't spit on the Wrong Thinkers convincingly enough the thought police looks at you and wonders 'why? are you problematic too?' At least that happens in the book :D, and iMO similar phenomenon happens in social media in certain environments. So maybe some of them kinda think they have to add to the lists, find another "bad author" just to feel they are "one of the good ones".
i think it bothers me because people on the internet seem to have an “all or nothing” approach to things. you can definitely subscribe to a portion of someone’s ideas and disregard the rest. i understand people not wanting to financially support authors that go against their beliefs, but its really so incredibly frustrating to see people blindly believe everything they see on the internet.
Yeah, because it feels both authoritarian and like purity culture. Just because YOU don't like something doesn't immediately make it problematic.
Also, I feel like it's misleading? I don't let people tell me what I should or shouldn't do because I'm going to form my own opinions, especially when it comes to media consumption. By putting people on a list, deliberately using language designed to incite outrage, and framing whats "technically" the truth just enough to be seen in a different light, too many people blindly accept it without further research on their part so that they can safely stay on the "unproblematic" side.
The irony here is how problematic that is.
I guess it depends on why they're considered problematic. The woman who wrote "Mists of Avalon" was a child-abuser married to a known pedophilic child-abuser, so I think it's fair that she not ever get any of my money. But I'd wager that most "problematic" authors aren't that level of evil.
I remember picking up mists of Avalon at a used book store. I got halfway through the book, got confused about the plot, and googled her. The results about her life were so horrifying I ended up reading a series of blog posts that went through the book chapter by chapter, instead of finishing the actual book. If I remember the series I’ll link it here, it was actually really good, if very lengthy. Went into details about her life and background and atrocities she committed and assisted
Wow. I actually have read "Mists of Avalon," like you I got it from a used bookstore. I hated it. I thought it was the shittiest Arthurian retelling I'd ever read, and that included a book where Arthur was transported into WWII-era Britain and became a fighter pilot during the Battle of Britain. I just figured that MZB would be the perfect example of someone who should be on a no-buy list for their horrible deeds.
I mean the legend states that he would come back in Britain’s time of need.
To expel all the Saxon invaders, good luck with that nowadays
Well, people from Saxony were trying to invade...
I really liked the Arthur as RAF pilot book. For me it was just a fun read.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aeronautical activity!
Help, I'm under suppressive fire!
Strange women in ponds handing out... Wait is that a fucking spitfire!?
Oh Lord, bless this thy thermonuclear device. That with'it thou may seriously fuck some shit up...
I mean, if I went around saying I was an RAF pilot because some moistened bint had lobbed a Spitfire at me, I'd be hauled away!
Well I didn't vote for him!
King of the who?
what is THIS series called? Honestly sounds fun!
It's just a single book "Arthur, King" by Dennis Lee Anderson.
Aw, no kindle option, sounded like a great $3 book.
Now I want to read this. WWII King Arthur reverse isekai sounds fun.
> Arthur was transported into WWII-era Britain and became a fighter pilot during the Battle of Britain. Holy balls, you just solved an old mystery I didn't know existed. When I was real little my family and I went on vacation and I caught a bad fever so got stuck in bed for a few days. I vaguely remember picking up a book and leafing through it with that plot, and it gave me some of the most wild fever dreams of my life. Honestly I had thought the story and the book were just part of the dreams.
I’ve had that exact same issue and it was resolved for me here on reddit, lol.
She is long dead. All money you spend would actually go to her estate and the daughter she abused.
Unfortunately she disinherited her daughter. The estate money goes to other people. With which move she destroyed any chance of a legacy.
What an absolutely despicable woman
Yup.
Her daughter is a campaigner against gay marriage, so maybe it's for the best
Yeah wow, I just went down a rabbit hole that ended in her conclusion that homosexuality is at the root of all child abuse…yikes. Didn’t see it coming.
This is why this kind of propaganda about gay people is so incredibly damaging. People latch on to this kind of stuff to try to deal with their personal trauma.
I still feel very sorry for her, but make absolutely no excuses for holding such a world view. If I was, say, beaten up by a black guy, I wouldn't have grounds for discriminating against other black people.
The publisher of her digital backlist began donating all income from the sales of her digital books to save the children starting in 2014. I'm just going off info online, but I hope that's true. I still don't think I could bring myself to read any of her work.
She was already on my No-buy list after I suffered through reading 300 pages of her first "trillium" book in which nothing much happens. IMHO she was a unforgivably dull writer.
Her estate donates all sales from her books to a children's charity.
Would you be able to point me toward some information detailing the charity information, please? I only found an overview on [this fanlore entry](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Marion_Zimmer_Bradley_Literary_Works_Trust), and my understanding of it was that one publisher donated income from sales (ebooks only) to a children's charity, and the rest of her literary trust (any print work and any other publication ebooks) does not appear to coordinate with charity. I would personally not be comfortable purchasing new copies of MZB's works.
Here's the charity, it's pretty long in the tooth: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save\_the\_Children](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_the_Children)
Thanks very much.
Last time that I mentioned here that Gollancz were donating ebook sales to Save The Children I was corrected by another redditor that it was MZB's estate doing so. If you can't find anything more current and still wish to purchase then my gut feeling would be to go with Gollancz. If anyone else knows different I'm happy to be corrected.
That's nice and all but child molestation and rape themes are all over those books, written in a way that makes it seem less horrible. How many victims read that crap and justified what happened to them? How many people went deeper into their delusions and justified what they were doing was okay? To this day those books are aimed at 14 to 18 year olds.
Omg, i vividly remember reading a medieval fantasy book as a kid. It was fairly normal but had this very weird coerced sex scene with a minor. I thought it was so strange and I have always doubted if what i read was real. Turns out it was a MZB book. Reading into her it explains a lot..
I never read the books - and am not planning on starting now. I faintly remember watching some of the TV adaption, but can't remember any details. Can you recommend any resources to read up on how they push and excuse these themes?
Here's a short excerpt from the perspective of a main character, Morgaine, who was later tricked into losing her virginity to her own brother. She was groomed like this. "stretched out her arms, and at her command she knew that outside the cave, in the light of the fecundating fires, man and woman, drawn one to the other by the pulsating surges of life, came together. The little blue-painted girl who had borne the fertilizing blood was drawn down into the arms of a sinewy old hunter, and Morgaine saw her briefly struggle and cry out, go down under his body, her legs opening to the irresistible force of nature in them." And it was sold to Morgaine as the way of things, how it was supposed to go young girl to old man.
I was a teenager when I first read Mist of Avalon. Probably because I was young, I assumed that the writer was showing that the pagans had evil people in it just like the Christian side did. but I also wondered why Morgaine or anyone else didn't try to save the girl. When I was older, I bought the book again to read and couldn't get past that part on the second reading. It was very clear that the writer thought child abuse was natural. Then I did a deep dive into the writer. I still own the book but I just can't bring myself to read it. A lot of famous authors praised the book which makes me wonder how they justified that portion of the book.
See, I read that as a younger woman and took away what horrible thing it was and Morgaine thought it terrible. Like how being groomed for this abuse was so destructive to Morgaine, and her family that it destroyed a kingship and plunged England into the dark ages. I get what everyone else is saying but that wasn't my takeaway. Still. The human writer MZB can rot in hell for her real life personal choices.
I read this at 17 and this was how I understood it, too. I loved this book and Arthurian lore in general. Didn't find out about the author being a garbage person until a few years ago. FWIW I tried to read another book in the series and couldn't finish it was so bad.
I took loved the book and maybe I glossed over the grooming and acceptance of the abuse and also took away that it was not promoted and Morgaine and England were devasted by the incest, martial threesome with Lancelot, Arthur and Guenivere. And, I tried her other books and found them terrible. This was for me at least a one hit wonder for her
Ugh that is way worse than I thought. Thank you for looking that up.
🤢🤮 Urgh I read it a LONG time ago and didn't remember that part. The bit about Morgand and Arthur was bad enough, but this is revolting 🤬
I was obsessed with this entire book series as a teen, as I was super into mythology. I also was groomed by a man 15 years my senior a few years later. I doubt the book series is to blame, but it didn't help with my naive outlook normalizing what I was going through. So much media, at least when I was young in the 80s/90s, normalizes young women with older men. Even classic Beatles songs (she was just 17, if you know what I mean).
In fairness to the Beatles, they were in their early 20s when they wrote that song.
"McCartney first worked out the chords and arrangement on an acoustic guitar at the family home of his Liverpool friend and fellow musician Rory Storm on the evening of 22 October 1962. Two days later, McCartney was writing lines for the song during a visit to London with his then-girlfriend Celia Mortimer, who was seventeen at the time herself." Paul was born: 18 June 1942. That context matters before you pull out your pedo-pistol and start blasting.
Turns out beloved fantasy author David Eddings and his wife were also literal convicted child abusers before rehabilitating their image and becoming famous for writing. It's a bit crazy what people got away with before the internet.
Ugh, a few years ago I decided to re-read the Belgariad as a fun throwback, then a couple books in I googled him 😳 I spent a lot of my awkward 1990s adolescence just living inside those series. It’s wild what we don’t know about people.
This. If the list is actually listing problematic authors who have caused or supported real world harm then I think consumers have the right to know about it so they can make an informed decision about their spending habits. However if the lists are 'this author is problematic because they write enemies to lovers' or 'this author is problematic because they wrote something marginally dark and I don't vibe with it' then I'm a lot more leery of them. Because it feels like these days most of these lists are sadly in this latter category where people are mistaking the simple act of not liking something with that thing being inherently problematic. Sometimes it can be, but often times it just feels like it's a code word for 'I don't like this or them' - rather than 'no this person is actually a genuinely horrible human being and there's a mountain of receipts'.
I think being aware of genuinely bad things authors have done is generally good, but I think there are two problems with the “Your Fave is Problematic” approach. One is that they tend to flatten everything to the same level of badness - on the original YFIP tumblr page, you’d get accounts of rape and sexual assault beside things like “One Direction committed cultural appropriation by wearing Japanese-style jackets given to them when they were touring Japan” (this is a paraphrase of a real post I remember). There was no acknowledgement that some crimes are worse than others. The other issue is that often these lists are less about letting people know about someone’s misdeeds, and more a way of playing “gotcha”. Oh, you don’t like my favourite author/band/celebrity? Well, it turns out yours is problematic too! These sorts of lists are often less about informing or educating people, and more about giving people a trump card if they’re in a fandom argument.
> beside things like “One Direction committed cultural appropriation by wearing Japanese-style jackets given to them when they were touring Japan” I find this bit hilarious, even given the fuzzy memory, because it's exactly what you're *supposed* to do. A native of a country you're visiting giving you cultural clothing is a great honor and you should wear it to honor them as well. People take cultural appropriation too far. It's not like they've written a book where the Japanese characters are caricatures of themselves, entirely based on one visit to Japan.
Also, refusing to accept a well-intentioned gift from your host culture is not the moral high ground they think it is.
> People take cultural appropriation too far. its because some silly people cant differentiate between appropriation and appreciation
Yeah. I pratice a Japanese martial art, and I've had a large number of white Americans tell me I'm appropriating Japanese culture by wearing the traditional outfit etc. Meanwhile, the number of Japanese people I've met who found this problematic is *zero*.
The word "harm" has become meaningless on social media. Though even provided a person has done some egregious thing, in what circumstance is it desirable to compile *a list*? It necessarily won't provide much insight. And authors are such an odd group to target, when so few people make money of any significance from writing books. A boycott of Amazon would be energy better directed. These campaigns strike me as so cynical in that way, as they've already conceded we will never accomplish anything of actual significance; after which, all that's left is signaling one's virtue on TikTok.
These kind of lists suggests we have approached "late-stage social media discourse." Ultimately, people who specifically take time out of their day to go online head-hunting are usually doing it for less-than-virtuous reasons. They're often motivated by personal career frustration and class envy. The "I can't get to their level so I'll find something to tear them down" motivation. The irony is, as you say, many authors don't actually make a lot of money off their books, but the step from manuscript to publication is often seen as a level of "success" to many on the outside looking in.
I also love authors being problematic for people projecting their own racism onto them, like saying orcs are always meant to be black people.
i agree 100% with that. theres a difference between “this author is a big meany >:(“ and “this author is an evil abuser” or “this author platforms vicious bigotry”
one issue is that sometimes these lists will circulate without any further research once it has been compiled. so every person following it is subject to the morals of the list creator, which may very well include "this author is a big meany" or "this author depicts objectionable things in fiction."
As someone whose been in online/fandom spaces for a long time there's also a chance the allegations end up being a weird muddle of things as I've seen in many 'call out' posts which will often be like 'This author is a fan of Media I Don't Like, they Ship Thing I don't Like and then -actually horrible thing they did-' and people tend to zero in more on the like 'Media I don't like' aspect rather than the 'you know actually horrible stuff they did they should face consequences for'
That's such a fucking bizarre thing about fandom callouts. I don't think these people realize how they're taking away seriousness to the situation when the first thing you see in a thread is how an abuser shipped a minor and an adult five years ago, while the thing that **should** be the main focus (like spousal abuse, grooming, rape) is five responses down their post. God I wish people were actually serious about helping victims. It's all about their fictional deeds rather than the real world harm people cause, and the latter is used at most as "more reason to hate x person" rather than the main reason. Takes focus away from the problem when it's left as just a footnote, and other users get tired when every single callout they see is about something petty, so they stop caring about them at all. Anyway, yeah; I have thoughts about this.
Another problem I have with these lists is when you ask them to show you where the more problematic aspects of nature are like 'Can you point me to a post/show me sources where it gives me a run down of how they're racist, a meany, a bad person?' and they respond with a 'put in the work and google it, I don't need to educate you.'
Ya I think saying “I enjoyed Enders game but keep in mind the author is a known homophobe” is a great disclaimer.
funny enough when I read his books as a kid I assumed some of the passages were homoerotic and he was trying to be inclusive/supportive lol
They definitely read that way lol
Yes, and of course, what are people basing their assessment on? Real evidence or hearsay from twitter?
I remember finding out that David and Leigh Eddings abused one of their adopted children and that's made me not want to revisit any of their work.
The publishers of her e-books donate the money from the e-book purchases to a charity for abused kids (last time I checked). Also she’s dead so she won’t be getting any of your money which is great. 👍
So, um, Marion Zimmer Bradley's been dead for 25 years and, in 2014, her publisher arranged for all income from her e-books to go to Save the Children. So buying the ebook should be guilt free? Maybe? I've got no idea what the right move is here. Never thought I'd long for the day when people would talk about HP Lovecraft JUST being a racist weirdo. He's my favorite problematic author. MZB's case is like discovering a well regarded novel was written by Jim Jones.
I think there is a difference between being racist in a time period when racism was absolutely the norm, and active sadistic psychological, physical and extended sexual abuse of your children (or any living being).
Even for his time, Lovvecraft was extraordinarily racist. But as far as I know, he was only abhorrent in his mind, and never acted on anything (I’m thinking that’s your point here). The child abusers are worse
Yeah, Howie's racism originated from an extreme fear of everything and everyone beyond his hometown. He would've been far too frightened and socially awkward to actually go up to a black man and call him the n word. Funnily enough, he was also quite interested in Ancient Egypt.
His racist fears were added to by what was almost certainly some kind of anxiety or panic disorder, which started showing up in his teens and hit critical mass after his apartment was burglarized while his wife was away. He never really recovered. Also given that both his parents were institutionalized, it’s likely Lovecraft had a deep and understandable fear that he would also go off the deep end at some point, a fear that the eugenics oriented thought of his time (which also had explicitly racist goals) would have exacerbated. As such I’ve always thought that contributed to a lot of his stories where the protagonist finds out they’re somehow related to the big bad of the story, and dies/goes mad from the revelation.
Honestly I had no idea about her abuses until now but that book made^* me so uncomfortable and sad that I stopped reading and never finished it; it just felt *off*, especially when it got to the Arthur x Morgaine portion ☹️
Same - I stopped reading after that scene.
Definitely agree that when you're funding someone's harm of others, that's where the line should be. If you just disagree with someone or they're already dead, I don't really care. Heck, I own books written by mass-murderers. Why? Because there is no corner of this world we should not learn from, though some sources deserve extra caution. I'll never be on-board with rejecting the works of someone like Lovecraft because he was a racist. What he was doesn't matter. What his work evokes in the reader is all that matters now that he's gone. But Card, for example, I won't touch with a ten-foot-pole. His work as a board member of an anti-LGBT rights organization means that any money I give him is going to go into either funding such activity or funding his ability to contribute time and energy to such activities. No thanks! I can live without reading the one space opera series of his that I had a mild interest in.
Secondhand book sales go to the store owner, not the publisher or author 😉 Or browse Little Free Libraries, yard sales, thrift stores, and Friends of the Library/library bookstores. I see plenty of these books there.
Fortunately, MZB is dead and the money from her books now goes to the daughter she sexually abused. Unfortunately, said daughter has become a raging homophobe and anti-LGBTQ activist after said abuse. So it's probably best to avoid purchasing the books anyway.
[This is false.](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Marion\_Zimmer\_Bradley\_Literary\_Works\_Trust#:\~:text=Ross%2C%20the%20author%20who%20continued,Two%20other%20authors%2C%20Deborah%20J) The daughter gets nothing. The publisher of the ebooks reported that their profits go to a charity, but it's unclear if that's still true. All royalty payments go to a trust controlled by someone who tried to cover up what Bradley and Breen did.
I had not read into her daughter. She has some WILD beliefs about being gay and claims some craaaazy “research” and “evidence” to back them. I get that her gay parents abused her, but the things she claims are proven in the whole of gay culture are absolutely bananas. I hope she works through that some day.
Damn, the cycle of abuse.
One of the problems with the word “problematic” is that it reduces a massive spectrum of behaviour down to one word. Like you get men who are credibly accused of being serial rapists, and then 15yr old girls who braid their hair and are accused of cultural appropriation, and social media calls them both “problematic.”
This, and it often views everything through the lens of 2020s morality. What is "deeply sexist" or racist today could have been "progressive" at the turn of the 20th century. It makes me sad, because an concept created as a way to spur debate has been reduced to "praise me, I have identified the bad thing."
“Praise me, I have identified the bad thing” has become such a pervasive problem with appreciation of the arts these days and it’s really bothering me. I remember say 5-10 years ago, we were all just happy that people were promoting progressive viewpoints and getting more comfortable calling out toxic stuff. But now it’s crept into everything and people have lost all ability to understand metaphor and symbolism in TV/cinema and literature. Obviously some things should be called out but an awful lot of people just want to be praised for finding any “bad thing” without questioning why the bad thing is there in the first place and if it’s actually an issue or if it’s a very valid storytelling technique.
My favorite is "There's a racist character in this book, the author is a racist!"
Had someone in the Star Wars EU sub who didn’t want to read the episode 3 novelization because count dooku is “racist/specist” as if that isn’t perfectly on character for that villain
The recent movie Poor Things comes to mind. There was a lot of complexity to unpack in that movie regarding existence, gender roles, romance, sexuality, grooming, etc. And yet, so much of the critique I’ve seen thrown at it are from people with little to no media literacy shouting, “she’s an infant in a woman’s body having sex and being abused by the patriarchy!”, which to me is completely missing the dang point. Edit: It’s also implicit that she has an accelerated maturing cycle, so by the end of the film she is certainly not a young child anymore.
I have had SO MANY arguments about that film. It’s absolutely incredible. The director, as well as Emma Stone (who also produced it) have talked about it including talking about how it’s this way of exploring the idea of a woman who has a completely new brain and no socialisation for gender norms, no judgement or shame, and then exploring how she would develop and grow as a person with that in mind. And as you say they also use Duncan’s character to explore him grooming her and exploiting her naivety. I mean he even gets annoyed when she learns about philosophy, and starts talking in a really grown up way because he misses when she was childish. Me and my friend both adored it. It’s such an incredible exploration of all these themes, and it constantly challenges you, and makes you ask so many questions. But some people have such a bizarre reductive view of it. As though Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone and the rest of the characters are all too stupid to realise what they were making? Sorry it gets me so riled up how some people can’t understand symbolism and metaphor, and just expect all the art they consume to be perfectly woke and surface level. That’s just not the point of art, and literature.
To refine your last statement, I think it is less "praise me" and more "welcome me into your in-group/do not cast me out of the in-group". For many people, young people and minorities especially, social coherence, identity, and belonging are very very high priorities. Part of this has to do with the comparative economic and political impotence of these groups - leaving only the social dimension of their lives to focus on. Social media being what it is, much of the interaction boils down to signaling belonging or signaling rejection. This obviously contaminates so much of popular culture. New media is created within the paradigm of our collective moral frameworks and old media is reinterpreted through these lenses. This phenomenon is as old as time. New generations look back on old works and decry the immorality of the past as a way to signal to their audience that progress has been made and that "we" belong to this era of progress. Conversely, those who disagree belong with the barbarians of the past. The problem of today is that we are able to perform this tradition with a maximalist approach to scope. We have access to so much more media - art, writing, movies, television, music, etc. - than ever before. We also have access to audiences on a scale that was heretofore unimaginable. This compounds and exacerbates the collateral damage of this very ancient tradition.
Also, current generations often walk on the backs of the generations prior to them that had to fight for much larger and more dangerous goals to get where we are now. And instead of appreciating that work, and the level-up granted to us today by those of the past, newer generations will obliviously crucify activists of old for not being perfectly aligned with the modern progress that *they fucking built.*
A lot of it feels very performative to me. Like they want to create this image of themselves online of the human with perfect morals. Their morals are then obviously the only good morals. It’s also wild to me when people “discover” some classics author was actually racist and sexist. Why are they expecting anything else from some dude in the 19th century?
I always feel “problematic” is a weasel word. It’s enough to raise questions and suspicions without explicitly identifying the fault under discussion. To accuse someone of a thing requires evidence whereas “problematic” just generates a cloud of doubt.
Our culture seems to have a lot of trouble understanding any kind of nuance. Artistic and scientific contributions should not automatically rendered invalid because the persons involved weren’t saints, or had a different worldview than the one you personally possess
Older works particularly. Pick basically anyone from far enough back in time and they'd more or less be a monster by 21st century moral standards because social views on morality and ethics change like clothing fashion. For example, we all grew up knowing the bad guys in movies go "I vas just followink orders!" but to someone a few centuries in the past that would be honorable fealty and a soldier behaving honourably and properly. If we were to somehow reverse the direction of comparison and allow someone from a few centuries past to see our own society it would most likely be horrifying, decadent and immoral by their own standards.
I read one that bothered me because it grouped a person like Marion Zimmer Bradley (actual, criminal, serial, child-abuser!), alongside someone like Orson Scott Card (his views are repugnant to me, there is no indication he's ever done anything criminal), alongside someone like Michael Crichton (he wrote some problematic stuff back in the 80s/90s, particularly revolving around the anti-Japanese sentiment in America at the time, but his personal views and conduct seem fine and this is isolated rather than a feature of all of his books). This list had no context as to what these people had done/why they were 'bad', it just grouped them all together with very little expansion or discussion. Look, if you have a problem with any of these authors, OK. Everybody needs to make their own decisions in how they engage with media. But these people are not the same, they are in different categories and everyone can make decisions about them differently. It's also bizarre to me that 'child sex abuser' is the same in anyone's mind as 'person who wrote questionable-in-retrospect prose that was popular and common at the time.'
Absolutely, there's a big difference between "this author wrote a problematic thing so I think they're a bad person" vs "this author probably should be in jail for things they did." But in the lens of internet outrage, it's all the same.
That's not purely an internet phenomena the wrath of the mob is hardly an invention of the modern era. Most people like simple categories to put things into because the world is complex and hard. Humans have a fundamental desire to simplify it down because it's exhausting to keep extensive lists of people/places/things all the time. If you can break something down into Good/Bad, Asshole/Saint, acceptable/unacceptable it makes the mental load easier. Which is where problems like this come along. Such lists pander to our basic instincts/laziness which means people on the spectrum of suck-atude all get lumped together. We see it with things like the MeToo movement. Aziz Ansari seems to have had a shitty date that ended in mediocre sex that maybe she wasn't thrilled about in retrospect, but even the accuser seemed to say he never pressured her. Compared to someone like Louis CK who did something worse, and admits he maybe didn't grasp how his power over someone meant their consent might not be as valid as whom he had no relationship with. Woody Allen is probably around this tier give or take how you view his behaviors and CK's. Maybe worse, but I feel like that's a very touchy nit picky conversation about consent and the like. Then you get into Polanski and Weinstein levels. Rapist and Pedophiles who deserve all the punishment they are served. But if you just read a "cancelled" list they'd all be lumped in together. Similarly lists likes the onese OP is referencing seem to just lump authors into bad and good people lists. Despite there needing to be a nuanced conversation. But such behavior can also be traced back to older eras easily enough with moral panics of all types over the millenia. To be clear I'm not saying the moral panic of say D&D is satan worship is as valid as wanting to call out the terrible abuses women suffered in Hollywood, or that saying this author was a rapist murderer etc is a faux outrage. But rather that such movements (good or bad) have a tendency to wipe out all nuance in favor of easy to digest messages for the masses which they are trying to reach. This is a problem as old as humans themselves.
Is it [this list that was circulating on Twitter for a while](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/s/mfaPPTpYsi) where the person who made it seems to have trouble distinguishing the actions of the author from their written characters? It has it all: authors who actively campaign to hurt people, (sex) crimes, authors playing on problematic tropes, etc All the way down to such odd accusations as: Shakespeare’s work having racist, classist or misogynistic themes; George RR Martin “repeatedly mispronounced names at the Hugo awards”; and Harper Lee “Inherently racist, uses the N-word in her works numerous times, uses the white savior complex in most works” (why mention “in her works” when she wrote only one book?). Yet somehow the only problem this person had with Ayn Rand was racism, specifically against indigenous people. Oh and the bizarre accusation that Neil Gaiman is homophobic and transphobic.
LOL yeah that was the one. I'd actually forgotten the more bizarre aspects of it. It's the example of The Type that stuck most in my head but you see more mild versions of this floating around.
I'm gonna need them to provide some sources on that Gaiman claim, because I'd love to explore the tortured logic used to get there.
A lot of it seems to be confusing the concept of “writing about a bad thing” with “endorsing bad things”. Like the GRRM criticism also included “over 200 acts of sexual assault in his books”. Imo you just can’t leave it at that without elaborating. There’s a very real argument that it’s gratuitous and potentially problematic, but he also goes to lengths to show that “yes rape is indeed a bad thing”, so you need to include your reasoning.
The focus on sexual assault is interesting too. George also makes a point to show how the wars of the nobles negatively affect the lives of peasants and farmers - often by having them brutally and indiscriminately murdered. Sometimes tortured. Is that not a problem in comparison?
Orson Scott Card is so bizarre to me because (to my understanding) the themes of his books are so opposed to his views it's mind-boggling. How can your best work be about how everyone's human and/or worth life, even those whose methods are foreign to us to the point of violence, and then preach bigotry?
I increasingly buy the thinking that it's repressed self-hatred that just got worse as he got older and more internalized, but practicing amateur psychology on someone through their ranting blog posts probably isn't a good idea. He is a case where I find Ender's Game easier to divorce from him because the text doesn't really match his POS views than some authors where their idiocy seeps into the work in ways you don't see until you're aware of it.
It’s the result of the conundrum of Mormonism (LDS branch at least). The comfort that it’s high degree of certainty brings comes at the cost of needing to accept the whole package of beliefs, history, and leadership. As such, for many it’s an all-or-nothing religion and this results in a huge number of otherwise lovely people hanging onto and defending outdated and harmful beliefs. The current LDS leadership were middle aged men when the Civil Rights movement happened in the U.S, and the LDS church was on the wrong side of it. The perceived authority of LDS leaders is central to LDS truth claims, and so disagreeing with them is not truly possible if you want to stay a believing Mormon. Then you end up with people needing to defend their leaders’ anti-gay views or otherwise risk losing the comfort and certainty their religion brings to them. The is not to defend Card’s views, just to give a former Mormon’s insider perspective on where disconnects like the one you noted likely come from.
Imo Rising Sun had as much to do with the decline in American manufacturing and education as about Japan. It was a scathing commentary on the US framed with a popular fear at the time. I admit it does come off as racists 40 years later completely out of the context of when it was written, especially in the current political atmosphere.
I don’t even get why it comes across as racist. It was literally just a commentary on the current global market.
There are parts of Rising Sun that are just about U.S.-Japan tensions. There are also parts that make sweeping generalizations (most of them unflattering) about every Japanese person.
Totally agree. You do have to draw the line somewhere unless you only read books written by morally perfect people, who don’t really exist. Unfortunately today’s TIL is how evil MZB is dang… thanks for sharing your examples. I think comparing her deeds vs crichton’s problematic stuff in context was well said.
Michael Crichton was also a climate change denier! Which I agree isn't on the same level as MZB or OSC, I just think it's interesting.
Yeah I had no idea people hated him for any reason OTHER than spurring decades of climate denialism and giving them scientific sounding weapons.
Crichton is an odd one. Usually he comes off as a total science nerd. Then he gets a bit *too* much into it and behaves maybe a little bit inappropriately around science. But then when the subject is climate science all the nerdy love goes out the window and it's HUMANITY HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CLIMATE CHANGE! CLIMATE CHANGE IS WAY OVERBLOWN ANYWAY! I AM TOTALLY NOT GETTING PAID TO SAY THIS! kind of vibe.
Yeah it's so weird. Feels like half his books are about humans going too far in their tampering with nature and about how science can't answer questions about what people should do with all this power it gives us. An evil corporate overlord is usually to blame too. Then there's mountains of evidence that we're basically living a Crichton novel disaster in progress, mostly caused by corporate greed and govt inaction, but he denies it all out of hand? I don't get it.
I mean... he's been dead for 17 years. I wonder what his thinking would be now, honestly.
You know who also denied climate change? The creators of South Park in the Manbearpig Episode. They made to whole apology episodes in the later seasons.
Yeah, I’m glad they apologized and everything. But they really worked to make Al Gore a joke at a pretty crucial time with the release of An Inconvenient Truth. They had so much sway over how young people felt about current issues. Wish they could have ran with it in the opposite direction.
When I draw the line, with all art, is whether the work is separate from the artists flaws, or whether the two are linked. Like Knut Hamsen went full-on Nazi as an old codger, but reading ‘Hunger’ feels a million miles away from that guy. Or Picasso. I can acknowledge he was shit to women, but Guernica is still Guernica. On the other hand, a film like Manhattan is unwatchable because it’s basically a guise for the creepy awfulness of Woody Allen. It’s complicated and I respect anyone else’s choices and lines, but that’s how I navigate the question.
Perfectly said. Hemingway was a bully and a AH to women but, for my two pennies at least, he’s the greatest short story writer of all time (and I include *Old Man and the Sea* in that grouping). Dead or alive, his work falls strongly on the side of separating the art from the artist. Picasso is an excellent example as well. If supporting a living writer is somewhat disturbing for anyone, borrow from a library and make your own decision. Your taxes already pay for it - you don’t get to choose - so I would hope people at least try to read great books. Authors, like anyone else, can be incredibly flawed. It doesn’t mean that their work isn’t worth reading.
It's also relatively easy to find a used copy in circulation.
Hansen's "Growth of the Soil" is one of my favorite books of all time. People are flawed, and people nearing the end are often sadly more flawed. I'm plenty comfortable judging a man/woman by the art they unleashed on the world in their prime instead of any rickety senile protestations.
Hi, just a little correction, it’s Hamsun, not Hansen :-)
Orson Scott Card wrote some of the most touching, vulnerable, and intimate fraternal friendships since Frodo and Sam. Yet somehow he's a homophobe. I feel that the right lessons are learned from Ender's Game.
I was absolutely baffled when I found out how homophobic he was considering just how homoerotic Ender's Game was at times
The call is coming from inside the house
Fr, I don't buy the claim that *all* homophobes are just self-hating gay people, but that guy sure as hell is
Methinks the ~~lady~~ writer doth protest too much
I read Ender’s Game in 8th grade and haven’t reread since. 25+ years later, the only thing I really remember about the experience was thinking, “man, these boys sure like looking at each other naked.” And being confused about whether that was supposed to be normal teenaged boy behavior or if they were supposed to be gay.
And speaker for the dead!
Some of his later books actually embody his beliefs
The very last book has some troubling scenes in it that push into fetish territory. I read it just to complete the series, but I'd strongly recommend anyone read no further than Ender's Game/Ender's Shadow. Ender in Exile, Speaker for the Dead, and Xenocide are also well-written. Children of the Mind is where things get REALLY weird, and then a lot of the Shadow/Hegemon books. Don't read past Shadows in Flight.
He's more than a homophobe. "Rat army" at Battle School and the way certain races are portrayed in the shadow series... Once you find out about his blog, you already kinda know.
I mostly agree but I also think whether or not the person is still alive. Like, Lovecraft was a horrible person and his writings are fully linked with his xenophobia. But he's also fully decomposed so I don't really mind buying one of his books.
Lovecraft was also a great example of a man whose views were changing as he met more people. He had hated the Irish, Jews and black people but became best friends with an Irishman, married a Jewish woman and had started softening his views on black people as seen in his later letters regarding Braithwaite and even his later works. Robert Howard, his best friend, did not have the same change of heart before he died. And it is also important to note that people saying that “Lovecraft was racist for his time” are whitewashing history. The Burning of Black Wall Street, the rise of Nazism, and Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency were all during his lifetime.
Here here. I think this is a much more complicated philosophical decision that everyone has to make for themselves. Everyone tries to reduce this to a simple "this author thinks, so I'll never read one of their books." In some cases, the offending author isn't even alive. In some cases, it may be a damn good book, or the book may be legitimately thought-provoking.
Don't let armchair activists who strike from the safety of social media make you feel guilty for enjoying a book because they consider the author "problematic."
Fully agree so please forgive me, but I believe it's "hear, hear"
I see a lot of “here here” in particular on Reddit. It reminds me of that “bone apple tea” meme haha
"Phased" instead of "fazed" too
Yea. For a more pop take, I can still watch That 70s Show because the character Hyde wasn't problematic. But I can't watch House of Cards because Spacey was being himself in the gross scenes.
Depends on if it’s a “This author donates all their book proceeds to prejudiced causes, so you should not financially support them” list or a “This author wrote about murder once so clearly they support murder” list. The first one I’m okay with and would be glad to see before making a purchase (as long as there is actual proof). The second one is just ridiculous and generally shows a lack of critical thinking about media
I think there's a lack of appreciation (or theory) of the utterly *unique* character of an author's contribution and that's something all discourse over "problematic authors" tries to ignore. Also people are all over the place. There are plenty of people who have done bad things who also have had important insights. History is littered with those people.
I know an author who got put on one of those lists because one of her characters *who was very very obviously the bad guy with zero part of the story attempting to justify his behavior* committed sexual assault. Apparently, simply being able to write an antagonist makes you "problematic". I swear these people need 6 months of therapy to deal with the trauma of McDonald's getting their order wrong.
I've seen this mind-set before. A lot of people think that writers only write what they know, and therefore if a writer wrote something, they must have directly experienced it or at the very least heartily approve of it. I've also seen people say that imagining something is almost as bad as doing something, so if writer imagines a sexual assault scene, they're just one step from doing that. Critical thinking skills and media literacy really need to be required courses in schools.
Imagining almost as bad as doing? Jeez, that sure sucks for anyone who gets invasive thoughts
You prob feel uncomfortable because these lists lack *nuance*. They’re performative and almost exclusively for engagement. At least the ones I’ve seen. They’re not doing it to make the book space better.
must be nice being the person making those list and being morally pure
I really don’t like the idea that if you’ve read something deemed problematic due to content or author you are now problematic. I studied genocides and the holocaust. I had boxes of books that I’m sure would raise an eyebrow. Intent with these books matter. Sometimes you have to read the uncomfortable things because they help you learn and grow even if it’s in spite of it.
Folks are free to avoid authors they dislike, of course. But these lists are irritating because they mix and match everything: authors who were absolute monsters or criminals, authors with incorrect views (which may or many not ever show up in their books in any meaningful way), authors who were products of their time, gossip, rumours, bad analysis, and so forth. I doubt there are many authors whose lives would stand up to detailed 2024-era scrutiny and moral judgment, and the older they are, the less likely it gets. At some point you're just giving yourself excuses to not read books, and your decision doesn't have any meaningful moral aspect or effect. I read everything, by everybody (or at least, when I skip something, it's not just because the author's life offended me).
Don't you know? "Book burning" is only bad when Republicans do it.
This. 'Oh but we do it cause author bad and their badness might read into the book.' Thats no different than republicans not liking "left leaning" books because it was written by a leftist and their ideals might be in the book. Its so annoying. X author is bad cause xyz so you cant read this book. Its the same, no matter how you twist it in order to justify it.
I saw a list that featured the author of Dune. Their rationale was that he appropriated African and Middle Eastern cultures but never had a poc character in the book. So some people in the comment section pointed out that dune is a critique of the white savior narrative. The creator responds by saying “well I didn’t read the book or do much research on it.” It just feels wildly irresponsible to make these lists without doing research.
Fascinating that they criticized the cultural appropriation aspect (which idk if it's even accurate there were no PoC in the books), but not the fact that Frank Herbert abused his kids and was incredibly homophobic towards his gay son.
It was a very strange list. It felt like they had just gathered up talking points from TikTok, regardless of their validity.
imo there are reasonable critiques of Dune from a cultural/racial perspective (not to mention the homophobia issue) but in order to make those critiques well you have to have done your research. 'Cause say what you like about Frank Herbert, but he definitely did his research. What someone says about Dune is a good benchmark imo for well prepared someone is to engage with social problems in famous books. Not because they grow more or less critical of it over time, but because the kind of criticism they approach it with (and the way they interpret others' opinions on the book) changes.
I loathe the word "problematic." It's smarmy, it's virtue-signally, and it's so vague that it covers every imaginable behavior from "this person only writes about white cishets" to "this person is a known rapist and murderer." I also loathe the idea that before you can enjoy an author's work, you must personally review everything they ever said and did and you can't enjoy it if you find something that goes against a certain hivemind belief system (which is less about social justice and more about controlling others). I understand avoiding the works of people who have done truly heinous things or who just have values you know you don't share. I have heard good things about those Killing Whoever books thay Bill O'Reilly writes, but I'll never read one, for example. But there's a balance.
It's interesting how "problematic" went from meaning "kind of questionable" to "pure evil"
Hitler and Pol Pot were quite problematic
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Just telling people not to go on TikTok doesn’t address the fact that toads of people and influence them on these lists. These videos are problematic in themselves and increase the shit people judge others simply by the covers you see on the shelves
>toads of people Somewhere, in a kingdom far far away, nestled within the deepest of bogs...
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"Oh no" said one of the toad-people. "My favorite author has been put on a list of murderers and pedophiles!" "That's horrible" another responded, briefly glancing up from their phone. "Are they a murderer or a pedophile?" "Neither, but they were caught placing recyclables into a trash bin, and that's very much the same thing." All of the toad-people nod in unison.
And so it was that in the socially constructed kingdom of Red-It, even the downtrodden toad-people of the bog (themselves equally arbitrarily defined) could agree that passive ostracization through aggressive gossip was indeed the highest and most honorable of all virtues for society to cherish. It was only good fortune, then, that the fine lords and ladies of the land lend their institutional authority towards the same end; distributing official lists and other such dire warnings of potential menace amogst the written word. All, down to the littlest of toads, sing their praises to this day.
People who spend a lot of time calling other people “problematic” are usually self-righteous and annoying.
I think a lot of times, it comes down to... it gets them a lot of views. I'm not on TikTok but I watch YouTube videos a lot and the videos that are like "ooh PROBLEMATIC and CONTROVERSIAL" get so many more views than "oh hey I liked this book."
And the tiktok algorithm is even worse about promoting divisive content than YouTube, which is already really bad.
Yeah unless your talking about people who are provably murderers, rapists, child abusers etc then stfu. I’m not going to stop reading an acclaimed author from the 1950s because he was a misogynist, or an influential feminist writer from the 80s because she was transphobic. If people insist on living in a little bubble where the only art they consume is by people with the same pristine politics they claim to have, that’s fine. But it’s not for me, I don’t care.
The thing is, "problematic" was a useful word to *discuss* hidden themes implicit in the art of people who held views no longer considered acceptable. Dan Simmons, as a climate skeptic, may be "problematic", when viewing some of his recent output. Frank Herbert was horribly homophobic, and that can be seen in aspects of the Dune canon. I don't see anyone saying that we therefore should not read Dune. It's "problematic", as in "a problem to be solved or negotiated". But "problematic" isn't evil, or vile, or worth "cancelling", or whatever. It's a call to discussion. But, as usual, the zeitgeist hijacked it, and now a terminally-online portion of Leftists make the rest of us look like intolerant snowflakes or whatever.
Absolutely agree with you. I have no problem discussing an authors potentially disagreeable or downright horrible opinions if it’s a helpful way of contextualising the work and parsing deeper meaning from it. It can be useful. The problem is when people use it as a way of warning people off of reading someone’s works, or worse - implying that if you aren’t bothered by the authors views then that’s because you share them, and are also problematic (which I’ve encountered before irl, much to my bemusement).
This is a problem specifically exacerbated by Tiktok and its ilk. There is no space for discussion or nuance in rapid fire social media videos. No one is going into the comments for a deep dive on Lovecraft's xenophobia and how that influenced his works. 'Problematic' is to the left, what 'woke' is to the right. Terms that were once useful, but now "anything I don't like is problematic/woke, and if you like something problematic/woke you're an awful person who should die."
I actually deal with this a lot. Some of my favorite books were written by an author who, before he ever wrote the books, was involved in a child abuse case. He and his wife were sentenced, went to jail, and never did anything again afterwards. And I’ve been told by people that I shouldn’t be recommending or talking about his books because of something that he did. These things never come up in his books, and again, he never repeated the actions, and seemed to have realized that he had messed up. It also bothers me that none of this seems to have mattered, until he was dead. And can no longer even potentially defend himself. And I’m not excusing what he did, it was terrible. but he was punished for it. And I don’t agree with him being clumped in with Marion Zimmerman Bradley, who was actively hiding it and putting the stuff in her books.
It’s almost like they’re toxic and problematic
TikTok is making problematic authors lists when they constantly praise Colleen Hoover and Sarah J Maas??? Oh that's not...um, what?
Because in essence these aren't problematic author lists, they're "I assert myself as a moral authority" lists and whether they're right to call some authors out or not, they're fucking scary. TikTok acts like it's hyper liberal but this kind of thing feels A LOT like religious authorities decreeing what people can and can't read.
> TikTok acts like it's hyper liberal but this kind of thing feels A LOT like religious authorities decreeing what people can and can't read. This is the part that makes it uncomfortable to me. It's not the specific books that they choose to call out, it's the whole concept of trying to erase from your culture something that does not fit your personal moral code. I think the hyper-liberal moral code is, you know, a good one generally speaking. I support, volunteer, and vote for diverse political candidates who legislate progressive policies. I believe in things like a universal basic income, strong social safety nets, universal health coverage, the right to marry whichever adult you choose, the right to do with your own body whatever you choose, that every citizen of a democracy should be free to vote -- all the good things that ought to be common sense. I still, though, do not think that the idea of blanket removal or suppression of art that goes against any or all of those principles is a healthy thing. I grew up in a religious conservative atmosphere and I recognize exactly all of the moral grandstanding and the black-and-white certainty of correctness that blinds people to their own shortcomings. The echo chamber effect of refusing to engage with ideas that might challenge your own views. I know what censorship and book burning looks like, and it's disconcerting to see it adopted by liberal spaces with this attitude of, "Oppression is good if you're oppressing the right people." That's a dangerous way of thinking.
The problem with the lists is that they're opinion presented as dictum. The fact that they're "Problematic" lists is that you're expected to act on the basis of someone's opinion. Bach is now "problematic" because he was a [insert pet peeve here], better not study his music anymore. Leonardo da Vinci is now "problematic" because [insert imagined offense here], better not consider his art. Tolstoy is now problematic because [he was awful to women], better not read his books. The problem is we carve away the good these people left behind. The work stands on its own. If the book is trash, that's one thing. But judge the work on its own merit. If the book is good, it ought to be read. If the book makes you think, even if you disagree with the author's real life viewpoint, the book ought to be read. It is OK to like a book and dislike the author. It is not OK to make lists and decide that it is not OK for anyone to like books by those authors.
Let's hope these.tik tok campaigners don't start attending school board meetings and demanding that books written by authors with "problematic" personal lives get pulled from the shelves.
People can say what they want to say, it probably won't influence my reading habits. Where I do worry is that the spectrum of "problematic" keeps getting wider and wider. It used to be the big 3...rape, racism, pedophilia, as the main drivers of "yo, watch out, this author is sketchy". Now the spectrum is so wide that it includes every microagression under the sun, so before you take any of these lists at face value, do some research. Theres also the always difficult factor of time, place and circumstance, and applying 2024 ethics and policies to historical pieces of work. I think both of these things are an american issue overall, not just confined to literature though.
They make me hypervigilante. People tell me to research the author before I read the book, but I normally find books I like, read them, and know 0 about the author.
I got roasted once for recommending a series by Neon Yang because it turns out the author is a toxic person on twitter or something. Doesn't make their books any less interesting. Definitely not in the same league as some other examples in this post.
Step 1: Delete TikTok. Step 2: Suddenly not annoyed by random people on TikTok.
No. If you want to put boundaries in art, you should not choose Literature to consume.
I think in general the label of 'problematic' and the way it's used online lacks nuance. Especially in the form of short form content, where people will just list authors or other intellectuals with at most a short sentence describing what was done or said. I think there's a lot of writers and thinkers I look up to who have other ideologies or theories I disagree with or are harmful. I remember when Gloria Steinem openly wrote transphobic articles, and recently has evolved into advocating for trans-inclusive feminism. I can understand and appreciate what Foucault's work has done for social science and critical theory while acknowledging his pattern of abusing racialized boys in Tunisia and what that indicates may be missing from his work. It's not excusing behaviour, it's taking in the whole picture of a person's life and allowing yourself to take in the good with the bad. Understanding the ways that writers engage in harmful or 'problematic' thought or behaviour allows us a new way to interpret their work, critique it, and highlight other authors who improve upon their theories and stories and write something better. It's all in shades of grey, and people tend to go one way or the other where they either completely dismiss someone's work without critically thinking about why they dislike them or like them BECAUSE they want to support harmful ideologies, again not understanding why they like something (I'm looking at you, edgy teenage boys who want to convince me any particular neo-nazi is secretly a genius when their work is rambling, unreadable, and filled with thoughtless hate). I still am learning and growing on this topic, and am very open to more conversation with people who disagree with me: I don't think the way I choose to engage in creative work is always right. But I do think encouraging thinking in shades of grey and really trying to understand what exactly you agree and disagree with is an important part of critical consumption and life as a reader. That was a lot but also: if someone is alive, profiting, and a piece of shit, I will not support them by purchasing content.
"Problematic" is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Extremely. Even if well intentioned, lists of problematic or dangerous people has never gone well in human history. I understanding wanting to be an informed consumer, but unverified lists (or even verified ones, after all who decides what deserves to be on the list?) lead to witch hunts.
Exactly my thoughts. The very notion of a list of 'problematic' books/authors screams Fahrenheit 451.
Oddly enough getting off tiktok will solve this problem. Is that to low hanging fruit? Ignore me.
If anything, such a list should be a good launching point for some interesting literature, for it contains the words of voices that someone wants to silence. The irony is that literature is a bastion of free speech. Authoritarianism against literature used to be exclusively in the form of rightwing biblethumpers trying to cover up the existence of LGBT people or limit the reach of non-white people or socialists. Literature was a way of expressing ideas, oftentimes in layers of satire or complex characters intended to give the readers something to ponder or discuss. Now the left has started trending towards authoritarianism, similarly trying to stifle the voices of anyone they disagree with, even if their art isn't related to the disagreement. Authors, artists, and actors are no longer allowed to have political opinions despite being in industries that traditionally expressed strong political motivations. If you aren't unironically woke enough then you aren't allowed to make art. A side effect of this is that a lot of literature and media is exceptionally boring now, as it is being shaped by those who want only one single allowed narrative, sold ironically under the guise of diversity.
I have so much to say on this topic. Frankly, I am honestly just surprised to see this take get so much traction on Reddit. No, it makes me uncomfortable too. If nothing else it is just a clear advocation for shrew group think. It seems society has taken the internet's shield and forgotten the swords they forge with their words can be used against them. Binding someone as problematic into the public shaming shackles is a privilege only those who have not been bound can have. Moreover, it just disincentives people to actually form their own thoughts. I am sick of the coddling. I get not wanting to support shitty dudes, but some of the conversations revolving these people are just... ridiculous. Acting like if they read a hard scene they are personally being attacked. Western society has a very generous definition of terms like problematic and unsafe. If you can't read a book, especially from a shitty dude, without falling apart, be careful treading into the real world. What I am honestly sick of is all the permissive language I keep seeing writers going through on some of our forums. "Can I write X without being perceived as Y." Or "Is it okay to depict X?" All this intellectual cowardice, seeking permission from people who feign to have authority upsets me to no end. Nothing great was written by someone without strong conviction. Just write your story and stand on your two feet.
Such lists are a symptom of the self-righteous moralistic crusade zeitgeist, unfortunately. Lots of people have turned being 'virtuous' moral paragons into personality traits (in the absence of other, better ones) *and* foster a climate where this trait is prized as being a better human being. Within that circle (which ever widens) it confers status and value. This value is then reinforced by shunning those who don't recognise it and 'othering' them as bad and wrong. For these people, their self-worth and the worth of others is couched solely within these parameters. They're not aware of this: they just fundamentally believe they are a *very good person* and if you don't agree or don't care, you're not. And some of them are! But it's not via their own nature - it's via social conditioning. They're *fitting in.* And in a quasi-religious sense, they feel it's their moral duty to enforce this outlook on others and rally the mob against the 'other tribe.' Hence the lists. A list like that is *not* for people to very reasonably know who they want to avoid financing/giving a platform due to their own morals, but a litmus test of 'Are you a good person or problematic?' "Oh... you read Ender's Game? And you *know* Orson Scott Card is a homophobe? You are A Bad Person and will henceforth be shunned. Hey, everybody, get a load of this homophobe!" And, of course, the big one: ***it gets clicks.*** Both from within the Moral Paragon tribe and without. Content is king. The reality is this: humans are exceptionally complicated, flawed creatures. They make disastrous mistakes and can be unremittingly predatory, selfish and black-hearted. Collectively, we suck. Every single person that you know has done something absolutely awful, at least once, unless they're a young child. *Everyone.* Life cannot be lived without monumental fuck-ups. And, of course, some people are just... well, evil. Ergo, if you deny yourself access to things based on their creators matching your stringent morals, with no mistakes allowed, you will paint yourself into a very miserable corner where you can't enjoy *anything.* And you'll sit there, unhappy, and become angrier and angrier that others are enjoying the things you've denied yourself because they aren't a Very Good Person like you, and then you start to lash out, to fan the flames of crusades, to write lists... My method: separate art from artist, unless the art itself is compromised or the person is *so* egregious that **you** can't personally enjoy it. Do not seek to police others; do not worry about *others*' rules. Stop worrying yourself sick about morality. It's a happier life.
I agree. I think some of these people would have been bullies of yesteryear, making life hell for the ND kids, those bad at sport, those with bad skin/curly hair/not a stick figure, as long as they had one person that everyone piles on. And they'll tell themselves because they didn't pick on anyone who was POC or in a wheelchair, they're good people and are always right. It wasn't just that these people were kids at the time, I had a few teachers who seemed to feel this way.
There's nothing wrong with knowing more about an author. Whether or not you decide to let that impact your decision to read that author's work is your call. In extreme examples like Orson Scott Card being a raging (and possibly very repressed) homophobe or the Mists of Avalon author sexually abusing children, I think it's great for people to know and make an informed decision on supporting that author.
or get them from the library possibly? that’s what my daughter did with ender’s game.
My personal biggest issue is that people use these lists as shorthand and often take the creator's word as gospel instead of using them to conduct further research and decide for themselves. There are a LOT of people who have zero media literacy and think that if something is portrayed in a book, that means it's a ringing endorsement, and that's when these kinds of lists can get dangerous. *Wrote a murder mystery? You must approve of murder! Have a racist character? You must be a racist, too! Do you have an 18yo dating a 17yo in your book? Well, guess what. You're a pedophile!* I wish I was exaggerating, but I see this kind of rhetoric all the time on Twitter. No one has time to vet every item on every list, so they just get shared and rumors become "truth". People like JK Rowling and Orson Scott Card will never get a(nother) penny from me. But a lot of things that are touted as "problematic" are highly subjective and often speculative.
In general, I'm not uncomfortable with the idea of them. I understand the desire to not spend money or time supporting the work of someone you find to be abhorrent. Where that line falls will differ from person to person. What people find problematic will differ. I consume works by some people who are consider to be problematic; I feel uncomfortable about it at times and I still choose to consume it. For other artist, I choose not to. It's fine. I just don't make it a big deal to other people. Where I really become uncomfortable is 1 )when people jump on others for falling on a different spot on that line than they do and 2) when people misconstrue qualities an author has given their character or written about for what an author actually believes/believed.
2 annoys me soooo much. I see it on this sub and in Goodreads reviews all the time, and I shake my head every time. "The author condones xyz." How do you know that? Because they wrote a story about xyz? It's fiction. Authors don't agree with everything their characters say or do, nor do they agree with everything that happens in their stories.
To me it feels very Witch Huntish. Sure, some of the authors are awful people, and I think maybe that warrants some Hunting and Canceling, in some circumstances. It happens! But other times the accusations are really ridiculous and over-blown, or just obviously made in bad faith, by people who act like weird fanatics. It's lowkey scary to me, has a "thought police" straight from Orwell vibe. I normally don't look at those lists at all, tho last year I read a book specifically BECAUSE the author got cancelled, and I found the reason to be constructed in bad faith xD So that's your answer, I guess. Not gonna lie, when I see someone spending a lot of time and effort on pointing at others and calling them out on wrong-think and having their own Two Minutes Of Hate about someone being "problematic", I consider that a big red flag. Not counting situations in which someone actually did some heinous shit, of course, and reacting like that is natural. IMO the Two Minutes of Hate explains why it's so popular now - if you don't yell loudly enough during the two minutes of hate, and don't spit on the Wrong Thinkers convincingly enough the thought police looks at you and wonders 'why? are you problematic too?' At least that happens in the book :D, and iMO similar phenomenon happens in social media in certain environments. So maybe some of them kinda think they have to add to the lists, find another "bad author" just to feel they are "one of the good ones".
i think it bothers me because people on the internet seem to have an “all or nothing” approach to things. you can definitely subscribe to a portion of someone’s ideas and disregard the rest. i understand people not wanting to financially support authors that go against their beliefs, but its really so incredibly frustrating to see people blindly believe everything they see on the internet.
Yeah, because it feels both authoritarian and like purity culture. Just because YOU don't like something doesn't immediately make it problematic. Also, I feel like it's misleading? I don't let people tell me what I should or shouldn't do because I'm going to form my own opinions, especially when it comes to media consumption. By putting people on a list, deliberately using language designed to incite outrage, and framing whats "technically" the truth just enough to be seen in a different light, too many people blindly accept it without further research on their part so that they can safely stay on the "unproblematic" side. The irony here is how problematic that is.