(Disclaimer: to the extent that this article was inspired by a specific creator, it’s not a creator you’ve heard of, and not one that I mention anywhere in the article! I mention a few authors as examples, but I was not setting out to specifically comment on any of them.)
When a creator falls into disrepute, there tends to be a public re-evaluation of their work. “Oh, I re-read their book, and it’s aged terribly.” “I’ve always thought their work was bad.”
This is reminiscent the story of sour grapes. In the Aesop’s fable, a fox tries to eat some grapes, but cannot reach them. So the fox says the grapes were sour anyway, and he didn’t want them. So when an artist falls from grace, people can no longer wholly enjoy the art. So they say that the art was never good in the first place, and nothing of value was lost.
But there is a major difference between the fox’s re-evaluation of the grapes and the public’s re-evaluation of the art. The “public” is made up of more than one person. There may be some individuals who first liked the art, and then stopped liking it. But more often, what happens is we first hear from individuals who liked the art, and then later we hear from another set of individuals who did not like the art. Perhaps no individual re-evaluation took place, and it’s just a matter of listening more to the haters.
For example, when Neil Gaiman fell from grace, just about the only thing I can think to say to that is, I never liked him in the first place. I read a book by Neil Gaiman in college, and it annoyed me so thoroughly that I decided I never wanted to hear from him again. I’ve never publicly talked about it before, because it’s not that interesting and nobody particularly wanted to hear from Gaiman haters. But now there’s more appetite for Gaiman hate, so I could imagine saying it.
Another flavor is when people “hate-read” books. For example, take Shaun’s video which is very critical of the Harry Potter books. Shaun said that he had never read the books before. So he’s not really re-evaluating the books, nor could he say “he never liked them”. Rather, he’s offering a first-time impression. But the reason we are so interested in such a negative evaluation of Harry Potter, is because of JK Rowling.
This is not to say that individual re-evaluations do not also occur. I read and liked many Rowling books, including several outside of the Harry Potter series. But I’m pretty sure if I re-read any of her books, it would be a fairly negative experience. I would constantly imagine Rowling whispering “large gamete producer” into my ear, and that’s just not an environment that is conducive to charitable reading.
(Aside: As I see it, the problem with JK Rowling is not that she is a TERF. I would not be nearly as upset at her if she were just a TERF. The problem with Rowling is that she is the queen of TERFs. She’s literally the most vocal TERF in the world. People talk about how she financially supports TERF organizations, but she is also functionally a leader of the cause. This is much worse than, e.g. Orson Scott Card, who had sat on the board of National Organization for Marriage, but had never been considered the most famous homophobe on the planet.)
Now I thought to call it “sour grapes media criticism”, but in Aesop’s tale, the fox is wrong. I don’t think people are wrong to re-evaluate art. Whether it’s a matter of public re-evaluation, or individual re-evaluation, what the artist is up to is relevant to how we experience the art.
On the other hand, I feel like there’s something petty and disproportionate about it. Writing a bad novel is not a sin. Being a sexual abuser is. So why do we talk about sexual abusers by saying, “and also their books suck”?
To make a comparison: Donald Trump is a treasonous wannabe dictator and miserable incompetent surrounded by evil scheming yes-men. However, I would not criticize him for being fat or having a toupee, because that’s so petty, that it seems to vastly downplay the real problem. And it’s really quite unfair to other people who are fat or use toupees. Likewise, I wonder if saying Rowling’s books suck might be unfair to other people who also suck at writing books.
Well, it’s not quite the same. Rowling’s books had been her primary accomplishment, not just an incidental fact about her.
Here’s another angle. I like to criticize books and other media on a regular basis. I don’t do it in order to attack the artist, I do it because it’s simply how I engage with media. There is no animosity inherent to media criticism. So I find it strange to use media criticism as a way to attack an artist we don’t like. How much of an attack is it, to give the art the same treatment I would like to give to art in general?
And you know, I like to see it. I’m not complaining about it. I really liked Shaun’s critique of Harry Potter. It’s just strange to think, I probably would have liked it even if the author hadn’t done anything wrong.
Have you encountered the concept of “the suck fairy”?
https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Suck_Fairy
Over time a reader changes, as does society. When it comes to re-reading a book that means that flaws in a book that were overlooked on the original read may have become obtrusive. And that’s before how the author’s public actions change the context in which the book is read – where a book is a Necker cube with two readings the author’s actions could switch the content from one interpretation to another.
I agree about “the suck fairy”, who has ruined books, movies, music, and tv shows I once enjoyed. For example, the decades-old song Southern Cross by Crosby, Stills, & Nash. I connected with it over the singer’s love of sailing and world travels, but reheard it recently and was struck by the singer’s tone about losing the woman who refused to sit passively by, waiting at home and paying the bills for him while he was off having all kinds of adventures, and his vow to travel the world to find a “woman-girl” who as too young and naive and didn’t know any better than to await his return to please him.
But the opposite happens, too: an artist’s early work can be so awful for me that I simply don’t like any of their new stuff. I feel that way about Taylor Swift, who started out as a country singer because country has a lower barrier to enter and her rich daddy built her a recording studio. She crossed over with a song about a girl sitting passively around while her boyfriend asks her father for her hand in marriage and improbably connecting it to the story of Romeo and Juliet. Swift is about the same age as my daughter who was in college at the time. I reminded her that Juliet was 13 and died in that story, and that passively sitting around waiting for the boy to do all the relationship work was regressive. Taylor’s later hits all sounded like she was still 13 and mostly featured why she was better than all the other girls who had boyfriends and she didn’t–in other words, a female incel. Later, her songs were about everyone she’d ever dated and how they “done her wrong”. After that, she had a social media post comparing the genitalia of girls who had had sex with filthy, sloppy ham sandwiches, while her own genitalia was a pristine, neat, and untouched ham sandwich.
I wonder if part of this urge to announce that “I never liked their art” is because we worry that if we do genuinely enjoy something made by an abuser, if it’s emotionally meaningful and has a positive effect on our lives, is that… bad? If the artist is such a bad person, does that badness inevitably touch everything they do, and there’s something wrong with us if we don’t notice it and we have a positive experience with their work?
@Perfect Number,
One of more specific reasons I don’t think I would enjoy JK Rowling if I re-read anything, is because of the (now widely observed) fatphobia in those books. So many villains are fat, and she seems to enjoy describing how disgusting that is.
TBH, it does feel bad that I hadn’t thought about the pattern of fatphobia when I first read the books. Maybe it does reflect poorly on me that I liked them. Although, I don’t feel *that* bad about it, and I’m not going to revise my personal history of liking the books. It’s just a fact that we often don’t notice certain prejudices until we are later made aware of them.
So that’s just an example of how an author’s badness could indeed touch their work. But I don’t think it’s inevitable. And it could have happened with any author, even if the author wasn’t otherwise a bad person.
I recently learned that an author whose books I enjoyed was convicted, with his wife, for child abuse. The books do not promote child abuse, although they do contain some other things that are considered problematic today, but were not seen as problematic in the past, and are believable for their settings (medieval-ish high fantasy). I am aware of those problematic things, and I see them as problematic, but I still enjoy the books overall, and I re-read them recently. I did not find anything that needed re-evaluating.
I never read anything by Gaiman, so recent revelations about him did not affect me in any way, and I completely lack an opinion about his works.
J.K. Rowling’s books are excellently written in the sense that the characters are believable, the world is entertaining, albeit completely inconsistent and illogical, and a lot of the story can be interpreted favourably. But after she came out as a howling bigot, it became apparent that those favourable interpretations of the story were probably not correct. The metaphorical grapes were, in this case, really sour; it is just that we deluded ourselves into thinking otherwise because they looked so tasty. One of my friends put his finger on this even before she came out as a bigot – after the last book came out, he asked incredulously, “Why the fuck was the Nazi House at Hogwarts not banned after the war? Why were the houses kept at all?”. So some people, even those who liked the books, always saw the problems. They just preferred to look at the good things and ignore the bad. Now it’s the other way around.
Rowling also writes the CB Strike detective series under the name Robert Galbraith (the series is available via streaming on some platform). In the first 6 or 7 books, CB Strike is notably overweight. In a later book, his partner (a woman) goes undercover in a religious cult and loses weight because the cult members are kept on a starvation diet–and her partner, coworkers, and family are all deeply worried for her and urge her to seek medical help when she leaves the cult because she’s underweight.
So, in other words, don’t put too much overthinking in a children’s book series started 30 years ago that contained on traditional children’s book tropes.
I’ve read three of the Cormoran Strike novels. I thought the first one was good. They got increasingly worse.
I’m not sure if you’re trying to defend Rowling’s fatphobia, but I’ve been treated as underweight my whole life so what you describe actually does the opposite of inspire confidence in me.
@ Siggy, you’re confusing me. First, you call Rowling fatphobic. I counter with examples from books she wrote in this century, and then you talk about how you are considered underweight, seemingly in response to my comment that when a character in her current series is underweight, the other characters are concerned and want her to seek help. Are you saying that’s being fatphobic? I don’t understand how that could possibly be.
I was just trying to point out what I had read over a number of novels in a series. Your experience of Rowling’s work is not what I found in her series. I’m sorry you found them worse; I did not. In fact, some of the themes explored as the novels go along is Robin’s growth as a person and her realizing how badly she was being treated in her marriage, and despite her husband’s pronouncements, that she is very capable and strong. Several of the side characters (other investigators, the office secretary, a couple of the police officers they interact with, Strike’s childhood friend from the cheap squats) show unexpected and welcome strengths. Strike himself has a number of flaws and biases, recognizes them and works to overcome them with varying levels of success–just like people do in real life.
On the flip side, some characters who seemed good and trustworthy at first turned out not to be so, and some of the villains who appeared to be banal were actually breathtakingly evil.
@Katydid,
Let’s put aside the question of Rowling. I obviously can’t evaluate a book that I never read, and I also obviously don’t need to. Rowling is a terrible person either way, and the Harry Potter books contain fatphobia regardless of whether the Cormoran Strike books do as well.
Speaking purely on the issue of body weight. A major reason why I care about fatphobia is precisely that I’m underweight. I grew up constantly being accused of anorexia. And hey, eating disorders are real and very serious, but it goes to show that people are not as good at diagnosing them as they think they are. This is not the same as fatphobia, but I believe it goes hand in hand. It’s treating one size as the “correct” one, and busybodying about people’s health issues based on superficial information.
So when I remark on fatphobia, you offer a “counterexample” in which the same author is treating thinness as a negative. That… is not a counterexample. And I’m not even saying it’s a problem, maybe it reflects a genuine concern about eating disorders! Again, I can’t evaluate a book I didn’t read. But what you describe fails to be a counterexample.
“Donald Trump is a treasonous wannabe dictator and miserable incompetent surrounded by evil scheming yes-men. However, I would not criticize him for being fat or having a toupee, because that’s so petty, that it seems to vastly downplay the real problem.”
Normally, I would agree with this, but Demented Don is a special case. First, because he is a fascist with millions of tiny-brained supporters. They look at the crowds at one of his rallies and think they are in the vast majority of the country. They need to realize that is not the case, but they are too stupid to follow an argument against his tariff policy or the nuances of mRNA vaccine policy. You get their attention, though, when millions of people hurl schoolyard insults at their golden boy.
Furthermore, Donald Schmuck himself is such a an insecure narcissist that a well-lobbed childish insult can essentially force him to waste time to reply to it, time that otherwise might be spent thinking up ways to harm people who have no power themselves to fight back.
So, I think we all should be thinking up the most childish, gross, and above all, funny insults to hurl at that old, fat, ugly, brain-damaged fart huffer we possibly can.
@Siggy, I think you’re reading what I say and stuck in your own biases. Let’s see if I can explain it another way:
In the CB Strike books, the main character (Strike) is overweight. He is the only one who broods on it because the excess weight causes problems with his prosthetic. On the other hand, when a character emerges from a dangerous situation and is underweight WHEN SHE WAS PREVIOUSLY OF NORMAL SIZE, the other characters express concern for her and ask her to seek medical attention. Why you consider that fatphobia is just…confusing.
Also, you have no issues with Taylor Swift slut-shaming women and girls who had sex–which is traumatizing to the 1 in 3 women and girls who have been sexually assaulted against their will and are being punished for it by Swift. Or that the first decade of her songs are either clinging to a 1900 idea of passive womanhood, bashing any man she ever dated or proclaiming she’s better than any of the girls out there who stupidly…occasionally wear skirts, enjoy sports, go out with the boys Tay-Tay secretly likes, or practically anything.
I get it, you’ve built Rowling (a battered wife who escaped her husband by fleeing to a woman’s shelter with her infant) into a demon strawman for using traditional children’s book tropes in a children’s book…and all you want to talk about is how much you hate her for stuff she wrote in the past century. Got it. Peace out.
@Katydid,
You’re stuck in a different argument of your own imagining. You’re interested in defending Rowling, when that’s not even the point I was trying to make. I did not argue that fatphobia in Harry Potter makes Rowling a bad person. I explictly argued the opposite, saying that it could have happened with any author. I brought up fatphobia in response to Perfect Number @3 as an example of why I might not like a book on re-read.
(I feel it’s already well established that Rowling, as queen of TERFs, is a bad person. I do not feel the need to establish it further.)
You also seem confused by fatphobia and how attitudes towards thin people might be related to attitudes towards fat people. I was trying to explain that, but what a waste to explain things to someone who isn’t cooperative.
Also, this is embarrassing for you, but I have not commented on Taylor Swift.