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Something I& #39;ve noticed in the past ~5 years is folks& #39; tendency to retcon themselves re: the quality art/media/etc. from problematic creators. X person did something fucked up, ipso facto folks have "always known" that their creations are terrible. https://twitter.com/RB_Lemberg/status/1308051823425662976">https://twitter.com/RB_Lember...
This drives me nuts for a couple of reasons, but first among them it& #39;s a kind of personal gaslighting that denies the reality of your own experience, and by extension creates an incentive for other people to do the same.
Bad people can make good shit. Good as in meaningful, special, but also good as in good—brilliant, first of its kind, singular in its genre, objectively excellent and beautiful.
(Similarly, good people can make bad shit. A lot of folks are good at mistaking art that shares their personal politics with, like, good art.)
I think the reason this problem is so serious is that it denies you, the person doing the retconning, a specific kind of grief that is, like, normal and human.
This grief isn& #39;t particular to art—it can come from a person, too. Sometimes, someone is special and important to you, and good things happen between you. Then they do something unforgivable and your relationship with them changes forever—it ends, or is otherwise altered.
To say "I always knew X was bad" or "I never liked X anyway," if that isn& #39;t actually true, denies you the reality of the fact that things and people can disappoint you, and that as you get older your relationship with certain books, etc. will change.
Art is not a fixed thing. A book whose text never changes hits you differently at different ages because YOU are different. YOU are the variable in the equation. If your relationship with art was completely static, it& #39;d mean you were static.
Denying that something that you once loved or thought was good was lovable or good (however you define that) negates that past self and her experience and her reality, as well as the growth you& #39;ve made between those two points.
And to feel grief—real, heart-obliterating grief—about JKR being a TERF or whatever, is a normal human reaction and a very normal part of being alive.
HP was—and is—really important to my genderqueer spouse. She& #39;s been that way our whole relationship. Even as I went from "young person who loved HP" to "professional writer who desperately wants ppl to read another book," she had this deep emotional connection to those books.
Part of it was the books themselves, part of it was the fact that she raised her much-younger kid sister and they bonded through those books.
And it& #39;s real and true to say that, and to say that JKR being a TERF is devastating, and that this contradiction is a part of the human experience. If my spouse turned to me one day and said "Whatever, her books have always been bad," she& #39;d be negating a whole chunk of her life.
I know it feels cool and righteous to say "I always knew X person/book/etc. was trash" when such a thing is obvious on its face, but effectively what you& #39;re doing is telling your past self that her experiences weren& #39;t real.
And I& #39;m picking JKR more or less at random. She& #39;s in the zeitgeist right now; the quote above triggered this thread. I loved her books at a kid. As an adult & a professional writer I don& #39;t find them particularly artful, though they do have a je ne sais quoi that cannot be denied.
And she sucks! Her transmisogyny and racism is hateful and aggressive and unspeakably harmful; her wealth and position only aggravates the situation. But the fact that a lot of people have always known how pedestrian her sentences are is pretty suspect to me.
Another interesting example is "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" by Isabel Fall. One of the most gobsmacking things I experienced in the fallout around that story was people on Twitter telling me that *I was mistaken* about the story being good & well-written.
Because they had decided it was problematic and it was easier to tell a professional writer & reader that she, like, didn& #39;t know how to read or have an opinion about a piece of writing, than to admit that something problematic* could also be good.
Anyway. I guess if you& #39;re so invested in virtue-signaling and purity politics that you can& #39;t admit to something being good or having been meaningful to you—well, that& #39;s certainly a choice you can make. But I think you owe your past and present self better than that.
. @RB_Lemberg sums it up really well here. https://twitter.com/RB_Lemberg/status/1308117340291305474">https://twitter.com/RB_Lember...
Oh, and it goes without saying that another horrible piece of this problem is people telling *OTHER PEOPLE* what their relationship should be with that art. Which, like, fuck right off into the sun with that nonsense.
