C’mon. You know you want to, but it’s tough, right? The internet lynch mob is out with their coats on, but the guy gave us decades of enjoyment with his work. This is one of those impossible situations in which you have to choose whether or not you’re able to separate the artist from his work.
It could all be a storm in a teacup in which we find stories have gotten out of control. It could also be worse than you could possibly imagine.
The modern world doesn’t really do nuance. It does headlines, hashtags and people frothing at the mouth in the comments section of something they didn’t actually read. I’m not defending anything or anybody here, I just thought it would be interesting to talk about.
But Gaiman has never exactly flown under the radar. He’s been a gunslinger since Sandman came out. Black clothes (no big deal), great hair (but not as good as mine), dark fables and an uncanny ability to speak to the goofy kid inside all of us who grew up wishing Ray Harryhausen was your Dad because the real world was always out of reach.
From that day to this (or close anyway), he was one of The Untouchables. A storyteller’s storyteller. The kind of writer you namedropped to look a bit cooler at parties–though if you were really going for points, you should have gone with Clive Barker–does anybody remember his Tumblr account? And the truth is, Sandman, American Gods, and Ocean at the End of the Lane are all killer pieces of work that helped define a generation of outcasts.
So when the internet knives come out, it feels weird even if the allegations are true. It’s not just someone being “cancelled”—it’s your guy. The one you pinned a huge amount of your persona on. I’m not alone in being defined through much of my younger life as a fan of something–in my case, it’s either Kiss or Alice Cooper, but it could have all gone horribly wrong in the blink of an eye and could at any point, for anybody.
So maybe you’re wondering: what am I supposed to do with all these beautiful stories now? Do they feel tainted and dirty? There’s also every chance you don’t actually care that much. Everybody approaches such things in their own way.
But nobody likes to admit that you can’t unread something that moved you. You can’t undo the way a story rerouted your brain in 2002. That’s not you being complicit—it’s you being human sitting in the rivers of time.
This post isn’t here to exonerate or condemn. I have No Facts At All and neither do you–unless you happen to be Gaiman’s lawyer–but we’re living in a strange era of public trials with no juries, no evidence and no right to remain silent.
I’d like to ask a question here: would you get your house repainted if you found your last decorator was a sex offender? Or, perhaps more in keeping with my mindset: would you get a tattoo removed if you found out your tattooer was?
I think it’s OK to press the pause button and wait it out. If you’re one of those angry villagers with a torch in your hand chasing Boris Karloff through the village, you’re a fool to yourself. Not unlike those audience members in the Derren Brown show Remote Control (I think that’s what it’s called) who get a man killed because they were baying for blood because everyone else was baying for blood.
If we’re going to be judged by our worst moments, stripped of context and served up for digital entertainment, who among us is safe?
This last couple of weeks I’ve seen massive amounts of videos on YouTube about Doctor Who saying “I’m done with the show!”, “How dare they do this and kill our show!” and “Rani has no right being Indian” - I don’t have to read between the lines to know what they’re really saying. It’s like the worst of Trumpian America commenting with all their guns out, on what is, after all, a tea-time kids show. I don’t see those same people being up in arms about this headline: “Police have been issued guidance on how to search women’s homes for abortion drugs and check their phones for menstrual cycle tracking apps after unexpected pregnancy loss.”, which to my way of thinking, might actually be important by comparison.
Think about this: Every time you click one of those ‘I’m done with [insert fandom]’ videos, someone’s ad revenue goes up. Your moral outrage is fuelling a business model created by imbeciles for imbeciles. Why not just hand over your lunch money to a terrorist in the street? I know there’s irony in the statement but I only figured that out later.
2025? Welcome to the party.
Anyway, seems to me that sometimes, as an outsider, the only thing you can do is sit, look at the mess and see what truth rises to the surface.
Footnote: On that Doctor Who topic, I’m surprised I haven’t been banned from YouTube for the amount of creative four letter words I’ve conjured up to throw back at some of those creators. If there’s one thing I despise in this modern era we call life, it’s a phone warrior with balls the size of a cranberry throwing out comments while they sit on the bus. For the record, the only thing wrong with Doctor Who over the last four or five years has been the quality of the writing–also for the record, this current season has been much better. End of story. Get on with your life. It’s not 1975 anymore.