“Nearly every social event I have attended with [communists] has inevitably had some conversation about linux, furry culture, obscure leftist history, tabletop games, or other equally nerdy subjects”
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The leftist cooks recently made a video about Neil Gaiman and how to deal with the realization that one of your favorite artists is an abusive piece of shit. In typical leftist cooks fashion, the vid is long and very meandering and goes off on costume change heavy tangents about celebrity worship and parasociality, the cultural industry under capitalism, DIY communities and what death of the author originally meant before it became an excuse for “i’m still throwing money at my problematic fave”, but it has some honest takes about the anguish you feel as a morally repulsed fan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T31HKuabyMA
I never got into Gaiman’s orginal works, but i saw and kinda enjoyed some of the adaptations and like you or the cooks, i don’t think i can ever come back to this stuff. Death of the author was originally designed as an approach to literary theory that compensated for the fact philologists couldn’t access university libraries full of letters and diaries from the author, historic works on their era and other material to read a text within a framework that centered authorial intent. It was never meant as a way to easily disavow creators while still consuming media that’s full of stuff that suddenly appears in a new, dreadful light after the allegations have been made public, it was driven by a material necessity to get away from always hovering around the question “what did the author mean by this?” and center the recipient instead. Now it has become a way of indulging in cynical indifference and intellectual lazyness.
It’s very strange to me to see how people now seem to be using death of author to completely disconnect the artist from their work in terms of culpability or consequence. I used to never see it as anything but meaning of a work is not beholden to author intent, whether due to author intent being unknown or the meaning transcending author’s own intent or even it betraying the author.
I think its a defense mechanism. People can overreact to any implication that they aren’t being their best moral selves. Sometimes with anger, others with denial. An example of the former is the unwarranted hatred that gets thrown at vegans. Not really for being vegan but for the implication that the non vegan is being a bad person. That’s where the viciousness comes from: we, as a culture, are obsessed with being a good person and drawing a line between ourselves and the bad people.
Weaponized delusion can arise from that same place. These death of the author types are harnessing denial to hollow themselves out. Instead of confronting the author’s monstrous nature they avoid it. They get to have their cake and eat it too, condemning the monster while celebrating his works.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: