[Debate] Creation and Creators

Scope of discussion includes perceived merit of created things (artistic, economic, policy) in the context of the perceived merit of their creators. In situations where the creator is accused or believed to have committed a crime or other undesirable action, the discussion does NOT include debate as to whether this is true or not. However, this does not preclude observations based on beliefs about a creator, whether verified or not.

Oh shit.

A bit about Rowling and how her prejudices might be reflected in the Potter novels.

Sorry it's all images or I'd cut and paste some quotes.

Stele wrote:

Oh shit.

A bit about Rowling and how her prejudices might be reflected in the Potter novels.

Sorry it's all images or I'd cut and paste some quotes.

Wait, today I not only learn that Rowling is a TERF but also a racist and antisemitic? Damn...

I am shocked! Shocked!

Mixolyde wrote:

I am shocked! Shocked!

Who would have ever guessed? Could there have been clues all along? We'll never know.

Arise thread! I’m wondering what your thoughts are on honoring questionable creators for their achievements even if you vehemently disagree with their politics. I’m asking this as fantasy writer and libertarian Terry Goodkind has passed and I’m trying to come to grips with his legacy. On one hand, he had a lot of repugnant views in his later books. But on the other he helped grow fantasy from a subgenre niche into the juggernaut it is today. We probably don’t get the Witcher, Game of Thrones, or Kingkiller Chronicles without his work.

All art is political. Separating an artist from their art allows us to excuse bad behaviour in order to perseve the parts that please us without having to confront the problematic context in which it was created and how that would otherwise represent where we stand. It breeds complacency and acceptance through complicity.

Death doesn't absolve bad behavior. If he wanted his legacy respected he could have wielded his platform more respectably.

Welding his platform more respectably would only strengthen the distaste for it...

I kid. I kid.

Nuance is valuable here - I think you can note his impact on the fantasy genre in spite of his status as a horrible human being, and consider why that combination was more possible then than now.

So when are we getting Goodkind Country? I'd watch the hell out of that.

Edit: No wonder the joke sank.

Were Goodkind’s books really that seminal? I read the first couple – as I suspected a lot of people did – but I didn’t find them particularly noteworthy, especially compared to say, Patrick Rothfuss and Jim butcher. To suggest that he enabled Game of Thrones seems bizarre to me.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:

Were Goodkind’s books really that seminal? I read the first couple – as I suspected a lot of people did – but I didn’t find them particularly noteworthy, especially compared to say, Patrick Rothfuss and Jim butcher. To suggest that he enabled Game of Thrones seems bizarre to me.

They were not. He was a bestseller, but basically he was just walking through the gateway that Robert Jordan had already bashed open for that sort of thing, from the standpoint of doorstop fantasy book series, and that Stephen R. Donaldson had bashed open for loathsome characters that we're supposed to sympathize with.

I feel like he turned up in the 90s, after the fantasy genre's popularity had exploded , but before it's creativity had followed suit. The 80s and 90s were ripe for entirely derivative fantasy, and he was far from the only offender, just one of the more successful.

Yeah, ok, glad I'm not crazy. I was mostly wondering in light of

jdzappa wrote:

he helped grow fantasy from a subgenre niche into the juggernaut it is today.

wondering if I was misattributing the who's who. I figure, if anything, he rode The Wheel of Time into prominence.

Grenn wrote:

To be fair, he doesn't write fantasy.

Wow, what an asshole.

Grenn wrote:

To be fair, he doesn't write fantasy.

Yup. He was a pompous jerk, so I've never bought or read any of his material. There are more deserving writers out there than I'll ever be able to finish reading, so why waste my time on someone like him?

Well and he has a hard on for Ayn Rand?
Yeah, I've never read his books and now I never will. (if for no other reason than I've read enough WoT, so anything remotely close to it garners little interest)

Wow this blew up - figured I would bow out with the announcement of RGB. The significance of his work is being hotly debated in some of my writer circles which is why I brought it up here.

I still struggle with pissing on graves of people who were jerks but not actual real life villains. It’s one thing to write about rape in a misogynistic way, but Goodkind was never accused of real rape. That’s a huge difference between him and Cosby. I’m also not sure I can agree with the idea that having had a guilty pleasure decades ago makes one complicit or a bad person, especially if you‘ve recognized what’s wrong with the message and rejected it.

All that being said, I also see that Goodkind shouldn’t be held up as a titan of the industry and some of my conservative friends are probably overselling his true accomplishments. And fully agree there are some amazing genre writers like Rothfuss and NK Jemisin that blow his stuff out of the water.

I mean, all that really ends up meaning is that, even if he's not an actual rapist, he helped sustain rape culture through his media.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I align with the sentiment expressed above, that there are so many more deserving authors out there that I will never get to in my lifetime.

His death brings an end to new works by him. The most we can hope for at this point is that his works fade into cultural obscurity, and his influence diminishes.

The news of his death will likely spur on sales for a little while, and I can only hope that the new readers who pick up his works now will know better about the troubling things in his books, and thus put them down for good afterward.

Plus, the later books are just so bad. They are truly atrocious fantasy, designed to hit you over the head with the superiority of Objectivism. It's one of those series where the protagonist is never, ever wrong, and the "heroes" just casually commit horrific atrocities, but it's okay, because they're the good guys.

Just say way away from that series. The first few books are actually fairly good, but it's a trap.

Malor wrote:

Plus, the later books are just so bad. They are truly atrocious fantasy, designed to hit you over the head with the superiority of Objectivism. It's one of those series where the protagonist is never, ever wrong, and the "heroes" just casually commit horrific atrocities, but it's okay, because they're the good guys.

Just say way away from that series. The first few books are actually fairly good, but it's a trap.

That’s a good point - I only read the first trilogy so I may very well have fallen into that initial trap.

And before I go to much down a rabbit hole arguing about personal versus artistic morality or how media influences real life behavior, I’m going to stop. Goodkind isn’t worth defending till the bitter end and he’s certainly in my list of top favorite authors.

Not to mention that the "hero" of the series personally leading his cavalry to kill peaceful protesters because he disagrees with their pacifism is especially tone-deaf today.

Amoebic wrote:

All art is political.

Yeah, I'm going to have to disagree with this. A more accurate statement would be "I personally choose to view all art through a political lens." I will concede that some art--perhaps a significant proportion of modern art--is political or at least tries to make a statement of some kind. But "all art is political" is pure projection of your own biases and how you seem to choose to see the world. I can see dragons and sailing ships in clouds but it doesn't mean that's the reality. Similarly, it's easy to sit around and speculate that politics either explicitly or implicitly affects all art, but that doesn't make it reality. The example that comes to mind is Tolkien, and how people have tried to talk about how his books were a statement on industrialisation and/or nuclear proliferation. He explicitly denied any such motive, and *still* had people telling him that his work as political but he just didn't know it.

I object fairly strongly to the idea that all art is political. It's a sentiment espoused by pretty much every repressive society in history to some degree, and has resulted in the death of a lot of artists and writers, many of whom had no intention of creating a political work. I find abhorrent the concept that creators must pass some sort of political purity test, and I advocate for the position that art stands on its own merits. The Sistine Chapel has an intrinsic artistic worth that exists irrespective of who funded it or whether the various Renaissance masters were great guys or total asses. Great literature is rife with words and actions that our modern sensibilities properly find abhorrent, such as Flannery O'Connor using the N-word more times than your average gangsta rap song. You guys are talking about Goodkind. I've never read the guy's stuff, but it sounds like both he and his works are both fairly crap.

I'm not saying that it's not reasonable to choose to avoid supporting a person's work financially if you find their personal conduct is unbecoming. But the aggressive insertion of politics into every form of art really strikes me as yet more of the tedious performative "wokeness" that I see with a lot of the crowd that use the word "problematic" a lot, which is done in lieu of actually doing something to create actual change.

If humans are involved, it’s political. There is no such thing as an apolitical act in society. Choosing not to take a political stance is itself implicit support of the prevailing power, regardless of intent. This isn’t about being “woke” or what-have-you, this is just about how society functions.

The Sistine Chapel has an intrinsic artistic worth that exists irrespective of who funded it or whether the various Renaissance masters were great guys or total asses. Great literature is rife with words and actions that our modern sensibilities properly find abhorrent, such as Flannery O'Connor using the N-word more times than your average gangsta rap song.

I don't buy this at all; whether or not the Sistine Chapel has "intrinsic artistic worth" or not does not mean it's some how nonpolitical, and it's clearly chock full of all sorts of political implications. That ceiling gets painted because somebody who was extremely rich and powerful wanted to be performatively pious, and that Pope was clearly easily as much a political leader as any kind of religious figure. It's representational of the fact that detailed imagery of religious stories was used to teach basic lessons to the masses, who were prevented from reading the Bible themselves, and that's another function of a highly-regimented hierarchical society where, if you wanted salvation, you had to follow the existing political structures of the day and stare at those beautiful paintings and have somebody tell you very specifically how you should be living your life. The Sistine Chapel is not just a beautiful painting, it's a historically important artifact created to fulfill a very specific cultural and political role within that society, and that's just as significant as any "intrinsic artistic worth".

All art is political, because "art" does not exist in some rarefied space, untouched by all things. Art is the creation of an individual who is part of a particular culture, and that's inherently highly political.

That seems like it'd require you to exclude lots of things from what you can consider art.

What? No, the Sistine Chapel is still art, but even the definition of "art" has always been highly politicized. Art is just another part of a culture's history, and, due to that, is packed full of the implications and politics of that culture.

Take popular music. Keith and Mick initially got together because they shared a love for blues artists that just weren't making it on the radio, because music that was "too black" didn't get airplay. The Rolling Stones at the start are a blues cover band who eventually find their own identity, but they were given the opportunity to find that identity because they were a bunch of good-looking white dudes who successfully managed to find a line between "cute" and "just scary enough to piss my parents off". That, right there, is how the politics of the day led to the success of the Rolling Stones, and, if Keith and Mick were black, that band never makes it. That's politics, and none of those facts change how the Stones were able to take classic Chicago blues and R&B and gospel and country and throw together the greatest album in rock and roll history (Exile on Main Street, and I will die on this hill if need be). That album is also tied up with drug arrests, recording contracts, and fleeing England because of tax laws; those are absolutely part of what makes the album great.

Art is political because art does not exist outside of the political context in which it was created. It doesn't exist in a magic aether as a representation of some Platonic ideal of achievement. Artistic expression is just another form of cultural history.

The example that comes to mind is Tolkien, and how people have tried to talk about how his books were a statement on industrialisation and/or nuclear proliferation. He explicitly denied any such motive, and *still* had people telling him that his work as political but he just didn't know it.

Written art is inherently political because of the way our brains work. We encode our ideas and ways of looking at the world into the language we use, typically without even realizing. You always have a subtext with any text, because words are imperfect representations of reality, and they frequently mean slightly different things for different people. Parsing out the way authors present ideas, and the language they chose to use, can often tell you a lot about their internal mental maps. Their underlying ideas leak into any text they write, because they have to.

For instance, there's a noticeable white supremacist subtext in Tolkien. It's not super-strong, definitely not a dominant factor, but all the characters are white, and much has been lost from the halcyon days of yore. The world is under attack by subhuman beasts, and only restoring the proper bloodline to the throne will give the armies of white purity the strength to hold back the subhuman darkness until the two main heroes can cast the One Ring into Mount Doom.

This doesn't mean you can't enjoy the story, but orcs and Uruk-Hai, with their whole almost-but-not-quite human thing, have some super-creepy undertones, particularly in the context of the World War 2 era. And the anti-industrialism theme is very strong, and the loss of purity and the invasion of modernity somehow polluting the Way Things Should Be might be the dominant theme of the books.

I think visual art can be pretty much politics-free; if you paint a picture of a kitten playing with a ball of yarn, it's hard to argue there's much additional meaning there. But written works always have subtext.

Coldstream wrote:

A more accurate statement would be "I personally choose to view all art through a political lens."

Coldstream wrote:

You guys are talking about Goodkind. I've never read the guy's stuff, but it sounds like both he and his works are both fairly crap.

This is his dedication in the book Pillars of Eternity:

Terry Goodkind wrote:

To the people in the United States Intelligence Community, who, for decades, have valiantly fought to preserve life and liberty, while being ridiculed, condemned, demonized, and shackled by the jackals of evil.

Seems like he was using his art as political commentary to me if the first thing he writes in his book is an extremely political statement. And again, the man idolized Ayn Rand and was known to use her ideas as influences on his stories. Do you think that books like Atlas Shrugged are not political?

Coldstream wrote:

I'm not saying that it's not reasonable to choose to avoid supporting a person's work financially if you find their personal conduct is unbecoming. But the aggressive insertion of politics into every form of art really strikes me as yet more of the tedious performative "wokeness" that I see with a lot of the crowd that use the word "problematic" a lot, which is done in lieu of actually doing something to create actual change.

Honestly it sounds to me like you're less interested in the Goodkind conversation and more on arguing about "performative wokeness" in general and using Goodkind as an example of it.