Tumblr crosspost (10 February 2021)

[anghraine]

I’m so tired of posts about how the OP never liked the thing made by [creator who turned out to be an awful person], they always knew it was mediocre, and now, aha, vindication.

This isn’t just about JKR, for the record; the specific instance that set it off was about someone else, though of course I’ve seen it with HP.

It redirects the conversation onto the quality of the creation, and the quality does not matter.

The person is awful regardless of whether they’re good at [thing]. The conversation around that doesn’t need to devolve into arguments about whether [thing] actually is good or not, which is at best a distraction. Going on about your good judgment isn’t helping people, it’s just patting yourself on the back and often sneering at those who didn’t have your ~vision, including less visionary people who are among the terrible person’s targets. That is, I hope obviously, a shitty thing to do!

And it also very frequently implies that people’s awfulness—bigotry, abusiveness, whatever—is going to be apparent in their art or their outwards conduct. Often this isn’t true and leads to such obviously bad faith scrutinizing of their work that it weakens the actual, real objections to them as a person. Terrible people are very, very often perfectly upstanding outwardly and, when artists, creators of high quality work. There is absolutely no need to make it about how right-thinking people will know there’s something off about the person in question, or just dislike them before the revelation. Plenty of right-thinking people won’t know and have no clear reason to dislike them!

Just. It’s not about you and how right you were and scolding the less prophetic. It’s about the terribleness of the person and the cultural strains they’re participating in and the harm done.