The Struggle of Separating Art from Artist: Neil Gaiman Edition

This fuggin' guy, I swear.

[Warning: The following article contains just all sorts of references to sexual assault of a wide variety]

So, if you're a Neil Gaiman fan you probably already know this but it has been a RIDE for us fans of his work. As the amount of women accusing him of sexual assault nears the double digits, as Neil Gaiman dances around the accusations, denying the claims while stating "he's done things he deeply regrets" and "he was selfish", and with ex-wife Amanda Palmer holding her kid up like a shield and pleading the fifth every time anyone, including a former friend, come to her for her input, it's not looking great.

I know, I know. Innocent until proven guilty, but goddamn is Gaiman going out of his way to make this look bad. Also, the accusations the women are saying sound like something Gaiman would write. A claw foot bathtub in the middle of an outdoor garden? I mean, what?

So how do long time fans deal with this? Do we boycott the work from here on out like so much Rowling? Do we take the works that we've watched and read and enjoyed and continue to enjoy them focusing more on the other people who made the work possible?

I'd want to continue to enjoy Gaiman's work but in this attempt I've run into something I call the Whedon Paradox. I LOVED a lot of stuff that Joss Whedon did and I looked past a lot of the red flags in his work because I thought, "maybe I'm just misreading it because Joss is a feminist." Oops.

Now when I go back and look at his shows like Firefly, Dollhouse, Buffy, etc, I see things without his riot shield marked "Feminism" he'd often bunker behind. The constant close-up of women's feet, making the characters barefoot regardless of whether or not it made any damn sense. The constant sexual double standards his female characters were held to. The casualness in which Firefly antagonist, Jubal Early, stops in the midst of a fairly entertaining monologue to threaten to commit sexual assault on a beloved female character.

When I recently rewatched the first 10 MCU films (for what was an entertaining article you should check out) and was very quickly reminded of Joss Whedon's presence as we see a LOT of close-ups on feet. We see Jane Foster turned into a damsel in distress, Scarlet Witch unable to act unless a man pushes her to act, and of course, the big one, his treatment of Black Widow. He took the Black Widow and turned her into a mother to everyone while at the same time implying a sexual attraction betwixt her and about everyone in the room on a level that would make Freud die laughing. And let's not forget when she compares herself to the Hulk saying her inability to have children makes her a monster.

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But back to Neil Gaiman.

We have this problem now with MANY of Neil Gaiman's works. A lot of things that we sort of just accepted in his work get shown in a new light after the allegations started to pile up.

I love Neverwhere, but the fact that the book attacks the protagonist's career oriented wife (who's main flaw is an incompatibility that the main character chooses to fight against) and, instead, has the main character form a relationship with Door, the exciting magic girl who, according to the book, looked 15.

Anansi Boys uses women like pawns, with the main character, Charlie's, twin brother taking his wife's virginity as merely a way to show off how much more confident he is. The twin brother did this disguised as the protagonist which sort of reminds me of the whole "Revenge of the Nerd - Darth Vader mask" scene. Charlie, then ends up marrying a different woman after "giving up" his fiance to his brother and, instead, marrying a different woman his brother slept with.

A lot of his books feature a myriad of similar red flags. They will often feature a female character that is frequently described as "young" that becomes sexually interested in the male protagonist. If there's witches and one of them looks young you KNOW she's gonna try to fuck the main character. And if a woman is old, you will have the condition of her skin and body described to the point where she might as well be Ben Grimm.

Almost every one of his books seem to focus on a male character who's worried about aging, unhappy with their standard life, and thrown into an opportunity where they can avoid all responsibility of their daily life while traveling and having fun adventures with young girls. Something that I'm sure an author who constantly travels while leaving his kids with other people and racking up accusations of sexual abuse from young women has absolutely NO experience in.

It's REMARKABLY hard to unsee this for me. Much like the work of the aforementioned Whedon, or Orson Scott Card, or Ernest Cline, or, obviously, J.K. Rowling. There are just certain authors who's transgressions shine their previous work in a light that makes it impossible to ignore the signs of the author's crimes.

But, unfortunately, with Neil Gaiman it seems like there are not buttons big enough to sew over our eyes that would prevent us from seeing the signs in his work for many of us.