but what’s wrong with being willing to separate an author from their work? why is that so hard? especially ender’s game, which, aside from one or two lines from some stupid boys in the book, holds next to none of card’s horrible views. you shouldn’t bar good literature just b/c the author is a terrible person.

thecheshirecass:

johndarnielle:

gailsimone:

Do what you want.

I will choose to do the same. OSC is not just a raging homophobe, he actively worked to enact legislation to oppress rights for lgbtq people. He said he would try to bring down the government if they disagreed.

Seriously, screw that guy. There are a thousand books I haven’t yet read that don’t have that guy attached.

this is exactly my position on this kinda thing by the way. I don’t need to separate an author from his work if the author’s a truly terrible human being. nobody’s perfect – I don’t ask anybody to be perfect; I just ask them not to be, you know, nazis, or virulent homophobes. But if they are, then I don’t care how good their work is purported to be. I don’t have to listen to Burzum; there’s no shortage of amazing black metal that isn’t written by racist murderers. the amount of tremendous black metal that meets the “not the work of an appalling horrible person” yardstick is sufficient to excuse me from having to listen to the stuff made by assholes. so when people go into the “I separate the art from the artist” thing, I’m like – why? if we live several lifetimes, we should all be so lucky, we won’t read all the great books or hear all the great music. we can allow artists to be human and make mistakes, even big huge everybody-has-their-personal-lows mistakes, while still saying “artists who are just worthless garbage as people, who actively and unapologetically campaign to make others’ lives worse, don’t deserve to have their work read.” we will not actually miss much; we can put our attention elsewhere. there’s just no shortage of amazing books to read, incredible music to hear. unless one wants to claim “no no, these terrible-people artists are actually the best artists,” in which case I think one might want to more closely examine one’s aesthetics.

Especially timely for me having recently discovered Brandon Sanderson is a big old fucking homophobe. Like can we please just stop letting Mormons write?