Watching it go sour, watching it grow bitter
It’s a special kind of heartbreak to lose the love you held for a form of art. Be it music, writing, a film, or anything else, it’s a very specific feeling of bland hollowness that bores into you when you face something that filled your heart and soul with colour once upon a time, but no longer does. And in some cases that hollow might not be so empty after all. Sometimes you’ll look at something you once held dear and find yourself afflicted with an equally unpleasant but much more incendiary feeling: resentment. Resentment at looking at something once so inspiring and joyous and knowing that for you in this moment, it’s all spoiled.
While I could go on to discuss changing times, changing preferences or personal development taking you in a direction you had never foreseen, I will do no such thing. Instead I’m going to fan the flames and take a look at the staggering, disturbing and unfortunately very real phenomenon of artists souring their own work by being, in the simplest of terms, absolutely horrible people.
From domestic abuse to anti-LGBTQA+ views to a truly appalling amount of sexual misconduct, recent years and the constant growth of internet culture and the 24-hour news cycle have taken the already disturbing amounts of people in positions of power and admiration doing horrible things and raised into a neverending hellscape of accusations, trials and (more often than not) said people proudly standing by said words and actions with full knowledge of how much hurt they’re causing. At this point I’m pretty sure anyone who has even blinked in the general direction of the internet has been forced to see several renowned artists, musicians, actors, YouTubers, writers, directors, producers, politicians or anyone else be accused or convicted of heinous crimes or use their online presence to berate, erase or invalidate the humanity and rights of others. If you haven’t, good for you, but for the rest of us it’s a rollercoaster from hell of seeing who’s going to turn out to absolutely suck today.
And guys, it’s so embittering. To see someone you used to look up to or admire turn out to be nothing short of an ignorant idiot at best and downright disgusting at worst can feel genuinely upsetting and violating. After all, this is someone you let into your thoughts and life (indirectly, but still) and now it can feel like they’re making a mockery of you. It hurts, and it’s allowed to hurt. You’re allowed to be pissed off at these people for ruining your enjoyment, poisoning your memories and making you throw away or hide all your memorabilia. Just because you don’t know them personally doesn’t mean you can’t be angry or hurt at seeing people others look up to act in disrespectful, inhumane or criminal ways.
But before I let you go to boil in your refreshed annoyance, I want to remind you of something. These people, these former icons and role models, are cruel and thoughtless. You are not. You, I hope, can tell the difference in personal opinion and something genuinely dehumanising or destructive. You, unlike them, understand the power of words and actions and influence, and won’t use their actions or my words as an excuse to be hateful towards others. Telling a person they’re disgusting or worthless because they like something fictional you do not is not the way to go here. Someone’s fave being problematic is, and I cannot stress it enough, not a reason to insult them. You’re allowed to be angry, but fiction and reality, the guilty and the innocent, the known and the stranger are two different things and I hope against hope that people would learn the difference between these two. This is why I’ll leave you off with this friendly encouragement that I wish I could speak to every single one of the people this article has been inspired by: it’s not that hard to be a decent person, you have no excuse.
