FWIS3

IDK if anyone has been following the abuse allegations? But uh... wow I didn't see this coming. Like I wasn't too surprised when it turned out he was a cheating hypocritical piece of shit, but this stuff is on a whole other level and makes me feel kind of sick for having been a fan of Firefly. Like just for starters

https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/news/michel ... 15802.html

This piece of shit was creepy enough with Michelle Trachtenberg - a minor at the time - on the set of Buffy that he was barred from being alone with her. And suddenly the dodgier writing around River Tam, and basically everything about Objects in Space, makes sense to me. And like this is the guy who pretty much dictated what "feminism" looked like in pop culture for over a decade... A child abusing piece of shit. Wow I am fucking disgusted. And angry. In the absence of Firefly style rough justice, I can only hope for some fucking legal and personal consequences.

Well, that sucks.

I will say it's such a strange thing these days to separate the art people create from the people who are sometimes terrible who create it. Like, Harry Potter existing has made the world a net better place- I know so many people for whom it was an integral part of childhood, and really helped them get through tough stuff they faced as kids, and I can't imagine never sharing that with my theoretical future children. JK Rowling the person in recent years however sucks.

I'm not sure I have an overreaching conclusion beyond the fact that I do really like say Orson Scott Card books but luckily you can buy them all in secondhand book stores, and same for HP, all while supporting a local business and not authors you don't like, so if there's a Firefly equivalent I say go for it.

Honestly my Firefly fandom wore off, in part because the show's attempts at feminism didn't age well. But yeah it was definitely part of my geek... identity? for a while. I doubt I'd rewatch it except for analytical purposes (and that with strong tea and frequent breaks). But yeah this still hits kind of hard.

Same with HP, but like... I feel less disgusted about HP, for obvious reasons. Rowling is the kind of person I want deplatformed on the Internet and in public media; Whedon, at this point, is the kind of person I want deplatformed from the world of the living.

(Also HP was never something I was as strongly into as a kid, and not at all as an adult? IDK.)

The sad part is that I really liked Firefly and the movie Serenity. I loved what they did with River and her "waif fu". I don't think there was a single episode of Firefly I didn't like. I think that some of the revelations of what a chump he was to work with shed some light on why his series kept getting cancelled even when they had a good fan base.

Good Grief

rommie hit the nail on the head. Michael always said that one should never confuse the artist with the art. something that is not easy to do.