Interesting. Reminds me of the meme back in the day that stated that Blake’s 7 (and by extension, Blake’s 7 fans) was created so Whovians would have someone to look down upon.
To try and answer your question, if I am in a convo about Lovecraft (or whoever) and I bring up his racism I most likely will be trying to remind myself and others that he was not a good guy and regardless of how much I like his fiction it is more important for people who look like me to remember that fact and not celebrate him in any meaningful way.
I wish I could give you a hard and fast rule about how I prioritize these things but the truth is I just (do what I assume everyone else does and) figure it out in the moment. Sometimes I want to ignore all the bad and focus on the fun but I don’t ever want to forget the quality and character of the person who created the fun.
You can’t know the quality and character of a person you never met.
This is part of the reason the death of the author is taken so seriously: We used to do literary analysis as a kind of biography, looking into the history of the author to understand the work. This fails utterly for people like Homer, about who we know practically nothing, but even for people we do know more about we end up with necessarily incomplete glimpses into their personality. There’s no way to know a person without meeting them, and even then you only know a part of the whole person.
You can only know very little of most authors. You can decide you know enough, based on some specific things, but never imagine you are rejecting the whole person when you reject their works. You’re only rejecting their works and, maybe, rejecting the concept of appreciating the context the works came from as you understand it. The person, alive or dead, is unknown to you.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear on this but…I am not necessarily dismissing or rejecting the person’s work(s). I’m simply adding more context and metadata and making sure I don’t blindly celebrate someone’s work while glossing over all of the bad shit they’ve done.
As an example, growing up I loved The Cosby Show. It was the first major television show that depicted a black American family that was similar to my own. After I found out that Cosby was a rapey son of a bitch it didn’t change my feelings for the show but it damn sure changed my opinion about Bill. Now when I reference the show I can’t help but remind myself to celebrate the show and not to celebrate Cosby because he doesn’t deserve it.
WWE
Having been a pro wrestling and WWE fan for over 30 years I would not describe the fanbase as “the least pathetic”.
There are hardcore fans that very annoying…spending thread after thread on message boards arguing about how many star ratings a match deserved. And whether the most prominent wrestling journalist accurately rates matches or favors particular companies and wrestlers. It’s very annoying.
I can see the difficulty here. It’s not easy to recognize the man’s influence on horror without celebrating him in some meaningful way. I think the World Fantasy awards went the right direction when they stopped using his image for the awards they gave to authors.
Why? I have zero interest in any team sport, but I don’t think sports fans are necessarily or even usually pathetic. I am quick to mock anyone who cost plays as Chewbacca as safe from unicorns, but I don’t feel any such impulse with sports fans.
Interesting allusion you’ve chosen, Skald. Some might view sports fandom as being on the spectrum of “toxic masculinity,” and perforce, subject to placement within the constellation of “things that are pathetic.”
The most ardent sports fan I know is my very female and very feminist baby sister, so I would be cherry of calling sports fandom “toxic masculinity.”
Buffy fans, maybe? They tend to just really like the show rather than get rabid about it.
Bjork fans seem to be genuinely very normal people who just like Bjork, but she definitely has a pretty large fanbase.
Of course, I am part of both fanbases, but I really don’t know that much about fandoms I’m not a part of, so it’d be hard for me to judge.
It was written over 400 years ago, though. And the hath now a Jew eyes speech subverts a lot of the negative aspects. It’s very easy for actors to play Shylock as a flawed but sympathetic character, which wouldn’t be easy if he’d been written as an out-and-out villain.
I’ll go with Heinlein fans. They tend to be older, quieter, and are disproportionally made up of military members, engineers, and scientists. Many of whom work in the actual space industry. One of them was the founder of Jet Propulsion Labs. One of his books is on the required reading list at Annapolis. Both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos were fans, and both have won the Heinlein prize.
You don’t generally see them hanging out in groups at cons.
On the negative side, there is a branch of his fandom that is into sexual weirdness and various woo beliefs like ESP and dark magic. They were a larger fraction in the 60’s, but not so much anymore.