#TW: mentions of NG and his SA allegations

[aureliusssss]

This goes to everyone who claims that one single person can ruin a project far bigger than himself. If you actually cared about the victims, if you actually cared about people attaching themself to a fandom with a problem creator, then you'd do something. You'd stop attacking people online and focus on what's right.

Gleafer has never said it better, for those interested I have included the links below:

First

Second

Third

Thank you to everyone who takes time out of their day to donate or simply share. The problem is NG. Not the fans. The problem is NG supporters. Not the majority of fans.

My blog is a strict no rape apologist place. I won't allow people to discredit organisations working to relinquish acts much like his.

So as my final message: stop attacking people, it gets you absolutely nowhere. My heart and soul goes out to victims like Scarlett and Caroline and others involved like Tory Amos.

[grumpy-gran]

The conversation around NG and the allegations seem to me to have devolved into pandemonium much quicker this time than the last, when the allegations initially came out. Idk why that is. There’s so much vitriolic, combative, moral grandstanding, that any balanced discourse has lost all meaning.

It’s weird. It’s all “fandom this, rape apologia that.” Or “how dare you moral police what I can or cannot enjoy.”

TW: SA, CSA, self harm mentions below

There is a man who has for decades allegedly physically and mentally harmed vulnerable people, fans included. For decades apparently. In front of a child, apparently. He’s misused mental health resources available to him to manipulate a survivor. He’s threatened self harm when called out for his behaviour. He’s used his celebrity to override rules of basic human decency. He’s caused DEEP fucking trauma. And so, I get the sense that a lot of us are super-triggered by it when we type our responses on here.

Meanwhile, This spineless coward has sat in his ivory tower in complete fucking silence and watched as keyboard wars are waged over his legacy. As far as I can tell, he’s not being held accountable in any court of law. He’s maybe lost a few sources of income, and that’s a maybe. The survivors? I don’t know how they’re doing, and I hope they’re doing well, but I don’t know if they’ve seen any substantial justice. I don’t know if they ever will.

There was a general sense of massive grief combined with rallying behind survivors six months ago. I’ve read about some fundraisers… some people had helpfully put long posts last time about how to help, how to do better.

Right now it’s just angry words everywhere, and I genuinely don’t know who it is meant to benefit.

Let’s just take a beat. Let’s think about who we are yelling at, really. Stay hydrated, get some sleep and get some distance.

[milehighmegs]

Healing Through Fiction

TW: Discussion but not recounting of SA and DV

Also, this is a very personal story, so if you're not comfortable with/don't have the spoons for a stranger's darkest confession, please go now, and with my full understanding.

In the wake of the allegations against NG, I find myself incredibly conflicted re: being a fan of his work, namely Good Omens. Only days before I learned about this, I was taken by an irrepressable urge to watch GO, over & over, and relive all the joy, pain, & bewilderment of the connection between Zira & Crowley. As an AuDHDer, with a smattering of other ND issues thrown in just for funsies (thanks God-or-whatever), seeing both the pure love and the heart-rending conflict between these two ND- and queer-coded characters has given me a deep insight into my own world. This will be long, so bear with me, and it gets a little tangled so I'll do my best to sort out this particular ugly bag of snakes.

[Note: I identify as cishet female, so when I refer to the LGBTQIA+ community in terms of my experience, I do not mean to infer that I'm part of that community. I am, however, a staunch ally & advocate, so please know that none of the reference to nor any language surrounding such reference is intended to be offensive. If at any point I do offend, please accept my apologies and educate me on better ways to address this.]

So.

A number of years ago, as a full-blown adult, I was touched by a family member in a way that family shouldn't be touched. Afterwards, I not only had deep feelings of shame, anger, hatred, & self-loathing, but I also had a dark feeling that something like this had happened to me before. It danced just at the edge of my memory while never stepping fully into the light. But I felt it, deep in my bones. Could I say for certain that I had been molested as a child? No, and I still can't. But I can't shake the feeling. The suspicion that maybe, just maybe, I'd been through this already, when I was too young to process it, thereby shoving it way down in order to bury the corpse of such a horrific experience. And yet its ghost has always haunted me, always been there at the corners of my emotional vision, always sliding up alongside me when things got intimate with all of my partners, no matter how deeply I loved or trusted them.

In addition to a potential traumatic childhood experience, it wasn't known at the time but I am (as mentioned) AuDHD. Because of this, I have a hard time getting to know people at first, but once I see even a hint of reciprocation of friendship, respect, or trust, I unload. And I mean like, UNLOAD. Having spent a vast majority of my life feeling rejected by peers, teachers/adult "authority" figures, even my own family, any sign of acceptance by others is like water in the desert. Alas, because I've come on too strong, it's overwhelming for others (both NT & ND), and it was all an oasis of my own wishful thinking. Again comes the rejection, again comes the self-loathing, lather, rinse, repeat.

Shame spirals really and truly suck.

To escape the harsh reality of my lonely little world, I did what any good "gifted" kid would: I disappeared into books. My favorites were fantasy, or historical fiction/period pieces (think 'Little House on the Prairie' and 'Number the Stars'). When it came to TV, I of course watched cartoons, but my favorite shows were the primetime sci-fi serials that my parents watched, namely Star Trek: The Next Generation and Quantum Leap. I won't get into a huge expose on the impact ST:TNG has had on my life (that's a story for another time), but it IS pertinent to my point (which I SWEAR I'll be getting to eventually!). Movies were especially fun escapes, though I wasn't much of Disney kid. I was (and still am) WAY more into the dark stuff. My top 4 favorite childhood films are 1) The Dark Crystal, 2) The Secret of NIMH, 3) The Neverending Story, and 4) Labyrinth. I also loved (and still love) just about anything Tim Burton. These years would have been prime for me to get into NG's works, but alas, I wasn't to find out about them until I was much older. As I got older, music took a starring role in the dealing-with-my-feelings-via-art arena, especially heavy, loud, frequently angry music. I was the "goth chick" in high school, and I've got the pictures to prove it. I still cherished the stories, shows, & movies from my younger years, but my tastes grew darker & angrier as I found less acceptance among my peers & family as a teenager, and even more pushback from those damned adult "authority" figures. This has continued into my adulthood.

So on that note, and (sorta) rounding back to the title here, stories are my favorite thing in the world because they offer the experience of living someone else's life, or putting yourself into that world and living the life of your choosing, rather than the one that was handed to you and in which you then made choices, not all of them good. Also, stories offer us a chance to be part of something bigger than ourselves because the central point of what I would deem a good story is that it's greater than the sum of its parts. The biggest reason ST and Marvel are my biggest fandoms is because they're primarily about good if flawed people doing their damnedest to set themselves or their differences aside and come together to save the world. While I don't imagine I'll ever be part of something quite that grandiose (but a girl can dream, yeah?), it's still something I've always craved: to be part of a group of people who, even if they aren't saving the world, they're saving each other just by being together. And I don't mean 'saving' in the sense of the broken-wing or savior complexes; I mean they're offering trust, friendship (or more), respect, support, & honesty to one another by accepting each other exactly the way they are BECAUSE of their so-called flaws. They pick each other up off the ground in hard times, and lift each other up onto their shoulders in good ones. They come together to achieve goals that they couldn't without one another, and always share the burden of defeat as well as the fruits of victory.

To put all of this into a somewhat messily wrapped package... Good Omens (and all the fan theories, analyses, and art of such) has been more insightful and liberating for me in terms of my emotional health than my 40+ years of relationships, attempted self-discovery, & shadow work. Watching Zira & Crowley love each other so thoroughly depsite the fact that they're supposed to be ineffable enemies gives me hope that in all my broken, battered, self-loathing ways... maybe I can be loved like that, too. What NG and Sir Terry Pratchett created all those years ago, and what has been brought to life by the brilliant messieurs Sheen & Tennant, is imo the (literal!) greatest love story of all time. The conflicts, their "flaws," and their ultimate acceptance of each other through it all, is the purest form of the deepest love ever in all of fictional creation.

And this is where the conflict comes in.

In addition to my suspicions about previous childhood SA, I spent a good chunk of my teen & earlier adult years being... well, promiscuous. It boils down to a desperate need for acceptance & validation as well as having been starved for physical affection as a child (we are NOT a lovey-dovey family). Sadly, the reality was a string of being used and then rejected, or enduring a continuous, insidious stretch of lies, manipulation, gaslighting, & verbal, even almost physical abuse. One of my former partners came very close to full-on assault, but stopped short of inflicting actual physical pain or damage. This does mean that it does not count. I had to learn that after years of trying to reconcile with what had actually happened.

Following my SA as an adult, I was lost, confused, angry, ashamed, and I dove deep into a well of anger, self-loathing, isolation; I even flirted with a bit of misandry. And could anyone blame me? I was, after all, hurt by a man I had loved & trusted for literally my entire life to that point, and that trust was broken in the worst possible way. Nearly every other time a man had touched me like that had led to pain, shame, & feelings of abandonment. I told myself that men couldn't be trusted, that even though they weren't all That Guy™, I would never know who I was actually dealing with until it was too late. Better to just put up the walls and be done with it altogether. I'm still struggling with this today, with no small amount of cognitive dissonance thrown in thanks to a few ongoing complicated situations in my life. Will I ever really learn? <sigh>

Having found comfort & healing in stories like Good Omens, learning about the allegations against one of its creators (and of other works that I've admired & loved) throws a big giant wrench into this whole thing. What a cruel twist of fate, finding out that someone who created something that had eleviated the pain of my trauma has potentially inflicted that EXACT SAME kind of pain on other people? It's the purest form of conflicted cognitive dissonance I can think of. Ironic that so much of my personal emotional development should come from the work of a person now accused of the thing that gave me the need for recovery in the first place.

As another interesting connection to GO, I feel kinda like Crowley: he was cast out of Heaven, and because of it, he met and developed a defining relationship with Zira, the very person who makes him feel safe, feel loved, and whom he loves in return, knowing that Zira has (almost) always sided with the very people who cast Crowley out in the first place. It's a wicked circle, is it not? So on top of finding healing in the underlying but obvious implications of GO, I identify with one of the lead characters. I also identify with them being "outcasts" (as in outcasts from their respective societies) in terms of their rebelliousness, and their reality-related "otherness" in terms of their queer/nonbinary/gender fluid presentations and ND tendencies. I'm not LGBTQIA+ myself, but I relate to and sympathize with being ignored or actively driven away by people who don't accept me for who I am in my entirety, although this is more related to my ND status (Zira & Crowley are more frequently referred to in the LGBTQIA+ sense than in the ND sense, but it's in the same vein). There's more to this relatability with Crowley in terms of being the "errant child," but that'll go a little too off subject to get into here.

[Again, I don't mean to claim that my ND experience and s**ual trauma are the same as or worse than being ostracized, physically hurt, and/or chronically bullied for being LGBTQIA+. I only mean to draw similarities between my experience and the descriptions & stories of these characters. I ask again that you educate me if I'm in the wrong here.]

So... what IS the point that I SWORE I would get to eventually? Here's the point:

My point is... dolphins. That's my point.

Sorry, couldn't help myself. =)

That healing through fiction & escapism, and the support & artistry of a strong fan community, is valid and helpful, and therefore should be as accepted as traditional therapy. But what do we do when the creator becomes the source of pain for other people? Everyone's answer to this is going to be different, and for different reasons, and EVERY ONE OF THEM IS VALID BECAUSE IT IS PERSONAL. (I will have NO talk of anyone being "wrong" for their opinion on MY blog, so be gone, foul fiends.) I am in the camp of separating the art from the artist, and yet... I can't ignore the accusations against him. I can't ignore the stories of these women, because I know how I felt when I talked about my assault with people I thought would believe & support me. They defended him. Made excuses, tried to blow it off, told me not to talk about it... it was infuriating, and invalidating, and all kinds of other awful shit. I know what these women are going through, so I can't ignore this whole thing outright. But then I turn on 'The Sandman', or scroll through my 'Ineffable' Pinterest board, or see the copy of 'Neverwhere' on my nightstand... it's a fuckin rollercoaster, folks.

If you can relate to any of these experiences and you feel up to sharing, I'd love to hear your story. I know that a cishet woman saying shit like 'I'm a safe space' can induce eye-rolling hard enough to see brain matter, but my intention is the same.

Thanks for getting this far with me, and for being my own safe space. Tumblr, while I'm EXTREMELY late to the party, is my favorite place in the world... next to my own little mental creation of Zira's bookshop, where I peruse the shelves with wonder, cozy up in a big comfy chair, and flip through tomes of ancient wisdom while my cocoa doth grow cold.

-MK

[aureliusssss]

I adore Gleafer, if I didn't I wouldn't follow her patreon

This goes to everyone who claims that one single person can ruin a project far bigger than himself. If you actually cared about the victims, if you actually cared about people attaching themself to a fandom with a problem creator, then you'd do something. You'd stop attacking people online and focus on what's right.

Gleafer has never said it better, for those interested I have included the links below:

First

Second

Third

Thank you to everyone who takes time out of their day to donate or simply share. The problem is NG. Not the fans. The problem is NG supporters. Not the majority of fans.

My blog is a strict no rape apologist place. I won't allow people to discredit organisations working to relinquish acts much like his.

So as my final message: stop attacking people, it gets you absolutely nowhere. My heart and soul goes out to victims like Scarlett and Caroline and others involved like Tory Amos.