#marion zimmer bradley

[autisticexpression2]

Just like bad people can make good art, bad people can also have good politics and the insistence that they were faking it and secretly fascist all along is just as irrational as retroactively deciding their entire body of work was always bad and you never liked it anyway.

I think Neil Gaiman genuinely believed he was a good and progressive person and was perfectly sincere in his support of trans rights and representation. I think Joss Whedon genuinely believed he was a feminist ally. I think JK Rowling was very sincere about the anti-fascist themes she wrote into Harry Potter, and thought she was a good queer ally when she clapped back at homophobes on Twitter. I think Marion Zimmer Bradley genuinely believed she was a good feminist.

We aren't reliable judges of our own character, and we all see ourselves as good people, even when we're hurting others. Anyone can justify their intentions to themselves, no matter how vile their actions are, and that's a scary thought. There's a perverse comfort in believing that people who do terrible things are pure evil demons in human skin with no capacity for good, but its just a fantasy. A comforting fantasy. The uncomfortable truth is that bad people are PEOPLE who do good as well as bad things just like you.

[perasperaadpasta]

I have no empathy for Good Omens or Sandman or whatever other Gaiman work fans who 1. just cannot help making the allegations about themselves and 2. are genuinely heartbroken to the point of being unwilling to reasses their attachment to these works (these usually overlap).

When I found out an author I was obsessed with, whose works I read nearly in their entirety and voraciously, whose stories inspired me and filled my imagination for years, turned out to be a paedophile who abused her children, facilitated the abuse of multiple others by her also paedophile husband, and raped her daughter, none of that... mattered anymore. How could it possibly?

I'm talking about Marion Zimmer Bradley, if her rap sheet isn't familiar. Having grown up a nerd who could read at highschool level at 7, and who was, at 12, already sick of how male-centered fiction (and particularly fantasy, my favorite genre) was, discovering The Mists of Avalon was a revelation. The pointedly anti-Christian, unapologetically female-centered narrative was a near-spiritual balm for a closeted lesbian kid in a Catholic small town.

I read all of her Arthuriana books and all of her Darkover series I could find. I'm interested in Arthuriana to this day because of the point of view she offered. The possibility of shifting the male gaze pervasive in art to a female view from within was so instrumental to how I approach art at all. And this is, of course, not pioneered nor exclusive to Bradley, but it was my introduction to it, to this critical and yet respectful framework of experiencing art.

And yet. When I learned what she'd done, it fundamentally and irrevocably changed what she'd said.

Is it really still a work of feminist expression if composed by a rapist? I cannot reconcile the thought that the most execrable creature in feminist thinking can be capable of anything but farcical, hypocritical emulation of sincerity, convincing as it may be. It cannot possibly be earnest and its pretense is pervasive. Even if the story was otherwise so good, so entertaining that its message could be sidelined, there's hardly a lack of that that makes this particular one indispensable.

My admiration for her is all revulsion now. I have no interest in what this sort of thing has to say about anything, safe for possibly in the context of criminal psychology.

I will never reread it. I will never recommend it as entertainment and least of all feminist entertainment.

And here's the thing, this wasn't life-ruining for me. This did not hurt me personally. My world didn't shatter, it didn't even crack. Important as it may have been, the loss of a THING, a book, ONE story in a world so saturated with them several hundred lifetimes wouldn't suffice to know them, is not a loss I would ever have the self-indulgent embarrasment of mourning. It was what it was once, and it is what it is now.

The only people who were hurt were her victims.

Absolutely no exceptions. It's vulgar to a degree I can't wrap my head around to consider otherwise.

[geekynerfherder]

'The Mists Of Avalon' by John Jude Palencar.

Cover art for the novel, 'The Mists Of Avalon', book 1 in the 'Avalon' series written by Marion Zimmer Bradley, published in 1982.

[missmists]

Today I finished a recasing project, it’s an old copy of The Mists of Avalon (a retelling of Arthurian legend from a female centered perspective) which had a badly damaged cover. I embroidered the spine to match the titling in the book, and sanded and painted the edges of the textblock to cover up some staining and where a name had been written across the book which worked pretty well. I like the purple edges though it was chosen to match the ink from the remnants of the name I was covering up, and the rest of the cover materials were chosen to go with the edge colors.

6 of 9 completed for Binderary 2025 only fanfics left.

[spacenoirdetective]

Tim White, cover for "Star of Danger" by Marion Zimmer Bradley, 1994

[cosmonautroger]

Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists Of Avalon, 1983

[lillyli-74]

Seek not to bring me forth, when I am resigned to stay here in death. Here within these undying lands all is at rest, with neither pain nor struggle, here can I forget both love and grief.

~Marion Zimmer Bradley

[vmures]

Art is a tool for expression and conveying emotions, ideas, and experiences. While art always carries seeds of its creator, it also becomes so much more than that once it is let free into the world. It becomes a conversation, a layered thing with different meanings and impacts on different people.

Humans are complex beings and everyone can create art. It can be heartbreaking and infuriating to learn that the creator of a piece of art that profoundly influenced you and changed you, that has become part of you, is a horrible, vile person. But it is important to remember that their art is more than the creator themself. Liking the art and finding meaning in it doesn't make you a horrible person.

It is also very valid to be unable to see the art the same way after you learn about the creator. Everyone has to wrestle with their own relationship to the art in question and how they know view it. You can still appreciate the meaning it had for you once upon a time while acknowledging that it hits differently now.

Often the hardest thing is not the fact that the creator is a vile person, but that they built a convincing mask of being kind and encouraging to others. While we often understand that public personas are not who people really are, when someone makes kindness their brand, it feels like a betrayal to learn that they have been using that mask to prey on others. I know for me, there is a part of me that is mad at falling for the con and that knows I would have been perfect prey because I fell for it.

So when such an unmasking happens, as it so often does, the best advice I can offer is this: be kind, to yourself and to others, as you all wrestle with this paradigm shift. Give yourself space and let yourself feel what you feel. Learn from it. Remind yourself that what we know of creators usually fills less than a thimble if we could distill knowledge into liquid. We know their art, but not them. We can appreciate that they make compelling art without putting them on a pedestal. Remind yourself that all creators are human and pedestals are dangerous places to put anyone, because inevitably you will be let down.

[wild-oats-and-cornflowers]

Thinking about the Neil Gaiman revelations, as someone who has been a casual enjoyer of his work for years. A lot of people are having a tough time with this, and I thought I would chime in my 2 cents on the topic of How To Deal.

I remember in my early 20s (so, like, around 2010 or so) learning about the terrible backstory to Marion Zimmer Bradley, who had both emotionally abused her children and allowed her second husband to abuse them sexually - as well as covering up for his repeated sexual abuse of young boys outside the family. Her Darkover novels had been extremely emotionally important to me in my teen years, and it was very hard having to try and figure out what to do about the fact that someone whose objectively skillfully written books had brought me so much joy and validation and strength had actually been an abuser and abuse facilitator. It was especially boggling to consider that one of her books' plot partly hinged on the profound misery that occurred as a result of unwanted sexual harassment/borderline sexual assault from a socially powerful older man towards a vulnerable teenage boy - the same kind of abusive behavior (though, to a lesser degree even!) that she had excused and covered up in her husband - and how appalling it was for there not to be proper consequences for such abusive behavior. Meaning that she KNEW that what she was excusing and covering up for was bad, and yet she could simultaneously continue to cover it up and excuse it, and abuse her own children, while writing books with beautiful prose that condemned abuse and praised kindness and open-mindedness. A really insane dichotomy of mind, I guess.

The good things I took away from the Darkover books were real, just as real as the terrible things that Bradley did irl; the good things that people have taken away from Gaiman's books are real too, just as real as the terrible things that he did irl. It's natural to want to distance oneself from someone one has just discovered to be awful; that doesn't mean that one has to distance oneself from the good things one already gained. Terrible people can produce beautiful things, and both of those aspects can be true and acknowledged without needing to deny either one. It doesn't make someone a bad person to have unknowingly taken comfort or joy from the work of a morally deplorable person, and it doesn't make them bad to still feel that they got something valuable there. Being a bad person doesn't render someone incapable of skill in writing, either. Acknowledge the badness of the author, yes, it's irresponsible not to. But that doesn't put the onus on you to rewrite your own past.

[cynicalclassicist]

With the stuff about Neil Gaiman that is coming out, I wonder if this might be for my generation what it was like when the stuff about Marion Zimmer Bradley came out. I suppose that with JK Rowling it's a bit like that, but I think that the comparison works better otherwise. You get the idea, we feel disappointed with the authors that we loved.

[pryotra]

At this point I actively condemn anyone who recommends the Mists of Avalon. It's been ten years since her daughter went public. There's no more excuse.

[autisticexpression2]

Neil Gaiman is awful, but some of the discourse I'm seeing on here is unhinged even by tumblr standards. By all means, avoid any future projects he is involved in, but I'm seeing multiple posts demanding that everyone religiously abstain from everything he has ever touched, including books they ALREADY OWN. And then they bring up their own boycott of their Marion Zimmer Bradley collection as if that helps their case. As if it's not even more insane to do this for an author who has been dead for 24 years.

We all need some fresh air, I think.

[boricuacherry-blog]

[vavuska]

So all in the same week…

Neil Gaiman, author Coraline & Good Omens, was MeTooed by his former nanny, as well as a fan he met when she was 18 yrs old.

A NY Times bestselling thriller author, Brendan DuBois— who co-wrote books with James Patterson—was arrested for pedopornography.

AND

Alice Munro’s daughter revealed she was assaulted by her step father as a kid—the man admitted it—but Munro saw it as an “infidelity” and stayed with him. Even AFTER he was found guilty in court—this rembers me of Marion Zimmer Bradley's daughter (I wrote about it here). All covered up.

Seriously.

[geekynerfherder]

'Priestess Of Avalon' by Kinuko Y Craft.

Cover art for the novel, 'Priestess Of Avalon', book 4 in the 'Avalon' series written by Marion Zimmer Bradley & Diana L Paxson, published in 2000.

[moratoirenoir]