Uses and abuses of mythology

[seluecus]

I’ve been thinking and talking recently with ploratrix about the use (and misuse) of mythology in geek culture and popular media, so I thought I’d post something about it and ask for feedback from the community

Comments

[foxie]

I'm not some Neil Gaiman fangirl unwilling to admit any of that. But
there are plenty of other male writers that make me far more irritated.

I have yet to find a writer who's "perfect" when it comes to not including anything racist, sexist, etc in their work. It's a spectrum. I know we come down hard around here on people for fucking up even a little bit in those areas, and that's understandable -- this is, after all, the place we go to talk about that. But the other side of that is, we ALL fuck up. We all have biases and we all grew up in a problematic society that taught us to assume things that aren't true, and we're all working to get past it. The most we can do is acknowledge and apologize when we do fuck up, and give others that chance.

Write Neil Gaiman an e-mail -- you probably have a pretty coherent argument and it's worth making him hear it. He reads and responds to e-mail, or so I hear. I've never done it.

That said? Please don't be angry at me about the fact that white male heterosexual men make up our Famous Writers bin ("humping his leg"? WTF?! No!). As a professional writer, I'm doing what I can to counteract that bullshit, but it's slow work. Hopefully it'll be better by the end of my lifetime. We'll see, I guess.

[entelodont]

Neil Gaiman is notoriously oblivious to criticisms to the depiction of marginalized people in his work. The fact that he's still making stupid remarks like the one I linked above after all this time proves it. I do not have to approve of someone's writing because there are worse depictions out there, nor do I have to accept the old "everyone makes mistakes" crap when stuff like this has been debated for decades, centuries even. He is not a child. He is a man with incredible privilege and as such there is no reason not to hold him accountable for what he does.