Content Warning for mentions of accused abuser and sexual-assaulter Neil Gaiman, non-specific mentions of the allegations against him, and the discussion of other figures in the public eye who have also been revealed to be terrible people (ex. Rowling, Musk).

Today, the thirteenth of January as I’m writing this, someone a lot of people saw as a “hero” was dealt a damning blow. It was nothing new to a lot of people, since the allegations against Neil Gaiman originally broke a few months ago and most people were willing to accept them then, given the stories and the fact that he immediately vanished off the internet. In the time between now and then, I did enough research to find out the rest of this most recent article’s contents (outside of the incredibly specific details the article contains, some of which I could have happily lived my whole life without learning since the article feels like it fell on the “exploitative spectacle” side of the “how much detail is appropriate” line), but it feels like a lot of people either learned that Gaiman is an alleged sexual assaulter and harasser for the first time, or just didn’t really believe it until today. There’s been a large amount of people reacting defensively or overly aggressively, running the gamut from centering themselves as they tear their clothes and anoint themselves in ashes while mourning the loss of this once-beloved author, to centering themselves by claiming they had some special insight that everyone else lacked as evidenced by how much they’d never liked Gaiman’s writing, to saying that this doesn’t matter to their appreciation for Gaiman’s art because his creations aren’t him so it is okay if they still like and enjoy his stuff despite his true character being exposed through the stories of the people he has harmed finally coming to widespread public awareness. People, predictably, are having a difficult time reacting to the grief they feel at the falling of a heroic bust they placed on a pedestal or the felling of a false god they now feel justified in actively hating, depending on where they fall on the spectrum of reaction. It’s a lot to deal with for everyone involved, but I mostly feel bad for the people just trying to quietly, peacefully, or appropriately angrily process their emotions without making it anyone else’s problem who are suddenly inundated in people who need their feelings to be witnessed or externally validated.

I can’t help but think about a post I wrote almost two and a half years ago, how grief can rewrite the past because we, as people, have a difficult time holding conflicting ideas in our heads. For instance, it was very difficult for people back then to accept that the Queen of England, this figurehead of one of the most abusive nations in existence, might be mourned by people who knew the figure behind the figurehead (those who had encountered her on a relatively positive personal basis or who had, say, just lost a beloved family member) or that this figure who was an active participate in all that her government used her figurehead to accomplish (include some incredibly heinous stuff) might have her death been seen as a thing to celebrate. Now, as people react to the grief of seeing someone they’d held up as a hero be unmasked as a villain, they are having a difficult time holding in their minds the conflicting thoughts that a story that was very important to them was created by someone who now feels gross to associate with at best and scarily similar to the people who have harmed them at second-to-worst (the worst is reserved for the people he harmed). It is difficult, of course, to react to such a powerful and emotionally charged change to how one sees the world without getting defensive since our brains react to attacks against our identities (or things we heavily identify with) the same way they react to physical assault, but it is work well worth doing. Maybe once the work of the moment–accepting that the writer behind many beloved stories, characters, and shows was actually a terrible, harmful person–is done, we can move on to doing some even more important work for the future: we should not have heroes.

Elevating anyone beyond the realm of the merely human has never worked out well. Religious figures, celebrities, rock stars, rulers… the list goes on and on. Every time we elevate people, that we hold them up as somehow more than human or treat them as unapproachable objects of worship or reverence, we are AT BEST denying them their humanity and the ability to react fully to the complexities of their lives. And it’s not just celebrities or traditional “heroes” either! It’s tons of people in our lives that we assume have it together or assume are somehow above what we write off as the petty or horrible problems of our lives. One of the worst experiences I’ve ever had was realizing that my relationship with a sibling was potentially never going to develop further because they see me as some higher order of being thanks to the events of our childhood, teenaged years, and early adult lives, and that’s such a minor thing compared to the curse of celebrity or the blind faith of hero worship. I can’t imagine being comfortable with that kind of fame or power in people’s heads without either becoming a terrible person or already being one. I also can’t imagine blindly following or supporting someone that heavily, but then I had my illusions about the world dispelled at a young age and haven’t worshipped any kind of heroes since (it’s difficult to put blind faith in anyone when every bit of blind faith you ever placed in your parents or the supposedly responsible adults in your life came back to bite you before you’d finished your first decade of life).

I’ve deleted and rewritten this post four times (three of those were half-paragraphs, to be entirely fair, though the fourth was two whole paragraphs of writing) as I’ve tried to figure out what I’m trying to say here. Yes, what Gaiman has allegedly done is horrible. Yes, I believe every story against him (whatever tiny, momentary doubts I might have ever held were dispelled pretty much immediately due to how Gaiman just vanished rather than say or do anything, which wouldn’t have made him seem less guilty mind you, it just wouldn’t have felt like he’d been waiting for a shoe to drop). Yes, I still use the word “alleged” because I don’t have the kind of money to face down any kind of lawsuit should his PR firm decide to go on that kind of campaign (not that I think this is likely, given the smallness of my personal blog, but I am very aware of how little power I have in most encounters with fame or wealth). That said, I feel no hesitation to describe him as a terrible person since that’s just an opinion and I can say that I think he’s a fucking hypocritical ghoul all day long. I will also freely admit that his books are still on my shelves. I’d like to say that’s because I was too exhausted and worn down form the rest of my life to spend the emotional energy on excising his writing from my library, but that would be dishonest. I spent a long part of my adulthood admiring and enjoying his writing. One of the best compliments I ever got about a bit of writing I did compared mine to Gaiman’s. I am not exempt from needing to process my feelings and figure my shit out. I’m just also not in denial about what all this means. From the day the allegations dropped, I knew I was never going to spend another penny on anything to do with the man. I have already planned how to fill the holes excising his stories will leave in my life (partially thanks to a friend, who reminded me of a beloved author I keep forgetting to read more of). I’ve made up my mind and just need to process my emotions. Feel my feelings and all that. And then throw all those books out.

I just wanted to take some time to write all this because I felt it needed to be said. I don’t want to tell YOU what to do. I think YOU need to make up your own mind and find your own peace in this world. That doesn’t mean I support whatever decision you make or that those around you won’t judge you based on the conclusion you come to. It just means I’m not going to be proscriptive here. You have to figure this stuff out for yourself and maybe reconsider your relationships with the people you count as your heroes. After all, we’ve got a lot of examples to show us all how blind hero worship can be manipulated to do great harm. How that kind of fervor and energy and be whipped up to horrible ends even without the usual excuse of religious zeal. Trump. Musk. Gaiman. Rowling. So many people who have used their celebrity and the power granted by their frenetic supporters to do so much harm in the world that, sometimes, I wonder, if it wouldn’t be better if we all found a way to live without the need for heroes. They’re all just people, after all. Ordinary people with the potential to be horrible or considerate. Ordinary people we, collectively as the Human Race, have granted far too much power to. I don’t know if this will ever change, but I think that changing how we view these kinds of people will be a necessary part of moving towards whatever comes after this horrible moment in history.