Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Because these author's are basing their work off of the work of someone who is an out and out big time racist. They should get some better ideas that are no based on the work of such a person.
|
I’m curious as to where one draws the line with this line of thought. Orson Scott Card has issues mentioned earlier on in this thread but most of his work doesn’t strongly reflect those views, I’m sure if you dug and stretched you might find some connections but you’d be stretching in order to do so. Philip Pullman would have problematic views for certain religious groups. Stephen King was a rip roaring drunk who by his own confessions doesn’t remember writing some of his own books (note this isn’t claiming he didn’t write them just that he was that intoxicated). Nabokov‘s Lolita has been accused of romanticizing pedophelia. Leo Tolstoy sure was a crappy husband though his wife might have had her revenge on him. Theodor Geisel aka Dr. Seuss, wore blackface in college and has several books with racist depictions of PoCs.
Should no work reference their ideas or, where allowed legally, take place in the universes they created?
It’s one thing to condemn the work of a problematic author, it’s quite another to condemn the work of a non problematic author who uses that work to grow their own. Especially if in doing so they remove any problematic elements from transitioning into their own.
Most often you can’t even make the argument that buying a second authors work funds in any way the problematic author because that problematic author doesn’t get royalties for the sales of books they did not write.