Some more stray thoughts about this Joss Whedon business.

Firstly, I've seen people saying, "Lol, I always said Whedon was a hack." Well, perhaps they have (though if so, they're wrong), but in connecting this with revelations about his moral character they'd be making a category error.

Certainly a person's moral failings can be visible in their work, but it's not inevitable and it's no use as a diagnostic tool. Good people can create art that ranges from iffy to abysmal, and vice versa.

I mean, I always thought Harry Potter was pants, but that had nothing to do with Rowling's transphobia, which has only become visible in recent years. She used to look like a well-meaning, kind, progressive person who churned out terrible fantasy books.

(Similarly, I've rarely got on with Gareth Roberts' Doctor Who work, but that's personal taste, not moral superiority on my part. There are Who authors and scriptwriters who seem to be perfectly lovely people and whose work I dislike just as much.)

So even leaving aside the contributions of Whedon's collaborators, it doesn't bother me that I still love Buffy. I love lots of "problematic" things -- Sherlock Holmes, Narnia, Dorothy L Sayers, Olaf Stapledon, West Side Story, The Prisoner, Paul Simon, Alan Moore.

Indeed, Doctor Who, which is as near as I have these days to a religion, has often -- if not usually -- been racist, sexist, Eurocentric, xenophobic and heteronormative. (When I had an actual religion, I wasn't blind to its traditional flaws either.)

Secondly, there's often a disconnect between the politics of a creator's art and their behaviour. Whedon seemingly treated his female actors appallingly, but counterintuitively that doesn't impact Buffy's feminism. It was still a profoundly progressive show.

It may feel less so by today's standards -- its California is unrealistically white, there's a lot of male gaze going on, gay men are erased, the lesbians aren't allowed to be happy -- but at the time it was absolutely trailblazing.

This isn't unique -- Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing has been subject to a similar reappraisal (partly driven by accounts of his own behaviour towards women), but its worth and importance at the time were absolutely real.

Looking back further, works created with explicitly antiracist agendas -- Uncle Tom's Cabin, Heart of Darkness, A Passage to India -- are often, in retrospect, racist as fuck. That doesn't mean they had no progressive value at the time, or that they're worthless as art now.

And this means that those of us who do create art should never be complacent about how future audiences will perceive us. Many of us will fail to live up to the morals of the younger generation. Ours (whichever it may be) doesn't and will never have a monopoly on righteousness.

...I don't really have a conclusion here. Just "Whedon bad, Buffy good," plus lots of nuance that probably isn't best suited to Twitter. Hence the indigestible thread. Sorry.