Yeah. I honestly didn't expect people to come down this hard against Mists of Avalon since I know there's still a lot of nostalgia for it! And I can't help but wonder how much of the "burn it all" reaction to MZB is because she's a woman that a lot of other women felt safe with and now feel really betrayed by - there will be plenty of Old White Dude authors coming up later who were known rapey douchebags* who I doubt will get this kind of response. (Asimov, for one.) Because somehow people don't turn against white dudes as hard as they do against other people, when they do turn.

But there is the bit where knowing what you know about a person makes it harder to overlook things in their fiction that you might have previously made excuses for, and you start having trouble thinking of it as great art because now all you can see are the gaping flaws.


*admittedly mostly not as bad as MZB, but then we don't know the bitter details for a lot of them the way we do her.