Neil Gaiman won’t survive the backlash from his fans, and here’s why

Updated 3 weeks ago

#MeToo hit its high water mark a few years ago, and the beach is exposed as a fetid wasteland

I was always more of an Alan Moore fan than a Gaiman fan. I have huge sections of this site devoted to him. I like his succintness and general economy of words. So I can consider myself pretty neutral here. And more importantly, I don’t think artists should be judged by their beliefs. Leni Reifenstahl‘s Triumph of the Will is perhaps the most glaring example, with Die Antwoord an honorable mention.

Will Neil Gaiman, like Marilyn Manson, survive his #MeToo backlash, or will he go the route of fellow comics creator Ed Piskor, whose suicide was needless and tragic, or for that matter, Bill Cosby, and Harvey Weinstein?

Even JK Rowling is calling for Gaiman’s blood, and ridiculing all the gender-ambiguous fans of Sandman. Gaiman is a Woke-friendly feminist, they will say.

Even Gaiman’s wife, Amanda Palmer, was basically a Ghislaine Maxwell!

I don’t think Gaiman will survive. I think the difference with Marilyn is that Manson can reach out straight to his fans and succeed, as the middleman has been disintermediated (LiveNation will go along with money every single time), while Gaiman needs to rely on a host of brand-conscious intermediaries that can de-platform him like they did Bryan Singer and Kevin Spacey.

Gaiman can’t just tell everyone he’s throwing a concert and hang a bunch of anti-Israel pigs on the ceiling, harass anyone who walks out, and still, have it sell out.

It’s still mighty powerful to be a rock star. Rock stars, while not immune to alcohol or drug abuse, are certainly bulletproof to #MeToo, or just being rabid antisemites.

You know who else cut over the middlemen to reach his fans? Donald Trump.

Yet Gaiman may still pull an Arnold Schwarzenegger/Woody Allen and just corpsewalk his way through this. He’s actually pretty lucky given the recent national US election, which proved that all sorts of sexual antics can not only be tolerated, but rewarded with the very highest honor- but inconveniently for him, he’s on the wrong side of the ideological divide for that.

Hypocrisy is perhaps the gravest modern moral sin.

His breakout song still kicks. He told us who he was:

Disclaimer: I met both him and Leonardo Di Caprio (who was with Jennifer Lewis) right before their ascents. Both were nice and cordial, but one time at Wax in SoHo I had a table with Manson and had time to really pick his brain. He was very generous with his time. Maybe it’s because I was wearing a suit and worked in media! And no shenanigans, though it was public and I was a straight dude.

All anecdotes aside, what with Roe v Wade being freaking GONE, the election, people laughing off all sorts of MeToo accusations…. hell, #MeToo is dead.
We now live in an era when you can be a convicted rapist and become president. How surprised should we be that someone with similar allegations hit #1 in their next album?
From a PR perspective, now would be an ideal time to deal with long-simmering accusations. Even for Gaiman, though his liberal fans are throwing him in the purity spiral chainsaw as we speak. Kind of a double standard, if you squint.

It must truly be a dark time to be a liberal/moderate woman today.
The dark reality tunnel we are in is just a little darker now.

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