Random Roar: Supporting Bad People

 

Adolf Hitler, among other things he’s famous for, is often considered to be a bad artist.  He tried and failed to get into an art school a couple times.  To some, that must mean that he sucked at art.  He didn’t.  He just didn’t have what the art world could appreciate in an artist.  Unfortunately, in the years since being rejected for his art, Hitler became known for some very monstrous acts and pushed the world to a second global war, one that necessitated the first global war be retroactively renamed.

Can you separate a man from the works that they produce, or do you have to always be mindful of the people you’re supporting when you consume a piece of media?  I feel like I can acknowledge Hitler’s talent with a paint brush even if I also acknowledge that he ended up becoming history’s most evil human.  At the same time, I wouldn’t want to own any of his paintings, even though I know that he’ll never be enriched from the sale.

It’s a little tougher when the person in question is still alive, and stopping your support of that person would negatively affect others.  I agree that it is a little gauche to compare a living person to Hitler, but I couldn’t help but think of Hitler’s paintings when I was on Twitter the other day and I read some of the things that Kevin Sorbo has been tweeting recently.  The man who once played Hercules is definitely nowhere close to being Hitler, but with some of the things he’s been saying, I wouldn’t be surprised if he has opponents who think of him as such.

As someone who used to watch Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, I had come to see Kevin Sorbo as… well, okay, he wasn’t always the best actor, but he was in stuff that I liked.  It’s like how Scott Bakula was in Quantum Leap, which I watched nearly every week, and then Enterprise, which I also watched every week, even the painfully slow and boring third season.  This lent him the kind of star power that other people would attribute to a movie actor they like or someone who happened to sing a bunch of their favourite songs.

But then to find out that Kevin Sorbo’s a garbage human being… I like to think that I could still enjoy watching his old shows, but Hercules is harder to find on television nowadays compared to Xena: Warrior Princess, and I admittedly have had too much on my plate lately to want to watch Andromeda from beginning to end again.  Plus, I suspect that the only episode of Hercules people will be sharing these days is the episode where he was transformed into a pig.

It’ll probably come as little surprise that Kevin Sorbo supported the Capitol building riot in early January, at least until it became politically disadvantageous to do so, at which point he did what the rest of the Trumpists did and started blaming Antifa for it.  Even before then, if you look at his current pinned tweet, he was one of those “but muh freedoms” person, for whom getting sick from COVID-19 wasn’t as important as making sure his rights were still intact, as if wearing a mask somehow took them away.  He also coyly blamed Joe Biden for January’s entire COVID-19 death count – in such a way that he could then backpedal and call it “just a joke” if it didn’t go over well – just three days after making fun of him for being in office for only a week and having an unfavourable hashtag trend.  Sadly, he’s a very politically charged person and the things he tweets are indistinguishable from the things that other supporters of Donald Trump and QAnon are typically known for.

As I become more aware of politics and the way the world works, I’m finding myself having to make decisions all the time about who I’m willing to support and who I’m not.  I don’t agree with Tim Allen’s politics, for example, but I still think that Home Improvement was a great show and I’m looking forward to seeing him and Richard Karn in their new show together, Assembly Required.  It helps that he also doesn’t go on Twitter spreading the same garbage that Kevin Sorbo does.  It’s almost like Tim Allen treats his personal Twitter account with the same intelligence and professionalism that he treats his career with, and that’s why he still has one.

But that’s the thing.  Conservative voices have their place.  They just need to learn to curb their more problematic aspects.  Kevin Sorbo gives in to the hate, Tim Allen does not.  Gina Carano had been a thorn in the side of Disney for months and so when she was fired for comparing the plight of Conservatives today with the Jewish people of the 1940s, that was actually the final straw for her, and definitely not the only straw.  Tim Allen’s guilty of making the same comparison, by the way.  In his case, the timing of his statement and the initial cancellation of Last Man Standing by ABC (yep, Disney again!) before FOX rescued it was likely a coincidence.  Or maybe they really were looking for an excuse to not pick up the cheque for season seven and that interview was their ticket out.  I don’t think we’re ever going to truly know.

But I should still be able to enjoy The Mandalorian, even the seasons where Gina Carano was a part of the cast.  I can acknowledge her character without supporting her, I like to think.  I can support Tim Allen even knowing that he’s Conservative and that yes, he also occasionally makes statements like that, but he’s no Kevin Sorbo.

I think with a lot of things, one problematic person shouldn’t ruin something for everyone.  It’s like when Roseanne Barr was fired from her own show and they retooled it to survive without her, although in her case, they already established that her husband surviving his heart attack was part of a fictionalized book she was writing in the series finale of her show’s original run, so her own death in the series can also be waved away if they want her back.

I thoroughly enjoy the Dragon Quest series, enough to be writing a series of retrospective articles about the games, but have alluded to series composer Koichi Sugiyama’s politics more than once.  He denies his own country’s war crimes, to the point where he added his name to a Washington Post ad called “The Facts” which denied the Nanjing Massacre, among other atrocities.  He’s also come out as anti-LGBT, but has retracted at least that opinion, I suspect, under duress.  Square-Enix made a relatively benign public statement about Sugiyama in 2018 but in private, they must’ve been fuming.  Dragon Quest is their biggest franchise, even more so than Final Fantasy, and they’ve been trying to make it as successful in North America as it has been in Japan for years.

I like to think that I can separate the music from the man, and that I can separate the man from the game.  He’s just one person working on the series and I wouldn’t want to punish the rest of the developers who work hard just because I disagree with one person.  It’s why I can still enjoy Tim Allen’s films or Andromeda.  That said, it’s very interesting how protective Sugiyama is about his own music.  If you’re playing a Dragon Quest game on the PlayStation 4, you’re not allowed to mute the music and listen to Spotify.  His music is also not available on Spotify, at least not in North America.  You must listen to his music on his own terms and not on yours.

I think, though, there are times when you can drop your support of something and only hurt the person you disagree with.  Last week, Geoff wrote about the almost creepy way in which the entire manga industry is throwing their support behind Nobuhiro Watsuki, artist and writer of several manga titles.  He is also convicted of owning child pornography, a crime which carried with it the stiff penalty of… paying a fine that roughly equalled a couple thousand American dollars, and having his manga temporarily suspended for a few months.  I’m sure he’s learned his lesson!  If I were to stop supporting Watsuki, not that I was supporting him in the first place, but if I was, I would stop buying the volumes of his manga and the only one who would suffer is Watsuki himself.  He doesn’t hire an artist to draw his art for him like some in the industry do, so I don’t have the excuse of “I’m supporting the other guy”.

I suppose child pornography is a very different problem than hateful Tweets, but hopefully I’m getting my point across.  You can be against someone and can choose whether to support those around them or boycott the thing entirely, and the decision can be easier when there’s only one person involved.  I feel like I can continue to support things despite the Conservatives working on them, but if you feel you cannot, that’s valid too.  If I’ve accidentally made the case for you to boycott Dragon Quest or Home Improvement or whatever Gina Carano did before The Mandalorian, that doesn’t actually bother me in the slightest, to be honest.  I can certainly see how one can come to that conclusion.

One final thing, though.  It’s interesting to compare Scott Bakula’s career to Kevin Sorbo’s.  You can even throw Tim Allen’s career in for fun.  Scott, Kevin and Tim all starred on an iconic television show that will forever be associated with them (Quantum Leap, Hercules, Home Improvement).  All three then became the captain of a starship, two of whom were captains in a Gene Roddenberry franchise (Jonathan Archer on Enterprise and Dylan Hunt on Andromeda) and one was making fun of a Gene Roddenberry franchise (Peter Quincy Taggart on fictional TV series Galaxy Quest, played by Jason Nesmith, Tim Allen’s character in the movie Galaxy Quest).  But Kevin Sorbo embraced Christianity and Conservatism in order to further his career and all he has to show for it is God’s Not Dead and a few other non-noteworthy projects.  Scott Bakula and Tim Allen did not ruin their careers and went on to star in another successful television show each.  (NCIS: New Orleans and Last Man Standing.)  Just imagine what might’ve happened to Kevin Sorbo’s career if he hadn’t ruined it.