Unsurprisingly, Plei's take on things mirrors my own.

The bloom has been off the rose for me since long before the info from Kai came to light (pretty much every interview Joss has done in the last decade has ratcheted my personal opinion down another notch—smug egotism does not play well with me even if it's allegedly in jest). But at the same time, he's responsible for the movie I most enjoyed in that decade. And if I rule out the work of everyone in Hollywood I find problematic, I'll be left with Keanu Reeves' acting, Pierce Brosnan's singing, and whatever Betty White is still healthy enough to do.

What if his power and patronage is what allows a woman of a color to become a showrunner?

They already have with his SiL, as dull as I found the show when I was still watching AoS.

I think there are other people in Hollywood doing interesting things more to my current tastes and in part doing them by having a more diverse writing staff and those are the people who are going to be paving the way. Buffy was hugely important to me, as was Angel. They're a fixed part of my past. Whedon's work didn't really evolve as much as it could have, the unexamined affection for various and sundry problematic things that showed in Firefly just got more obvious as they continued to go unexamined and the world and social consciousness largely moved along.

See also: that god-awful Wonder Woman script that he still thinks was the goddamn bomb.

It's a shame: he's obviously talented, though his range isn't broad. But, intellectually, he's still as complacent as your typical man in his position, and that's left his work with a stale, trapped in the past quality.

(Also, specific to the Buffy reboot, Monica Owusu-Breen is already an established showrunner in her own right.)

I'm finding the retroactive Joss was never a good writer and none of his characters are very feminist that I keep seeing all over Twitter very annoying.

I think h was/is an asshole, but he also gave opportunities to a lot of female writers when no-one else was, with nothing expected in return. For that alone, I am not creating him off my list.

I just don't see Joss on the same plane as a Harvey Weinstein (who not only sexually assaulted women but ruined women's careers who refused him or spoke out).

I completely agree.

I'm finding the retroactive Joss was never a good writer and none of his characters are very feminist that I keep seeing all over Twitter very annoying.

Yeah, Tumblr does that too. I think there was stuff that was glossed over at the time because fandom deified him, and I think there's shit leveled at him now that's unfair.

That's a fair assessment, Dana.

So, if can push the question forward where do you sit with the following creators considering their various ethical failures?

(I'm not just reeling off a random list but these are artists I've spent some time trying to sort through my feelings about.)

Woody Allen (personally, I have stopped wanting to watch his movies, and find Manhattan in particular troubling)

Roman Polanski (I'd still watch Chinatown or Repulsion, but not interested in defending him)

Bill Crosby (rapist. No interest in revisiting his work. Which is definitely a bit of a personal amputation as his standup was formative in my childhood years and my brain still reaches for some of those jokes)

Coco Chanel (after reading her bio it's clear that she wasn't just cozying up to the Nazis for protection, but actively endorsed their philosophy. She's a very important designer and I love her work BUT she was truly an awful person and I dislike her being held up as a role model to young girls)

David Bowie (using him as a placeholder for any number of 60s/70s rockstars who had lots of sex with underage girls. I'm so familiar with the context of that era I feel like I can make a more nuanced call than just "moral standards were different then." Which is that the culturally presumed age of consent in that era was about 16 and everybody thought sex was a good thing to do. It also landed in that rare bit of history post-pill and pre-AIDS so No Consequence Sex was the rule of thumb. Also, no accounts of Non-consensual sex with Bowie. So, I do see claims that any musician/actor of that era who fucked 15/16 year old girls was a rapist, but I don't buy that at all.)

Any thoughts on these or others you've wrestled with? What's your rule of thumb?

I do take the cultural presumptions of the era into account, but don't let that excuse things like...Agatha Christie's racism or anti-semitism.

Yeats is one of my favorite poets but he had some unfortunate Fascist leanings. Doesn't stop me from reading him, but I see some his poems in a different light because of it.

One thing that I am more cognizant of is viewing their work in light of their malfeasance. How does Wood Allen's pedophilia and (at times) misogyny inform his work? A lot! So I don't just let that stuff slip by uncritically.

It's hard for me to figure out where the line is. I recently removed all of Mario Batali's cookbooks from my bookshelf after the accusation went from harassment to rape. And boy I'membarrassed to admit how hard that was for me. I have no interest in seeing any more Woody Allen movies. And I would really like to see Bryan Singer removes from the X-Men franchise.

Joss is interesting in that regard, because the quality of his work suffers in direct proportion to how much he gives in to his worst impulses. And not just because it's icky; it's like all quality control gets thrown out the window as he tries to shoehorn his baggage into the script.

Contrast that with, say, Alfred Hitchcock, whose work tends to be more critically acclaimed the more personal his work gets. Vertigo is rated as the greatest film of all time, but it's a really fucking creepy gross movie given what we know about Hitchcock now.