[fishtank]

In neither case is the person's tribal identity used against them for writing things that others don't like. Orson Scott Card holds a professorship. He just published a book this year. A large corporation made a mass market film out of his book, well after he had been writing things that others didn't like.

The controversy with the poet seems like a different issue, but even so -- Michael Derrick Hudson seems to be in exactly the same place before Sherman Alexie assumed he was a Chinese woman 3 years ago.

[nickelcitymario]

Maybe OSC isn't a good example of an author being destroyed, but it IS a good example of being unable to separate the person from their work.

If you really need examples of how a public identity can impact how your work is viewed, see every famous person who has been named in the #MeToo movement.

(Please don't attack me for that statement. I'm implying neither support nor opposition to #MeToo in this post. That's not the point.)

So in the case of Ender's Game, I first read it without any knowledge of who OSC was or what his views were. And I came away from reading it as being about the underdog, about how complicated power and morality can be, about trying to do the right thing. I thought it was a wonderfully complex story because almost every character sees themselves as trying to do the right thing, yet are seen as villains by others.

Then I read about OSC and think: Did I miss the point? Did he? How can the person who wrote this wonderful story not see that they are in turn bullying others? It complicates the whole relationship to the story.

Of course, you may argue that I'm the one who is mistaken. That's fine. But we have to at least agree that the more we know about the artist the more we think about their art differently, and vice versa.