I have to say that I'm glad about how all of his relationships to [adult swim] was handled quickly & professionally, as was him stepping down from the Squanch Games. Far too often, the presence of one high profile individual overshadows the hard work that a MASSIVE team of people put in to creating something that people enjoy, and could still continue doing so without them.
As much as Twitter dives into the nitty-gritty details can be intriguing, I'm not sure if it's really worth doing. The accusations themselves surfacing publicly have ultimately served their purpose in giving others who experienced issues the confidence to speak up and make sure that certain behaviours don't continue without consequences. That's really just a dynamic of what happens in any type of power structure like that, where the hierarchal dynamic reinforces that type of toxic evasion of accountability for the person in a position of authority. It's often necessary for one person to "break the ice" publicly to give others the confidence in joining together into a balance that feels that it can overcome that.
Since it's so often necessary for a public outcry to take place to gain the confidence necessary to wrest someone away from a position of power, often as that's the only thing that's enough to mean that they'll ever be held legally accountable for their actions (ex: Weinstein), it's just as important to understand that the public's sudden exposure to that information is only a subset of information that comes flooding out all at once in a reaction to that power dynamic. That information wave HEAVILY pollutes first exposure bias, and is why that initial wave of accusation isn't always reflective of the totality of a complex situation (ex: Johnny Depp having consequences for YEARS before Amber Heard did).
Oftentimes changes to public opinion that match reality only sway depending what information gets that same level of exhaustively public exposure as a counterbalance (again the initial accusations vs. the trial with Depp & Heard). That's why people involved in the actual legal proceedings on the jury have to be people who are only first exposed to the information that they encounter during the process of a formal trial, where that information is held to extremely strict standards of what's able to be proven.
Leaving the ultimate punishment for those accusations up to the justice system, to empower it to be the tool to do what it's designed for in holding people accountable matters a lot. The consequences of the outcome have different weights depending on exposure bias, and the severity of a specific betrayal feels different based upon what certain indirectly impacted people attribute to it based on how much they feel as though they have a level of parasocial trust to an individual through their portayal of popular characters makes things more complex – especially when they're carrying that baggage of what they think happened based upon what information they've heard.
I find it interesting but also a bit frustrating how the consequences of legal penance may or may not hold appropriate weight for the public's perception of post-justice rehabilitation if any individual eventually comes back to work that they'd been justly or unjustly dropped from,. It's especially problematic as those are things that negatively impact people someone moving on from them afterwards that are more significant the less notoriety someone has. These days I think that once the accusations have moved someone to the legal system, it's better to just be informed about the results and gauge the outcome then.
Mainly, I'm thinking about this because of how much exposure impacts how significant we think those things are. Like, if one of the show's key writers or animators for the show had been convicted of the same thing... would anyone care as much, despite that they may be even more responsible for the portrayal of emotionally significant moments that people identify with in the show? Is that lessened because we don't know their names, or because they have a skill set that's easier to just quietly replace? Would you care if THEY eventually came back to their job after serving time for their criminal action? Because at the end of the day, it's just their job and that's something everyone needs to return to doing in some capacity.
Do people ACTUALLY care about this the way that they seem to when something like this happens? Do they feel that it "pollutes" something about a show or media? It often feels like it's just an overreaction based upon the overwhelming exposure to extremely disturbing information in the context of accusations resulting in necessary prosecution. I think most people are associating the experience of THAT being what taints their memory of something, rather than anything about it actually being linked to an individual involved with the creation of something you care about being a horrible criminal.
It's one thing if you're giving someone money and status that is allowing and facilitating someone's criminal actions initially, or that supporting it is fueling their return to inappropriate or criminal behaviour afterwards... but most often it's just gonna impact everyone else around them who didn't do anything at all, but suffer the extreme social consequences of something that they likely feel impacted by FAR more significantly than anyone in the public does. There are plenty of institutions where the public backlash energy to drop the whole thing and start from scratch is necessary (ex: so, SO many police departments) but hopefully we can maintain that pressure where it's needed and keep a level of professional detachment from it where it isn't in cases like this.
This tl;dr is because a friend and I were talking about those things the other day and I figured it might be interesting food for thought to some folks here. I actually haven't watched
ANY of
Rick & Morty since that Season 4 trailer post I made – just because life's been a whole rollercoaster of a time and I've barely kept up on anything media related over the last 4 years. After seeing the headlines about all this, I didn't really bother digging into the specifics at all for the aforementioned reasons. I don't really think that I'll feel any differently about eventually going back to catch up on previous seasons or (likely by the time I do) watching future seasons with new VAs for some of the characters.
As significant as he was for bringing that about, I don't think that it's something that's so instrumental that it's impossible to exist without him despite his prominence in the show – which is honestly better for everyone the more we have places like that where it's possible to remove the bad actors without having that be an inextricable pollution into the core of the environment itself (as Blizzard's a whole rat's nest in the game world that I was also reminded of with all this news).
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