"On Cultural Icon Betrayal" by H.R.R. Mosteller

I hate to have to write about this, but I have to write about this.

Horror stories are often based on the idea of taking something innocent and beloved and revealing it to be evil and harmful. It feels like we're living a bunch of horror stories all balled up and jumbled together.

For all of my friends who are/were fans of Neil Gaiman: I am so, so sorry. I really do know how you feel. It's empathy. I've been there.  You feel gut punched right in the Childhood/Adolescence. This is Epic-level betrayal.  Fans of J.K. Rowling, Marion Zimmer Bradley, et al, feel this, too.  For me, the horror-story gut-punch betrayal came from Bill Cosby.

Cosby's betrayal never stops hurting. For me, his is the worst of the bunch, because, while I was a fan of Gaiman and Rowling et al, none of those folks were woven into the fabric of my whole life like he was.

I grew up on "Bill Cosby is a very funny fellow. RIIIIIGHT!" and "To Russell, my Brother, Whom I Slept With" like breakfast cereal. "Himself" was the snack food of my adolescence. My dad and I bonded over these works like we did over nothing else. Not even *music* and *mechanics* (the air we both breathed and the water we drank) brought us together quite like that guy did. 

I recognize that his work was brilliant and clean and wholesome. But now it just hurts to watch or listen to. If he had said "yeah we were big jerks back then and felt all entitled, it's the way we were raised, men, to feel entitled, but I stopped that shenanigans and will resolve to do better teaching more men it's not ok" or something similar, we might've been able to forgive him. But he didn't. He (heartbreakingly) doubled down on the assertion that none of that was wrong. THAT is the betrayal of everything he ever said or taught. He betrayed his educational messages, he betrayed his wholesome humor, his clean, almost-profanity-free shows, everything he presented himself as. It's as if, like Marilyn Monroe, this Bill Cosby guy was a character, a caricature, that he put on like a costume, so no one would see he was a smarmy playa who considered women to be toys he was entitled to play with who did not deserve agency / the choice to say no to him.  So even though his work was brilliant and wholesome and had great messages, it's too painful to take it in anymore after such a bitter betrayal.

So I see you, Sandman and Stardust (that one really hurts!) and Good Omens fans, over there having to dismantle your entire vocabulary of cultural references. I feel your pain, truly. I offer hugs, literal and virtual, if you want them, kind words and gentle empathy if you don't. I've been where you are. In fact I'm still there. The pain of a betrayal like this doesn't really go away. The only part healed by time is that your brain eventually steers clear of the references before you become consciously aware of them. Sometimes.