ik this blog isn't active anymore so sorry for bothering you but I loved W&P and I'm sad that it's no longer being worked on. hate to ask but does it have anything to do with the allegations currently against the actor playing danny? is that why you stopped? dk how to feel about all of it
I got this ask the other day in my inbox. I haven't felt the need to be on tumblr for a few months, and I'll go back to not using it anymore pretty soon, but I found myself thinking about the questions here a lot over the past few days, so I’m logging back on for a hot sec to say my tiny piece and then get back to it.
There are two parts to your question, Anon. I’ll answer the first part now.
Thank you for the nice message, friend. It means a lot that you enjoyed that story. I put a lot of heart and hard work into it for a long time. I am sorry, but I’m not interested in continuing it, primarily because I no longer have the time or motivation to devote to it anymore. It takes more out of me than I have to give.
Anon, I don’t know where you are, but in the US, things are just so bad. There are so many days I wake up feeling wholly, completely dispair-pilled. Paramilitary gangs roaming the street hunting down your neighbors. People disappeared without due process. War crimes for the clout. Long-standing post-war alliances violated for the ego trip. Independent agency authority gutted. It has been less than a year of this administration in power.
My instinct is to curl up in a ball and sob, every day. But I’m not doing that.
To be an agent of change you cannot move through the world by instinct alone. You must move through it with intention. I used to spend my days asking scores of questions to understand my relationship with the world around me. Now I mostly ask myself one: What can I do?
To that end, I’m trying to be an active and engaged person. I'm volunteering with local political orgs and a mutual aid group in my community. But I’m also working two jobs trying to pay the bills, because ghost jobs and the gig economy is all there is now. I’m trying to fix my broken brain by getting some vague kind of fitness routine back, wherever and whenever I can.
That doesn't leave me with a lot of spare time, Anon. And tbh, the times when I have devoted significant energy to writing and sharing that story the last few months, I found what I got out of the experience wasn't worth the effort it took out of me. Maybe some day I’ll feel the need to return to it and pick up where I left off. I’ve finished other WIPs years after the fact. But I know I can’t do that right now. I ain’t got no gas left in the tank. I’m sorry.
Now for the second part of your question.
That news about Timothy Busfield was awful and shocking and deeply affecting. As a person who has been SAed multiple times, to say nothing of groped and sexually harassed countless more, it is not something I take lightly. And even if I wasn’t someone with those experiences, I’d still be a person with compassion whose default position is to believe victims. So if he's found guilty, then I hope he goes to jail for the rest of his life!
How I feel about his work is more complicated.
“What to do with the art of terrible men” is an old question. Miles Davis beat his wives. Pablo Neruda was a rapist. David Bowie was a statutory rapist. Insert the multitudes of others here: Cormac McCarthy. Norman Mailer. Kobe Bryant. Alice Munro (who was not herself a perpetrator, but did little when she learned of her second husband's abuse of her pre-teenage daughter). Diddy. Neil Gaiman. Those things are all true.
And, yet, when I hear "Blue in Green", or "Rebel Rebel", my day is instantly a little bit better. When I read a Neruda poem, I'm affected by his power and style. The art of monstrous people has enriched my life. My feelings about their art, my attachment to it, my enjoyment of it, those things are also true. Would I be better off for never having encountered these works? Does enjoying them mean I'm supporting and endorsing the artists, even when I know they've done awful things? I don't know, but I doubt it.
One thing I do know—those are all real people. Some dead, some living, but all individuals who existed, and whose actions harmed other real human beings around them.
Where I personally come down is this: This news is awful and terrible, but it doesn't change my affection for Danny, a character who is not real, and which predates this awfulness by 25+ years. This character was created by writers, directors, and a collaborative process, and exists outside of a single performer. I still love the CJ/Danny ship and the character the actor played many years ago. I imagine it will be pretty unpopular to say that.
I very, very much want actual people to be held accountable for their actions. I am not concerned with fictional ones, who, by virtue of not existing, bear no moral responsibility for their portrayers.
No one is profiting from my fanworks that involve this character. If there are residuals from streaming, then the financial value to be gained is likely small enough as to be negligible. But most importantly, I have enjoyed Danny for decades and no shitty, shitty man gets to ruin a thing I love. Men like that do not deserve to affect what I care about. I reject the idea of it. I will not allow it.
I first watched this show from the moment the pilot aired in the actual year 1999. Given my long relationship with this piece of media, I will have had a different experience relating to TWW as a piece of art than someone who is newer to it, or who comes to the show after the fact. And I can understand how their perspective would be shaped by this information. That’s undeniable, and I have no argument with it. I choose to distinguish starkly between actor and character. Others will not.
The way you consume art doesn't make you a bad person, or a good one. You'll have to find some other way to accomplish that. And what makes art worthy or important to us depends on who we are and what we’ve lived through. I think that is a good thing. A plurality of experiences, views, and perspectives is more interesting, vibrant, and challenging than a homogeneity. We draw our own lines. We make our own choices.
Two weeks ago I decided that I had had enough of writing and contributing to fandom. Having pushed myself to get to the most recent point in W&P, where I had met a kind of stopping point, a semi-ending, I was content to take months, if not a year or more to refocus my attention on other things. As I said above, I am busy, stressed, tired.
But, I figure if I'm going to take a stance about how I still love this character and ship, I should do as I've been trying to do IRL for the last year and a half and back that up with action. It'd be easy to step away and continue to nominally "support" a thing I had already decided to stop doing. I don't know. That feels kinda cheap.
In the process of writing this, I began to rethink my desire to stop writing. It would be easy to say “nope, bye” and bounce. But I'm a stubborn cunt. More importantly, if I’m on here claiming that I want to support communities who feel the way I feel, I should probably do that and keep showing up. (I bet you didn’t think I would bring this back to community participation!)
All of which is to say, I guess I'm going to continue writing. I am tired, yes, and am short on time, and often inspiration. But I spent over two hours last night trying to organize my thoughts here, understand and challenge my own views, assess what agency I have, and evaluate what, if anything, I want to do about it.
Some people won't countenance my desire to keep writing for this character. I'm not interested in judging their choices, and I have no control over how others perceive me or mine, except to articulate my complicated feelings about good art vs bad artists here as best I can, emphasize the need for justice, and insist that others may think and do as they wish.
So I guess, while I can't continue to do the heavy lift that is continuing W&P, I'll keep plugging away at some silly things and finding joy in the rare places I can. I don't have anything to lose, aside from followers here who don't agree with me.
I know there are people who have been around this fandom for a while, as have I, and if any of them feel even a tiny bit similar, if a few dumb, HEA stories on a tag in a long-since-ended network television program representing a bygone, more-centrist-than-you-think fantasy of American political life makes a few people feel less alone, I can live with that.
So no, Anon, to answer your question in a very long-winded way: Stepping away from W&P has nothing to do with this news and everything to do with the amount of disposable time and energy I (don’t) have at this moment.
And I don't feel conflicted about continuing to love Danny as a character and as part of a ship I adore. And I plan to keep writing about both those things.
I just feel sad in many ways, and I hope that justice prevails.
Anyway, I gotta get back to work.
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