How to bury your heroes
On Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman, parasocial relationships, and the broken pieces
The Internet is a peculiar place. Sometimes, in a matter of minutes, you can reconnect with an old college friend, catch up with a distant cousin, or — on rare occasions — strike up a conversation with a celebrity you deeply admire. There’s something profoundly unsettling about how the internet grants access to virtually anyone with online presence. But of course, all comes at a price. Minor deities demand their sacrifices - and the internet “killed” more of your heroes than any other form of media ever could.
As a little girl, I remember sending a letter to the official Harry Potter fan club circa 1999. I lived in central Siberia at the time and found the fan club address in a children’s magazine. I wrote my letter carefully in the best English I could muster and waited. A few weeks later a response arrived, and it came with a surprise — a signed photograph of Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson in their iconic Hogwarts uniforms. There was no way for me to know them as people, but there was this sense of some opaque familiarity. They were of age to be my classmates. In the photo, they looked mischievous. Maybe, in another world, we could have been friends? This is how fan relationships are created: they are parasocial ties predicated on a deep sense of one-sided emotional attachment. That was my first taste of fandom.
I remember buying and reading my first Neil Gaiman book — Coraline. I found it in a bookstore at the mall on an exceptionally snowy day, just a few weeks before the winter semester at university began. Broke and full of hopes, I barely had enough spare change for a coffee. Yet, Coraline was one of those books that transported me beyond the everyday misery of bleak student existence. Books like Coraline sparked my love for English literature and creative writing.
At the time, I was seventeen and living on my own, a few cities away from my parents. I was impressionable and vulnerable. Books became my companions and gave me the courage to make my first bold choice: enrolling in a degree in English and Theatre Studies. To this day, I look back on my undergraduate years as one of the best periods of my life — I pursued something I really loved, and as I kept at it — the rest simply fell into place. These were the days of blissful, lucky, happy ignorance, as I was bubbled up in the naïve, colourful version of the world that was comforting, but not exactly real. Later it turned out that my department had all kinds of machiavellian, predatory and egotistical behavior boiling below the surface. This realisation kept evading me because I avoided social functions and wasn’t looking closely.
The professor who introduced me to The Graveyard Book was later rumoured to have some dark history with abuse. As a graduate student, you don’t have as much separation from peers and faculty as you might want to, and the fog started gradually clearing up and revealing a rather unsettling version of the world where grooming, power disbalance, and overstepping boundaries were commonplace under the guise of the clever fictions so eloquently told. For example, I remember a tenured professor giving an entire class of six graduate students (five of whom were women) a massage under the pretense of experiential learning. Back then, it felt like I owed open-mindedness to my professors for my own sake. Years later, all my classmates agreed it was not okay.
The departmental machinations escalated years later after I graduated, when one of my professors of Early Modern literature, whom I deeply admired, and with whom I had many one-on-one beers throughout both my undergraduate and graduate studies (heck, I even taught classes with him) — committed suicide over having a sexual relationship with an undergraduate student, which was eventually reported. I found out about this on social media.
Fast forward many years into the future, and I learned that literature and theatre departments are especially prone to abuse and sexual harassment scandals. I had friends who went through something similar during their undergraduate years in acting schools. Details and people were different, of course, but the underlying pattern was undeniably there. This made me think a lot about how abuse of power dynamics can be systemic in certain contexts. Professors are not celebrities, of course, but they were clearly in positions of respect, admiration and authority. Students looked up to them for guidance and career opportunities. Likely, some of these professors believed themselves to be celebrities in their own right. They had access to vulnerable segments of the student population — young, creative people needing support.
When the Tortoise Media investigation on Neil Gaiman came out in July 2024, I was not ready for it. I put off listening to the podcast series for nearly three months, because somehow I instinctively knew what I would find there. The last thing I wanted was to experience that visceral shakeup that pulls the ground beneath your feet and leaves you in a state of free-falling for days on end. Upon absorbing the details, I hibernated for nearly a week, unable to functionally collect myself. All this time wondering why this affects me so much. I guess re-evaluating one’s values and shedding integral parts of one’s identity takes time. It also takes energy and a lot of self-reflection to re-grow them with something better, and more resilient.
Disillusionment is overwhelming when the carefully crafted image of someone you admired shatters into pieces. And in moments like these, paradoxically, it is the feeling of apathy and disorientation rather than anger that first bubbles to the surface. As if you grossly misunderstood something essential about this world. Were the signs always there and you just weren’t paying attention? Some fundamental sense of trust and naivete is gone forever: what else was I not seeing?
No wonder that for so many, the brand death of one’s favourite author felt like a betrayal.
Construction, deconstruction, reconstruction
The internet culture took the news of Neil Gaman’s sexual assault allegations with a very different flavor of “heavy”. Disillusionment with musicians (Dave Grohl?) and producers (P Diddy?) resonated through the media differently. This time, the blow was dealt to the precious ones, the “quiet dreamers” - the literary types.
Thousands of now grown up boys and girls who identified deeply with Gaiman’s worlds, Bods and Coralines, received a cognitive dissonance of a lifetime. Young writers inspired by Gaiman’s work remain in a deep existential crisis. Fans and literary critics alike trace back the steps and analyse Gaiman’s portrayal of women, looking for all these uncomfortable undertones that were previously dismissed as a product of wild imagination. Teenagers are learning to morally navigate the complex news by re-gifting the now unwanted Gaiman’s books and donating to sexual assault helplines. Kids named after Gaiman’s characters consider pivoting to middle names. The impact is massive.
Perhaps we expected to hear these kinds of stories about film producers or rockstars, but not writers of fiction for children and young adults, who advocated for naïve idealism in their message to the reader.
In recent years, the debate around separating art from the artist has resurfaced with increasing urgency. Public reckonings with artists like Woody Allen, J.K. Rowling, or Kanye West have sparked endless discussions about whether we can — or should — engage with their work independently of their personal actions and public personas. Yet beneath lies a more fundamental question: Who really owns meaning in art? And perhaps more provocatively, in the current celebrity culture climate, are we over-aggrandizing the artist? Are we putting too much faith in their reputation and legacy?
After all, they are familiar strangers. We might build a certain connection with their work and their public image, but we don’t really know them.
It's important to understand that we play a significant role in constructing our heroes (and erecting pedestals for them in our minds) - this means we have the power to de-construct them, too.
This isn’t meant to be yet another “separate art from the artist” discussion - there are many fantastic articles that exist on the subject. It’s also not an attempt to shift the moral responsibility onto the victims or fans. I can only hope my writing can serve as chicken soup for the wounded culture. At the very least, I wish it could help to look at the artist - audience relationships in a different light.
Not seeing the forest for the trees: digital spaces and vulnerability
I was already working on this article when the piece by Lila Shapiro came out. But she mentioned one key detail that really spoke to the ideas I outline in this piece:
People who flock to fantasy conventions and signings make up an “inherently vulnerable community”...[]. They “wrap themselves around a beloved text so it becomes their self-identity”...[]. They want to share their souls with the creators of these works.
This vulnerability is what I am addressing.
In today's world of superficial and fragile online relationships, forming parasocial connections is effortless. However, these connections often lack the depth and complexity of traditional, reciprocal bonds — like real-life friendships and partnerships — that are essential for us to flourish as whole, complete individuals.
Parasocial connections are not new to the digital frontier, but digital socialization makes it hard to see clearly how inherently one-sided they are. Following someone’s online personality gives us a sense of intimate familiarity. Our brains excel at filling in the gaps in between the crumbs of information we read to string together an entire phantom person. However, when we invest emotionally in these constructed relationships, we risk putting ourselves in danger: mentally, and sometimes — also physically.
The low-effort quality of online interactions opened up a whole new playground for celebrity influencers, dating scams, and predatory marketing tactics. They made us feel lonelier, too.
Despite our hyper-connected world, loneliness has become the defining emotional condition of the 21st century. Online culture, rather than alleviating this alienation, often serves as a placebo sugar pill - offering a simulation of connectedness, yet at the same time exacerbating loneliness at a scale. But here’s a thing…loneliness sells.
Loneliness is advantageous to the propagation of appearances and brand fictions via parasocial ties. In online spaces, manufacturing intimacy is often key to creator success, be it YouTube influencers or more traditional kinds of celebrity.
Easy access to strangers and misleading interfaces that enable such relationships make it challenging to assess them critically. This is because online, our interactions are limited in temporal (time), situated (space) and multimodal (sound, smell, body language, etc.) richness. The same instance of online communication might mean different things to different people, but social platforms flatten all this complexity to an abstract, common denominator.
In her book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015), Sherry Turkle calls these fragmented digital interactions "conversations in sips", contrasting them with the deeper, more meaningful face-to-face conversations that are essential for building genuine connections and combating loneliness. Essentially, by focusing on symbolic digital micro-conversations, we do not see the forest for the trees – so that the bigger picture and the bigger questions remain evasive.
Someone might type “...are you okay?” into the message window probing for vulnerability or information, and someone else might interpret this as a genuine gesture of care.
Some time ago Amanda Palmer, musician and Neil Gaiman’s now ex-wife, wrote a book on how artists can benefit from unequal fan-celebrity dynamics (The Art of Asking). The book focuses on Palmer’s side of such arrangements and doesn’t go into much consideration for those on the receiving side of the equation who might find it difficult (or altogether unable) to say “no”.
The examples she gives may seem innocent, like asking fans to host her in their homes instead of booking a hotel, but things like these need careful balancing and even in her experience, lines were regularly crossed. Amanda Palmer has a history of using her niche celebrity status to get favors and make people work for her for free. For example, despite crowdsourcing 1.2 million dollars for one of her albums, on tour, she expected supporting musicians to perform with her band for “hugs and booze”. This story is old, of course, but what I want to illustrate here is not the story itself (the symptom), but the underlying mentality of celebrity entitlement not many cultural icons are immune to. While this is not about Amanda Palmer, with her book and communicative online personality, she gifted us an exemplary case study. And in Palmer’s case, that same logic / rhetoric that laid the foundation of The Art of Asking repeated itself in a different amalgamation, in the weeds of Neil Gaiman’s story.
Now, I want to emphasize here that the problem lies not in “asking” per se, but in abusing the power dynamic: in sniffing out vulnerable people in precarious positions who wouldn’t be able to meaningfully establish and enforce their boundaries. Another side to that same problem is feeling both the entitlement to be helped, and simultaneously, a lack of emotional connection / personal responsibility to be willing to meaningfully reciprocate the care. This kind of relationship is also one-sided, where the artist may feel they deserve to “take” (because they are successful), but draw a line at giving.
Scarlett Pavlovich, who eventually became one of Gaiman’s victims, did not know the author personally. First, she befriended Amanda Palmer.
Taking a page from her own book, Palmer did not hesitate to ask Scarlett, who was in a vulnerable position and earning for connection, to “babysit” on their premises (as a live-in nanny) without an employment contract and, as it turns out, without proper compensation (as investigated and reported by Tortoise Media).
It’s important to emphasize that when this relationship dynamic works the opposite way, Palmer has no difficulty setting her boundaries. When Scarlett needed a temporary place to live after she got discharged from the hospital (where she remained on suicide watch, following the short-lived relationship with Gaiman), Amanda suggested Scarlett to move back in with her parents whom Scarlett wasn’t on speaking terms with, saying “I can’t offer you exactly what you want from me, but I can still be here. remember this.” (Shapiro, 2025)
Equal social relationships are reciprocal; reciprocity is a crucial component. While the help Amanda requested from Scarlett was real, specific, and frankly, a big ask for someone who is practically a stranger, Amanda herself prefers to be there “in spirit”, as a symbol.
It’s also worth mentioning that based on conversations with Scarlett, Palmer was aware of Neil Gaiman’s pattern of abuse, yet she refused to speak to every social outlet that reached out to her for a comment on this story. She promptly attempted to capitalize on it in her own way, however, by writing a song.
Look at the discrepancy between what Palmer is willing and not willing to tell, in how she’s willing to talk about it and what mediums she chooses. Talking to the media would not leave her a lot of gray area of plausible deniability, where the recipient of the message would be able to fill in the necessary blanks and still retain the overall positive view of her personable artistic brand. But a song performed to her fan circle is very likely to land well with her audience, even if she chooses ungraceful, detached metaphors to describe the scandal.
At this point, I would like to address the common rhetoric I see in online spaces that defends celebrities’ choices to not engage in public discourse of their personal lives. It can be succinctly summarized as “they don’t owe us their statements or personal details”. While overall this is a good ethical direction, I would like to point out that this statement is also context-specific and can not be used to absolve parties that are already involved in abusing the celebrity power dynamic. One can not simply both benefit from this disbalance and detach themselves from the issue if and when they get caught being complicit in it.
Art is a Process of Co-Creation: We can Choose Reflection over Consumption
There are many theories of authorship. Some of them favor the author’s intent, but the popular majority of them don't. Authorship is a co-creation process. The deep sense of empathy you experience when reading a book or watching a film arises from your own mind interpreting and connecting with someone else's work. In this way, you become an active co-creator of their message, absorbing and shaping it through your own perspective. In this sense, engaging with art is a process not of consumption (directed outward), but self-reflection (directed inward).
Roland Barthes articulated this beautifully in his seminal essay, The Death of the Author, where he argued that once a work is released into the world, its meaning is no longer confined to the artist’s intention. Instead, it becomes a shared space where audiences bring their own experiences, biases, and emotions.
Consider Bob Dylan’s Blowin' in the Wind. Written as a protest song in the 1960s, it became an anthem for the civil rights movement. Dylan himself was famously evasive about its meaning, leaving listeners to project their own interpretations onto the song. Decades later, it continues to find relevance in movements far removed from its original context. The song no longer “belongs” to Dylan — it belongs to everyone who engaged with his work and felt its message resonate.
This co-creation is not merely an intellectual exercise; it’s emotional, visceral, and deeply personal. The artwork, in essence, transcends its creator. In celebrity culture, the role of the audience is often overlooked and underplayed, but it is the audience’s engagement that amplifies the artist’s work in the first place. And, since we live in the age of raging capitalism, also the author’s image and brand.
Celebrity as a Constructed Performance
Traditionally, our relationship with art is not solely about the art - it’s also about the artist. Analysing the art can be complex or confusing (I am looking at you, James Joyce’s Ulysses), but the artist is human, is situated in space and time, and therefore, is relatable. Thanks to celebrity culture, the artist’s image has become an extension of their creative work. But it’s worth remembering that such an image is often constructed. It’s a performance, a narrative meticulously crafted by publicists, managers, and the artists themselves.
Take the case of Taylor Swift. Swift’s public image — her girl-next-door relatability, her open diary songwriting style — creates an illusion of intimacy. But that intimacy is carefully calibrated, designed to foster parasocial relationships where fans feel a deep, one-sided connection to her as a person, and not just her music.
This phenomenon isn’t new. In the 19th century, Lord Byron cultivated a public persona as the tortured, romantic genius. His poetry and public image became so intertwined that it became impossible to separate one from the other. Audiences weren’t just consuming Byron’s poetry; they were consuming Byronism.
The Beatles offer another striking example of constructed celebrity image. Their manager, Brian Epstein, insisted they wear matching suits, maintain clean-cut hairstyles, and exhibit polite behavior in public interviews. This “safe” image was designed to make them palatable to the parents of their teenage fans, ensuring The Beatles were “parent-approved” and seen as charming young men rather than rebellious rock stars. Behind the scenes, of course, the band members had far more complex and at times contradictory personalities — but those were hidden from public view during their early rise to fame.
So, when we ask whether we can separate art from the artist, we must first ask: are we responding to the art itself, to the constructed narrative of its creator, or to something we are reading in-between these lines?
It is healthier to bond over art (love for written word, storytelling, metaphor, genre) as opposed to over artist (and thus, unfairly idolizing them).
Loving the fame, hating the fan?
Many artists have antagonistic relationships with their audiences. The reasons for that are typically very simple: artists like making art and getting paid for it, but upkeeping superficial parasocial relationships with thousands of their fans (especially when forced to do so by their management for business reasons) is draining for them too.
Once, I was an opening act for a fairly established international headliner with devoted yet niche following. I overheard the artist calling fans, who gathered outside the venue for an autograph and a small talk, “the nasty people”. I also saw a flipside of this, when fans were running “businesses”: being pushy and demanding artists to sign multiple records in order to pedal these later on eBay. Whether we like it or not, there is a lot of opportunistic advantage taken in these spaces — we can’t assume them to always be safe.
You don’t need to be looking far for other similar examples of this phenomenon. Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman, once infamously described his fans as “a necessary evil.” This statement colourfully demonstrates the uneasy tension between artists and their audiences - the dependency on fan support paired with open disdain for those same supporters. Waters’ words are emblematic of how success can breed entitlement and resentment, reducing fans to little more than cash cows.
Metal bands are consistently speaking out against “VIPs” and “meet-and-greet” experiences. Some, like Roger Waters, do so because they dislike their fans. Others — don’t feel comfortable monetizing their attention and treating fan relationships like a factory conveyor job (signing posters, taking photos, rinse, repeat).
In modern artistic business the mounting pressure of “performing” a parasocial persona is so high that it feels instantly suspicious if the artist has only overwhelmingly positive things to say about it. In fact, everyone who does so either has an immense composure (and carefully sets their boundaries), is diplomatically lying, or is directly benefiting from this (think groupie culture).
For fans, the illusion of intimacy can manifest in deeply invasive ways. One of the most harrowing examples is the 1996 incident involving Icelandic singer Björk. An obsessed fan, unable to reconcile his parasocial fantasy with reality, sent her a letter bomb before taking his own life on camera.
These unhealthy dynamics thrive in cultures where fame is not just admired but also marketed and consumed, which is why I am trying to delicately advocate for decoupling art from the parasocial fantasies that are often meant to stimulate consumption (VIPs, personalized video greetings, book signings). This can only be done through careful, honest, and mindful self-reflection, and through bringing oneself back into the epicentre of one’s relationship with the art.
Even if artists’ incomes may be temporarily affected by this cultural shift, the creative cultures will emerge healthier from this. In the long run, it might also slow down the capitalist abuse of creative businesses and protect the vulnerable by cutting a direct access to narcissistic self-aggrandizing at fans’ expense.
Establishing horizontal connections instead of vertical ones
Despite the terrible, gut-wrenching revelations disclosed in both Tortoise Media podcast series and Shapiro’s article, there was at least one bright highlight for the victims of the allegations. They formed a social support group to help each other heal and some of them even met in person.
Forming horizontal relationships with other people of equal power dynamic, who are more likely to reciprocate the attention and care, is inherently more beneficial than clinging to the parasocial top-down ties with the artist. Of course, not all horizontal relationships will be equal, just like not every celebrity is a covert sociopath, but leveling the playing field from the start — means less possibility to over-invest and get hurt. Investing in such relationships is also an occasion to make friends, learn new things, share love for the art, and perhaps even create one’s own opportunities for creativity.
What the title “How to bury your heroes” is meant to metaphorically signify is the growing need to dispel the ideological, parasocial hierarchies that dominate the artist-audience relationships.
The future of the creative cultures will be more equal, honest, and ethical, because we simply can’t carry on any other way. “Bury” your idols and heroes, before they take themselves out and drag you down with them.