Before July 2024, the Neil Gaiman subreddit was a relatively chill place by internet discourse standards. “It was a very quiet and almost peaceful community,” says JN, a forum moderator who did not want to be identified for reasons of privacy and safety. r/NeilGaiman, an unofficial outlet for discussing the career and work of the American Gods and The Sandman author, was formed in 2011. It currently includes roughly 24,000 members, which puts it in the top 5% of subreddits by size.
“People would post about their creative works, or their love of a specific book,” JN tells Polygon. “I distinctly remember that there was one person who would post their incredible paintings based on Gaiman books.”
Then in July 2024, Tortoise Media released an article and a podcast series, Master: the allegations against Neil Gaiman, outlining allegations of violent, coercive, and nonconsensual sexual behavior involving the British writer and media personality. The group’s tone changed. “Rape apologists and trolls have flocked to the subreddit to ‘defend Gaiman,’ turning a peaceful community into a toxic environment,” says JN. “The majority of people are reasonable, but the worst people are always the loudest.”
This was when nineteendoors, another of r/NeilGaiman’s currently active moderators, stepped up her involvement. “[The lead mod] really needed help moderating the discussion [after the news broke],” nineteendoors tells Polygon. “As a longtime fan and as someone who was just devastated by the allegations, I decided to help because I think people are grieving in a very public way, and I wanted to be a part of facilitating that discussion.”
Nineteendoors, who first encountered Gaiman’s work in high school and says it helped inspire her to become a writer herself, says r/NeilGaiman now serves an important function for fans who are processing their response to the allegations against him. As more women came forward, The New York Times and Rolling Stone picked up the story. On Monday, a highly detailed New York Magazine cover story painted a clearer picture of the author as an abusive predator. Gaiman has denied the allegations, but the majority of the fans posting in the subreddit have shifted away from publicly supporting him.
“There’s a lot of grief,” nineteendoors says. “Just post after post after post of people talking about how Gaiman was formative in their life — their personal life, their professional life. […] His words meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but more than that, because he publicly presented himself as an ally in about every conceivable way, there’s a lot of deep disappointment and devastation about these allegations.”
Overwhelmed by the influx of comments, the r/NeilGaiman mods initially shut down conversations about the allegations. Another subreddit, r/NeilGaimanUncovered, formed to “raise awareness of the allegations against Neil Gaiman and promote accountability processes for him and others like him.” The r/NeilGaiman facilitators quickly changed their policy. “I think we collectively realized that we can’t bury our heads in the sand,” says nineteendoors. “The allegations are what they are, and we can’t quell discussion of them. It’s something we have to actively engage with.”
The community had settled into a new norm, with more mods facilitating the increased engagement, when New York Magazine published its in-depth investigation. “[Monday] was an extremely bad day to be on Reddit,” says nineteendoors. “The last couple of days have just been this endless flood of people grieving, and then of people coming in and saying, ‘But they’re just allegations.’” One comment she removed claimed the “public outcries are because most of [Gaiman’s] fans are women, and this is what you get when you have women for fans.”
r/NeilGaiman is only one of the many nerd-centric online spaces (or subreddits) that have been actively processing the news of allegations against Gaiman. Gaiman has been building his extensive, passionate fan base since the 1980s. Many of his works have been adapted into TV shows, movies, and audio dramas, further expanding his audience. He’s written episodes of Doctor Who and Babylon 5, and the English-language script for Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke.
He’s appeared as himself on The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory — roles directly driven by his persona as a creator, and his early and consistent use of platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and his blog to cultivate a parasocial relationship with his fans. His work and his public persona are woven into the tapestry of modern nerd-dom.
The allegations were a seismic event on the internet. Fans across social media platforms continue to discuss the situation as they collectively and individually try to determine whether they can separate their responses to the allegations from their long-standing fandom for his work.
“I always call it ‘the ancient discussion of separating the art from the artist,’ right?” says Simone Driessen, an assistant professor in Media & Popular Culture in the Arts & Culture Department of Erasmus University Rotterdam. “You can really thoroughly enjoy and find comfort in the books that he wrote, or in the series that are produced based on these books, but you might question the personal life of what this person did. And to most fans, this is the moral debate, perhaps the moral struggle, that also will happen in their minds.”
Though Driessen has not studied the Gaiman fan response specifically, she is currently researching why fans discontinue their fandom after a controversy around artists they love, and she’s following the Gaiman situation as it unfolds. She categorizes fan response to what she calls “cancel cases” into three categories. The first, she says, “will defend their idol no matter what. […] So as long as he’s not convicted, as long as there’s not a trial, or as long as he’s not at least prosecuted to some extent […] then they don’t, per se, consider what he does wrong. Or at least, they think that he is still to them what he always has been. The ideal picture, the romanticized image that they have of him, just continues.”
The second group is more tentative, less adamant. “[They] will already start doubting things, meaning ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,’” Driessen says. “They will be hesitant. They will try to publicly, most likely, share that they know about the cases, about the allegations, know that there’s something happening around their favorite artist, but not, per se, discontinue their fandom.
“So they might turn [their fandom] more private on an individual level. Collectively, they might not participate, but they will continue, for example, reading the books, or following him on social media, or watching the series that he’s involved in.” While Driessen is not yet able to pinpoint the relative sizes of these three categories of reaction, she says most fans in cases of scandal around a creator fall into this group.
Driessen’s third group is composed of people who more decisively and publicly step away from the artist and their fandom. “I think this is what you currently see with [Gaiman’s] case at the moment. [Fans] who publicly really condemn what is happening, and who just discontinue their fandom, and who step back. They will say, ‘I believe in what these victims have shared, and we will side with those victims. And to us, that’s more important than anything else.’”
Across the Gaiman fan discourse happening on X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, Tumblr, Bluesky, and in other online, public communities, “fuck neil gaiman” does anecdotally seem to be the predominant response, at least during this current period of shock. However, as both Driessen’s research and the experiences of the r/NeilGaiman community mods proves, this is far from the only kind of fan reaction happening across the internet.
Ultimately, Driessen says, how much a fan can separate an artist and their art is a deeply personal decision. “If we talk about sci-fi, fantasy, or lots of music [fandom] as well, [your favorite art is] just such a large part of your identity,” she says. “I mean, most of these fans have not just been following [their favorite creators] for two years. They’ve been living with it for many, many years, and they draw on elements from these texts [to define who they are].”
Driessen references the seminal fan studies work of Henry Jenkins. “[Fans] poach these elements and they apply that to their identity,” she says. “In that way, the art sits with you and it’s part of you, even though you might not, per se, support it or support the maker of it. That piece of art can still be there [after disillusionment with the artist], and that can still be valuable and meaningful.”
Driessen says if there is anything novel in the modern incarnations of the ancient debate about whether it’s possible to reject a creator and still embrace their creations, it’s in the “mapping out the gray areas” that we’re doing. She encourages fans who are struggling with this process to get informed about each case, to ask themselves precisely what they value about the fannish work in question, and to sit with how the situation maps onto their own values and norms.
“In a way, fandom is personal,” she says. “It can be part of your life in a certain way, and sometimes that might even overrule the moral issues that we have in society. But then again, I would say to all these fans, it’s important to acknowledge that [those issues are] there, and it’s also important to at least think about them, and to also see what your position in this would be if this were happening to a friend of yours.”
On Tuesday, the day after the New York Magazine article was published, nineteendoors started a thread on r/NeilGaiman for people who want to get rid of their Gaiman books, helping them connect with people who are looking to add to their Gaiman collection, perhaps without spending money that would go to the author. “Some people are burning [their Gaiman books],” says nineteendoors. “That’s their choice. I don’t feel comfortable doing that, but I am deeply disappointed, and I don’t think that I can engage with his work in the same way again anytime soon, if ever.”
The book-selling thread is one more venue where fans with varying responses to the allegations are engaging with each other about how to properly express their current feelings. Still, as is always the case on Reddit, one response literally rises to the top: “I will ‘trade’ my collection (novels, special editions, original individual comic book run, other NG comics) to anyone who can show me their donation to RAINN,” reads the most-upvoted comment on that thread as of this writing. It centers the United States’ largest anti-sexual violence organization in the deal. “It’s the least I can do,” writes the fan.
