What is this line for?

Age of the Geek Column
I had a good Comic-Con this year.
Not bad. Not super great. Just good. When you've gone fifteen times some are bound to be better than others. Still, like Marvel Studios movies, even the worst ones are plenty enjoyable.
Speaking of Marvel movies, you know who didn't have a good Comic-Con? James Gunn.
The director of "Guardians of the Galaxy" and its sequel was unceremoniously fired from his job directing the third entry in the franchise on Friday, mere hours before he was scheduled to appear at Comic-Con.
An "uncovered" handful of distasteful jokes the director made on Twitter between 2009 and 2012 has resulted in his firing nearly a decade later.
So much about this incident is wrong it's hard to decide where to begin.
For starters, Disney is setting a very dangerous precedent in firing a director for things he did years before he ever worked for the company.
If Gunn had made these jokes while working for Disney I can see how that would be a problem, but Disney is holding Gunn accountable to standards that didn't apply to him at the time. Most felonies have a statute of limitations of a few years but saying something offensive on the Internet is forever? There's something wrong with that. It's not sustainable.
Just hours after the news broke of Gunn's firing I attended the annual Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation, a Comic-Con mainstay that showcases animated shorts that are difficult to describe in a family friendly newspaper. While watching the festival, the obvious joke was that we hoped none of these people are working at Disney now because if they are, they won't be for long.
If it had been discovered that Gunn was a Holocaust denier or a white supremacist that would be one thing, but the guy just made some dark and raunchy jokes. Some of them land. Most of them just reek of an edgelord trying to get attention. Either way, they're just jokes.
When did we stop expecting adults to handle adult humor?
I don't know what changed, but Bob Saget must be breathing a sigh of relief right now. The "Full House" star and host of "America's Funniest Home Videos" spent the better part of the 90s as the face of family friendly programming. Yet anybody that's ever seen his stand-up comedy knows that Saget is far from the mild-mannered personality he portrayed for family audiences.
It's almost a rite of passage as you grow up to discover that the goofy television personality also has the raunchiest stand-up act you will ever see.
Gunn's situation is no different. This is the guy that created "Slither," "Super," and "PG Porn," not exactly family friendly material. Disney knew this when they hired him. Heck, the last thing Gunn directed before "Guardians of the Galaxy" was a segment for the very R-rated "Movie 43" called "Beezel," which would have fit right in at Spike & Mike's. Then there's the hypocrisy of it all.
James Gunn made some bad jokes that don't mesh with Disney's family friendly image. So the thinking here is that you can't work for Disney if you have ever done something that could make Disney look bad, even if you weren't employed by Disney at the time you did it. Right?
So did everybody at Disney forget that Robert Downey Jr., the face of the MCU, is a convicted felon that spent time in prison on drug charges? Obviously we aren't holding Downey's past transgressions against him today, nor should we. It was a long time ago. He's gotten better. People are allowed to do that. Or, at least they used to be.
Of course the most disconcerting thing about this whole incident is that it's not really his old tweets that got Gunn fired, it was his new ones. Gunn has been very vocal about his contempt for the current administration, leading alt-right figures to launch a smear campaign against him in a transparent attempt at retaliation after the firing of Roseanne Barr, whose racist tirades recently led to her own firing.
Whataboutism is the go-to tactic for alt-right trolls and they've been in full force this weekend trying to make a comparison between Roseanne getting fired for making an unhinged rant against former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett while her show was on the air and Gunn making off-color jokes to nobody in particular years before he ever signed up with Disney.
None of them actually care about the content of the ancient tweets. The whole endeavor was about hurting somebody they disagreed with politically.
Of course it's not only the alt-right to blame for this fiasco. They're merely adapting the tactics of the regressive left (or, ctrl-left as I like to call them), who never pass on an opportunity to be morally outraged. Their obsession with purity tests and Pavlovian response to call-outs means they'll happily do their opponents' work for them and eat their own for a chance to show how enlightened they are.
The rise of social media has changed the world and it seems that we're still trying to figure out how to adapt to it. The ability to shine a spotlight on the worst of humanity has had some positive results. It took the power of that spotlight to bring down Harvey Weinstein and usher in an era where women are less afraid to stand up to men that abuse their power.
But the spotlight can only illuminate, it still has to be up to the individual to make the judgment call. It's too easy to get lazy and assume that if the spotlight is on somebody, then they are terrible and deserve to be destroyed. That's not how it works though. Sometimes when the spotlight hits, you have to be able to say, "Yeah, so what?"
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and recommends deleting your Twitter history every few weeks.

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