Go, Read: Atlanta Journal-Constitution On Ed Kramer/Dragon*Con Split

Here. That's an effective re-telling of news that broke yesterday that the folks that run Dragon*Con had formed a new operating organization by trading out their existing shares for shares at that; controversial co-founder Ed Kramer, accused in multiple states of child molestation, will take a cash payout and no longer be involved in any way. Kramer had been using the profits from the successful show to wage a tenacious legal campaign against charges levied against him. Their subsequent uncovering led to many pros to call for a boycott of the show.

The two things that jump out at me that the AJ-C has is the percentage of the show that Kramer owned, and the size of previous bailout offers.

The nerd culture aspects to this fascinate me a bit. The way this argument developed wasn't so much "let's get to a place where maybe this guy we think is a creep no longer has money to fund his legal battles" but this sort of weird, fan-driven way where calls for a boycott where met with a "these other people are blameless" and so on. It was hard not to see a pretty typical fan response -- which isn't to say it's all the fans -- here that the arguments defending the show tended to be the kind you see a lot in fan culture, where they strongly align with keeping access to the thing that's enjoyed and therefore spend time building a rhetorical place to defend one's enjoyment of that thing both directly and via the defense of someone's right to profit and benefit from this good thing. The fascinating thing to me about a settlement is that if you really look at what you wanted done here as "let's keep money out of this guy's hands," this really doesn't do that; it simply gives Kramer a lot of money all at once rather than from year to year. But if your primary concern is ridding the thing at the heart of this of its taint, then certainly mission accomplished. If you feel that the blamelessness of the other organizers and their right to be rewarded for their successes has its own moral force, and that this moral force is compounded by actions changing this unfortunate circumstance, this does those things as well. I would imagine that you're also going to see people wonder after why this wasn't done earlier, and people respond to that by saying the people that ask that question just want to attack and blame. And so on.

Since this is a show that I'm going to guess remains super-popular, I would love to see a percentage equivalent to Kramer's go to victims groups. If the charges end up being true, it sucks that Kramer got to make money from that show for so long; it would be great if such groups were able to profit for a while instead.
 
posted 12:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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