I should preface this by stating I had a pretty neutral opinion on Gunn prior to learning about his twitter past. I knew pretty much nothing about him or his behavior and twitter history. The first i'd ever heard of Gunn was when GOTG came out, and his position as director and writers for those two movies were still all I really knew about him before a few days ago. I'm also not a huge fanboy of GOTG, solid movies but i don't gush over them like many do. So I went into this controversy with a very neutral mindset.
In case it matters, i'm a liberal. I'm not trying to turn this political, I just wanted to make my intentions clear as not trying to smear him because of political bias. I'm also not hyper PC and really enjoy even extremely dark humor when done right (done right being key here). You need proper context, it has to be constructed in a clever and humorous way and with good intent. It's why I enjoy George Carlin so much, or South Park (who often use humor to attack pedos).
In my opinion (and this is subjective and JUST my opinion), Gunn's tweets lacked what I require to support "dark humor". It just came across as gross, unfunny, lacking in clever construction and seemed to have no intent other than trying to be edgy for the sake of edginess. It's the sort of behavior I more closely associate with the website 4chan- kids trolling people with offensive jabs to try to get attention and cause drama. Except this was apparently an older man doing it. The sheer quantity of tweets he made is also disturbing...
Similar to
@raven24 (there's an ongoing discussion in another topic in politics), I am still not sure how I feel about the firing itself. It was quite an easy decision with Lasseter given that he actually sexually harassed women. But "distasteful humor" (if you can even call it humor, and hopefully that's the extent of what it was) is more complicated.
I am also well aware that Disney didn't make this decision out of moral integrity. While I wasn't aware of Gunn's past behavior (again I know very little about the man), the Disney executives who hired him certainly HAD to have been. So the issue broadens from "should they have fired him" instead to "should they have hired him to begin with". They fired him because they caved to public pressure, not because it was the "right thing to do". They had no problem with his behavior until this past week. The moral position should have been considered during the initial hiring process, not a few days ago.
