I used to love Joss Whedon from everything he made. I grew up watching Buffy, and loved Firefly, then Marvel got him for Avengers and I was excited for him to be getting such a big break. He later Agents of Shield which I also loved. But then it came out that he was an abuser. His whole persona of championing strong women was merely a facade to hide this.

Learning that Michelle Trachtenberg (RIP) had a clause in her contract while working in Buffy (2000-3) at age 15 that she was not to ever be in the same room as Whedon alone opened my eyes to just how bad things are. Not just how bad he was, but how well it was known that he was an abuser and no one did anything about it. That's just how things were.

I have a hard time watching Buffy or any of his works anymore, just knowing now that he was behind these things.

JK Rowling

Neil Gaiman. I fucking loved Sandman and damn near everything else he wrote. Finding out he's a total scumbag has basically ruined a lot of very dear memories.

Used to love watching the Cosby show and watching his stand up specials....

Hulk Hogan. I was such a huge Hulkamaniac as a kid, brother.

I used to think Musk was ok.

I didn't know anything about him other than he was investing in EV's which I felt the world desperately needed, at a time when it felt like big oil was squashing the uptake.

Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, George Soros. I had a period where I appreciated people who played the system to get rich. Before I understood the system itself is the problem.

My mother. Turns out she's a narcissistic, fascist Trump-loving Norwegian, who's only been to the USA twice. Last time we spoke, she defended the killing of Good and Pretti, stating that innocent lives can be taken in order to get the Somali fraud.

I don't talk to her anymore.

Kevin Sorbo as Hercules©®™.

And I used to listen to the lost profits as a teenager. ultra sigh

As a teenager I loved to read Lovecraft. It was a way to learn English as a nice side effect because it isn't my native language but that also obscured the appalling racism from me which lead to disappointment when I found out later.

Wayne Gretzky.

Nobody mentioned God?

I was raised Christian. Never deeply religious, but had all the bible study stuff, religious school, etc. Religion was comforting.

Then I got older and started seeing the fanboys for who they were. Hypocrites of the highest order. Assholes that armored themselves with being “Christians”. Trying to game the system or to buy their way into heaven, making it transactional. Heaven also seems like a shitty place; an existence locked into worshipping a deity while in a drugged out euphoria and never being able to learn, grow, and experience things again. A “Matrix”-like place. A God that is psychotic, manipulative, and a classic narcissistic abuser. Jesus would probably be a cool guy, but nobody actually gives a fuck about him. A book full of contradictions and other awful things that are constantly rationalized and massaged to mean whatever the needs of the individual might be. Just generally how awful any religion is, how it’s used to control people, do shitty things, and consolidate power and money.

Yeah, if you’re formerly religious, you get it. I’m an scientific atheist now.

Ironically, thanks to modern “christians”, I’ve found myself citing scripture to shitty people who claim to be religious to point out their hypocrisy, idolatry or whatever, and occasionally listening to religious people who point out how awful and un-christian these people are.

I reserve 'cunt' and 'dumb bitch' as especially strong, disrespectful expletives to call a woman.

When I say "Fuck that dumb bitch TERF cunt JK Rowling" it carries the hurt and ire of a broken childhood love of Harry Potter. The series itself was incredibly important to me and provided a world I could escape to when the real world was overwhelming. The hate and bigotry that cunt has shown breaks my heart and sullies too many childhood memories to describe.

I was deeply inspired to pursue engineering after watching the first Falcon 9 boosters land themselves. I was enamored by the idea of using my little blip in humanity's timeline to assist our expansion to another planet. I wanted to contribute to something important, something that turned many brilliant minds towards an achievement that would eventually benefit the entirety of mankind.

I even hopped on the Tesla train; I recognized the existential threat that carbon emissions bore as well as the damaging, restrictive nature of building a society that scorns public transportation and promotes individual car ownership.

I didn't worship Elon so much as admired the causes he was advancing. That admiration withered over the years but my dream of contributing to the colonization of Mars helped me push through the ten years it took to earn my four year engineering degree. As details of his derangement came out, as he acquired twitter and more overtly spread his billionaire propaganda, that dream started to fade. The fascist salutes at Trump's inauguration crushed those dreams and ground them into a dust too fine to even attempt a rebuild.

My jaded ass still wants to benefit humanity so I've set my eyes on climate science, even as the country I was born in denies the havoc and damage our relentless consumption has wrought. Not just denial, but outright derision and contempt for the future of our world. Thus I hope to take my dreams elsewhere, hoping to find a culture with a clearer view of the consequences we must face and the changes we must make to preserve our planet.

What about the anti-theist and leftist public intellectuals like Dawkins, Kraus, and Chomsky who turned out to be somewhere between anti-feminist and full-blown sex-offender? Even NDTyson has some pretty credible accusations for those who remember. Dennett seemed like the only one of the "Four Horseman" who could be considered a decent human being, but nope... he's flying the Lolita Express.

But nobody has fallen farther than Richard Dawkins. Fame did to Dawkins what the One Ring did to Smeagol.

Neil fuckin Gaiman.

The monster went from my favorite author to a name that elicits rage and disgust.

I watched The Apprentice when I was a teenager. I seem to have blocked out my memory of how I felt about Trump back then but my aunt says I used to think he was funny. I remember the opening tricked me into believing he was a good businessman (I was a teenager and this was my first introduction to him). I wouldn't say I viewed him as a hero but I guess I liked him as a celebrity. Now he's ruined countless lives. It was the birther conspiracies that made me start to dislike him.

Keanu Reeves, I used to really like the guy when the matrix trilogy came out but then he said and did all these super nice things like saying "I don't want to be part of a world where kindness is perceived as weakness".

Nah just fucking with you. The dude is solid!

Hulk Hogan. Also, not really a hero, but his work had a log of influence on me- Orson Scott Card. The reasons I liked it so much are kind of cringe looking back as an adult anyway though.

Many already mentioned. Steven Seagal, Ultimate Warrior, Dennis Miller

Only ones who dissapointed me were Star Trek: Voyager actors. Its the only thing I got attached to as a kid.

Robert Beltran - Commander Chakotay

Roxann Dawson - B'Elanna Torres

Both transphobes and trump supporters who won't shut up about no one wanting to invite them to Star Trek stuff anymore.

I used to feel bad for Rob because he got such a shit treatment in ST:V in terms of writing and because his character fell victim to Jamake High water's grifting (look him up if you want to see why 90's native american characters kinda suck).

Steve Jobs. There was some magic to him, but also an extremely dark side. I had a corporate bio from the early 90s that made him and Woz seem like superhero partners, when in reality he shorted Wozniak and Esposito and only really looked out for himself. He seemed like a countercultural LSD dropping hippie, and he was some of that, but when it came time to get rich and get his, he went down that path too. Shitty father, terrible boss. None of the things I would say my own life aspires to now.

I can't think of any artist more divorced from their work than Orson Scott Card

would not say "hero", but I did like a lot of Michael Jackson's music when I was younger.

let's not pretend he didn't do anything just because he could settle/pay off everything ...

My parents, unfortunately.

My childhood heros were the cartoon heros of the 80's. And they all turned out to be lieing to us the whole time. Saying things like "evil never wins", "crime doesn't pay", and all that. They were really just trying to reduce the competition.

OJ Simpson, Scott Adams, Joss Whedon, friends and family that are MAGA