Find myself thinking a lot about this after the
Justin Roiland debacle... sure, you go to journo classes to learn the five
W's-and-H and how to write a decent coherent article; you go to art school to learn how to compose an appealing layout for a comic page and construct a credible-looking figure, fine. I get it.
But how about teaching students how to handle their success properly when they
get there? It seems like a growing number of creative minds don't
get that, and a lot of content creators are seeing their careers implode because they either get caught at sexual misconduct, say things deemed racist or homophobic, or go on mad power trips, abusing underlings and ignoring the top brass' orders, creating hostile work environments. Of course, they have to be let go and replaced--but invariably, the quality goes down, the new showrunner gets blamed for everything that went wrong, and the studio boss who fired the rank offender is seen as the foolish, greedy king who killed the fabled golden goose and then gathered all his vassals together and handed each one small cup of worthless guts.
Some folks I've talked to really think this business is easy--that you can walk into a newsroom with your [
bleep] in one fist and your batch degree rolled up in the other, and the doors will swing right open for you. Trust me, it's
not. There's egos--both your own and others'--that get in the way. There's a game that needs to be played, and played well, if you want to make it. I had enough trouble keeping things together at a rinky-dink
college paper. If I were to ever make it in the animation industry, I would live in constant fear of losing everything I'd built because of I unthinkingly ordered a white actress in the v.o. booth to "try to sound black", or looked approvingly at a woman's breasts and then found out later she's only 15, or just took to social media to espouse a controversial opinion not shared by my coworkers or superiors.