death of the author – just moving along like everyone else

jumpingjacktrash:

roachpatrol:

olanthanide:

villainsexuale:

wintergaydar:

Take creators stepping in and dismissing fan theories and interpretations of their works with a grain of salt. This is a lesson I learned early, from Anne “my vampires aren’t gay and also I might sue you” Rice.

During the peak of my Vampire Chronicles love, I – at that time, a very petty fifteen-year-old – set out to underline every single really queer moment in the whole series. Spite aside, I quickly realized that in a series where the protagonist runs away to Paris with clearly his violinist boyfriend, and convinces his next super angsty obviously boyfriend to MAKE A VAMPIRE CHILD WITH HIM to keep said angsty boyfriend from leaving, this was easier said than done.

I mean, she’s not fully wrong – Lestat’s not gay, he’s very bisexual. Louis and Nicki are both hella gay, though.

Anyway, I’ve meandered. The point is – creators can say wildly inaccurate things about their works sometimes. Anne Rice went Christian and didn’t want her books to be SUPER FUCKING QUEER anymore. Creators’ views on what they’ve made can change over the years. You never fucking know.

Sometimes I just want to wave my English major wand over fandom and cover everyone in “the author is dead” pixie dust. Because…it doesn’t matter??? The second they put their creation out into the world, they forfeited the right to be the sole authority on its interpretation.

One of the most important things anyone ever told me, as both a writer and a reader, was when my AP English teacher said to me, “Your thesis statement can be whatever you want it to be. You can tell me that King Lear is gay and in love with Kent, and divvying up his kingdom between his daughters is his way of divesting himself of the role of heterosexual fatherhood he’s been forced into. I don’t care what you say – you just need to show me how the text supports it.”

Creators put things in their work that they didn’t consciously intend to. Creators intend things in their work that don’t come through in the text. Once it leaves their hands, it’s yours now.

So I have just learned something life changing from your AP English teacher via tumblr osmosis that I failed to grasp during my entire high school stay, including my own AP English.

every story is told to a different person and to every person it is a different story. and that’s not just okay, it’s wonderful.

hey, can i do a little zen sidestep on this one –

as an author, i do not embrace ‘death of the author’, because when i write i’m deliberately trying to convey the actual specific story i’m writing; whether i communicate it well enough for you to hear it the same as i said it is up to my skill, our cultural similarity, and so forth, but the damn thing does exist, for crying out loud. i’m not an infinite number of monkeys.

also, in this as in so many areas of life: don’t tell me what i fuckin’ said.

and yet. and yet, my darlings. sometimes when the author fails to convey themselves as they wanted to, the message you recieve in error is waaaaay cooler than what they wanted to say.

there are two messages here, the one sent and the one percieved, like a starfield image distorted between the stars and the radio telescope – it’s nonsensical to say those stars don’t exist just because your telescope didn’t image them, but it’s also nonsensical to say that the data you recieved isn’t just as real – and, if you happened to discover a really cool gravitational lensing event, tons better.

the death of the author is based on an illusion, that only one end of that transmission is real.

ask yourself instead: can fandom be better than canon?

and the answer to that, i believe, is: well, duh.

whether it’s permissible, or even desirable, to squirt an egotistical hack with a squirt gun and tell them ‘no’ in a firm voice, is less clear-cut.