being a published author yourself, do you ever feel like these days people are too reliant on word-of-god social media posts when analyzing stuff? ive noticed that in the 2010s creator confirming things over twitter or w/e platform instead of putting them in the actual meat of the story was pretty widely mocked, but recently it feels more and more like it's just expected behavior now from fans. it's made me feel kind of down about ever putting my own stuff out there since it seems like people are less interested in actually reading and analyzing a piece of art on its own now. is this a feeling youve dealt with at all?
lol you've either got impeccable timing or you saw me butting heads with people about this Elsewhere today (in which case for future reference, if you're responding to something i talked about under my other name, it's better to ask me about it on the account of that same name rather than come here)
yes i have dealt with this. i find it immensely frustrating and intellectually lazy on the part of the audience to go "the creator said this, so it's the only correct interpretation." you can't reach people who are like this because they are not interested in being reached, learning, or considering another perspective. they are only interested in being correct, and as far as they're concerned, there is only one person who can be correct--the creator. and if they align themselves with that person, they will also be correct, and therefore the winner of any argument.
we used to mock it because it was less about audience members proving themselves right, and more about those creators attempting to get credit for work they didn't do. claiming such and such character COULD be gay (so please keep watching) but never following through because they either never actually cared or were never actually able to. but now fandom cares more about who is and isn't allowed to be Right, when back in the day nobody ever Got to be right. and we have parasocial access to everybody involved in a project and can demand they hand out answers like knives to fight each other with.
and i'm so completely uninterested in it when it comes to literary and critical analysis! i don't care what the creator said in a tumblr post! i only care about what i read, watched, saw--what was put directly in front of me--and how it made me feel. if an author wanted me to feel a certain way, or leave with a certain interpretation, they should have put it in the work. that's the point of making the work. outside information can affect the interpretation of a work, but it does not supersede it.
also authors can be full of shit. i told everyone sylas was straight for the entire duration of never satisfied and people believed me, despite everything about his behavior pointing toward a sensitive gay boy trying too hard to perform heterosexuality for his father.
but i said he was straight, so i guess he must have been!
this is all part of why i push people to theory post about hunger's bite in the tag and not exclusively through me. my book is a rich text with a lot of metaphor and subtext. i know what i wanted to do with it, but if i have to tell you, it means i did a bad job.
and a lot of the time, the people who reach for "but the author said" are defending a bad job.
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