spacestationtrustfund replied to your post “Good Omens fandom: Please explain this canon adjacent thing to me in...”
WOW YEAH THANK YOU FOR SAYING THIS, it's been bugging me /non-stop/
I JUST HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT ~ART AND CONTEXT AND HOW TRANSFORMATIVE THOSE THINGS ARE NOT ONLY TO THE ART BUT TO OURSELVES.
This is a conversation I was having on twitter the other day with @allofthefeelings, but the current obsession with Word of God when it comes to fandom really bums me out. So much of how a piece of art affects a person has to do with the way it came to them and what it meant to them personally before they engaged with anyone else about it.
I don’t know how everyone else wrangles Fandom, but I don’t seek a fandom out if the art didn’t speak to me somehow on its own. If that importance isn’t already there to me it doesn’t feel like there’s a point in seeking out other ways to engage with it. And the idea that the viewer would need the creator of said art to sanction the way they like their art (whether by verifying relationships or pieces of world building or what have you) feels like it removes the importance of the art to the viewer from the equation. If the viewer’s love and understanding of a thing is no longer as important as the way they were “supposed to” love it, then what even is the point?
Lately I’ve also been thinking about how important when a piece of art comes to me is to that equation. When I first moved to Boston I got an annual pass to the MFA where I ran across the Kiki Smith sculpture Lilith, which I find both beautiful and terrifying. It’s the eyes. Lilith made me feel a lot of things, and a lot of the things it made me feel were attached the fact that I was in a new place trying to figure out who I was outside of the context I’d known my whole life. If I was even the same person without the Florida beaches and the highways and the people I’d known intimately for years. That mess inside of me 110% informed the very specific way in which I fell in love with that piece of art in particular.
If I had first seen Lilith at the OMART say two years earlier, when my long term relationship was dying and I was feeling itchy and sad all the time, or even eight years earlier when I wasn’t really aware of how sad I could become as a person, she would have meant something else to me. But I didn’t see her at 21 or 29, I saw her at 31. And while the context of art and viewer is constantly changing, that initial point of impact will always be important to that relationship.
The same goes for when I think about what Good Omens means to me. I read it in college, and I came to it with an appreciation for Sandman and Neil’s writing certainly (I had not read any Terry at that point), but also with my specific protestant upbringing and the relationship I had to my mother’s religion and my family and my loves and all of the other themes in the novel. It was a time in my life when I was trying to establish myself as a person outside of who I had been told to be my whole life. I was struggling with how much impact I could even have on the world around me. I was figuring out what I wanted love and family to mean to me. And here was this book that also did all of those things while being incredibly funny and also telling me that the sound a tree makes when you speed it up is Vroom!
And now the TV show is here and we’re both a bit of an update to the old story. I do not know if the TV show would have touched me now if the book hadn’t touched me so long ago. I do not know if the book would have touched me at any other time. It’s like how I can’t just tell my friends in their 30s that they HAVE to watch the Labyrinth if they didn’t see it five hundred times as a child. Because a person in their 30s watching the Labyrinth is NOT going to get the same thing out of it that I did when I was seven. Just because something was formative to me doesn’t make it something that other people will like or even understand. That’s part of what formative means. It becomes a part of you in ways that are specific to you and do not rely on how other people feel about them. (And really, Labyrinth is fucking weird and makes no sense to adults, which is FINE. That’s WHY I loved it when I was seven!)
This is why I don’t usually tell people to read Good Omens, on the grounds that it’s one of my very favorite books. If they do read it, I of course want to know all about it, but giving it to someone specifically feels a bit like giving them one of my lungs and expecting them to find a way to make it work for them while also keeping me breathing. This dumb book is just that important to me foundationally and I don’t need everyone’s shitty opinions about how it doesn’t jive with their context. BECAUSE, and this is the first point again, so much of how we appreciate a piece of art lives in the context of ourselves.
This isn’t to say that an artist did not have intention when they created their work, or that the piece of art is not saying anything outside of the viewer. Of course it is. It wouldn’t exist if it didn’t. Neil and Terry didn’t write Good Omens to fit into my life as neatly and specifically as it did. Kiki Smith didn’t make Lilith to give form to my nebulous feelings about being and desire. Hell, Our Lady Peace didn’t write any of their albums knowing they’d save my god damned life, but they did all the same. I see myself largely (and I know this is a personal preoccupation and not how I expect other people to engage with the world) as a collection of all of the art I’ve seen and all of the art I’ve made. Art is just really important to me, and the fixation on asking a creator how I’m supposed to feel about it sort of dampens the impact of the entire thing for me.
Sometimes I just want to shake fandom and be like, it’s a big world, guys. There’s a lot of art to see. And a lot of art to make. Stop worrying so much about the proper way to do either and just get to it.
