[ SECRET POST #3512 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3512 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 35 secrets from Secret Submission Post #502.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

You're arguing apples and lemons here.

Your example was an author insisting through word of god that a work can't be interpreted a certain way.

This is word of god that it was intended to be a certain way.

Like... Ok. I have a shitty shitty TV, I put on a movie and a guy's shirt looks green. I see it as green! But if the prop director gave them a RED shirt and the movie intended for it to be red and the director says it's red then I have to admit they intended it to be red and I just interpreted it differently.

Does that make sense?

So racist dude can say he doesn't intend for the joke to be racist and that can be true, and I can find the joke hella racist, and BOTH CAN BE TRUE.

[(Anonymous)]

so "my badly filtered and misinterpreted version of events is just as valid as everyone elses"

k

[cbrachyrhynchos]

"Word of god" is almost never used for such trivialities on the level of, "page four of the American edition uses a period and a semicolon." It's used for matters of interpretation.

And why are we concerned with authorial intent? We're not doing a biography of Feig or McKinnon where that intent matters. We're doing a close read of Ghostbusters where it's important to pay attention to exactly what the text says and does not say. For another example, it's great that the Wachowski siblings are literate in both queer theory and religious philosophy but damn do they need better script editors in getting that to the screen.

[(Anonymous)]

I think we're so concerned with authorial intent because it's one part of the creative work trinity.

What is intended -- what is put into the work -- how people interpret the work.

And so all discussion revolves around interpretation and if the ideas in the work clearly represent authorial intent.

Like, ok, I was just reading a discussion of morals in movies and how so many people see Fight Club as a glorification of toxic masculinity even though the moral at the end is that toxic masculinity is a bad thing. It discussed how some people put more weight on the end statement/moral and some people put more weight on what gets the most airtime. So a movie that's 99% "This thing is awesome and entertaining!" with a quick blurb at the end of "And then they all died because this thing is in fact awful." is going to make a lot of people walk out still convinced the thing is amazing and discounting the end message. Because of this, moralistic things need to disproportionately push the consequences and downplay the entertaining part of the bad thing if they want to mostly get interpreted right.

Or, in more fandom things. I'm watching two shows where the main characters are male and female friends and in both cases Word of God is they're not dating (in one they've said multiple times because we know the couple is endgame and they said they're saving the romance arc for a later season to get other stuff out of the way and properly focus on it) and something like 98% of the fandom assumes these characters are already together! Because the bar is just So. Low. for viewers interpreting male and female friends as a couple that without any clear in-show declaration that they're not together the default is that they are.

So... to kinda sum up, yeah, a lot of viewer interpretation is trying to figure out what the creator intended and thus discussion is on how effective it was.

So if they had said "Her sexuality wasn't important to the story, we wanted to leave her open enough that all viewers could see themselves in her." That would be an interesting discussion on how viewers project on a character and interpret things and what's used to signal character sexuality to an audience.

Since they said "We totally intended audiences to read her as gay, gay, gay. Gay as springtime." It then becomes a discussion of who read it as intended and why, and who didn't and why, and how effective the storytelling was, and how to make her gayer without being obnoxious, instead of how to make her more neutral or more straight.

"The dog is blue."
Ok, did I mean the dog is literally the color blue, or am I saying the dog is cold because of the phrase so cold they're turning blue, or do I mean sad, or am I referring to the gray coat color blue? Or something else? All of storytelling is trying to craft something that gets your intended meaning/effect across.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

What is intended --

Which is a bullshit psychological issue, not a literary one. Even if we were to consider intent to be a critically important factor when it comes to interpreting art (and we have not for over a half-century now), the primary evidence for that intention must rest in the work itself, usually the product of hundreds of hours of rigorous study, development, and refinement. Not off-the cuff interviews or cocktail napkin ephemera.

For example, is Luke Skywalker gay or bisexual? Mark Hamill has said it's reasonable to interpret his performance in that manner. Is that supported by anything actually produced by Lucas, Kerschner, or Marquand? Not really. Is Poe Dameron into Finn? Isaac says yes, but the text in question is pretty ambiguous. This is in contrast to openly LGBTQ-friendly texts like Orphan Black, Steven Universe, Marcella, or Wynonna Earp. Not all of those shows use the terms "gay," "lesbian," or "bisexual" consistently to communicate that to the viewer.

Again we habitually reject "Word of god" when it comes to issues like racism and sexism. Did George Lucas intend for the Star Wars universe to skew white and male? Probably not. But his films do. Did Roald Dahl intend to use a pickaninny caricature in early editions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? "Word of god" is no, the oompa loompas were not pickaninnies, but he changed it anyway.

Is it reasonable to interpret Holtzman as lesbian? Yes, because the performance incorporated non-verbal signifiers of lesbian community that a fair number of lesbian critics have picked up and commented on. Is it reasonable to interpret her as straight? Yes, because that performance is coded and not explicit. "Word of god" here just supports what we already knew from the text.