[ SECRET POST #2624 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2624 ⌋

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

01.


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02.
[Outlander]


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03.
[The Walking Dead]


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04.
[How I Met Your Mother]


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05.
[Twitch Plays Pokemon]


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06.
[Batman, Kill La Kill, Borderlands]


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07.
[Overlord]


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08.
[Red Dwarf]


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09.
[Paranatural]


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10.
[Pitch Perfect]


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11.
[Insidious: Chapter 2]


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 053 secrets from Secret Submission Post #375.
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

[illiadandoddity]

Yes and no. If I write something and a reader thinks, "You know this could work as a metaphor for racism" that's fine. They're allowed to read that into it, and good for them if it makes the story more meaningful to them. If they say "This story IS a metaphor about racism" and ignore me when I say "No, it's really just a story about a werewolf solving a murder mystery" then they're being ridiculous.

Just because a story can be read with a certain meaning behind it if you're thinking along those terms doesn't mean that that IS what the story's about. The author still gets to define that.

[(Anonymous)]

The author still gets to define that when they're writing the story.

ftfy

[(Anonymous)]

What? Just because something can be interpreted a certain way doesn't mean that a story IS that. And interpretation is an interpretation, not a magic spell that changes everything (and I mean everything) that went into a story.

[(Anonymous)]

You're assuming that the author made their intent universally crystal clear and frankly, that's just not reality. Look at Harry Potter: JKR says Dumbledore was gay. But she didn't include that in the HP books. The twist is that she thinks she wrote that into canon but the vast majority of readers can only see it if they squint really hard, read between the lines, and know what her intent was. Simply put, she got it wrong and what was published was not what she intended.

There's nothing wrong with HP fans choosing to include WoG in their headcanon/meta/fanworks. But they're not required to because, by definition, canon stands alone. They can ignore all the things she's said after the fact that she didn't include in the canon. It's the ones who insist WoG is canon and try to impose it on others that are a problem.

[(Anonymous)]

But we were talking about interpretations, not what counts as canon or not. A more apt example would be people who interpret Harry Potter as a queer narrative ("boy comes out of the closet") and insist that's as valid as it being a story about good vs. evil. Or, going on with the original example, a werewolf story doesn't become a story about racism just because someone interpreted it that way.

Death of the Author is used in analyzing the text, yes. But it's only one literary tool, no more or less valid. People taking into consideration JKR's words isn't a "problem", at least not on an analytic level. But on a fandom level... sorry, both sides have ground to stand on. You'll claim DotA all you want, because your interpretation is valid to you, while for others the author being alive is equally valid.

[illiadandoddity]

Um, speaking as a reader of Harry Potter, I read the seventh book and took away the interpretation that Dumbledore was gay long before Rowling's interview where she confirmed it. It was there in the text, maybe not as obvious as people would have liked, but it was there.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yeah, me too, partly from the way he talked about Grindelwald, but just as much because of the way Skeeter writes about him in her hatchet biography - it very much reminded me of the way unfriendly journalists used to hint at closeted gays' sexuality.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, but. I got the same exact impression of "these characters are queer; this subtext is intentional" about Sirius and Remus in the third, fourth, and fifth books as I did about Dumbledore in the seventh book, and apparently Rowling hadn't intended the former reading at all.

[(Anonymous)]

I was trying to figure out how to word it but now I can rest easy because you've done it for me.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, this. I see a lot of people cite death of the author to mean all interpretations of a story are equally valid, which I disagree with.People can read whatever message they want into it or look at it how they want, but their interpretation isn't suddenly on the same level of the author's. Especially with what someone mentioned upthread about Lord of the Rings. Yes, it can be read as a metaphor for WWII and Tolkien was probably influenced by it, but stop saying that he's wrong when he says he didn't write it as a metaphor.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Yeah, let's just ignore all the textural problems involved in the metaphor theory to push authorial intent. Brilliant!

[(Anonymous)]

What?

[cbrachyrhynchos]

The WWII metaphor is a stupid interpretation. You don't need to go trawling through Christopher's edits of JRR's notes to drop a bomb on it. You just need a High School level of understanding about WWII, and Lord of the Rings itself. Death of the Author doesn't justify Missing the Fucking Point Printed on the Page, which is what the WWII metaphor demands.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, okay. I thought a first you were disagreeing with me and I couldn't figure out what you were saying.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

You don't even need to trawl through HoME to find it, it's right in the preface of FotR, where JRR's most famous piece of "This is not a WW2 metaphor!" goes on to say that if it had bee, Saruman would have invented a One Ring of his own and Hobbits would have been universally reviled and exterminated.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

I think it's a crappy interpretation even without the preface.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

So do I.

[(Anonymous)]

Eh, I think once art is out there, independently, Word of God is not biblical. Of course the author's word means something, and author's intent with the story is never going to change. ("I didn't intend for this story to be a metaphor for racism" and so forth) But I don't think any interpretations (well, most interpretations) are wrong, once it's out there, whether or not it's the author's intent.

[(Anonymous)]

YES.