#1132: "Yay!"

[Fifthfiend]

People can choose to accept different messages than the ones that were intended. Sometimes an author can make a work poorly enough not to send the message they desire. That doesn't mean they're incorrect. It just means they didn't send the message well.

No, it means they're incorrect. If I tell someone to go fuck himself, then turn around later and say oh well what I meant was you're a wonderful person I think highly of, then that doesn't actually make "fuck you" a compliment, I just said something completely different from what I (claim that I) meant to say.

Dumbledore being gay isn't much of an example because it's completely irrelevant to the story, you can believe it or not believe it as you like. A better example would be if JK Rowling said that the meaning of her story was to show a hero succeeding through hard work, perserverance, and skill. In which case it would be like that's super JK except the story you actually wrote is about a hero coasting on a never-ending tide of Deus Exes and plain dumb luck. If an author has a meaning they want to convey then they need to convey it in the actual story when they're writing it, after-the-fact pronouncements don't mean shit.

Originally Posted by russianreversal

It's like (forgive me but I only have food on the mind right now) me creating a lentil soup, and you saying it tastes like beets to you. I can't say you're wrong (though suggesting that your senses might be out of whack is perfectly within reason), but when insinuate that I was actually trying to make borscht and just called it lentil soup I can certainly call you out on being full of it. I know what I put in my goddamn soup thank you very much and it was lentils.

If you continue to insist on that after your guest dips a ladle into it and pulls out a spoonful of beets, then you're gonna look pretty silly. Authorial omniscience is easy to argue if you only use examples where the author is plainly correct but the long history of art and culture is filled with creators who imagined all kinds of shit about their work that wasn't and couldn't hope to be the case. Convince me why I should accept Ayn Rand's view that her body of work represents a philosophical treatise demonstrating the true nature of human beings, and not a ridiculous Mary-Sue wankfest extolling the philosophy of It's Right Cause Ayn Rand Says So, Fuck You. Go exhume D.W. Griffith and get him to tell me how Birth of a Nation was a story of a proud people's noble struggle to uphold morality in the face of corrupt outsiders and degenerate ideas and we'll see if I don't choose to continue viewing it as a pile of crazy racist bullshit.

People always and forever have believed all kinds of shit about themselves and the things they say and do that don't have fuck-all to do with the reality of their interactions with the world around them, picking up a pen and titling yourself An Author doesn't make you somehow exempt.