we're reminded of a piece that someone once wrote on, tumblr or a forum like, 15 years ago - it was discussing how fan communities tend to cleave in of two ways.
(HOLLY NOTE: THIS POST WAS FOUND. THIS POST IS THIS POST BY A REDDITOR DISCUSSING WHY REDDITORS OFTEN BASH TUMBLR FANS OF DR WHO. YOU ARE WELCOME TO READ THAT, AND IN FACT WE ENCOURAGE IT, AS IT LENDS A VERY SPECIFIC TONE TO THE REST OF THE REFERENCE THAT THIS POST IS.)
The first option is that the community is largely transformative - artists, writers, musicians taking a base material that affected them in some way and changing it. Classic examples being fixing what they didn't like, expanding on material they wanted more of, retreading the material but with explicit queer themes, transposing it to an alternate universe to explore character dynamics with different stakes. This is where you get those 50 billion alternative sanses in undertale aus. it's where you get coffee-shop kylo kissing someone, or an extended alternate take of a show/movie that changes major points to meet the creator's desire. it's your fanart of the wolf and the snake from bad guys kissing exactly as passionately as i'm led to believe their on-screen chemistry would imply.
the other type of fan culture is archival - the wookiepedias, the dark-souls wikis, the rivet counters. these people don't want to create, they want to record a perfect library of everything that happens or could have happened or will happen in a media as if they were creating a sistine chapel ceiling fresco of the exact shape of the silmarillion. you can argue whether or not these people have experienced any feelings about the materiel they have interacted with because they seem dead set on not actually grappling with whatever themes or morals the media had.
these are the people who cannot be reached by the question of "why does it matter what the author meant, what does it mean to you" - they don't want it to mean anything to them at all and resent you for asking them to weigh in on such a matter. if it's not the "true and correct" meaning, then what value does it have to an archive? if someone can find value in interpreting the catcher in the rye as being about the loss of innocence in war, which runs counter to salinger's own personal insistence that his time serving was of no matter to the book, what does that mean in an archival sense? you can't put that on a shelf. it doesn't fit into a neat web of interconnected wiki pages, it doesn't slot onto a timeline.
archivalist fan culture breeds a sneering anti-intellectualism by way of said intellectualism being unable to be slotted neatly before or after the battle of yavin 4.
Even beyond "what does it mean to you" is the fact that humans usually don't know what they're doing or why, and that includes authors, and it's extremely common to notice after the fact that there was more to something you created than what you were aware of at the time! Most people have things going on with them that they'd deny if you asked about it, and things like that absolutely will show up in their work! Humans aren't perfectly self-aware! Even ignoring "death of the author" discourse, this is basic human existence stuff! These people aren't media literate, yes, but they also aren't human literate!
okay but like, counterpoint as someone who has archivist tendencies and doesn't really find anything interesting about transformative fan works: i think it's possible to be interested in the literal thing presented without being a ding dong about it.
archives can be an incredible way to understand a work and its place in the world. i am fascinated by wiki culture and tv tropes because there is so little interpretation happening. to me, it's a chance to see ideas ping against each other in the abstract. i love seeing connections between disparate pieces of media and theorizing why those things treat the same subject matter the way they do.
on the other hand, i have seen some of the worst possible media takes from transformative artists!! it is possible to deeply love a work and still completely miss the point.
anyway i think there's actually a ton of overlap between the transformative folks and the so-called "rivet counters." it's hard to transform something that you don't know a great amount of detail about. at the very least, it's unconvincing. and i think it's hard to be a true archivist for a work without having it change in your mind as you learn about it.
my point is that the transformative/archival divide is not only untrue (surprise, this enby hates binaries) but it also has nothing to do with whether someone is capable of understanding a work. media "literacy" (scare quotes because i think this term is very poorly defined) is just totally separate from how one enjoys a work of fiction.
it's pretty frustrating to write off a whole group of people as "not human literate" too.
EDIT: Further reading on how archival work is transformative: https://cohost.org/Toyguin/post/6461094-thank-you-as-someon
