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!
I have said multiple times that my subconscious often seems to have a better idea of what I'm doing creatively than I do. You can't omit the intuitive dimension of creativity, even if it doesn't fit the image of artist as hyperaware chessmaster. the parts of your brain which don't give you immediate feedback are still there, doing their thing, and they are as much a part of you as the bits that make conscious decisions.
also there is a ton of creative process where you just do something and then later have to decide what it means so that you can emphasize that meaning
Easter egg reveal! I guess :P
This is in the source for https://post-self.ink, and it has been since I set up that domain. More than a year after I bought the domain and set it up, my partner and I had a series of conversations that eventually led to me saying, "Oh, shit, actually...yeah, I guess I am plural???"
This was something ey (and several others) picked up on rather quickly. Hell, the first of these things with heavy plural undertones, ally, led to a review saying, "I think it’s my favorite plural memoir."
If I lived the ethos of "it's pointless if the author didn't put it in there", who fuckin' knows what I would be, these days? Would I be sad? Would I still be singular? Would I still be a skunk?
And hey, that is just talking about me! What would the Post-Self community be? Would I have opened up the setting? Would I have taken the ideas that others have put into the setting and run with them? Would Motes Played exist? Who knows. I think probably not. I think that maybe there would be some fanfiction, but I doubt there would be short stories and novellas and art.
All of this to say, yeah. I had no idea what I was doing, but my subconscious did, and that wound up in my art. Had I decided to shut down media/human literacy when it came to engaging with my work, I think I would be worse off for it, never mind those who engaged with it. What a baffling take...