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.
I watched a vod of a streamer who became repeatedly frustrated by the lack of meaning to all the symbols and imagry in a game and someone in their chat said:
"Why have themes and meaning when you can have wikis and lore?"
And that phrase has been rattling around in my brain ever since
I'm gonna risk sounding dismissive, and I really don't mean to be--I'd rather see people talk about things like this than not talk about them regardless of all else. I agree with some of what's been said and think the comments are interesting personal ways of trying to work through the issue. But I also feel sort of obligated to point out that we don't need to reinvent literary theory from first principles every time this comes up, which it does often.
There is a text and an author (in some sense), but texts are public utterances, both products of and subject to history, made in one context and experienced in others. This doesn't mean you're suspect for the mere act of updating a wiki, or for liking one set of things about a work more than another, or for reading an author's biography. But if you take an extreme position on authorship vs. meaning like the one in the original post, what you're doing is at least as much political as it is aesthetic, and critics have produced huge volumes of work about how this construction of the author is at best not that useful anymore and at worst a cudgel wielded by capitalism and the already-privileged in western Europe and its white-majority colonies. Again, interesting to see people apply this to their own experiences, but when someone conceives of the author as absolute, I do think that at this point we're allowed to call their aesthetics shallow and to worry about their politics without a lot of additional justification.


