#'to demonstrate here's Pakko and Be in maid dresses and Vue in a butler suit'

[burinazar]

the tenor of some discussion spaces for my current main fandom is so antithetical to the 'analysis/reinterpretation beyond the bounds of what it is likely the author actually intended to imply is enjoyable for what that interpretation itself offers' culture of most other fandom spaces i've been in over the last twenty years. that is, i am not convinced that many people who post in like the Abyss subreddit and stuff would see the point of analysis that a fan knows is probably not what the author intended, but still thinks would be cool/poignant/thought-provoking as a lens to view the work through, regardless of (sometimes explicitly knowing there is a lack of) authorial intent.

like. for comparison, consider that most spheres of Star Trek fandom contain many people who would totally *get* what you were doing if you posted a meta reinterpreting an episode as being about a different or more specific social issue than the one that we can tell the authors intended it as a metaphor for. (i mean do i even need to say which DS9 episode can be reanalyzed thru any of a number of gender and sexuality related lenses even though it's likely it was meant for one or two in particular)

relatedly a good portion of them would *get* what you were doing if you were heavily invested in a ship with no chance of having ever been intended by the showrunners to be seen as canon. yes i do think that the brain places that lead to the best written and most intricately characterized ship fic and the best pieces of non-fic meta and analysis as described above are comparable brain places, the 'pick apart what i like about it and put it back together, in the forms most beauteously to my tastes' brain places. i know from experience the same people are often the ones reading and writing both at once.

....Trek fans are perhaps primed to respect the culture of reinterpretive fanwork because they get that Liking Spirk is so valid (tm) that it saved the show and created fan culture as we know it even if Roddenberry did not intend for us to Think That Was The Case.

anyway. this is so much the case that i think when i get more stuff onto the neocities i may have to actually put in some sort of disclaimer somewhere that's the meta version of a don't like don't read warning and/or explaining death of the author as it applies to meta and perhaps fanwork in general