#again disclaimer this really isnt meant to attack anyone or say im right...its just another opinion to be lost in the sea of internet

[always-a-joyful-note]

Thinking some fandom thoughts and then about ORV's portrayal of an author-character-reader relationship with the story and realising how....lacking at times the whole death of the author perspective on media can be.

(Turned out to be long and rambly so I put it under a cut. If you like death of the author, probably not for your worldview? Also, beware major ORV spoilers if you care about that)

Like, perhaps I'm misinterpreting something here, but in ORV, we had these three characters plus an entire system that gave us a look into the relationship between author/reader/character. And focusing on the Han Sooyoung, Kim Dokja, and Yoo Joonghyuk dynamic, I realise that none of them really died. Pushing asides Joonghyuk and Dokja for the moment (as I am talking about death of the author), we have Han Sooyoung whose consciousness faded after finishing Ways of Survival.

However, I don't know if we can really call that death of the author, really. Because Sooyoung's whole purpose in writing ORV, her authorial intention, was to save Kim Dokja's life...which she DID. And even after the story left her hands, her intentions were imprinted into the story itself. Yes, Dokja realised that the system was lenient to him because of (spoiler alert) his status as the OD. But at the same time, I think that Han Sooyoung's authorial intent to keep Dokja alive with WoS can also be taken as a factor in the system's leniency towards our reader.

And just jumping from that back to my original point, while death of the author IS fun and can be awesome for reinterpreting stories that the author may have intended as problematic (to our modern standards, at least), to separate the actual story itself from its creator seems just....a tad disrespectful to the author.

Or maybe disrespectful isn't the right word. Like, say, even if said author is objectively the worst of humans, there remains the fact that the story in essence has part of them embedded into it. It doesn't make sense, at least to me, to only give "morally okay" writers the allowance of people who put a part of themselves in their works. Any writer, even those who are writing for money imo, can't help but put part of their own selves into their story...and to separate the story from the author just because we hate the author or hate their beliefs seems a bit counter-productive. You can't just say, after all, that this author's vulnerability in their writing is okay because it's Correct but this other guy's vulnerability should be ignored because it's chalk full of Problematic Content.

But again, that's not to justify authors you dislike or the deeply wrong messages implied in their works. Especially those that could easily be shooed away by employing death of the author. But I think I'd consider fanfic or analyses that ignore authorial intent and their message to be something...new entirely? (Best way I can say it is something something death of an author employed to help the reader create their own narrative inspired by someone else's story rather than it being used to ignore author intent and claim our interpretation is what canon actually meant).

I think there's a saying in music as well as writing that you could play the same exact score or write the same story, it's just that things will come out different depending on the player or writer. (That's not a perfect comparison because the player/musician who WROTE the score could be considered a reader/author relationship...the point is more that the same thing will look different in the hands of different people. And that just as the reader will interpret something in their own way when reading/re-reading (another ORV reference), the author also has placed in their own interpretation and intent in that own work...which should at worst be respected because they DID make that content (and then we proceed to brutally revise it to make something we like better xD) or at best be taken as "word of god" for lack of a better term)

Not sure if any of this makes sense, and I definitely don't have any factual evidence to back up this opinion, but it was just something I was thinking of.

TL:dR? Death of the author is FUN and actually pretty cool but I think the things coming out of it are new(ish) things/works entirely, and og author's beliefs/intentions are important to consider for that text they wrote in of itself.