hope I never improve my game

[lotesse]

Late-night hypothesis (i had a hard day i'm not thinking about it): might the weird misdirectedness of "sj shipping" and whatnot be a possible aftereffect of the hardcore fannish embrace of the death of the author?

Instead of accepting all fannish responses while questioning the motives/credentials of directors, movie studios, and various financiers, we seem to be ignoring the latter classes of being almost entirely to instead police fannish response.

I am pretty sure that a substantial chunk of this is "women can be easily made to feel badly about libidinal desires," but also think it's interesting that, after having gloriously launched myself into the arms of Barthes during the Harry Potter years, I now find myself endlessly wanting to remind fellow fen about who gets paid for these stories, who has control, and who exactly doesn't (hint: it's us).

Comments

[legionseagle]

Massively agreeing with all of this. It explains, for example, why Mark Oshiro is making such a hellish mess of reading Discworld, which is quintessentially a set of stories in dialogue with the whole of SFF and other forms of literature and popular culture (Masquerade is a satire on the entire oeuvre of Andrew Lloyd Webber) but because of "authro is dead" you get the commentariat going "Yet again this hoary old trope [ ] appears in the story" without the way it's being subverted being spotted at all.

And agreed about the aggressive fan policing, too; people can get to a fellow fan, but if they even get a nasty message past Joss Whedon's gatekeepers, he can just cry himself to sleep about it, pillowed on his sackloads of money.