I think I only really got caught up for the first year or so in believing that creators were /strategically/ seeking to create the effects I saw (although in terms of movies and tv, sometimes SOME of the creators are - the Ben Hur situation is a case in point). I think, because my coming to fandom and my coming out were also tied up with my coming to queer theory as a medievalist, I just didn't sustain a long-term interest in Word of God level truth.
The equivalent decoding-systems of queer reading in academia, especially for premodern academia, rely on the fact that The Queer Truth has been Suppressed, and we must decode it (h/t Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, she calls this the hermeneutics of suspicion). That's intoxicating in its way, too. But by that point I was already fed up with the comparable feminist lit crit strategies (there's... i have no idea if you know of a poem called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but anyway, there's a foundational feminist essay on it that seems to assume the character of Morgan has an existence separate from the poem and has been suppressed BY the poem), so gravitated to more... pluralistic ways of thinking about reading. Reader response rather than authorial intent or societal suppression.
I did all that and a coupla theses alongside growing into adulthood in fandom, so the two concepts are deeply entwined for me in ways that get awkward at times. Inception fandom really epitomised what I like in a reading community - that fandom was high on symbolism and coding, but never really got into One True Canon-ism. By and large it treated the canon and the surplus of meaning generated by the canon as _something we could use to communicate with each other_. That's... very much what I see happening in Arthuriana in the long run (and why I literally did not speak to a friend for nine months after she tried to get me into an argument about The Real Morgan Le Fay, circa Merlin s2).
Anyway, um hi, you probably don't know me well enough to know that a. I WILL put citations in my fandom meta and b. everything is about Arthuriana to me
no subject
The equivalent decoding-systems of queer reading in academia, especially for premodern academia, rely on the fact that The Queer Truth has been Suppressed, and we must decode it (h/t Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, she calls this the hermeneutics of suspicion). That's intoxicating in its way, too. But by that point I was already fed up with the comparable feminist lit crit strategies (there's... i have no idea if you know of a poem called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but anyway, there's a foundational feminist essay on it that seems to assume the character of Morgan has an existence separate from the poem and has been suppressed BY the poem), so gravitated to more... pluralistic ways of thinking about reading. Reader response rather than authorial intent or societal suppression.
I did all that and a coupla theses alongside growing into adulthood in fandom, so the two concepts are deeply entwined for me in ways that get awkward at times. Inception fandom really epitomised what I like in a reading community - that fandom was high on symbolism and coding, but never really got into One True Canon-ism. By and large it treated the canon and the surplus of meaning generated by the canon as _something we could use to communicate with each other_. That's... very much what I see happening in Arthuriana in the long run (and why I literally did not speak to a friend for nine months after she tried to get me into an argument about The Real Morgan Le Fay, circa Merlin s2).
Anyway, um hi, you probably don't know me well enough to know that a. I WILL put citations in my fandom meta and b. everything is about Arthuriana to me