dear self: the whole point of interpretation and meta in a fannish sense is that there are DIFFERENT WAYS TO GO ABOUT ANALYZING A TEXT THAT ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE!!!
(sometimes i have to write it down in all caps a bunch because i forget and i fall into patterns of harmful and unproductive thinking)
and you can read one thing someone’s written about a show and think ‘huh, never thought about it like that, that’s something interesting to keep in mind’ and it doesn’t cancel out whatever different opinion you might personally have, because there are a BILLION AND ONE WAYS TO ANALYZE ANY GIVEN TEXT whether it’s a show or a movie and a book and almost all of them are all A BILLION PERCENT VALID AND ACADEMICALLY SANCTIONED and it’s never about right or wrong interpretation! it’s about using your resources to uncover meaning that you think is important.
and i need to write it out because i’m sensitive and quick to think i’m wrong and back down on an opinion i have when someone else has a different one than me and that’s just silly!
fandom is like an english class — just because that kid in the backwards baseball cap sitting next to you thinks that the narrative is all about class structure or that weird girl with the bad dye job starts talking about how the themes of the novel aren’t consistently articulated doesn’t mean that you have to agree. more importantly, it doesn’t even mean that you have to disagree or even have strong feelings about it! you don’t have to do anything with that interpretation! it exists, it’s valid, and it’s up to you what to do with it next — or raise your hand to add to the discussion!
tl;dr that kid next to me wearing the backwards baseball cap is an idiot that i never take seriously, but i just shrug him off and let him shout into the void because his interpretation is just as valid as mine even if i don’t care about it or agree with it. our different ways of reading a text can coexist peacefully in ways that we ourselves cannot! i’m not sure where i’m going with this but it made me feel better to get it out and i need it on my blog. thank.