Specifically thinking about Homestuck on this topic, with things like the mess that is troll worldbuilding and how despite claims of araciality the kids are described as "white", "pink", or "pale" at least five or six times and are clearly drawn as skinny Caucasians in Hussie's more detailed art styles. It's actively against canon, but canon is terrible on this count so we're changing it.
I would still call that just "headcanon", or maybe "personal rewrite". Little omissions and fixes are par for the course of making a thing work for you personally.
Death of the author in its simplest form just means "the author's onion on their own work is not inherently more valuable or authoritative than the onion of anyone else on the work in question". It's not really an action or an attitude, more of a philosophical stance on media as a whole :D Death of the author would be more like if the author had said in an interview that "you're wrong about this character being a racist caricature, there's actually all these reasons they have to be that way" and the audience went "um, okay? They're still portrayed in extremely racist ways in text, your intentions do not matter".
Death of the Author as a social phenomena occurs in fandom mostly when Word of God says something and fandom goes "we're just gonna ignore that and pretend you said nothing".
Ah, see, I've always heard "headcanon" as "filling in gaps" or "picking an option the creator didn't specify", not active contradiction.
Further info: In its original context, it was specifically a response to the prevailing philosophy in academia at the time that a lot of how you do in-depth literary analysis is by closely examining the author's life to try to figure out exactly what they were thinking at the time. Like, if you wanted to write about all the gay shit in Dracula, a lot of what you'd be doing is looking into Bram Stoker's life to try to find any evidence you can about his relationships and his opinions on gay people. The original essay was arguing that the only really important aspect of analyzing a text is the text, rather than trying to scry into the past with a crystal ball to read someone's mind. So, for instance, without Death of the Author, if you're analyzing Fahrenheit 451, you'd need to talk about how Ray Bradbury said it wasn't about censorship, and either accept his claim or make an argument about why he said that. With Death of the Author, you're allowed to go "That's fucking stupid" and ignore Ray Bradbury and talk about what the book says about censorship. But on the flip side, a major criticism of Death of the Author is that texts don't actually exist in a vacuum, and ignoring outside context makes it very easy to miss anything relating to an experience you're unfamiliar with. If you read Animal Farm and don't know anything about the history of the Soviet Union, your analysis will be incorrect. And it's especially easy to erase marginalized voices this way, because you are, explicitly, centering your own experience of the text and saying that's the only one that matters.
Hmm. That kind of thing where basically everyone agrees that a particular part of canon can't be right, but there's no particular consensus on what should be there. I've heard the term 'discontinuity' used to describe that, but usually in reference to a particular episode rather than a specific plot point (e.g. how Trekkies collectively agree Threshold never happened). Maybe 'canon hole'? Sort of like a plot hole, except it's not necessarily a hole in the plot, but in the canon making any kind of sense.
Look, fuckface elsewhere, when I can list sixteen offensive anti-black stereotype traits just off the top of my head that a certain single character falls into and back this up by linking to a black person pointing some of them out, maybe they're actually an anti-black stereotype. I'm not even good at spotting those.
And arguing that "but being dirty/drug-addicted/etc is a classist stereotype!" a) doesn't make it not also a racist one and b) does not make it better even if it did!
started reading Long Way to a Small Angry Planet recently and... was expecting it to be a lot better based on all the hype. I couldn't get past the first few hours of audiobook. maybe it's just a personal taste thing - the lack of conflict made it really tedious for me, but I know some people enjoy that - but honestly the writing itself felt kind of mediocre too. weirdly soapboxy. every time a new alien character was introduced either they or someone else immediately got up to do a damn powerpoint presentation on their species. and all the characters are so tropey, and not in a good way. around the time the ship's AI started asking the software engineer if he wanted her to be pretty, I gave up :/
Yeah - I was recommended the series by a friend a few years ago and felt the same. There’s a lot of bits with neurodivergent characters as well that I found really uncomfortable. The third book is an improvement on the first two but it’s still pretty preachy and I wouldn’t recommend it.
Whole SCP community's a disaster right now. It's kinda hard to enjoy it anymore, I don't like the changes they made to old entries and I'm not a fan of how they handled the Bright fuckery, though I'm not even sure what would have worked "better" in my eyes. Maybe at least communally designing a replacement instead of having one guy seemingly unanimously decided to find-and-replace the name. Group writing always has those risks, I guess.
I really try to be more understanding about grammar and such, but I'm sorry, if you're going to write Goblin Emperor fic, you have to be able to use thee and thou and conjugate verbs correctly around them. Especially if your story is about characters coming to treat each other more informally. If you just throw "dost" and "hath" into your dialogue even when characters are talking about themselves, I can't actually follow what they're supposed to be saying and I have to close the fic even if it's good.
walpurgis no kaiten isn't even out yet in japan, so why am I already encountering madomagi fanfic tagged as taking place after that movie?? hello???
Are they just that confident that it's going to undo/retcon everything they didn't like about Rebellion or...?
