Interpretation Isnât Sovereignty
I truly hate the entire concept of âDeath of the Authorâ as it exists in modern fandom culture. Not as a literary theory in its original academic sense, but as this flattened, weaponized slogan that people use to shut down creators and insulate their own head canons from criticism. What started as a critical framework has turned into a moral ideology, and thatâs where it becomes nonsense.
Roland Barthes wasnât writing about fandom spaces, social media discourse, or franchise storytelling. He wasnât talking about shared universes, canon hierarchies, or collaborative media ecosystems. He was talking about literary interpretation in an academic context. But fandom took that idea and turned it into a blunt instrument: creators donât matter, intent doesnât matter, and the only thing that matters is how I feel about the text. Thatâs not interpretation... thatâs entitlement.
The companion idea that âcreators shouldnât interact with fandomsâ is even more artificial. This isnât some historical norm weâve broken. Creators have always interacted with audiences. Shakespeare did. Dickens did. Comic creators did. Science Fiction writers did. Letters pages, conventions, interviews, fan clubs, serialized fiction, public readings â none of this is new. Whatâs new is the idea that creator presence is somehow intrusive, as if the people who made the work are trespassing on a space they supposedly donât belong in.
Creators do have authority over their creations. Not total authority over interpretation or emotional response, but authority over canon, intent, structure, and design. Those arenât imaginary concepts. Theyâre part of how art is built. If a creator explains what a character was meant to represent, how a story was constructed, or what a theme was designed to explore, thatâs not âinvalidating interpretation.â Thatâs explaining authorship.
You can still feel something different about the work. You can still have personal meaning. You can still connect to it in your own way. But that doesnât erase the framework it was created within. If Greg Weisman says Demona was written as X and not Y, that isnât him âpolicing interpretation.â Thatâs him explaining authorial construction. Youâre free to respond to Demona however you want emotionally, but the architecture of the character didnât come from fandom. It came from the writersâ room.
And sometimes, yeah, peopleâs headcanons are lame. Sometimes theyâre shallow. Sometimes theyâre pure projection. Sometimes they flatten complex characters into comfort characters, self-inserts, or aesthetic avatars. Fandom culture increasingly treats personal interpretation as sacred identity instead of subjective engagement with a text.
Whatâs especially funny is how selective âDeath of the Authorâ actually is. The author is only dead when they disagree with you. When a creator supports someoneâs interpretation, suddenly their word matters again. Suddenly intent matters again. Suddenly authority is real again.
Tolkien is a perfect counterexample to all of this. Not only did he believe in authorial intent, he actively engaged with his audience through letters, essays, and detailed explanations of Middle-earth, its languages, its metaphysics, and its moral structure. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien are literally an archive of creator interaction with fandom and readers. He clarified meanings. He corrected interpretations. He explained symbolism. He rejected readings he felt were wrong. And somehow Middle-earth still survived. The books werenât destroyed. The fandom didnât collapse. The art didnât lose its power. If anything, it deepened the mythology and the understanding of it.
No one accuses Tolkien of âviolating Death of the Author.â No one says he shouldâve stayed silent and let people misunderstand his work forever. Because we instinctively understand that creators explaining their creations is not an attack on art. Itâs part of the artistic process.
The real issue isnât interpretation versus authorship. Itâs sovereignty. A lot of people donât want interpretation. They want ownership without authorship. They want their reading to be unchallengeable, their version to be untouchable, and their headcanon to exist in a vacuum where no creator, no text, and no structure can contradict it.
Art doesnât work that way.
Interpretation matters. Personal meaning matters. Emotional connection matters. But they exist alongside authorship, not above it. Meaning doesnât come from nowhere. Stories are built by people, shaped by intent, structure, craft, and design. Pretending creators are irrelevant to that process isnât progressive or enlightened.
âDeath of the Authorâ as a critical lens can be useful. As fandom doctrine, itâs incoherent. It turns art into pure projection and creators into inconveniences. And honestly, it says more about fandom insecurity than it does about the art that inspired it.
Once the creator enters the room, head canon stops feeling like canon. And some people just canât handle that.
