[This posting is *not* an administrative announcement!]
"Marian" == Marian de Haan maya@multiweb.nl writes:
As I writer, I'd hate it if someone would take the characters from my books and distort them to the point where they would become unrecognisable to me. And it would hurt even more if they then went on to claim that their version was the way I had really intended the characters to be, and kept ignoring my denials.
Avoid becoming a professional writer; you'll hate it.
Before I turned to the dark side and became a sysadmin, I studied literature at university for three years. One of the very first things we were taught, in the very first course of the first term, was that the author's opinion of a work and/or intent behind it is utterly irrelevant.
This is not just nastiness on the part of the litcrit crowd, there is some sense behind it. Most of that sense is that the creator of a work is much too close to it to provide any sort of unbiased commentary. When the creator looks at her work, she does not just see the work, she also remembers the Platonically ideal version of that work that she had in her head while she created, and that ideal *does* get mixed up with the actual work as seen by others.
The way we were taught, all works are supposed to stand by themselves. When evaluating a literary creation, you look only at the creation itself. You disregard when it was created, you disregard who created it, you disregard why it was created; you just look at the creation as it appears before you. No more, and no less[1].
A consequence of this view is that there is no such thing as a "right" or a "wrong" interpretation. There are interpretations that can be more or less strongly argued for or against, but that is not at all the same thing. There are also no such thing as an impossible interpretation. As soon as someone has interpreted a work in a certain way, that interpretation is obviously possible, and all that remains to do is to argue for or against it (or to ignore it, of course).
In this pro/con-slash flamefest, you and others have argued that the pro-slash interpretation of Blake's 7 shouldn't be made, because it wasn't the intention of the creators of the show that it should be interpreted that way. I and, I think, several others reject this argument for pretty much all of the reasons given above.
The slash interpretation can be made. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of fanzines as evidence of that.
The non-slash interpretation can also be made. There are just as much evidence for that.
Arguing that the slash interpretation can't be made or shouldn't be made is utterly pointless. So many people, many of them entirely independent of each other, have come up with the slash interpretation that we can say that it is, undeniably, one valid interpretation of Blake's 7. Trying to argue it out of existence will achieve absolutely nothing except a lot of bad feelings and ill will.
[1] This is not the only way to do literary criticism, of course. Marxist critics, for example, invariably try to see works in relation to the Marxist view of historic progress. But the views I describe above were the predominant ones a few years ago, and as far as I know they still are.