anorthernskyatdawn:

i am eternally aggreived on behalf of people who were clearly never taught what literary analysis can be. people who were never shown the incredible satisfaction when you see something in a piece of literature and you can /prove/ it’s there, the slow and careful tugging at an image, at chasing implication and meaning, at pushing and pushing until it all falls into place.

sometimes that looks like catching a “throwaway” line in a novel (“[the drawings] remembered Beardsley”) and chasing that single image until you have five thousand words about attempted freedom, conformity, and inescapability.

sometimes that looks like noticing a motif of reused roman ruins and going through and through until you can argue about colonising gaze and welsh devolution.

sometimes that means reading a novel where every chapter tells a story of someone telling a story and proving that that is an attempt at catharsis that fails.

it’s not all “the curtains are blue therefore the character is sad”

and besides, that’s actually “this character seems sad but the author never says so > how does the author create that? > oh hey there sure are a lot of washed out or cool colours in this scene > wait hold on the furnishings are almost obsessively described > does that say something about material culture? can i parallel that against appearances vs reality? > “in this essay i will argue that this short story interrogates arts and crafts aesthetic ideals by portraying an obsession with furnishings that ultimately leads the main character into despair. In order to do so let me first demonstate the connection between the furnishings and the emotional state of the main character”

A little reminder that just because canon doesn’t come out and say something explicitly doesn’t mean it’s not there. An implication that’s pulled out of the subtleties in a work is not mere “headcanon”; it is *interpretation*. Yes, you have to argue for it; you have to provide evidence. But once someone has done that, it’s insufficient to dismiss the point with “That’s just your interpretation,” much less “that’s just your headcanon.”

And yes, works of popular fiction can have subtleties that need to be drawn out by interpretation. Yesterday’s pop culture is today’s classics. Athenian tragedies, Shakespeare plays, Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald novels were pop culture at one point. There was also a whole lot of bad pop culture that has been lost to the ages just because nobody bothered to keep copying it down or reprinting it. The good pop culture is what survives.