Linkspam

[primeideal]

In a roundup of weekly news, saw this link to a 1996 piece making the case that, roughly, "some people might want to censor or restrict access to books/movies/media with Bad themes, because people might learn bad lessons from them. BUT, this take is too simplistic, because people engage with media in ways that are more complicated than just absorbing the surface-level message or attempt at morals. People get takeaways or messages that weren't necessarily what the creators intended! They post about them on internet bulletin boards! Sometimes they even make transformative fanworks and start slashing Kirk and Spock!" As someone who was alive but not exactly part of the fannish community in 1996, I found this to be an interesting perspective--the writer is clearly not part of the transformative fanworks tradition himself, so it's an "outsider" take on this side of fandom, but the more general point about "not everything has to be didactic, and even if it was, you're still fighting a losing battle because you can't control what people take away from media" is still relevant 26 years later.