User:RD/9k/because author said so (Q60,63)

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Fictional events only happen because the author said so / Details in fiction only exist because the author said so -> no. if this were true Media Representation would be impossible. say there's a fictional book meant to teach people about the United States Reconstruction era, or slaves escaping to the North. can somebody just go around saying that every single thing that happens in that book is the author's opinionated agenda peculiar to their own individual tastes and not inherently shared with any other person like them for reasons they did not choose? or are some of the things in that book in there because they are representational art of things that regularly happen in the real world or have happened? if historical fiction can be based on particular unique historical events, then events in books can also be based on general patterns seen in history. and they can be based on scientific models. and they can be based on any number of internally-coherent things which make sense in and of themselves without asking what the author's desires or agenda are. (ontologies.) many well-written stories don't look intentionally designed although they in fact are, and you keep this in mind if you want to solve them.

Treating authors as gods is reductive to art -> if all art is is just waiting for authors to say things, then why would anyone pay for it? can't we all just imagine stories on our own, regardless of how good they are? when you realize that, you realize it's vitally important to treat art as an internally coherent system in order to get anyone to appreciate authors. when fan theories are framed as an alternate form of humanities study which is more scientifically-minded — this being an arbitrary flavor choice, not an objectively better way of doing things — they act as a form of art appreciation because they are predicting things and looking for sound structure and solid craftsmanship within the fictional world. it's something like the systematic "music theory" of narratives. sometimes people do it wrong and fail to correctly analyze departures from reality as legitimate rules within the system rather than "unrealistic". this doesn't mean that the entire analytic approach is bad, or doesn't understand what art is. I think there's at least some amount of an argument, maybe not rock-solid exactly, that it understands art on a higher level. the level where art has already succeeded and transported us to the new reality it has fabricated. shouldn't it be the highest praise of art having succeeded when people are actually living in that reality for a moment?