art is not the same thing as philosophy, though a lot of art has ideas from philosophy.

Mhh, that's a good aesthetics/psychology question I guess. But regardless, then the topic that you were covering isn't "philosophy" anymore.

It's something even worse than the "telephone game", where not only you trying to get other people to understand your every own intuition is very likely to fail.. but even your yesterday self with your current one could disagree.

Art can't make an example about an arbitrary human construct by accident.

Yeah, except you would never find it in that case.

So appealing to shakespeare's authority as a quick determiner of "good work" wouldn't fly.

> the real question is whether Anno is being dishonest or excessively modest about his background knowledge

I don't think so. Even putting aside that I see no reason or way for somebody to be "modest by lying" the real question first and foremost is how whatever we are talking about fits in the context of the broader story. Of course.

But since most of it really gives you no fucking clue about the symbolism (excuse my french, but there's just so many loose threads, including main plot devices like the spear of longinus) you must eventually grasp at some straw behind the fourth wall.

Like, most people don't even seem to be aware that a lot of the tone shift mid-way throughout the series was due to extraordinary measures taken after budget and production constraints.

> or if some other contributor to the work impacted the meaning.

He has been pretty open about the fact its absolutely biggest inspiration has been previous animes like gundam tbh.

Then it's not like you have to have studied psychology to talk or portray depression (for as much as he really goes down hard trying to push certain BS concepts) but you wouldn't argue that you can have good takes on plato or hegel without even having read anything from them.

> If a text can be effectively used to advance an idea, even one the author didn’t intend, people are liable to do so.

Yes. But as I said in another comment, it's one thing to "accidentally" come up with some new wholesome character or world dynamic.. Like, anything can happen in a fictional reality.

It's very much another to "accidentally" come up with some profound meaning/reflection (let alone if then you want to pretend that it's a direct inspiration or a clear example of a certain famous thinker) about something real and factual of academical interest.

Maybe if you lower the bar to "just something more trivial" it's not really impossible, but good god... Even in this entire post I couldn't read once somebody arguing for the material merit of the christian symbolism in context. It's just automagically assumed to have to be meaningful, like in the infamous "student of philosophy" example by Reichenbach, and then everything else is just trying to defend the "possibility" that it could be valid.

> There’s plenty of value outside of authorial intent that we throw away if we narrow acceptable interpretations down to ones the author plausibly or likely intended.

Yes, but we are trying to do philosophy here, not (for the lack of a better word) gossip or HR.

Unless you want to claim that despite X intentions of the writer, then Y came to happen in-world anyway, then they very much matter. Here people want to have it both ways: anno is simultaneously some kind of genius for having created this work, yet anything and everything can never be ascribed to his will.

And I wish to piss on the grave of the guy who came up with that. Death of the Author is the Death of Communication, if you divorce yourself from the meaning others try to convey, why interact with them on that level at all?
You may as well take a lesson from a stone if you’re willing to ignore a creator’s intent and invent your own theories.

thank you i felt like that had to be the case but im in no position to argue as im pretty new to this stuff. unsurprisingly you’re the only one who elaborated when i asked :)

Death of the Author is just one more tool among many you should wield when analyzing a work. It is not the be-all and end-all. It can be misused. And this is one of the cases of misuse.

It's like when the author writes that the curtains are blue because he thinks it's a cool color. Then people theorize that the color "blue" symbolizes depression, and when the author comes and dispels this, they invalidate the author's intentions. This is not a good application of "Death of the Author".

It takes a lot of modesty to claim that the curtains are blue. You'd have to admit that when you personally interact with the work, you feel that the curtain's color reinforce the feeling of dread and depression in the story. Now that's a good application of "Death of the Author".

But to claim that the author symbolizes depression with the color blue would be objectively wrong. And people try to get around this by saying not that "the author symbolizes..." but rather that "the story symbolizes..." as if the story, a combination of words, had sentience and agency.

There are only two sentient agents. The author, and you (the reader). Any interpretation must be the product of the voluntary effort of one of these two agents.

This thread is a combination of bad applications of "Death of the Author". The scenes in Evangelion may be interpreted as materializations of complex philosophical concepts (just like any story), but it must be made clear that the author has no background on philosophy, did not write the story with philosophy in mind and did not consciously inject any philosophy in it. The reader is free to experience the story however they want, of course.

It's totally possible to send some big "special vibe" even without having meant it (just think to MLP). Just like good intentions could end up capsized even just by the wrong lighting or whatnot (boy haven't I heard hot takes on the movie passengers).

But you can't write about some specific aspect of reality (be it physics or psychology) completely out of your ass, it would be akin to the famous monkey writing a poem by blindly typing on a keyboard.

This is only seldom a problem for fiction, since most of times you are writing about something completely made up happening to somebody completely made up (you just have to clear the bar of understanding basic human interactions) but if you shift the focus from the story itself to how it could relate to an irl topic, the lens is dramatically different.

In this case we know the author's understanding of christianity to be basically nonexistent (to the point that if it had happened the other way around, we'd be calling for that to be insensitive and trivializing). The symbolism was literally there just as a sort of clickbait. You can argue the cross that was originally drawn with no particular meaning suddenly has one given the context of the scene, but... uh, what's even the meaning of that meaning then? How much are you actually still analyzing the medium itself, as opposed to just your own experience?

Not who you are replying to, but there is some interesting theory on this related to "death of the author". It is not a clean-cut question, with lots of fascinating implications.