Who took down Roosh V’s sites this week? Danes, gays, Jews … or Big Toilet Paper?

@katz

Because if it’s canon then no one can dispute it. A creator’s word is the definitive word on what they create because they created it.

Besides, with that thinking, who’s to say that Krem from Dragon Age or Birdo from Super Mario or Poison from Street Fighter are trans? Are we to accept people drawing Krem in frilly dresses or addressing Poison as he? NO! Because that goes against canon. Krem is a trans man, Poison is a trans woman and these are indisputable facts that no one can argue against because it’s canon.

And, lastly, the most famous lady in gaming is trans! That’s HUGE for the trans community! Samus would be a good, strong representation of trans women everywhere! Having a creator’s word say that, yes, she is trans means SO MUCH you have no idea!

When you’re bombarded with Norman Bates and “haha men in a dress” all the time, having someone like Samus being CONFIRMED TRANS is something to fucking embraced the shit out of.

@Jackie:

At the risk of mansplaining, are you familiar with the theory of the Death of the Author?

Roland Barthes wrote:

We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal “thing” he claims to “translate” is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum…

Once the Author is gone, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing… In a multiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, “threaded” (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning. Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a “secret:’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.

Or in Umberto Eco’s somewhat pithier summary:

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would not have written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

Applied to the Metroid case, this means that when it was created the programmers and designers may or may not have intended Samus Aran to be trans*. Indeed, different members of the production team, and different teams in the series, may have had differing thoughts on the matter. That isn’t important: as katz said, once Metroid is out there it belongs to everyone, and nobody’s view on it is more valid than anyone else’s.

The creators may say, as Palahniuk did about the gay interpretations of Fight Club, that they did not intend this meaning, but again intent is unimportant. The meaning of a piece is created by the act of reading it, or in this case playing it, not by the act of writing. If trans* people play Metroid and find that it speaks to their experiences, then Metroid has become a work of trans* significance whether the creator intended it or not.

Some wit on the web said, a year ago at the opening stages of #GG, that “if these people object so strenuously to Sarkeesian, they are going to shit themselves if and when they encounter Derrida and Foucault.” We may be coming to the point where we can apply, if not Derrida, at least Barthes to video games. That’s a very good thing: being able to tap into the mainstream of literary criticism will help creators to make vastly better games.

* * *

It’s worth noting that certain writers (Margaret Atwood, for example) oppose the concept of the Death of the Author and believe that their own interpretation of their work should be taken as the only correct one. It’s not a closed issue.

Aaaagh, blockquote mammothed.

Err… Sorry, all, I only brought it up because I thought it was nifty. I’ll go hide now. >_>;

There is literally, like, three other confirmed trans women in gaming and you’re asking why it MATTERS.

No, I’m not. You’re not understanding the question. I didn’t ask whether Samus being trans matters; indeed my question is not about Samus at all.

It’s about your approach to textual criticism. Why do you take it as a given that what the creator says, outside of the actual text, is part of the canon? There are many problems with this approach, starting with the fact that Samus wasn’t created out of whole cloth by one person, so why does this one guy’s gross slur define what she is or not?

If you take a death-of-the-author approach — very sensible for works like this that have passed through a lot of hands — then Samus is defined entirely by the actual text (ie, the games) and whatever her creators say is irrelevant unless they explicitly write it into a subsequent game. In the meantime, any interpretation is valid if it can be persuasively argued from the text. (And, for that matter, the text itself can be open to debate too, especially if it’s contradictory.)

Going by the word of the person in charge leaves you at the mercy of whatever Fleming said about Bond, whatever Moffat says about the Doctor, whatever Lucas says about Star Wars, and however many other auteurs might say obnoxious things about the stuff they’re in charge of.

@katz

Just so you know, officially, Samus’ cis or trans status IS in the air. It has neither been confirmed or denied that she is cis or not. That means, even after all her creators are gone, she can be still canonize as trans and no one can say otherwise.

In fact, most characters are up in the air like this. Beowulf? Snow White? Jean Valjean? Hermione Granger? Neither confirmed nor denied that they are cis or not, they are just ASSUMED to be.

The older a story is, the more its canon can be turned. It’s just how works work. Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland or American McGee’s is no more non-canonical than Lewis Carroll’s. Wicked and Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful are no more non-canonical than Baum’s.

This is because times have changed and things can be interpreted differently. But the main body of work is still there. Alice and Dorothy still go on adventures – there are things that do not change.

This is where spin offs and alternative universes come in. These can also be apart of canon. Just look at Marvel or DC.

When you go so far from canon, it becomes a completely different body of work. What is Lord of the Rings when you go against canon? Dungeon and Dragons. Warhammer. The Elder Scrolls. The canon is just something someone draws upon as inspiration for another body of work when you go against it enough.

Of course, there are canon works that go off of establish canon, it’s pretty much a different work altogether. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Van Helsing, Nosferatu, Castlevania, Love at First Bite, Buffy – all have THE Dracula but they’re way off canon.

Thanks for teaching me the word “headcanon.” It’s a surprisingly useful term for literary analysis. I am now giggling over imagining how certain great literary critics would use it.

Barthes: There is only headcanon.

Derrida: Art is headcanon.

Eco: A novel is a machine for generating headcanon.

Borges: We cannot know what the author’s headcanon was.

Said: One’s headcanon is the history of their civilisation.

Atwood: Headcanon will result in unemployment among writers.

Ah, no, sorry, apparently Poison isn’t from Fatal Fury. Or rather, she appeared in *one* Fatal Fury game. She’s also appeared as a crossover character in about half a dozen other fighting series, mostly by Capcom. Her actual origin is from Final Fight, which I had never heard of, and apparently has no sequels – but some of the characters from that game got absorbed into other Capcom fighters. Apparently she even appeared in one Street Fighter game (SF IV Ultra). I checked a bit later because I realized I wasn’t quite 100% certain, as I haven’t played that sort of game for several years.

Borges would argue* that point, I think. He wrote several pieces exploring what would have happened had the same text been written by a different author in a different place (yes, fiction about fiction) and concluded that while the author’s intent and circumstances are immensely important, we cannot know for certain what they are and therefore must always bear this ambiguity in mind when we read them.

Let’s take an example. Imagine if one day, it was discovered that Philip Pullman was actually a hardline catholic all along and wrote His Dark Materials in the intent to support catholic dogma; that he saw Will and Lyra as the villains; and that he was surprised that anyone read it as meaning anything else. The correct response to this announcement would be “You fucked up then, because the novel you thought you wrote wasn’t actually the novel you wrote.” No matter how strenuously the author denies it, the text stands complete.

If you think this is silly, bear in mind that Anne McCaffrey is a homophobe; a fact which is not immediately apparent from the Pern books. You know, what with them being chock full of gay lust and all.

Another example, out of Borges: Suppose an author writes a novel which is widely praised as being feminist, and becomes hailed as a landmark in women’s literature. Secretly, the author is a huge misogynist who goes to their grave never telling anyone. Does this change the text? No, of course not. Then how can we be sure that it isn’t the case for any author?

This is important because the author may be dead or otherwise unavailable for comment, and so we cannot say for sure what their intentions were. A good example of this is the reading of historical texts as gay fiction. Was Homer gay? Was Shakespeare gay? We’ll never know. That ambiguity must be applied to living authors too.

Atwood argued against the Death of the Author; I haven’t read her essays on it so all I can do is quote her sarcastic little witticisms. I highly respect her as a literary critic, so I’m sure that whatever argument she makes is subtle, powerful and very Canadian.

—

*He argued more powerfully and persuasively than I can, because he was a great writer and I am not; and also more intimidatingly because half his works were semi-autobiographical works about Argentinians killing one another in knife fights over matters of honour, and so even after his death I’m scared of him.

@EJ

Canon is not interpretation. Canon is the Drink Me potion making you small, interpretation is the liquid being magic or LSD.

@EJ

Consider Tolkien’s work. The Silmarillion is still canon even if it’s not a part of the actual stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It’s, in fact, a history book, supplementary material, separate. The notes and maps Tolkien added to his books are no less canon because they aren’t in the actual story.

The words in Klingon dictionaries are no less canon because they aren’t in the show.

Pottermore is no less canon because the information wasn’t in the books.

We live in an age where not everything has to be in the book or whatever day one because we can communicate better. No longer do we send letters on ponies! We have the wealth of information at our fingertips. You don’t even need to have books printed or movies put on films anymore.

We can literally just Tweet a writer to confirm whether or not a videogame character has sex with another.

What a time to be alive.

@EJ

Like I’ve been saying, interpretation is different from canon.

The fact that Frodo is a hobbit is canon; the eagles coming to save him and Sam from representing the USA in some sort of allegory for WWII (or just eagles saving them) is interpretation.

The fact that Alice eats a variety of different things to change her body from big to small and such is canon; the things she’s taking are psychoactive drugs (or just dream logic) is interpretation.

The fact that books were burned so people can’t read them is canon; the moral being that censorship is bad and every form of media is valid (or just books are awesome and you should read them) is interpretation.

The audience can look at the same thing and take away different things from it. The author can do the same.

This is because we all have different experiences that form us. We all look at things from our own perspective and such perspectives can change over your lifetime. Over the centuries after the book is written, you’re going to get different interpretations of your work.

Unless Anne Rice says “the earlier books aren’t canon”, they’re still canon and any meaning anyone gets from them is a valid interpretation.

Unless H.P. Lovecraft disavowed his earlier stories, they are still canon, no matter how embarrassing they are and whatever moral they get from them is a valid interpretation.

Unless Luis Aragon burned those paintings, those are still part of his canon and no matter what HE says they say, whatever someone gets out of them is a valid interpretation.

This is why we have essays and books over the interpretation of things. Hell, this is why we have a billion sects of every religion in the world because they interpret things differently. Bible canon says Jesus turned water into wine, but is the wine an allegory? A metaphor? Are we supposed to drink this wine everyday with crackers? Do we not? Was the wine JUST AN ILLUSION? Or did he really magic up wine? Is Jesus a wizard? Better make about a dozen sects on whether or not Jesus was secretly Gandalf this entire time!

I hope I’m getting my point across better this time.

@EJ

I don’t know that this will make things any clearer, but consider the following question:

Is there any appreciable difference between an author saying “X is gay/trans/ what-have-you” in the body of a work and saying the same in a supplementary document?