I love reading Teen Wolf metas, but can’t help thinking “Yeah, Jeff Davis did not put that much thought into it.”
Extraordinarily few creators are able to put as much thought into something as the combined cognitive power of a good-sized fanbase can manage.
But this is the thing about textual analysis. It doesn’t matter if the writer deliberately put thought into it, or whether they deliberately meant something. Every one of us has so much going on under the hood that when we spend days, weeks, months creating a work of art, it inevitably includes layers.
- The things we consciously planned to put there.
- The things we didn’t exactly plan for but are part of what we consciously wanted the work to say.
- Things we put in not because we thought they were meaningful, but just because we liked them.
- Things we didn’t choose, plan for, or intend that made it in because we were distracted by other parts of the work and didn’t notice it was doing that. Sometimes, these are even things that are contradictory to what we actually wanted the work to do.
- Assumptions and beliefs we have perhaps never even examined or realized we hold that make it into our work because they are unquestioned elements of our personal conception of the world.
There are probably others as well. All this means that a work of art inevitably says far more than the creator ever intended (about the world and sometimes about the creator’s mind, although it can be dangerous to make assumptions about the latter because you can’t always tell which layer any particular element stems from).
it means that, especially when you’re talking about something like a show that has run for multiple seasons and represents a huge investment of time and resources from multiple people, it is saying a LOT, and it doesn’t matter whether the creators deliberately put that much thought into it, or what they actually meant it to say, because what they think it means is not always what it really means.
And this is even before you get to the whole ‘death of the author’ side of things and the question of whether what the creator thought matters at all in the first place, because really, what a work means rests in what people THINK it means.
So WRITE THOSE DAMN METAS, HELL YEAH. That stupid little show about teenage werewolves (or the one about the crazy dude in a flying box, or the homicidal codependent brothers who leave apocalypses for each other as birthday presents, or the batshit detective and his groin-chafed short friend) means just as much as you think it does.
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