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6/25/2025, 6:38:14 PM
>>49618886
Authorial intent doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. The author's literary interpretation isn't any different from the reader's - unless you're trying to prove something in court, but that's forensics, not literary analysis. It's not that it must be opposed, and not even that it shouldn't be taken into account, there's just no point in treating approaching it as the only ultimate goal. Texts being machines for generating interpretations aside, it's too fickle of a thing to grasp anyway. ZUN could have had anything at all in mind, and that would be none of our business anyway, would it? I never said that the story has no facts either! Even playing fast and loose with the source material still has to be based on something. Those facts are what the text itself is, at face value, it's not an empty box at all. Everything else is interpretation and what you choose to factor into it, and there is no one true interpretation, naturally. You can pretend that there is a kind of truth for your own amusement, but it's not really the kind of work that calls for it, which is what makes that kind of approach quite odd... It's understandable and even pretty intuitive to restrict yourself to a specific interpretation with works that pose themselves as having thoroughly developed imaginary worlds with concrete limitations, but with something like DiPP, insisting on it is quite odd...
>The mystery of the album comes from the fact that there appears to be an answer in it, so you analyze it to see what the answer is. Sure, the answer isn't concretely stated, and you can hold to the interpretation that the answer is purposely kept hidden, I hold to that interpretation, but for that you still need to accept that a concrete answer is expected.
I don't see it as a mystery to be solved. To me, there's no answer because there's no question, it's just a statement. Must be the fundamental difference here.
>You can engage with DiPP however you like, but finding it weird that people try to decode the story is like finding it weird that some people follow the instructions when building a lego set.
Does it really have anything that can be likened to instructions so directly? I don't think it does. It's fine to infer something like instructions from what's there, of course, if you want to, but it won't be particularly objective.
>>49618886
Yeah! All of that is true. I just don't get why this word-of-god approach to authorial intent prevails even in discussions of older and vaguer Touhou works! It's understandable with the modern games, even if they aren't exactly hard worldbuilding-focused, but DiPP, Exotic Girls, PC-98 games? Seems stifling.
Authorial intent doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. The author's literary interpretation isn't any different from the reader's - unless you're trying to prove something in court, but that's forensics, not literary analysis. It's not that it must be opposed, and not even that it shouldn't be taken into account, there's just no point in treating approaching it as the only ultimate goal. Texts being machines for generating interpretations aside, it's too fickle of a thing to grasp anyway. ZUN could have had anything at all in mind, and that would be none of our business anyway, would it? I never said that the story has no facts either! Even playing fast and loose with the source material still has to be based on something. Those facts are what the text itself is, at face value, it's not an empty box at all. Everything else is interpretation and what you choose to factor into it, and there is no one true interpretation, naturally. You can pretend that there is a kind of truth for your own amusement, but it's not really the kind of work that calls for it, which is what makes that kind of approach quite odd... It's understandable and even pretty intuitive to restrict yourself to a specific interpretation with works that pose themselves as having thoroughly developed imaginary worlds with concrete limitations, but with something like DiPP, insisting on it is quite odd...
>The mystery of the album comes from the fact that there appears to be an answer in it, so you analyze it to see what the answer is. Sure, the answer isn't concretely stated, and you can hold to the interpretation that the answer is purposely kept hidden, I hold to that interpretation, but for that you still need to accept that a concrete answer is expected.
I don't see it as a mystery to be solved. To me, there's no answer because there's no question, it's just a statement. Must be the fundamental difference here.
>You can engage with DiPP however you like, but finding it weird that people try to decode the story is like finding it weird that some people follow the instructions when building a lego set.
Does it really have anything that can be likened to instructions so directly? I don't think it does. It's fine to infer something like instructions from what's there, of course, if you want to, but it won't be particularly objective.
>>49618886
Yeah! All of that is true. I just don't get why this word-of-god approach to authorial intent prevails even in discussions of older and vaguer Touhou works! It's understandable with the modern games, even if they aren't exactly hard worldbuilding-focused, but DiPP, Exotic Girls, PC-98 games? Seems stifling.
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