reading about ship wars (avatar the last airbender ship wars, to be honest) and it’s pissing me off because the high and mighty tone some shippers have about another ship
so let’s have a media lesson
stuart hall’s encoding-decoding theory states the following: in media texts (which is defined as anything broadcast through media), symbols are created by the producers, encoded into the text, transmitted, then decoded by the audience. an important point here is that these symbols the producers encoded can only have a meaning once they are decoded by the audience.
because of that, we have some problems.
the people who decode media texts (you, me, everyone else who watches media) have different backgrounds and come from different places and society and had different experiences in their lives, which cause them to interpret symbols differently from the intended meaning. there is also the possibility that the producer unintentionally placed certain symbols within the media text, simply because the producer also comes from a different background and as such is not familiar with everyone’s interpretation, only his.
so what happens is that, there is a possibility that 1) the audience decodes the text exactly how the producer intended it, 2) the audience decodes the text a little bit how the producer intended it, the only difference is that there are some symbols they reject and read differently, 3) the audience decodes a text a rejects all the symbols the producer put in it, thereby creating a different reading of it.
which begs the question. whose interpretation is right?
it’s tempting to say “the producer’s, because they’re the ones with the original message to deliver” but remember that symbols do not have meanings until they are interpreted by an audience, meaning that they only take effect once the media text is consumed by the audience. which means the audience has a hand in creating meaning for media texts. which means the audience is also correct, no matter what interpretation they came up with. this is why there are always different readings of certain texts.
what’s the point of this damn post?
a. ship wars are dumb and make me mad
b. yes i know (insert ship here) was canon but stop acting all high and mighty to those who like the other, non-canon ship because their reading of the text is valid
c. you do not have the right, as the shipper of the canon pairing, to say “sometimes when i watch avatar the last airbender and hear about shippers of (non-canon pairing), i wonder if there are two versions of avatar that i watched bc frankly them coming to that conclusion is dumb”
d. you also do not invalidate people’s readings of certain media texts. whether it’s in support of a non-canon ship or a queer reading, you just. don’t do it.
e. audience makes meanings and the fact that there are shippers means they all interpreted symbols the same way WHICH IS WORTH LOOKING INTO and not invalidating as “you only like them because they’re both attractive”
f. just. be nice. the op was asking in good faith about why people liked this ship and y’all go and invalidate them
g. the internet sucks sometimes