How do you respond to WDYMINP

What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?

Do you say "Merely a coincidence" or "Well it is mixture of thing" or probably the least used "Pretty much."

edited 8th Jun '11 11:59:46 AM by Worlder

"Good for you, not what I meant."

(Though for the right Epileptic Tree, it might be exactly what I meant)

edited 8th Jun '11 12:08:26 PM by Yej

Seeing as how I don't write my works with any intentional subtext, I'd be mildly annoyed. But, if people want to find subtext, they're going to, whether you put it there or not.

I raise a fair amount of questions in my works, but I don't intend there to be specific answers. I think that (most) readers are smart enough to come to conclusions on their own without having it hammered into them, and while I may not personally agree with those conclusions, I want them to still be valid.

So what would basically upset me is people finding one specific and dominating meaning in my works. As noted elsewhere, I'm a big believer in the idea of "Choose Your Own Aesop", and people finding a specific didactic message would depress, if not surprise, me quite a bit.

Just tell them it's a metaphor for the atom bomb. That'll shut them up.

In my case, they'd stand a fairly good chance of being right.

In the case of Project One Fifty Four, the story actually is somewhat political, so they're kind of right. It's my worst-case scenario prediction of what may happen to society/the economy if currency went entirely digital and paper money got phased out. Also a strong (but hopefully not quite Ayn Rand level) vehicle for my belief and support of individual freedom or the freedom to be an individual.

In the case of AB!Beowulf, it's only political if a commentary/criticism of the ancient Germanic society counts as such.

Everything else is political in no way, shape or form.

edited 8th Jun '11 2:41:58 PM by annebeeche

Remus is a dystopia, but due to the content I can very easily imagine certain people misconstruing the point and interpreting it as a call to open rebellion against the "fascist" American government we've got right now. At that point, I would redirect them to page one, which involves the original instance of open rebellion by the same kind of right winger likely to hold this point of view sending the country on a one-way trip to Orwell-ville.

edited 19th Jun '11 10:59:56 PM by KyleJacobs

I'd probably say something like "I sorta suck at politics, so you probably know better than I do if it's political or not."

"It's whatever you want it to be."

Or, if they were angry about it, "That's not what I actually meant, but OK."

Or, if that was what I meant, "Yeah, I'm afraid so."

Um, I'd tell them they read too much into shit and what ever work they are looking at is probably not intended as such and they are just projecting their own views and desires on shit so that they can be happy and falsely self hypnotize themselves into self validation.

Cause that is really all that trope is.

Though in my main work the only actual political message is: outlaw civillian guns = evil, and heavy centralization = evil. But those are in the subtext and not the focus of the work, but they are lightly touched on. the heroes' home and culture detest both of those evils, and the former is proven to raise crime in hundreds of reports about gun control. tight gun control historically coincides with a rise of crime, and of those reports not a single incident showed a reduction in crime. National Academy of Science can back me up on this, all this gun control bull is just political moves and a common misconception.

There's irony here, to be sure.

Eh, people are always going to read things into your work that you didn't intend to put there. I used to get all kinds of unwarrantedly "deep" interpretations of my stories at the writers' workshops I went to in college, although that may say more about the type of people who attend writers' workshops in college than anything else. Anyway, there's no point getting overly fussed about it — just say "Huh, it's interesting that you see it that way" and move on.

Or you could take the route that AA Milne talks about in the preface to his Once On A Time and turn it into a joke. "Yes, how clever of you to figure that out, but I bet you didn't realize that the whale on page 23 also represents Ireland!"

I probably wouldn't understand whatever thing my work supposedly was a metaphor for. I know very, very little about politics.

@Bobby G

If they don't like it...

"Tough luck pal, because that's how I roll."

Unless it is something that I don't like either. Then it is...

"Really? I didn't intend for that to be interpreted in such a manner."