So after several days of nagging at myself to try to explain just why it is I find fanfiction so distasteful, I realize that pop criticism is basically fanfiction, insofar as it’s an attempt to graft a personality and lived experience onto a blank of a character that was deliberately created so as to appeal to as many people as possible, and that all arguments about pop music are essentially arguments about whether Kirk and Spock would really fuck.

And I guess I’m just more comfortable assigning intentions to ciphers that correspond to something in the real world than to ones that don’t.