When I have a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion, then I go out and paint the stars

—Vincent van Gogh

Part I

The shadow haunting every pop-cultural exegete is the question: "what if there is nothing there?"

What if the director just thought it would be cool?

What if the artist just didn't care?

What if the character designer was simply directed to make the character's silhouette more recognisable at high angular velocity?

What if, to the author, a cigar is just a cigar?

Scriptural exegesis is sustained by the notion that scripture is divinely inspired, perhaps even—in the understanding of the Muslims and their inheritors—the literal word of God.

If we grant that in the beginning was the Word, then all of natural philosophy is actually literary analysis, and literary analysis a continuation of science by other means. Word and World are coterminous. If this is the case, the unending, fractal analysis of holy books is motivated—demanded—by a conviction akin to Feynman's aphorism, that:

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each piece of her fabric reveals the organisation of the entire tapestry

The exegete understands on some level that this is their mode of worship. A welcome burden shaped to the backs of the cerebrotonic, and equal in dignity to any other. It consists of attaining a fuller understanding of the God of Nature Or Nature, in full faith that the Chain of Thought of God is a numinous thread which may be gently tugged forever, revealing infinite branches, burls, unknots, to be teased open like a silken cocoon with no exterior and no interior.

Whether you consider this a good and proper use of one's time is a matter of opinion, apt to analysis at multiple levels. Even to the extent that one discounts the existence of gods, the exegete can represent an obsession that one can see a certain beauty in, if so inclined.

Part II

When I was in school, I remember repeatedly sitting down to lunch across from two guys, a bit older than I, whose conversation was almost always regarding analysis of the Bible. In expounding their interpretations, they would trade barbs and concordances, but there was always the impression of steel sharpening steel, and a man sharpening the countenance of his friend (Proverbs 27:17). Whatever they were doing was working, in the sense that it raised a gleam in their eyes, and gave the impression of comrades being raised to a higher consciousness. This is to say that it aroused a sense of benign envy, or perhaps what the Germans call sehnsucht.

Perhaps you are steel in wait of sharpening. Or you are a whetstone in wait of steel. Maybe you are some other substance, or wait to hone something else entirely. What matters is that these fellows came alive, adjacent to me, out of a base assumption that the Bible represents an unfathomable depth which they explore the surface structures of, as a team.

The ability to bond over the Bible (or of any other holy book) is not prima facie evidence of its divinity, which carries with it implications of inexhaustible and sublime subtlety. However, those who analyse such works can at least claim (within their belief system) that the end is never.

Such claims cannot be licitly made about Metal Gear Solid, or Five Nights at Freddy's, because we cannot ascribe supernatural complexity to these works. Authorial intent must be exhausted at some point. The ten-hour YouTube deep-dives must eventually start eating their own tails.

We have a word for where the production of meaning and insight through textual analysis overshoots authorial intent: 'fanon', named in honour of pop-cultural theorist Frantz Fanon. The question is then: to what extent does fanon represent a sublimated desire for the apeiron of 'true scripture', which is to say a desire for text elevated to the gnostic and soteriological realms? To what extent is fanon an instinct to ascribe supernature to our faves? Is this instinct a conserved quantity?

Part III

There is this idea in fandom that the live-action adaptation of a work represents the consummation of the franchise. This first struck me as obvious, but later struck me as strange. A lot of forum pages have been written describing fan casting of this or that property, of who will do Akira justice. Justice. The desire is to see the things we love vindicated by the social proof associated with the Hollywood blockbuster.

The supremacy of the live action adaptation has very little to do with the format of the thing, and everything to do with what its creation signals. Presently, the 1993 live action adaptation of Super Mario Bros. is rocking position #58 on the IMDB bottom 250. It's considered one of the worst films ever made. The problem is that whilst it is by no means a good film, it's also not anomalously or abhorrently bad. It's simply a betrayal of the fans expectations, a ruined orgasm in the Mushroom Kingdom.

Uwe Boll made a career of shitting up film adaptations of video games (apparently as some sort of tax dodge?), and I found myself wondering when people would stop caring and simply ignore him. I then realised that people could not stop caring because their experience of Boll's film-making was essentially violative. He was profaning what he adapted. But the rights to adapt these intellectual properties were sold to Boll cheap (instead of not at all) because the rights holders did not ascribe to the works the same significance that the fans did.

Part IV

There is the danger in fandom of taking works more seriously than they take themselves. Of imputing vast hidden structures to actually tiny worlds, or mere sketches of worlds. Of doing the work of an indolent demiurge. The danger is opportunity cost which we may not be able to retrospectively justify, and the unavoidably dissipative aspect of—for instance—debating the political valence of a blue hedgehog who goes fast. There is also the danger of becoming trapped in orbit around a work. The SCP wiki has a long list of admonitions begging authors to stop writing variations of the same articles, evidencing the extent to which fan contributions can become essentially epicyclic: engravings inscribed upon engravings.

Eventually one craves to escape the perimeter of the fractal Babel.