User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-24894325-20170121220436/@comment-1789834-20170124160915

You just disagreed with me even though I agreed with you. I know fully well what "authorial intent" means. I'll make my point easier for you:

I write an episode for Doctor Who. In my episode, I use the phrase "the Ship" to mean "the Doctor's TARDIS". The BBC are happy with it. They produce it. They broadcast it. A few years later, another bloke comes along and writes the novelisation despite me being willing to write it. In that novelisation, he writes "the ship", rather than what I wrote in my script "the Ship".

The authorial intent here is the BBC, not myself. The BBC totally allowed "the Ship" (with capitalisation) to mean "the TARDIS". The novelisation, despite having a copy of the script, has made use of "the ship" to refer to the TARDIS as a generic ship. You see my point now?

The unfortunate problem there is that the novelisation is also valid... if it were published under license. They're just not trustworthy unless written by the original writer.