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It has been pointed out to me that there is a corollary to Death of the Author, IE, Malice of the Reader.
Death of the Author assumes good faith on the part of the person finding unintended meanings in a work. Malice of the Reader applies to those situations where someone says "I'm trying to read more works by female authors" and someone else says "oh, so you hate men."
It's usually pretty apparent when someone is twisting a work until it screams in an effort to get a negative or "edgy" read out of it, and in those cases, I will say it's NOT on the author.
We can work hard to improve ourselves and our work. We can't stop people from being assholes on purpose. If we could, we would no longer be authors. We'd be demigods. Very, very busy demigods.
I would rather be a demigod of turning people into frogs than a demigod of educating assholes.
