The Author was never Alive to begin with

[Update2023: Small parts of this I don't support anymore.]

My biggest annoyance with a lot of the YouTube Video essay discourse around Death of The Author is the idea that it's a very recent concept.  That phrase may have been coined by a 1960s French intellectual, but the basic sentiment is there in what Tolkien had to say about allegory.

Separating the Art from the Artist isn't what's a new innovation, rather it's marrying the Art to the Artist in the first place that is an inherently modern product of Capitalism and Intellectual Property laws.

Most of the most ancient art is stuff we don't even know the name of the Author.  No one knows who wrote any version of the Epic Gilgamesh, or the Mahabharata or Ramayana, or the tale of the Bamboo-cutter.  And in the case of many ancient myths we not only don't know who originally wrote them but we don't even have the original version, just latter reboots for which only some we might have the name of an author.

Even Homer probably didn't exist as a singular individual the way he's commonly thought of.  The beginning of us having known Authors in the modern sense were the play-writes of classical Athens and the dialogues of Plato.

The fact is in ancient Greek thought the Art of Artists was believed to be strongly influenced by mythical spirits known to the Greeks as Muses and by other names in other cultures.  The term Muse is still used today but it's not taken literally and I'd argue maybe it was never meant to be taken that literally, it refers to anything that inspires an artist. Those inspirations include prior art, history, personal experiences, people they are close to and their beliefs both religious, philosophical and political.

It also has to do with the complexities of art being done collaboratively.  Purely prose fiction may not be as inherently collaborative as other mediums but even then the development of what a writer does is influenced by how they talk about a given work in progress.  The Godfather does not list George Lucas in it's credits yet on the audio commentary Francis Ford Coppola actually talked about how Lucas basically saved the Hospital scene.

But Movies and Anime especially tend to have multiple authors and yet the director is the one people most care about.

There is a perception that Death of The Author and Auteur Theory are inherently contradictory concepts.  In my view they compliment each other.  The Author is definitely a factor in why a piece of art is the way it is.  And so studying different works from the same author in the context of how they relate is useful.

Some people are concerned about using "Death of the Author" as an excuse to separate art from a problematic author, but there should be no need for such an excuse.  I constantly find progressive value in the works of authors who I know weren't progressive at all without really even trying.

Again as far as the financial aspect of it goes, "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism", money you spend on Harry Potter mostly goes to people far more actually harmful then a has been author spewing bigoted nonsense on her twitter account.

Sarah Z talked in her latest Rowling video about the things in Harry Potter that were always problematic but are apparently worse now that we know Rowling actually is transphobic and anti-semitic.  Greedy ambiguously Jewish Goblns and gender ambiguous predators are tropes fiction constantly falls into even from authors who had no bigoted intentions at all due to how pervasive they are.  And they need to be pointed out criticized and corrected whether they're a product of intentional malice or not.  Frankly the fact that most fans didn't notice or care about these issues in Harry Potter until they had proof that Rowling probably did them intentionally is a far greater problem then Rowling herself.

I guess it's a lot easier to be into Tolkien and Lewis who were always known to have been fairly reactionary in their politics, no one was taken by surprise when they found out this idealized medieval Europe was written by people who had an idealized view of medieval Europe.