And I wish to piss on the grave of the guy who came up with that. Death of the Author is the Death of Communication, if you divorce yourself from the meaning others try to convey, why interact with them on that level at all?
You may as well take a lesson from a stone if you’re willing to ignore a creator’s intent and invent your own theories.

thank you i felt like that had to be the case but im in no position to argue as im pretty new to this stuff. unsurprisingly you’re the only one who elaborated when i asked :)

Death of the Author is just one more tool among many you should wield when analyzing a work. It is not the be-all and end-all. It can be misused. And this is one of the cases of misuse.

It's like when the author writes that the curtains are blue because he thinks it's a cool color. Then people theorize that the color "blue" symbolizes depression, and when the author comes and dispels this, they invalidate the author's intentions. This is not a good application of "Death of the Author".

It takes a lot of modesty to claim that the curtains are blue. You'd have to admit that when you personally interact with the work, you feel that the curtain's color reinforce the feeling of dread and depression in the story. Now that's a good application of "Death of the Author".

But to claim that the author symbolizes depression with the color blue would be objectively wrong. And people try to get around this by saying not that "the author symbolizes..." but rather that "the story symbolizes..." as if the story, a combination of words, had sentience and agency.

There are only two sentient agents. The author, and you (the reader). Any interpretation must be the product of the voluntary effort of one of these two agents.

This thread is a combination of bad applications of "Death of the Author". The scenes in Evangelion may be interpreted as materializations of complex philosophical concepts (just like any story), but it must be made clear that the author has no background on philosophy, did not write the story with philosophy in mind and did not consciously inject any philosophy in it. The reader is free to experience the story however they want, of course.

It's totally possible to send some big "special vibe" even without having meant it (just think to MLP). Just like good intentions could end up capsized even just by the wrong lighting or whatnot (boy haven't I heard hot takes on the movie passengers).

But you can't write about some specific aspect of reality (be it physics or psychology) completely out of your ass, it would be akin to the famous monkey writing a poem by blindly typing on a keyboard.

This is only seldom a problem for fiction, since most of times you are writing about something completely made up happening to somebody completely made up (you just have to clear the bar of understanding basic human interactions) but if you shift the focus from the story itself to how it could relate to an irl topic, the lens is dramatically different.

In this case we know the author's understanding of christianity to be basically nonexistent (to the point that if it had happened the other way around, we'd be calling for that to be insensitive and trivializing). The symbolism was literally there just as a sort of clickbait. You can argue the cross that was originally drawn with no particular meaning suddenly has one given the context of the scene, but... uh, what's even the meaning of that meaning then? How much are you actually still analyzing the medium itself, as opposed to just your own experience?

Not who you are replying to, but there is some interesting theory on this related to "death of the author". It is not a clean-cut question, with lots of fascinating implications.