Illustration and Authorship - Rebecca Sugar

Rebecca Sugar is an American storyboard artist, animator and director, who weaves messages through both the medium of visual communication and writing.
Her work contains themes of societal acceptance, gender equality and LGBT rights, all represented through metaphor, as her work appears on channels such as Cartoon Network, where broadcasting law restricts the specifics of what you can present to an audience of children.
She uses simplistic methods of character construction to convey her views that themes such as love, friendship shouldn't be overcomplicated by the media's restriction of certain ways of thinking, and how the simplicity of acceptance has almost become a fairytale. She uses fairytale conventions in her work, both visual and written, to tap into this idea and make her ideas accessible to an audience perhaps too young to be emotionally developed enough to fully understand what she is getting at.

It could be said that the message of Sugar's work is mainly dependent on the recipient. As her work is mainly seen by a young audience, and it cannot directly address the subjects it is based around (sexuality, gender roles and subversions etc), then the children interpreting it are the real creators of the message. Barthes suggests "The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination." This could be said to mean that the recipient of the message is the person that really puts the meaning into the message, rather than the creator of it.

Barthes also suggests that giving the ideas that Rebecca Sugar is conveying the title of being "hers", the message is diluted and lost, as the idea should be bigger than the author. "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing." He suggests that imposing her as an author on her own work and the concepts she is dealing with is counterproductive to those very concepts, as it makes them smaller than they are and just another piece of work in her portfolio, rather than another important idea being presented to the outside world.

One part of Barthes' interpretation of work that I agree with is the idea that work created shouldn't be forever tethered to he/she who made it, as it can grow and soar above the initial intentions of the creator. "The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it". I think this is particularly an issue with a lot of famed classical artwork and artists, such as Van Gogh and Picasso, etc. Their work is largely well regarded because it was made by them, and they are famous, rather than being valued on its own merits as a piece of work. I feel that this is when the author becomes too involved, and the message is lost. Rebecca Sugar deals with some quite big and influential topics for today's young people, but I believe that as her work is very dedicated to the continuation and communication of that message, she deserves the credit of authorship on it, as what she is doing is bigger than just herself.