Troperville
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Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.
--Sigmund Freud.
If it's not one thing, it's your mother.
When correctly viewed, everything is lewd
Covert sexual symbolism and repressed desire is everywhere.
Not only is everyone in purgatory - everything is about sex.
Two Heterosexual Life Partners who spend a lot of time together and enjoy each other's company? They're really gay. Damsel In Distress being mentally tortured by a sadistic villain? He's really raping her. Two girls smile at each other? They're really thinking about having sex. Some dude gives a pencil to an attractive young lady? What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic!? Overprotective Dad has reservations about letting his daughter date? Instant Squick! Brother and sister hug? It's symbolic of incest. Biblical patriarchs, creepy father figures and guys who just don't get along with their dads? It's about sexual rivalry between sonny and daddy.
What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic? You heard Freud.
It's annoying, but there is an up-side for the writers. A fabricated Subtext can attract as large and loyal a Periphery Demographic as real Subtext -just ask the fans of Kim Possible.
So remember, the next time your English teacher asks, "Now, what is this poem really about?", just answer, "Sex."
The troper-namer is a Dr. Sigmund Freud, a Viennese doctor who proposed a theory of human behavior and development based on the idea that all our desires are ultimately expressions of instinctual, biological desires. Like, oh for instance, sex. Poor Freud has been flanderized beyond belief, but such is the price of fame.
Some say Freud was right about something else, too. Not to be confused with All Psychology Is Freudian.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- Deliciously satirized in a sketch from the first season of Saturday Night Live with Gilda Radner as a young Anna Freud (Sigmund's daughter) innocently describing to her father a series of dreams she had about him that are fraught with increasingly obvious "Freudian" symbolism and content. Meanwhile, Freud practically goes into seizures as he reacts to the implications he's reading into them; at the end, when she inquires what it all means, he reassures her that "sometimes a banana is just a banana".
- Faith of Buffy The Vampire Slayer describes her dreams seriously, then adds with her tongue (probably) firmly in her cheek, "That, and some stuff about cigars and a tunnel."
- In a similar vein, Wolf's tail in The Tenth Kingdom. The scene in the beanstalk forest, where he practically dares Virginia to touch it, she asks why he keeps it hidden, and especially the positively orgasmic look on his face when she brushes against the fur rather than with it, is extremely Freudian in nature. In a bizarre twist, however, the size of his tail apparently changes due to the time of the month, suggesting a connection to the female menstrual cycle. (Werewolves, after all, are tied to the typically feminine moon...) The fact it is hanging out of his pants following his 'hide-and-seek' in the forest with Virginia near Wendell's castle, and that this lets Tony disapprovingly know what they were up to, doesn't help.
- And leaving aside monthly-transformation-into-a-monster cracks, the connection between menarche and the onset of lycanthropy is explored in a shory story called "Boobs" where a schoolgirl deals with bullies picking on for developing by tearing them to shreds when she turns into a werewolf, and the movie Ginger Snaps covers similar ground.
- The Doctor Who Made For TV Movie has the Master take the form of a snake, taking over the mind of a man by slithering down his gullet, then proceeding to kill the man's wife, (not long after the two had sex, no less), make a naive young man his servant, fire acid semen at an unsuspecting female, and attempt to steal the lives of his long-time arch-nemesis by tying him to a rack (in a crossover with What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic) and forcing him to stare into the gaping hole at the heart of the TARDIS while screaming "I'm alive!" at the top of his lungs. And he does all this clad entirely in black leather. Damn.
- The Buffy episode "Doublemeat Palace", already a not-so-satisfactory venture in its own right, became downright ludicrous when the monster of the week was revealed to be... a phallic demon-thing that emerged from the back of an old woman's head and which ate people. And then it shot paralyzing gunk all over Buffy. And then Willow, a lesbian, cut it off with a meat cleaver. I Am Not Making This Up.
- In a later episode, Willow starts to describe the monster "Well, if I wasn't already a lesbian..."
- The Freud Was Right moment the writers cite is in "Reptile Boy" where frat boys feed teenage girls to their giant snake demon that they worship. It gives them power!
- Frasier has an erotic dream about a male co-worker and tries desperately and implausibly to interpret it any way but sexually. Eventually he comes to the conclusion that his subconscious created a dream that defied interpretation just to give him a challenge. The following night Sigmund Freud appears in his sleep to congratulate him for figuring this out. Frasier is pleased until Siggy sprays breath freshener in his mouth and climbs into bed with him, arms held out expectantly.
- On Wings Lowell comes to Brian with a baffling dream about riding a train speeding into a tunnel with a cigar in one hand and a snake in the other. When Brian informs him that it means he is afraid of heights Lowell agrees that that would explain the one about sitting atop the Washington Monument.
- Also on Murphy Brown Miles spends the episode worrying he is gay after dreaming about shooting out the top of the Washington Monument with a male friend. Eventually he realizes that sometimes a long, pointy monument is just a long, pointy monument.
- Lampshaded in an episode of M*A*S*H, when Hawkeye asks the psychiatrist, Dr. Friedman, what the rationale for gambling is. "Sex," he replies, and when pushed on why it's always sex, he responds, "They told me to say that. Sex is why we gamble, sex is why we drink, sex is why we give birth."
- Queenie in Blackadder II is a parody of Queen Elizabeth the First, AKA the Virgin Queen. So it's not too surprising that she has dreams about being a sausage roll or sitting in this enormous tree...
Anime
- Referenced in Welcome To The NHK. Misaki tries to psychoanalyze Satou's dreams. Satou purposely gives her... well, we'll just quote it:
Satou: There was a robust snake that dived into the sea, then, stabbed an apple with a broadsword, and shot it with a large, black imposing gun.
- Subverted: Misaki concludes that Satou is a virgin. Which he is. So it didn't really help at all.
- Except that Satou is not a virgin - he really did have sex with his sempai, although it was anything but a fulfilling experience for either of them. But it's clear that Misaki knows next to nothing about psychoanalysis, despite of pretending otherwise - she had to look the symbolism for Satou's "dream" from a book!
- On top of the usual Studio Gainax mind screwing, FLCL has more sexual symbolism and Double Entendre than you can shake a suspiciously phallic baseball bat at. At times, it's like What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic with sexual symbols instead of religious ones.
- Like the moment in episode 5 where a conspicuously phallic... gun hammer, forms in the back of Naota's head. Now, what makes this Freudian is the fact that there's a (nearly) naked Haruko on top of him, close enough for the little phallic... hammer in the back of his head to bring their lips together... in front of his father. Yeah, you decide.
- Continuing in the vein of Gainax and symbolism, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has drills. Epic, manly drills that will pierce the heavens. Made the jump from subtext to text in the fight with Lord Genome, where he remarks that "your Spiral Energy is bigger than mine". Spiral Energy. Right.
- Well, we knew Simon was packin' from the Onsen episode. his drill grew to hide his package
- There's also the fifth "Parallel Works" video
 which is just a very weird dream of Gimmy's.
- This editor assumes that the only reason Neon Genesis Evangelion hasn't made this list yet is either because the Freudian symbolism was explicit and intentional, or because the egregious sexual symbolism was overshadowed by the even more egregious religious symbolism.
- For example, looking at the entry plug and the shape of hole it enters on an EVA, and how suspicously phallic the fourth angel is.
- In .hack//SIGN, Tsukasa, a player of a virtual reality MMORPG gets trapped in the game and is given amnesia. He is also given "the Guardian"; a giant pair of floating yellow balls that stab other players with tentacles. Shortly after Tsukasa rebels against the Guardian and it is destroyed, he regains his memory and realizes that in the real world, "he" is really a girl.
- The Elric brothers in Fullmetal Alchemist love their mommy waaaay too much. This subtext is so obvious that the third episode of Full Metal Alchemist the Abridged Series is appropriately dubbed Motherf*cker. In the anime, Al even develops a crush on Psyren precisely because she reminds him of his mother (and let's not even talk of the scene of the anime where Sloth practically seduces him). In the anime, Wrath even fuses with his substitute mom and is welcomed to the Gate by Loving Naked Izumi in the movie. Ed, Selim, and the Tringham brothers have daddy issues and so do Greed in the manga and Envy in the anime. And most of the homunculi have strange mommy or daddy issues in the anime and adore almost masochistically their terrifying father/God figure in the manga. Add some ReplacementGoldfish syndrome and EvilCounterparts and stir.
- And let's not forget that in a healthy (??) display of Oedipal neurosis, evil stepmom Dante in the anime explicitly tries to trick Ed into sleeping with her because Hohenheim wouldn't. Added to the fact that Ed is 15 or 16 and looks like a younger Hoju or a very young Hoho... Squick! But this is nothing compared to the squick Edward would've felt.
- Also, the brief scene in the anime that shows Hohenheim and Trisha naked in bed Squicked out many fans, as they are not only the main character's parents but also obvious mother and father archetypes, what with Trisha being a Perfect Stereotyped Mom and Hoho being the local Dumbledore. As a fan who might take FMA too seriously put it, "Imagining my own parents in that situation makes me shiver!".
- This troper thinks you're all being wimps if it squicks you out that they are implied to have had sex, despite the fact that being the main characters' parents implies they had sex anyway. Though, if this was the scene where Hoho discovers he's rotting, ignore everything I just said.
- The Squick factor in this scene (and in the whole Hoho/Trisha couple) probably partly stems from Hohenheim's actual age and the fact that he vaguely looks in his forties -and might look fairly ugly and/or old in some fans' eyes.
- Roy's repeated freezing when Riza Hawkeye tells him that he's "useless by rainy weather" is bound to make us think that this statement is actually not about his alchemy skills. This troper even wonders if the Japanese word used in this context, "munou" (with "mu" meaning "nothingness", as in The Nothing After Death), doesn't also mean "impotent."
- Vash the Stampede in Trigun worships his adopted mother too much, which is particularly disturbing in the light of his hallucinations about her in the anime and apparent lack of 'adult' sexuality. When this troper read the manga scene that introduces Rem Saverem as lying by his side wearing the same clothes as him, she thought she was his dead girlfriend...
- To be fair, though, he's perfectly normal compared to Knives, who seems more interested in going after his own twin and is into slicing people (with giant blades, no less... ahem). Also note that he absolutely hates Rem and thus doesn't share in the 'ordinary' Oedipal schema of the manga (we might even wonder if, in Nightow's logic, it doesn't explain why he's so batshit insane).
- The end of the first Trigun manga dares you to see Knives 'rebirth' scene and not to think of anything involving gynaecology or rape. It actually seems to involve Death By Childbirth. Then it gets worse when Knives grabs Vash and forces him to deploy his Angel Arm. While standing nude behind him and obviously enjoying his pain very, very much --which, by the way, isn't the only time he goes full frontal. It's even more disturbing when you know that men who get raped anally by other men get an erection. And that it's his effing twin brother, of course.
- Let's not forget the overtones of sexual rivalry that his feud with Vash tends to take, especially when Dr. Conrad teaches him that "Vash's gate is larger than [his]". His face is priceless when he nearly gets overpowered by the "size" of said "gate" and, much later, when Vash calls him "a wimp with a bulldozer" once he has fused with thousands of plants, which makes him without a normal lower body but also a guy "fused" with thousands of girls. Who are all his "sisters"... Also, note that Knives's "power" tends to disturb everyone in the area (notably Wolfwood). For the sake of the argument, let's just say that pretty much everything Knives does and thinks has a Freudian subtext. This troper is vicious enough to conclude from his lack of on-screen sexuality that he's either a highly frustrated virgin or a serial rapist.
- Oh yeah, in the anime, as a one-year-old boy / the rough equivalent of a twelve-year-old human boy, he induced in one of the crew women an illusion that she was being raped by one of her fellow crew members. Where he got the background information about this type of thing is beside this troper.
- There's also the fact that Legato seems very obsessed with him. And got raped by a Gonk when he was a teenager. And is so jealous of Vash (or rather, of Knives's twisted love for Vash) and obsessed with killing him that Vash is the only one who manages to break his composure. HoYayyyyy! Also, don't put Elendira's explicit love for Knives in the hands of a Freudian, they hate Transsexuals and might develop crazy theories involving "psychosexual inversion", fetishism and Elendira's mom (or lack thereof).
- There's also the relationship between Meryl and Millie, two very strong women. And if you think too hard about it, Meryl's crush on Vash is a crush from a human towards a non-human, cyborg-like lifeform, essentially a Ridiculously Human Robot. And Vash's budding reciprocation in the anime seems due to her likeness to Rem. We suggest you follow the MST 3 K Mantra, specially when you read Fanfictions where they have kids together.
- In the manga, Nicholas D. Wolfwood sounds creepy when he has an imaginary conversation with Auntie Melanie about what an amazing guy Vash is. Also fits into HoYay, oddly enough. Also, he has obvious daddy issues too, both in the anime and in the manga.
- The whole deal with the Humpty Lock and the Dumpty Key in Shugo Chara. Many times through the series, he tries to put his Key in her Lock. If you add in that Ikuto is in high school and Amu is still in elementary, the subtext suddenly takes on a whole new level of meaning.
- I'm kinda surprised no-one's mentioned Haru Glory from Rave Master's odd thing to do everything his sister ever told him to do... Not the least bit suspicious to anyone? Come one people!
- In Zettai Karen Children, when The Children are singing at a karaoke bar, the Chief's camera lens zooms in and out in a very suggestive way. Definite lolicon subtext there.
- In a scene in the Ah My Goddess manga, a dimensional door vaguely shaped like a malicious girl falls in love with Keiichi and accepts to open herself... provided he is the one who puts the key into her keyhole. Yeah, that's subtlety for you. The subtext becomes explicit when he slowly inserts the key into her, she moans, and Belldandy very nearly goes into a destructive fit of jealousy.
- Revolutionary Girl Utena. Phallic symbols abound, from swords to the tower, and Akio makes it pretty obvious we're not just imagining it. Also, this troper has read a very detailed analysis of Akio's body language that basically concludes that everything about Akio, from the way he stands to the way he holds a wine glass, is about sex.
- Studio Ghibli's Tales From Earthsea had some of the most laughable Freud Was Right moments ever seen in anime --which makes sense, given the main character manages to kill his dad in the first few minutes of the movie. Arren's shadow gives the sword to Therru and rubs it very suggestively while it is in her arms. Therru gives Arren his sword and his 'manliness' by the same token. Therru looks moved to tears when Arren draws his 'sword of light' before her for the first time. Sword of light... right.
- And let's not forget The Reveal that he's in love with an effing dragon and the other way around. This troper doesn't want to think of how they could possibly have sex together (in a way that doesn't involve magic shiny swords wielded majestically). Though we see them flying to the skies...
- If you're perverted enough, Arren and Aitaka have a few Ho Yay moments too. This troper prefers blocking it out from her consciousness and thinking they have a nice father-son relationship.
Comics
Film
- This editor was unable to enjoy watching El Norte the first time around, due to the entire class getting grossed out at the sight of the brother and sister main characters holding each other (admittedly, quite tenderly), following the death of their parents. A result of being unable to comprehend the notion of personal space standards in other cultures.
- In the Made For TV Movie, Highlander: The Source, it's revealed that "There Can Be Only One" really means that only one Immortal can have a child, so all the running around cutting people's heads off really is overcompensating for their self-perceived lack of sexual potency. I wish I could say this came out of nowhere, but the movies and TV series have mentioned this occasionally. Still, it's enough for many fans to drop it down the Dis Continuity hole.
- Two words: Dr. Strangelove
- Alien. Even besides the alleged male rape allegories or the grotesque perversion of childbirth, according to some Film Studies scholars, it's all about a homicidal penis-headed monster chasing a strong, independent woman through the womblike tunnels of a spacecraft controlled by a computer called Mother. Clearly, Freud Was Right. And H.R. Giger was mental.
- The same critiques also said that Aliens was about the Vietnam War and the strength of mothers defending their children.
- Apparently the monster was taken from his chronic night terrors, which also inspired HP Lovecraft.
- One should also mention that Giger's original design for the alien was to include a grotesquely overlarge penis: he was talked out of it. Fortunately.
- In addition, one scene in the first movie has the Alien's tail sliding up a woman's leg, to the sound of her moaning and crying. (It was revealed in the audio commentary that this was actually intended to be perceived as the Alien raping her)
- Lamphaded in Star Trek: First contact: Data and Picard are musing about the repurposed nuclear missile that later becomes the first Warp-capable Earth vessel, and stroke it in awe-- whereupon Troi throws out, "Would you three like to be alone?"
- Ghostbusters. "I am the gatekeeper." "I am the keymaster." Yup, nothing symbolic there.
- Given that this troper remembers (unless mistaken) a scene where it's not just implicit symbolism...
- In the ending of North By Northwest, there is a love scene aboard a train, and the very last shot shows the train entering a tunnel. Alfred Hitchcock actually once said that this was a phallic symbol.
- Played for humor in Shrek; when they first see Farquaad's castle, Shrek slyly asks Donkey, "Do you think he's Compensating For Something?" Sure, Farquaad is The Napoleon, but Shrek didn't know it at that moment so it's more of a Parental Bonus than anything else.
- A lot of critics have pointed out that an alien character's head in the animated kids' movie Space Chimps looks a lot like a boob.
- This troper has read several IMDB posts speculating that Maxwell "Wizard" Wallace, the Fagin-type character from August Rush, was a pedophile. Considering who plays him, this troper can only say: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
Literature
- The Spenser novel Crimson Joy by Robert B. Parker (which obviously draws its name from the poem above) features a man who kills black women in a particularly "symbolic" way and leaves a red rose at each scene, all because his mother's name was Rose Black. Not one of Parker's better efforts, in this troper's opinion.
- Pick a story about vampires. Any story. In fact, start with the classic: Dracula forces a young woman to drink his blood, after quietly invading her bedroom. And consider the two violent stakings of female vampires.
- Once upon a time, some guy decided to do a production of Shakespeare's classic play Hamlet with some seriously Oedipal subtext thrown in. Through a combination of Adaptation Decay, Popcultural Osmosis, and Mel Gibson, this is now frequently considered to be the official, canonical "true meaning" of Hamlet. A careful examination of the script will not yield a single quote to support this interpretation. In fact, Hamlet shows more signs of an Electra Complex. Now that would be an interesting production...
- In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hyde is often interpreted (by The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, most notoriously) as a metaphor for Jekyll's repressed homosexuality. Because we all know that "gay" is synonymous with "murderous gremlin-thing".
- Apparently, the word "degenerate," which is repeatedly used to describe Hyde, was a 'coded' word for Depraved Homosexual in the Victorian era. The descriptions of this character also emphasize details that would have been seen as 'androgynous' back then. Finally, in the words of one of this troper's English literature professors, "if you think about the space of Jekyll's house... Mr. Hyde enters from behind."
- This editor always thought it was a metaphor for drug addiction.
- The Discworld novel Equal Rites really is full of this stuff. From the magic manifesting itself as "hot dreams", to the wizard reincarnated as an apple tree "innocently" commenting that the heroine likes apples, to the phallic broomstick on the cover. The Annotated Pratchett Guide gives the details here. (In a later novel, however, a footnote dismisses the idea that the broomstick is a Freudian symbol as a "phallusy".)
- Within the Discworld novels Nanny Ogg has written a recipe book, a book of traditional folk tales, and a book of etiquette and household management. All of them are really about sex (although the third one, which exists in the real world as Nanny Ogg's Cookbook isn't quite as much about sex as the first two, since the publishers had to recall them).
- Not to mention the first and foremost of Discworld sexual innuendoes, the wizard's staff. And the various jokes surrounding it, such as the famous Ankh-Morpork song, "A Wizard's Staff has a Knob on the End". (Jokes that the wizards themselves, being mostly old fat academics traditionally not allowed to dilly-dally with women, never get. So what, they say, if a wizard is very proud of his staff and gives it a good polish and charges it with mystical energy every day? And the fact that the knobs on the ends of their (usually wooden) staffs grow there by magic, and by mystical resonance take on a shape symbolical of their owner? We really don't know what you laymen find so funny about it.)
- Not to mention that the female witches ride broomsticks, but the wizards seldom ride their staffs (although technically they could get them up in the air...). And it's considered bad taste for a wizard to handle another wizard's staff. I'm just saying.
- And Lord Vetinari, Ankh-Morpork's patrician (and iron bachelor), Does Not Have Balls. In fact, there's even a famous saying about it in Ankh-Morpork. And a humorous song. Ankh-Morpork's citizens take their amusement where they can find it. Only not during state balls because there aren't any. Obviously.
Western Animation
Video Games
- This is half of what makes the undead enemies of The Legend Of Zelda -- the mummy Gibdo and zombie ReDead -- major sources of Nightmare Fuel. Their attacks involve paralyzing, grabbing, and biting you, but most people think it looks and most of all sounds like they're raping you.
- In Earthbound, the dialogue of the Cosmic Horror at the end of the game was taken from the writer's traumatic memories of seeing a rape scene of a movie as a child.
- Turns out it wasn't actually a rape scene, although the writer certainly thought it was.
- It's said that Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2 is the living incarnation of James Sunderland's repressed lust, among other emotions. PH is famous for raping the town's monsters and carrying a BFS so huge that he literally has to drag it behind him. Subtle.
- The official interpretation is that he's a supernatural executioner out to make James realize that he Mercy Killed his wife. Note that a second one appears after James kills someone else.
- One does not rule out the other.
- There's also quite a bit of vaginal imagery that pops up in both the second game and later games.
- At least one intepretation of Portal brings up the fact you're a woman fighting an alternately caring and lashing female-voiced overmind with a weapon that opens passages through space. Oval passages.
- According to Psycho Mantis, the reason he hates all of humanity is because everytime he looks into someone's mind, he finds the same "disgusting" desire to reproduce at the heart of their motivation for every single thing they do.
Music
sex kill your mother/father
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