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Uhh, Captain?
"Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar."
— Sigmund Freud
"Yeah, well sometimes it's a big brown dick!"
— George Carlin
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 fan-fabricated Subtext can attract as large and loyal a Periphery Demographic as real Subtext -just ask the fans of Kim Possible.
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. There's also the matter of his having assumed that the issues felt by his Gilded Age upper-middle/upper class, mostly female Viennese clientele were universal to all humanity...
Some say Freud was right about something else, too. Not to be confused with All Psychology Is Freudian. Frequently leads to Accidental Innuendo.
Examples:
- Any character with a BFS, BFG or a Really Big Gun is Compensating For Something. It can be intentional (as with the Anvilicious Lesbian Deagle example on the Really Big Gun page) or unintentional, but these days it's almost always lampshaded. If the characters don't notice, the fandom definitely will. Just ask any Final Fantasy VII fan about length versus girth and you'll find out.
- There's a mention of something to this effect in the Dragaera book Dzur. After experiencing pleasant feelings from his new Empathic Weapon, Vlad notes that he finally understands why his friends who possessed similar objects were always compulsively stroking them.
Anime
- Fans have frequently noted a similarity between the monsters in Blue Gender and, um... well, see for yourself
 ◊
- 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.
- 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
penetrate 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 Hot Springs Episode. He needed his whole damn drilling tool to hide his package.
- In the manga, Kamina actually looks at it and comments "Drill Simon!". Also, manga Leeron Lampshades the drills' symbolism by telling a frozen, blushing Simon "You thrust it in! How manly!".
- And not just drills. Adiane's Gunmen talked through its crotch and had eyes right about where its nipples would be. Her Gunmen's teeth (used as cockpit displays) are also rotated 90 degrees from the usual orientation. And there was a scene where the Dai-Gurren (which is really, really phallic) hits a ship the shape of a man's shadow... between the legs. The male crew member all let out a collective wince.
- There's also the (definitely NSFW) fifth "Parallel Works" video which is just a very weird dream of Gimmy's.
- This troper would like to direct your attention to the soundtrack, in which one of the pieces is entitled "Pierce the Heavens with Your XXX!". Apparently, subtlety is for other people.
- 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...
- Shamshel, the fourth angel, is suspiciously phallic-shaped. Ramiel, the fifth, penetrates NERV with a giant drill. Arael, the fifteenth, "rapes" Asuka's mind. Armisael, the sixteenth, literally physically penetrates Rei and her Eva while Rei arches her back and makes the sort of cute squeaky vocalizations than one might expect Rei to make during sex (if one were to spend time speculating about such things).
- NERV HQ itself is built around a central shaft that Angels are always trying to penetrate.
- Entry plugs might be phallic, but are inserted into the upper backs of the Evas; not many people have vaginas on their upper backs, so draw your own conclusions.
- Don't even get started on the mother thing. The souls in the Evas, Misato's relationship with Shinji, Ritsuko going after the same man that... look, just don't even get fucking started.
- 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 near the end 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 Replacement Goldfish syndrome and Evil Counterparts 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. But this is nothing compared to how creeped Edward would've felt.
- Also, the incredibly brief flashback 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!".
- 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. The Japanese word used in this context, "munou" (with "mu" meaning "nothingness", as in The Nothing After Death) also means incompetent or inefficiency — "impotent."
- One would wonder how she knows this, in that case.
- 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.
- 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.
- Not to mention that the activity in which the series mainly concentrates is people sticking swords in roses on their opponents' lapels. Can you say "deflowering"? And then there's that time Shiori polished Ruka's sword, or the one when Akio breaks his sword (ouch)...
- 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.
- Mimi's giant cactus mirage. Then, later that same episode, a real giant cactus gives her her Crest. Are we sure she's only 10?
- Yes, I know that the real cactus opening up to give her the crest is supposed to evoke the beginning of Togemon's Digivolution sequence to Lillymon, but Togemon was never that big.
- Not that it should matter with that Digivolution. Anyone else see "Poison Ivy" as a plant-based Naughty Tentacles? Then, of course, there's the Fetish Fuel factor of the Ultimate and Mega form...
- Digimon is full of those moments. Girls always squee in awe when they are attacked by anything with... "vines".
- The character William Will Wo in Gun X Sword is one gigantic walking Oedipus complex. He spends most of the episodes that center on him walking around his family's mansion in nothing but a sheet held over his naughty bits wailing about his mother, whom he killed accidentally while trying to kill his father as a child. At one point, as he's thinking about her, his collapsable sword (which he is holding over his crotch) extends. When Van finally gets over his Heroic BSOD and kills him, it's a relief.
- Do I even have to start with Gundam? Let's just throw in some examples...
- Wing Zero's BFG
- Gundam Exia's and later, Gundam 00's BFS
- ZZ's BFG
- Shining Gundam's BFS
- The Strike's Launcher Striker equipment pack. Just tell me what the BFG looks like when it's being aimed.
- Also, the Cybernewtypes of UC were pretty much mind raped into submission. And Zeta's Scirocco wasn't just 'nice' too all the girls he talked into working for him. Amd Dorothy's admiration towards Relena is not even a little sexual. Or Treize attitude towards Milliardo and Wu Fei. Or the Tallgeese (GWING TAS is right) Let's don't even start with Domon's admiration towards Master Asia (canon's wrong anyway) or Tieria's attitude towards stupid, sexy Lockon. (Yeah, not much of an order here but Gundam's just so full of them I can't get them organized by any means not even talking about them being close to complete)
- Let's not forget the most obvious example. In Gundam Wing, Duo, in his Gundam, heads on down in the ocean to Wing Gundam. How does he shut off Wing's self destruct mechanism? By switching his scythe to a more phallic shape and sticking it into Wing's ass, that's how.
- This poster once read a line by line analysis of the Lucky Star opening song which concluded that it was all about the main girls losing their virginity. He's never been able to listen to said song in the same way again.
- If you thought all the drills in Gurren Lagann were suspicious, you should watch the also Hiroyuki Imaishi-directed work Dead Leaves, where a dude has a similar looking giant drill for a penis!
- One guy tried to prove that Pokemon should be banned because he ranted about Jigglypuff being the Pokemon representation of breasts. Oh, yeah, he tried to prove that there was an upskirt shot and that it should be banned. The scene is so fast, he could only have noticed it if he was looking for it.
- Freud would have a field day with Dio Brando. His very reason for being evil stems from his daddy issues. Later on in Part 1, he literally wants his adoptive brother's body in order to "live gorgeously forever". The creepy obsessions many of his servants have with him in Part 3 (extending well beyond his mind control over some of them). And let's not get started on the creepy subtext in Enrico Pucci's flashbacks.
- "Do you believe in gravity, Enrico?"
- And let's not forget Gyro Zeppeli, who literally fights with a pair of balls.
- Joseph◊ did it a few times, too
- Both subverted and played straight in Hana Yori Dango. Akira is a Cake Eater because his mother's extreme childishness has turned him off of younger women, but one of the initial things that attracts Tsukasa to Tsukushi is that she reminds him of his older sister.
- Sora Wo Kakeru Shoujo's Leopard, a living space colony, needs a pair of golden orbs (and in Japanese, golden balls also means "testicles") so that he can successfully fire his Wave Motion Gun. In the first episode, he tells Akiha, his new lady friend, to use his "golden gun". Oh yes.
- And in the third episode he looks decidedly... pleased after she does. There's really no mistaking that one.
- Venus Versus Virus's Sumire is "attracted" to Lucia's scent while in her Berserker mode. Of course,we know the real reason to this,but still,the manga/anime is yuri,subtext only but still yuri.
- Her dialogue and reactions during her trial to overcome her superpowered Berseker side in Volume 2 of the manga counts.
- The amount of rather harse affection between the two girls can also count as Freud was right.
- Lucia dislikes Sumire's boyfriend. A LOT. So much that she kills him with a giant log object to "protect" Sumire. Of course,she does that due to the fact he is a virus.
- Lelouch from Code Geass. He hates his father, has ridiculously saint-like memories of his mother, and the only women in all of his Unwanted Harem that he openly admits his love for were both his sisters.
- In Katekyo Hitman Reborn, Tsuna is attracted to and has a crush on Kyoko, despite hardly even talking to her or knowing her. But there's one thing that stands out as being extremely suspicious: she looks exactly like his mother. Of course, if you start analyzing and looking deeper into the Art Evolution where they both start looking exactly like each other, the possible explanations can be rather disturbing...
- It also seems to be the fact that their eyes are nowadays drawn exactly the same... Now why would the mangaka do that?
- Halibel's release form◊ in Bleach. Considering that it looks like a giant vagina, it could have been avoided had her sword been held another way.
- Full Metal Panic. Season 1's showdown between Gauron and Sousuke. Gauron's sudden grappling of Sousuke's mecha starts looking suspiciously like he's raping him and they're having hatesex. And please don't say that the thick white liquid that starts dripping down on Gauron while he's grinning doesn't represent anything at all. If one were to look deeper into it, in the novels, a very probable explanation is that Gauron was subliminally (or maybe not so subliminally) enacting out exactly what he wanted to do - fucking Sousuke up the ass. Only, he was in his mecha while he was doing it.
- Why isn't Gunsmith Cats on this list? Or is it that two rather affectionate females working together in a male-dominated enterprise with a gun shop as a front is just too blatant?
- Oh, the kicker here is while Minnie-May has Ken, Rally might have Bean (It's complicated...) Paraphrasing Minnie, Rally compensates "...with those big 'ol guns..."
- A rather blatant example: in the manga, Goldie drugs Rally with a halllucination-inducing drug. Her first halllucination? A xenomorph-looking monster popping out the hammer of her gun...
Live Action TV
- Deliciously satirized in a sketch from the first season of Saturday Night Live with Laraine Newman as a young Anna Freud (Sigmund's daughter) innocently describing to her father (Dan Aykroyd) 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".
- 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 her for developing by tearing them to shreds when she turns into a werewolf. The movie Ginger Snaps covers similar ground.
- The Doctor Who Made For TV Movie has the Master take the form of a snake, overtaking 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 Master's pretty awesome when it comes to stuff like this. His name, Ainley!Master's Tissue Compression Eliminator being shaped like a dildo (and DVD commentaries rife with mentions of the cast joking about this at the time), and everything about the Simm!Master, ever, TOMTIT and phallic crystals, the HADRON web, beard jokes... really, the Master owns this trope.
- On the subject of the Tissue Compression Eliminator, let the record show that the Master invented a device whose sole purpose is to make people smaller. Nope, not Compensating For Something at all.
- The actors themselves once noted that, when hiding undercover as a human, the Master had a desire to be chauffered around in very large limousines, whereas the Doctor was happy enough to drive around in his humble little car "Bessie". It was suggested that maybe the Master was compensating for something the Doctor didn't need to...
- Sonic screwdrivers◊.
- The little rivalry that Captain Jack and the Doctor have about their respective sonic devices in "The Doctor Dances" (Jack's big, flashy sonic blaster versus the Doctor's humble little sonic screwdriver) also seemed to be a little competitive in... other ways. Amusingly, however, Jack's flashy device is revealed to be completely useless when the 'extra features' end up draining the battery, whilst the Doctor's humble little thing is a bit more... durable.
- 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."
- 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.
- 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 a thoroughly creeped out Brian informs him that it means he is afraid of heights, Lowell agrees saying that that would explain the one about sitting atop the Washington Monument.
- 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 and then frolicing in the reflection pool. 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 during a poker game. "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."
- Then he takes $5 from the pot and explains, "That was a house call."
- Which is even worse considering that Freud classified money as a phallic.
- 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...
- This troper is ashamed not to have spotted the symbolism of the sausage roll, given the phallic role that sausages play in British comedy in general and Blackadder in particular.
- During the poker game in the "An Echolls Family Christmas" episode of Veronica Mars, Weevil comments on how comfortable Logan looks with a cigar in his mouth. As if they didn't have enough Foe Yay already... Logan, for his part, shoots back with a racist remark.
Web Original
Comics
- A (not exactly graphic, but still Not Safe For Work) webcomic example proving that Freud Was Right.
- During the much reviled One More Day story arc in Spider Man, many fans claimed that Peter Parker must have an Oedipus Complex to choose Aunt May over Mary Jane (as much as this troper hated the story, he thought that this actually was going a little too far). Keep in mind, Peter is not choosing to date Aunt May over M.J, he's choosing to save her life rather than stay married.
- Though given the emotional ringer he puts himself through AND the extreme lengths he went through to save May before Mephisto showed up (up to and including having Dr. Strange work his mojo, resulting May's spirit outright telling Peter "Let. Me. Go."), it's not very difficult to read something more (and unseemly) into the deal.
Film
Literature
- Parodied in the Young Adult novel Walk Two Moons. A teacher reads a student submission complaining about the endless subtext analysis of poetry in school, and concludes The Long List with "Maybe the forest doesn't represent sex. Maybe the forest is just a forest."
- 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...
- Harry Potter is full of this. The second book is called Harry Potter and the CHAMBER OF SECRETS, for God's sake. Harry travels down a long slimy tube into a mysterious, dangerous chamber in which he finds a giant snake. He uses a big shiny sword to kill this giant snake (), thereby saving his friend's sister, who he later marries.
- Also, in the first and third books, everyone is jealous of Harry's new broomstick. It's so much better than all the others. Everyone congratulates him on it and wants to stroke it. Ron can't wait to ride it. Malfoy is jealous until he gets super-brooms for all the Slytherin team. Hermione buys Harry a "Broomstick polishing kit". In contrast, Ron's wand breaks in two in the second book and won't work properly. He also only gets crappy broomsticks. Prof. Umbridge has an "unusually short" wand, and she punishes Harry, Ron and Fred by locking up their broomsticks. In general, Harry likes anything phallic (towers, brooms, wands) and hates anything resembling a womb or vagina (chambers, tunnels, dungeons, lakes, eggs, baths).
- In The Tales of Beedle The Bard, Word Of God says that No witch (i.e. woman) has ever been known to claim the Elder Wand
- 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."
- 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).
Granny Weatherwax: Maids of Honour?
Nanny Ogg: Weeelll, they starts out as Maids of Honour... but they ends up Tarts.
- 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.
- Neither do the wizards. They do not have balls. They do have their annual Excuse Me, though.
- Also in the Discworld series, Monstrous Regiment and socks. The only moments in Pratchett's masterworks This Troper nearly got Le Cringe. Although it may just be an Unusual Euphemism.
- Though sometimes, a red rosy bird is just a bird. No points for guessing what kind of bird, though...
- This troper is honestly amazed that so few people seem to have noticed exactly how perfectly Redwall fits this trope. The hero of the first book is a thirteen-year-old mouseboy, who is told in cryptic messages and the odd bizarre dream sequence, including one involving a really big snake and a rose bearing swords instead of thorns, to go hunting for a very famous Sword (with a capital S). When he has it and has finished using it to defeat the villain, his dying mentor gives him permission to marry the girl he's been chasing after for most of the book. The villains are all insanely jealous of this Sword and spend half their time trying to steal it. At one point in the prequel Mossflower, the female Big Bad Tsarmina breaks the sword and locks up its owner in a very obvious case of castration symbolism. If one wants to read it this way, Cluny's recurring nightmare about being chased by the Abbey Warrior and stabbed to death takes on a whole new and deeply disturbing meaning ... Also could explain why at least two people have written fanfic featuring Triss as a lesbian.
- If we're going to go this route with the weaponry, Russa Nodrey's song about "me liddle stick o' wood" could be read as involving gender-confusion issues.
- Oh, and a couple of people have claimed that Slagar the Cruel comes across as a paedophile, particularly in the Nelvana cartoon. He had perfectly good reasons for choosing child captives (they last longer, they can't fight back as well, and in the case of the Abbey kids it was "revenge" on their parents), but ... And then there's Ublaz's pink pearl fixation.
- In Doomwyte, a very large blind snake gets trapped in a cave.
- In the novel Things Fall Apart, the staple crop of the igbo village is yams, theyr'e long, cylindrical and the more you have, the more manly you are percieved. You can probably figure out the symbolism here.
- In Lord Of The Flies the scene in which Jack and Roger kill the pig is written exactly like a rape scene, complete with very phallic descriptions of the boys' spears.
- The otherwise awful High Fantasy Kingdoms of Light by Alan Dean Foster deserves special mention for a truly brilliant lampshading. Each main character has a different magical power, and the self-consciously macho Rival can make his sword double in length. The first time he uses it in combat, the Shallow Love Interest thanks him for saving the group, and he responds that he's always happy to extend his sword for her.
Western Animation
- This troper has had people explain to him that Rufus the Naked Mole Rat from Kim Possible represents Ron Stoppable's penis. It's long, pink, lives in his pants, and does his thinking for him. Not to mention the earlier episodes had consuming tacos from the inside on top of the fact that he would emerge from Ron's pocket in a very suggestive position when Kim was present. Oh snap!
- I can see this - especially when you consider that EVERY girl that meets Rufus is grossed out when she first sees him, but eventually gets used to seeing him, evenually acknowledges his usefulness, and some even go so far as to like playing with him and aren't happy when he's sick or can't do what he's needed to do for them. (I only wish that I was making this up - examples can be found throughout the series.) Do I need to go into the Ho Yay factor in the episode where Ron gets Drakken's evil (through an accident) and abandons the small Rufus in order to build ever-bigger and bigger devices (phallic symbols, every one) while the mentally emasculated Drakken becomes Rufus's new owner?
- And when that happens, Shego dumps Drakken for Ron. Though come to think it, I don't think she ever gets past a disgusted hate of the naked pink thing... no wonder she read too much into wrestling with Kim.
- He also purchased Rufus in his early teens, just before Puberty sets in. Baby Rufus is very small. Kim is initially squicked, but quickly accepts him and grows to love him. Rufus also appears as Ron reveals his feelings about Kim in The Movie.
- In "Number One" Ron is hit with a paralyzing ray, Kim checks on Rufus, and well, if you watch it enough times it looks like she's grabbing his erect penis.
- In "Virt-U-Ron" Rufus is wielding enormous sword that grows even larger throughout its appearance. Rufus himself is also referred to in this episode as "The Tunnel Lord".
- In "Exchange" Ron receives a magical sword that changes shape and size and causes him to burst into a strange blue Power Glow.
- So Ron's "Magic Wand" can't shoot "Sparkles" unless Kim grabs it. Nothing suggestive here.
- Code Lyoko: In the penultimate episode, Jeremie's Cannot-Fail-Kill-XANA-Real-Dead program is visually represented by an army of sperm. You really have to wonder what goes on in that boys head...
- Some of XANA's monsters fall into this category as well, such as the flying stingrays that poop mines. And the Scipozoa, with its mighty Combat Tentacles. Suuuure...
- In Futurama, 31st century Washington D.C. has, right next to the phallic Washington monument, a similar but taller Clinton monument. One episode even had an alien spaceship cutting its tip off with a giant claw.
- Space aliens with Yiddish accents, nonetheless.
- Roxy Rocket from Batman The Animated Series, an stunt-themed jewel thief whose gimmick is riding a rocket clutched between her legs like a broom... or, ah...
- Or how excited she got after Batman tackled her that the rocket starts going out of control.
- A literal example, Played For Laughs in Clone High. Right after Joan's completely incomprehensible Le Film Artistique has finished at the film festival, we see a shot of the auditorium, in complete silence. Until the boy sitting next to Joan - a clone of Sigmund Freud himself - starts singing "Joan loves Abe! Joan loves Abe!"
- Used in Bromwell High, when Keisha is making a speech about the school. She begins quoting Martin Luther King's speech, and then goes on to say "Latrina has a dream about a tunnel and a series of bigger and bigger trains! Let's make those dreams come true!"
- In Invader Zim, all Irkens are judged and placed in society based on on their height. So the largest guys are the unquestioned leaders, despite being incompetent, and the main character will never amount to anything because he's "very small...he's a tiny thing." Right.
- Obligatory Avatar The Last Airbender example: In the episode where Aang has trouble standing his ground and being an earthbender, Toph steals a bag of nuts◊ from his satchel, and then uses his staff◊ to crack them◊, finally commenting how Aang's staff "isn't the only delicate instrument around here".
- Zuko's comment, referring to losing his ability to firebend after his Heel Face Turn, that his three-year-long obsession with capturing Aang was his "inner fire". Uh...
- In Phineas And Ferb, It appears that Dr. Doofenshmirtz was an excellent hand puppeteer, so much so that it impressed a girl. Said girl eventually left him for a guy who was a sucky puppeteer but had huge "fingers." Real subtle, Disney.
- The thousand foot cliff in Total Drama Island. The cliff in TDA might be larger.
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. To death.
- In Earthbound, the dialogue of the Eldritch Abomination 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 (and later an enormous spear). 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.
- For the more explicit sexual elements of the game, the Mannequins are a pair of sexy legs attached to another pair of sexy legs, the Bubble Head Nurses are incredibly busty women in skimpy nurse outfits with horribly deformed heads, the Abstract Daddy/Doorman resembles two figures bent over a table or a bed and attacks by swallowing James' head, the Flesh Lips grab James with a tentacle and pulls him towards its vagina-mouth, and then there's the continual attention paid to holes, several of which James must jump down in order to reach the next area of the game.
- In the third game meanwhile, the Closers have vaginas for faces and penises for arms (out of which a blade extends), the Numb Bodies heavily resemble sperm, the Slurpers knock down the player character and climb on top of her in an act of quasi-rape, the Split Worm is an enourmous penis that burrows through various holes and whose head splits open vertically in a vulgar representation of childbirth, and in the latter part of the game there are pulsating walls and vertical holes everywhere, in particular the enourmous hole that leads to the "birthplace" of the Final Boss.
- Not to be left out from the party, Homecoming has its own contributions to this trope: the Lurkers have Vagina Dentata for a face, the Needler has its head between its legs, another symbol of childbirth, the Bubble Head Nurses make a reappearance, the Schisms' head is a giant penis split down the middle, Asphyxia is a mass of female bodies fused together to resemble a centipede with arms for legs, several of which are always groping it, and as for the Siam... well, just look◊ at the damn thing. Hilariously, there are absolutely no sexual elements in the game's plot whatsoever, meaning all of this was apparently added for the lulz.
- The fourth game has relatively subtle examples regarding Walter and his "mother" (actually the protagonist's apartment). The entrances and exits to Walter's otherworld are long tunnels with a light at the end (more childbirth symbolism), giant worms connect the different sections of the otherworld, umbilical cords connecting him to "mother", and the first step in defeating Walter in the Final Boss fight is to use the remains of his actual umbilical cord.
- 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. 'Portal' is for Lesbians indeed.
- 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.
- Metal Gear Solid also has a lot of sexual imagery mixed in with violence, to symbolise how killing arouses Snake more than sex (which is canon, if Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake is to be believed). Snake, who is hot, smokes a cigarette after every boss battle. He punches a sadomasochistic zombie ninja to orgasm at one point. He fights the beautiful Sniper Wolf through the sniper scope of a Male Gaze, twice. Metal Gear REX has a penis that shoots lasers. The final battle is a boxing match between him and his sexy twin, both dressed only in very tight trousers with their waxed muscled chests on full display. I could go on but I won't.
- Should I point out that the most horrific scene in the series involves a man, previously named Solid Snake, now known as Old Snake, crawling down a tunnel, having to use all his might to avoid going limp? Or the BB Corp members draining Snake's health when they hug him for no readily apparent reason?
- The whole plot is basically about men named after penises fighting over a fortress named after a clitoris. Solid Snake ("erect penis") destroys Outer Heaven (clitoris); let's point out that his two vague female romantic attachments both ended in him leaving them (in one case without a goodbye) and he ends up in a close relationship with a man, wanting nothing except that (and, to boot, all his outfits throughout the series draw specific attention to his buttocks). Big Boss ("large penis") builds Outer Heaven and had a female lover who he saved when she was in trouble and who was dedicated to him until the end of her life (and all his outfits throughout the series draw specific attention to his crotch). The series casts Snake in the right, and Big Boss in the wrong. I really am worried about Hideo Kojima's marriage.
- Revolver Ocelot could practically WRITE this trope.
- "There's nothing like the feeling of slamming a long, silver bullet into a well-greased chamber".
- Koishi Komeji, the Bonus Boss in Subterranean Animism, has a whole arsenal of spellcards based off of Freudian concepts... but then you get to "The Embers of Love" and then your brain just sort of shuts down. Seriously, ZUN, phallic heart bullets?
- Many, many moments in the Devil May Cry games, not to mention that every weapon and use thereof is some sort of phallic metaphor.
- Vergil's prologue in Devil May Cry 3 provides us the image of Arkham very... suggestively stroking Vergil's sword.
- Two words: Lucifer scene
- Pokemon. Diglett? Cloyster? Palkia? Beedrill in particular had a rather suggestive entrance in the Pokemon Stadium game that involved thrusting its stinger...
- In the first episode of Sam And Max: Season One, Sam has a dream and the player can choose what he does in his dream. It is possible to make a hot dog appear in a rat hole. The therapist then says, "A weenie in a rat hole... nothing symbolic there."
- It's probably cheating considering the nature of the game but Fate Stay Night has tons of Freudian undertones. I mean, the entire "stabbing the Holy Grail" thing...
- In Katamari Damacy, one of the many Royal Cousins is Odeko, whose most striking feature is his long head. While most cousins have cute little pill-shaped heads, his extends straight up. He's explicitly very proud of his height, and is even prone to exaggerating its size. This has been the subject of many, many jokes.
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