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What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic?
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alt title(s): What Do You Mean Its Not Didactic Everything is a metaphor for life. Therefore, life is a metaphor for everything.
— Anonymous
Right, so you're looking through the library and come across a copy of Moby Dick. First published in 1851? Wow, if it's still being published after more than 150 years, it must be good! You've heard a lot of good things about this novel, so you eagerly check it out and head home.
Later, you open it up and discover there's a preface. Might as well read that to get an idea of the context it was written, and so maybe enjoy it even more. You start reading, and naturally the preface begins by summarizing the plot... wait, why are you annoyed? You weren't planning on reading it for the story, were you? This isn't just literature, it's a work of True Art!
In the minds of Really Clever Literary Critics, the true worth of a book, movie, or TV series is not in telling an engrossing story with interesting characters, but in allowing people to write long, complex, deep essays on the true meaning of the subject matter, whatever they think that may be. Once the critics have done this sort of analysis, they can objectively declare these works as True Art: it doesn't matter how much you personally like or dislike these works so long as you understand the deeper meaning behind them. Only ignorant fools don't understand.
Such an attitude may be expressed in several ways:
You can even get away with Completely Missing The Point if you're a Really Serious Critic who wants to reveal all sorts of Family Unfriendly Aesops inside a work, whether or not they have anything to do with the actual characters or plot. Goodness forbid that the author(s) wanted you to do so. ( Not that what the author wanted actually matters.)
How long will it be before high school/college students are forced to write long-winded essays about the philosophical and socio-religious undertones of Harry Potter? (Answer: Already happened.)
Note that having the plot given away becomes less and less of an issue the older the subject is. Most people who haven't read, for example, Moby Dick will still be familiar with key plot points due to Popcultural Osmosis. See It Was His Sled.
This is one of the nasty things that can happen when literary analysis becomes Serious Business.
See also True Art Is Angsty, True Art Is Incomprehensible.
Examples:
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- Neon Genesis Evangelion has gotten this treatment, of all places, in an economics essay here
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- This Troper once read a lengthy paper, apparently 100% serious, that asserted that the Pokemon anime is the idle workings of a comatose Ash Ketchum's mind and that each character represented different stressors and aspects of his personality.
- This troper once read a fanfic to the same effect, although it was just presented as an interesting "what if"?
- Intentionally writing subtexts into things that don't have them is something of a tradition on the internet, and possibly beforehand. This troper particularly remembers seeing a fan-drawn comic◊ that suggests that the cartoon Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends was a series of daydreams by a severely autistic Frankie.
- The last episode of Bottle Fairy inspired "Too many words about Bottle Fairy", which interprets the fairies as dolls Sensei-san's "deeply disturbed" (possibly autistic) younger sister uses to interact with a world she is unable to cope with herself.
- Um, when I wrote that, I wasn't trying to be profound. — Chizumatic's owner
- Alison Bechdel, in her graphic novel memoir Fun Home, notes how annoyed she was with her college English professors forcing symbolism on everything they read. Probably the funniest panel in the book is a bewildered looking student asking "You mean... like... Hemingway did that stuff on purpose?"
- ...although elsewhere in the book, she and her girlfriend analyze several children's books (e.g. James And The Giant Peach) this way.
- Watchmen Gets this treatment quite a bit, as does Kingdom Come and The Sandman
- Is Blazing Saddles a serious deconstruction of the Western and a profound statement on race relations in America, or just a lowbrow genre parody? Depends on who's asked; of course, "both" is a viable answer.
- This troper has seen similar arguments regarding the Harold and Kumar movies.
- This troper once tuned in to see Australian critic Bill Collins hosting the movie of Frankenstein. It was only so long before he went for the Mute button, so he could actually enjoy the movie.
- For a double-dose of this concept, feel free to read this article which asserts that Fight Club is Calvin And Hobbes grown-up.
- This troper once read an essay explaining that Alien was in fact about a man searching for a strong woman, and not a horror movie about an alien killing people on a space ship.
- This is talked about in the movie Fame. Music student Bruno argues with his instructor, Mister Shorofsky, that if Mozart were alive today, he'd be cranking out rock and roll songs, not chamber music and symphonies, because Mozart wasn't doing it to be "artistic", but rather just to put bread on the table.
- The Coen Brothers' films are much analysed for their symbolism and subtexts, but the brothers themselves just respond "Well, if you say so."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, widely considered the greatest and most important poet and writer in German history, and particularly his most famous work Faust, which by this time has been interepreted to death, undeath, back to death and straight into the sun, thought that the entire process of over-analyzation and insisting on trying to find a meaning and idea in a work was absurd and contraproductive even in the early 19th century.
- Vladimir Nabokov explicitly disliked people's tendency to overanalyse Lolita.
- Although it is a metafictional novel rich in reference, with an afterword about the novel's inspiration... and then there's this... so I have my doubts.
- This editor missed most of the tension in E. M. Forster's A Room With a View, as the plot was tidily resolved for him on the back cover.
- Some of the newer editions of Penguin and Oxford World's Classics have started to give a warning that the preface reveals major plot details, likely because of complaints about this tendency.
- Steven Brust, the author of the Dragaera series, is part of an informal group of writers who call themselves the Pre-Joycean Fellowship, in reference to their perception that James Joyce started a trend in literary criticism which believes that meaningful works were meant to have obscure language and lots of symbolism and anything well-plotted was not in this category.
- A school of thought sprung up around The Lord Of The Rings in which it was "proven" to be an allegory for World War II: the Shire was England and the hobbits were the English, the elves were the French, Mordor was Nazi Germany and Sauron was Hitler, and the One Ring was the atom bomb or nuclear power. Not even J.R.R. Tolkien emphatically stating—including in the prologues to later printings—that The Lord Of The Rings was not and was never intended to be an allegory for World War II (and that he disliked allegories anyway), has stopped people from writing papers to that effect. Even though the allegory is literally impossible: Tolkien had been writing The Lord of the Rings and giving the Ring its central importance prior to World War II, before he ever heard of the possibility of an atomic bomb.
- Eventually, Tolkien went as far as to write an outline of what the book would have been like if he had meant it as a World War II allegory. Among other things, Saruman would not have been counted on as an ally, and Sauron would have betrayed him; Saruman would have tried to make his own One Ring; and in the end the Fellowship would have had to use its power to win.
- Just pick a Charles Dickens novel. Dickens's works were mass entertainment, serials designed to reel audiences in, populated with over-the-top caricatures and implausible coincidences. Does that stop high school English teachers from assigning meaning to every last word of them? No.
- Dickens notes (carefully preserved for most of his later novels) showed that he did in fact spend a lot of time carefully planning and considering the symbolism and characters in his books; he did intend them to have meanings.
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn starts with a death threat aimed at anyone who tries to analyze it. This is often taken as an invitation to do so.
- The author of the blog Slacktivist once compared reading The Bible as the writers of Left Behind do to "seeing a homosexual subtext in Huckleberry Finn". This has been done, in an infamous paper called "Come Back to the Raft, Huck Honey!".
- Nick Cave's novel And The Ass Saw The Angel is a giant Mind Screw set Through The Eyes Of Madness, brimming with confusing religious symbolism, right down to the title. In an interview, he told everyone not to read too much into it, and just to enjoy it.
- The title -as a stand-alone text string, at least- makes perfect sense to anybody who knows the story of Balaam and his donkey. The story may be found here.
- This troper's edition of The Sound and the Fury contains, in its liner notes, no information whatever about the story, but instead a listing of what supplementary materials are included. The lack of any exposition within the actual novel makes this all the more infuriating.
- The original Dracula novel was a pot-boiler cross-the-world adventure. Even though vampires became sex symbols far later, the original novel is still often interpreted as heavy on sexual allegory.
- Richard Adams has always sworn that Watership Down was intended to be a children's book. However, many fans and critics don't agree and often see the book the 1970s' answer to Animal Farm, a political animal fable that focuses on fascism and appeasement.
- In-universe example: Grand Admiral Thrawn, resident Magnificent Bastard of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, uses this as his favourite military strategy: he can deduce a species' entire psychological makeupfrom their works of art, and plans his tactics accordingly. One wonders how he would interpret hentai doshinji. Or comic books. Or dogs playing poker.
- He does admit at one point that it failed once (against a presumably nonhumanoid race), but not how or why—though he does believe, some years later, that he's finally got an insight into them. He also admits to having had to effectively destroying their world, so it's too little, too late.
- This troper recalls a quite magnificent parody that used to be online (supposedly written by one of Professor Bernice Summerfield's students) which, amongst other things, explains that every single character in Mary Poppins is gay. And proves it.
- Alice in Wonderland gets quite a few critics analyzing exactly what everything means. Teenagers and stoners love to paint it as a drug allegory, some see it as story of madness, a Dying Dream, about religion, a critique of British Imperialism, a meditation on language, or simply a love note to a child.
- Dogma had fun with this one, featuring a scene where a fallen angel convinces a nun that the Walrus and the Carpenter story is an allegory for corrupt organized religion.
- Another reading is that it's all about growing up. In Through the Looking Glass, Alice has no real plan except to get to the garden she saw earlier on. When she gets there, it's full of falsehood and cruelty: kind of like how children always want to grow up. Note also the progression from the unplanned life of a young child (Alice in Wonderland and randomness symbolised by cards) to the ordered life of an older child (Through the Looking Glass, order and logic of chess).
- Some people (and more than a few high school text books) say that a great deal of it is based on math and logic. In his day, Lewis Carroll was known for publishing mathematical treatises under his real name, Charles Dodgson.
- "The Jabberwocky" is one of th better known poems written by Carroll and one of the most often analyzed independently. Some academics claim that the poem is a satire of bad poetry or an example of how not to write a poem. Others claim that Carroll is commenting on the nature of language by using nonsense words that seem like real words. Still others have more far-fetched analysis.
- A few of them are now real words, most famously 'vorpal' blades being enchanted for more likely decapitations.
- I think 'vorpal' is probably a less well known word than 'chortle', which was also invented in Jabberwocky.
- The foreword to The Flood by Ian Rankin mentions how the authour attended a lecture on his book, and was surprised at the things that were being read into it, most of which he'd never consciously included.
- This troper's edition of Nineteen Eighty Four spoiled the conclusion in the foreword, to his great irritation.
- Twilight seems to have had a bunch of critics' panties in a bunch when they found out that the author was a Mormon. When Bella and Edward decide to remain chaste, it seemed to produce theories that the author was brainwashing kids into accepting everything about her religion.
- Of course, it's really not so much deciding to remain chaste as it is Edward refusing to sleep with Bella for fear he'll, umm, kill her.
- It's also worth mentioning that the biggest "mystery" of the book—the fact that Edward is a vampire—is spoiled in the mere four sentences on the back cover.
- Hardly a spoiler. To quote the Nostalgia Critic, "PEOPLE FROM EGYPT KNOW YOU ARE A VAMPIRE! YOU DON'T HIDE IT VERY WELL!"
- This troper's edition of The Moonstone added a footnote to highlight a sentence that had been dropped from certain editions of the book because it made the solution to the mystery too obvious. Which, of course, flagged it as a vital clue — without being told it was important most readers would have skimmed right over it. The professor who assigned the book apologized to us for that.
- Convincing people that Alan Shore represents Spock is easy. Convincing them that Christine Daaé is Jon Stewart...
- Parodied in an episode of Frasier, where Frasier and Niles read the manuscript to the second ever novel of a famous author, then tell him how much they enjoyed how it was evocative of Dante's Divine Comedy. The author states that he didn't intend such imagery, and bitterly concludes that he must have "drawn the whole thing from Dante", before angrily destroying the manuscript. Frasier and Niles console themselves by claiming that the critics would have picked up on the Dante allegory and torn the novel apart.
- There's a special feature on the Muppets season 1 DVD which apparently was a video specifically made for Stockholders meant to convince them to buy stocks in The Muppet Show. In it, the muppet presented a list of various demographics, and what that demographic would like about the show and why. One of those groups listed was intellectuals and college students, and the thing that would appeal to them was (paraphrasing) "The Meaning of everything".
- Parodied in Monty Pythons Flying Circus, where a murder mystery about railway timetables is given an inane analysis by "Gavin Millarrrrrrrrrr". An excerpt:
"If La Fontaine's elk would spurn Tom Jones the engine must be our head, the dining car our esophagus, the guard's van our left lung, the cattle truck our shins, the first-class compartment the piece of skin at the nape of the neck and the level crossing an electric elk called Simon. The clarity is devastating. But where is the ambiguity? It's over there in a box."
- Parodied by The Onion on at least three occasions.
- Made all the more hilarious by an AP English test from a few years back that involved analysing an Onion article.
- William Shakespeare is a frequent victim of this. Were he alive today, he might well be writing Hollywood blockbusters or, given his penchant for adaptation, "his own versions of certain stories". But every plausible intellectual slant, and more than a few implausible ones, have been earnestly applied to his work by English students. Some, fearing a desecration of the Canon, oppose any and all film adaptations, and heaven forbid that you stage the plays in anything but their most complete forms. Even if the original performances were heavily improvised and no authoritative versions ever existed, canon is Serious Business.
- The book version of the Reduced Shakespeare Company's play, The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged), ruthlessly deconstructs the sort of forewords usually included in Shakespeare reprintings. Not only does each member of the troupe get a foreword, there's a foreword to the foreword, an afterword to the foreword, a foreword by the publisher, a foreword by Shakespeare (in which he gives special thanks to the Dark Lady), and even a foreword by the reader, in which he (read: you) complains that the endless forewords are getting annoying and demands that the book Get On With It Already.
- Isaac Asimov had a little something to say about this, in his short story The Immortal Bard.
- One reason many scholars, critics and plain old fans of the Bard dislike most modern adaptations because, for some reason or another, the director insists on shoving in various politics or ideologies, the vast majority of them wrong and completely out of place within the play.
- There's an argument that virtually every play by Henrik Ibsen lacks an Aesop, instead showing characters in conflict and letting the audience decide who's right and who's wrong. Didn't stop a fair number of people from being utterly appalled by the ending of A Doll's House for seeming to promote divorce. Feminist authors hailed Ibsen during his life for A Doll's House in spite of Ibsen's strong denial that it had a feminist message.
- Played with at the opening of The Pajama Game, where Hines appears in front of the curtain to proclaim the play's serious themes:
"This is a very serious drama. It's kind of a problem play. It's about Capital and Labor. I wouldn't bother to make such a point of all this except later on, if you happen to see a lot of naked women being chased through the woods, I don't want you to get the wrong impression. This play is full of symbolism."
- ''The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy.''
- That's a series of books which use elements of pop culture to illustrate philosophical concepts, not necessarily giving the works any deeper meaning.
- Metal Gear: This troper has seen a number of sources saying that Hideo Kojima does not take the series at all seriously, uses it, entirely as a satire of his fans and hates his fans for valuing style more then substance.
- That explains a LOT. Kojima was sending up all video games in Metal Gear Solid 2, spy thrillers in Metal Gear Solid 3 and Final Fantasy (All cutscene no action) Role Playing Games in Metal Gear Solid 4.
- That's a pretty big stretch for the amount of effort that goes into the quality of the series, and "hates his fans for valuing style more than substance" sounds more like a fancy way of saying "I hate MGS4's cut-scenes." This seems to be a twisted version of the idea that Hideo Kojima just wishes he could do something with his life besides make Metal Gear, which probably has some truth to it considering he's tried to bow out of the last two games until it became clear his fans just don't want anything else from him.
- The Game Overthinker makes a habit of doing this to video games. See for example his episode Super Mario and the Sacred Feminine.
- Crono is a Christ figure. And that's just the beginning.
- Megatokyo fans often have fun producing in depth essays proving Epileptic Tree bait: Miho is a Time Lord/The Author/Lain/A Cabbage. This troper once proved she was George Bush in disguise. Judging by the Wild Mass Guessing pages, this is a pretty common hobby within fandom.
- Dinosaur Comics:
Alt-text: i tried to figure out all the symbolism in this comic and i was SO CONFUSED
- Anything Vanderbeam analyzes becomes saddled with more symbolism than it deserves.
- Fillmore! has an episode where the Book Club try to steal the best books from the library for themselves. The head of said club when he is collared and sent to detention rants about how the Book Club deserve them more than others as they are the only ones who appreciate them in the right way and understand things like the subtext of Judy Blume. Ingrid Third points out, "Judy Blume doesn't have a subtext, but she is very good."
- A serious investigation into the "deep philosophical significance" hidden between the lines of the Super Mario World cartoon episode and You Tube Poop staple "Mama Luigi".
- Scooby Doo and the Loch Ness Monster is at least a little about scientific skepticism, isn't it? Anybody?
- Parodied in the series finale of Futurama, 'The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings'. Fry's opera depicts the Robot Devil plainly saying aloud how stupid he is. After this the real Robot Devil interrupts, criticizing:
Robot Devil: Your lyrics lack subtlety. You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
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