Why is it that so many WMG theories are along the lines of "it's just the main character in his dream/coma/imagination"?

So many shows that require viewers to suspend their disbelief a bit will have someone pop up suggesting it's All Just a Dream or they're in a coma or the kid's just playing with toys and imagining it or they're taking drugs...you get the idea. Like, did this start from somewhere or are people just really cynical?

edited 3rd May '17 9:35:25 AM by BreadBull

I think people just have bad imagination, or want to find an excuse to why something didn't happen.

Interesting question. A couple of spoilery thoughts:

I think that the idea of it being All Just a Dream was popularized by The Wizard of Oz and it's even sort of the trope name IIRC.

The idea of everything being a child's imagining was famously used as a twist on St. Elsewhere. And speaking of tv shows, Newhart famously did a jokey All Just a Dream twist that had it that this show was a dream of Bob Newhart's character on his previous sitcom. What's kind of interesting with this example is that similar things have been proposed in WMG's- like the idea that the protagonist of The Prisoner is actually the somewhat similar main character of an earlier show, Danger Man starring the same actor.

The other being tv example of such a twist is Roseanne, where it was revealed that a lot of the previous events were actually a novel by the eponymous character following the death of her husband.

I'm sure there's some other big tv and film examples I'm forgetting, but I think the one's that I mentioned are important because they are well-known- sometimes the most well-known aspect of those shows, and so it's not surprising that people who speculate about tv and film come up with similar ideas as theories.

There's also some influential literary examples. I think the most famous is An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, but I'm also reminded of works like The Telltale Heart and The Queen of Spades and The Yellow Wallpaper where characters go crazy and/or have mental illness prior to and during the story and ambiguously supernatural events take place.

edited 3rd May '17 1:31:35 PM by Hodor2

Another answer: it's becoming a laughingstock and a meme, at least in this site.

It was thought provoking when there was some kind of idea behind it like Final Fantasy VIII's WMG for that... but now that stuff just needs to DIAF.

It's one of those things the poster thinks "might as well get it out of the way," and probably doesn't pay much mind afterwards.