History Main / WhatDoYouMeanItsNotDidactic

* Parodied in "Hyakugojyuuichi 2003" by ''Music/LemonDemon'', which has a verse daring listeners to try and analyze Creator/NeilCicierega's {{Animutation}} "Hyakugojyuuichi" (a nonsensical Flash video set to one of the ending themes from ''Anime/{{Pokemon}}'')

* In his Top 10 '80s Movies video, WebVideo/{{Benzaie}} seems to take ''WesternAnimation/HeavyMetal'' just a little too seriously, going as far to compare it to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, but on a smaller scale. Well, more power to you, but the people who actually made the film take it considerably less seriously in the "Making of Heavy Metal" documentary, describing it more appropriately as the last gasp of the counterculture before the wave of 1980s conservatism (apparently, they didn't watch a lot of [[HairMetal MTV during the '80s]]). And his views on the ''Conan the Barbarian'' film were taking it too seriously also. Interesting that he praised that film's audio commentary, which has been ridiculed online and even by Creator/EdgarWright on one of the audio commentaries to ''Film/ScottPilgrim''.

* ''WebVideo/TheNostalgiaCritic'' did this in his ''Anime/SailorMoon'' review, when he talks about the transformation sequences, suddenly goes off on how [[{{Squick}} squicky]] they are given that the girls are 14 years old, despite not looking like it (ignorant or unknown of AnimationAnatomyAging) ''and then'' goes off on a tangent about the Japanese law in regards to Age of Consent. Which isn't even exactly the same all over Japan.

* Interpreting the work through the "lens" of your personal political ideology and rating the work based on how much it supposedly adheres to said ideology.

* ''Comicbook/{{Watchmen}}'' gets this treatment quite a bit, as does ''ComicBook/KingdomCome'' and ''ComicBook/TheSandman''.

* In the classic ''Series/DoctorWho'' story "City of Death" the TARDIS lands in an art gallery and is mistaken for a piece of modern art. Two art lovers [[note]]one of whom is played by Creator/JohnCleese[[/note]] wax lyrical about its brilliance as a comment on modern life. Seeing three people and a robot dog pile into it before it de-materialises in front of them doesn't change their mind.

* Wiki/{{Uncyclopedia}}'s [[http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Fisher_Price:_A_Retrospective Fisher Price: A Retrospective]], a multiple pages-long essay regarding a page created by a WikiVandal which consists nothing but the text "go eat shit fuckers".

* Music/TheyMightBeGiants are often analysed (their [[TheWikiRule wiki]] has a whole namespace dedicated to interpretations), even for songs like "Don't Let's Start," which has been said by John Linnell to just be nonsense words that fit the music, which was written before the lyrics.

** Of all things, it is given this treatment by [[TheWikiRule The Homestar Runner Wiki]].

* Parodied in a ''Creator/{{ProZD}}'' skit. Person A criticizes a manga for just being an excuse for mindless fanservice, to which Person B utterly loses their shit about how there's a lot of deep symbolism that's clearly going right over Person A's head. Cut to a shot from an interview with the author who said he just wanted to draw big titties.

** Among the editorial essays on [[http://www.mugglenet.com/ MuggleNet]], there's an essay on the relationship between Harry and Voldemort, and how the language in key moments implies symbolic rape.[[http://www.mugglenet.com/editorials/potterrape.shtml 1]]

* Steven Brust, the author of the ''Literature/{{Dragaera}}'' series, is part of an informal group of writers who call themselves the Pre-Joycean Fellowship, in reference to their perception that Creator/JamesJoyce 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.

High school and college students now write long-winded essays about the philosophical and socio-religious undertones of ''Literature/HarryPotter'' and ''Literature/{{Twilight}}''. It gets more relevant when you get into works aimed at even younger audiences, however: most kids under the age of twelve or so aren't going to be terribly philosophical; most of them will enjoy a work simply because it's "funny," or "colorful," or even "interesting."

* ''Literature/{{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. [[SpaceWhaleAesop "We can't have sex because it'll kill you except for when we get married for some reason"]] does sound rather like abstinence moralizing.

High school and college students now write long-winded essays about the philosophical and socio-religious undertones of ''Literature/HarryPotter'' and ''Literature/{{Twilight}}''. It gets more relevant when you get into works aimed at even younger audiences, however: most kids under the age of twelve or so aren't going to be terribly philosophical; most of them will enjoy a work simply because it's "funny," or "colorful," or even "interesting." This provides a huge amount of leeway for the producers of children's shows to insert subtle commentaries and promote ideas without the readership (or even themselves) picking up on how they're shaping young minds, so to an extent ''every'' work aimed at young children is didactic ''whether the author intended it or not'', increasing as the audience gets younger. This can even open the door to the authors sneaking propagandistic messages into the work, if they are political or philosophical partisans.

** Subverted in the post-Doctor NA ''Down''. At first glance, it looks like Bernice's student Ash's analysis of 2530s [[TwoFistedTales pulpzine]] character Mr Misnomer is this, with Benny herself unable to decide if "it was really quite clever or just psychoanalytic piffle". If you actually read the exerpts though, it turns out Ash is making a somewhat more reasonable point along the lines of "obviously this isn't ''intentional'', because this is schlock fiction that was literally churned out by a computer, but it does say something about the society that created it".

* In the ''Literature/DoctorWhoNewAdventures'' novel ''[[Recap/DoctorWhoNewAdventuresSkyPirates Sky Pirates!]]'', we're told that Bernice Summerfield, when an angsty teenager, wrote a lengthy dissertation on the ''WesternAnimation/RalphWolfAndSamSheepdog'' cartoons that used the words "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" 327 times, pointed out the significance of the supposedly primitive wolf being the tool user, and portrayed Sam as the unwitting dupe of a culture that killed and killed again, hypocritically "defending" its victims from outsiders, before concluding that everything ended in misery and death and she was glad she didn't have a boyfriend or girlfriend because they were all wilfully uninterested in the important truths behind these so-called jokes.

* A [[https://web.archive.org/web/20080524041149/http://waluigious.blogspot.com/2008/03/in-which-i-analyze-mama-luigi.html serious investigation]] into the "deep philosophical significance" hidden between the lines of the ''VideoGame/SuperMarioWorld'' cartoon episode and WebAnimation/YouTubePoop staple "Mama Luigi".

* ''Art/{{TheMonaLisa}}'' has been the center for large debates regarding the mysterious nature of both the subject and her smile. One popular theory even claims it's a self portrait depicting what DaVinci thought he'd look like as a woman. This despite it being definitively proven it was a commissioned portrait of Lisa Gherardini an Italian noblewoman. Which somewhat undermines a lot of the mystery. It's also usually treated as a long standing cultural treasure, when really it wasn't particularly respected, even in the art world, until its world famous robbery in 1911.

* Parodied in "Hyakugojyuuichi 2003" by ''Music/LemonDemon'', which has a verse daring listeners to try and analyze Creator/NeilCicierega's WebAnimation/{{Animutation}} "Hyakugojyuuichi" (a nonsensical Flash video set to one of the ending themes from ''Anime/{{Pokemon}}'')

* ''WebVideo/TheNostalgiaCritic'' did this in his ''Anime/SailorMoon'' review, when he talks about the transformation sequences, suddenly goes off on how [[{{Squick}} squicky]] they are given that the girls are 14 years old, despite not looking like it (ignorant or unknown of AnimationAnatomyAging) ''and then'' goes off on a tangent about the Japanese law in regards to Age of Consent. [[CriticalResearchFailure Which isn't even exactly the same all over Japan]].

* ''Wiki/SCPFoundation'': Invoked in-universe with [[http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-3435 SCP-3435]] (a painting of a wyvern wizard and a cyborg T. Rex fighting), which makes viewers nauseous if they overthink what the painting is supposed to represent. The artist who made it deliberately added this feature so when critics he hated came by, he could laugh at the sick looks on their faces.

* ''Manga/{{Naruto}}'' gets a lot of this when it comes to the nation politics, and the use of 12 year old ninjas as living weapons, along with the true meaning of ''Will of Fire''.

** In another episode, Frasier begins having a bizarre dream. He spends the entire episode over-analyzing and racking his brain trying to figure out what the dream means and what its trying to tell him. He finally concludes that since he had been complaining about being bored at work, his brain invented some overly complex problem to keep him entertained. Simply "having a weird dream" wasn't enough.

* Music/TheBeatles song "I Am the Walrus" supposedly originated after Music/JohnLennon heard that Beatles lyrics were being used for literary analysis in university classes. Finding this ridiculous, Lennon decided to write "Glass Onion", a song where the lyrics ''sounded'' symbolic [[IceCreamKoan but were just utter nonsense]], as a TakeThat against people taking their songs too seriously (of course, this would turn into a trend with later Beatles songs, even naming the [[TheWalrusWasPaul associated trope]][[note]]The TropeNamer there was a line from the song "Glass Onion", which was thrown in just to screw with the people trying to find the hidden meanings of "I Am the Walrus".[[/note]], and it became a case of GoneHorriblyRight when [[UsefulNotes/CharlesManson a certain cult leader's]] attempts to find meanings in nonsensical Beatles lyrics led him to send his followers on a killing spree in 1969).

*** There have also been some laughable attempts to identify "Mormon themes" in ''Twilight'' by people whose total knowledge of Mormonism seems to come from reading a couple articles on Wiki/TheOtherWiki. Mainly they just take concepts that are vague or fairly common and try to label them as uniquely Mormon, as though Mormons are the only ones who believe in close-knit families or frown on sex outside of marriage.

** Another fun (and plausible) one is that the castaways represent the Seven Deadly Sins. Gilligan is Sloth, the Captain is Wrath, the Professor is Pride, Mr. Howell is Greed, Mrs. Howell is Gluttony, Ginger is Lust and Mary-Ann is Envy.

* Creator/JohannWolfgangVonGoethe, widely considered the greatest and most important poet and writer in German history, and particularly his most famous work ''Myth/{{Faust}}'', which by this time has been interpreted 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.

* Creator/VladimirNabokov explicitly disliked people's tendency to overanalyse ''Literature/{{Lolita}}''. By contraste, he also nearly demands it in the foreword of ''The Defense'' and understanding most of ''Literature/PaleFire'' is impossible without it.

* Some of the very pages on Wiki/TVTropes, but in a good way.

* ''Literature/AliceInWonderland'' gets quite a few critics analyzing exactly what everything means. Teenagers and stoners love to paint it as a drug allegory, while others see it as story of madness or a DyingDream. Still more think that it's satirizing religion, British Imperialism, or language and logic. Later in life, Carroll, a conservative mathematician, would reportedly claim it was, and always had been, a hidden tract against "new math" and how people ascribing to it lived in a world of neither rhyme nor reason. This may actually make him a victim of this trope in regards to ''his own work''. On the other hand, [[Mid-DevelopmentGenreShift there are quite a few additions in the final book that aren’t present the original draft, which was intended solely as a children’s story, and these all have some allegory related to math which were later found.]]