A Midsummer Night's Dream/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Author's Saving Throw: Played with in the epilogue, which coyly "apologizes" to anyone who didn't like the play. This was more or less formula for the period, and shows again in The Tempest, among other places.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Both Felix Mendelssohn and Carl Orff wrote epic soundtracks for the play. Mendelsson`s version taking a romantic tone, while Orff was concentrating on the bizarreness of the turns the plot takes.
  • Esoteric Happy Ending: The pairing of the human couples when you realize that the only reason Demetrius is with Helena is not because he has genuinely fallen in love with her, but because he has been affected by a Love Potion.
  • Fridge Horror: Sure, the play is all lovely and funny and such but then you walk out of the theater and you suddenly realize that this whole conflict was about which crazy, sociopathic faerie monarch is going to get that mortal child they kidnapped.
    • It's a little unsettling to think that Demetrius goes the rest of his life never realizing that his "love" for Helena is just a fairy charm.
  • Hilarity Ensues: Puck is the embodiment of Epic Fail.
    • Or is he? One gets the feeling he's just messing around: he is Oberon's court jester after all.
  • MST3K Mantra: Puck's final soliloquy: "If the story offended you, remind yourself it was nothing but a dream."
  • Values Dissonance: After the potion makes Lysander hate Hermia, he wards off her advances by saying she looks like an "Ethiope." African women were considered horribly ugly at the time in Europe.