What Do You Mean It's Not Didactic?/Playing With
- Basic Trope: The audience finds meaning in a story which was written for its own sake.
- Played Straight: The reader sees all sorts of symbols, motifs, and aesops
- Exaggerated: The story is little more than IKEA Erotica, and yet is regarded and treated as deep and meaningful.
- Downplayed: The reader finds a hidden moral in what is nothing else more than a generic story.
- Justified: There are symbols and motifs used in the telling of the story, and one can find An Aesop in almost any story.
- The fans find symbols motifs above and beyond the ones the author purposely put in.
- Inverted: The story is Just for Fun and treated as such.
- The story in question is meant to be didactic and treated as such.
- The story is didactic (maybe even to the point of being Anvilicious), but treated as though written Just for Fun.
- Subverted: The story seems to be Just for Fun, nothing more than Acceptable Breaks From Reality
- Double Subverted: But there are some instances of Faux Symbolism, which gets the audience thinking
- Deconstructed: The Death of the Author. Authorial intent has absolutely no bearing on what the story conveys. The story can only be considered on its own elements through outside non-authorial analysis. A simple work someone finds deeper meaning in is complex, regardless of the way the author saw it.
- Reconstructed: While stories can take on meaning beyond what the author intended, that they emerge from the writing is due to conscious or subconscious effort from the writer. Someone can create a simple work and intend it to be simple, and it could have deeper meaning, and they can both be right.
- Lampshaded: "This story means nothing...unless you want it to."
- Parodied: A badly-written Porn Without Plot Fan Fiction is the subject of an English assignment and has its own Spark Notes.
- Averted: The audience treats the story as it was written: Just for Fun.
- Enforced: Wild Mass Guessing, Epileptic Trees, Faux Symbolism
- Invoked: Ms. Troper gives her English class a reading assignment.
- Defied: The audience takes the story in question completely at face value.
- Discussed: "I want you to notice..."
- Conversed: "This story doesn't mean anything!"
- Played For Laughs: See "Parodied"
- Played For Drama: The book is actually a secret prophetic book with information relevant to Twenty Minutes Into the Future. Only those who can decipher the symbolism and tropes in the book will gain the knowledge they need to survive/warn people/etc, and this is a race against time.