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What Do You Mean It's Not Didactic?: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|'''''NOTICE''''' -- ''Persons attempting to find [[The Runaway|a motive]] in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find [[Family
To the literary analyst, all works are [[When All You Have Is a Hammer|ripe for analysis]].
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* Writing dense dense dense descriptions of what makes the book good in the blurb, which only make sense to someone who has already studied the work for several years.
You can even get away with missing the point if you're a [[Serious Business|Really Serious Critic]] who wants to reveal all sorts of [[Family
High school and college students now write long-winded essays about the philosophical and socio-religious undertones of ''[[Harry Potter (Literature)|Harry Potter]]'' and ''[[Twilight (Literature)|Twilight]]''. It gets worse when you get into works aimed at even younger audiences. Let's face it: 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." Trying to find the "hidden meaning" of a children's show is more often than not like pulling apart a hunk of angel-food cake to see what's inside it.
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See also [[True Art Is Angsty]], [[True Art Is Incomprehensible]],
{{examples
== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]'' has gotten this treatment, of all places, in an economics essay [http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/VC6.PDF here].
** Eva's connection with this trope was even referenced in ''[[FLCL]]'', where one of the characters is said to have "written a long book on the deep mysteries of Eva."
** The Eva-effect reaches to the rest of the Super Robot genre. Any Super Robot show made after 1997 is either considered some sort of [[Reconstruction]] of the Super Robot genre, a [[Take That]] to ''Eva'', a [[
* ''[[FLCL]]'' is one to talk: The show is full of such frantic (and hilarious) [[Mind Screw]] that it's not clear if ''anyone'' is even clear on what the plot is, let alone what it's all supposed to mean. Brought to you by the folks who made Eva, of course.
* The last episode of ''[[Bottle Fairy (Anime)|Bottle Fairy]]'' inspired [http://denbeste.nu/Chizumatic/tmw/BottleFairy.shtml "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.
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* ''[[The Scarlet Letter]]''. What was once a simple romance novel about two adultering people in early Puritian society has been examined and re-examined to death since the 1850s, trying to find hidden meanings. The biggest offender is the notion of Hester's daughter Pearl being one giant symbol rather than an actual character.
* [[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 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.
{{quote| [[What Do You Mean
* [[Vladimir Nabokov]] explicitly disliked people's tendency to overanalyse ''[[Lolita]]''.
* 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.
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** [[Older Than You Think|Vampires had been a sexual symbol well before Dracula]] - they were a popular symbol for "deviant" sexuality in the Victorian times. ''Carmilla'' features the world's first [[Lesbian Vampire]] and in Dr. Polidori's ''The Vampyre'' the titular vampire, Lord Ruthven is modeled after certain [[Byronic Hero|Lord Byron]], and is depicted as a sexual predator.
*** Geraldine from Coleridge's "Christabel" is even older.
* Richard Adams has always sworn that ''[[Watership Down]]'' [[What Do You Mean
* In-universe example: Grand Admiral Thrawn, resident [[Magnificent Bastard]] of the ''[[Star Wars]]'' [[Expanded Universe]], uses this as his favourite military strategy: he can [[Awesomeness By Analysis|deduce a species' entire]] [[Warrior Therapist|psychological makeup]] from their works of art, and plans his tactics accordingly.
* ''[[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 [[Squick|love note to a child]].
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** This can also be seen as a parody of ''[[South Park]]'' itself, and its critics. [[Mind Screw|The really ironic part about that is that it adds another layer of meaning to the episode and arguably takes it from "funny" to "brilliant."]]
* In 2005, the journalist Wilker de Jesus Lira wrote a monograph called "O merchandising capitalista no desenho Bob Esponja" (''The capitalist merchandising in the [[SpongeBob]] cartoon'') where he attempts to show that [[SpongeBob]] preaches the American capitalism that predates the lower classes, saying that "[[SpongeBob]] is the perfect capitalist employee, who doesn't rebel against his chief and accepts everything, even if he lives with a misery salary".
* People love applying this to ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (Animation)|My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic]]''. There's been essays on everything from [http://www.overthinkingit.com/2011/02/24/my-little-pony-political-economy/ the political makeup of Equestria] to the application of Jung's shadow archetype to [[Large Ham|the Great and Powerful Trixie]] to [http://www.reddit.com/r/mylittlepony/comments/h12nm/pony_personality_disorders/ psychoanalysis of the main cast, complete with personality disorder diagnoses]. This is part of a larger trend of overanalysis, which includes the famous [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muVfidujxRg physics presentation] that concluded that Applejack is made out of dark matter.
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