Nov. 29th, 2021
(no subject)
Nov. 29th, 2021 07:28 amWay back when, I posted on the TV Tropes forums that I didn’t actually know what a theme was. People on Something Awful who hated TV Tropes used it as an example of how dumb we all were—we didn’t even know what themes were! And the thing is, none of those people on SA actually said what a theme was!
My current guess is that it’s kind of like a misc AO3 tag, except literary people consider it the main tag. Like, if your story is about coming of age in Mississippi in the 1950s, one of your themes will be coming of age, and another will be 1950s Mississippi culture. But people talk about “deep themes,” and tags aren’t a thing that can be deep in and of themselves. The thing that’s deep is what you do with the subject matter referenced by the tags, and I wonder if “deep themes” is a misleading term in that sense.
My current guess is that it’s kind of like a misc AO3 tag, except literary people consider it the main tag. Like, if your story is about coming of age in Mississippi in the 1950s, one of your themes will be coming of age, and another will be 1950s Mississippi culture. But people talk about “deep themes,” and tags aren’t a thing that can be deep in and of themselves. The thing that’s deep is what you do with the subject matter referenced by the tags, and I wonder if “deep themes” is a misleading term in that sense.