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"I cordially dislike allegory, and have done ever since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other resides in the purposed domination of the author."
J. R. R. Tolkien, Foreword to the 2nd edition of The Lord of the Rings

When it comes to writing thematic stories, there are essentially two methods to go about it: allegory or applicability. Which method you use will depend on how obvious you want your theme to be.

In an allegory, it's the author who supports only one interpretation of the work as canon. J. R. R. Tolkien himself hated formal allegory because the reader was forced to see nothing but the author's point of view on what they considered the theme. In answer to the many allegorical readings of the The Lord of the Rings — which he eventually got tired of getting letters about — he stated the book was not an allegory, but had applicability — the story simply happened to be comparable and applicable to many Real Life issues.

Applicability encourages the reader to interpret what the theme of any given work is. Sometimes a reader's interpretation of the meaning of the story is very different from the authorial intent. Anvilicious works with high applicability can see alternate interpretations on part of the audience. Put another way, applicable works support multiple interpretations, only some of which are those that the author specifically intended. Applicability can give a fictional work different interpretations even on different readings, and is one reason Alternate Character Interpretation, Alternate Aesop Interpretation and Wild Mass Guessing are such active topics in fandoms.


Compare Lowest Common Denominator. Death of the Author is the enforcement of this trope, regardless of authorial intent. Contrast with The Walrus Was Paul, where the audience tries to find meaning in a work when in fact the work isn't supposed to have a hidden meaning — the author's just messing with them.

Often leads to Periphery Demographic, Misaimed Fandom, Shipping, and/or Broken Base. This is the root of many an Epileptic Tree. See also Does This Remind You of Anything?, Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory, What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?, Values Resonance.



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    Anime and Manga 
  • In Revolutionary Girl Utena, there are a lot of feminist themes revolving around the character of Anthy, but because she is dark-skinned, westerners (particularly Americans) may see racial themes there as well.
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist, the Amestrian war of genocide against the Ishbalan minority is so widely applicable that nobody can seem to agree on which real-life conflict it's supposed to be referencing. Is it Nazis vs. Jews? The West vs. the Islamic world? Arakawa herself said that the Ishbalans were partly inspired by the Ainu, an indigenous ethnic group who suffered persecution and cultural genocide in Japan.
  • Believe it or not, Dragon Ball Z. Some fans within the Black community relate to Goku as an underdog who discovers his true heritage and learns more about his culture, and see themselves in him and his group of friends, whereas some fans within the Latino community see him as a hardworking immigrant, Gohan as his first-gen immigrant son, and Vegeta as someone who immigrated as an adult and struggles to adapt. Read this article (and some of the comments) for more details: link

    Comic Books 
  • Watchmen. Go to the Headscratchers page for it, and you'll see people who see Rorschach as the only heroic character, people who see Rorschach as the least sympathetic of all the characters, people who argue over exactly how long Ozymandias's peace will last (and whether or not he was justified), people disgusted by Dr Manhattan's revelation over the Comedian and Sally Jupiter getting together after he attempted to rape her, and people who see that moment as a heartwarming moment. Alan Moore has officially stated that he was very much aiming for this, and compared his vision for the book to a diamond with many different facets, where any reader can look through any of the facets that they choose and still get a completely consistent and coherent view of the story and all the events in it.
  • Invoked and discussed In-Universe by Alan Moore in Issue 7 of Providence. After seeing Pitman's paintings, Robert Black puts on his amateur art critic hat and theorizes ghouls/zombies and other beings as metaphors for middle-class fears of class uprising. Pitman notes that he's never seen things that way but Sure, Let's Go with That.
  • Anti-mutant prejudice in X-Men can stand in for a metaphor for any number of Real Life prejudices. Fans have tended to take this very literally and argue about what the "original meaning" was and how it has changed. Word of God has confirmed, upon occasion, that individual writers have used it for a specific metaphorical purpose; Grant Morrison, for one, has said that he used his run to comment to the demonization of young people. Not even this squares completely with his comics, but it makes a lot more sense if you sympathize way too much with Quentin Quire. But that does not mean that every writer has used it as a metaphor, or has used it for the same one every time. That it has been so readily used as allegory for such diverging issues as racial tensions, LGBT struggles, McCarthyism, the Cold War, and generational conflict is proof enough of this. Interestingly, the movie series takes it at face-value: normal humans are terrified of going extinct, and the prospect of actually siring the species that will replace us is unthinkable, thus the fear and hatred. Analogies are also drawn in the film with the debate over American Gun Politics, with some mutant powers seen as threats to society by their very nature due to how useful they are for killing people.

    Films — Animated 
  • Invoked by co-director Phil Lord for The LEGO Movie. He openly stated that "My dream is to have terrible undergraduate term papers written about the movie."
  • Likewise, the anti-bullying message of The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part has also been interpreted as a criticism of toxic masculinity, specifically with the villain Rex Dangervest's obsession with surface-level markers of maturity that instead reveal him to be grossly immature, even though this wasn't the filmmakers' intent.
  • Frozen:
    • The song "Let it Go" is about the joy and relief of no longer hiding a secret about yourself. This is open to interpretations including, but not limited to, coming out of the closet, either as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or asexual. Elsa's lack of love interest or any romantic inclinations in the films has added to this.
    • It could also be interpreted as coming out of the closet as transgender.
    • John Lasseter has also spoken about seeing parallels between Elsa's struggle with her powers and his own son's struggle with diabetes.
    • Elsa has a personal secret which isolates her from her family, and is never seen eating. This did not go unnoticed by anorexics. It especially stands out in "Frozen Fever": Elsa has organized the treasure hunt for Anna, and one of the "treasures" Anna gets (and is seen eating) is a sandwich — but where is a sandwich (or anything else to eat during this day-long event) for Elsa? Much of the short involves Anna trying to get Elsa to take care of herself, while Elsa pretends to both others and to herself that everything's fine in her desire to see the day as "perfect." The short ends with Anna finally convincing Elsa to let her help after Elsa nearly gets herself killed with this attitude, and how do we see Anna taking care of Elsa during this ending? Feeding her.
    • People who have autism and Asperger's often identify with Elsa and her "Let It Go" song. She was just born different from the rest, the majority of people who weren't born different react negatively to her difference, and she just wants to be accepted.
    • In the same vein, people with mental illnesses often identify with Elsa's journey. Director Jennifer Lee has described "anxiety and depression" as major themes of the film, and while she didn't necessarily mean "clinical" anxiety and depression, the applicability is still there. People with disorders such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder can also relate to her, as they deal with the fear of having violent psychotic episodes and hurting loved ones as Elsa fears hurting Anna and others with her emotion-fueled ice powers.
    • On a simpler level, Elsa and Anna's relationship also reflects a typical coming-of-age journey shared by older and younger siblings, as director Lee did with her own older sister. As small children the siblings are close; then the older sibling shuts out the Annoying Younger Sibling as s/he becomes a teenager, develops more "grown up" interests, and becomes absorbed in his/her own adolescent moodiness and coming-of-age process; but when they're both mature adults, they can become close again.
  • Frozen II:
    • Anna's song "The Next Right Thing" shows her overwhelmed with grief, yet finding the strength to carry on with the mission one step at a time after Elsa and Olaf both die. It obviously reflects the grieving process after the death of a loved one, and co-director Chris Buck has stated that it was largely inspired by his own experience with grief after his son died in a car accident. But Anna's voice actress Kristen Bell has also pointed out that the moment parallels her own struggle with clinical depression and anxiety (in fact "do the next right thing" is her personal self-motivating mantra), so there's applicability there too.
    • The plot involves finding out why the Northuldra and the residents of Arendelle broke out into a fight 34 years prior, even when Arendelle built a dam to bridge them to the Northuldra's forest as a peace offering. However, as they dig deeper, Elsa and Anna discover that their grandfather, King Runeard, actually built the dam because he knew it would deplete Northalda's resources. He didn't trust the Northuldras because they practice magic, so he decided to sabotage their resources so he could force them to trade with Arendelle in order to submit them to his rule and forcibly assimilate them into his kingdom. Runeard then killed the Northuldra leader in cold blood to cover this up, while the Northuldra leader was tricked into letting his guard down underneath the impression there were going to have a peaceful conversation, no less. While the story was written with the historical and current discrimination the Sámi people suffer from the dominating Nordic cultures in mind (since Northuldra and Arendelle are Fantasy Counterpart Cultures of the Sámi and Norway, respectively) this can be easily applied to any ethnic group that has a history of being persecuted because their traditions and way of life was viewed as "wrong" by a dominating culture note .
  • The Toy Story films have at least two possible interpretations: "toys as children" and "toys as parents."
    • In the first interpretation, Andy (and later Bonnie) is like a parent to the toys. The tension about "Who is the favorite?" that dominates the first film parallels Sibling Rivalry, in particular with Buzz's arrival and Woody's jealousy of him mirroring Infant Sibling Jealousy, which eventually gives way to a close bond as Woody becomes Buzz's Big Brother Mentor and realizes that Andy still loves him too. The next three films, which deal with the issue of toys being left behind when a child grows up, parallel a child's fear of growing up and leaving the security of their parents' home, but accepting it when it inevitably happens and embracing adulthood, knowing that their happy childhood memories and their parents' love will always be with them. The fourth film can even be seen as encouraging young adults not to let a sense of duty to their parents keep them from following their own dreams and desires – note that Woody eventually leaves Bonnie to be with his Love Interest Bo Peep, i.e. leaving his "mother" and cleaving unto his "wife".
    • In the second and more popular interpretation, Woody is like Andy's father. The fact that Andy has no father of his own makes it all the more convincing that Woody should fill that role. The fear of being "replaced" in the first film arguably parallels a parent's fear of being incompetent, embarrassing, or not "cool" enough for their child. Woody's jealousy of Buzz might mirror a divorced father's jealousy of a stepfather, or any father's envy of another man (teacher, coach, celebrity, etc.) whom his son seems to idolize more. The next three films then deal with a parent's struggle as their child grows up and leaves the nest: first accepting that it will happen (the second film), then facing it when it does happen (the third film), then finding a new purpose in life afterwards (the fourth film). Bo Peep's independent life in the fourth film can also be seen to champion women who defy cultural expectations and choose not to have children.
  • Zootopia was intended to examine the effects of bias in a society where two groups (predator and prey) had a historical tension between them. While the creative team worked hard to avoid any direct racial analogues in the film, that didn't stop many from seeing implications of simple racism, white supremacy, social justice circles, police brutality, the LGBT movement, patriarchy, political conflict between the right and left wings, election debates, and even the War on Drugs.
  • In Home on the Range, the song "Will the Sun Ever Shine Again?" was written as a reflection of songwriter Alan Menken's thoughts post-9/11 and the War on Terror. It can be interpreted as a metaphor for depression, and also fits how many people feel about the seemingly never-ending COVID-19 Pandemic.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Battles Without Honor and Humanity is both a Genre Deconstruction of yakuza films and a look at how economic downturns and trickle-down economics affect poorer classes, with much of the Yakuza violence in the beginning being sparked by class inequality and desperation.
  • The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1962) was made long before global warming and climate change became big issues, but is still about climate change which has been caused accidentally by technology (simultaneous nuclear tests at the north and south poles change the tilt of the Earth's axis).
  • Battle Royale (2000) is about the Japanese government and school system, in an attempt to battle juvenile delinquency, forcing classes of high school students to kill each other until only one emerges victorious. The movie attracted multiple interpretations from reviewers, who read into it a satire of the harshly competitive nature of exams and education, of the poor state of the Japanese economy at the time, of the Japanese economy shifting towards elitism and dividing people into castes based on intelligence, and of hostile relations between the young and old. And that's just how it was viewed in its home country of Japan (and by those versed in modern Japanese culture) — for Americans in the wake of the Columbine massacre just a year prior to the film's release, and especially amidst the wave of school shootings in the 2010s, it was very easy to read a metaphor for violence in schools and political apathy towards the plight of the young people who suffered from it, even though Koushun Takami wasn't thinking about life in the US when crafting the story.
  • The Matrix, a film about the reality we know being a lie designed to enslave us, has attracted fans from all over the spectrum, from LGBT people who see it as a metaphor for being trapped by heteronormative sexual norms (the film's creators both being transgender, albeit closeted at the time), to far-right activists who embraced the Red Pill, Blue Pill scene as a rallying cry, to plain old teen outcasts wishing to escape from their boring suburban life. This episode of Really That Good goes into more detail on how the film's applicability made its message so universal for a generation of '90s teenagers.
  • John Carpenter wrote They Live as a satire of Reaganism and consumer capitalism, but its plot, about evil space aliens infiltrating Earth and brainwashing the populace with subliminal messages to turn them into consumerist sheep, has naturally attracted a large Conspiracy Theorist fandom, one that Carpenter has mixed feelings about. (He specifically told neo-Nazi fans of the film to go to hell.)
  • Each version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers follows the same basic plot, but uses the aliens as a metaphor for different contemporary fears, illustrating how that basic plot can be reinvented and reinterpreted in different ways over the decades.
    • For starters, the makers of the 1956 version insisted that they did not intend any subtext, but many people have read into it a metaphor for both communism and, alternatively, McCarthyism. The former metaphor, incidentally, was the one that Robert A. Heinlein made explicit in his very similar 1951 novel The Puppet Masters.
    • The 1978 version, meanwhile, turned it into a story about urban alienation, pop psychology, born-again Christianity, and post-Watergate paranoia in the streets of San Francisco at the tail end of the counterculture.
    • The 1992 version moved the setting to an Army base in Alabama, and used that setting to satirize suburban alienation and military regimentation.
    • The Faculty, a 1998 film inspired by the above that moved the story to a contemporary High School, used it to comment on the conformity imposed on teenagers by a rigid school system and by the Popularity Food Chain.
    • The 2007 version used the story as a metaphor for the paranoia of The War on Terror, with the setting moved to Washington, D.C. and the protagonists unable to trust anybody around them because they might be a terrorist... sorry, pod person.
  • As noted in this article by Randall Colburn for The AV Club, The Passion of the Christ was written and directed by Mel Gibson, a devout traditionalist Catholic (a subset of Catholics that rejects the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, some having even broken communion with the Vatican over the issue), and rooted in a perspective on the Gospels and Christian theology that brought the film under fire from mainstream Catholic and Protestant theologians. Traditionalist Catholics, however, were not the audience that propelled it to break multiple box-office records. No, that would come from evangelical Protestants, who saw, in its graphic portrayal of Jesus' crucifixion before a braying mob, a metaphor for their perceived marginalization within the wider society, with the promise that one day they would inherit the Earth.
  • Brazil: People have gotten all kinds of different ideas about the film and who it's supporting; liberals, conservatives, communists, anarchists, objectivists, and so on and so forth. Terry Gilliam has noted that the reason the film has such broad appeal to people all over the political spectrum is expressly because he actually didn't favor any particular group; the film is anti-authoritarian in general rather than targeting anyone specifically, allowing many different people to empathize with the characters and their situation, because the setting and story are vague enough they could be applied to any number of situations.
  • Bong Joon-ho discussed this with regards to Parasite (2019) becoming a breakout hit internationally. While he wrote it with a specific South Korean context in mind, the fact that it resonated so broadly made him realize just how applicable those ideas were all over the world.
    Bong: When directing the movie, I tried to express a sentiment specific to the Korean culture and I thought that it was full of Koreanness if seen from an outsider's perspective, but upon screening the film after completion, all the responses from different audiences were pretty much the same, which made me realize that the topic was universal, in fact. Essentially, we all live in the same country called capitalism.
  • As you might guess from the current page image, Star Wars gets this treatment a lot. The films are archetypal enough that just about anybody can make a convincing argument that they support their beliefs, and have been called allegory for wars, religions, social movements, political leaders, and who knows what else. Probably the most notorious instance of this was the many attempts to claim the Prequels were an allegory for the War on Terror and Bush Administration, which George Lucas has repeatedly explained is impossible (the principal details of the storyline were written in the 1970s, before either of those subjects existed).
    • According to this video, one of the main reasons why the sequel trilogy failed to impress viewers as much as the original and even prequel trilogies did stems directly from the writers' inability to recognize that this trope is the core reason behind the franchise's success:
      DX: Star Wars is not about the force, or the power it gives the user. It's not about lightsabers, or battleships. It's not about aliens, and droids. Star Wars is about life. It's about coming-of-age. It's about trust, deception, love, fear, and everything else we experience from the second we're born to the moment we die. The sequels thought that Star Wars was about the tools used to tell the story and became a story about those tools, costing them their fantasy and their ability to relate in the process—something that could have been easily avoided if the people working on them understood what they were making sequels to and planned the movies out in advance.
  • Midsommar is a movie filled with pagan imagery whose plot lends itself easily to metaphor, so naturally, there are many different takes on what it all represents. The most popular interpretation is that it's about a couple slowly realizing that their relationship is falling apart, with Dani abandoning her boyfriend Christian over the course of the film. It's also been described as a satire of white supremacy and nativism in its portrayal of the Hårga, a commune of conspicuously Nordic-looking people engaged in traditional, pre-Christian European pagan rituals who are willing to murder outsiders who threaten their way of life. Likewise, this article by Emily VanDerWerff for Vox notes that Dani's journey in the film reflected her own as a transgender woman before she came out: feeling like the "odd man out" amidst the all-male friend group around her, and becoming much happier and more at ease as she connects with the Hårga women.
  • Mars Attacks!: The scene where the president tries to form a truce with the Martians and delivers a great Rousing Speech to do so, only for them to kill him is nowadays often compared to attempts to form peace with other countries.
  • Paul Verhoeven created the film adaptation of Starship Troopers as a satire of the ideals of Robert A. Heinlein's original novel, drawing on his own experience with fascism in the occupied Netherlands to portray the Terran Federation as a fascist military regime that devalues its own people and sees them as cogs in the war machine. During the Turn of the Millennium, however, the film was reexamined through the lens of The War on Terror, its satire seen as uncannily mirroring many criticisms of Bush-era militarism: a foreign, low-tech enemy stages a devastating attack against a major city, causing the Federation to go to war on a distant desert world and get bogged down in a quagmire.

  • J. R. R. Tolkien always denied his Middle-earth works being an allegory for anything, but said that because they were so archetypal and universal (literally a lost mythology), their stories and themes could be compared and applied to many real/historical stories and issues. It's one of the reasons why The Lord of the Rings is so difficult to pigeonhole and figure out what the theme is — he didn't put any obvious one in. Once when pressed, he responded that the Lord of the Rings was about, "Death and the desire for deathlessness. Which is hardly more than to say it is a tale written by a Man!" - meaning that fear of death is the ultimate reason humans do anything. This explains why people from a wide spectrum of viewpoints tend to read the same book and yet get widely different interpretations of the theme of the book. This lack of an obvious theme also makes it hard for some readers to get into the books because they expect the books to clearly show what theme it is.
    • In later editions of the book, Tolkien specifically goes into detail about the incorrect notion of his books being an allegory for World War II, which was probably a comparison he was tired of. He argued that if his book were based on World War II, Saruman would've gone into Mordor during the chaos and found out the knowledge needed to make his own Ring of Power. The War for the Ring would end up being a war of Evil vs. Evil with Hobbits being destroyed in the process. As he stated in the foreword of the book, most of the things people tie to WWII were written before the war even started.
    • The Éowyn subplot can remind western readers of the story of Joan of Arc. To Chinese readers Éowyn's story can easily be seen as a version of the story of Hua Mulan.
    • In a letter, a fan asked Tolkien if the flying steeds of the Nazgûl (large naked, leather-winged birdlike monsters ) were pterodactyls. His reply was that if that's what the reader thought they were, it could be a valid interpretation of the text.
    • On the cast commentary for the Lord of the Rings movies, Sir Ian McKellen makes tacit reference to the "innocent physical affection" displayed by Sam towards Frodo in the book and the rather famous modern interpretation of it. Bean and Wood also comment on a specific scene, mentioning a fan who wrote in to thank them for including a nod to this rather than avoiding it.
    • The physical and psychological effects of bearing the One Ring is often compared to the effects of drug addiction.
  • Miguel de Cervantes originally wrote Don Quixote as a spoof of Knight Errant tales, but its hero was interpreted as idealism personified for many readers. Annoyed, Cervantes wrote a sequel to hammer home the point the readers apparently missed. Much to his shock, the second half was considered more brilliant and was better-received. Different ages have tended to read different things into the novel. When first published, it was usually interpreted as a comic novel. After the French Revolution it was popular in part due to its central ethic that individuals can be right while society is quite wrong and seen as disenchanting — not comic at all. In the 19th century it was seen as a social commentary, and the Russian's interpretation of Don Quixote has shadows of the Messiah Creep, but no one could easily tell "whose side Cervantes was on".
    • Literary critic Harold Bloom wrote in his article, "The Knight in the Mirror": "The aesthetic wonder is ... when we stand back from the huge book and ponder its shape and endless range of meaning. No critic's account of Cervantes's masterpiece agrees with, or even resembles, any other critic's impressions. Don Quixote is a mirror held up not to nature, but to the reader. How can this bashed and mocked knight errant be, as he is, a universal paradigm?" That means that every reader will interpret Don Quixote on his own way, and all of those interpretations will be valid. It also means that none of them could be valid, because every reader’s impression of himself is reflected by the novel.
    • This was parodied by Jorge Luis Borges in "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." The story is about a man who attempts to write a novel identical to Don Quixote, from a modern perspective.
  • The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a case of confusing applicability with allegory. The connection between The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the then-contemporary American political landscape was not even raised until 1963, when summer school teacher Henry Littlefield, while trying to teach the 1896 Presidential election and the turn-of-the-century Populist movement to bored history students, stumbled upon the idea of using the characters and events of The Wizard of Oz as metaphors to teach the concepts. He and his students made a number of connections - the Scarecrow represented the farmers, the Tin Woodman the factory workers, the Wizard was President Grover Cleveland or Republican presidential candidate William McKinley, the Cowardly Lion was Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, the silver shoes were the silver standard, the yellow brick road the gold standard, and so on - and Littlefield eventually wrote an article, "The Wizard of Oz: A Parable on Populism," which was published in the magazine American Quarterly in 1964. You can read this article here. Unfortunately, this was eventually taken to mean that Baum wrote the book as an allegory for the political landscape at the turn of the century despite the fact Littlefield believed Baum had no political agenda when he wrote the book.
  • Umberto Eco is a major pioneer in this technique. The Name of the Rose itself is about this; the detective character is constantly trying to interpret the clues in their proper contexts. There are so many ways to read the book that, like the symbolic rose, the conflicting interpretations make it practically meaningless. All the interpretations any reader gets are all valid. The same holds true for Foucault's Pendulum. In one of his essays, Eco wrote that even giving a work of fiction a name is to determine the reader's interpretation of it too much.
  • This essay, which argues that Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges's biggest influence was the internet, which was invented four years after he died.
  • A huge number of different interpretations exist as to what Hunter S. Thompson was trying to say with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, regarding whether it's supposed to be a comedy, serious, political, or just an exaggeration of things Thompson actually did. The reality is that they are all right, as the whole point of Gonzo journalism is to allow the reader to be put in the same frame of mind as the author, whatever the author was thinking at the time. In the case of Thompson, a man who was politically astute, had a great sense of humor, and was known for being over the top, this leads to a book much like him: something equal parts genius, lunatic, and poet.
  • This article from Cracked lists several books whose main theme was interpreted in a completely different manner than expected.
  • Several books have been written on the subject of Harry Potter symbolism, to the point where there is now a greater body of work devoted to explaining Harry Potter than there is Harry Potter to explain. Whether Harry goes on a Grail Quest, sacrifices himself as a Christ figure, purifies his soul with alchemy, or re-enacts a mythological journey to the Underworld, there's probably a book explaining it somewhere.
  • Guy Gavriel Kay commented that from South Korea to Poland to Quebec people have been praising him for basing the plot of Tigana on their national history. For reference, he based it on Renaissance-era Italy. His writing philosophy is that history-inspired fantasy, among other things, lets a story have more of a universal appeal than mundane historical fiction would.
  • Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has enough of this going on that Lucy Mangan's Milestone Celebration retrospective Inside Charlie's Chocolate Factory devotes two sidebars to examining the Marxist and Freudian interpretations (albeit with tongue planted firmly in cheek!).
  • Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid is open to many allegorical interpretations, as are its various adaptations.
    • The undersea world of the merfolk can be seen to represent the pagan world, while the human world represents Christianity, which requires more sacrifices and hardship than paganism but which promises an immortal soul and rewards after death.
    • The undersea world can also represent childhood while the human world represents adulthood, with the mermaid's journey either portrayed as tragic Innocence Lost (as in the original tale and the opera Rusalka) or as leaving behind the limits of childhood to embrace the new joys and freedom of adulthood (as in the Disney film).
    • The two incompatible worlds can also represent different social classes, with the mermaid as a literally lower-born person, doomed to be snubbed by the humans who represent the upper class. This arguably reflects the working class-born Andersen's "fish out of water" feelings among the elite. The loose adaptation Once On This Island runs with this by explicitly making the story about peasants vs. Grand Hommes instead of merfolk vs. humans.
    • In the same vein, the two worlds can represent different races, either with the merfolk as the minority race and the humans as the privileged majority who snubs them (the easier interpretation of the original tale, which again, Once On This Island makes explicit), or with the merfolk as the bigoted majority and the mermaid as an open-minded individual who sees the value in a different culture (as in the Disney film).
    • Both the original tale and Disney's are open to feminist interpretations too: either "Don't throw everything away for a man, or you'll be doomed" (the original) or "Do leave behind your oppressive old life and its patriarchal rules to build the life you choose, with the romantic partner you choose" (the Disney film).
    • The story is also very much open to a queer reading. Andersen was bisexual and is thought to have partly based the tale on his own unrequited love for another man. The themes of forbidden love, of being literally unable to speak those feelings, and of being rejected in favor of a more "conventional" partner are easy to read in that light. So is the theme of parental opposition that the Disney version emphasizes. The fact that the mermaid literally wants to change her body also brings to mind the experiences of transgender people, especially in the Disney film, where Ariel doesn't just want to become human for love but distinctly wants to be human and have every human experience from the start.
  • Tom Perrotta originally wrote Election (later adapted into a more famous film by Alexander Payne) as a Roman à Clef satire of the 1992 United States Presidential election, with Tammy's run for Student Council President in particular based on H. Ross Perot's firebrand independent campaign. However, many critics and political journalists rediscovered it during the 2016 election, arguing that it worked just as effectively as a sendup of the ridiculousness of that election. Hillary Rodham Clinton in particular saw many, many comparisons to Tracy Flick, the perky teenage overachiever whose run for student council president is derailed by both an outsider's campaign and a teacher who doesn't trust her, to the point where both Reese Witherspoon (who played Tracy in the film) and Clinton herself made note of it when the two of them met.
  • Ray Bradbury famously felt that many fans of Fahrenheit 451 focused too much on its anti-censorship message, when his main intention was to criticize the growth of mass media (especially television) in the postwar years, which he felt was dumbing down the public and creating a culture of Anti-Intellectualism where the kind of Moral Guardians and mass censorship portrayed in the story were able to run amok in the first place. However, the use of Book Burning, one of the most notorious and blunt methods of censorship, as a major motif throughout the story means that it often winds up as the first thing everybody notices. It has also been interpreted as a tale about holding onto one's individuality in a conformist society that rejects those who step out of line.
  • Isaac Asimov's "The Immortal Bard": [Invoked] William Shakespeare is amazed at the commentary and lessons taken from his stories, comparing it to creating a monsoon out of the water in a damp washcloth.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The Big Bang Theory is a show that runs with nerd stereotypes but does so in such a way that they don't all fall into the exact same character mold. As a result a lot of people are able to find themselves in the characters despite being on the extreme end of "smart people." Sheldon's rampant Schedule Fanatic and Super OCD behavior lead many people to assume he has Asperger Syndrome, and there's much debate about whether he's a positive or negative portrayal of the condition. Leonard is timid and a pushover while trying to stay a Nice Guy. Howard is a Casanova Wannabe who has a hard time understanding why women aren't falling for his excitable energy. Raj is painfully shy around women to the point he can't even speak in their presence, though he later gets somewhat better. And Penny, the only non-nerd/non-genius of the cast, is easily overwhelmed by the nerd topics and science talk and often ends up the odd one out. It's covering this wide spectrum of personalities that lead many reviewers to speculate this is the reason behind the show's success.
  • The 100 features a lot of political, cultural, and military conflicts that people have compared to World War II, the colonization of the Americas, modern generational conflicts, China's One Child policy, American slavery, and others. However, in most cases it's hard to make a one-to-one parallel line up, and even if you could, the show generally refuses to make definitive moral statements, preferring to have characters take conflicting stances on various issues, and leaving it up to the audience to decide who's right.
  • Defiance: The backstory bears a resemblance to the European refugee crisis of 2015: an international coalition (Earth/the European nations) finds itself having to deal with large numbers of desperate people (the Votan/refugees and migrants). This is despite the fact that the show began in 2013. Of course that could be as much Values Resonance as this trope: The Syrian Civil War is far from the first war to displace a large number of war refugees, and nor will it be the last.
  • Though Doctor Who occasionally goes into straight-up political allegory, such as Seventh Doctor story The Happiness Patrol bashing Margaret Thatcher or Twelfth Doctor two-part story The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion bashing certain American political ideas, the show generally stays on the applicability end of things-it's a Science Fiction Fairy Tale with an ever-changing cast and stories that can be set anywhere from Earth's distant past to a planet halfway across the universe, and the stories vary from horror to comedic, so anyone with any political, economic, social, ethical, or religious view can find something in the show's 50+ year history to back it up. And that's not even counting the colossal expanded universe.

  • Despite the lyrics and the video suggesting it is about a relationship, Lit lead singer A.J. Popoff claims that Miserable does not have to necessarily have to be about one. It could be about addiction or any other thing that you enjoy no matter how much it hurts you.
  • The Eagles's song "Hotel California" has several interpretations due to the way the lyrics were written. Don Henley called it "our interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles" and later reiterated "it's basically a song about the dark underbelly of the American dream and about excess in America, which is something we knew a lot about." Still it's interpreted as an allegory of cocaine addiction, Satanism, or a mental hospital.
  • The Beatles:
    • Paul McCartney wrote a song in support of the American Civil Rights Movement. He changed it from "Black Girl" to "Black Bird" in the spirit of this trope — in his words, "so you could apply it to your own problems".
    • Paul's mom was the inspiration for the "Mother Mary" lyric from "Let It Be". When asked if the song referred to the Virgin Mary, McCartney has typically answered the question by assuring his fans that they can interpret the song however they would like.
  • U2's music is known for its wide range of interpretations, be it religious or secular, universal or personal, literary or pop-cultural.
  • Imagine Dragons has produced several songs that encouraged multiple theories about their meanings. To quote the frontman:
    Dan Reynolds: I always like to leave art and music open to interpretation.
  • Dream Theater's songs are well known for being able to be interpenetrated in different ways.
  • "Once I had a secret love" from Calamity Jane: In the context of the film, it's about Calamity finally admitting her feelings for Wild Bill Hickok. Out of context, it's a woman singing about her secret love without saying a man's name or using male pronouns. This allows people to think that she really means "the love that dares not speak its name."
  • The booklet from Taylor Swift’s 2017 album reputation tells listeners to draw their own conclusions about how much of it can be taken at face value and how much is exaggeration.
  • A very dark example comes with Drowning Pool's "Bodies". It was originally written as a mosh-pit anthem, but its lyrics, particularly the chorus line of "let the bodies hit the floor", caused it to be interpreted by many as a mass-murder anthem about a man Going Postal. Association with real-life murderers who played the songnote , as well as its use for Enhanced Interrogation Techniques at the Guantanamo Bay prison, burned the alternative interpretation into people's minds, and now, when most people think of the song, they think it's about killing people. (The song was also used as the theme song of WWE's revival of ECW, until the Chris Benoit murder/suicide happened, at which point it was pulled.)
  • Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" was about the death of Billie Joe Armstrong's father when he was ten years old. However, as the song was released three years after the 9/11 attacks on their album American Idiot, a Concept Album rooted firmly in that era of American politics and culture, it became an anthem for people who opposed the Iraq War and were just waiting for the post-9/11 era to be over. It didn't hurt that the music video was themed around a young woman losing her Marine boyfriend in Iraq, which Armstrong found to be thematically appropriate given that the song was about loss. On a more minor level, the following year it also came to be associated with Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans on August 29, 2005 (two days before the song was released as the fourth single off the album) and whose aftermath stretched well into September and beyond, with Green Day performing the song at a benefit concert for the disaster.
  • Hedley's "On My Own" is a song about leaving somebody you have a bad relationship with and trying to find your own way in the world. It could be a Break-Up Song, a song about breaking off a toxic friendship, or one about running away from a household with Abusive Parents.
  • Gregory and the Hawk's "Boats and Birds" is about wanting to be there for someone you love, but accepting that one day they might want to leave you. Most people's first impression is that it's a song about one-sided romantic love, but others have pointed out that it could be a Parental Love Song about one's child leaving the nest.
  • Many of Midnight Oil's songs are about the struggle of Australian Aborigines, but many of the lyrics could also apply to other indigenous peoples.

    Tabletop Games 

  • The Book of Mormon, by the same guys who created South Park. Word from the creators is that they didn't want to insist that one particular lesson should be learned from the show, and prefer to leave it open for people to interpret any way they'd like. Even Matt Stone's own philosophy of "religion is a tool, not a rulebook" is presented rather ambiguously. In-universe, however, Elders Price and Cunningham conclude from their experiences that it's more important to have a religion that helps people improve their lives than to follow the dogma of an established church.
  • The Crucible by Arthur Miller. First staged in 1953 at the height of an anti-communist witch hunt, at the time Miller strenuously denied (in no small part to avoid getting blacklisted) that it was written as an allegory for the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which became notorious for their excessive zeal in rooting out communist sympathizers. That said, the metaphors were obvious to anybody willing to read between the lines, and he would later admit that it was indeed meant to be allegorical. When it was first staged in China in the early 1980s, however, people had just recovered from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, during which time Mao Zedong had a policy of stamping out the "Four Olds" (old customs, culture, habits, and ideas) that he deemed old, useless, and "anti-proletarian". This led to the destruction of a great deal of Chinese culture, as literature, paintings, temples, and classical architecture were burned and countless scholars, intellectuals, and other "revisionists" were murdered. The Chinese found similarities between the events of the Cultural Revolution and The Crucible, which is why the play received such a warm welcome there. The play was certainly a reaction to and commentary on American politics, but Miller dealt with it as a series of broad, timeless themes, and as such, very little can be read as directly symbolic of any contemporary event; rather, the content is archetypal in nature.
  • William Shakespeare is a wonderful case for this. All of his plays have been subject to multiple interpretations throughout history and even argued over today on This Very Wiki. There's so little in the way of clear stage directions, or of the Bard's own writings, to be sure of what he thought of anything. For examples:
  • Bertolt Brecht: every single play, explicitly so. Especially the songs. To illustrate: the song "Pirate Jenny" from The Threepenny Opera has been used as a sociopolitical allegory by Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Alan Moore, Lars von Trier, Dorothy Gambell and Anarchy Comics. Brecht would have probably approved of all of the above; maybe not for their individual message, but for the fact that he inspired later authors to think for themselves and appropriate his texts in their own social contexts, which is exactly what he wrote them for. He also applied this to all literature before him, though, stealing poems and plays left and right because he considered everything applicable and "common commodity". After being found out, he casually said he couldn't be bothered to spend time thinking about intellectual property when he had art to do, and besides, he expected (and wanted) people to do the same with his work.

    Video Games 
  • Bloodborne, on top of adhering to the usual FromSoftware formula of having a strict Figure It Out Yourself relation in regards to its plot and lore, is crammed shock full with Symbolism, Motifs and Mind Screw, by far eclipsing its predecessors in all regards. As a result of all of the above, and many other things, the applicability is through the roof:
    • The game world could easily represent the corruptive effects Organized Religions and/or Science have on their surrounding societies. On the other hand, it could also represent the ailing body of someone struggling with a disease and their desperate prayers for salvation and search for a medical treatment that can cure them of their condition.
    • The lore and gameplay could be a brilliant case of Gameplay and Story Integration, or they could be a closely intertwined Post Modern reflection on what it takes to get through a FromSoft title.
    • The characters could be commentaries on the relation between gamers (the playable character), game creators (like FromSoft) who want to provide something special that the players will appreciate (much like the Plain Doll does), and big corporations (like Sony) who wish to enslave the gamers and take as much of their resources as they possibly can (much like what the Moon Presence does).
    • The game could be the single greatest tribute to the works of H. P. Lovecraft yet, or it could be the single greatest Take That! in regards to everything the man stood for as a person. Heck, it could be both.
  • Dark Souls: One common interpretation of the work is that it is about living and dealing with depression.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask:
    • Is the game an adventure or a mystery? The one that draws you into the story (or out of it) will directly have an effect on how much you enjoy the experience.
    • The dungeons and subplots, when played in order, line up with the five stages of grief. The entire plot is shaped by apocalyptic cataclysm coming on the fourth day. Is the game a metaphor for death, or even Link's Dying Dream? Or is it just a tale of a wanderer, in a far-off land, trying to do the best he can?
  • Super Smash Bros., especially Brawl.
    • It's either a fighting game which stars as many Nintendo characters as possible (and a few 3rd-party guests), or it's one of the most interactive and wacky cartoons of all time.
    • Alternatively, it's the story of a boy growing up and having to put his toys away.
  • Nintendo called Metroid Prime a first-person adventure to specifically break up the "Is it a first person shooter, or an adventure game done in first person?" arguments that surrounded its launch. The exact same thing was done with Geist, another game that can be interpreted as a First Person Shooter or an adventure game done in first person.
  • Persona 4:
    • Naoto is intended to be seen as someone struggling in a male dominated work environment, but many Western fans see her to be Transgender.
    • Shadow Kanji's effeminate behavior is supposed to represent Kanji's interest in things that aren't considered masculine, but its led Western fans to wonder if he's actually a closet homosexual.
  • Persona 5 features societal problems that are shown from a primarily Japanese point of view, but that have also resonated with millennial players overseas: systematic corruption, the older generation not having any concern for the well being of young people today, and the fact that anyone with enough money, influence, and fame is essentially above the law.
  • Chihiro Fujisaki from Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc tends to be seen by Western fans as transgender, but his backstory is intended to address the issues of bullying and strict enforcement of gender roles in Japan, since Chihiro was ruthlessly bullied for his frail and unmanly physique and crossdresses to avoid the ridicule.
  • Yume Nikki is a game built around this. Is it an ambiguous character study? An allegory for Japan's social problems? A simple Wide Open Sandbox that isn't supposed to be analyzed deeply? Kikiyama's official website suggests the latter, but its lack of plot and abundant symbolism make fans think otherwise.

    Western Animation 
  • 3Below:
    • The premise of the series is about two teenaged siblings who are forced to flee for their lives when a dictator stages a violent coup on their home planet, and get separated from their parents in the process. They wind up hiding out on Earth in the United States of America, struggling to adjust to an entirely new culture and way of life, which is made easier by them meeting and befriending one alien who's been living on Earth for a while now and gladly teaches them human customs. Some humans also discriminate against them due to being aliens in, depending on who's in the loop, either the foreigner or the extraterrestrial sense of the word. Through it all, the siblings try to hold onto hope they can return home, reunite with their parents, and the dictatorship over their home collapses. That story, without any of the alien sci-fi elements, can be easily applied to any refugee seeking asylum in better-off countries.
    • In the first episode Krel is marked as the king-in-waiting by his father in a public ceremony that was used by his ancestors for centuries, with his father telling him that he did this with his father. In the second episode, Aja is marked queen-in-waiting by Varvatos, who would be present in the normal ceremony but not in this role, and with only her brother looking on, and in a completely different setting without much of the ritual. This has a lot of applicability to trying to maintain customs and traditions after being displaced and trying to connect to a sundered heritage.
    • In the series finale, Krel decides to remain on Earth because he considers it his new home and wants to remain with the human friends he made. Meanwhile, Aja chooses to return to Akaradion-5 to accept the planet's throne and help repair the damage Morando had done during his rule. This reflects the two choices refugees have to make when the trouble in their home countries subside; either remain in their adopted homelands and continue with the lives they had created there or return to their original homelands to help rebuild them.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, much like The Lord of the Rings, have many historical inspirations without ever falling into straight allegories of any particular events.
  • Adventure Time has loads of this. Many of the plots and characters are ambiguous enough that multiple interpretations can be made. For example, "All The Little People" can be viewed as an affectionate jab at Shipping, a parody of the creative process, or a metaphor for puberty all at the same time. A lot of things about the show just depend on the viewer's personal interpretation.
  • Lloyd in Space: Cindy the two-headed girl - where one head is nice and the other is aggressive - could be considered a parallel to someone with bipolar disorder or other mental illness.
  • In later years, some have noted that My Life as a Teenage Robot works surprisingly well as a Trans Tribulations allegory, with its premise of a robot trying to become like a human girl and scenes like said robot demanding that her creator refer to her by her preferred name. Word of God has acknowledged this and noted that, while it was completely unintentional, they can definitely see how viewers reached that conclusion, and that it's as viable a way to interpret the story as any other.
  • In Steven Universe, Gems can perform a Fusion Dance to become a new individual. Word of God describes this as "the space between people becoming its own character," and has been used to represent romance, friendship, toxic relationships, a horrific war crime committed by the villains and sheer utility over the course of the series.
  • Pixar Shorts: Bobby Alcid Rubio wrote Float as an Allegory for his struggle to accept his son's autism diagnosis, but the son's ability to fly can be easily symbolic of any sort of difference that would set a child apart from other children, which their parents would have to struggle to accept.


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