Thoughts About Theme

I don’t do these writing articles nearly enough but here it goes. Today I want to talk a little bit about theme. Now, first and foremost we need to talk a little bit about what exactly “Theme” is. Theme is the answer to one simple question: “What does the story mean?” As in, what does the author tell us about life, human nature, the universe, etc., etc. through the story they tell us? 

Let’s go over some examples: 

Pokémon - Failure isn’t the end of everything but rather part of the journey 

Grave of the Fireflies: Sometimes maturity means swallowing your pride

Inside Out: Ignoring or burying your true feelings isn’t healthy 

The Tell-Tale Heart: The Truth will eventually come out

OK, now that we understand what a theme is, let’s talk about how themes (and the stories that contain them) actually work. See, stories can have more than just one theme as long as they don’t actually conflict. 

For a REALLY good example of this, let’s take a look at the story of Joseph (you know, Technicolor dream coat Joseph except, the biblical one) from the final chapters of Genesis. To summarize, a man named Jacob has yet to have a child born to his favorite wife and true love, Rachel, despite his other wife Leah, and two maidservants bearing him 10 sons and probably several daughters. When the long awaited 11th of the 12 is born, that would be Joseph, he is obviously favored by his father over his elder brothers. The brothers plan to kill him but end up deciding to sell him into slavery in Egypt instead, where he is bought and earns the trust of a man named Potiphar. However, after Potiphar’ s wife gets mad at Joseph for refusing her sexual advances she accuses him of assaulting her and Joseph is arrested and thrown into prison until he becomes of use to Pharaoh 20 years later because of his ability to decode the symbolism of prophetic dreams. He ends up saving Egypt and his family from a terrible famine, marrying, and living out his days as pharaoh’s 2nd in command. 

Now what themes can we draw from this? 

Parental favoritism = bad

You can’t fight destiny

Sometimes standing up for your values will mean suffering

Those are the ones that jump out at me. I’m sure you could come up with one or two more. 

But when themes are in direct contradiction to each other, that causes both themes to lose some of their weight and the story as a whole to lose its impact or even just feel…off… to the reader. 

For an example of this, let’s look at Pokémon the First Movie. Specifically the movies have themes of their own that don’t conflict with the overall theme of the anime as mentioned above, however, the first movie’s theme is counter-intuitive to its premise. It’s hard to sell a “fighting is wrong” message to viewers when we’re talking about a universe built on magical creatures trained by humans specifically for combat engage in tests of physical strength against each other. While an argument can be made that a Pokémon battle is something different than the all out fighting going on in Mew Two’s lair in the 3rd act of the movie, that argument has always been a hard sell to basically everyone who wasn’t already a fan of the franchise when they saw the film and its not hard to see why. 

Another criticism of that movie which also has some weight is that the message (which wasn’t a good fit for this film in the 1st place) was shoved down viewers’ throats. I mean, they outright tell us at the same time they’re showing it, they couldn’t have beat us over the head with it anymore than they did, which a well written book/film/anime/TV drama would NOT do. Themes are much more effective when you show your themes throughout a story that fits well with them and aren’t such a mess of tangled contradiction that you have to beat your readers/viewers over the head with your actual point like it’s a shovel.