My favourite is when they present an obvious plot point as some kind of secret symbolism
"You might miss it, but Final Fantasy 7 actually has an environmentalist message! 😱 "
Or plain old world building as an Easter egg. "Bilbo's home in the shire is a throwback to The Hobbit series."
It may surprise you to learn that Animal Farm is actually an allegory for Russian communism 🤯
Reminds me of how the English 101 class at my college was the most failed class in the school. The entire class could be summed up as "don't fucking summarize the damn text" and yet.
So yeah this makes a lot of sense
Academia has the advanced version of this where you just summarize what someone wrote about their own work and pretend that that's analysis.
Jacob Geller is one of the few that actually does in depth analysis of games. His trick is to find a deeper theme and then pick several games that match that overarching thesis and then see how each approaches the topic differently.
