I've highlighted my distaste for fan theories before, so I'm not going to rehash that here. I just want to briefly call attention to this fine essay by David Roark over at First Things about the ways in which fan theories are, at heart, anti-art. Here's Roark:
This methodical, forensic approach to film, however, no trivial artifact of our times. It’s actually a problem. When we watch and talk about television shows and movies this way, we treat them as if they were merely puzzles to be put together, mysteries to be solved, data to be sorted. In this, we diminish and undercut both the art and the artist. We miss what they want to say and do to us as viewers. We miss transcendence. We miss the mystery.
We miss the whole thing.
This is all quite perfect. And true. When you're obsessing over minutiae in an effort to prove that you're the best redditor and/or recapper because you've unlocked the key to the whole mystery five episodes ahead of everyone else, you miss the grand scheme of things. Indeed, by trying to solve the mystery you actually, as Roark writes, "miss the mystery."
I think the thing I resent the most about fan theories is that I find them more or less inescapable? I spent, like, 20 minutes reading pieces arguing that one character in Westworld is actually a younger version of another character and hated myself for the rest of the day afterward.
Anyway. I don't want to be the fun police, so if the only way you can enjoy a piece of entertainment is by relentlessly over-analyzing it like a demented codebreaker with no social skills, godspeed. But you are, as they say, doing it wrong. Stop doing it wrong.