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@jane-maree But can’t you create a positive message from a negative theme? For instance in A Wizard of Earthsea the theme is ambition, and that nicely leads to the focusing question “what happens when you use your talents for selfish ambition?” and the message that selfishly following your ambitions leads to self-destruction and potentially harms others. That’s a positive message out of a negative theme.

I suppose you could argue that the theme is “overcoming ambition”, but that doesn’t seem right as it’s not what’s being dealt with in the first half of the book. So saying the theme has to be positive sounds a bit like an arbitrary rule to me, and I’ve come across plenty story analyses where people talk about a story’s theme as a negative or neutral concept.