You guys need to read my Genre Analysis on Comedy as well because you need to actually be funny if you're going to add humour to a story. If you don't then you're the same as someone who comments 'LOL' at unfunny stuff for no reason.

There are so many criticisms I have for people who literally name a TV Trope entry and consider themselves to be 'Meta'. You can't be writing meta humour if you aren't subverting audience expectation through those widely known tropes.

One of the reason the Monogatori Series got popular for a time was when Nisioisin used the characters calling out tropes as a way of oversimplifying their more 'real' struggles. For example: The 'Crab Girl' (not even going to try writing her name) introduced in the first episode calls herself a 'Tsundere' when taking into account how she was cold towards him but gradually warmed up towards him. This was ignoring the fact that she had complex reasons for doing so and is never portrayed the way the 'meta' thought of her.

One of the ways of meta humour is to use the supposed 'meta joke' as a contrast of what's actually happening rather than going along with what was pointed out. If the meta says someone is a 'Yandere', make her as far-removed from the average perception of that trope as much as possible while showing clear reasoning for why your character exhibits what that joke pointed at.

If you were to write a straightforward Tsundere or Yandere before pointing it out to the audience, you are not being meta, you are being redundant. What is the point of pointing out something so obvious?

This doesn't only apply to Dere Tropes as there are a multitude of ways you can subvert a scenario by playing into the 'meta' before revealing a shocking twist. Being self-aware doesn't mean 'knowing', but rather 'understanding' what trope you pull out and going against reader expectations. Which should be a natural part of your storytelling anyway...

Now although I've been taking about 'calling out before subverting' tropes as a part of meta humour, it isn't really everything. From a writer's perspective, every page and even the chapter title is an opportunity to make a self-aware joke.

Whether it's by playfully tricking your audience or by sending a magical punch five pages into the future rather than five seconds really makes for a worthwhile read. However, there are many pitfalls that happen if you focus too much on the meta.

The first flaw of being 'meta' is that jokes and plots introduced just for the sake of humour can grow stale. After all, you need to ground your words with a sense of realism and relatability to be able to captivate your readers. No one cares about an opinion they can't personally relate to and not everyone is a book nerd knows all the tropes.

Let's take the classic 'Isekai Hero' trope as an example of this. There are some mean ways to portray a classic Isekai Protagonist by making him as overpowered like what we see in Isekai Smartphone while also adding a harem. Some second-rate writers think they are 'meta' by just mentioning flawed tropes in the form of characters.

The problem with doing this is that the reader's suspension of disbelief will be stretched too wide if the 'straight man' (normal person who points out unreasonable trope) and the 'jokester' (the one being made fun of) have no chemistry together.

I don't mean this in a romantic way but more in a sense that, for example, if someone brought the trope of a plain girl having a love triangle with two desirable dudes and also added a 'straight man' to make that trope stand out, you'd have a problem of both characters acting and thinking as if they came from entirely separate worlds. I see this a lot in Otome Isekai where they subvert and switch up tropes, which ends in the average IQ dropping...

Although saying a certain trope happens because people be stupid sometimes can work, it wastes A LOT of potential of that story! There are SO MANY other ways you can justify a flawed trope existing!

For example: In Oresuki, instead of saying everyone liked the main character because they are stupid, it actually gave them mostly believable reasons for why they act the way they do. Sure, some tropes are played straight, but it doesn't use lack of IQ to justify a flawed trope happening for no reason and instead uses the trope to the writer's advantage.

All you writers can also do the same thing!

The main character has a harem? Maybe the twist is that the protagonist is manipulative and pays tragically later on for tricking them, or you could even play it straight but fix up the issues about their relationship dynamics by actually letting the harem members fight and settle on what they want to do with the relationship, rather than dragging it.

Your main character is a Mary Sue? Take the attention off of them and figure out a way to humanise the main character. You don't have to give them a flaw, just go the Medeka Box route and make it cosmically impossible for her to lose by ramping up stakes to ridiculous degrees before getting her to solve it an equally ridiculous way.

There are no boundaries in the realm of meta humour, but there are a lot of ways to fail spectacularly if you don't remember the basics of comedy when trying to be 'humorous'. Sometimes exaggerating consistently and subverting expectations of the trope from what's actually happening in the story is all you need to succeed.

I'm sure I missed out on a lot more stuff but this is a very broad topic. Request if you want more~ ?