Broken Aesop / Yu-Gi-Oh!

• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions has a couple, mostly by virtue of being a Happy Ending Override that turns Yugi and Atem's final duel into a catalyst for the plot and the scope of what the characters intend to accomplish.
  • Kaiba spends much of the film in an obsessive state, trying futilely to see Atem while being told that Atem has moved on and isn't coming back, with Yugi recompleting the Puzzle to prove it. Throughout the movie Yugi and his friends have moved on from the loss, Yugi gives Kaiba a speech directly telling him to move on, and Atem himself takes the Puzzle to the afterlife with him. Kaiba then decides that if he can't bring Atem back, he'll meet Atem by going to the afterlife instead, leaving Mokuba to run his company in his stead.
  • In the manga and anime, the Ceremonial Battle was all about Yugi overcoming Atem in a duel to prove he had grown to the point he no longer needed his other self and was ready to be on his own. In this film, much of the film is spent building up the ideas that Yugi has grown as a duelist, and he and Kaiba need to move on with their lives and accept Atem isn't coming back. Then the possessed Aigami is about to deal the game-ending blow when Atem spontaneously returns to save Yugi and defeat Aigami, showing that Yugi does still need his help sometimes.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! GX states repeatedly that having fun at a game is more important than who wins and who loses. Jaden, the main character, very nearly wins every time, and many of his duels have nothing at stake, so it's not as though he couldn't afford a few black marks on his record. It's even worse when you take into account how much importance the card game is given in-universe; the same level as friggin' politics and economics. This is eventually deconstructed and becomes the driving point of the plot, with Judai realizing how broken his Aesop is after the duels stop being fun, the stakes are increased, and that he wins all the time regardless.
  • One episode has Juden Duel a guy who's essentially used Charles Atlas Superpower to master The Magic Poker Equation, and who relies entirely on his ability to draw any card he wants. The moral, along with the usual "have fun and don't take it too seriously", is "you can't just use luck to carry you; you have to use strategy as well." This is coming from a character whose ability to always get the right card is an explicit part of his character, to the point of one opponent literally building their strategy around countering it (and failing).
  • One duel had Syrus and Hassleberry forced into somewhat of a tag duel with Thunder and Frost, two members of the Big Bad's sister's Quirky Miniboss Squad. After a few snarky comments, they realize that they need to put aside their differences and work together lest they become hostages to lure Jaden into a trap. However, just as they are about to overcome the Teeth-Clenched Teamwork of their adversaries, Frost activates a trap at the last minute to pull out a victory while throwing his partner under the bus, rendering the protagonists' team efforts meaningless.
    • This is made worse when you realize that Hassleberry and Syrus don't mind working together-aside from a few snarky comments, they barely argue compared to Frost and Thunder. The problem is that they've been tricked into dueling with their backs facing each other, so they're unable to work together even if they want to, as they don't know what their teammate is going to play next. The solution they come up with is that they use their opponents cards as mirrors, but, as stated above, they fail anyway.
    • This also applies to Frost and Thunder themselves, as both are treated as babies for arguing and not working together. However, this only applies to Thunder, as he completely ignores his partner's moves, while Frost is justifiably angry at Thunder for not listening to him.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds:
  • Several times, the series gives the moral that "no card is worthless, just as no person is worthless." However, this is undercut by the fact that protagonist Yusei Fudo uses one of the most powerful decks in the series, full of Synchros ranging from rare to one-of-a-kind, that just happens to be themed after junk and miscellaneous scrapped vehicle parts. What's more, every time he uses "worthless" cards to make this point, he quickly reverts to his usual Deck. In any case, Yu-Gi-Oh! is kind of a terrible game to make this moral with, being laden with cards that are either completely useless or strictly outclassed; every time Yusei tried to prove the moral, the card he used was a Lethal Joke Character at worst. One wonders what he'd do with something like Morinphen...
  • Team Unicorn is constantly praised for their amazing teamwork, yet Andre did the majority of the work in their match against Team 5D's by defeating Jack and Aki, as well as cutting Yusei's life points in half. It gets even worse when it's revealed that in all previous team matches before this one, Andre was able to beat all three members of every opposing team by himself without shifting to Breo or Jean. Worse, their apparent dueling performance does not back this up; Breo's entire strategy doesn't even slightly intersect with his teammate's. It's contrasted even further by the fact that, while the moral is supposed to be "Team 5Ds was at a disadvantage because they didn't have teamwork", the fact is, they still won that duel, despite relying entirely on Yusei.
  • At the end of said Duel, Jean decides to break from the script set up before the Duel, in favor of trying to defeat Yusei through a more aggressive method rather than simply letting him deck out. This is treated by the narrative as a good thing, since he's gone from thinking in terms of pure analytics to doing what he feels he should do. The problem is that not only does this break the above moral on teamwork even further (since it means completely ignoring all the hard work Breo put in to deplete Yusei's deck), but it causes him to lose when he triggers Yusei's defenses, and by extension, causes Team Unicorn to ultimately be knocked out of the tournament altogether. So actually, if Jean had stuck to his rigid script and not gone with his gut, he would have won.
  • In general, the moral of the entire WRGP arc is intended to be of teamwork and The Power of Friendship. This isn't borne out, because Team 5D's works together by far the least of any of the onscreen teams. Every other team runs synergetic if not outright identical decks and frequently dedicate themselves to a single strategy to the point of members deliberately sacrificing themselves, while the members of Team 5D's run personalized and completely dissimilar decks and pursue totally unrelated strategies, at most leaving a card or two for their teammate. Further undermining this is the presence of Yusei, who is the ultimate victor of almost every battle in the tournament, the most skilled and successful member of his team by a significant margin, and the only member who never loses. It's hard to take the idea of teamwork seriously when you get the feeling that Jack, Crow, and Aki could have spent their duels blowing spit bubbles and Yusei would have still carried the whole thing. Not to mention on a meta level, this arc saw most of the prior cast be Demoted to Extra - particularly Ruka and Rua, who have almost no role at all in the entire arc, and Aki, whose only role was to fail at filling in for Crow. Essentially, it asks us to care about the cast's teamwork while writing only the three protagonists as significant and only the protagonist as competent.
  • The moral of Aki's first Duel with Yusei was that she had to learn to think for herself and couldn't just let one person think for her. But when she makes a Heel–Face Turn, a large chunk of her screentime is spent on being Yusei's Satellite Love Interest, and her only arc is dedicated to trying to copy something Yusei does.
  • The Crimson Devil mini-arc deals with Jack accepting that he mustn't rely purely on his power strategy or else he will die. He keeps refusing to accept that until he does something else. But in the end, he's rewarded with an upgrade that gives him even more power and it gives him the victory.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL:
  • The show goes for a Cheaters Never Prosper moral a number of times, a common one in the franchise - but Yuma only succeeds as he does because he has Astral giving him tips, and the ability to alter the result of his draws.
  • During Yuma's World Duel Carnival duel with Nistro, the former is suffering from a Heroic BSoD and plays defensively. He is called out by Nistro and Astral for playing it too safe, seemingly delivering the message of "Face your fears" or "You won't accomplish anything if you keep playing it safe"... except Yuma made some pretty good combos. Of particular note is when he played Gagaga Cowboy in Defense Mode, then used its effect to damage Nistro's Life Points, a move that is commonly used in the real card game. Plus, they were on the Desert Field, where summoning and attacking causes the player damage. So it seems like the message is "If you were recently traumatized, you should stop doing things safely, even if it's working out well for you."
• Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V suffers heavily from having two major morals and attempting to switch between them from episode to episode - specifically, "making people smile and entertaining others are the best things ever", and "War Is Hell and Humans Are Bastards". So a number of characters have personal trauma, deep prejudices, or depraved attitudes... but it's nothing that five minutes of making them smile can't cure. Being an entertainer is awesome and will lead you to greatness... but Yuya's biggest successes are found by relying on his Superpowered Evil Side, and the most prominent entertainer in the cast besides him is a Memetic Loser. People die in war and it's horrible... but that would be a downer, so it's clear from the start that everyone to "die" by being carded can come back. Making people smile is a good deed... but the villain's entire motivation is steeped in the fact that he did what the audience wanted and was corrupted. Class divisions are dangerous, deep-seated, and hard to remove... but if everyone is smiling because they watched a cool duel, they break down overnight. So entertainment can do anything... except that the main villain's defeat has nothing to do with making him smile; he was buried in bodies and sealed through magic.
  • Overlapping with Aesop Amnesia, the intended moral of the Synchro arc was that people have to make their own style. Yuya finds that his entertainment style isn't appealing to people, and Jack calls out Yuya's style of entertaining and dueling as being forced, shallow, and not his own, because it's copied from his father's and powered by Zarc. This does lead to a payoff of Yuya finally developing his own style, along with a set of cards that come from neither, in the final episode of the arc... but then Yuya completely forgets this new style and the cards he created, and goes back to copying his father and borrowing from Zarc for the rest of the series. Where this goes from Aesop Amnesia to Broken Aesop is that despite this, Yuya's never shown having any problems entertaining people again, despite his style being as forced, shallow, and not his own as ever. Turns out never doing your own thing is perfectly fine.
  • Professor Leo Akaba, the Big Bad for most of the story, wants to capture the Bracelet girls and fuse them back into their original incarnation, his daughter Ray. After the conflict with the Greater-Scope Villain Zarc is over, the Professor acknowledges that it was unfair of him to value Ray's existence over the four Bracelet girls' individual lives. However, the story ends with only Yuya and Yuzu retaining their physical form, while their respective dimensional counterparts fuse with them and forever lose their bodies, and the rest of the cast is OK with this.