Avatar: The Last Airbender: In a flashback scene from "Sozin's Comet, Part 1", Fire Lord Ozai asks Zuko (who spent most of season 2 Walking the Earth) how best to take care of the the remaining pockets of resistance in the Earth Kingdom. Zuko thinks that the resistances are stubborn like rocks and won't give up as long as they have hope. Zuko meant 'you're never going to be able to terrorize them into submission and should seek to pacify them diplomatically', but Azula thinks he means 'the best way to stop them is to terrorize them more until their will is completely broken' and suggests using Sozin's Comet to commit genocide against them. Ozai actually liking Azula's solution finally clues Zuko in that Ozai is a Complete Monster and that the Fire Nation's campaign of world conquest is totally unjustifiable.
Arthur: In "Arthur's Big Hit", Arthur gets a lot of flack from his parents and peers for hitting D.W. in retaliation for breaking his model plane. He focuses entirely on the fact that he constantly reminded D.W. not to touch it, failing to realize their point is that hitting his sister is still not an appropriate response. It takes Binky (who was pressured by the Tough Customers) hitting him to finally realize his mistake.
A Boy Named Charlie Brown has Charlie Brown, who feels he is a complete loser as a spelling bee competitor, fails to realize he not only won the state Spelling Bee championship but he came in second in the National championship. His friends miss the point as well, as the closest thing he gets to support is Linus telling him he didn't need to be worried because everything is okay despite his failure, totally missing the point that both winning the state championship and coming in second at the National championship is actually an incredible level of success.
Castlevania: Nocturne: Driven by fear that the French Revolution will spell the end of the church, Abbot Emmanuel has thrown in his lot with the vampire queen Erszabet Báthory, who promises a return of the "natural order", which he interprets as the church returned to a position of power. To that end, he prepares his daughter, Maria Renard, as a sacrifice for Erszabet in the season 1 finale "Devourer of Light". When Richter Belmont leads his friends — including Maria's mother, Tera — on a mission to rescue Maria and stop Erszabet's plot, Emmanuel fights back against them, quoting the Binding of Isaac, a story from the Book of Genesis that tells of Abraham, who had been commanded by God to make a sacrifice of his son Isaac, as justification for sacrificing Maria. Tera pointedly fires back that God stopped Abraham from carrying out Isaac's death and offered a ram to sacrifice instead. In the end, with Erszabet too powerful to stop and with no alternative, Tera offers herself in Maria's place as a sacrifice to Erszabet, telling Emmanual "I am the ram!"
The Daria season 2 premiere "Arts 'N Crass" has Daria and Jane tasked with submitting a painting meant to represent student life. Daria, being The Cynic, gets the idea to submit a painting of a pretty girl with a poem explaining she maintained that beauty through bulimia. Even after having it explained to them, their cheerful English teacher and Dean Bitterman Mr. O'Neill and Ms. Li struggled to understand the negative message and tried to get them to change it despite the entire point being the juxtaposition of beautiful imagery with a darker underlying theme. Although to his credit, Mr. O'Neill attempted to meet them halfway by suggesting a Missed Meal Aesop to lighten the tone but the two refused to compromise.
Gravity Falls: In "A Tale of Two Stans", during Stan and Ford's final argument before the latter is sent into an alternate universe, the final straw in Stan's argument that Ford is putting his ambitions before his family is that Ford is "selfishly hoarding" his grant money instead of using it to help his family. Stan, a high school dropout and con man, doesn't realize that this is the one instance where Ford really can't do anything, because that isn't how grant money works. The people who gave Ford the grant money would be monitoring Ford's expenses quite closely to make sure that he wasn't embezzling from them by spending the money on anything but the project he said it was for, which unfortunately for both Stans includes using it to help his family.
The Conductor. Or, rather, Amelia. Towards the end of Book 1 we learn that, much like every other passenger, she found herself aboard the train after a traumatic event. However, after learning about the purpose of the train and its inner workings, her (admittedly justified) questions about how no one there consented to adventure therapy give way to an insistence that she should be allowed to use the science of the train to bring her husband back to life instead of working through her issues, too enveloped with grief to see any issues with this. The result of reaching for this goal is three decades of suffering and confusion for the train's native denizens and future passengers, both directly and indirectly.
The reason for Book 3's conflict is that Grace decided that numbers going up was a good thing (the actual goal is to get your numbers down to 0 via Character Development so you can leave the train) and taught this to her Apex cult, resulting in them venerating bad behavior and refusal to move on from trauma. By the midpoint of Book 3, she's started to learn that she was wrong. Unfortunately for everyone, while her friend Simon gets to learn the same lessons as her, he instead concludes that her number going down was a bad thing purely because it meant they were growing further apart (because she was developing as a person while he remained selfish), so he decided that the only thing for it was to kill Grace if he couldn't make her return to her old self.
Justice League: In the Unlimited episode "Patriot Act", Shining Knight (a time-displaced Aurthurian knight) faces off against the Knight Templar General Eiling, and tries to get him to come to his senses and realize that following orders isn't always the right option by relating a story of when Arthur gave him a Secret Test of Character by ordering him to destroy a village, which Shining Knight disobeyed because he knew that would be an evil act and not something Arthur would have wanted. Eiling retorts that Shining Knight is clearly not a good soldier, ignoring the point that what Arthur wanted was to make sure that Shining Knight would, of his own accord, make the right choice in a To Be Lawful or Good situation.
In the Miraculous Ladybug episode "Stormy Weather 2", Nathalie, Gabriel Agreste's assistant, reveals in an Internal Monologue that she admires Gabriel's commitment to his family. Of course, this is ignoring that Gabriel is an emotionally abusive Control Freak whose "commitment" is damaging to everyone involved.
In "Owl's Well That Ends Well", Twilight lectures Spike about all the trouble he's been causing because he's jealous of Owlowiscious, telling him "This is not the Spike I know and love!" A dejected Spike interprets this as meaning Twilight doesn't love him anymore, and prompts him to run away from home.
Rocket Power: In "Radical New Equipment", the gang encounters a group of winter sports athletes with different physical impairments, such as blindness and paralysis. Reggie is particularly impressed by Lizzie, a girl with a prosthetic leg, and tries to strike up a friendship, only to treat her like a helpless child. Hoping to help Reggie understand that Lizzie is not helpless because of her disability. Reggie's father, Ray, and honorary uncle Tito tell her a story about their friend Leonard "The Lizard" Brady; he used to be the best surfer around until he lost his eyesight. All his friends felt sorry for him because he could not surf anymore, until one day at night, he was able to surf in the dark with no problem. Tito explains that Brady did not let anything stop him from living his life to the fullest. He even uses his blindness to his advantage. Reggie got that Lizzie is making the best of a bad situation, and left before Ray and Tito explain the real lesson that she should've learned.
Santa Inc.: Candy wants to be the first female and elf to become the new Santa, and to that end she's fixated on that goal. However, she's also very rude, irritable and uninterested in getting along with others, which hurts in the one area most important. As being Santa means being a Friend to All Children, Candy's guaranteed success was shot down when Santa saw she hated being around kids and scared them away to Devin, whose genuine ability to easily interact with them made Santa decide to give him the position instead. She fails to understand why this is so important until Santa tells her that getting along with kids is the number one aspect he needs in a successor, but Candy's insistence she can learn makes it clear she sees it more like a minor job requirement rather than the key aspect of the job. When Santa instead offers her the role of being the brains of the Santa Inc. while Devin becomes the face as the new Santa, she rejects this and curses him out.
In the South Park episode "Kenny Dies" (with a semi-parody tone), where the boys are told Kenny is diagnosed with a terminal disease. "But he's gonna get better, right?" inquires Stan. Somber music plays in the background as the adults exchange saddened looks.
Spider-Man: The Animated Series: Morrie Bench was Mary Jane Watson's ex-boyfriend from high school, whom she broke up with and, after being enlisted in the Navy by his parents, became the supervillain Hydro-Man. He set out to prove to Mary Jane he could give her anything she wanted, thinking she had every right to break up with him because he had nothing so he committed thefts to provide for her. Mary Jane had to spell it out for him that he was an obnoxious and overbearing person who was jealous of everyone around her, and that she didn't love him. Unfortunately, not only does he not see his attitude is a problem, he's convinced he'll have to flood all of New York if it means she'll be his, still not getting that this is the very reason she rejected him.
Star Wars Rebels: In "Ghosts ofGeonosis", the rebels exploring the titular Ghost Planet find a surviving Geonosian. When they ask him what the Empire was doing at the planet, all he does is draw a circle inside of a circle, clearly representative of acertainsuperweapon. Due to the Language Barrier, however, the rebels can only misinterpret the images, ultimately concluding that Klik-Klak was drawing the poison gas canisters they find at the bottom of a shaft.
The Homeworld Gems have performed experiments with fusion as a means to strengthen their forces. Unfortunately, they see it as nothing but a power boost, not realizing that the relationship between two or more Gems is why fusions can be formed in the first place. By forcefully and emotionlessly mashing together Gem shards, all they manage to create are misshapen pitiful horrors. But rather than abandon the project, they doubled down and used the results of their research to make a "fusion" out of millions of shards called the Cluster, which they proceeded to stick in the Earth's core as a ticking time bomb.
In "Off Colors", Lars saves the Off Colors from the Shattering Robonoids by blocking their scanners with his body and beating them with a rock. He finishes off the last one by jumping on top of it and jamming a pointed rock in its "eye", causing it to blow up. He gets flung into a wall with a nasty "CRACK" and falls thirty feet to the ground. The Off Colors, who are used to Gems' Super-Toughness, start celebrating and praise his heroism... while Steven starts to panic because he knows that humans can't just walk off those sorts of hits. Sure enough, when he checks Lars's pulse, it isn't there, and he starts sobbing because he knows he's just lost a friend.
In "Now We're Only Falling Apart", Sapphire is distraught upon finding out that Rose Quartz was actually Pink Diamond, as she ended up believing that Rose was the cruel, cowardlytyrant the Crystal Gems assumed they were supposed to shatter along with the other Diamonds, and she never looked into Rose or any of her intentions because she trusted Rose that much. Steven and Pearl eventually get her to realize how backwards Sapphire is thinking when Pearl explains why Pink Diamond did what she did to spare the Earth. Pearl's following flashback story reveals that when Pink Diamond told Blue Diamond she wanted to save life on Earth from the damage Pink's colonization was causing, Blue created a People Zoo and put a few humans in, believing that that would appease her.
In "Prickly Pair", Steven vents his bottled-up feelings to a sentient cactus, who ends up causing problems when it starts parroting Steven's words. Steven realizes that using the creature as an emotional outlet was a mistake, but what he takes away from the experience is that he shouldn't talk about his problems at all.
In "Mr. Universe", Steven is upset upon learning his father ran away from a comparatively mundane life and ended up raising his son with limitless freedom, along with not giving Steven the basic necessities he should have had growing up like schooling. Greg's reasoning is that his parents were emotionally controlling, whereas Steven points out that they might have had their reasons for their actions and how Greg's decision to raise his son in the opposite manner resulted in Steven having no idea what to do with his life and his inability to connect with people anymore. After Steven yells and crashes the van, Greg says he's proud of Steven for speaking up as he himself never had the courage to do that with his own father. If this were any other scenario, this would be heartwarming. However, it's clear Greg doesn't realize Steven isn't acting out or expressing his individuality, he's furious at his father for essentially running away from a normal family and not giving Steven any structure, cementing in his mind that Greg is a Manchild who was not fit to raise him. Saying he's proud of Steven just made it worse.
