Broken Aesop Discussion - Television Tropes & Idioms

Discussion goes here:

============= On the Naruto argument posited in the article that "The most blatant example of 'Hard Work Hardly Works' is the Naruto vs. Neji battle," this Troper thought that that battle actually illustrated the value of hard work rather well. Neji was a fighter who relied on innate talent AND a bloodline limit, so Naruto would, in all frankness, have to have been strong to the point of being broken in order to be able to beat him on his own, in the same way that even an expertly-trained soldier will lose if his opponent is an equally trained soldier with a gun. Using the power of the Kyuubi just basically acted to neutralize Neji's bloodline advantage (giving the other soldier a gun, too, so to speak) so that the fight essentially became a fighter who relied on talent and believed in fate versus a fighter who relied on hard work and believed that nothing is set in stone - and Naruto edges him out, proving his philosophy is superior.

Hello, I think one specific broken aesop deserves special mention in this article because of its frequency and severity. That is the case where, the heroes allow, participate in, and even directly cause the deaths of many innocent bystanders and nameless minions/underlings, before or after showing mercy to the one character most deserving of death, the main bad guy (who often ends up dying anyway). A recent example of this is in Prince Caspian. Actual moral taught: only the lives of special people matter. I probably would have added it myself, but I am new to this site and wouldn't be able to use all the appropriate lingo.

Ununnilium: Doesn't that one have its own article?

Should the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air example be on this list? I always thought that episode was intentionally ironic. Which, of course, would make it belong with the Spoof Aesops rather than here.
Lale: Move it.
(Um, sorry, but the previous poster rather misses the point. The Mystic Force were getting lazy, relying on the Weaponof Mass Destruction to do their job for them (and, indeed, relying on their magic to do everything for them). A growing library of combat skills and number-coded-spells and the only plan any of them seemed to come up with is "have our teacker shoot the cat at it" (and once they've suggested it for the fifth time or so, you KNOW it ain't gonna work, 3-parter or not).

... and actually, the easy fix is to go like this: pulled out ...

Power Rangers Mystic Force: "Dark Wish". The Rangers' reliance of magic to perform mundane tasks is suddenly taken to be a sign of laziness, despite the fact that thus far in the series, they were actively encouraged to treat their magic abilities as an extension of themselves and use it freely. This is compounded by secondary characters repeatedly pointing out that they are literally on the point of collapse from exhaustion from the stress of defending the city. They repeatedly ask — and are reprimanded for asking — Solaris Knight to use his Weapon Of Mass Destruction (which involves pitching their genie at a monster), an attack he has used in every single appearance so far, which is suddenly taken to be a bad idea for unspecified reasons. Eventually, they are injured in an attack and on the point of defeat, at which point Solaris Knight relents. The pitched genie is captured and forced to grant a universe-damaging wish. The wish is reversed only when the rangers "learn their lesson", which is apparently "Don't use your skills and resources to their fullest extent, and don't talk your much older and wiser advisor into using his most powerful weapon even when it clearly seems to be the only way to save the world and your own lives, and always do things the hardest way possible for no reason other than the moral benefits of hard labor." As the coup de grace, as a reward for learning this "lesson", they are gifted with even more spectacular powers, which they are advised to use freely and to their full extent.

... as lacking clarity.

Cassius335: Would like to note for the record that the stuff in itallics above was written by me.

Man Called True: My mother and I caught the last episode of Sabrina on a rerun recently, and she made a suggestion I hadn't thought of: that rather than the Broken Aesop given here, the real moral was "Don't settle for anything less than what you deserve". Still a really clumsy Aesop, but not quite broken. Any thoughts?

Red Shoe: That aesop may have indeed been contained therein, but I think they were pushing pretty hard for "Heart right; magic wrong", and at the last minute decided that it had been the magic that was right, and her true feelings that she'd been mistaken about.

Jason: Could it have been a "go with your gut" thing? I've only seen a few episodes of that season but it seemed like she was trying to convince everyone including herself that she loved her fiance more than Harvey. Maybe the stones were just supposed to be telling her what she already knew.

Barratsoss: Err, wait a minute. First, when Sabrina does the actual decision, she doesnt follow the advice of magic. She simply tries to say the words at the altar, then noticing that she just couldnt say them. Because she didnt felt them. Thats not magic, thats simply realization of her true feelings in this crucial moment. Everyone could have done it, and its likely to happen this way in the real world, too. Magic actually only warned her that this was the case before, but she didnt wanted to hear that and, to that point, followed through with the marriage ceremony anyway, despite her doubts and "cold feet".

And the real error behind this logic that this is a broken Aeosop is that people assume here there would be any morale involved that would only span this episode. This is dead wrong. The final episode was the logical conclusion of what happened over no less than the last three seasons, and its really obvious too.

For after season 4, Harvey disappears and it is stated he left Sabrina for he found out she is a witch. Not exactly a reason that makes much sense, as he obviously has nothing to fear from Sabrina, but whatever. However, during season 5 he appears (at least) two times in the second half of the season again, and in season 6 and 7 he appears with even increasing frequency. And he is always dropping hints to Sabrina that he still loves her, to which she doesnt really react.

A very important moment is the end of season six. In the last episode of season six, Sabrina managed to get herself in a very unfortunate position. Invocing another one of the many pitfalls of the dangerous magic of this setting, she manages to make the true love of Aunt Hilda walk away from her. This causes Aunt Hilda to instantly freeze to some kind of statue and shatter into pieces. In the course of restoring Aunt Hilda, Sabrina is asked to sacrifice her true love. Seeing no other way, and feeling guilty for Hildas fate, she agrees.

While she first notices no effect, at the end of the episode, after Aunt Hilda has married her true love, the magic starts to operate and no less than three true loves leave Sabrina behind in the same moment - Harvey himself, Josh, and some random guy she just met and instantly liked. Implying each of them are a true love of hers. Now she herself is caught in the same kind of magic that hit Hilda before, freezes to a statue, and shatters.

At the beginning of season 7, it is shown how first Salim appears (stating he doesnt know what happened, but hes sure this will be blamed on him), then Harvey for a last word (obviously, since Sabrina has been killed, the magic has stopped to operate, so he can get close to her again), only to find the remains of Sabrinas statue on the floor. Suddenly we see Sabrina restored and an 8 year old girl is shown which Sabrina somehow instantly recognizes as Aunt Zelda. Aunt Zelda has sacrificed her adult years to rescue Sabrina from her state. It is later in the season implied this sacrifice also broke the spell on Sabrina that made it impossible for her to be close to a true love of hers.

Therefore the sacrifice of Sabrina seems to have removed all potential true loves in her environment but Harvey, who instantly returned to Sabrina "for a last statement" the moment that magic stopped operating.

So the last episode is simply a logical conclusion of the events in seasons 5 to 7 (and also the romance between Sabrina and Harvey in season 1 to 4), and not an Aeosop of any kind.

Keenath: Does it count as a broken aesop if it's intentional, or does that always make a spoof aesop? (Move the Avatar example to Spoof Aesop if necessary.) The only reason I think it's an intentional broken-aesop is that they aren't really having the character learn an opposite or non-sequitur moral; rather she reasserts that her original judgement was correct — that stealing from pirates is not wrong. It IS played for laughs in the situation, but the moral itself is not particularly funny. I'd almost say it was a warped aesop, except it's clearly intentional (while most warped aesops seem to be unintentional lessons).

I don't know. Opinions?

Lale: Here's how I understood the Aesops:

Family Unfriendly Aesop: They deliver the message they intended, but it's a bad message in any another context than what they use, like, "Trust everyone no matter what- really, no matter what." Unintentional.
Broken Aesop: They break the message they genuinely try to deliver. See Beauty and the Beast. Unintentional.
Spoof Aesop: Not seriously trying to deliver the message; just for laughs. Intentional.

There is nothing sincere about that "Stealing is wrong unless it's from pirates" line. They did not mean by any stretch to actually teach that Aesop. It strictly is for laughs. The description also says "Backwards morals, where the characters learn the exact opposite of what you'd expect them to," which is clearly the case here. Excellent example, wrong trope. Moving to Spoof Aesop.

Tzintzuntzan: I wrote the initial entries for Spoof Aesop and Family Unfriendly Aesop way back, and I think Lale's pretty much got it right. The Avatar episode wasn't seriously trying to teach that moral. However, a Family Unfriendly Aesop can be deliberate, if the writers seriously, deliberately argue that stealing is perfectly normal and decent.

Solandra: Those fairy tales always bothered me once I grew up past my childhood stage. Many, many versions on how an ugly heroine is scorned by her peers, but she has a heart of gold which endears her to her love interest. The clear message is that inner beauty is what really matters...and inevitably she turns out to be stunningly beautiful on the outside after all. I always got this vibe from these stories: "Well, being nice and sweet is important, but you can't be that, unless you're beautiful too! Inner beauty can't be had without outer beauty!" For once, I'd like to read a story with an average-looking heroine who actually stays plain-looking without a She Is All Grown Up episode, and the guy likes her just fine.

Would the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "The Outcast" qualify as a broken Aesop? It's broken more by casting decisions than anything in the script. (Riker falls in love with an androgynous alien, but the alien society views hir attraction to a person of specific gender as a perversion. It was intended as an allegory of homophobia. The problem was that the androgynes were all played by women, making it look more like a planet of man-hating lesbians.)

Lale: According to my "fail to deliver the Aesop they were sincerely trying to deliver" theory, yes.

Jordan: Regarding the heroine remaining plain and the guy still liking her, this is true of Jane Eyre, although there is a Broken Aesop here as well, since Rochester is first disfigured, blinded, and maimed in a fire, so essentially, no other woman would have him.

Cassius335: Quick Beauty and the Beast note: IIRC, in at least some versions of the story, we're told up front that the handsome prince has been turned into the Beast (and that he will only be turned back if someone can love him despite his newly monstrous appearance). Not sure how it's a Broken Aesop... The point gets made, the prince learns his lesson (not to judge by appearances) and the curse is broken.

Lale: Learning that lesson doesn't prompt the transformation back, though, blurring the connection.

Ununnilium:

Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer intended its Aesop to be about acceptance of differences. However, there isn't the slightest implication of anyone advocating to accept Rudolph until he proved that his differences were actually needed to save the day.

This absolutely isn't true if you're talking about the movie version. Meanwhile, the song version is compressed enough that there isn't really room for such a thing.

Nezumi: Taking out

Codename: Kids Next Door, "Caked 4": Numbuh 2 has an epiphany while tubing in the river in a race about just relying on his tube, rather than dirty tricks and motors and stuff. But then again, he still doesn't win the race anyway.

Although the summary as given is slightly inaccurate, the bigger issue is that although he didn't win the race, he did save everyone because of this, as mentioned in Friend Or Idol Decision, which is a much bigger deal than an inner tube race. It's only "broken" if you never learned the "Winning Isn't Everything" Aesop.

Ungvichian: Okay. Trying again with a Winx example. Hopefully this one holds more water. (No pun intended.)

Ununnilium: It was confusing, so I rewrote it. That's what you meant, right?

Mister Six: Isn't this a Spoof Aesop?

In Diffrent Strokes, Arnold gets into a fight with the bullying son of the landlord's brother who is subbing for a short time. This leads to a loud confrontation where the brother confronts Mr. Drummond, threatens to evict the family and provokes Drummond to punch the blowhard out. This gives the landlord the excuse to exploit a lease violation that the brother found to raise the rent on the Drummonds, with a veiled threat of eviction to convince them to give in. The punchline is after the Drummonds cave in to this threat, the father tells the kids that this is the result of his act of violence. However, when asked if it was worth it, Mr. Drummond immediately remarks it was for having the pleasure of shutting a bully up.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Yes. It ought to be listed there now.

Kinitawowi: Serious issues with this bit (in the BTVS section about Wrecked)...

To kick matters up a notch, it was finally decided that Willow's decision to give up magic was what eventually caused her to lose it and nearly destroy the world — she really wasn't a magic addict after all. (Though this aspect of the Aesop got broken due to Creative Differences: Joss Whedon didn't like the whole "magic-as-drug-abuse" concept and wrote it out of the series.)

Tara's death was the catalyst for that (unless you try to claim that Willow's giving up ~~crack~~ magic was what got her Tara back...) - and when she got shot, Willow went on the mother and father of all benders (witness her raiding of Rack's place, long-established as a den for drugs and prostitutes - well, their metaphorical versions at least) before being packed off to England for rehab at the start of the next season. I'd rip the paragraph to shreds myself if it wasn't for the stuff about Creative Differences, which I more or less buy.

Fast Eddie: I pulled it. It was all over the place. The next bullet is a little iffy, too.

Jason: I'm not sure I agree with the arguement against Buffy's episode Wrecked being a Broken Aesop. While magic was treated somewhat similarly to what he describes, I'm not sure literal overuse was every suggested as problem until season six itself, witchcraft had been used as subtext for Willow and Tara's relationship up until season 6 where it was suddenly only a drug metaphor and a bad one.

Lale: 64.12.116.18, see Spoof Aesop.

Red Shoe: I dunno. In the next season, someone, Giles I think, tells Willow outright that she never was a magic addict, and that the reason she snapped when Tara died was because she'd been suppressing her magic — that if she hadn't done that, she'd have been able to deal with Tara's death without destroying the world. That sounds pretty broken to me.

J Random User: I've just finished watching the series on DVD, and I can say with certainty that no such statement is ever made. Giles does say in the first episode of S7 that 'it's not an addiction', but this refers specifically to Willow's power itself and why it can't simply be taken away. As he points out later in the season, it's possible to use magic without going on a bender. You simply need to learn responsibile use and respect for the enormity of the power. In Season 6, Willow was automatically turning to magic as the solution to every problem that cropped up, without a thought to the consequences—witness her plan to find Dawn in a crowd by shifting everyone in the room who wasn't Dawn into another dimension for a few seconds. She then was enticed into visiting Rack whose specific brand of magic was addictive and corrupting.

Jason: By a trusted friend who'd never done anything against her. Honestly I felt like the sudden change to making magic addictive turned it into an arguement against Willow trying to better herself.

Obsidian: Let's just write the entire magic addiction arc, and most of season six, off as Broken and be done with it, shall we? They were far from consistent when it came to magic and ethics in the show. Whenever Willow did something magical in season 6, it was wrong. But, if another character did something just as morally questionable at another time (Angel changing his team's memories of Connor; Xander's love spell in 'Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered'; etc), it was either regarded as perfectly fine, glossed over, or played up for laughs.

Vampire Buddha: removed the following from the Buffy example:

This editor disagrees that this is a Broken Aesop, because the original Aesop was not what was presented above. Over the course of the entire series, magic, since the first season, has always been treated as something that is simply powerful - something not inherently good nor evil, but which can be used for either, along with strong overtones that overuse or misuse could be dangerous. "Wrecked" goes along with this perfectly. If the episode "Family" has an Aesop, it's that making your womenfolk believe themselves to be evil demons or otherwise "unclean" so that they'll stay home and cook and clean for you is wrong.
- Then I'll disagree with the disagreement. Many episodes do indeed treat magic as powerful but not good or evil. "Wrecked" is not one of them; the implications are that magic is like drugs, which are inherently bad. That's one reason it's a Wall Banger.
- Actually, the Aesop of 'Family' was in the title: Family is not blood, but the people you care about. The Scoobies are a family, even though only Buffy and Dawn are related by blood. And magic was always said to be potentially addictive and euphoric, but that is a discussion for elsewhere.
- So, long story short, the lesson is "If your metaphors tend to have all the subtlety of an anvil, you should at least make sure they're consistent anvils."

Pro-Mole: Given the hooling obviousness of the example, I'm rather surprised nobody had yet added Fairly Odd Parents to the example list. And that makes me question the validity of the example... If anybody see anything wrong, just justify and kick it out.

Jefepato: I thought the Aesop of that show was, if anything, "be careful what you wish for." Which isn't really broken, because the main character's careless wishes go wrong consistently. He never seems to learn the Aesop, but that's more of a Status Quo Is God problem, in that the premise of the show relies upon him continuing to make poorly-thought-out wishes.

Ununnilium: Agreed, and thus, taking it out:

The whole premise of Fairly Odd Parents is a broken version of "taking responsibility for your actions (wishes)", for if anything goes wrong there's always the "I wish everything goes back to normal" Reset Button, even if Timmy has to work a bit to make that wish happen.

Jefepato: The Harry Potter example really bothers me. Ignoring the fact that diversity and tolerance are minor themes at best, "Muggle" is never presented as a slur or otherwise impolite term. I'm removing the example.

Lale: I thought that, too. Glad I wasn't the only one. We sem to be on a Broken Aesop and Family Unfriendly Aesop binge lately.

Artful: Dare I add examples from the bible, or will they be redacted? I'm not talking about the ones due to cultural differences over centuries, but the ones that are internally inconsistent.

Lale: I thought Aesops had to come from fictional stories intending to teach a lesson from the plot? You're gonna get tons of different lessons from real life. Come on, then we could include contradictory advice given in magazine articles, counseling textbooks... Like I said, we seem to be on a Broken Aesop binge.

The Defenestrator: I don't see how any of that rules out Biblical examples. Not all of it is supposed to be literal, or so I've heard. I think if there can be a biblical example in God Is Evil, having one in this trope won't be a problem.

Lale: The editor calling God evil for what Job goes through is his/her own interpretation, not from the book itself, but I won't cut it because of the out-of-scope discussions that would start. Everyone has their Smite Me Oh Mighty Smiter moments.

thatother1dude: Does this

count? (I mean anything anti-drug that involves Captain America)

Lale: Only in the twisted minds of Media Watchdogs. Superpower-granting pills are not drugs.

thatother1dude: OK, I was just kinda looking for somewhere to use this.

Ununnilium: Taking out:

In this troper's opinion, the moral of Terry Pratchett's Jingo, that all races are equal, and thus have both good and bad individuals, is somewhat broken by the fact that the character 71-hour Achmed, who is treated as the heroic police officer Vimes' Klatchian (Arabic) equivalent, does not share the latter's qualms about casual killing, and in a troubling scene, orders his subordinates to endure torture if captured long enough so that their captors will believe lies they tell them. As a result, the unintentional message received is that someone like Achmed is the best that the Klatchians could hope for, and thus for all of its faults, the "European" Ankh-Morpork is still superior. Of course, given that Achmed is portrayed as smarter than Vimes, and has a similar respect for the law, this doesn't come out as badly as it could have.

...because, frankly, it does exactly what the Aesop says not to do: judges the group by the individual. Achmed isn't "the best that the Klatchians could hope for", he's who the Klatchians have. He's not supposed to be the Platonic ideal of Klatchian Vimes, he's just the person who has to do the job.

Nobodymuch: The real moral of Beauty and the Beast, is that even though men appear to be hairy, bad tempered, louts, after being married to one for a while, he won't seem so bad. His physical appearance is just a metaphor for the fear that virgins about to be married generally feel toward the prospect.

Cromage: Of course it is, darling. Just as we all know that Everyone Is Jesus In Purgatory.

I will agree however, that the Aesop in Beauty and the Beast has nothing to do with physical appearance. Beast isn't an ugly duckling; he's an embittered jerkass. Belle isn't repulsed by the Beast's appearance; she's repulsed because she's being blackmailed into staying with him.

It doesn't belong in Broken Aesop, although arguments could be made that it does belong in Family Unfriendly Aesop. I'll be removing it if someone can't come up with a better Aesop that was broken. Or for that matter, prove me wrong in the book (at which point I'll only remove the reference to the movie and add a footnote)

Gryphon: Someone just pointed this one out to me. In "Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus" the main villain turns people into statues and other stuff. Obviously bad right? Well in the third stage Barbie's gained power is... to turn enemies into plants. But not living plants. Oh no. LOGS. She turns them into logs. WHAT?! And to top it off it can turn spore flowers into spring flowers.

Er. I guess can someone help me turn this into a viable entry then?

arromdee: Sounds like Moral Dissonance to me, not Broken Aesop, since it's not trying to teach "turning people into inanimate things is bad" as a lesson.

That Other 1 Dude Removed:

And Guy, Rock Lee's hero who has a similar work ethic, is in an ongoing rivalry with a character that's both a prodigy and has a bloodline trait by proxy. Guy being the only one who takes the rivalry seriously, and even still, Kakashi usually wins their competitions. Moral: hard work is for idiots. Hack out your best friend's magic eye instead, because that's all that matters.

That's ignoring that the fact that Kakashi does have to work hard (we once see him climbing up a cliff one-handed), he's just not so excited about it. Having the sharingan never helps in those competitions, and it actually keeps him from using an eye. Really half of those are stupid stuff like playing rock-paper-scissors.

Caswin: Is the page quote really a Broken Aesop? Sounds more Warped to me; it's not like they're contradicting themselves there.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Not in itself, but Yu Gi Oh The Abridged Series is a satire of the original Yu Gi Oh. Thus, the quote is a Spoof Aesop, but it is probably reflecting an actual Broken Aesop in the original Yu Gi Oh. Now, would someone kindly add that original Broken Aesop from Yu Gi Oh to the example list so we can be more certain about what that quote refers to? Or remove the quote if the original really is a Family Unfriendly Aesop?

Charred Knight: Please put discussion of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann here. The main page is for the listing of tropes, not if Fate, and Destiny is the same thing.

Man Called True: I haven't seen Fullmetal Alchemist in a while, but as I recall, Rose wasn't raped because she stood up to the soldiers. She was grabbed, pulled into a building, and assaulted without warning. Diabolus Ex Machina, perhaps, but not a breaking of an aesop.

Charred Knight: She was protecting a bunch of kids from the Soldiers, see gave the quote and raped her. That's a broken aesop.

Man Called True: The justification helped out, and like I said, I haven't seen it in a while. Sorry about the back-and-there-again... kneejerk reaction. The manga fanbase is so They Changed It Now It Sucks that I tend to overreact to manga/anime comparisons. On one last note, the aesop gets glued back together again at the end, when Rose gets her mind back and yells it at Ed to get him to resist Wrath.

Charred Knight: Deleted because only a part of the town went back, those where the weak willed people who didn't want to stand on their feet, and just kept waiting for miracles to happen. To be more specific, in both manga and anime, Envy pretends to be Cornello so that he can use the weak willed people to become a cult so that the army will attack them, and destroy the city. An example, the cofee guy stopped believing in Cornello, and everyone left in the city when the series revisits the area presumably did not believe in Cornello since the army crushed Cornello's followers.

In the anime, the Aesop would already have been broken when Envy masquerades as Cornello, convinces the people that the last one was a fake, and they gladly flock back under his control without hesitation. Which is how Envy got their village involved in the fighting to begin with.

Masami Phoenix: removed the following from the Star Wars, because it's not on the subject. It also makes the mistake that the "balance" is talking about numbers (early on it's established that the balance is to restore the power of the Jedi who's powers are growing weaker and weaker, as shown by their inability to sense Palpatine or the clone army.)

This troper thought the moral seemed to be "When the Light Side of the Force reigns supreme, make sure you look up 'balance' in the dictionary before training someone destined to Bring Balance to the Force."

Burai: Removing (at least temporarily) ...

** Not sure how superior a sling is over a spear. Unless I'm mistaken, slings were for hunting, not for war.

... because it's discussion.

That said, the answer to this is "Range". As The Other Wiki

puts it, "In general, a sling bullet lobbed in a high trajectory can achieve ranges approaching 600m [...] ancient writers repeatedly stress the sling's advantage of range." And slings definitely did see significant battlefield use in the pre-medieval eras, hence qualifying as "weapons of war". (Bear in mind, nearly every weapon in human history other than the sword started life as either a hunting aid or craft tool, including the spear).

Sikon: Americans, once again, please don't presume all tropers are from the same country as you, even if most are.

Do the jokes at Fahrquad's expense really break Shrek's Aesop? Nobody's making fun of him because he's short; they make fun of him because he's a pompous, arrogant, overbearing, xenophobic jerk and control freak.

Charred Knight: I reverted the FFTA entry because it was biased. The entry is to be left neutral, its obvious that the creator meant it to be about not escaping to your fantasies, but it was badly written when concerned with one character.

Cosmetor: "The problem is that many players interpret..." is not neutral. It's a biased Justifying Edit that shifts the blame from the writers who used a flawed comparison to the players who interpreted it differently than the writers meant it.

Tanto: Cut it altogether. It's not broken internally, in any case, so it doesn't belong here. The problem with it is a result of player interpretation; Marche is clearly depicted as being right within the game. (Watch the ending again.)

Besides, we don't need another goddamn FFTA flamewar. It isn't worth it.

arromdee: Having Aesops that are broken because of player interpretation is legitimate. Basically, a broken aesop is one that doesn't work. I don't think this has to mean it doesn't work for 100% of the audience; something that doesn't work for a substantial portion of the audience counts. And this one qualifies for that.

Tanto: ...No. What the entry actually says, if you read more than the first line, is that the moral is added in at the last minute (which FFTA doesn't do), then breaks it (which FFTA also doesn't do).

The Aesop in FFTA is alluded to at the very beginning of the story, and by the end Marche is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be absolutely right. It would be a Broken Aesop if Marche preached the "don't live in your fantasies" moral for the whole game but then decided to stay in Ivalice in the ending, or let his friends do so... The warped/broken aspect of it is 100% in the eyes of the beholder here, so it does not qualify. Period.

This is the kind of thing that would properly go in The Trope Formerly Known As Warped Aesop, and is in fact one of the main reasons TTFKAWA was deleted: It lended itself too well to people bitching about plot elements they found personally objectionable. If people force Broken Aesop down the same path, then it's headed for the same fate, I'm afraid.

Cosmetor: No, it's broken because the situation which teaches the Aesop isn't what the game claims it is. Ivalice was not an escapist fantasy, it was a real place. It still existed after their world is restored. Their problems were actually fixed there. It belongs here because it preached an Aesop that it didn't teach. It's obvious what they meant; their comparative situation was just different enough that it didn't apply there. And don't try to bring personal bias or accusations thereof into this; the only thing I'm personally annoyed about is that someone rewrote the entry to insult the intelligence of those who thought it applied.

Tanto: But that's complete bullshit. Nothing in the game suggests that Ivalice is real; it's just fanon. (It's clearly not the same Ivalice as the one from FFXII, FFT, Vagrant Story, etc.)

And their problems weren't fixed there. They thought they were, but it's just a fantasy. Again, watch the ending.

(I hate arguing about this; it's so fucking stupid. But it doesn't belong here, and I'll delete it again if you insist it does. There are plenty of places to bitch about perceived hypocrisy in this game, but this isn't it.)

Cosmetor: So you're basically saying that the game was a magically-induced mass hallucination?

Tanto: Or it's All Just A Dream, whatever you prefer. It's a redux of The Wizard Of Oz, basically. Nobody whined about Dorothy abandoning her perfect world when she decided to go back to the Dust Bowl to live with her dirt-farming, teetotaling aunt and uncle in the midst of the Great Depression. Ritz and Mewt have it easy.

Charred Knight: I should point out that the after game content was created for the international version. In the original Japanese version, after the main quest ended the game was over, for the American version they added extra quest after the quest was over so you can play as characters like Cid, Ritz, and Shera. The Ivalice in FFTA has taken over the real world, and added additional people based on characters found in the Ivalice Alliance games in particular Final Fantasy XII. By rejecting the ideal fantasy world Marche, has chosen to accept that life is not perfect, and to work with what life deals you. By doing this people learn new life lessons, and are improved because of it, for example Cid gets over the depression of his wife's death. Also The problem is many people is neutral because many people did not get the Aesop and that is a problem. I don't see how the hell that is not bias. It's not Square Enix's fault you misintepreted the point of the game.

Cosmetor: It isn't neutral and neither are you. "This is what they meant to say and you're a stupid whiny spoiled brat who Just Doesn't Get It if you even consider anything else" Just Doesn't Cut It. I understand what they were trying to say. And if, in your own words, Ivalice had "taken over the real world", then that interpretation would break the Aesop as explained before.

That Other 1 Dude: That thing about Danny Phantom is really just characters not learning their lesson, as it's still seen as bad when he does those things later.

Ununnilium:

Then again, that's a thing all members of his species can do.
Yeah, but he never had to work for his longevity. In whole, it seems that the Doctor's philosophy is that the humanity should never change and every time it does, it's for the worse. He's paid lip-service to the opposite but really, the "semi-humans" of the distant future were more human, physiologically and psychologically than the "pure human" racist Cassandra. And finally, he's full of glee when he finds out that right at the end of the universe the humanity has abandoned all the attempts to become better than they are supposed to be, in his opinion, and have settled to be no different from the modern day humans. And when they start trying to improve themselves, things go badly, once again.

...what? The fact that the semi-humans were better than the pure-human seems to go exactly against the point you seem to be making. And where the heck was the "glee"? I saw no glee, only sadness.

On Scrubs, the moral of the episode "My Musical" is that you should be wary about getting exactly what you want, because you might miss what you left behind to get it. Which is all well and good if it didn't imply that the patient of that episode shouldn't have had her life-threatening brain aneurysm fixed so that she could keep hearing singing in her head instead. That didn't stop it from being one of the best episodes of the season, though.

I only saw the latter half of this episode (came in during the "Guy Love" number), but it didn't seem to imply this at all. Sure, she missed the singing in a sort of bittersweet mono no aware way, but it was clearly shown that things were better this way.

In His Dark Materials, the Big Bad, Mrs. Coulter, teams up with the protagonists to fight an evil deity. The Aesop was supposed to be that no one is beyond redemption, but Coulter had long been established to enjoy sucking the souls out of little children by this point.
- Actually, the Aesop was more likely intended to be "even the most horrible person can have some good qualities", as the books continuously rammed the point that it's difficult, if not outright impossible to make clear black & white distinctions between good and evil. It's worth noting that Mrs. Coulter never really joins the good guys and only does things that are helpful to them for one, single motivation, which is protecting her daughter. If that single issue hadn't been there, she would have been a pure villain with no redeeming qualities. Reminds you of someone?

...so, if it's wrong, pull it out. >>v

The Aesop in the third movie seemed like it was going to be something about not running away from your responsibilities. But then Artie becomes king. Shrek dragged him over there in the first place to avoid becoming king and, uh, it worked? Though the responsiblity more important for him to face is raising his kids as nobody else should be doing that, while there are plenty of other people that can be king.

This says "There's a Broken Aesop. Although, come to think of it, there isn't."

This troper is amazed nobody has mentioned "Pay It Forward" yet. She defies you to find a film with more Broken and Family Unfriendly Aesops.

...can you tell us what they are?

In The Hottie & The Nottie, an alleged Romantic Comedy about a nerd named Nate who must find a man for June, a troll of a woman with warts, excess body hair, and rotting teeth, in order to win over her best friend and his childhood crush. Predictably, it's only after June gets a massive makeover (i.e. her reasonably attractive actress removes the halloween makeup) does she suddenly become acceptable to Nate and they pair up. But honestly, would you expect anything less superficial from a movie starring Paris Hilton?

Similarly, where's the Broken Aesop here?

The animated special Cartoon All-Stars To The Rescue was supposed to remind kids that drugs are BAD. What some kids walked away with, however, was the idea that if they did drugs, their favorite cartoon stars would come to visit them.
- Although, if you're stoned, you very well may see your favorite cartoon stars visiting.

...did anyone actually walk away with this? Frankly, it seems like the kind of thing an ironic twentysomething would come up with, not an actual kid.

Kaleido Star spent its entire first season hammering home the message that you have to work for your dreams (and, venturing into Family Unfriendly Aesop country, probably endure constant humiliation in the process). It also promoted the "a sweet nature and friendship will make everything all right" aesop that's so popular with shoujo. This aesop isn't so much "broken" as shattered from the first episode of the second season, where obnoxious, ambitious May jumps onto the stage and tries to forcibly take over from Sora... and is then given pretty much instant promotion from newcomer to star, merrily skipping over the hard work and "prove yourself" lessons that Sora had to go through.

This is already over in Lost Aesop, and it seems to fit better over there; the breaking mentioned in this example is part of the whole pattern that makes it Lost.

The whole existence of the Sharingan, which copies others' techniques, sort of spits in the face of hard work. Of course the founder of the Uchiha clan is established to be one of the most evil people ever, and its stronger attacks are gained by killing your friends and siblings so that's to be expected.

Self-defeating.

Gundam Wing ends with the Earth throwing away all weapons, embracing peace, and the Gundam pilots retiring. The Aesop of the 49 episodes series being that the Earth would be better off without war, and absolute pacifism is the way to go. Gundam Wing Endless Waltz has the Barton Foundation conquering the defenseless Earth in about 20 minutes. No, EW ends with the Gundams destroyed, but the activation of The Preventers to replace them.
- Actually, the Aesop of Gundam Wing is that communication and understanding make the world a better place; peace is something you earn, not something that five kids with Humongous Mecha hand you on a silver platter. The point of Endless Waltz is the main cast of the show, having already learned this, passing the message along to the Muggles.

Another if-it's-wrong-take-it-out one.

In numerous Carl Barks and Don Rosa Uncle Scrooge stories, it's clear that we're intended to view Scrooge Mc Duck's diligence, intelligence, hard work, and general sense of fairness in accumulating his fortune as his strongest and most admirable characteristics. More often than not, however, he ends each adventure no richer than before, his discovered treasures gone to another from bad luck or some law technicality. Certainly, his already vast fortune limits how sympathetic the reader may be to this, but the frequency with which his and his family's hard work turns out to be all for nothing may qualify it for Family Unfriendly Aesop status. Especially bad since his fortune means that he could discover treasure without needing a Snap Back for the sake of future plots.
- Unfortunately, at this day and age, a person who loots national treasures of other nations is deservingly called a thief, no matter how many legal loopholes he may have in his disposal. Such artefacts stolen in the past are a source of international tension today. Rosa, and sometimes also Barks, work around this problem by allowing Scrooge to find the treasures, but not keep them, apart from few mementoes. They also make it very clear that whatever he might claim, Scrooge isn't hunting treasures to increase his massive fortune - he could usually make larger sums by ordinary business, and indeed is likely to lose money in his trips, because he's unable to make any decisions during them - he is seeking adventure and excitement that he had in his younger days, but lost when he got wealthy. It would be a far more Broken Aesop, if a rich American could steal the treasures of Third World countries without consequence.

And another.

The story of David Versus Goliath is supposed to show the underdog defeating a far stronger enemy and thereby giving a moral along the lines of "Have faith in God and/or yourself and you can do anything". Somewhat broken by the fact that, despite being the smaller of the two, David was the one with superior weapons technology.
- No, actually. David wins because most giants have poor circulation thus little resistance to injury, and David is a grade-A Badass who kills Lions and Bears with his bare hands on a regular basis.

See, to me, the Aesop of this seemed to be "you should stand up to bullies". Either that, or "intelligence is better than brute strength".

This troper has acted in a play for her church, which involved several Bible stories illustrating the importance of faith. Some of the stories acted out were those of Job (Being tortured just to see if he'd keep his faith) and Lot (whose wife is turned to a pillar of salt for an impulsive and rather trivial act.) It makes one wonder if the God in question is really worth worshipping.
- Job is especially disturbing, as the titular character becomes unknowingly nothing more than a pawn in a trivial bet of divine beings. Furthermore, it implies that God can easily be persuaded into all sorts of nastiness by none other than Satan — and furthermore, it outright states that Satan is powerless unless God deliberately gives him the right to act.
- Of course there are other examples, most involving the Hebrews happily slaughtering anybody who happens to be on their way or breaks laws that's existence they are unaware of.

These seem more like Family Unfriendly Aesops.

Qit el-Remel: Removing the ridiculous (and grossly over-used) "discrimination excuse" from the South Park entry. The idea that opposing bigotry is itself bigoted is patently bogus, and easily countered with the old saw about the result of good people doing nothing.

Ununnilium: Agreed.

Ununnilium:

Likewise, the Aesop of Shrek is "Don't mistreat those who look different from you"... but nobody is ever punished for the endless short jokes at Farquaad's expense. So it becomes "Don't mistreat those who look different, unless they're the Designated Villain".
- Shrek was feared and hated because he was an ogre who are believed to be cruel monsters who eat people which in Shrek's case is not true whereas Farquaad was mocked for his height, not his personality.

This is true. Thus, pulled.

arromdee: Why is that a reason to pull it? They both boil down to appearance—it's just a little indirect for Shrek (they deduce that he's evil based on his appearance, and is mistreated for that, as opposed to Farquaad, who is directly mistreated for his appearance).

Ununnilium: Um...

Well, you see...

Nah, I got nothin'. I'm not sure exactly what I was thinking. >>

Ununnilium:

In a story arc for the comic Monty, Monty and a time-traveling professor go back in time to take an old comic from young Monty so they can sell it for a lot of money when they get back to the future. But when they get back to the present, Monty has a huge house, a loving wife, a cute kid, and lots of money, though he's an unsuccessful Republican advisor, the US is an ultra-environmental hellhole because Al Gore became president (tiny electric cars, for one thing), and his friend Moondog is unemployed (because he didn't hang out with Monty that much, he got a business degree, and got a job at Enron). Why? Because by taking away that comic, young Monty didn't develop quite as much of an interest in comics and sci-fi, so he concentrated on other things and became more attractive to girls. The aesop is either broken or mixed, because Monty finally decides to give the comic back to his younger self. So either focusing on more important things in life can lead to success, or trying to change who you are can lead to misery. Or maybe just don't bother time traveling. Or maybe give time traveling a shot, because things might end up better.

This doesn't seem broken at all. Family Unfriendly Aesop maybe, but even then... —-

Cipher: As bad as Jack Chick is, I could not find anything on his site that said that homosexuals were not human. In fact, he's said that Christians should pray for homosexuals and let them know that Jesus loves them. So I deleted those two last comments about him hating them. I left the larger part because that part definitely fits as a broken aesop.

Ununnilium:

Steve is injected with "super-soldier" serum until he transforms into a muscled god-at which point the genetically perfect, blond-haired, blue-eyed superman is ready to battle everything the evil Nazis represent.

Cracked.com on Captain America

This is Very No.

Different season, different opponents, though. It also perhaps helped that Yubel and Judai's Fate had been set in stone in Judai's previous life. Saiou simply didn't have the back-history, just an ability to cheat at a children's card game.

Justifying Edit; it's still breaking the aesop, no matter why so in-canon.

However, isn't Yuuko limited by the principles and rules that give her her magic powers, in a sense? In this case, she couldn't tell the woman what the ring was for because she'd immediately deny she was a liar, thus piling up even more bad karma and much quicker. Not to mention, Yuuko's mission is just to give wishes and artifacts, not to be Team Mom to her customers; she often tells them "that artifact is NOT for you", but they take them anyway (i.e.: the monkey paw).

Conversation In The Main Page. Also, piling up bad karma is different than directly causing her to be run over. And she didn't tell her any such thing — did she?

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer has a similar Aesop about tolerance, but the message ends up being "Tolerance is good — as long as the weirdo is useful.

That's silly. Tolerance is unilaterally presented as good (witness the friendships between the various rejects), it's just that most of them aren't willing to admit it until one of the misfits actively sticks his neck out for them.

The South Park episode "The Death Camp of Tolerance" has a good moral, rendered broken by awkward writing. Mr. Garrison's big speech at the end is meant to give the lesson that tolerance does not mean accepting behavior that would be inappropriate no matter what orientation, race, or gender the person doing it is. However, what he actually says is that tolerance simply means you can hate gay people or anything else all you want, as long as you don't act on it.
- Isn't that what tolerance is? If you liked something, you wouldn't need to tolerate it. You only tolerate things you dislike.
- This is more likely a Spoof Aesop than a real Aesop, much like the rest of South Park's Aesops.
  - Which, if thought again, actually make more sense than most Aesops. They are indeed played for laughs, but still, they generally make sense. Sure, the episodes themselves generally mock the people's behavior and show exceptions of Aesops, but you can easily agree with the stated lesson (given the situations).

Self-defeating.

He was quite intelligent: he figured out where the ticket was by using his brain and pointed out the ramifications of a machine that could teleport matter to Wonka, pointing out that he was using it for trivialities. In the end, one is left with the distinct impression that being smart is a bad thing. Apparently, you can't be educated and imaginative at the same time. Television has something to do with it, but we're not exactly sure what it is.

Actually, it was still his Know-it-all-ness that undid him. He simply jumped on the Wonka-vision without stopping to think about the whole "stuck in TV a fraction of my size" thing.
He incorrectly assumed that anyone who built a shrinking machine/teleportation device would be smart enough to find some way to reverse the process.

This part doesn't have anything with the actual Broken Aesop.

In the "Lazarus Project" episode of Doctor Who, the Doctor comments that the life-extension researcher got what he deserved when he was turned into the Monster Of The Week. (Considering that the Doctor is a centuries-old being who can regenerate himself into new younger bodies...)
- The difference is, though, that the Doctor's longevity and regeneration are natural to his race. The researcher, on the other hand, was playing God and trying to make humanity into something it shouldn't be.

Thus, not an example, and thus, taken out.

Andrew: Took this out: Recently, a series of ads have began running on American TV trying to tell teenagers that drugs and alcohol are bad for you, because you might do something stupid which will be put on the internet. Suspiciously, all of these ads feature teenage girls who expose themselves. This sends the aesop that drugs and alcohol are bad for girls because it might cause them to betray their feminine modesty, but are A-OK for teenage boys

Look, I can get on board with mocking anti-drug advertisements, but that's an incredible stretch.

grendelkhan: Well, it's certainly a Double Standard. I'll add it under... My Girl Is Not A Slut, I think.

Tanto: It's very irritating to have a long edit Edit Stomped because someone wanted to put back a page quote that had already been deleted once before. Anyway...

Added in a disclaimer. If it ain't an Aesop, it ain't an Aesop.

Twilight. Just... Twilight. Apparently, when your boyfriend informs you he is constantly having to resist the animalistic urge to snap your neck and drink your blood, that this is his true nature, that seeing you in any sort of danger makes him almost murderous with rage and that he's a monster, and that you should stay the hell away- you should fall further in love with him and do anything to be around him. I sense a generation of young women dating ex-cons. Because it's romantic!

Does not appear to be an Aesop; just warped. And people do do this.

The PBS series Maya and Miguel had one doozy. The Latino twin stars of the show and two of their friends are unable to get into a movie so must spend the afternoon at the museum, where they learn about ancient cultures and have a better time than they would have at the movie. A fine message about the value of history, right? Except that each kid wanders into a section of the museum dedicated to their own ethnic group — Miguel sees ancient Mexican art, an Asian friend finds the Chinese exhibit, etc. All of a sudden the message starts looking like "you should only be interested in your own ethnic group, not others."

Does not appear to be an Aesop. Unfortunate Implications, maybe, but not an Aesop.

Many, many in Greek mythology, usually boiling down to "don't screw with the Gods, no matter how pointlessly capricious they might be acting at the time". This is similar to the frequent Judeo-Christian Aesops of trusting in the divine being and obeying His will, but it's Broken in the Greek pantheon's case by the fact that they are even more vindictive than He is, for less cause. The Origin Stories of many classical monsters are illustrative of this.
- Particularly Medusa, a beautiful priestess who had sex with the god Poseidon in Athena's temple, enraging the goddess and causing her to curse the girl with serpentine hair and a gaze that kills. This was seen as a fitting punishment for her sacrilegious deed, and Medusa herself as an evil monster to be slain by the hero Perseus... despite the fact that in most versions of the story, she was raped by Poseidon and had done nothing wrong except apparently being pretty enough to make goddesses jealous and catch Poseidon's attention. Just how effective "No means no" is when the sexual aggressor is a god factors into plenty of Greek myths, especially those containing Zeus. Values Dissonance indeed.
- On the topic of Zeus, his many dubiously-consentual dalliances with human girls lead his jealous wife Hera to drop her usual role as a queenly, dignified mother goddess and pursue vindictive revenge... not on her cheating husband, who is King of the Gods and thus immune to retribution, but on the women he sleeps with and the children of their union. The victims are usually portrayed as being blameless (most of the children end up becoming heroes (like Heracles) or even gods (the twins Artemis and Apollo) but Hera is never called out for her actions and Zeus is never really called out for his infidelity, which causes their suffering in the first place.
- Arachne. Full Stop. She boasted that she was more skilled at weaving than Athena. When Athena challenged her to a weaving contest, she won, making a flawless tapestry illustrating the gods' infidelity and general bastardry. It is not hubris if you really are that good. Athena then smashes her tapestry and turns her into a spider.
  - It's not quite that bad in some other version, like the one where Athena indeed tore up her tapestry, partly because she considered its subject matter offensive, and Arachne was so upset she ran off and hanged herself. At this point Athena felt a bit sorry and brought her back to life — as a spider. The gods always did have an odd idea of doing a person a favour. (You poor thing, you seem upset or in danger, let me turn you into a tree to make you feel better.)
  - And there are some versions of the myth in which Arachne loses the weaving duel.
  - The opening of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys puts it best: "This is a story of a time long ago, when the ancient gods were petty and cruel, and they plagued mankind with suffering."
- In this troper's opinion, these don't really qualify as Broken Aesops. Most Greek myths don't say the gods are right to abuse humanity the way they do, just that there's not much we puny mortals can do about it, so we might as well try and get on the gods' good side. Definitely a Family Unfriendly Aesop, and possibly a case of Values Dissonance, but not actually Broken.

As the last bit of natter says, I don't believe these are actually supposed to be moralistic tales. They're more explanations of the human condition. Now, the Bible... but I won't go there.

Ununnilium: Yeah, agreed on this last bit. No Aesops here, broken or otherwise.

That Other 1 Dude: Disputed

The Avatar The Last Airbender Grand Finale stance on no killing falls apart when you notice than in real life the death toll of the Fire Nation would have been enormous. With no boats, or islands nearby the soldiers who fell out of the airship would have died of drowning, the soldier into the tank would have died of heat exposure (during the attack of Jeong Jeong), or died when King Bumi threw the tanks about 100 feet in the air. Don't even get started on the people in the building who King Bumi would have killed.

There was no lesson about not killing people; that was just something Aang felt personally. No one else but him said they were going to pull any punches.

Rogue 7: I would argue the opposite point: The Aesop set up was: To defeat great evil, you may have to kill. And then, suddenly, you don't, if you get help from a giant lion-turtle...thing.

Charred Knight: Rewatch the Ba Sing Se scene, and watch how Jeong Jeong, pushes back tanks USING FIRE, King Bumi flips tanks 100 feet in the air only to have the Fire Nation soldiers be unscathed, and tell me the staff isn't trying to have a nobody from the Fire Nation dies thing. The only deaths I can think of happening are the guys on the airship, and Mai's family.

That Other 1 Dude: If they're An Aesop, it's less "killing is always bad", as it is "if you don't want to kill someone you don't have to" and/or "stopping someone without killing them is never impossible, just very hard". It's not as if anyone else comes of that bad for saying he should just kill him (and this isn't the first time Sokka's killed a bunch of soldiers before). And quit whining about that "fires pushing things"; firebending has always been shown to be able to do that. On an entirely different note why is none of that in spoilers?

Charred Knight: The problem is that its UNREALISTIC, you can't fight an actual war like that, the actions that the White Lotus, and Sokka would have took would have killed soldiers in the thousands. An Aesop is useless if you can't actually use it in the real world. When the hell is this situation going to come up? America hasn't been attacked large scale since 1942, and with the creation of Nukes no one is stupid enough to risk nuclear armaggedon. If the aesop is supposed to be if your being bullied just turn away, and not kill them, than that's an aesop for crazy people since only a crazy kid would seriously think of killing someone.

That Other 1 Dude: Well, then even if that's right, it would just be an overly idealistic aesop, not a Broken Aesop.

Dark Knight: So Lucius Fox lets Bruce Wayne walk away with explosives, a tank, an extremely lethal Batsuit, not to mention cooking the books to siphon off the millions of company dollars it takes to pay for all this, and covers up for a known fugitive wanted by the police... but when Batman wants to use the sonic cell phone trick to find the Joker before he murders thousands of people, somehow that and that alone crosses the line?

Tanto: Not An Aesop! Jesus! Read the disclaimer! In the story =/= "We, the writers, advocate this behavior."

I swear, every time I come on to the Aesop pages, I grow to hate humanity a little more. I'd say "Reading comprehension is good", but I'd settle for just "comprehension".

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut for inaccuracy & natter and placed here:

The show also used "force a character to act weird" bit when Worf was used to express discomfort with the concept of a sexless species, an opinion he never exhibited before or again when faced with other species (such as the cloned Jem'Hadar, or the inherently sexless Founders).
- Of course when those races are trying to kill you, discomfort tends to be near the bottom of the list of things you notice. Besides it's not out of the line for Klingons in general, whom see romance as almost important as battle, thier creation myth has the first klingon and his wife kill thier gods essentially through the power of love and sheer asskickery. Worf doesn't really seem out of character for this troper.

"This editor remembers a retelling of the 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf" in a modern context, just replace boy with girl, wolf with fire and villagers with fire brigade and you there. The third time she tries to call-out the fire brigade there actually is a fire, her house burns down with her inside still pleading on the telephone to send help. You know the moral 'Never lie incase you have to repeat it as truth.' This would be all well and good except for the fact there is a law in Britain against ignoring a 999/112 call because of this very senario, even if they know it's a hoax - in this story they only suspect it is."

Robin Adams: I think this editor is talking about Hilaire Belloc's poem Matilda, Who Told Lies, And Was Burned To Death, written in 1907. In that case, this is a Spoof Aesop.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: But they didn't have 999 in 1907, did they?

arromdee:

Moved the Adam Sandler example to Spoof Aesop. Guys, if your example starts with "Parodied with" it isn't a Broken Aesop.

Deleted Rumpelstilskin. This is at best a Family Unfriendly Aesop, and probably not even that. Many versions of the story say the girl had to spin gold or die, so it isn't greed; and the audience clearly isn't supposed to think of Rumplestilskin's deal as being a fair deal. The moral becomes "it's okay to cheat in a drastically unfair deal that you only made because your life depended on it", which isn't even really a Family Unfriendly Aesop.

Cassius335: Removed

Real life example: Top Gear once finished an episode with Jeremy Clarkson meaningfully declaring "Speed kills!" - immediately after showing footage of co-presenter Richard Hammond surviving what's believed to be the world's fastest car crash.

Spoof Aesop.

The second season of Yu-Gi-Oh GX has the Aesop of Screw Destiny, but then, Judai is shown a vision of his future... which ends up coming true in the third season, reverting the Aesop to "You Cant Fight Fate".

This one just flat out wrong. Judai was facing different opponents, after all. If it had been Saiou both times, maybe. Yubel was just better at the "chilren's card game" thing.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Pity. You'd think that if Judai could Screw Destiny in the second season, he could Screw the Destiny of those visions of Yubel. There certainly seems to have been incentive!

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here. If it isn't a broken aesop, it does not belong with the examples...

Power Rangers Jungle Fury: If not actually broken, certainly a strange choice of aesop in "The Blind Leading The Blind". Theo learns that he must focus on the task immediately at hand, rather than trying to handle everything at once. Learning this gives him the strength to face this week's obstacle by fighting two monsters simultaneously.
- This is isn't such a problem given both of the monsters were attacking him...

Red Shoe: Why isn't this an example? The Justifying Edit is irrelevant. Yes, there is a good in-story reason why he is fighting two monsters at the same time. This does not change the fact that he spends the entire episode learning "Don't try to do two things at once," and the climax is "Do two things at once." Putting it back in (but preserving discussion to stop someone pulling it out again.

Ununnilium: Taking out the "not actually broken" part, since that seems to be the problem.

Isn' the Scrubs example a matter of character development for Turk, as he learsn in My Case Study how bad it is for him ot get attached to his patients?

Tanto: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is only broken if you willfully ignore huge chunks of the story in order to make it work. It is not supported by anything, including the sequel. Please stop putting it in here.

{Bob}}: There's always been something that bothered me about this article and, reading through the main text just now, I finally figured it out. WHAT THE HELL IS THIS ARTICLE ACTUALLY ABOUT?!

Is it: Basically, a Broken Aesop is a story that forces an anvilicious moral on you at the last minute, even though it isn't at all a moral that the episode actually contained (though, unlike the Spoof Aesop, they didn't do it on purpose). It's an Anvil Ex Machina.

Or is it about:

One of the easiest ways to break An Aesop is to couple the moral message of taking responsibility for your actions with a Reset Button or Snap Back. So... the lesson here is that I have to take responsibility for my actions, but there aren't going to be any actual consequences of my actions, since we'll have all forgotten this by next week.

Or is it:

Another way to break the moral is to have the resolution rely on a Deus Ex Machina, a Fantastic Aesop, or a Twilight Zone Twist. Often, it is the motivation which makes the difference between right and wrong: lying to help yourself is wrong, but lying to help someone else is sometimes okay. But if An Aesop is learned because of the consequences of the actions, and not the motives, the moral gets distorted. When Failure Is The Only Option, the moral also gets dicey: it's okay to do some ethically questionable things to save your closest friends from an immediate and definite danger at this very moment, but not to instantly get back to the Alpha Quadrant (which would save your entire crew from the potential, uncertain dangers they'll face during the next 70 years or so going the long way).

Seriously, what is it about?

An Aesop comes out absolutely nowhere at the last minute, like a Giant Space Flea From Nowhere.
An Aesop is delivered, but the characters don't actually learn it.
An Aesop is delivered that... somehow doesn't work... for some reason?

Tanto: "Aesop is presented, but isn't adherred to in-story."

Ununnilium: To be fair, that isn't quite what the entry says; I'll fiddle with it a bit.

In the South Park episode "The List", Kyle is visited by the spirit of Abe Lincoln, who attempts to make him feel good about his "ugliness" by explaining that ugly people will grow up successful because they have to work hard, while attractive people will inevitably grow up to be useless and boring. And naturally, Kyle accepted the message by the end of the episode.

Not quite sure how this is broken. Could you make it clearer?

Sara: The aesop is supposed to be "looks don't matter", but ends up being "pretty people will never amount to anything worthwhile". And now that I think about it, it'd be more appropriate to list it as a parody, or playing with a trope. Since the broken-ness is pretty much right there instead of Unfortunate Implications.

Pro-Mole: Moving discussion(and further discussing):

Um, we're not talking an Aesop like No matter how big and powerful you get, you'll never be immune to trouble from the little things (or little guys)? (Similar to how the mouse freed the lion from the hunter's net, which was The big and powerful can't do everything, and sometimes the small and seemingly helpless can actually help out.) Seems like a pretty straightforward Aesop couched in poetic language that should make it easier to remember.
- And why would Aesop — again, I say, faithful to the straight-forward style fo the original greek fable — suddenly start giving his Aesops in figurative language instead of the direct one he uses in other fables?

Ununnilium:

Well yes, there was no moral that you shouldn't listen to soulstones. They are in fact absolute indicators of compatibility.

...which means "magic is right after all", which is exactly what the entry was saying.

The implications of these casting decisions are rather trivial compared to the underlying messages of the actual story. The ending of the episode strongly implies that Riker's love interest will voluntarily submit to treatment that will make her conform to the genderless Status Quo. This treatment will most likely come down to Conversion Therapy, FGM or both. The first severely broken Aeseop here is that non-human, read non-Western, cultures have the right to maim and brainwash those that do not conform their sexual norms. The second is that non-humans, read non-Westerners, cannot be happy if they turn away from the culture they were raised in even if said culture maims them and takes away their individuality.

I thought the whole point was that her doing this was a bad thing.

Voyager did this again in "Real Life": a ex-Maquis crewmember is infected by an alien parasite, and the Doctor can only save her by relying on a Cardassian war criminal's Mengele-ish research; the war criminal himself appears via the magic of holodeckery. (It's a straightforward metaphor — Cardassians as Nazis, Bajorans as Jews and Maquis as resistance fighters.) Over the objections of the Bajoran crewmembers and of the dying crewmember herself, she's cured, but the evil, evil research is destroyed right afterwards. The hologram even points this out, but the Doctor just ignores him. So the moral is that using morally tainted research is bad, unless it's crucial to the plot; it's all right for all those other people to die offscreen in the unspecified future, because we don't have to see them.
Crell Moset: You can erase my program, Doctor, but you can never change the fact that you've already used some of my research. Where was your conscience when B'Elanna was dying on that table? Ethics, Morality, conscience; funny how they all go out the airlock when we need something. Are you and I really so different?
The Doctor: Computer, delete medical consultant program and all related files.

Honestly, this seems like intentional ambiguity. I haven't actually seen the episode, mind you, but from this description, it seems like it's not trying to teach a lesson; it's showing off the Doctor's character and the fact that he will do morally questionable things to save his crewmates.

The Harry Potter books have some trouble with the exact status of killing people. Death is far from the worst thing in the world, but murder is the supreme act of evil and damages the soul irrevocably, but it's okay if you do it to spare someone pain, but it's not okay if you do it to save the lives of hundreds and have no other reasonable option, but it's okay if you do it using a technicality of wand behavior instead of a curse. Maybe they should have said avada kedavra was evil and left it at that. However, this could be considered an example of the characters developing an increasingly complex worldview rather than a broken attempt at a simple Aesop, particularly as the more complex ideas and contradictions emerge as Harry grows up.
- It's actually pretty straight foreward. If you murder someone in cold blood it will harm your soul. If you do it to protect your friends, spare the person suffering or to defend yourself it won't. It's the intention that determines how your soul will be off afterwards, not the execution.
- In another Harry Potter book, the Sorting Hat delivers An Aesop directly on how the houses are supposed to band together. Too, Dumbledore several times tries to impress on Harry that the traits Slytherin prized aren't necessarily negative ones. Of course, when the series ended, there were a grand total of two Slytherins who actually helped the good guys without wanting something directly in return, and the actual aesop wound up being more like "It's okay to discriminate against people, except the rare 'good ones' out of that group you might find."
  - That's not true. In the final battle the Slytherins retreated at first, but most of them (if not all) came back with reinforcements later. Without these the battle might not have been won. You can argue if that's cowardly or just smart, but either way, they stood by the other houses and not the Deatheaters.
- Back to the subject of "how bad is murder" for a moment: Keep in mind that we only have Slughorn's word that murder is the ONLY thing that damages your soul. And while Slughorn is one of the good guys, he is certainly no stranger to the Slytherin way of thinking. It's entirely possible that Voldemort's soul was only split by murder because ''he believed'' that murder was the worst thing you could do to someone else.

Pulling this whole thing out due to heavily-entrenched Natter.

To make it worse, the main thing Teevee was mad at was that all of Wonka's amazing technology was being used to make candy.

Doesn't really matter to the example, and isn't an example itself.

It gets even worse, they decided to modernise the story by replacing the scene where he watches television with playing video games with loads of anti-gaming tropes (including shouting "die" at the screen, this troper hates that stereotype). Because of this... we never actually see him watching television making his supposed flaw an informed abbility.

Already covered in the entry.

The contrived anti-death-penalty message of The Life Of David Gale.
- This is in dispute. Certainly, if the audience is meant to agree that David's example is proof, it's ridiculously self-contradictory. "The death penalty is wrong because it leads to the execution of innocent people. And I'll prove it by framing myself, ensuring that I am found guilty and sentenced to death, and arranging it so the evidence that I didn't do it only surfaces after I'm dead." However, the movie may be less about his message and more about his motive. After all, he did it because he believed in his cause even when the evidence didn't support his argument. Whether or not the lack of evidence proves the lack of problem is left to the audience.

Not An Example, then.

Don't forget the part where the friends realize that pretending to be abstinent and "understanding" of women can get them laid. And the implied moral that men can't really think about more than just sex. And the part where no "romantic" movie is complete unless the male lead is embarrassed in some way and/or has to apologize/chase down to the female lead.

Are any of these actually Broken Aesops, though?

According to WALL-E, big businesses are destroying the environment and technologies are alienating us all from each other. Good thing we have this movie from the Disney company to tell us this. Surely its slick CGI will compensate for the very limited dialogue.
- Dialogue isn't everything. Interpersonal connectedness also depends a lot on non-verbal communication, of which the film has plenty.

Indeed. I don't see how this breaks the Aesop at all.

The third movie is even worse in this sense. Apparently being ugly isn't something that can be helped, and people should be tolerant of it, but being handsome is unforgivable. Charming didn't seem that much worse than all the other villains he recruited, but he was apparently the only one who was irredeemable, and completely undeserving of even some moderate level of happiness.
- In terms of actual evil he wasn't that much worse, but he was pretty damn spoiled, and all he'd ever been interested in was the happily ever after he'd been groomed from birth for that Shrek inadvertently robbed him of. So he might actually have been redeemable, if he hadn't been so hung up on the happily ever after he didn't get, instead of the one he could have made for himself.
Where Farquaad is concerned, the movie stresses that first of all, he invites ridicule by being a jerk, and secondary, Shrek and Donkey are, to some extent, just like him. The fact that you, as the audience, feel uncomfortable with the short jokes suggests that the filmmakers have succeeded, if you believe the presented Aesop. Shrek and Donkey are not presented as role models. Indeed, the whole movie is - how to put this? - a satire full of intentionally broken Aesops, cannibalistic heroes, the abuse of animals, humans, and sentient cookies, and the skewering of traditional fairy tale tropes. It's Beauty and the Beast, with the ending done right, but it doesn't anoint any of the characters as saints. The sequels make it clear, I think, that we are not supposed to think Shrek is above reproach or Fionna is fair or Donkey or Puss should be construed as generally good sources of advice.
- This troper things that the previous Justifying Edit put way more thought into this than the writers did.
- Welcome to 75% of literary analysis.
Shrek 3 seems to have lost the satirical element, slipping from Aesops being intentionally broken to make a point to just... broken. Technically it broke the Aesop of the first two movies rather than its own, but it does seem awkward how the message seemed to change from "It's ok to be yourself" to "It's ok to be like Shrek." Wasn't it strange how the ONLY villain to not be redeemed was the one who wasn't born a hideous monster?
- And although it's wrong for Shrek to manipulate Arty into being king just because he doesn't want the responsibility himself, it all turns out all right because it's Arthur's destiny anyway.
- On the other hand, if Shrek had convinced Arty by explaining how things went when he actually tried to do the job set before him, there'd be less stylish teenage angst. Hell, I'D take over for Shrek, after that fiasco.
- Another unintentionally broken Aesop in Shrek 3 concerns the princesses' conversion to feminism. They spend all that time and energy kicking physical ass, but still hew to the automatic assumption that the ruler of Far, Far Away must be male. Queen Lillian is clearly capable of ruling the kingdom, so why doesn't she?

Ye gods the natter. Compressing down what's useful.

Um... How is this broken?
- It's broken because the film makes the aforementioned Aesop very clear... and yet makes fun of fat people anyway.
This troper would argue that encouraging respect for rural communities isn't exactly family unfriendly...
- It isn't. That troper is just an ignorant city person, probably from California.

Miscellaneous Conversation In The Main Page.

Also, moving all actual Aesop's Fables examples down into Myths, Legends, and Folklore.

grendelkhan: On returning the Voyager example to the page: The whole point is that it's a thin, thin allegory for an actual recurring debate

; it pretends to come to a conclusion—it's okay to use knowledge learned by evil means to save life—but then decides that, no, it's really not all right, so long as a main character isn't going to die now. A lesson is learned, then broken.

Some Guy: just performed massive cleaning to the page, as a side effect of splitting off Right Place Right Time Wrong Reason. Among one sliced variety the Voyager example just mentioned. As far as I can tell, the episode isn't actually trying to deliver an Aesop. The holographic Cardassian specifically calls the Doctor out on his hypocrisy in the quote that was provided. For something to be a Broken Aesop, the show in question must clearly be trying to teach us something, and really, the only Aesop I can get out of that episode was "all of our options really sucked, maybe this one doesn't suck as much as the others. Maybe."

Some Guy: The other main category of sliced entries- when it's not really a Broken Aesop so much as "life doesn't really fit into Aesops". To wit, the Funky Winkabean- the first breast cancer instance may have been meant for an Aesop, but the fact of the matter is that breast cancer does recur. I think it would be a little disingenuous for these kinds of stories to never let things that can happen in Real Life get in the way of an Aesop.

—- Lots42: I could have sworn that Voyager episode had the Doctor doing all he could to return B'Elanna to Voyager. Of course, even if this was the case, this doesn't change the Broken nature of the episode.

P.S. Honey Nut Cheerios back of the box story: Honey Bee uses trick ball to win game...is praised! WTH.

Anonymous Mc Cartney: Cut this and put it here for now. I saw this one, and that's not quite how I remember it. If I recall correctly, Janeway decided that he oughta be punished and decided he should be confined to sickbay for one week. Being Janeway, she decided this one week after the main story had finished, and he'd already confined himself to sickbay during that time because he was feeling guilty. So I interpreted her decision as limiting the punishment to time served.

Star Trek Voyager. In the two-part episode "Flesh & Blood" sentient holograms were being treated as combat training tools and Turned Against Their Masters. The Emergency Medical Hologram defects to help them, kidnapping B'Elanna in the process. Although the issues are not presented as being clear-cut, there's a definite argument that an artifically-intelligent hologram has rights just like a sentient "flesh and blood" being, but they also have to be responsible for their actions. In the end the EMH returns to Voyager and suggests his mobile emitter (which frees the EMH from the confines of Sickbay) be removed temporarily as punishment. Janeway says it's all her fault because she allowed him to expand his programming in the first place, and refuses to punish him. Which would mean that the EMH is not responsible for his actions and therefore does not have the rights and responsibilities of a sentient being…

Peteman: Which episode was the Family Guy Lois becomes a feminist? That episode described seems to be the episode where Peter gets in touch with his feminine side. Lois gets pissed because Peter is no longer paying attention to her, and the woman outright states that it was because of her somewhat subdued behavior that Peter was the misogynistic prick that he was and was worried about how her children would turn out. Lois understandably gets really pissed at the Straw Feminist in that scene, and subsequently gets into a catfight with her.

Ramidel: Removed the following:

In a Family Guy episode, Lois becomes fed up of being used as a doormat by her family, so she becomes a feminist. However, she soon learns that the feminists she hangs with are contemptuous, or implied to be contemptuous, of housewives like her. Lois gives a big speech about liking her job as a stay-at-home wife and mother and goes home to take care of the family that drove her to the movement to begin with. Show creator Seth McFarlane seems to be implying that feminism is a good thing—as long as feminists continue to wait on their dumb, lazy husbands and kids. The last scene literally depicts Lois doing chores while her family does nothing.
- Not to mention the episode that attempts to preach tolerance toward homosexuality and gay marriage even though being gay is constantly made the butt of jokes throughout the series, including in that very episode. So apparently even though it is correct that intolerence is wrong, intolerence for the sake of a cheap laugh is A-OK!
  - It's Family Guy, friends. Alert us when they deliver an unbroken aesop.

Family Guy is not South Park. It is not trying to tell An Aesop with its punchlines, it's just using everything for cheap laughs.

—- Honore DB: Removed

Buffy The Vampire Slayer- after two years about how our title character is so Cursed With Awesome that she'd rather be dead than have to shoulder it - we're supposed to inspired and moved by her cursing thousands and thousands of other girls with her awesome?

The reason it's a curse is that she's the only one, giving her great responsibility. After the spell, a Slayer can choose whether or not to slay monsters, and to what extent, because the fate of the world isn't on her shoulders. I haven't read Season 8, so I don't know how it turns out, but it makes sense as of the finale, and it's been praised as a demonstration of feminist dogma—you're more empowered when the individuals in your community are empowered too. It's not breaking the Aesop, it's Taking A Third Option to the dilemma of the series.

Patrick: That is a well reasoned counterpoint to my intial posting. Could you have just made an edit arguing it and not just deleted my post altogether? Let's keep it open for discussion, as it is definitely a Your Mileage May Vary moment.

movie007: You both make good points. In all fairness, though, I think Honore DB was worried that adding a counterargument might be too much like Natter. I think it's okay for both posts to be there, though.

Ophicius: Cut:

Doctor Who. Turn Left. "Obey your parents, and the world will come to an end."

That's not a Broken Aesop, that's a Family Unfriendly Aesop. And it's not even the Aesop, anyway.

Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: Cut this and put it here until someone wiser decides just how relevant the Justifying Edit is.

An episode of Captain N The Game Master featured a boy who couldn’t read and who was strongly encouraged to learn by the heroes. However, the villain then encoded a hypnotic message in writing, and the illiterate boy was the only one unaffected, leaving him to save the day.
- He saved the day by learning to write. More significantly, he was the paperboy (yes, that one; at least he wasn't chased by The Grim Reaper this time). While his illiteracy rendered him immune to the brainwashing, it also made him the perfect carrier to infect everyone else. If he had been hypnotized immediately, the evil plan wouldn't have worked as well as it did.

ladyindigo: Deleted this from the bit about Rent -

Let's not forget the character of Benny, who the group rejects after he "sells out" (read: gets a job, something Mark simply abhors, apparently), but is accepted again once he cheats on his wife. Seriously, what?! This show was just one big Broken Aesop, really.

Benny is ostracized because when he bought their building, he promised his former friends could stay there for free - and instead went back on his word, using the rent as leverage to make them do what he wanted. Not to mention trying to pull homeless people out of tent cities so he can expand his corporation through the building space. He gets back in their good graces by using his money for good in paying for Angel's funeral, and they still are happy when his cheating is discovered and he's forced to move - they never voice any approval of it. There are plenty of other problematic things about Rent, which I added to replace what I took out.

Garbonzo42: What the heck is with the Beach Boys example? That belongs in either Unfortunate Implications or Did Not Do The Research. Somewhere not here, at least.

The Kim Possible examples have gotten very talking and opinionated. For example saying Kim isn't allowed to do everything but Batman is because he's a man. Many fans prefer Batman when he works as a group, and in fact when he works entirely on his own a lot of the time the plot's difficulties will decrease. Such as from supervillains out to conquer the world to Gotham crime bosses.

grendelkhan: Removed the following; it's almost a Funny Aneurysm Mmoment, but not quite:

Not strictly speaking An Aesop, but the Beach Boys song "Kokomo" is about forgetting your cares and just relaxing in a Caribbean port. The song lists several Caribbean ports to enjoy the beach in, such as "Port-Au-Prince/I wanna catch a glimpse." Oops...

About the Angel page quote... So, what Aesop did they break? It seems somewhere between Lost and Warped, honestly.

Danel: I removed the entire Harry Potter example, but preserved it here, since each of the points within is stupid and flawed:

The Harry Potter series is rife with these.
- "Racism is bad." Well, it's all well and good to have a villain who hates muggles, muggle-borns, and those of impure descent, and one appreciates the symbolism of the Death Eaters having obvious allusions to both Nazis and the Klan, but it tends to fall a bit short when every single Muggle portrayed in the series is shown to be backwards and comically inept, if not outright cruel.

What are these strange creatures known as "Muggles"? People without magic? What on earth would such fantastic beings be like? It's true that the series really needs to show such people.

"The world isn't divided into good people and Death Eaters." Well, you say that- And they did, in virtually those exact words- but once Dolores Umbridge, the only bad person in the entire book who wasn't a Death Eater (and the one to whom the quote referred), starts working with them in the last book...
- She's working with them because Voldemort's controlling the Ministry of Magic, so technically many of the MOM employees are working with them too (unless they're also rebelling in some way like Arthur Weasley). Also, she agreed with the hatred of "half-bloods" in her original appearance as well, so she was already shown to hold similar biases to Voldemort.

Umbridge isn't the only bad person in the series who wasn't a Death Eater. Not by a long shot. Nor does she ever become one.

"It's our choices that make us good or bad." Which is why every single Death Eater's child is in Slytherin, and is a Death Eater themselves.
- Draco was the only one who was officially a Death Eater. Theodore Nott, Crabbe and Goyle weren't official Death Eaters, and Theodore really doesn't do anything bad in the series except snicker at Hermione in one scene in the sixth book. It was rather significant that Voldemort even allowed someone as young as Draco to join him, he was the only Death Eater who joined while still underage (unless there are other D Es who are Draco's age or younger that weren't mentioned). Elsewhere on this wiki, Harry Potter is mentioned as averting the In The Blood trope, using Sirius as one of a few other examples.

I'm not even sure what the point here is. These are all minor, background characters. This point at least may survive, but really needs to be edited.

Okay, I figured I should just remove this entire example, as none of it seems to make sense.

This can count as either a Broken Aesop or Fridge Brilliance depending on how you look at it. Harry Potter's main moral has always been The Power Of Love triumphing over all. Yet, by having Voldemort thematically select his Soul Jars based on the one place he felt loved and respected (Hogwarts) Voldemort was destroyed, NOT saved, by the love of his old school. Even in Half-Blood Prince, when Voldemort in the past goes to Dumbledore to ask for a teaching post, it's unclear how much of his motivation was wanting a Death Eater keeping an eye on Dumbledore on the students and Hogwarts so much as it was him wanting to teach there again despite his soul going beyond The Point Of No Return.
- Except that Voldemort's "love" of Hogwarts was entirely selfish, based on how he considered it to be "his first kingdom", and the fact that he was descended from a founder reinforced his belief that he was "special" and above even the other students. His choices for Horcruxes were always things which he considered to be part of his mystique, and were all symbols of what he felt made him "better" than any other wizard.

This thing is really murky to begin with because as the other troper said, being attached to a building for selfish reasons is very much not Powerof Love

Another example: the whole series is about tolerance of all kinds, but especially towards muggles, squibs, and muggle borns. How much do we see of the muggles? A few pages at the beginning of every bookand squibs are portrayed as somewhat pathetic. All muggleborns apart from Hermoine are secondary characters-and the only 'main' secondary characters are bad-

The muggle thing seems to have been refuted earlier in this page (of course we don't see much of them, we are them, and the book takes place in the WIZARDING world), I don't even know what the "main secondary characters" is about, as for us not seeing much of muggleborns besides Hermione- um, that's a HUGE besides. She's one of the MAIN characters. She's an extremely talented and brave heroine, which refutes every bit of prejudice against Muggle borns with a sledgehammer. And we forget Harry's MOTHER, who is certainly very important to the series, is also Muggleborn. And Harry, the HERO, is considered almost as bad as Muggleborn, being a "half blood." As for Squibs, we only see two as they're rare. Mrs. Figg, while strange, is no more flawed than any other character and is a member of the Order.

http://terri-testing.livejournal.com/19911.html#cutid1 - Here's an in-depth article which explores the parallels between Draco's gang and James', when James and his crew are expected to be honored as respected martyrs.

James behavior in school was looked upon as VERY VERY bad. In fact, didn't Harry despair over it beCAUSE it reminded him of Malfoy? But the point is, he grew out of it and became a good and noble person. And hey, even Draco went...well, he decided not to be totally evil. The Aesop is "People can be jerks when they're kids, but sometimes they grow out of it and become good people." I'm not seeing what's broken here.

Antwan: Is it just me or is the Natter really starting to build up here? I think we need to start making some deletions, because this page is getting stretched out ridiculously.

I removed the following from the X-Men example:

Read the briefing. They are arguing that the mutants are non human creatures (which is at least true to what many of the series prominent characters believe.) Not that mutants aren't people. Big difference. You don't have to be human to be a person and tolerance is still to be extended. Fans overreacted. The above post is a Broken Aesop itself if its trying to argue that nonhuman creatures can't be people.

"People" is simply the plural of "person" and "person" is simply another word for human being. If we ever find another group of sentient beings, then maybe the definition of "people" will be expanded to include a group of any sentient beings (rather than the popular SF "sentients") but until then...

gibberingtroper: This is a comic book universe. There are all kinds of nonhuman people from mutants to aliens to supernatural and extradimensional beings.

Anon: That doesn't make them people (it does make them sentient beings with the same rights we give humans, but that's not important right now). Not to mention the fact that these are claims made in real-life, so would use the real-life definitions, rather than in-universe ones. So...I edited it to accommodate both parts. Hopefully.

BritBllt: Removing this one...

This troper does not know what the message behind Chobits was supposed to be, but all he got was "you're evil if you want sex toys and you're male." Supported by the fact that everyone else who got into a romantic/sexual relationship with a persocom besides Hideiki had horrible things happen to them and/or their persocom, if they weren't already just fucked up people to begin with. People leave their wives and possibly children in order to run off and have sex with persocoms with no care for the real world. It's like the episode in Futurama where Fry fell in love with a robot Lucy Liu, only played deadly straight for 26 episodes in a row. On top of that, there don't seem to be any male persocoms, and you don't hear about any women running off with them in order to have flings. I guess there aren't any lesbians in that part of the Clamp universe either. Take that how you will. The whole story resolves when Hideki, who is one of those anime males who is just meant to not get any anyway, decides that he won't have sex with the chobit that he can't possibly have sex with because he loves her for her too much. Because according to Clamp, it's OK to tie emotions into what may be an inanimate object, but it's wrong to want to have sex with one? Or if you want to look at it another way, according to Clamp, if you put sex in a relationship at ALL, there cannot be any true love, period. The messed up thing is, knowing the message that Clamp was going for, it's so easy to break the Aesop the OTHER way so as to negate it: ladies be nice to your man because if you aren't eventually they'll go to someone who won't bitch at them 24/7, an Aesop that actually has some validity, but is against everything the writers were going for.

It starts off with This Troper on an objective page, and it's just way, way too long. It's also crossing pretty deep into Complaining About Shows You Dont Like territory and frankly, none of it really holds up. Chobits doesn't have an aesop apart maybe from the typical romantic-story aesop of following your heart. The only other persocom relationship we ever see onscreen is Hiroyasu, whose persocom gave her life in a Heroic Sacrifice for him, and they do show male persocoms in the background, sometimes accompanied by women. You could argue that the "follow your heart because sentience is overrated" aesop in the manga is a bit squicky (does that make marrying your blow-up doll okay?), but that still wouldn't be a Broken Aesop, and the anime avoids the issue anyway by putting the persocoms and chobits on a sliding scale of sentience.

castaghast Upon thinking about it, this aesop is less broken than it is just screwed up, probably a Space Whale Aesop or a Fantastic Aesop, so I'll edit it and move it there. That said, you have an invalid point about persocom relationships: Hiroyasu and Chiroyu may have been the only other persocom relationship on screen (and if I remember correctly that may not be the case), but the flashbacks and fallout from other persocom relationships were present throughout the show. The whole issue with Shimizu and her husband was a major plot point, instigated by the fact that her man was too busy with a persocom to pay attention to his wife. It is also mentioned several times throughout the anime that this isn't exactly an uncommon problem: men get persocoms, ignore their wives, and retreat into their own little world. Even if we ignore any subtext about "wanting sex being bad if you're a guy" that could be considered subjective, just watching the anime, we can conclude that if you get a persocom, and you're a guy, at best you're going to wind up a reclusive loser who abandons everyone regardless of your past ties to them. At worst, you're going to get feelings for them, and then something terrible will happen to them because of you, and You'll Be Sorry you didn't get you a red-blooded human girl. Come to think of it this might be Fantastic Racism as well.

Rebochan: Pulled this:

Valkyria Chronicles goes to a lot of trouble to deliver a message about the power of unity for unity's sake, and how teamwork can achieve things beyond what a single person can do. It does this by showing the unified, multi-member ragtag Squad 7 as unfailingly good and morally righteous, and by presenting every single individual who gains any power themselves as either struggling with amorality or simply downright evil— Alicia, who was born with the potential for magical invincibility chooses to abandon it because she's afraid of how it will affect her, even knowing she could save her imperiled homeland with it. This on its own wouldn't be so bad, but the Aesop breaks toward the last quarter of the game. Alicia uses her power to damage an otherwise-impenetrable battleship in an attempted, emotional-breakdown-fueled Senseless Sacrifice; Welkin comforts her, she loses her superpowers, and then everyone vows to defeat the enemy without using Valkyria powers. Then they proceed to attack the battleship— by exploiting the hole her attack made as a weakness. Turns out sometimes you really do need someone who's naturally gifted to soften it up for the rest of you muggles!

That wasn't the moral at all. First off - being a Valkyria? You're a living zombie weapon and lose your humanity. Being able to blow things up is meaningless when you have to sacrifice everything to do it. Second, what was the team supposed to do, blow off the hole? She'd already done it - they just stopped her from suiciding along with it. The whole teamwork speech would be really pointless if they blew off an opportunity that had been created, even if it wasn't intended. The troper who put this up likes to spam the theories across the wiki, though.

As for "anyone with power not on Squad 7 is evil", the hell? Where is that message? We talked about this on the Valkyria Chronicles page - the moral isn't "Power is evil", the moral is "If you have power, use it responsibly." Actually discussing what that means is not a Broken Aesop (and how the hell is Rosie's open bigotry "moral righteousness" anyway?)

—No gay marriage debates on the main page! See T Vtropes rule 146: "No gay marriage debates on the main page!"

This troper was annoyed at how Lois' views were portrayed as being wrong. Lois supports gay rights but she isn't sure about marriage so the series shows her being just as bad as the characters who directly oppose it and are clearly hateful of homosexuals. Apparently it's not enough to support them having basic rights and be uncertain about the marriage issue, you have to always be pro gay marriage or you're just as bad as the racist young Republican club that Chris joined.
- Because if you think they should have less rights than other people, you ARE just as bad as the others. If someone replaced "gay" with "black" this wouldn't be an issue, you be unambiguously against such a person. If you are against a group having the same rights as every other group, it doesn't matter what those rights are.
- It's not being against. It's uncertainty. She wasn't even opposing what was going on, she just wasn't sure whether or not it was right. She should be allowed to take as much time as she needs to figure out what she really thinks. She can be hated after she takes a side but not before. Look, I think gays should marry but it's wrong to force someone to have an opinion when they really are confused. Lois was doing everything right, she went and consulted friends and relatives and she wasn't burning petitions in the mean time. All I'm asking is what is wrong with a little bit of uncertainty? If people aren't allowed to have the freedom to feel out their own beliefs then we've failed in our goal to give freedom to all.
- If you watch the episode at the part where Lois first brings up her uncertainty about gay marriage with her parents, it takes exactly 36 seconds for her to become staunchly pro. Come on Seth! Not even a reasonable argument, she just flips when her parents say they don't love each other and she should've already known that.
- Yes but that's bordering on idiocy and Character Derailment. Just because your parents say they don't love each other but are still together doesn't mean that you're going to switch your views instantaneously. She still would've had to struggle for a while with the idea of whether or not it was immoral. Also, she really should've already known that people can get married without loving each other (Vegas anyone?) and so the "revelation" that her parents didn't love each other but could still get married shouldn't have changed her that much. Also I don't know why you're still talking about the hostage scene. Everyone who entered in text before you was talking about Lois and her parents.
What struck This Troper was the way the girl from Young Republicans, supposedly a devout Christian, was willing to bribe Chris with sexual acts (touching her boob) to get him to sabotage Brian's efforts. Not only do Republicans corrupt kids, but the kids are willing to corrupt other kids. As Stewie would say, "What the Deuce?" Mr. MacFarlane.
The girl bribing Chris with sexual acts is a tiny bit of Truth In Television. Often times girls who are "good girls" repress their sexuality to an incredible extent until such a time as that sexuality explodes beyond their control. Sometimes this results in them bursting into whorish sexuality when they are "liberated" in college. Other times Christian girls will do a lot of really sexual things to a guy as long as it isn't sex. I know a few Christian girls that perform oral sex regularly because it's not sex so they're still "pure." I know many more Christian girls who give handjobs and get fingered because again, it's not quite sex.

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