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Accidental Aesop

redirected from Main.AccidentalMoral

alt title(s): Accidental Moral
When a writer intends to simply write a piece of fiction without An Aesop but someone reads something into their work that they didn't intend. This can also happen when the creator did intend an An Aesop, but the one people pick up is completely off tack from the one they intended.

This seems to stem from some people always assuming Everyone Is Jesus In Purgatory, which leads to them gasping "What Do You Mean Its Not Didactic?" when you tell them as such. This also generally requires the Word Of God to clear things up — if, indeed, even that helps; don't count on it.

Like Misaimed Fandom (where readers fail to catch the moral or satire intended by an author), an Accidental Aesop may result from poor authorial communication or, indeed, the Unfortunate Implications that come with poor use of common symbols.

See also: Aesop, Broken Aesop, Family Unfriendly Aesop and Death Of The Author. Occasionally these unintended Aesops have Unfortunate Implications.

Examples:

Anime and Manga
  • At first, Gunslinger Girl's disturbing depiction of the horrors and abuses its innocent little girl protagonists faced and how their lives were completely destroyed was lauded by many fans as a brutal Deconstruction of the lolicon genre and/or a commentary on the use of Child Soldiers. Nope. Turns out it's straight-up Author Appeal. Many of the more subversive elements and Fan Disservice of the early part of the series were apparently to make it more palatable to a mainstream audience and probably weren't even the creator's idea. As time went on and the series' popularity grew, the creator gained Protection From Editors, and it became decidedly more Fan Service-y and disturbing for totally different reasons.
    • And then there's the straight out porn, drawn by the creator, of the girls being intimate with their handlers, consensual or otherwise.

Literature
  • JRR Tolkien claimed to despise allegory, which didn't stop people seeing the One Ring in Lord Of The Rings as an allegory for the atomic bomb. Key difficulty with this theory, along with any other theory that takes Lord Of The Rings as an allegory for World War II: the major plot details were planned out well before the war even started. Also, as Tolkien himself noted, if it had been about World War II, they would have used the Ring.
    • But not World War One, though Tolkien denied that too.
    • This is why Tolkien made such a distinction between allegory and applicability. You can apply as many meanings as you like; you just can't presume put them in the author's mouth.
  • An example so famous it's taught in US History classes is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Sinclair was trying to convert Americans to socialism with a Nightmare Fuel-loaded story about the horrors of capitalism made manifest in meat processing plants. Unfortunately, all anyone noticed was the description of how sickeningly unsanitary the meat processing plants were, which led to the passage of food inspection laws. Sinclair put it best when he said, "I aimed to hit the nation in the heart, but I hit the stomach instead."
    • What didn't help his case was how out-right boring everything was after the two or so pages about the meat processors. Although it's more of a matter of opinion, the rest of the book was highly disappointing and anti-climatic. This troper had to force herself to finish reading it for a Creative Writing project, only to have the book slammed in her face the very next semester in History. She was able to sum it all up with "It's a love letter to socialism with a few awesomely gross things thrown in so that people would read it." Needless to say, not many in the usually bright class even bothered to finish. The fact there wasn't more gross details about anything (other than maybe that one female Jurgis knows becoming a whore after he goes tramping), really turns the latter half of the book into a Missed Momentof Awesome.
  • Some people became vegans after reading War Of The Worlds, despite the story being about the morality of British imperialism.
  • The stated Aesop in Aristophanes' Lysistrata might be interpreted as stating that if Athens and Sparta teamed up instead of fighting each other, they would be unstoppable and have the rest of Greece at their mercy. In modern times, the play is generally considered to have a pacifist and/or feminist message. These are justified in so far as the play does portray the war as hurting both sides and acknowledges (albeit in a humorous way) that war has a toll on female civilians. However, given the Ancient Greek opinions of women, it seems that his message was more like "even women are smart enough to know this war is bad".
  • Robert Frost vehemently denied that his poem "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" was a metaphor for contemplating suicide, but at that point it was too late, and it's now the single most popular interpretation of the poem.
  • Starship Troopers is quite openly about two things: the importance of personal responsibility in a worthy society, and the importance of a professional military. However, some readers see it as a disquieting work of rah-rah propaganda recounted by an unreliable narrator brainwashed into praising his fascist social system and the ultimately meaningless war he fights. This reading turns the book into a dystopian work with almost exactly the opposite moral originally intended.
    • In the film version, the director supposedly literally ignored the book and just made the film an open mockery of neoconservatism due to the aforementioned themes.
      • And the movie is usually taken about being how awesome war is, bringing it full circle.
      • Of course, there's no getting around the apparent idea Heinlein expresses that lesser crimes should be punishable by whipping, the rest with death—even for juvenile misbehavior. Ouch—the man really hated liberal social science and Dr. Spock's theories, contemporary back then. Also, his idea that only those serving in the military and otherwise should vote is equally disturbing. Um, legal, elected military junta, anyone? So civilian taxpayers have no say in their own government?
      • It should be noted that it's explicitly stated that citizenship is gained by military service — and that they will find something for you to do if you sign up. You want to sign up and become a citizen & gaining a vote, there is absolutely nothing preventing you from doing so. Non-citizens usually don't get a say in governments.
      • You can't even use your vote or hold any kind of office until after you leave Federal Service. And the military is not the only way to go, either.
  • Dr Seuss's Horton Hears a Who: "A person's a person, no matter how small" was not meant to be a commentary on abortion and Ted Geisel and, currently, his widow have tried to keep it out of the hands of the people in that debate.
  • When Tom Clancy wrote Rainbow Six, it was almost certainly intended as an Author Tract against environmentalists, especially the extremist fringe. But the only way he could make them into a credible threat was by putting them in charge of a megacorporation with near-limitless resources and political influence. Since anyone with extremist views could have done what they did with the resources they had, this turns the story into an Aesop about the dangers of corporate power, which is almost certainly not what Clancy had in mind given the strong conservative tone of his works...
  • There seem to be some people who think that Harry Potter is meant to represent Jesus. This is ignoring the fact that he practices witchcraft. Of course, then there are the Christian Moral Guardians who think that the whole point of the series is to convert kids to satanism...
    • I'm pretty sure there's a difference between witchcraft in the Biblical sense and the magic used in Harry Potter.
  • Guess what Fahrenheit 451 is really supposed to beabout?

Film
  • George A. Romero did not intend Night Of The Living Dead to be a social commentary. He hired Duane Jones, a black stage actor, to play the hero, because "he gave the best audition." Much of the movie's dialogue was improvised by the actors during filming; the original script was only loosely adhered to. It was only when the film was released that Romero became aware of the full implications of his decision to cast Duane Jones in the role.
  • The director of the suffering-from-much-Adaptation Decay The Golden Compass film claimed that he pared down the book's parallels between the Magisterium and the Catholic Church in an attempt to avoid people reading too much into the film.
    • The director was definitely rowing upstream against the book's reputation, but he gets an A for effort, at least.
  • Many critics were shocked horrified by the apparent Family Unfriendly Aesop in 1992's Radio Flyer, in which a little boy escapes his abusive stepdad by using a flying machine he rigged up with his brother instead of telling other adults about what's going on: a kid should take care of such problems by his/herself, and fantasy is an acceptable way to handle them. Not an Aesop that's going to be appreciated. (The whole movie is problematic in terms of how it's supposed to be interpreted; check out its listing at the Other Wiki.)
  • The Aesop of Seven Pounds is probably not "don't use your cellphone while driving". But that's what at least one critic concluded.
  • The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, made at the height of the Red Scare, was praised by people on both sides of the issue who assumed the villainous pod people were meant to be analogous to either Communists or people being swept up by Senator McCarthy's witch hunts. Director Don Siegel was quick to say that he did not intend to portray any kind of message and just thought he was making a simple alien invasion film. Seeing as the film ends with the hero shouting into the camera "They're here already! You're next!", opinions are still divided.
  • The 1970 film Joe (starring Peter Boyle, directed by John G. Avildsen) was meant to send a message about the narrow-mindedness and brutal intolerance of mainstream American culture when faced with the hippie counterculture, but a lot of the audience sympathized more with the bigoted blue-collar title character and saw the hippies as getting what they deserved.
  • The director's cut of Will Smith version of I Am Legend, in which Neville returns the zombie girl to her fellow zombies, then abandons New York to look for survivors elsewhere has the accidental aesop of "it's bad to offer a cure if the sick people don't want one"; the original book also has this to some extent, but Neville is the Sole Survivor of uninfected humans and the zombies have already more or less rebuilt society, so by capturing the infected, only to inadvertently kill them every time a cure fails he's become a Complete Monster.
    • On the other hand, in the new ending, instead of letting the girl go (after which the zombies go away voluntarily) Neville holds onto a grenade and blows up a bunch of them to save two human survivors. Leading one guy on Cracked to remark "finding a diplomatic solution with your enemies is now more controversial than blowing them the fuck up."
    • Of course, the original ending also revealed that Neville was kidnapping and experimenting (and often killing in the process) sentinent creatures capable of relationships and love, so there's the lesson of assuming how human things are.
  • District Nine is supposed to be an allegory to apartheid South Africa. Then the protagonist tells a coworker that face-masks are for wusses, and everything bad which happens to him afterwards is a direct consequence not of his racism, but of his refusal to wear a protective mask when handling strange chemicals. Is this a movie about racism or about how you should always follow workplace safety regulations?
    • Uh, good luck being the next Dr. King and all, but how exactly was racism supposed to get an extremely rare and valuable alien fluid sprayed in his face? Anyway, racism definitely gets one of the bad guys killed, so stow the outrage and relax.

Live Action TV
  • The series finale of Battlestar Galactica seems to have an Anvilicious anti-technology Aesop that comes completely out of nowhere. Ron Moore admits in his podcast on the episode that this was simply a desperate last-minute attempt to explain why none of the fleet's technology was discovered after they arrived on prehistoric Earth, and he didn't put much thought into any message that could be read into it.
  • The Bones episode "The He in the She" featured a transgender woman killed while swimming by the jealous ex-wife of her lover, with a subplot about her life as a male fundamentalist preacher and her estranged son. Temperance concluded that the Aesop was "always swim with a buddy".
  • The Doctor Who episode "The Unquiet Dead" was perceived in some quarters as an attack on immigration (since the episode features aliens who come to Earth on the pretense of finding a new home after their planet was blown up, but are actually attempting to invade), even though the subtext was entirely unintentional.
    • The iconic Baltans from the original Ultra Man series have a similar story. This may have been intentional in their case, however, as nationalistic themes were fairly common in earlier toku productions.
  • The Torchwood episode "Meat" appears to have a pro-vegetarianism Aesop. But episode writer Cath Treganna "enjoys a good fillet steak as much as the next person".

Music
  • Ozzy Osbourne's song "Suicide Solution" has been infamously condemned as having pro-suicide messages. In fact, if you actually read the lyrics the song is clearly an Aesop on the dangers of alcohol abuse.
    • Ditto for "Revolution" by the Beatles, primary because Lennon throws the word "in" after "you can count me out."
  • "Captain Jack" by Billy Joel was mistaken for a pro-drug anthem. (Apparently, mentioning masturbation didn't help.)
  • "Puff the Magic Dragon" was supposed to just be a song about a dragon.
  • The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was intended to be about... Lucy. In the sky. With diamonds. It was based on a picture that John's son drew of his classmate Lucy, and the acronym is a complete accident (although both John and Paul admitted they were pretty high while writing the song).
  • Brian May insists "Too Much Love Will Kill You" ("...if you can't make up your mind") was only about the end of his relationship with his wife, having no connection to the bisexual bandmate who died of AIDS shortly before its first release.
  • The J.J. Cale song "Cocaine", famously covered by Eric Clapton, is often interpreted as pro-drugs because of the refrain "It's all right". The rest of the lyrics, however, basically boil down to "cocaine will ruin your life".

Newspaper Comics
  • Charles M. Schulz (Peanuts) said he only created the Great Pumpkin as a fun idea: "What if someone believed in a Hallowe'en Santa Claus?" Many saw Linus's efforts as a mockery of the foolishness of religious people, but Schulz himself was quite religious, at least in the early years.
  • A Dilbert cartoon featuring Wally receiving a pig as a mail order bride was taken by a lot of people to be a racist comment on the looks of oriental brides. Scott Adams denied this was the case, saying that the pig was supposed to be just a pig and the joke was about a shoddy mail order company sending a non-human bride.

Webcomics
  • This strip of Shortpacked! was seen by most fans, including Willis's own wife then-girlfriend now-fiancée, as his commentary on the New York Post controversy. Word Of God is that he hadn't heard of it.
    • Monkeys get used a lot for that, and always seem to be mistaken for 'some sort of racial slur.' On the basis that the evidence is growing for the Classical theory on monkeys ("They're faking it so we don't make them work") being right & that, this troper has taken to describing such as having been done by "12-year-olds in Special Ed."
      • We have the start of a monkey-to-human dictionary. (No wonder they fling poo at us.) However, this troper feels obliged to observe that 12-year-olds in Special Ed sometimes would have done less QUALITY work...

Western Animation

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