Aesoptinum - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Aesoptinium; Aesoptonium

A form of phlebotinum with a moral component, which exists only so that the author can build An Aesop out of it. May or may not turn into a Fantastic Aesop. Can result in a Phlebotinum Muncher or Mary Suetopia where You Fail Economics Forever.

Sometimes works when the effect is of a fable or non-realistic tale and the metaphoric value is clear.

Compare with Powered By A Forsaken Child; sometimes these tropes overlap. Also overlaps with Fantastic Aesop.

Examples

Anime

In Soukou No Strain the Strains are derived from research done on aliens that look exactly like little human girls and the research is supposed to continue (though they don't really finish that plot thread) so they can achieve instantaneous communication and more with the further dissection and possible brain removal of said girls. Naturally, the bad guy didn't like this. So he decided it would be best to punish humanity for this.

Comic Books

In the Marvel Comics Earth X, the Cosmic Consciousness grants omniscience, but due to a strange form of observer effect will slowly make those who have even a fraction of it kinder people.
The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents' Mento helmet gives its user telepathy, which lets Janus see the good in others and become more empathetic, leading him to turn from evil to good.

Film

In Serenity, the chemical "Pax" was created by the Alliance to sedate the populace. In case that wasn't objectionable enough to the audience, its first wide-spread test failed spectacularly, resulting in nearly the entire population of a planet developing severe amotivational disorder and simply sitting quietly until they starved to death. The survivors were rendered insane and horrifically violent, becoming the Reavers. This is a clear Fantastic Aesop, since the second part was completely unforeseeable.
- Of course. Because uncontrolled broad-spectrum experiments on unwitting subjects would never have unexpected consequences.
The movie world of Logans Run is utopic, no hunger, want, or need to work. The catch? Everything is run by a Computer, Children 0-7 years are raised in tubes, Youth 7-14 are set to run wild, and once you become 30 a gem on your palm (or Palm Flower) turns black and you're sent to compete to be "Renewed". Unfortunately, The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard and kills all contestants for being "too old". Most of the people living there were for the arrangement, except for Runners, who want to escape to Sanctuary and live longer.
The drug Prozium in Equilibrium subdues emotions to prevent such things as violence and war. This is helped along by the banning of anything with an Emotional Content rating of ten, which can include anything even remotely artistic, and anyone caught with such contraband is burned alive. Naturally, there's an underground resistance that the main character eventually champions after he stops taking his meds.
Running Man allows convicted criminals to compete against gladiators for their freedom. But those who win are killed and left to rot while the network pretends they're living in luxury in a tropical paradise.
In The Island, a large group of people lives comfortably in a high-tech city doing safe, not especially taxing make-work. Every now and then, it's announced that one of the city's inhabitants has won a trip to the titular Island, which is portrayed as an idyllic retirement spot. The hero discovers, however, that the inhabitants of the city are actually clones being maintained to provide spare parts for their "originals", and that 'going to the Island' is actually a death sentence.
- The Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie "Parts: The Clonus Horror" inspired this one.
  - "Inspired" as in "successful lawsuit for completely copying the plot." Well actually I think they settled.
  - A better film, though mileage can definitely vary. It was intended to be a pastiche. It was almost challenged by Tessa Dick and inadvertently killed the Logan's Run redux due to similarities. Saying The Island is derivative would be like saying Kill Bill is derivative.
In Ghost In The Shell Innocence, the gynoids' sentience is due to their containing copies of the ghosts of abducted preteen girls. The ghost-copying procedure eventually kills the girls. Even more disturbingly, they were first brainwashed into near-robots so that the gynoids wouldn't be too human-like - and that they were intended to be Sexbots. Despite all this, a surviving girl and her rescuer are actually chastised by the heroine, as she says that the real victims were the robots.

Literature

Most all of the serious magic in Harry Potter applies. The aesop is: be nice to yourself and to other people and don't tear your soul apart to make yourself immortal.
- But...immortality.
- Although the very title of the first book establishes that there is an alternative to Horcruxes if you want to gain immortality through magic. Thus, that particular instance could be interpreted as a more standard Aesop about choosing between what's easy and what's moral.
The short story The Giving Plague by David Brin features an especially egregious example; it includes a microbe (Acquired Lavish Altruism Syndrome, or ALAS) which makes one's blood feel "full", which, in turn, makes one want to go and donate blood in order to alleviate the feeling; the germ would then reproduce and spread among blood recipients. Then, apparently, feeling that one had to "justify" going to the blood bank, the person would start acting more altruistic.
The central premise of Ursula K. Le Guin's short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas was a city whose happiness depended upon the suffering of one innocent child.
Subtly parodied (along with phlebotinum in general) in the novel Generation Dead, as the proposals by scientists to "explain" the whole "teenagers suddenly coming back as zombies" phenomenon, which are mentioned in asides throughout the book, tend towards this. Choice examples include proposals that it was caused by "too much fast food", "too many First Person Shooter games", and — thanks to the expansion of the book's accompanying Character Blog — "too many generations eating microwaved food". Naturally, none of them is true.
Norman Spinrad's 60s sci-fi novel Bug Jack Barron has an Evil Rich White Man gaining immortality from the glands of irradiated-to-death children, with the one we know about in the book being African-American. Good book, anvilicious Aesop.
Damon Knight's short story Rule Golden has an alien that spreads a special plague which induces tele-empathy. This means that prison guards become depressed from the sadness of their prisoners, somebody that strikes someone else will feel the pain from their blow, and somebody that kills someone else will suddenly drop dead (strangely, this even includes such acts from a distance, such as shooting someone, which just kills the shooter rather than everyone else within the same radius). The ostensible reason the alien does this is to make humans become peaceful before they invent interstellar travel, with a side benefit supposedly being the elimination of hierarchic governments (since "government is force"). For no particular reason, the plague affects all warm-blooded animals, not just humans. This means that all mammals and birds are now effectively vegetarians (unless their prey are insufficiently cuddly-looking), causing the extinction of larger beasts of prey all over the world.
- The aliens did offer help for the screwed up ecosystem that resulted. Birds that ate insects should be able to continue, just not mammal hunting ones.
- Also used in the TV series The Tomorrow People, where the main characters' telepathy makes them incapable of killing.
Similarly, Stanislaw Lem's short story Highest Possible Level of Development had a drug, Altruzine, that caused tele-empathy, but the story is much more tongue-in-cheek. The results are still not altruistic, though: a man with a toothache has its painful tooth ripped out by nearby people who don't want to feel the pain, a newlywed couple is nearly mobbed outside their hotel where they consummate the marriage (and criticized on their poor performance), and depressed people are driven from towns rather than treated.
The Giver

Live Action TV

Star Trek is fond of these. A recurring episode conflict involved the crew finding a (near) Utopia planet with a morally questionable requirement in its upkeep. Much navel gazing would take place, and they'd usually pass judgment on the planet as backwards, either leaving them to their luck or forcing them to change (Kirk prefered the change option).
- One episode had a planet with truly awesome technology — but that technology damaged their ozone, allowing excess ultraviolet light to the surface, causing radiation damage and sterilizing the entire species.
- Subverted in the episode of TNG (starring James Cromwell) where a planet is a utopia — after they banish all of their genetically engineered super-soldiers that won them said utopia. The super-soldiers get out and plead with the Enterprise to help them, the "peaceful" members of society plead with the Enterprise to help them, etc. After much soul-searching (approx. 43 and one-half minutes worth), Picard finally remembers that this is exactly the case where the Prime Directive should be enforced, and bids a cheery adieu to the planet — leaving the 'peaceful' population at the mercy of the people they had genetically fucked with and then kicked out.
- Star Trek Enterprise also gets in on the act with Trellium-D, used to insulate Enterprise from the harmful effects of the Expanse. Unfortunately it also degrades the neural pathways of Vulcans, causing loss of emotional control. T'Pol starts taking "carefully controlled" doses of Trellium-D in order to loosen up a bit and becomes addicted, permanently damaging her ability to control emotions. She also gets Pa'nar Syndrome, an allegory for AIDS, which also causes a loss of emotional control.
- The crew of the Equinox in Star Trek Voyager were built up as sympathetic and being more down on their luck than Voyager, when they did a Face Heel Turn. Any audience sympathy they might have had was destroyed by the discovery that their improved warp drive runs on the corpses of sentient aliens.
Ditto Stargate SG-1. This plot occurs with some variations in at least "The Broca Divide", "Brief Candle", "Learning Curve", "Beneath the Surface", "2001", "Cure", and "Revisions".
- In an unusual example where such a society is the future Earth, the episode "2010" featured an alternate timeline where the Tau'ri (humans from Earth) allied with another human civilization called the Aschen and defeated the Goa'uld, and so, the Aschen gave the Tau'ri medical supplies, including an anti-aging vaccine whose true purpose was to sterilize Tau'ri populations to reduce it to a tiny fraction of the original, allowing the Aschen to easily conquer Earth.
Babylon 5, "Deathwalker": The Dilgar war criminal Jha'dur develops an anti-aging serum that can be used repeatedly to extend an individual's life indefinitely. The cost? It requires a non-synthesizable ingredient available only in other sentients (one treatment requires one sentient). Her intention was to disperse the knowledge of the serum to start genocidal wars as vengeance for her species dying. The Vorlons take it upon themselves to destroy the serum, Deathwalker and her ship to prevent that (and destroy any chance of researching the process to give the younger races true immortality and become rivals of the Vorlons).
One Gilligans Island episode involves the castaways finding some seeds that when ingested, bestow on the consumer the ability to read other people's minds. Trouble is, everyone then becomes privy to every tiny little critical thought the others have about them, and the group is unable to stop fighting with each other. Gilligan solves the problem by burning the bush that produces the seeds, leading to the moral "Some things are better left unsaid" —even though no one actually said them.

Video Games

Bioshock has ADAM, the substance giving the potential to alter genetic code to achieve new powers. It can also be seen as the game's way of telling the dangers of unrestricted economy, and morality-free experimentation.
- Actually, the aesop of Bioshock is that Humans Are Flawed and it is Word Of God that the game is not meant to be interpreted as "free markets suck" or "Ayn Rand sucks" or anything of the sort. As additional evidence, look at the names ADAM and Eve. In the Bible story, Adam and Eve did something that ruined paradise. In BioShock ADAM and Eve ruined Rapture. Rapture is meant to be beautiful and the fall of Rapture is meant to be a tragic consequence of flawed human nature. ADAM itself is obviously a plot enabler for Bio Shock, and the plot itself clearly aims to demonstrate an aesop (being "humans are too flawed to consistently practice a philosophy"). So whilst it can be argued that ADAM is Aesoptinum, it is for a different reason than above.

Western Animation

One Ducktales episode features a "Pearl of Wisdom", which will grant whoever holds it at a certain point at sunrise temporary infinite wisdom. Every person who has ever stolen it and used it in this manner realizes the error of their ways during their "moment of wisdom," and voluntarily returns the pearl to the islanders from whom it was stolen. (This is, of course, why the islanders are never bent out of shape whenever the pearl is stolen — they know it will eventually be brought back to them.)
The original name for this trope, Powered By A Forsaken Child, came from an episode of The Venture Bros in which Doctor Venture used the heart of an orphan as the power source for a Lotus Eater Machine, which, naturally enough, fails disastrously, with the only hope coming from Functional Magic and The Power of... *giggle* Sorry, I just couldn't finish that last part.
- That joke from the Venture Bros. is most likely a poke at the short story The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas in which a Utopian society is literally only kept happy under the condition that one child is completely secluded and forsaken.