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alt title(s): Broken Moral ''You can't have an anti-gun message, when you CLEARLY USED GUNS TO SOLVE YOUR PROBLEM! IT JUST DOESN'T WORK!
— Linkara, Superman Bearded Idiot: At Earth's End
"I learned something, too. I learned, um, men are evil? Oh wait, I knew that. I learned that L.A. is full of self-serving phonies. No, had that one down, too. Ahh...sex is bad?"
The desire to end a story on An Aesop is natural and strong: it's often the only thing that elevates the story above a piece of insubstantial fluff.
The trouble is that it doesn't always work. And when there's Executive Meddling or a Writer On Board, the moral of the story feels as awkwardly tacked-on as the " Wheel of Morality" lessons that ended many Animaniacs episodes.
Basically, a Broken Aesop is a story where the moral at the end of the episode doesn't match the moral that the episode actually contained (and unlike the Spoof Aesop, they don't do it on purpose). It's an Anvil Ex Machina.
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.
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. Perhaps the majority of stories use deontological morality, claiming that it is motivation which makes the difference between right and wrong: lying to hurt others is wrong, lying to help yourself is sometimes okay, and lying to help someone else is right. 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).
In the sledgehammer morality of Animated Shows, this often distorts the moral into "It's only wrong if you do it." Possibly the most common form starts out shooting for "You're a good person just the way you are and don't need to be rich or smart or super-powered for people to like you", but ends up delivering, "Don't try to better yourself; it'll just end badly".
An Aesop can be supported by the events in the episode and still feel broken, if to get there the writers had to force a character to behave in an uncharacteristic manner, or otherwise break with the continuity of the series. For example, in an episode of Friends, Chandler learned a lesson about not breaking up with women over petty little Man Hands reasons — something which he'd never done before, and would never do again, throughout the history of the show. The exact same thing happened to JD in an episode of Scrubs, but it had already been established as a plot device in an episode from an earlier season that JD has never broken up with a girlfriend in his entire life, ever. Even worse was another episode where Dr. Cox teaches JD a lesson about not bottling up your emotions, when JD is, for the rest of the series, a sappy guy who tends to irritate others by expressing his emotions at every possible moment. Compare Compressed Vice.
If a show attempts to present a moral ambiguity but fails badly, it could be perceived as a Broken Aesop.
Using Be Careful What You Wish For as an Aesop is easily Broken when the wish was granted by a Literal Genie which didn't actually give you what you wished for, and/or the bad effect was a secondary, tacked-on result that didn't have much to do with the wish.
Space Whale Aesop is a Sub Trope of this, where the lesson is broken simply because the consequences are unlikely as hell, if even possible.
This is not to be confused with a Family Unfriendly Aesop, where the lesson is followed, but the Aesop itself is strange and/or non-standard. A Fantastic Aesop is one where a speculative fiction story tries to sell an Aesop that breaks once it's removed from its particular speculative fiction universe. See also Moral Dissonance.
See Stealth Cigarette Commercial for anti-smoking PSAs that make people want to smoke, and Truffaut Was Right for when any effective portrayal of the topic glamorizes it in spite of any message it holds. Compare Analogy Backfire, which is when an analogy (which may or may not contain an Aesop) makes a point that is the opposite of what it was supposed to.
Specific Examples
A note regarding examples: Remember, if the story is not seriously trying to teach a lesson, it does not have An Aesop, and hence doesn't go here. Just because something happens in a story doesn't mean the creators are actively endorsing such behavior. If it's not a legitimate Aesop, don't put it in here. This page doesn't give you a License To Whine about plot points you don't like.
Examples:
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Live Action TV
- The final episode of Sabrina The Teenage Witch badly mangled its moral. On the eve of her wedding, Sabrina gets cold feet because the magical stone representing her soul doesn't quite interlock with the magical stone representing the groom's. The entire rest of the episode builds to a clear moral: there are no sure things, don't rely on magic, just do your best and have faith. Then she leaves him at the altar to run off with Harvey — and their magic stones interlock perfectly. Hm. Guess the moral was that magic is right after all.
- Another episode of the final season had Sabrina giving up magic. The aesop was Be Yourself... which would be all right, if 80% of the previous episodes hadn't ended with an aesop about not using magic to solve your problems, or indeed do anything at all.
- The marriage example may have been about the not at all fantastic, perfectly family-friendly, fully functional Aesop "marry in haste, repent at leisure."
- In Family Matters, one of Steve Urkel's redeeming traits was originally that he was a personification of the aesop "just Be Yourself." The original appearance of his alter-ego Stefan Urquelle was merely a vehicle for anvilicious preaching of this aesop. Unfortunately, then someone on the creative team decided that Stefan should become a regular part of Urkel's bag of Mad Scientist tricks, and the aesop was broken, which by extension derailed the character. Attempts to mend it — for instance, the fact that Steve and Stefan could not exist at the same time, forcing Laura to give up her romance with Stefan because Steve had the right to exist as himself — were themselves broken by later, new wrinkles (Steve accidentally clones himself and the clone decides to be permanently Stefan). We can only conclude that Jaleel White had a really good agent, and refused to do the series unless he was given every opportunity to appear as a smooth, irresistible ladies' man.
- The Aesop was eventually, finally mended in the show's final season, when Laura dumps Stefan finally and becomes involved with the real Steve — a development that led to some of the show's most genuinely touching romantic moments, and possibly constituted jumping back over the shark. It's a shame no one watched it, because it was on CBS.
- Many Urkel episodes had their Aesops broken by Snap Back. One or more members of the family would learn to be nicer to Steve, only to completely ignore this in the next episode.
- The Star Trek The Original Series episode "The Galileo Seven" had Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and four expendable redshirts trapped on an alien planet. In the end, they manage to get the shuttle working long enough to get in the air, but the Enterprise is too far away to see them; this leads to Spock taking a risk and igniting their fuel in order to grab the attention of the Enterprise. And as a result, we all learn an important lesson about how you can't rely entirely on logic and need to make an emotional decision at times. ...well, we would have, if Spock's actions hadn't been so logical. Basically, he had a choice between certain death in a few hours and possible death in a few minutes.
- The Star Trek The Next Generation episode "The Outcast" was broken more by casting decisions than anything in the script. Riker fell in love with an androgynous alien, but the alien society views gender identity as a perversion (Riker's lover self-identified as female). It was intended as an allegory of homophobia. The problem was that all of the "gendered" J'naii were heterosexual, as Riker's girlfriend explicitly states. The consequence of this is that it just adds to the view of "heterosexuality is the only natural thing, and everything else is weird and perverted".
- In addition to that, all the aliens were all played by women, making it look like a planet of man-hating lesbians. Jonathan Frakes (Riker) would complain about this, saying it would have made the allegory clearer to have his love interest played by a male actor (regardless of identifying as female).
- The episode was written to support homosexuality...by expressing them as brainwashers...er...
- A Star Trek Voyager episode clearly exists to make a statement about racial profiling, with an alien species that is arrested far out of proportion to their percentage of their planet's population. But then the one representative of them we see (who's even played by a black actor to make sure we get it) turns out to be a bad guy who was just manipulating Neelix's emotions.
- Another episode, "Nothing Human," has the crew create a holographic assistant for the doctor (in the form of a Cardassian doctor) to deal with a radically different alien species. Things are pretty tense to begin with, but when it turns out that this doctor had committed numerous atrocities in the course of his experiments, they resolve to delete the information so that no one should benefit from the man's actions (taking the hologram along with it). But they still use the man's knowledge to save the crewman before deleting him. Unfortunately, deleting the hologram really felt analogous to executing a man for someone else's crimes, since the holographic Crell Mosset was little more than a simulation of the guy, based on the more idealized version the Federation had of him.
- As one watches Voyager, one realizes that Broken Aesops (in particular ones which try to teach a lesson and end up with something anathema to Federation morality) in practically every other episode are one of the main reasons the series is considered unwatchable.
- Star Trek Enterprise, had one with "The Cogenitor". The result is a story wherein Trip befriends an alien and starts to teach her (him, it; it's a member of a trigendered alien race) about all sorts of things and discovers that she's basically kept as a brood mare despite being fully sentient. Despite being ordered to sever contact with her, he refuses and continues to teach her until the point that she decides she's had enough of her culture and begs the captain for sanctuary. He refuses and she later kills herself, and it's implied that it's Trip's fault. The moral would seem to be "don't interfere in different cultures," which would be fine. Except that Archer is constantly interfering in different cultures and in any other situation would have been happy to help the alien, except that the captain of the alien's ship was Archer's new BFF. So the real moral becomes, "Don't mess with the Captain's drinking buddies." Moreover, he's regularly spewing hateful, borderline racist trash about Vulcans because they help humanity less than Archer would prefer.
- Out Of This World: Evie uses her powers to pass her driving test, with the result that she gets a license despite not being able to parallel park. This is, obviously, a reprehensible thing, and consequentially, she gets in a car accident the very first time she takes the car out. Everything's reasonable so far, except for the fact that the tester was being a jerk and demanded she park in a space visibly smaller than the car. So the moral is "It's not fair to use your superpowers to succeed at something that would be physically impossible to do without them."
- And then there's the episode "Cinderella Evie", whose moral seems to be "Sometimes you need to say "no" to your teenage daughter, even if there's no good reason to and you don't actually have any problem with saying yes, because it's good for them. The thing you choose to put your foot down and say no about can be safely chosen at random."
- This may actually be more of a Family Unfriendly Aesop than a broken one; it's possible that was actually the aesop they were going for. Many people do feel that reminding young people who's boss, per se, is important.
- And "I Want My Evie TV": Evie's recently-arrived Uncle Mick tries to persuade her to use her powers for personal gain. After being repeatedly cautioned about using her powers for personal gain, she uses her powers to make a music video for a school project. She is punished by her mom, for using her powers for personal gain. So far so good, right? In the end, her video gets entered in a contest and she wins $500. And that's the end of the episode. That's it. No confession, no moment of revelation. No moral epiphany. Turns out that using her powers for personal gain just works with no negative consequences.
- For that matter, almost every episode of Out Of This World relied on some variation of "It is arbitrarily wrong to use your alien powers for this thing".
- Both Out Of This World and Sabrina The Teenage Witch attempt to justify these plots by occasionally pointing out that using their respective protagonists' powers to solve the problem of the week is only wrong on Earth, and would be perfectly acceptable on Antareus or in the Other Realm. Of course, this just pushed them into the Fantastic Aesop.
- When Hiro from Heroes discovers that his father had died, he traveled back into the past to save his father, but his father declined the offer by saying that he should not play God with his powers; then the entire episode is about Hiro learning that his father is absolutely correct and he presents this as an aesop during his father's funeral. The problem is that Hiro's Time Travel abilities are about changing the past and he had done it before without complaining once. Worse, Present!Dad wouldn't have died if Future!Hiro hadn't traveled through time to save Past!Dad from dying in the first place!
- Kids Incorporated frequently had to shave off some load-bearing plot elements to fit in their morals — each episode only had about 7 minutes of actual show between the musical numbers. The two most common:
- Anything based around the Aesop of "Be Yourself". Time after time, one of the Kids would try something new or to hang out with someone who was different from their usual peer group. Unless this newcomer was Inspirationally Disadvantaged, the end result always ended up being that hanging out with the new person made them change, acting like a punk, acting too sophisticated, acting arrogant, etc. The writers wanted to show that it was bad to change yourslef to make new "cooler" friends, but the story was used with such frequency that it seemed as if trying in any way to broaden your horizons or make friends outside the regular cast was a bad thing.
- Ambition Is Evil: About once a season, something would give one or all of the kids a taste of stardom, and they would promptly forget about The Power Of Friendship and start acting like jackasses and rivals. In the end, they would have to turn down any chance at becoming rich and famous in order to keep to what's "really important". Aside from the usual "Success is evil" vibe, we're repeatedly told in the early seasons that Kids Incorporated are already the most famous juvenile band on the planet, and are world famous. Heck, the theme song includes the phrase "Looks like we made it!" So, um, exactly how successful are you allowed to be before it becomes immoral?
- Gilligans Island: According to series creator Sherwood Schwartz, the show was supposed to be about the need for us all to work together. So who ends up getting off the island? The guest stars, by betraying the regular cast.
- Saved By The Bell featured this trope frequently. One of the more galling examples was when Zach found out that his girlfriend and her father are homeless. After a little tear-jerking, Zach offers to let them move into his house, which they accept. And then apparently walk into a wormhole in the guest room, because they are never seen or mentioned again throughout the show's entire run.
- Specific episode example: iCarly "iDate a Bad Boy". The intended Aesop is a bit intentionally muddled to begin with (something to do with accepting people as they are and/or not judging a book by its' cover) but the combination of Dawson Casting averted (Carly was "almost fifteen" in an episode that aired shortly before Miranda Cosgrove's 16th birthday) and used (the actor playing the "bad boy" is 22) is pretty obvious...
Literature
- Chaucer parodies this trope in The Canterbury Tales, by having the despicable, avaricious pardoner's tale turn out to be a Broken Aesop about how terrible greed is. The fact that it was being parodied so long ago means it existed back then as well, making this trope Older Than Dirt.
- The Inheritance Cycle teaches us that slavery is wrong. Letting said slaves get eaten to aid the Designated Hero, on the other hand, is fine.
- Also, one of the characters is described as ugly...but a good guy. What Paolini is trying to say is that it doesn't matter what you look like, its whats on the inside that counts! Fair enough, but how come the other 99.9% of the "good guy" characters incredibly beautiful and ALL of the badguys (save Murtagh) ugly?
- The evil King's use of Mind Rape to control people is bad. Eragon using the EXACT SAME POWER to "punish" Sloan is A-OK!
- The book Race Against Time by Piers Anthony attempts An Aesop on how having a lot of different cultures is a good thing, but it gets broken into a moral on how you shouldn't mix romantically with other races.
- The short story "The Cold Equations" attempts to tell an Aesop about the uncaring nature of the universe, and how even an innocent mistake can cost a life, with no fault but that of universal law. Unfortunately, the basic thrust is undercut because of the setup of the situation. The only protection to keep someone from walking onto a spaceship where stowaways meet certain death... is a sign saying "UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL. KEEP OUT!" This is especially bad, because it's flat-out stated that stowaways have happened before — indeed, the pilot of the ship has a gun and explicit orders to shoot them — yet the entire situation is treated as the fault of nothing but the physical laws of the universe.
- InThe Poky Little Puppy by Janette Sebring Lowrey, we learn that if you are both disobedient and slow, two thirds of the time you can not only escape any punishment whatsoever but also eat all the food that your siblings have been punished from.
- The four book series The Dreamers has a powerful one at the end. The series appears to build on the Aesop that the gods are supposed to barely affect people and use their powers sparingly and let things go naturally; so, after the gods are given children, who are their replacements, who are said to be able to save the world, they collect people from around the planet to help them fight off a Hive Mind force of super insects. How is The Aesop broken? During the last two chapters of the last book, the new gods in turn go back in time, render the original Hive Mother infertile, and give the man who almost single-handedly won the war because the loss of his wife caused him not to care about dying and and made him want unending revenge his wife back. All this actively Unmakes all four books, and the main character's life is removed from existence. Now, that is first-class meddling!
- In the very first Arthur book, Arthur's Nose, the main character (who actually looks like an aardvark in this story) is upset with the ridicule and problems he gets from his long nose and decides to change it. In the end, he decides not to do so, for he's learned that looks aren't really important. In spite of this, though, starting with the very next book, Arthur's Eyes, Arthur starts being redesigned until finally, in the early '90s, his "nose" is barely visible.
- The obvious gender equality message of Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites feels undercut by the fact that, while at the end of the novel, Esk becomes the Discworld's first female wizard, she is never seen or even mentioned in any other books featuring the wizards. (Perhaps even more problematically, Esk seems clearly to be one of a kind - there is no question of her example allowing other girls to become wizards, or for that matter, boys to become witches.)
- Well, don't the books about wizards focus mainly on the main faculty? The Arch Chancelor and them? Their students are only mentioned in passing so you really can't expect them to say "Oh look here comes Esk to perform a token cameo."
- Also, Esk became a wizard because a wizard gave her his powers by mistake(having assumed she would be a he at birth), it's all well and good to preach about gender equality, but in a society where power is handed down by the older generation, you can't expect them to just up and say "Well, we're old and set in our ways, but I see no reason why we can't suddenly do a complete turnaround and start including females as well.".
- No, Esk was a wizard by virtue of being the eighth child of an eighth child. The wizard merely gave her his staff. She was capable of magic even without it.
- Esk was a wizard by virtue of narrative imperative. If she'd not been confused for a eighth son, instead of a whateverth daughter, and gotten the staff anyway, it likely wouldn't have done anything. Anyway, it's distinctly said to be all down to mindset. Esk had the mindset for a wizard (why she couldn't be a proper witch anyway), she had the birth for a wizard (being handed down the staff was a convenience, but it created the Mac Guffin), if she'd been let alone her younger brother would probably end up a wizard instead (might still). It's been kept throughout the series that the wizards are behind the times, to phrase it "politely", and so are the witches even though no one's really called them on it (several characters being said that they were a witch in all but the trousers, though it is partially, and only partially justified in that half of headology is convincing people that the one fact you know that they don't is witchy, and men are never witches so they must just know something you don't instead of being a witch...) Anyway, I'm not saying the aesop isn't still broken, or at least dented in places, it's just that the above troper is incorrect about about why.
- At the end of the children's book Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock, the trickster spider gets all his tricks played back on him. The last page of the book says, "But if you think Anansi learned his lesson, you are mistaken. He is still playing tricks to this day."
- That one's justified. Trickster figures are not exactly known for learning their lesson. Anansi in particular refuses to take a hint.
- The book Rewind, the name of whose author is forgotten to this troper, teaches "it's not all about you". The person who learns this is a boy who finds out that he's adopted when his foster parents inform him that the mother is pregnant with her real child, and is then driven to what is pretty much suicide when they tell him that art, his passion, is a waste of time and that he should admire the jerk who constantly picks on him at school. God then gives him several more chances at life- all but the last of which end in the same results. Yeah, there's a problem there...
- Warrior Cats: When Firestar has to choose between reinstating his old deputy, Graystripe, or keeping Brambleclaw, StarClan tells Leafpool that Firestar should make his decision with his head, not his heart (oh so subtly hinting at Brambleclaw), completely ignoring all the times in the series characters have been told to listen to their heart or do what they feel is right. In fact, the whole reason he chose Graystripe in the first place was because he was told to follow his heart.
- And of course the few times when "listen to your heart" has blown up in characters' faces. Most notably with Leafpool, where "listen to your heart" ended up leading her to "do what we tell you".
Film
- I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Period. The movie is about how you shouldn't discriminate against gay couples...everyone in the movie is a flaming stereotype and Adam Sandler seems to go out of his way to make sure he doesn't kiss anyone of the male persuasion. In fact, he's a god damn CASANOVA in this movie. Its like he's YELLING at the audience, at the top of his lungs, through a megaphone, on national TV, saying "NOT GAY. BEING GAY IS OKAY BUT I'M TOTALLY, TOTALLY NOT GAY! DON'T F***ING CALL ME GAY!"
- Yeah, REAL subtle.
- His character, as well as his "husband," are supposed to be depicted as not even vaguely gay, to make their plan appear more outlandish. If he had actually kissed a man, it would go against the point, and not even be necessary to the plot. The one time kissing a man even comes up in the plot, had he done it, the big final Aesop speech would not have come.
- But there is no justification for making every gay man in the movie a Camp Gay. Not only does it perpetuate the very stereotype it's trying to tear down, it's not even vaguely realistic.
- The James Bond film For Your Eyes Only seems to conclude with the Aesop that 'Revenge is bad and will destroy you'. Fine, except that Bond has spent almost the entire series engaged in revenge for something or other - in the film in question, he pushes someone's car off a cliff for the murder of a love interest and a colleague and gets away with it.
- Star Trek First Contact also had a "Revenge is bad" Aesop, which was working when Picard decides to cut his losses and abandon ship, but it breaks the moment Picard snaps the neck of the Borg Queen, at a point when she was already helpless.
- Although it could be argued that the earlier Aesop is perhaps closer to 'risking other people's lives to get your revenge is bad', since the earlier argument is initially about Picard refusing to order his crew to abandon ship when it's clear that the battle is already pretty much lost and that staying on board is suicide, all for his own desires for revenge. At the point when Picard kills the Borg Queen, he's pretty much alone on the ship, having accepted that it's something he needs to do himself, not have his crew die to do for him.
- One of the biggest problems this troper has had with the TNG movies is how mercilessly Picard beat his enemies. For all the restraint he's shown on the series, he snaps the neck of the Borg Queen, doesn't warn Soran about the sabotaged missles, leaves Ru'afo to burn and impales Shinzon.
- You can't kill a borg queen, they're like a bee queen, another one is made.
- The Oompa-Loompa's song about Mike Teevee in the original book of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory may have been an Anvilicious Take That, but at least it had An Aesop in it. The movies, on the other hand, have it be a Broken Aesop. The first one, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is already a bit broken because it's talking about how children shouldn't be watching television in, you know, a movie. Tim Burton's movie made it even worse: Mike Teevee's character flaw wasn't even watching too much television — it was being an obnoxious know-it-all with no imagination, yet they kept the song as originally written.
- He also played a lot of video games (Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000 was invoked), but this wasn't closely related to the song at all.
- This may have been somewhat intentional in the Tim Burton version, as it is sung in a heavy-metal style that makes the words basically unintelligible.
- In the first movie, and especially in the second, his punishment came from Wonka's annoyance that Teevee was (understandably) dumbfounded that Wonka had a TELEPORTER and was using it to shrink and move chocolate. In another story his immediate desire to be Wonka's first human teleportation experiment would be somewhat noble.
- ...except Wonka warns him in as many words that the thing is a prototype, and that it's still going through the bug-catching stage. Mike's real problem is that he's Too Dumb To Live (presumably caused, in the original book, by his TV-watching).
- The "Stone Cold" Steve Austin star vehicle The Condemned, revolves around a shady producer who arranges for death row inmates from around the world to be dropped in an island and forced to fight to the death while the "show" is broadcast onto the Net under the name "The Condemned", hence the movie's title. However, WWE Films made the bizarre decision to turn this into a moralist tale by having several characters berate the brutality and senseless violence of the show... all the while showering the audience with scene after scene of senseless brutality and sexual violence. To top it all off, it culminates with this Wall Banger of a quote: "All of us who watch... are we The Condemned?" (to which several critics replied "Yes. Yes we are.")
- This kind of "have your cake and eat it too" typified a lot of Hays Production Code-era films. You could have seven reels of glorified gangster violence and alcohol abuse, as long as the gangsters die in the eighth reel. Biblical epics could have decadence and orgies as long as God smote the sinners at the end.
- The Aesop of the first Jurassic Park movie is meant to be about arrogance and nature and playing god and so fourth, but it feels a bit broken. Why? Because the dinosaurs were under control until human sabotage ruined it. It does work in the book, where it's clear that the dinosaurs had already mated and laid eggs all over the island; Nedry's actions simply sped up the process of the staff losing control of them.
- To be fair, the movie also shows that the dinosaurs had started breeding and that some of them were systematically testing their containment for weak spots, demonstrating that the humans weren't as in control as they thought.
- Making a movie out of Jurassic Park probably broke the Aesop in the first place. The movie would inspire hundreds of kids to become scientists by showing them how cool it would be if we could clone dinosaurs.
- That's not a broken aesop, that's just the fact that no publicity is bad publicity. Somebody completely missing the point does not mean the aesop is broken, it just means people are idiots.
- Of course even the original Aesop is warped in many ways. Both in the book and the movie Ian Malcom makes a speech of how Hammond's science is bad because it's purely based on taking the next step from the geniuses that came before you, and thus doesn't allow you to learn responsibility for your newfound power...but all science is climbing on the shoulders of giants, and extrapolating upon the discoveries of the previous generations. The idea seems to be that every scientist should start from scratch in order to do something worthwhile - a patently absurd concept.
- Dodgeball, underneath the general sports movie parodies, seems to come out against the idea that everyone in America should slavishly devote themselves to a singular idea of fitness, and that people should work out mainly because they feel like it and not because of what society tells them. Cue the fat jokes!
- This sounds pretty much like the premise of Heavyweights,another Ben Stiller movie.
- Though the fat jokes are at the expense of the Jerkass villain who hates fat people, so the irony might have been the point.
- Encino Man, an entire movie about how even the Simple, Noble Savage Caveman knows Violence is not the answer, capped by the titular caveman using his awesome caveman strength to beat the crap out of the school bully.
- The Devil Wears Prada has Anne Hathaway's character ridiculed for not conforming to the current trends in fashion and even mocked for being a size six - quite slender by the standards of anyone who ISN'T in the fashion industry. Eventually she goes from ugly duckling to swan and even drops down to a size four. By the end of the movie she realizes that her employer is a cruel and selfish harpy and she quits, and goes back to her more comfortable style of dress - but there's never a mention about her weight again. Sorry, insecure teenage girls, but even confident and well-adjusted women are still fatties at size six!
- So wait, are we supposed to believe that in that kind of situation, you should gorge yourself until you get right back to your original weight immediately?
- Unlike what movie writers think, there is no such thing as "a" size four. Anne Hathaway's character probably "lost" a size because she began to wear designer clothing, which is vanity sized - a size zero in Prada is a size eight in Wal-Mart.
- Thanks to Adaptation Decay or time constraints, take your pick, the movie's Aesop of being true to oneself came across as "Never accept a dream job because your friends will all turn on you simply because you no longer have as much time for them as you did in the past, even though you are not neglecting them."
- The Korean movie, 200 Pounds of Beauty
 , is an excellent example. The Aesop was supposed to be about loving yourself and being proud of who you are, but the Aesop is broken because the main character is able to use plastic surgery to become thin and pretty, and becomes famous, even after people learn she's had plastic surgery. To take the cake, the closing scene of the movie shows another overweight girl going in to get the same surgery.
- The Irwin Allen
disastrous disaster movie The Swarm (1978) preaches environmental responsibility: the military wants to use pesticides that would damage the environment, while Michael Caine keeps suggesting other methods. Unfortunately, the threat of the killer bees is so overdone (at one stage, they cause the explosion of a nuclear power plant) that this continuing refusal is hard to justify. Especially when his final successful method consists of pouring oil on the ocean and setting it on fire. Since when are burning oil slicks environmentally friendly?
- The pesticides the military wants to use will cause massive damage lasting for a lot longer than that from a burning oil slick, although admittedly this isn't as bad as the damage the bees have already caused by blowing up a nuclear power plant. The film is so painfully stupid and hamfisted that it's almost painful to have to point this out.
- Although the film is less blatant than the novel, the original First Blood has as a theme the dehumanization of war. Cue three sequels of Sly Stallone vs. the Red Shirt Army!
- As pointed out by The Nostalgia Chick, Don Bluth's Thumbelina breaks its aesop by its very existence. The film is supposed to be about the triumph of love over money, but by making it Bluth himself was finally caving in after his various labors of love kept making less and less money, and copying the Disney formula. And ironically it still didn't work.
- The Hannah Montana movie spends the entire movie preaching the aesop of being yourself, even if it means giving up on the glittery lifestyle.... And then it completely breaks it with a reset button ending.
- They spoof this in The Incredibles bonus features, they were having one of the superheroes who has a particular affinity toward children (not the perverted kind, mind you) give a speech about how important it is to stay in school, since the superhero in question dropped out. However, he quickly realizes he's mangling the aesop with him saying things like "stay in school, or you'll end up like me" when he goes around saving people for a living.
- Lampshaded and parodied beautifully in Johnny Dangerously. After spending the entire movie presenting a spoof on gangster films to support the moral "Crime doesn't pay", the titular character walks out of his pet shop wearing a fashionable mens suit, hops onto the running board of a period luxury car driven by a chauffeur with the character's gorgeous wife in the front seat (she wearing a white fox wrap), mugs to the camera and says, "Maybe it pays a little.".
- The first two Home Alone films had "creepy strangers aren't dangerous serial killers as long as you get to know them", which is a Family Unfriendly Aesop in the first place, but it completely broke the aesops by the recurring villains who start out just as unknown as the shovel guy wanting to steal from and/or kill the main character, not to mention how the hotel staff in 2 were treated by the writers. Fortunately, the third film reduced the point to "People's pain is funny".
- The Ralph Bakshi animated film Wizards takes place in a post-technology future, and spends the entire film building up the conflict between a good, druidic wizard who lives in harmony with nature and who draws his power from all living things, and an evil wizard who's reinventing mass production, firearms and munitions, and whose conquering armies are threatening to plunge the world back into the chaos of technological warfare. The contrast between their philosophies keeps building until, at the end, they're finally facing down one another. And then the good wizard... shoots and kills the evil wizard with a shotgun. With Bakshi, it was probably intentional, but whether that makes it any better is a different question.
- That wasn't a shotgun, that was a handgun (unless the clip I saw was a different than the one you were referring to). And it was hilarious, as well as the fact that the whole "nature is always superior to technology, forever" message that would otherwise have been sent is really kind of stupid since humanity has lived off of technology of some kind for over a thousand years.
Western Animation
- In this Winx Club episode, a character suspects that one of her teachers is evil, especially after reading a prophecy and seeing that everything that has happened so far fits the prophecy to a T, and so fires a spell at him. This gets her reprimanded and told that her logic was flawed. Already a shaky Aesop to begin with, it gets broken when the teacher does turn out to be evil (although not the kind of evil she expected). And a clone to boot, thereby breaking the plot along with it, since the spell she had fired was supposed to reveal its target's true nature, and we don't even get an explanation for why it didn't work. (At least, not in the story itself...)
- It's definitely a Dub Induced Plot Hole. This troper actually saw comparisons of the scene in two different dubs: the original attack was... just an attack.
- Also, in season 1's story arc, the witches' and the fairies' principals give a pep talk about how working together will help stop the Trix's invasion, and yet when the battle is actually going on, the only girls being shown are from the fairies' school. Either the writers just don't believe in the idea of the witches (opposite numbers to the fairies) doing good things, or the animators are just lazy.
- A late S3 mini-arc has Layla disliking her parents' planned Arranged Marriage for her, and would rather have freedom to choose. Eventually, her parents concede to her point... that is, after she's just found out the person she's been hanging with for the last couple episodes is the very person they'd arranged for her.
- One of the biggest Broken Aesops on Hey Arnold! surrounds Rhonda finding out that geeks shouldn't be treated like crap. First, the impetus for this (Rhonda being nearsighted) is a Compressed Vice. Secondly, she ends up getting glasses, and keeps them through the end of the episode, yet there is no change to her looks in subsequent episodes. (She does mention looking for her contacts in a trashcan later... three seasons later.) And lastly, she clearly hasn't learned her lesson in later episodes; for example, when she invites Arnold, but not Gerald, or other geeks to her party.
- Ben 10, in the Ghostfreak two-parter, tries to do an Aesop about teamwork. Unfortunately, this fails when The Hero is armed with one of the most powerful artifacts in the universe; try as they might, Gwen and Max really don't compare. It's like Tien and Yamcha trying to teach teamwork to Super Sayian Goku. Also, at the beginning of Part 2 ("Be Afraid of The Dark"), Gwen tells Ben "We don't need your help". Frankly, the story makes it seem like she's jealous of the Omnitrix, and having sidekick issues. Max has a lesser case, but, not being ten, he knows when to shut up and get on with things.
- Oddly, she is also guilty of a Broken Aesop in the opposite direction. The first season episode "Lucky Girl" revolves around her becoming a superhero based on a magical charm she finds. After losing it and finding out that the Big Bad of the episode possesses many similar charms to augment his magical power, she opts to destroy them rather than use them herself, justifying it as a decision to "just be me". Unfortunately, this Aesop is broken for two reasons. First, her stance on not relying on such power tends to be overshadowed when her cousin keeps using that Omnitrix thingy, especially since she benefits from it as much as everyone else. Second, what does she do in later episodes? She readopts the persona briefly after finding an even better charm. Then she learns that she is capable of using magic, and (with a few tools stolen from one villain) starts regularly using it herself. In fact, in the future-based episodes, she carries and uses the exact same charms that she destroyed in that first episode! It seems those powers are just too cool to pass up after all.
- If you include Ben 10 Alien Force in the canon, it makes "Lucky Girl" even worse - apparently, using magic-like powers is being herself.
- And then there was an episode where a gang hijacked the Rustbucket, the iconic RV of the series. The Tennysons managed to hitch a ride with another RV driver, and Ben and Gwen were highly impressed with the state-of-the-art entertainment system and other luxuries. Meanwhile, Max repeatedly lectures them on the importance of the Rustbucket's rustic charm and personality, and insisted on them trying to get the old one back. The Aesop apparently involved valuing the things that belong to you, even when better things exist. And yet... it's almost as if the writers for the episode completely failed to notice that the Rustbucket used to belong to the Plumbers and thus contains laser cannons, high-tech computer systems, flight capability...
- A couple of episodes of WITCH ended with one of the girls' parents learning an aesop about how they should trust their children, right after the girls pull off a Zany Scheme to keep anyone from finding out the truth.
- The Aesops in Fairly Odd Parents constantly get broken because Timmy has fairy godparents who do a Reset Button almost every time he asks. Maybe that's why he forgets them...
- Actually, that doesn't break them. After all, wishing things back to normal doesn't contradict the aesop, since there's no lesson about learning to take responsibility (except in "Wish Fixers" where there was no Reset Button). But the Wonderful Life episode certainly qualifies. Its moral is "Do nice things to be nice, not because you'll get noticed." Good lesson, but it suffers from the same problem as The Simpsons example below: it comes at the end of an episode where everyone was acting like a complete Jerkass to Timmy and being completly ungrateful for the things he did for them, often because of trivial things. Plus, it's not like Timmy wanted a medal or anything, just a thank you. So the moral is now "Do nice things for people even though they treat you like dirt." And this comes after Jorgen spends the entire episode telling Timmy that everyone is better off without him...So Yeah.
- In the Bratz cartoons, the main characters constantly tell the one-shot characters that they should follow their own unique sense of style... right after they give them a makeover or get done gawking at the villains' untrendy Limited Wardrobe.
- In addition, the villains are supposed to reinforce the message that the viewer should be unique and look like nobody else... and yet the main characters and their boyfriends are all recolors of one another. (Yes, that includes their outfits.)
- The entire Chicken Little movie from Disney. First, the original story is about how people shouldn't just blindly believe doomsayers, and winds up completely inverted throughout the movie. Second, the character of Foxy Loxy is portrayed as a bully until a bad encounter with a transporter changes her from a tomboy to a stereotypical, possibly insane girly-girl. The heroes are asked if they want to have her mind fixed... their response? "She's perfect!" Bullying is bad. Taking advantage of a Mind Rape and refusing to fix the victim because they're no longer "a bad person" is good. Also, tomboys are bad - you can be ugly as sin, but as long as you know your proper place in the world, it's okay.
- He Man And The Masters Of The Universe:
- One episode of the remake of He Man And The Masters Of The Universe involves Orko being assigned to make the palace garden bloom again. After several catastrophic failures, he heads out to find help, and in doing so unwittingly unleashes the Sealed Evil In A Can Monster Of The Week. Once the crisis is averted (with help from a newly arriving hero), Orko admits in the final scene that tending a garden is too much for him, and Man-At-Arms turns this into An Aesop: knowing what you can and can't do is a sign of maturity. One line of dialogue later, He-Man adds that if you try your hardest, you can accomplish anything. A Stock Aesop that effortlessly contradicts the entirety of the episode's plot up to that point, including the already-delivered moral? Bad form.
- The original He-Man had another Broken Aesop, in an episode where a tribe of primitive beings manages to steal He-Man's sword and Man-At-Arms's laser blaster. After the tribe nearly kill themselves by misusing the weapons, the heroes deliver a canned speech on the dangers of weapons. The beings respond by throwing the sword and laser into a lava pit! Of course, our heroes have them back by the start of the next episode... The Aesop apparently being "weapons are bad things, unless the right people have them".
- And another one for He-Man. The moral at the end of the episode was that violence solved nothing—this from a guy who wields a great big sword. In that very episode, He-Man dukes it out with a wizard and a demon, and two dragons have at it. The good guys win, of course.
- In The Defection, there the whole thing about people not changing their ways and someone defecting from evil and people don't trust her but she actually does want to change and etcetera and so forth. Except at the beginning of the episode she says that she was once good and was just lured over to the side of evil. So, no, people can't change.
- In Eye of the Beholder, He-man joins forces with giant insect people and there's the aesop about not judging people by their appearance. Then after a Disney Death, his insect ally returns, having "evolved" into a more human form. So don't judge people by their appearance, because they may actually just be normal looking people who are primitive.
- 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 short". Arguably, this is intentional; after all, the rest of the movie deconstructs the traditional fairy tale, so why not the moral of the story?
- Made even worse in the musical, where to cover up Fiona's costume change there's an annoying bit where all the fairy tale creatures out Farquaad as a half-dwarf in denial about his own "freakishness." They then proceed to ridicule him openly for said freakishness (and some loserdom to boot), because clearly the way to punish a bully is to justify the reasons he has for bullying others in the first place.
- Shrek 3, on the other hand, seems to have lost the satirical element, slipping from Aesops being intentionally broken to make a point to just... broken.
- The message seemed to change from "It's OK to Be Yourself" to "It's OK to be like Shrek". Being ugly is something that can't be helped, but being handsome is unforgivable; the only villain not redeemed was the one who wasn't born a hideous monster.
- 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.
- The princesses convert to feminism and kick the asses of their captors, yet 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?
- Blood right; she married into the family. Totally different broken aesop, especially since Shrek was the next in line instead of Fiona, who was the frickin' blood heir, child of the previous ruler.
- One of the aesops in Cars, despite being arguably Family Unfriendly ("Tiny little towns in the middle of nowhere are important"), is delivered in a way that somewhat shoots it in the foot, with one character lamenting "The road didn't cut through the land, it moved with it"... directly after following the old route, which literally cuts through two rock outcroppings.
- Indeed, the old route was identified as Route 66, which actually owes its original fame to the fact that it was the first modern American highway that way built arrow-straight.
- Not exactly. Route 66 owed its fame to being the first major road in what was to become the interstate highway system (66 was finished in the 1920s), and allowed true cross-country inter-state driving instead of having to follow a hundred different roads to cross the country by car or truck. It gained even more fame in the 50s when Nat King Cole released the song "(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66." The "straight arrow" parts are really only visible where its flat (such as in many parts of the California desert). Everywhere there were hills or mountains, however, the road crews made it twisty and winding because it was easier to pave with the tools they had available (paving steep inclines is a pain when you're pouring tar by the bucket). Between Oatman and Kingman Arizona was particularly bad, as I remember, and a lot of people died there over the years, to the point where the locals called the area "Bloody 66". And they weren't alone in that, there were several other dangerous spots (such as east of Albuquerque in the Sandias) that also earned the same name, with many "Deadman's Curve" areas noted to history.
- The end of The Simpsons episode "Make Room For Lisa" has Lisa learning the lesson that she needs to go easier on Homer and not be such a nag, because he puts himself out to make her happy by doing things with her that he doesn't enjoy but she does. Fair enough by itself — except that this moral comes at the end of an episode where Homer has been behaving in a genuinely thoughtless, inconsiderate and — even by Homer's recent standards — incredibly Jerkass fashion towards Lisa throughout the entire episode, all of which has caused her so much stress over the episode that she has developed stomach ulcers. This includes giving away her room to a cell phone company to be used as the control room of a cell phone tower installed in the house to compensate for his destruction of the Bill of Rights. As a result, "go easy on your loved ones, because they really do love you" thus seems to become "put up with any amount of unreasonable crap from your loved ones, because they sometimes do things you like to do but they don't".
- Kirk and Luane Van Houten's divorce in "A Milhouse Divide" was all just one big aesop about Homer needing to respect his wife, which is what Kirk tells Homer after losing his home, his job, and his car. But they way losing Luane caused those was utterly contrived: he lost his home because he apparently got absolutely nothing in the divorce settlement, he was fired for being single, and his car was stolen by a woman he met on the rebound (which was his fault, but was more general incompetence as he was dumb enough to hand over his keys to someone he just met while waiting in a bar).
- In Galactik Football's second season, Rocket is banned from playing and leaves the team to play in a one-on-one game called Netherball, becoming a much more aggressive player the longer he plays. The Aesop is rammed down our throats by every "good" character — playing as a team is good, playing for yourself is selfish. Rocket eventually returns to the team, and in his first match back the opposing captain (Warren, who was one of the main proponents of the whole "teamwork is good" mantra) plays a game that's like that old Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs is playing all the positions in baseball. Then in their next match, their opponents all leave the field save for their ace player, who proceeds to run rings around the protagonist team and score three goals in a row. It's only when Rocket draws upon his experiences playing Netherball and decides to do it all himself that the heroes score a goal.
- The Aesop of the film The Polar Express seems to be about the importance of belief... but the fact that the plot consists of the main character actually meeting Santa Claus in person suggests that it's only to be believed if you know it's true.
- In the first season, Kim Possible got in trouble with her parents because she lied to them. In the second Kim got in trouble with her parents because she was affected by a truth laser and couldn't lie. We learn that honesty is very important for the Possible parents, yet they do everything in their power not to be honest during that dinner.
- In an episode from the second season Ron is angsting about dating a cute girl because that'd be against the rules, while Kim is like, "There Are No Rules, Ron." In The Movie, the plot revolves around that Kim isn't dating Ron for no other reason than she is following the rules...
- Wouldn't The Aesop of Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer be so much more effective if Rudolph refused to help Santa and the other reindeer because of the way they all had been treating him?
- That would give the moral that it's better to start a cycle of being jerks to each other than learning to accept others.
- And Santa would probably turn him into reindeer meat.
- Jack Johnson's cover of the song does a little to fix the apparent aesop of "If you are different, people will hate you until you do something useful, then instantly start liking you.":
But Rudolph he didn't go for that, he said "I see through your silly games
How can you look me in the face, when only yesterday you called me names?"
All of the other reindeer, man well they sure did feel ashamed
Rudolph, you know we're sorry; we're truly gonna try to change
- The Land Before Time XIII teaches the lesson that planning ahead and thinking things through are good things, but only in moderation. It's important at times to just rely on instinct, as the Yellowbellies do, which would be a perfectly good lesson, if it were not for the fact that the Yellowbellies were thick as pig shit.
- The original Land Before Time movie is all about a group of kids (dino-kids, but kids nonetheless) who must remain strong and use every ounce of fortitude, ingenuity, and even tolerance at their disposal to find the Hidden Valley and reunite with their parents. One of the Aesops in the movie, whether they meant it to be or not, is that kids really can do anything they put their minds to. Almost as if they were apologizing for this, in "The Land Before Time II," there is an entire song and dance routine about how kids can't do things alone, and must always rely on their parents, thus utterly cracking in two the original Aesop.
- The Santa Myth, listed here because typically you'll find this in animated specials. The know-it-all loudmouth says nay, or the lone innocent believes it against all odds. Santa of course is proven to be real in the end. Except these specials are meant as Aesops for real life children, though unlike any number of gods who can't be proved or disproved, we know that Santa ISN'T real - we can trace his origin back to a historic saint whose very real deeds we ignore. He's also not supposed to be a normal human, so he doesn't signify anything about the real-life capacity for human goodness. Meanwhile, a number of other lessons are taught: don't question anything because you're wrong, you don't have to worry about generosity because someone will do it for you, be good because then people will give you things, and lying is ok if it's a really good story.
- In the Futurama episode "I Second That Emotion", Bender is given an emotion chip after Leela calls him out for being insensitive to Nibbler. The problem here is that Leela is no more considerate towards Bender when he gets cut up by the can opener while attempting to use it to open up a can of pet food for Nibbler's pet food, instead scolding him for yelling at Nibbler.
- This troper enjoyed Meet The Robinsons from beginning to end, every single time I saw it. Then I noticed something at the end. The scene when Lewis went back in time to where Goob fell asleep and missed the winning catch (which would cause him to gradually go insane and become Bowler Hat Guy. Lewis wakes Goob up so he catches the ball and wins the game, thus preventing that fateful, tragic moment from ever happening. Normally this would be a great scene, showing someone helping their friend in their most crucial hour of need. However, this completely broke the entire message the movie was trying to teach: "Keep Moving Forward." The aesop was that we shouldn't keep dwelling on the past, because the best years of our life might just be ahead of us. We learned this aesop through Lewis, when he spent all that time trying to find his mother who abandoned him at the beginning of the movie (like Goob, he kept dwelling on the past). But in doing so, his invention allowed him to be adopted by the Robinsons, thus giving him a loving family and making him one of the most famous people in the world. They could've shown something similar happen to Bowler Hat Guy at the end, but instead, Lewis changed his past and the aesop was broken.
- In the original deleted ending, it's Goob who goes back in time to stop it from happening, and states that he "just needed to wake himself up." Still breaks the Aesop a bit, but slightly less because he engineers his own destiny and the statement can be seen as symbolic - he kept reliving a failed dream before, and now he's decided to move forward as well by forgiving Lewis and creating something better for himself - just very literally.
- Bebes Kids tries to teach us the moral that it is wrong to judge by appearance or more specifically, to assume all African Americans are trouble makers, which is a worthwhile message to be sure. The only problem? The three African American kids who are constantly being judged are a bunch of hooligans throughout the whole damn movie!
- In an episode of Galaxy Trio, a subterranean race is wreaking havoc on the surface world. After the Trio beat them, it turns out that they are actually the original natives of the planet, forced underground by the colonists from space. The solution? Send them to live on the sun instead with no mention of reparations, which their physiology conveniently favors!
- In the Teen Titans episode "Troq", it's an Anvilicious message about racism. Sadly, it's somewhat undermined because the episode involves them committing genocide against a robotic race, on the word of a known racist. Sure they almost caused some severe collateral damage, but you could make an argument that they're trying to protect their species at all costs.
- As pointed out by The Nostalgia Critic, an episode of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog about the importance of reserving 911 for emergencies is broken by Sonic using two robots attempting to kill him as an example of what NOT to waste 911's time with. Sonic can defeat them fairly easily, but "don't call 911 if you think you can probably handle the life threatening situation" isn't a great message for kids either.
- An episode of Family Guy has an aesop of "Homosexuality isn't a choice", fine... except that the episode happened because Peter willing chose to be used as a test subject for an experimental gene test with full knowledge of what it might do... This episode gives absolutely no hint that it is not a completely serious moral rather than a Spoof Aesop.
- Another episode about Fox News featured Brian as very upset that Lois would take a job at such a biased network. When Lois' investigative reporting turns up damning evidence about Rush Limbaugh (that he is in a homosexual relationship with Michael Moore) and Lois is told not to follow up, Brian encourages her to report it, as it will be bad for the GOP AND Fox News. Lois points out that Brian is doing the same thing he is angry at Fox News for. Brian's response? It's okay to lie and twist the truth for your own agenda, so long as you admit it.
- That, at least, was blatantly intentional and meant to highlight his hypocrisy. Unfortunately he goes right back to to always being right the next time it's an issue.
- The first Justice League movie (the one with the man from Mars), they disarm all the nuclear weapons on Earth at the beginning of the movie. But then alien invaders come, and Earth has nothing to protect itself with. (Though nuking the ninety-nine percent of the Earth where the things landed would have been very bad indeed.) So is the movie anti-nuke? It tries to be. Is it? No.
- This troper's favorite line from that episode is when the Senator who originally championed the nuclear dismantling program appears on tv and says, paraphrased, "obviously nobody could have predicted we would face this kind of a threat", at which point I literally SCREAMED at my television "THE GENERAL PREDICTED IT YOU #$%@ING MORON!!!". Because he does. Quoth the General earlier in the very same episode, "Those missiles are our only defense against aggression". Granted, the Senator does turn out to be an alien impostor who was intentionally trying to cripple Earth's defenses to make way for the invasion, but we don't find that out until the end.
- The basis of Billy The Cat was that the main character was turned into a cat to teach him not to be cruel to animals. At the end, he stays a cat because he enjoys it. Meaning the basic message goes from "don't be cruel to animals" to "be cruel to animals, and you'll be turned into one, then you'll choose not to be turned back".
- Does he learn not to be cruel to animals in the meantime, though? If he does, the Aesop works.
- The US Acres cartoon "Gort Goes Good" has a "people can change" moral, completely subverted in that Gort's Heel Face Turn was just a ruse. Despite this, Orson still proclaims that it's possible for people to change for the better, but his case isn't looking too strong.
- South Park repeatedly throws Aesops in people's faces but at least one is an absolutely shattered moral. The four kids are facing the wrath of another kid who spent years in juvie hall for an accident they caused and he got blamed for. The apparent Aesop seems to be that the only way they can save themselves is to admit and take responsibility for what they did. However, they instead end up causing another accident, their antagonist gets blamed again, and they let him get taken away once more.
- This really falls more under Rule Of Funny than an attempt to impart an actual lesson.
- South Park's morals are usually politic and Word Of God says they're sometimes not even Trey and Matt's actual view. Comedic Sociopathy is also alive and well on the show and I'm amazed this is the first example of it you found. Scott Tenorman, anyone?
- Frequently, American Dad will deliberately break its own Aesops for the sake of humor. An example is in the episode "Threat Levels". Francine begins a career in real estate, and Stan becomes jealous when she starts earning more income than he does. Stan tries to sabotage her career, but by the end of the episode, he comes to understand that you shouldn't be jealous of your partner's success and that you should take pride in their triumphs. However, even after learning this, he still sabotages her career anyway.
- In Captain Planet, the moral of the entire series is "if we work together, we can save the planet", but in every episode, working together fails and the Planeteers always end up calling Captain Planet to deal with the problem for them.
Video Games
- Crusader Of Centy has one of the most broken, spindled and mutilated Aesops in gaming history. It's mainly broken by the gameplay. In expressing a message of tolerance and understanding, it attempts to convince the player that humans and monsters are Not So Different, could easily get along if they tried, and that the only reason humans fight them is because Humans Are Bastards. And because most monsters attack humans on sight. But the constant preaching of tolerance is always directed solely toward and against the humans, as if they were the only ones who did anything wrong. The hypocrisy arguably reaches its peak in the Heaven section, when God himself chastises you for "bringing bloodshed to this peaceful place" by defending yourself against a flying lizardman who came out of nowhere and attacked you for no reason. Even the Aesop it attempted is broken in the ending; rather than peace being established between humans and monsters, it is revealed that monsters were all trapped on Earth from another world. After going back in time and killing the creature trapping them there, all the monsters leave before humanity is born and history is changed to make human society a peaceful near-Utopia. The real moral of this story seems to be "Segregation is the way to go, because minorities are the root of all evil, even though it's not technically their fault".
- This so makes me think of the real life Israel-Palestine issue...
- The Humans Are Bastards theme of Chrono Cross is broken when you are being called out by races as bad if not worse than humanity. The Dragons answer to humanity is to war with them until the Dragons are defeated, and the Dwarves commit genocide on the Fairies when humans ACCIDENTLY poison their homes because Hydra are a source of medicine. The only two important races who are not genocidal are Demihumans and Faeries.
- In Sudeki working together seems to be the moral of the story: the Big Bad exists purely because the resident God split himself in half. Therefor, it's odd that you get to use your full party for four notable story sessions and in only one boss fight, about a third of the way through the game. Generally your party is split in half, and oddly enough (and unfortunately enough. Tal and Elco don't have healing skills) it's men in one group, women in the other.
- In Tales Of The Abyss Luke accidentally destroys Akzeriuth. This completely disgusts the rest of the party, and it takes about a quarter of the game for them to all come around - the game explicitly stating that trust lost is hard to regain. Then Anise ends up being pretty much directly responsible for Ion's death and openly admits to being The Mole the whole game, all because Mohs threatened her parents. The other characters reaction? Immediate forgiveness.
- There is a difference between blowing up a city because some guy said you should and spying on people to protect your family...
- Yes, there is a difference. One of them had no idea that what he was doing was wrong: he was following the directions of a trusted mentor under the belief that it would save thousands of lives (even if he was doing it for selfish reasons). The other one knew what she was doing was wrong, and chose to continue the deception (for three-quarters of the game!) instead of asking anyone for help or trying to find another way out of her predicament.
- The real Broken Aesop of Tales of the Abyss is the ending. Luke and Asch both have complexes regarding each other and personal identity, as Luke is a clone of Asch. Luke struggles with thinking of himself as second to/separate from his "original," and his party constantly reassures him that he is his own person regardless of his origins. Asch in turn feels replaced, and distances himself from his old life. A huge chunk of the game's moral hinges on their choices as individuals. It's even stated that should the two ever merge, it would wipe out their memories, creating an entirely new person - that both "Luke" and "Asch" would be dead. So what happens at the end? They're fused together without resolution as individuals... and the game acts like it's a happy ending because he's "alive."
- Also from the Tales Series: Symphonia tries to use a "Racism is Bad" aesop, but its more like "Racism is bad, but actively trying to do something about it is worse." because the Big Bad is actually TRYING to get rid of said racism.
- When you look at how he's trying to get rid of racism, the message is much less broken; it seems the Aesop he's following is "Racism is bad, so using the other races for Soylent Green is perfectly fine". And anyway, the party is doing something about the racism; besides treating the half-elves as people and equals, they make the racist meet acknowledge that the ones they look down are helping them despite the prejudice. In the end, the half-elves in the party Walk The Earth to help change attitudes towards half-elves without resorting to mass enslavement and genocide.
- Characters in Metal Gear Solid 4 continue the series trope of monologuing about Hideo Kojima's personal philosophy. He himself claimed the story's moral was that people must take responsibility for their actions now, and not leave the world's problems to future generations to deal with. Characters explicitly tell Snake this, at every possible opportunity. However, the character who saves the world at the end? It's not Snake, the dying remanant of an old generation doing everything in his power to finish his business in his final mission; it's the seven-year-old girl, who was a genderless, possibly-not-even-existing Mac Guffin of Metal Gear Solid 2 fleshed out into a character for this game only, and certainly not part of the previous generation. There's some evidence pointing to the fact that Sunny was not intended to be as important as she was, and was brought into the forefront in order to keep up staff morale and prevent a total Downer Ending. Either way, considering all the series and moral foreshadowing, it's awkward to say that nothing can be saved by leaving it to the next generation, but save the world by giving it to the next generation.
- This troper feels it's mitigated by the fact that while Sunny made some modifications to FOXALIVE that saved the world, it was Snake who did all the legwork and Liquid Ocelot that manipulated him into getting that far. Sunny just helped.
- In the most recent Star Ocean game (although the first chronologically), the Aesop is apparently that you shouldn't help anyone or let anyone help you or you'll be helping the Always Chaotic Evil Grigori. Somehow. Of course, this is contradicted not only by the fact that you previously saved the universe by meddling in one planet's affairs, but also by the plot of every other game in the series.
- Broken by economic concerns: The message of the Odd World series is that corporations are evil, world-destroying entities... except for delicious, life-restoring Sobe!
- Any single player game that makes a point on the importance of friendship tends to be self defeating.
- 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!
- Lost Odyssey has the Aesop of "Violence is bad, and ought to be avoided". The problem? it's a JRPG.
- While the intentions of The World Ends With You are noble, and most of its Aesops are cleverly reinforced by the game mechanics, it's difficult to take the "trust other people" lesson seriously when the plot turns out to be a Thirty Xanatos Pileup. And when almost every genuinely trustworthy character is killed off. And when characters start being mind-controlled.
- And (as stated in a point above) it's a single player game.
Anime
- A long running theme in the Gundam franchise is total pacifism and that war is bad. While war is understandably horrible its a little hard to argue the ideal of total pacifism when that ideal always seems to needs giant engines of destruction to defend it. Most notable in Gundam Wing with the Sanc Kingdom being defended violently by the Gundam pilots. This all said the franchise also seems to be aware of the inherent contradiction.
- Varies. Really, Wing is the only series to present this contradiction. There are mildly similar cases but usually Gundam's moral is more clearly "If there's something that needs to be protected and defended, you can't hide behind claims the situation doesn't affect you". Over time as the franchise has tried to be more marketable (especially to female audiences) this moral sometimes gets lost in the attempts to make protagonists likeable, facing the problem that 'heroes' that kill several people every episode aren't quite cute and cuddly.
- With the specific case of the Sanc Kingdom, the nation's leader allowed a defense force because she realized that saying "we're pacifists" would do absolutely nothing to stop the gigantic army from turning her homeland into a crater. This philosophy is mirrored in the Orb Union from Gundam SEED, whose philosophy is "Don't start war, but don't get bullied either."
- As much as Naruto stresses the importance of hard work, Hard Work Hardly Works. All the powerful characters have some form of The Gift — an innate talent, bloodline limit, sealed demon, or cursed seal (sometimes several at once) that make them more powerful than the talentless hard workers, with the possible exception of Might Guy. And as much as it may stress teamwork, after the Zabuza arc, all the important battles are one-on-one. As much as it is said that Sasuke cannot get true strength by using the cursed seal and focusing on revenge, he has turned into a walking Deus Ex Machina who is well on his way to getting revenge, thanks to the power of the cursed seal.
- The most blatant example is the Naruto vs. Neji battle. Neji feels his life is determined by his clan's bloodline, his birth to the Branch House, the general inter-clan politics, and the little fact he's got a seal on his head anyone in the Main House can use to kill him horribly with a thought — in sum, life is determined at birth. Nothing in the story actually argues against this, but Naruto convinces him otherwise when he beats Neji's bloodline trait... which he does only by using the all-powerful Nine-Tailed Fox sealed in him at birth. Neji seals his chakra; Naruto uses the Fox's chakra and wins, just barely, because of it. Even worse, the sealing-at-birth defines Naruto's character completely, too; he just doesn't seem bright enough to recognize it half of the time, and the rest of the time he's actively in denial about it.
- This Troper thought the battle actually illustrated the value of hard work quite well; among other things, Naruto had to dig through the ground until his fingers bleed to win.
- Naruto's winning move was using the Shadow Clone Jutsu (which had been an advanced version of the one jutsu he couldn't master) to trick Neji (who had believed his victory to be inevitable) that he had won long enough to punch him to the ground. While the Nine-Tailed Fox restored his access to chakra, his ingenuity won the battle and his overcoming his difficulties changed Neji's view on destiny.
- The thing that undermined hard work was that Neji had an innate power but he had to work very hard to perfect it and that's why he was so strong (Hinata had the same power and couldn't lay a scratch on him). But then Naruto is able to gain the power to match him by simply asking for it.
- It is especially true about Rock Lee. He is the epitome of hard work (using obscenely heavy leg-weights all the time, even when training and most of his fights). Yet, he actually seems to lose most of his progress at some fights, when he ends crippled and have to work even harder to catch up. Lee even states that Sasuke got as fast as he is in the month between the preliminaries and the finals. He also thinks that he's jealous that Naruto defeated his main rival and Sasuke gets to fight against the opponent who defeated him while he is unable to move on.
- Then again, around the time Lee graduated from the academy, he wasn't even very good at taijutsu on top of his other disadvantages. While he doesn't have very good luck in battle, if he hadn't worked as hard as he did, he'd be almost completely useless.
- The author seems to have tried to fix this problem when, during the "Sai and Sasuke" arc, Yamato tells Naruto to stop relying on the Kyuubi and train up his own strength. But it gets broken all over again when Naruto later learns a new attack by taking advantage of a training method that only he can use because of his naturally high level of Chakra.
- That was more about not using transforming into the nine-tailed fox during battles as it's becoming increasingly harmful to the health of himself and his allies, which he hasn't done since. In fact, even more recently Naruto began training to learn to drawn power from nature instead of the nine tails.
- There has been no evidence that Naruto's high chakra is because of the Kyuubi. In fact, for a short time when he's unable to tap into the Kyuubi's chakra, he doesn't get any weaker, slower, or less enduring. Those powers my have been his own the whole time.
- According to Kakashi, without the fox's chakra, Naruto already has twice as much chakra as he does.
- The Cycle Of Hatred aesop in the Pain arc, simply because of how unrealistic the whole thing is. NEWSFLASH! People having a heart to heart talk is not going to turn insane mad men into good guys. Defending yourself by killing a person is not bad, especially after that person blew up your whole town.
- Questionable, based on who you ask. Along with that, it wasn't so much a tried Aesop, even though it seemed like one, as much as it was Naruto being smart; insane or not, killing Nagato would just lead to hostile relations with another neighboring village. And after having the entire town of Kohona destroyed and many ninja killed, it wouldn't exactly be a brilliant plan, justified killing or not.
- xxxHolic has quite a few strange morals. In an early story of the manga/anime, a woman prone to telling white lies about her life receives a ring from Yuuko that gradually blackens each time she tells a lie. Eventually it shatters, engulfing her in a black smog that causes her to be run over by a car and killed. The intended Aesop seems to be "Don't tell lies, because they will eventually build up and consume you." But Yuuko herself, in keeping with her Mysterious Past and Omniscient Morality License, frequently speaks in half-truths throughout the series, and it was her own deceptions in not telling the woman the function of the ring that led to the latter's death. The Broken Aesop is therefore: "Telling white lies is wrong; telling half-truths that lead to people getting killed is a-okay."
- This was patched up later in the series by the presence of Himawari. With her and Watanuki having ditched Doumeki earlier, her natural power of unconsciously inflicting bad luck on others was in full force, which caused the truck to come along at just the wrong moment (the implication is that it otherwise would have been able to stop before hitting the woman). The ring was only meant to prevent the paralysis that had already begun to move through the woman's body, her removal of it right then was just plain bad luck. The anime actually changed this so that the woman lived (mostly due to Himawari not being there) and Yuko's later comments make it clear that it was more of a Karmic Death that resulted from a continuous string of lies that built up around her the point that they crushed her.
- Pokemon: The First Movie, dub version. The moral apparently is... fighting is bad. In a series which has Pokemon competition-fighting every episode, the idea that fighting-fighting is bad was apparently lost on many viewers.
- The original Aesop for the first movie is that you shouldn't treat people badly because they're different, say a clone. This was replaced by a "take over the world" plot in the dub, but the original theme was later addressed in the "Mewtwo Returns" special.
- What's the point of giving the Aesop if you are going to be mind-wiped out of it in the first place?
- That bit was addressed at the end of "Mewtwo Returns", too. Practically a Crowning Moment Of Awesome for Meowth.
- Ueki, the main character of The Law Of Ueki, is almost completely talentless; while most people in the show's tournament have about 50 talents, he has around eight, and most of them are useless. Despite this, he manages to win fights through a combination of creative thinking and sheer determination. He's the embodiment of the Aesop "No matter how talentless you are, you can do anything if you try hard enough"... until it's revealed that he's actually a celestial being who was taken from heaven as a baby. This not only makes him strong enough to do things that (according to the show itself) no normal human, no matter how hard they tried, could do, it also gives him the ability to summon ten special Celestial Weapons that only gods can use... and on top of that, since he was given powers as part of the tournament, he's a "Neo-Celestial" who has unique celestial weapons even stronger than a normal celestial which he proceeds to use to win almost all subsequent fights in the series.
- "Don't use violence in sports" is An Aesop repeated all over The Prince Of Tennis. Several characters are punished in different ways for being violent, whether it's a single individual (Kippei Tachibana almost blinds his best friend Chitose, seriously ponders quitting tennis as a whole and finally spends two years paying his penance for such deeds) or a whole team (Higa's coach Saotome Harumi instructs his pupils to throw balls at the other coaches and injure them; when they try this against Seigaku, karma bites them in the ass by having Seigaku unmask and beat them in the first National round). This doesn't explain why Akaya Kirihara from Rikkaidai, whose abilities relay heavily on an Unstoppable Rage-like mode, is often given a free pass; in fact, not only does he injure players deliberately when in this mode, but his sempai encourage it. And until the final matches with Seigaku, they're not punished for their lack of sportmanship.
- Ojamajo Doremi: An episode of the Naisho OVA ends with Seki-sensei chewing out the anchor leg of her room's opponents in a swimming relay for not trying as hard as Aiko. One, the opponents won that race, and two, after all her hard practicing, Aiko didn't even compete.
- Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro ep. 14 ends with a message about how people shouldn't be so intolerant of other people's cultures. The irony is that this is delivered in reaction to the antics of possibly the most xenophobic and offensive depiction of an American in anime since 1945.
- Mai-Otome: Arika succeeds in her quest to become an Otome not because of the purity of her dream, but because she's the daughter of Lena Sayers and so the authorities (first and foremost, Natsuki) are willing to bend the rules for her.
- Yu Gi Oh: The main aesop is friendship. The show is about games, normally SINGLE PLAYER GAMES. Where having friends to back you up is 100% factually irrelevant. The aesop is broken by default.
- In the duel against Weevil at Duelist Kingdom. Just before defeating the Great Moth, Yugi gives a speech about how he won because Weevil cheated while he dueled with honor. Yugi however cheats regularly with the ability to choose what cards he draws. While most villans cheat as a gimick, this is the only time a lesson is made of cheating.
- In an episode of Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, detective girl Miyako marks the titular Magical Girl thief on the cheek so as to be able to root out her alter ego. When she sees her best friend Maron in school the next day with a bandage over her cheek, she refuses to demand that it be removed, because she trusts her. Maron is suitably touched…but she really IS Jeanne!
- Actually, in the manga Miyako is unwilling to take off the bandage, but does it anyway because she has faith in Maron. Of course, Maron just has her angel pal make it look like she has a scrape on her cheek under the bandage anyway, so she doesn't get found out. Miyako's whole reason for trying to catch Jeanne is because she looks a lot like Maron and wants to prove that Maron is innocent, too. And if Jeanne didn't steal the paintings, the world would be taken over by Satan. So basically, the moral is actually "it's OK to do bad things if your reasons are good." Or then there's "you should have faith in your friends, even if they are probably actually doing the wrong thing because surely their reasons are good." Or maybe it's "always choose the lesser of two evils." I don't know, you tell me.
- Osamu Tezukas Metropolis has a lot of aesops, that social fairness is more important than big buildings, that robots can be people too, and the arrogance to play god leads nowhere good. Unfortunately at the climax of the film the innocent, passive and lovestruck robot-girl Tima is placed on her throne to take up her intended purpose as Master Computer/God-Empress for the city, and immediately starts trying to wipe out the human race. This sends the aesop that "Robots (or other other group you can name) are fine enough people in their place but should never be trusted with power". Or alternately "Humans are just so mean and horrible that they should never dare let themselves be judged"
- Or maybe (and to be fair I haven't seen it), "oppression and injustice leads to more oppression and injustice because it's what the victims learn," which is a worthy moral indeed.
- The things is it's not robots in general that turn omnicidal, it's Tima, who is in love with the protagonist, been protected by him for most of the movie, and has about 36 hours of actual experience with humans. I just could not swallow that naive robot girl with a yandere side+power=Angel of Death to humanity. Anyway the real victims of oppression are the human proletariat, who get shredded by the security forces after being brutalised/manipulated into rebellion.
- Stuff it, Lenin.
- It's a good thing we just settled the strong bonds of love and morality and that Diclonii and humans can live in peace together. Oh well, time to go kill ten thousand infants instead of about six other available options.
- Amu Hinamori, lead Magical Girl in Shugo Chara, spends most of her filler episodes telling other children a number of different aesops, usually variations on "you're great just the way you are", but Amu herself can't grasp these lessons when they apply to herself. Particularly in the latter half of the season when Amu's fourth egg, Dia, turns into an X-egg, resulting in several episodes worth of Heroic BSOD.
- In an episode of Wedding Peach, the message is that no matter if you are fat or thin, true beauty comes from within. Only, there is a student, Yukiko, whose boyfriend dumps her when she has been turned fat by the Villain Of The Week, but takes her back when she is restored to her former, slim self.
- This is wickedly parodied in Wedding Peach Abridged when Yukiko actually fixes the Broken Aesop by rejecting her boyfriend when he begs to be taken back because she is disgusted by how shallow he is. Unfortunately, the Love Angels proceed to break the Aesop yet again when they drool over the handsome captain of the soccer team.
Comic Books
- Many of Jack Chick's comics could be viewed in this manner. It's most notable when he tries to draw Christian metaphors using the American legal system, and gets the entire way it works wrong (i.e., death penalty states do not allow serial killers' mothers to die in their place, and judges cannot try their godsons because then they'd have personal involvement in the case).
- Furthermore, in one tract, he seems to imply that Supreme Court justices should use judicial activism based around fundamentalist Christian principles when judging abortion cases, or else they will go to hell.
- In-universe Aesop broken by real-world events: When the first X-men movie came out, at the same time that Marvel writers were driving home the point that discrimination against mutants is bad, Marvel lawyers proved that mutants are not people... in order to get a tax break on their action figures. See Misaimed Marketing.
- For more information on this case see Toy Biz v. United States [1]
- Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #39 has a foreign exchange student named Kristoff show up at Peter's school, and make a speech about how, unlike many of his countrymen, he doesn't hate America. Peter shows him around, and they talk until it's revealed that Kristoff is from Latveria, home of Dr. Doom. Peter freaks out a bit but accepts him for it. Then the Fantastic Four show up, attacking Kristoff seemingly just because of his Latverian origin, calling him a "potential threat to national security", and taking him away. So, it turns out that he's just a normal, nice kid and the Aesop is that ethnic prejudice is wrong, right? ...well, no, because it turns out that he was really a completely undetectable Doombot, and Spidey and the FF have to beat him up. So, the Aesop is that you should never trust people from enemy countries, even when they seem to be perfectly nice, and that it's totally logical to seize and search people who might be a problem.
- The moral of Birds of Prey: The Battle Within, the arc from issues 76 to 85, appears to be the fairly stock aesop of "You should accept your friends for who they are and not try to change them," except that what Oracle was trying to change about Huntress is her tendency to kill people. In the end, Oracle apologizes to Huntress, and, in the Dead of Winter story arc (issues 104-108), actually tells Huntress to use deadly force against the Secret Six if she thinks it appropriate, possibly making this the Family Unfriendly Aesop that sometimes killing people is a good idea.
- Well, sometimes it is. It's just that this isn't the case very often.
Myth And Legends / Folklore
- Beauty and the Beast in its various tellings usually ends up having a Broken Aesop (especially in modern versions) that is naturally an inversion of the above complaint about Shrek. It's supposedly saying that Beauty comes to see beyond the Beast's appearance and accept him for who he is... except that they're only able to live Happily Ever After when the curse is broken and he reverts to a perfect Handsome Prince (and thus comes off as "only beautiful people can love each other" instead). Depending on how violent the Beast's personality is portrayed as being, it can also contain the Family Unfriendly Aesop that it's okay to endure an abusive relationship, he'll change. The story in itself is hard to tell well, and thus often subverted.
- And of course, in the Disney version, the original reason he was cursed was because he refused a old ugly lady sanctuary. It turns out this was a bad idea because she was a 'beautiful' enchantress (emphasis on the beautiful) rather than a poor old lady.
- However, in the Disney version, it's made pretty clear that Belle (the beauty) loves him in spite of his appearance and that his reverting to his handsome human appearance is his reward, not hers.
- At one point, it was planned for Belle to have a throwaway line at the end about the redeemed Beast growing a beard.
- This troper played the Beast in a high-school production and still remembers the most interesting detail about the script: their first kiss, even described in stage direction as "the kiss that has waited for so long," doesn't take place until DIRECTLY AFTER he transforms back into the Prince.
- Granted, with all the screwy makeup and obnoxious costume pieces the Beast wears, this might have been a good thing...
- Indeed, when Jean Cocteau did his adaptation of the story in 1946, he intentionally aimed for making the audience be disappointed by the Beast's transformation — even this version's Belle is a bit let down — precisely because of the original story's implications. It's very telling that the two most famous versions of this story (the other being Disney's) noticed and addressed its implications.
- In Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter, he doesn't transform in the end at all.
- On the other hand, in the same author's previous take on the story, Beauty, he does, though he's older than expected, plus she (having always considered herself plain) suddenly realizes she is pretty. All in all, it's even more disappointing than the original, especially coming from an author who usually does a good job of subversion.
- Of course, when one takes into account there's not going to be much of a love life between them if he's not human, it's arguably an Esoteric Happy Ending.
- Not really. The Beast is a humanoid "monster". There are multiple scenes dealing with Beauty's physical attraction to him. He's simply very large, and very hairy, with fangs and claws. There are no hints whatsoever that he's not fully functional.
- And ditto in Mercedes Lackey's 1890's retelling, The Fire Rose.
- The original fairy story was designed to tell young women that if they were married off for money or politics they should suck it up no matter how repellent their husband initially seemed.
- Really, aren't most fairy tales broken in this way? Aside from how they may or may not have been broken originally? "The moral of the story is, no matter how well-meaning a tale, it'll be a moot point in three hundred years."
- There are many folklorists who would agree with this, with 'Beauty and The Beast' being a classic example. In the middle ages, a time when arranged marriages were entirely normal, there was no real law against beating your wife (so long as you didn't maim or kill her) and divorce was not allowed for the peasants, 'Beauty and the Beast' is a tale that offers at least some small hope that if the woman perseveres, her abusive husband may get better. Today, the fairy-tale is a broken Aesop. Five or seven centuries ago, however, it just might have been a tale of endurance and hope.
- The Beast being obnoxious and abusive to Beauty was a Disney addition to the story. In the first written version, published in the mid-18th century, the Beast was never anything but kind and gracious to her. Plus she got to live in a magical castle where her every wish was granted. The Beast let Beauty go back to visit her family even knowing that he would die without her — not because of any magic, but because he loved her too much to live without her. The Aesop is that you should love someone for being a good person, no matter their looks, and it is clear in the original written version that Beauty is perturbed (at first) to see her Beast replaced with a handsome stranger.
- 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 scenario, even if they know it's a hoax - in this story they only suspect it is.
- Ah, actually that was a poem: 'Matilda', by Victorian writer Hillaire Belloc. Belloc's story was written before that law was passed, and he made a point of writing his children's poems for humour rather than moral instruction - even adding in the introduction to one collection that none of the poems could possibly be true, as in a world of such violence and punishment as that which he portrayed, neither he nor the reader nor the illustrator could possibly have survived to live today.
- Also, "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is meant to be a simplistic tale that lying continually means people won't trust you, not an informative guide on the British Legal System.
- In his stand up tour "Politics", Ricky Gervais points out that the Broken Aesop of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is actually "never tell the same lie twice".
- The classic story "Little Red Riding Hood" — whose original Family Unfriendly Aesop was "don't talk to strangers or they will molest and kill you" — is arguably undermined by the later addition of the woodcutter rescuer.
- Alternatively, though, one could argue that the Woodcutter made a more Family Friendly Aesop by changing it to "Strangers could be good or bad, so be cautious"...
- Possibly what undermined Red Riding Hood was the wolf's killing of the Grandmother. She didn't give the Wolf the time of day yet he just busts into her home and eats her. For that matter, why didn't the wolf just eat Little Red in the forest? Some versions try to explain that the woods are actually safer than home, because they're filled with woodcutters. Ultimately, Adaptation Decay has resulted in even the slightest bit of Fridge Logic sinking the story.
- Uh, in every version of the story this troper's read, Red Riding Hood not only gives the wolf "the time of day", she tells him that she's going to her grandmother's house and indicates the direction. (Note to whoever wrote this: the "she" of the sentence to which you are referring is the grandmother, not Red.)
- The problems come up because the Aesop was tacked on by Perault and the Grimms (the Grimms are responsible for the woodcutter). Try a pre-Perault French version called "The Grandmother's Tale" and you'll never look at the story the same way again.
- Vampire Savior doesn't help. (Hyperdimensional Arsenal of land mines, anyone?)
- The moral of John Henry is that a man can do anything a machine can, as demonstrated by the title character managing to pound railroad spikes faster than a machine. But John Henry was born abnormally big and strong. And he died right after beating the machine. And due to that he'll never pound a railroad spike again. The machine would have been a better choice in just about every area, since it takes someone with almost superhuman strength killing himself to beat it once and only once.
- Much better handled in a Disney short about Paul Bunyan. He works himself almost to death to defeat a logging machine... and loses. The moral becomes "When it's your time, it's your time", as he wanders away and disappears into legend.
Close Myth And Legends / Folklore
Music
- Notorious B.I.G and Puff Daddy's video for Mo' Money, Mo' Problems stars Puff as a golf champion who laments over his recent acquisition of wealth in lieu with the song's title. For some reason, that doesn't seem to stop him from rapping for about three minutes about how awesome it is to be rich.
- There are a lot of songs designed to teach about tolerance and appreciating those who are different from you. But sometimes the lyricists don't think too clearly:
- The song "Cherokee Nation" by Paul Revere and the Raiders is a lament for what the US Government did to American Indians in general, and the Cherokee in particular. It has lines like "Took away our way of life/the tomahawk and the bow and knife" and "Although I wear a shirt or tie/I'm still a red man deep inside." This is a Critical Research Failure — at the time of the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee had adopted white ways more than any other tribe, and would have been baffled by ideas of keeping the bow and knife instead of guns. The song talks almost entirely about the evils of forced assimilation, and barely says a word about murder, theft of land, deportation, and the other horrors the Cherokee went through.
- In fact, a lot of the tragedy of the Cherokee is that they showed that if an Indian tribe adopted white ways to the point of having their own alphabet, their own newspaper, fighting with whites against other Indians, and bringing their case to the United States Supreme Court, they would still be treated as badly as any other Indians.
- The Supreme Court agreed with them. The President ignored it, and ordered the illegal deportation anyway. If Indians were as prominent as Jews, Andrew Jackson would be as hated as Hitler.
- Peter, Paul and Mary, the creators of "Puff the Magic Dragon," wrote a song called "All Mixed Up" that pleads for tolerance and the mixing of different cultures. It points out that "no race of man is completely pure" and that so many amazing things, from what we look like to what language we speak, are the result of hybrids (cultural or racial). Unfortunately, the list of amazing things includes the lines "There were no red-headed Irishmen/before the Vikings landed in Ireland./How many Romans had dark curly hair/before they brought slaves from Africa?" Think about it.
- This troper has thought about it, and suspects the previous troper doesn't realize that forty years ago, even most respected scholars believed there were no dark-haired people in Italy or redheads in Ireland before the changes mentioned. Seriously. And most Americans were convinced beyond dissuasion that most slaves in the Roman Empire were black. (Most slaves in the Roman Empire were Italian, and indistinguishable from their owners. The few blacks known to the Romans were either Nubians or Numidians, and in both cases were considered allies and skilled warriors.)
- You're missing the point. The song is describing this racial mixing as a good thing happening from the "mix of cultures" when it's really a result of rape. (Of the indigenous Irish by Vikings, or of slaves by masters.)
- More like "all that purity nonsense you're talking about doesn't exist because bigots like YOU dragged foreigners away from their homes or violated their land, and now everything's a part of each other because of THAT, so I'd hush if I were you."
Stand-Up Comedy
- In his stand-up, Ricky Gervais identifies the Broken Aesop inherent in a version of the children's folk tale 'The Lazy Mouse and the Industrious Mouse' that he was told by his headmaster, at a school assembly. In the story, the Industrious Mouse labours long and hard to prepare himself for winter, whilst the Lazy Mouse bunks off and has fun. When winter comes, the Lazy Mouse has nothing, so goes to avail himself of the charity of the Industrious Mouse — who, after beginning a lecture about how the Lazy Mouse should have done his own preparing, suddenly turns around and invites him in to share. Gervais notes with exasperation that the moral is mangled from being "work hard and be prepared for the future" into becoming, in his words, "fuck around, do whatever you want and then scrounge off a do-gooder". He also notes that most of the pupils at that assembly took the latter aesop and "kept it up" for the entirety of their academic careers.
- He also mentions 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf': "never lie" becomes "never tell the same lie twice".
- Ah, one of my favourite Garak lines.
- You can see the clip in question here.
- The original version of the story Gervais's headmaster told is a quite intact if brutal Aesop, written by Aesop, the man himself. In Aesop's version, it's an industrious mouse and a lazy grasshopper, and the grasshopper starves.
- Often happens with old folk tales, stories and legends. In order to avoid upsetting kids, the story gets watered down to the point that the moral is lost, conveniently ignoring the fact that having the characters who make the wrong moral choice meet an unpleasant and upsetting end is the whole point.
- Lest they make a realistic comprimise, like the industrious mouse barely giving the lazy mouse enough food to survive, and make him agree to work twice as hard next summer to pay it back (this works best when the lazy mouse at first rejects the proposal, then accepts it just before starving).
Theater
- In the Musical Rent, we are told we should all live our lives to the full because we could die tomorrow, and there is no day like today. Don't worry though, because if you do happen to die, and some-one sings you a very special song, you can always come back to life. So. Very. Broken.
- Angel didn't.
- Rent also likes to complain about how hard it is to be an artist, but any kind of artistic job working for someone else would be selling out. One wonders what would happen if Roger actually starts selling C Ds.
- One could argue that it's not about working for someone else would be selling out, but rather compromising your integrity for money is selling out.
- For people who spend the whole time talking about love and loving life, the circle of friends seems to have a lot of cheating, poor communication, and emotional sniping at each other - no one is enjoying themselves very much, or following Angel's lauded example.
- Except for Collins, who indeed, lives every day for today... and ends up broken because of it.
- And then there's Angel: percussion genius, representation of unconditional love,...and canine-killer-for-hire.
Newspaper Comics
- One of Funky Winkerbean's longest ongoing storylines was Lisa Moore's struggle with breast cancer, something that she apparently emerged victorious from in 1999. The generally optimistic moral of the story, namely that breast cancer was an experience that could be fought against and won with the proper diagnosis, medicine, and the support of family and friends, filled with vibes of hope and good humor, was lauded by numerous doctors and breast cancer survival groups. The later 2007 sequel storyline, when the cancer came back in a much more serious form, complete with a much more Wangst-filled and Creator Breakdown-inspired treatment of the condition and the general inevitability of death hanging over the proceedings has been received far less kindly for making the earlier story Shoot The Shaggy Dog. Putting aside the accuracy of the depiction, it is clear that the Aesop of the earlier story was rejected in favor of True Art Is Angsty.
Other
- An ad for Extra's chewing gum indicates that it helps clear away the debris from Things That Are Bad For You, such as doughnuts, coffee, and cigarettes. Unfortunately, these are represented with walking CGI versions that look really rather sweet, even the cigarette. Yeah, saying your product blows away perhaps the cutest walking doughnut in the history of advertising? Not a point in its favour.
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