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Joey: Once I win this card game, Duke Devlin will be out of a job and he'll be forced to live in the street! Tea: What a heroic thing to do! Tristan: Clearly, he is a role model for children everywhere.
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. Often, it is the motivation which makes the difference between right and wrong: lying to help yourself is wrong, but lying to help someone else is sometimes okay. But if An Aesop is learned because of the consequences of the actions, and not the motives, the moral gets distorted. When Failure Is The Only Option, the moral also gets dicey: it's okay to do some ethically questionable things to save your closest friends from an immediate and definite danger at this very moment, but not to instantly get back to the Alpha Quadrant (which would save your entire crew from the potential, uncertain dangers they'll face during the next 70 years or so going the long way).
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.
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. Pink Lipstick Aesop, for when it's really, really broken.
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:
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."
- 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).
- 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 actually 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.
- In the Scrubs season one episode "My Old Lady", Turk, JD and Elliot all take away a lesson from the events of the episode. Turk's lesson was about getting to know the people he's going to do surgery on a bit better. However, in later seasons, he says he doesn't see the patients as people when he's operating on them, keeping a distance. This is made clear in one episode where Carla tries to use Turk to help in an argument and she asks him about the patients. He is only able to tell her what surgery they are having done and nothing else about them.
- 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."
- 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, pretty much 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.
- In the various Power Rangers incarnations, have you noticed that the Red Ranger is always the one who saves the day, and the other four or five do next to nothing in the long run? So much for their teamwork and friendship spiels.
Literature
- 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 eat all the food that your siblings have been punished from.
Film
- 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.
- What makes it even worse is the fact he's at least partially right; Wonka is an idiot for wasting teleportation technology on candy.
- 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.")
- 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 weakspots, 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.
- 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.
- In 40 Days and 40 Nights, the protagonist forgoes sex for Lent and falls in love with a girl while doing so. Meanwhile, his friends have started a bet seeing how long he'll last, and his ex-girlfriend rapes him in order to win the bet. The kicker? He's the one who ends up apologizing to his current girlfriend, who walked in on the rape and immediately assumed the worst, for cheating. Apparently, the moral of this story was that either
- Men can't be raped by a woman or
- There was no problem in the first place, except for the "cheating".
- The end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ends with several speeches spouting the moral that "How we deal with death is just as important as how we deal with life" and "He's not gone as long as we remember him". The basic point is that accepting Spock's death is an important, natural part of life. A point of growth, in fact, for the main characters, as people come and go from your lives all the time and you shouldn't try to cling to the past. And then we get Star Trek III: Spock Comes Back to Life.
- 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!
- 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.
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 outright 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...)
- 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.
- 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 short-sighted) 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 rather 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.
- 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.
- 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, said 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 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 now compliant is good.
- He Man And The Masters Of The Universe. Here We Go...
- 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! 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.
- The Aesop of Shrek is "Don't mistreat those who look different from you"... but nobody is ever punished for the endless short jokes at Farquaad's expense. So it becomes "Don't mistreat those who look different, unless they're the Designated Villain". Arguably, this is intentional; after all, the rest of the movie deconstructs the traditional fairy tale, so why not the moral of the story?
- 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, and the only villain not to be 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?
- 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.
- 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).
- It's parodied/lampshaded in the episode "Blood Feud". Marge attempts to come up with An Aesop, and says "A good deed is its own reward"... but it's pointed out that Bart got an award, a massive stone head. Then she decides the Aesop is "No good deed goes unrewarded"... but Bart wouldn't have got the head if Homer hadn't moaned. She tries for "The squeaky wheel gets the grease", but it's decided there is no moral, it's just a bunch of crazy stuff that happened.
- 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.
- Lampshaded in 'Episode 257-494' of Teen Titans, which mostly took place in TV Land. When the team tries to come up with a moral ("Too much TV is bad for you."), it's shot down immediately, as the Titans only beat control freak because of Beast Boy's obsession with TV. Then they just declare the whole thing a waste of time and laugh it off.
- The Aesop of the film The Polar Express seems to be about the importance of belief, and how it brings magic and wonder to people's lives. Fair enough, its a Christmas movie. However, the Aesop is broken by the fact that when the main charecter's belief in Santa Claus is waning, an enormous magic train appears to whisk him off to the North Pole to actually see Santa in person (we can presume that the situation is the same for all the other passengers). This changes the Aesop from "Faith and belief are important to the magic of life." to "If you have trouble believing something than someone will surely come along to give you unequivocal proof that it is true. If they don't, your belief is probably unwarranted." This is illustrated in the scene where the boy talks to the hobo living on the roof of the train, and states that he wants to believe, and the hobo notes that he can't because he doesn't want to be tricked. He then says that "Seeing is believing" continuing to affirm that the only reason to "believe" in something is because it has been confirmed to be true. The whole thing is made particularly egregious by the fact that reference to believing is everywhere in the film, to the point that the word "believe" is stamped on the back of the train tickets.
- 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 while affected by a truth laser she couldn't lie.
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".
- Bioshock is another major offender. A big aesop delivered to the main character is that power at the price of innocent life isn't worth it — killing Little Sisters to get more of the Applied Phlebotinum earns you the bad endings to the game. Except killing the Little Sisters doesn't actually get you extra power, it just delivers the Applied Phlebotinum half a stage earlier than saving them would, and actually costs you access to some of the most powerful spells in the game.
- So basically, power at the price of innocent lives literally isn't worth it.
Anime
- 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 — wait for it — 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.
- While the ability to summon the Nine-Tailed Fox's chakra saved him from defeat, its primary purpose was to allow him to pretend that he'd lost while using the Shadow Clone Jutsu- where he had previously been unable to make even regular clones- then ambush and uppercut Neji. The fact that Naruto managed to perform the jutsu he could never do at the academy, and win against an opponent no one thought he could defeat is what helps change Neji's view on destiny.
- 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.
- Perhaps an even worse offender would be the fact that Shikamaru was the only one who became a Chunin in the exams, despite being the laziest.
- Really, most of these being broken aesops are based on the assumption that being "right" means you will always win.
- 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 taled fox during battles, which he hasn't done since.
- 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.
- 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 racist depiction of an American in anime since 1945.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann usually has at least one speech about fighting fate and not accepting the inevitable, etc. each episode. Then, at the very end, the love interest dies... and the protagonist just calmly accepts it as inevitable. Whatever happened to Beyond The Impossible?
- Justifying Edit time: Not reviving Nia is less about not screwing destiny and more about not playing God. Had Simon used the Spiral Power to revive Nia, it would have opened up a whole can of worms as everyone would be wanting to revive their loved ones too. By refusing to do this- even to revive his one true love- Simon proves that, contrary to the Anti-Spiral's accusation, he has not become conceited with Spiral Power and will not repeat the same mistakes that they did.
- There's also the fact that Word Of God has stated the whole "never, ever give up" thing wasn't really An Aesop, but rather a character trait.
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).
- 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.
- 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.
Myths, Legends, and Folklore
- Faithful to the straight-forward style of the original Greek fable as he was, Aesop himself delivered some of these along the way. Some of his stories seem to build up to a reasonable aesop, but then the real moral is either Anviliciously tacked on or absurdly nonsensical.
- One of the most nonsensical examples ever, "The Lion and The Elephant", tells the story of a lion that complained he was such a mighty animal, but was ashamed of being afraid of roosters. He then finds an elephant who complains about mosquitoes that may enter his ears and kill him. Instead of the implied "Everyone has his own problems" or "Stop whining, it could be worse", Aesop gives us the incredibly obtuse moral "The elephant is afraid of the mosquito".
- The moral of "The Tortoise and the Hare "was "slow and steady wins the race", implying that that the Tortoise won by taking his time. Only it was the Hare's over-confidence that let him win, not not the Tortoise's carefulness. The moral should have been "don't take a bloody nap before you reach the finish line!"
- That is the Aesop. Slow and steady wins the race, or in other words, it's better to keep on going very slowly than to run fast and take naps.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 best-regarded 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.
- And ditto in Mercedes Lackey's 1920's retelling, The Fire Rose.
- The Muppet Show addressed the problem with their usual subversion: At the end of a silent retelling of the story (with Sweetums as the Beast, and their human guest star as Beauty), Beauty and the Beast come to love each other, despite their differences, and, then magically... Beauty transforms into a female Sweetums, and they go off happily together.
- The end of Shrek presents essentially the same subversion.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Music Videos
- 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.
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".
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.
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