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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: At Earth's End
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 is granted by a Literal or Jackass Genie who doesn't actually give you what you wished for, and/or when the bad result is a arbitrary, tacked-on effect that doesn'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
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- A long running theme in the Gundam franchise is total pacifism and that war is bad. While war is understandably horrible, it's hard to argue the ideal of total pacifism when that ideal always 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 aware of the inherent contradiction.
- 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.
- 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.
- While that Aesop is a little dented for the aforementioned reasons, when you bear in mind that the Kyuubi comes with as many disadvantages as it does advantages (such as extreme difficulty controlling one's chakra, and the tendency to flip out and turn into a rampaging beast when under stress), it comes out mostly in one piece. However, it gets worse from there. Much, much worse. See, Neji's thing was that he had an extremely fatalistic view of the world: you're born to be a winner, or you're born to be a loser, and it doesn't matter what you do, you can't change it. Naruto rebels against this idea, and proves Neji wrong by winning the fight. Fine and dandy, except that a few hundred chapters later, we're finding out that not only is Naruto the child of the fourth Hokage and thus the exact opposite of a born loser, he's also a prophecied messiah figure who is destined to save the world. And Sasuke was destined to become a revenge-ridden jerk simply due to being born of the Uchiha family. How on earth is one supposed to reconcile this?
- 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 in most of his fights). Yet, he 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 good at taijutsu on top of his other disadvantages. While he doesn't have good luck in battle, if he hadn't worked as hard as he did, then he'd be almost completely useless.
- For all his hard work, one of Lee's power upgrades came in the form of accidentally drinking alcohol, which suddenly put him back on a similar level to the other characters.
- 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.
- The training method is essentially doing 20 years of hard work in about a week.
- 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 may 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.
- It's still the same problem, though. His high level isn't because of the Kyuubi, but it's still something inborn that he didn't get by hard work.
- Except that he doesn't depend on his high level of chakra alone; he still has to work hard, or he wouldn't be at the level he is now. Moreover, as much as Naruto stresses the importance of hard work, the realistic message of the series is that it's not a surefire guarantee that can overcome everything. The same way that natural gifts alone can take one far, but still aren't a guarantee of victory; even the most talented or genius characters have to work hard to stay competitive. In fact, the strongest characters of the series have all achieved their position through some combination between hard work and talent. Even Rock Lee is a natural at drunken fist and is credited as a "genius of hard work." So the real message seems to be that everyone has some talents, even if they're not always obvious.
- Another important message, perhaps the most important, is that it doesn't matter if you triumph against the odds or not, as long as you "go the distance" and never give up.
- 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.
- Yeah, but no. The fact is, if Ueki is indeed a Neo-Celestial, the last rounds of the tournament are absolutely full of these; not to mention that he got his ass handed to him by normal humans (notably Marilyn), and that his friends got their share of asskicking moments despite being just well-trained humans.
- "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 sportsmanship.
- They aren't punished because they're supposed to be the rival team, and therefore can't be 'punished' until the end. But even with that, Akaya does specifically get punished for using violence in his match with Fuji, when, in the anime, it's turned back on him and he loses his match because he believes Fuji is deliberately trying to hurt him - Fuji is not, Akaya is just thinking of what he would have done in that situation. The manga's a little different, but he still accidentally gives Fuji a kind of 'power up' and the will to keep fighting, all because Akaya injured him. And he loses then, too. Seems like it's upholding 'Don't use violence' pretty well.
- 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.
- Then again, you are searching for aesops in the wrong manga. Neuro is about a demon who helps humans just so they can kill each other and give him mysteries to solve while harassing any unfortunate chap who comes across his path, remember?
- 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 gimmick, this is the only time a lesson is made of cheating.
- It gets even more twisted when you realize that all that power of friendship/heart of the cards stuff is what distracts everybody from the realization that Yugi cheats in every match, so the Aesop becomes "It's okay to to cheat if you have lots of friends".
- Yami only has that ability in the Ceremonial Duel against Yugi.
- When Pegasus uses his Millenium Eye to read Yugi's mind, Yugi uses the Millenium Puzzle to switch back and forth with Yami Yugi to counteract this. Bottom line? If your opponent is cheating, cheat right back.
- Yami/Yugi's actions merely counter acted Pegasus' advantage, it was hardly cheating; furthermore, it put them at a disadvantage since neither knew what cards they had until the moment they used them
- 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 Tezuka's 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.
- But he already is!
- 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.
- And the Diclonii apparently do naturally want to Kill All Humans!! So... what point are they trying to make again?
- That racism is bad because
black people the Jews the Irish the dirty stinkin' Swedes Diclonii are naturally savage and violent, and they'll all get together and riot if you offend them.
- 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.
- In Sailor Moon (the dub, at least), Serena is distraught over Molly's infatuation with Nephlyte, the villain of the current arc. Serena attempts to convey this by blurting out a bunch of nonsense at her, and then running away to avoid talking about her personal life. Molly then goes on to steal a priceless gem from her mother's jewelry store at Nephlyte's request and is creepily seduced away from her normal behavior as Nephlyte, being around twice her age, easily manipulates her. When the Sailor Scouts confront them both in a park and attack Nephlyte, Molly attempts to protect him by throwing herself in front of Sailor Moon's tiara. When another monster appears, Nephlyte protects Molly from it, and she passes out. Nephlyte teleports away, gloating about how he's one step away from basically destroying humanity. Sailor Moon's response? To wish upon a star that Nephlyte will conquer the bitterness in his heart. She watches her friend get coerced into sneaking out at night, lying, and stealing from her mother by an abusive older boyfriend, and her solution to seeing how much her friend cares for said abusive boyfriend is to pray that he gets better. That on its own would not be so awful, if difficult to deal with, except that the Aesop we're handed at the end of the episode is that it's important to talk to your friends if they're doing something dangerous— just like it was important to tell Molly the truth about Nephlyte.
- Shoujo-oriented manga, and even soap operas, tend to suffer from Broken Aesops as a whole; by the end of some series, the lead girls end up with men that, at one point or other, raped or abused them, perpetuating the belief that if a man tries to sleep with you against your will, it's because he really, really loves you.
- The dub of Sailor Moon also had mandatory 'Sailor Says' segments after each episode to meet moral-teaching requirements of children's broadcasters. 'Sailor Says' segments generally had Stock Aesops that were only very loosely (or not at all) connected to the content of the episode, voiced by Serena over equally arbitrary episode footage. One that stood out to this troper was one that taught children to believe in themselves. However, the line "You never know what the real you can do; set your mind and heart on it and anything is possible!" was dubbed over a scene of Molly's mother transforming into the episode's villain.
- In one episode of Ai To Yuuki No Pig Girl Tonde Buurin Karin once got a demo of the Magical Girl form she wished for to try for one day, however she failed solving a dangerous situation making her deliberately become Buurin again to do that. While this was probably meant as a "maybe what you already have is better than you think" but is broken since her demo did not possess any super powers aside flight making it pretty much useless as a super form.
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.
- Well if you believe a law is wrong, you believe law enforcement and the legal system are also wrong. It's internally consistent at least.
- But it's not the Supreme Court's job to determine what is right or wrong, that's the job of Congress and the president (and by extension, the people who elect them). The Supreme Court's job is to determine if something is constitutional or not constitutional. Hence why they allowed segregation to continue. Separate but equal ended not because it was wrong, but because it wasn't equal.
- Let's remember that this is Jack Chick. As in the guy who EMBODIES Critical Research Failure.
- 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. Marvel responded to fan reaction by saying that "our heroes are living, breathing human beings" but with "'nonhuman' characteristics". Whether this means that having nonhuman characteristics innately makes you nonhuman as argued by the Marvel lawyers, that they're still human as argued in-universe, or whether any of these semantics really matter in a universe where sentient robots and alien gods make not-infrequent appearances all falls to your own viewpoint.
- 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.
- It's never okay for heroes to kill in DC
- Which is why DC Comics these days are anvilicious shit with no regard to the realities of justice.
- This might be changing with the War of Light trilogy in the Green Lantern Corps though. Green Lanterns were given leave to use lethal force during The Sinestro Corps War. Hal Jordan made a beautiful statement towards the end of the books about how, while lethal force should always be the last resort, sometimes it's necessary. Because, after all, he doesn't look down on cops who have to shoot somebody, and basically Hal Jordan is a cop IN SPACE, so. . . Hopefully this won't be reset in some ham-fisted way during Blackest Night or later.
- In Spider-Girl main heroine quit school basketball team, because she feels guilty about advantage her powers gaves her. Which would be okay, if she hadn't knew that and still been using those powers in play for over sixty issues.
- The basic message of the Transformers's "All Hail Megatron" series is that the Autobots having to accept small human losses for the sake of Earth's survival as a whole was wrong and they shouldn't ever take "acceptable losses", with the character Sideswipe delivering a speech about the sanctity of life, all life. So, the series ends with Sideswipe finding longtime human companion Hunter O'Nion not looking too well and decides to cut off the life support instead of calling Ratchet or anyone else to try and help save the guy. Yeah.
- To be fair, there's not much left of Hunter to save at that point.
- Then again, he's now a cyborg, so giving him new bodyparts should be easy for the autobots.The whole scene was probably nothing more that a take that at every fan of Simon Furman.
- In Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese, the gods refuse to let the Monkey King into a party because he's a monkey. (And doesn't wear shoes.) He kicks their asses, orders his subjects to start wearing shoes and masters the secrets of kung-fu to show the gods who they're messing with. They call to Tze-Yo-Tzuh ("He Who Is", the Creator) for help; when the Monkey King refuses to accept his monkey nature, he gets trapped under a mountain of rubble. Yang was probably aiming for "be proud of what you are" (the story is largely about the unfair stereotyping of Asian Americans), yet the message comes across more like "trying to improve yourself is useless and don't even think about standing up to inequality".
Film
- The moral of The Garbage Pail Kids movie has the aesop that being ugly doesn't make you inferior or bad in any way. This is broken by the fact that said Garbage Pail Kids act like complete ASSHOLES throughout half the movie and that the entire point of The Garbage Pail Kids cards is to blatantly MAKE FUN OF UGLY PEOPLE!!!
- As the Spoony one pointed out, the anvilicious aesop of Mazes and Monsters that role playing makes you insane is broken by the fact the protagonists have their own family problems and the role playing actually brings them together and occupies them.
- 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. It's 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.
- Suffice to say if you think long and hard about Bond's life you eventually realize this moral isn't as broken as it seems.
- 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.
- This Troper saw the killing of the Borg Queen as a mercy killing... I mean all her biological components have just melted off! Is there even enough left of her to qualify as alive? Basically all that's left of her is her implants...
- You can't kill a borg queen, they're like a bee queen, another one is made.
- Yes, but that particular bee queen would still be dead. It's like murdering the President of the United States: the VP would take his place, but that particular Prez would still be dead.
- There's good reason to believe that the 'more than one queen' is more like 'one queen with more than one body', this troper isn't sure if the books are canon but one has a queen mention how she was there when picard was captured and when picard tried to kill her in the past.
- Also the Queen (in this troper's mind) is the Voice Of The Legion, ie one is made even every the Hive Mind wants to talk with someone face to face.
- 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).
- Considering that in both cases Mike jumped into the teleporter after watching an teleported object come out a tiny fraction of the size it went in; this is clearly a case of Too Dumb To Live, presumably due to his obessesion with fictional worlds (TV in the book and first movie, video games/Internet in the second movie) resulting in an inability to separate fact from fantasy.
- 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.
- The real point of the book (which was more of an Author Tract than the film) was that a system like the one the scientists had created (introducing extinct animals to a modern environment and having them interact with humans) was inherently unstable due to the effects of Chaos Theory. Something bad was sure to happen because there were more factors than a mere human could possibly predict and control. Whether the "cause" of the dinosaurs escaping was a human is irrelevant, the mistake the scientists made was in assuming that everything could be under control.
- 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.
- It also ignores the amount of hard work that real scientists do in order to take that next step. College, grad school, getting grants, working long hours for low pay for years, all in the hopes that the thousands of other scientists working on the same problem don't beat you to your discovery. Crichton either thinks all of this is easy or he's completely unaware of how real research is done.
- As I recall, the line about "standing on the shoulders of geniuses" is in the middle of a rant about everything that was wrong with the park, especially the rampant commercialism. It could be that the line was meant to be interpreted as an attack on Hammond for not having any respect for the science he was using so recklessly, an aesop that otherwise came through pretty clearly throughout the rest of the film.
- The movie also demonstrates how Hammond built Jurassic Park on an island in Hurricane Alley. That alone shows that containment is tenuous at best.
- 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?
- 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.
- Actually, when you take in to account that Korea is one of the world leaders in plastic surgery, the message of the film changes to "You shouldn't look down on people who get plastic surgery." This Aesop may be unconventional, but it fully supported within the movie.
- 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.
- Believe it or not that was Executive Meddling. In the original ending she would've revealed herself and everyone would've accepted her anyway. However, Disney payed an exorbitant sum of money to bring back Miley for another season and so they had to edit the ending. Also I totally didn't see the movie, I just read the summary off of The Other Wiki.
- 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's a famous and popular hero who 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 gun. With Bakshi, it was probably intentional, but whether that makes it any better is a different question.
- This troper interpreted that as Bakshi saying that it was Black Wolf's tyrannical attitude that made technology — and the mutants who wielded it — appear to be evil, not anything inherent to them. Like Avatar said, Black Wolf was a real son of a bitch, and the conflict would've been just as bloody if he'd been arming his troops with magic wands instead of guns.
- In The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Peter and Caspian argue over whether they and the Narnian resistance should stage an attack on King Miraz's castle or fortify Aslan's How and try to outlast the enemy, with some valid arguments on each side. They end up attacking the castle, which goes badly; the movie suggests that the "right" choice would have been to trust in Aslan, which in this context would have involved meeting him in a particular part of the forest indicated to Lucy in a vision. The trouble is that, earlier in the film, the Pevensies did take the path indicated to Lucy, leaving it unclear as to why it's necessary to send Lucy back out into the woods by herself in the third act, and giving the general impression that the intended message is "don't ever try to take fate into your own hands, just wait for God to save you."
- This is primarily Adaptation Decay; in the original novel, the whole issue of going to meet Aslan is resolved before the Pevensies ever join Caspian and the Narnian army, and the question of attacking the castle versus holding up in Aslan's How is never even suggested.
- The Movie version of Steel has an anti-gun message, even though Steel uses a weapon that is, by definition, a gun
- Would the Little Shop Of Horrors movie count? The Aesop is don't give into temptation, but the movie kind of ruins that by having Seymour defeat Audrey II, rather than Audrey II take over the world, meaning the Aesop is difficult to deliver if you don't see what the consequences are to giving into temptation.
- Well, you could make the argument that giving into temptation will force you to fight and kill a giant man-eating plant by yourself. It sort of lacks the punch of the apocalypse, but I can't imagine it's a whole lot of fun.
- Another case of Adaptation Decay. The stage version completes the Aesop by having Seymour ultimately devoured by Audrey II (he finally clues in to the plant's evil plan, but by then it's too powerful for him to stop). The original ending was shot, but then changed (with the authors' compliance) after test screenings reacted badly. As director Frank Oz points out in his commentary, the problem was that audiences became too attached to the characters throughout the story to accept their deaths.
- Probably a big part of this is that unlike the play, the film never shows Seymour truly enjoying his newfound power, instead giving us moments like allowing the plant to suck on his bleeding finger with a morose look on his face. He never lets the situation go to his head, and thus we don't see that there's anything he needs to pay for in the end.
- Shallow Hal is this trope perfectly personified. If you can get beyond the cliched and anvilicious moral of not judging a book by its cover, you still have to sit through one of the most repulsive executions the moral ever took on. The plot has Jack Black's character "dehypnotized" by a stranger in an elevator, made so he will only ever see the inner beauty of a woman. Thus far, it doesn't sound so bad, but here's the problem: The point is emphasized when he falls in love with a morbidly obese woman, which breaks the Aesop for two glaring reasons: 1) When Black sees a woman's inner beauty, he—and the viewer—still interpret his impression in the form of a petite blonde. It's not really broadening somebody's judgement to include inner beauty when he doesn't even know he's seeing inner beauty or anything else but the exterior; it's just taking him from being shallow to being shallow and stupid. 2) the vast majority of the film just takes advantage of its aesop as a vehicle to make constant fun of fat people; even the "happy ending" seems designed more as gross-out comedy than anything else. Hypocrisy, thy name is Farelly.
- The film's stupidity doesn't even end there. Inner beauty, as the Farelly Bros. seem to define it, also extends to downright bizarre places. When black sees a muscular man cross-dressing as a woman, he percieves him as a beautiful woman—what is that supposed to prove; that inner beauty is necessarily female, even if "what's inside" is obviously not? Inner beauty and gender identification are two separate things. Even worse is Black's percieving a beautiful woman who smokes as being horribly ugly—yes, because smoking is the only thing that counts for judging somebody? Are you really saying that most of the world's population are hideous people, with no regard to their picking up of the nasty habbit from society rather than because they're allegedly so? Again, this film's aesop can barely even be called broken—with so many blatant expressions of its creator's own prejudice, the aesop is downright FUBAR.
- And then there's the biggest one of all. Is Jack Black really one to judge people's outter appearance? He's not exactly Brad Pitt himself.
- Funnily enough, despite what this movie seems to suggest, I've met a lot of lovely people who also happen to be attractive and more than a few ugly people who act like utter dicks.
- Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno has taken a lot of flak for arguably breaking its own Aesop about how Americans have a lot of homophobia to conquer. The declared purpose of the movie is for Cohen to act like a homosexual to get an idea of how people react to homosexuals, but the problem with that is that he really isn't acting like a homosexual—he's acting like a blatant and rude stereotype of homosexuals. How can you claim somebody is really homophobic when all they react negatively to is public behavior that no real homosexuals engage in? The short answer, however funny the film's exesses are, is that you can't.
- This gay Troper thinks Bruno is intentionally exaggerated because a "normal" gay wont work. The goal here is to illicit immediate hostile action, expose homophobia. The idea of dropping a "straight gay" into Bruno's place might not elicit much of a reaction unless he is kissing his boyfriend or something. Plus, gay people are not all straight gay, and while Bruno is an exaggeration, there are plenty of camp gays out there in real life.
- Camp Gays don't give their boyfriends a blowjob in public with children watching
- People weren't offended by Bruno's antics because he was homosexual, they were offended because the acts were calculatedly offensive.
- Some of his skits bordered on assault. If Bruno were trying to force his tongue down a woman's throat or shove his crotch in her face, I suspect people would find the hostile reactions to his behaviour more understandable.
- The film Christmas With The Kranks, based on the John Grisham novel Skipping Christmas, is about a couple whose adult daughter is going to be away for Chriatmas, so they decide to eschew their typical lavish, expensive and stressful celebration in lieu of a vacation cruise, to the protests of their overbearing neighbors. Predictably, their daughter announces, two days before Christmas, that she'll be back, and bringing along a new foreign boyfriend to whom she's been hyping the annual Christmas party for weeks, forcing the parents to abandon their plans and throw a party together at the last second, with the help of said neighbors. Intended moral: "Don't let the stress of preparations distract you from why you celebrate". However, since the couple's idea seems so reasonable to normal people, and the neighbors' reaction comes off as completely overblown, the real moral of the story is "You can't escape Christmas, even if you try".
- Deck The Halls one-ups this: it involves family trying to opt out of the commercial aspects of Christmas, but being actively forced into it by neibors who make the ones from The Kranks look loving and sane. The moral: commercialism will find you.
- The movie Poltergeist has the moral "do not disturb the remains of the dead". However, real human body parts were used for props
- Monsters Ball has the moral that love knows no racial boundaries...as long as the woman is hot. Seriously, how different would things have gone if she wasn't played by Halle Berry?
- The movie Shoot 'Em Up is both a parody of the genre it takes its name from, and by Word Of God an anti-gun movie. A very Anvilicious one, that stops just short of pulling a Family Guy and saying that everyone with a gun has a tiny tiny penis. Except, like the page quote, the hero solves every single problem he's faced with using guns. Saving the baby? Guns. Beating the bad guys? Guns. Defending his new family? Guns. For an anti-gun movie, the protagonist and everyone he cared about sure would be dead a lot of times over if he weren't better-armed than the Russian military.
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.
- 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 by a moral on how you shouldn't mix romantically with other races.
- I Was a Teenage Fairy, by Francesca Lia Block: tattooing your lover's name on your chest is stupid, especially if you fail to learn from it and do it twice more - but the fourth time is okay, because now it's really true love.
- Orson Scott Card's Empire is about the dangers of divisiveness in American political discourse and the evils of extremism at both ends of the political spectrum. Fair enough. Unfortunately, it's fatally undermined by the fact that the heroes all unambiguously share "Red State values" whereas the villains are a bunch of craven liberals.
- Christopher Paolini's The Inheritance Cycle teaches us that slavery is wrong. Letting said slaves be eaten to aid the Designated Hero, on the other hand, is fine.
- Also, one character is described as ugly...but a good guy. What Paolini is trying to say is that it doesn't matter what you look like, it's what's on the inside that counts! Fair enough, but why are 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 (while enjoying it) is A-OK!
- It's perfectly acceptable to painfully end dozens of innocent human lives, as long as you do not kill ants or plants. That would be an unforgivable act of evil.
- Tom Godwin's 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.
- There's also the fact that the ship has exactly enough fuel for its purpose, to the point that an additional 150 pounds ON A CARGO SHIP is enough to cause it to crash and burn. So a slight efficiency drop in the engine would also cause it to crash. It's not the universe that's uncaring and without regard for human safety, it's the organization who runs this operation.
- In The 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 ArchChancellor 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.
- There is also a broken aesop in Terry Pratchett's Men At Arms. The book is clearly intended to have an anti-gun aesop, showing how the evil "gonne" takes over the mind of everyone who touches it (except those protected by Dumb Is Good, or who might be The Messiah). Yet the gonne is clearly only marginally more effective a weapon than a good high-quality crossbow. Broken even further in the context of the series, when contrasted against the easily concealable spring-loaded bolt-thrower used by Mr. Tulip in The Truth, or Detrius the Troll's hand-held ballista. All of which are freely employed to solve problems whenever it is useful to the story. The aesop here appears to be "arbitrary limits on technology are good, as long as the protagonist gets to decide what those limits are"; or maybe just "New=Bad".
- Also arguably a case of Did Not Do The Research since the sort of firearm that would be available using Discworld technology would be roughly equal to a Crossbow in power, accuracy, and range. Of course, Pratchett did sort of get around this anachronism by having it created by Leonard Of Quirm.
- Or maybe it's just the Fantastic Aesop that "sentient mind-controlling guns are bad".
- There a few things that should be pointed out about this one though. First, when comparing it to the spring-loaded weapon the Mr. Tulip uses, that's in a later book after "Men At Arms" and so presumably, by that time, some people have managed to engineer/create several different models. It's even mentioned in "The Truth", how if either the Watch or the Assassin's guild caught anybody with a weapon like that, the results would not be pretty. Second, the difference between the new, 'evil' gonne and the traditional crossbows like Detrius's handheld ballista is that that crossbow's are only storing the user's force, while the Gonne's force comes from outside the user. Or to simplify it, to use a crossbow, the user has to use their own force to notch the arrow into position, while to use the "gonne", a person just has to drop in some gunpowder in some tubes and than a metal ball.
- Of course, some would argue that this fact is precisely what makes guns the "Great Equalizer" : in theory, the wimpiest of milquetoasts is able to blow The Dragon's head clean off, which in turn means the end of the tyranny of the strong over the weak. It's an equally fallacious point of view, obviously.
- 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.
- Rewind, by William Sleator, 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. He is then driven to run into the road in front of his house and into the path of an oncoming car 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. To add insult to injury, they go to his funeral, unconvincingly feigning sorrow, and tell everyone that it was his own stupid fault anyway. God then gives him several more chances at life - all but the last of which end in the same result. He finally gets to live when he realizes that he should bend to his parents' desire for him to give up on art and be a stereotypical "workin' man". 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 Firestar 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".
- And how we are told not judge Hawkfrost as evil just because of who his father was. But then he ended being evil anyway, meaning prejudice was right. So Yeah. Although the same lesson is pulled off with Brambleclaw (twice), and it works because, well... Brambleclaw isn't evil (although he came very close).
- This troper studied a poem (he uses the term loosely) in his Irish class entitled "Gealt?" ("Lunatic?"). In it, a man steps onto a bus, pays his fare and sits down - clad in pajamas. The other passengers and the driver get very nervous and worried at this abnormal behaviour, so the driver calls the emergency services. Pretty soon, the army and police have set up a blockade on a street, at which the bus comes to a halt. Several psychiatrists climb onto the bus, sedate the man in the pajamas and haul him away in a straitjacket in an appreciably Kafkaesque fashion. The point of the poem (which, lest there be any ambiguity, was spelled out to the class in excruciating detail by the poet herself) is, in essence, that society tends to discriminate against those who are different, purely on the basis of their appearances, and it isn't very nice, etc., etc.,. However, the Aesop gets broken due to a line in the poem which mentions that the man in the pajamas recognized one of the psychiatrists; so, obviously, he actually is a lunatic who had been previously incarcerated in an institution for his own protection, and so the passengers were entirely right to be so anxious in his company.
- Or perhaps this sort of thing had happened before and he's just stubborn, maybe?
- The Dr. Seuss story Green Eggs And Ham tries to teach the kids that they shouldn't knock something until they've tried it. However, all it told this Troper is that if you're enough of an annoying bastard, you can get people to do what you want. Truth In Television, perhaps, but surely not the intended message?
- The Sword Of Truth initially presents the lesson that no one thinks of themselves as a villain, that people should be wary of becoming tyrants, and that people should be able to choose their life for themselves. Over the course of the book it's explained that people who disagree with Richard are Evil and should be forced to join his empire, that when they torture people it's okay because they're doing it for the right reasons, and the main characters demanding unswerving obedience in the same breath as exhorting people to think for themselves.
- Bowman, Kestrel, and Mumpo spend the first Wind On Fire book learning that if they work together, they can make things happen and nothing can hurt them. In the book's two parallel plots, their father convinces downtrodden people that they need to stand up and peacefully insist on being given their rights, and their mother makes her views heard and gets the town to listen to her and consider her ideas. Then... the Mac Guffin shows up and makes it all better. Or at least makes them happy for the remainder of the book.
- In the Disney Fairies book, "Beck Beyond the Sea," Beck shirks her duties to follow the Explorer Birds, using special dust from Vidia in order to fly fast enough. Turns out that Vidia tricked Beck twice over, first by not giving her as much dust as promised, and second by using Beck's absence to pluck feathers from Mother Dove. At the end of the book, Vidia is punished for this, but Beck is not even reprimanded for leaving her post.
- The entire Dune saga. In several of his essays, Frank Herbert discusses the problems and evils of putting one's faith in "supermen" and "gods," and in real life had a distaste for the human tendency to hero worship and glorify people who would supposedly "show society the way," the expectation being that everyone should try to find their own way. Then he writes this wonderful series, where the survival of the entire human race depends on a small group of supermen who have set themselves up as prophets, god-kings, and legends. He also makes it exceedingly clear that if this group of supermen does not succeed in their task to guide humanity to the stars, we have no hope, and we're all going back to the caves, possibly to become fossils. End of story. Why shouldn't I worship supermen again?
- Because you are supposed to become one yourself. While the Kwizatz Haderach is the end product of the Bene Gesserit plan and undoubtedly special the enduring message is the exaltation of the human condition above its baseline capabilities. Worship is the real problem, religion is constantly shown as a cruel manipulation at best and a poisonous cancer at worst. Leto II's becoming a true god emperor is treated as a really dodgy move that his probably wiser father refused to take. It's not so much a broken aesop so much as it is a more subtle aesop that treats hero's and trailblazers with a cynical eye while refusing to lay down blanket condemnation. Also its hard to have a novel without meaningful protagonists and still have self determination. Foundation for example.
- And how is this supposed to happen? Basically, in the Dune universe, you're either one of the little people, or you're part of The Plan. Neither leaves much room for free will or independence. The people who were part of The Plan (the Bene Gesserit, Harkonnen, Atriedes, Bene Tielax, etc) all had extremely delicate plans, laid thousands of years in advance, from which they could not deviate or else the system would fall on them. Oh there were people who wanted to deviate from The Plan (IE Jessica, Miles Teg), but even when these people thought they were deviating from The Plan, it was part of The Plan. Then you can be one of the little people: living on a desert planet or something somewhere, barely subsisting. You won't make much, if any, of an impact, but you don't have to worry about any God Emperors or Reverend Mothers visiting their wrath upon you. Unless you happen to be in a city, country, or planet that one of the people in The Plan decide need to be destroyed in order to get rid of someone who shouldn't be in The Plan. Most notably occurred in Heretics of Dune, where the Honored Matres slag a whole planet to get a boy who isn't even there. Think about that for a minute: you get up at 6 in the morning, you've never even heard the name Atreides, you aren't religious at all, you have no dog in the spice war fight, and you don't even know there's a fight going on, then suddenly your planet gets burned to ash. So there are your options: be nothing, and be at the whim of powers beyond your reckoning, or try to be something, and get manipulated by an entire race of supermen who are smarter, faster, better armed, better prepared, and plain been at it longer than anyone new who might get into the game. Maybe I missed something here, and I'm not saying I agree with what I observed in the book, but the entire Dune series seemed like the Strawman Has A Point to me.
- Norman Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth introduces Milo as someone who needs to take an interest in the world, not just rush from school to home and back again. The residents of Reality confirm that this isn't a good way to act. Yet in the same story, "wasting time" is soundly derided by Tock, is cited by Milo as why you shouldn't jump to Conclusions, and is embodied in two evil beings: the Terrible Trivium and Senses Taker. So is Milo supposed to be learning to stop and smell the roses, or isn't he?
- I'm pretty sure that with the mindset in that book, taking a minute to appreciate the world around you wouldn't be considered wasting time, because it's a good thing. The Terrible Trivium and the Senses Taker seem to be jabs at pointless busywork and Obstructive Bureaucrat types.
- Exactly. The point is that the Terrible Trivium and the Senses Taker engage you in tasks that are truly a waste of time — they're meaningless, don't actually accomplish anything, and shut out the world rather than embracing its beauty and fullness.
- The aesop also holds up because trivium and doldrums were the result of Milo's hurrying. Because he rushed from one place to the other without taking time to appreciate anything, when he got there he just wound up sitting around bored, as was pretty clearly spelled out.
- In the children's pop-up book Ziggy The Zebra, the title character is plain white, and wanting a pattern for himself, tries out the patterns of other animals, only to be told these aren't appropriate for a zebra. Finally, after thinking about this, he gets stripes and is cheered for looking as he's supposed to, thus establishing the Aesop that being different or unique is bad, and you should be exactly what others tell you you should. Oh, wait, no, the author says it's supposed to be "Be yourself."
- Except that Ziggy is in fact a zebra. Even though he changes his outward appearance, he can't actually become another type of animal. The lesson that Ziggy should embrace being a zebra, and not try to look like something else, is thus consistent with the authors intended lesson, "Be yourself."
- But, since he was originally plain white, wouldn't remaining white be "being yourself", while suddenly having stripes is merely embracing conformity and bowing to the expectations of others?
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 fully functional Aesop "marry in haste, repent at leisure."
- The real issue here is actually assuming there is a moral that only applies to this single episode, despite it being the last episode of the whole show. Harvey, her true love, has been her boyfriend for the first four seasons, and has stayed around for the remaining three seasons, always dropping hints he still loves her and cares for her. Too, and the end of season six and the beginning of season seven, she loses every single one of her potential true loves in her environment, except Harvey. Therefore it simply was the long awaited climax of the series that Sabrina finally gets back to Harvey after strolling off to other men for such a long time. There might be no actual morale at all in it, but it was the romatically logical thing to do. It wouldnt have made much sense to keep Harvey around for full three seasons without much to do but to constantly drop hints he still liked Sabrina, only to then marry her away to someone else.
- Especially considering the guy she nearly marries is a complete tool.
- 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 City on the Edge of Forever" shows how pacifist revolutions let Nazis take over the world. Perhaps justified by the fact that the pacifist revolution in question happened just before World War II in an alternate timeline.
- Definitely justified. Note the line "She had the right idea, but at the wrong time."
- "Requiem For Methuselah" has an aesop about equality, feminism, and Fantastic Racism, in which Kirk gives a big speech about how Rayna Kapec should have the right to choose whether she stays on her home planet with her creator or leaves with Kirk. They then promptly break their aesop by having the emotional strain of making the choice kill Rayna.
- 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, all the aliens were all played by women, making it look like a planet of man-hating lesbians. Jonathan Frakes (Riker) later complained 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).
- Also, why does the alien have to identify as female to love a man?
- The episode was written to support homosexuality...by expressing them as brainwashers...er...
- Another close brush with homosexuality resulted in a partially justified Broken Aesop, in the episode The Host. In this episode, Dr. Crusher falls deeply in love with a handsome male humanoid alien. It later turns out that the alien's mind and personality actually belong to an intelligent slug-like parasite living in willing symbiosis inside the humanoid body. When the host body dies, the creature is surgically transferred into Riker's body so that it can complete a diplomatic mission. Crusher struggles with accepting that the person she loves doesn't have the shape she associated with him, and worse - it now has the shape of a close friend. After considerable angst, she finally comes to terms with her feelings, and even gets intimate with the Riker+Creature combo (Riker's mind is implied not to be present, of course). The Aesop is clearly that true love is a thing of the mind and the heart, and must therefore transcend visual appearance. But at the end of the episode, a replacement body arrives from the creature's home planet, and voila, it's a female. The Aesop is then broken when Crusher refuses to continue her romantic involvement with the creature in its current shape, basically going back to square one. This is justified in context by Crusher, who states that humans aren't emotionally equipped to cope with these constant body changes, asking the rhetorical question of what would happen when the current (female) body dies, and so on. Unfortunately this justification is rather flimsy considering the 40 minutes you've just spent watching Crusher explaining how pure and beautiful her love for this creature is and struggling to avoid that very conclusion. Not to mention the fact that the justification would've worked just fine if the new body was simply a different handsome male.
- The show had plenty of problems with tripping over its own message, but I think the biggest single problem was with the show's hatred for imperialism, or what the writers seemed to mistake for imperialism. Almost as though they were trying to apologise for the seemingly 'White Man's Burden'-like implications of Kirk's "fuck the Prime Directive" attitude, they went a million miles the other way: The Federation will bow to anything, accept anything, accede to any conditions. As badly as "The Outcast" mangled its message, you've got to wonder why the hell would The Federation even deal with a society that viciously repressed gender, forcing people into undergo psychologically-destructive 'treatments' based on the circumstances of their birth? It'd be like if we tracked down all homosexuals and lobotomised them. The idea that any and all diplomatic concessions are evil imperialism was the single most consistant mess-up on this show. Did The Federation have any ethical demands people must meet to join them at all or were they happy to help vicious dictatorships torture their citizens, or manipulate them with drugs, or surgically alter them, or flat-out murder them? Consider how many heavy eugenics-based societies they seemed to run up against, I wonder...
- As one watches Star Trek Voyager, one realizes that Broken Aesops (in particular those 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.
- One 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 in the B-story (the episode's primary focus was on a sociopath who had the guilt part of his brain activated and the possible ramifications of it). But the only 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. However, given that Paris does warn Neelix, this might suggest that the B-story aesop was "not everyone with a hard luck story is telling you the truth".
- The 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.
- I had always thought that this was a play on the Real Life issues surrounding the research of Dr. Mengele; and whether it was ethical to use the information he collected because of how it was collected.
- In which case their decision was the worst of both worlds, using the data themselves and then making sure no one else ever could.
- 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.
- It's strange that despite Star Trek's preaching about diversity and tolerance, every culture is a monoculture. There is no plurality of thought. For instance, if religion does exist in a society, then it's just one faith that everybody follows.
- 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 was always that hanging out with the new person made them change, act like a punk, act too sophisticated, act arrogant, etc. The writers wanted to show that it was bad to change yourself 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...
- iCarly has a serious problem with this trope, even for a Nickelodeon show. In one episode, Freddy states, in an inoffensive manner, that he does not personally enjoy the Youtube personality Fred's videos. The entire planet violently rebels against him, and at the end of the episode, Freddy is physically forced to recant his opinion. The lesson? Don't defend an unpopular opinion. At no point in the episode is standing up for one's beliefs presented in a positive light.
- Despite the characters of Merlin repeatedly claiming that 'not all magic is bad!', so far there's been a different evil sorcerer of the week in almost every episodes, and aside from the main character... maybe two instances of magic being used for good (and one of those was by Morgana, a.k.a Morgan Le Fey). Given that most people tend to interpret the show as being about prejudice... yeah.
- This is slightly lessened by the fact that the motive of many of the sorcerers is they want revenge on Uther for persecuting them
- A Saturday Night Live sketch parodying the Twilight Zone episode "The Eye of the Beholder" intentionally does this by having the male characters look at the "ugly" patient (played by Pamela Anderson) and proclaim, "She's hot!" Not only did they lampshade this trope, they slightly-more-subtly sent a message of modern media eschewing thought-provoking entertainment in favor of gratuitous T&A that ensures ratings.
- TrueBlood. The vampire rights movement seems to parallel every opressed minority ever, but the Vampires Are People Too message just doesn't ring when most of them are cold-blooded killers. Bill isn't an exception.
- Early promos for the show used fake anti-vampire rights commercials with a script that was ripped straight from anti-gay rights media. "We don't want them living in our neighborhood. We don't want our children growing up thinking this is an acceptable lifestyle." etc. Words like these sound bigoted in regards to homosexuals, but justified in regards to vampires since they, you know, prey on humans. The invention of artificial blood hasn't changed things.
- Tell that to the people who make those statements about gays. They believe homosexuals "prey on kids" because they think you convert to homosexuality like you change favorite bands; peer pressure. They'd probably accept the vampires before gays, if the vampires were straight.
- Even if homosexuals did or could do that, which is ludicrous, it would just result in them being a different sexuality. Vampires preying on humans results in us being dead, within the right vampire mythos, of course. Not exactly the same.
Music
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.
- A 'Mean' beautiful enchantress, she cursed the servants and their families as well. The prince might deserve it for being a jerk, but the others were inocent. Beauty not always Equals Goodness
- 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.
- Which would make it a Broken Aesop all over again, because the whole point of the story was that she doesn't care what he looks like. Having her prefer one form over the other, even the form that most people wouldn't like, would negate the whole point of the story. On the inside, he's still the same Beast she fell in love with.
- 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.
- Um... Three words: fangs and claws. That'll do a fine job of ending the love life. Imagine the logistics. If not into Gorn and/or 'vore, be Squicked. If you are into that sort of thing, the Rule34 for this will be in the /d/ section at 4chan...
- I think you'll find Gorn is strictly forbidden on /d/. Gurochan on the other hand...
- 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.
- Five or seven centuries? Try one or two centuries ago.
- 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.
- To be fair, one could consider the prince's good looks a part of the reason why he is so arrogant and thus cursed. In Beastly, a modern retelling, the enchantress actually tells the Beast (Kyle) before cursing him that he uses his wealth and good looks to get away with being a horrible person and basically tells him that any chance of getting back to normal hinges on finding a girl a heck of a lot more open-minded and selfless than him (prior to transformation, Kyle insisted that good looks are all that matter and that if a person is clever enough, they can make themselves look better).
- 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".
- Fridge Logic kicks in when you wonder why the fire brigade didn't just look out to check to see if indeed, her house was on fire that last time. A fire would be more visible than, say, a wolf.
- 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.
- The very first recognisable version of Little Red Riding Hood was actually a warning to young girls not to let themselves be seduced by older men who might take advantage of them, which is actually a fairly sensible aesop, and still largely applicable.
- 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.
- I don't know bout that. He loses by 1/4 of an inch during the final tally (the contest was to see who cut the most lumber and that was judged by the HEIGHT of the stack) so if he had simply gotten a thicker tree then the other guy somewhere along the line he would have won. I guess "Sometimes you get the bear sometimes the bear gets you" makes a decent lesson.
- The moral of John Henry is not a man can do anything a machine can. Henry is the idealized spirit of hard work and perseverance who is ultimately killed trying to beat the machine. It's more Ludd Was Right than anything else.
- Which is itself broken, because John Henry wasn't killed by the machine, he was killed by overwork. If he had just let the machine beat him instead of working himself to death trying to outdo it, he would have survived. Which turns the lesson into "Don't waste too much effort on something just for the sake of hard work if you could do it better and more easily with a machine". Or, more concisely, "work smarter, not harder".
- Not quite, remember, John Henry is a fable so everything and everyone in it is symbolic. Henry would technically have died no matter what he did. He can't work harder than the machine (as we see the strain kills him) and he can't lose to the machine (if he does Henry has shown he is unneeded and metaphorically dies). Very warped and creepy but internally consistent.
- John Henry is not so much a fable as a cultural myth or a folk hero. This troper never believed that there was a moral to be had in John Henry, his story is really just that, a bittersweet story in which we are supposed to feel awe for a man who killed himself to win and mourn the passing of an age of men and hero's for an age of machines.
- The Smothers Brothers had fun with this in one of their songs. It concludes with John Henry's declaring: "I'm gonna get me a steam drill too!"
- One Transformers alternate continuity story plays with the tale of John Henry a bit, by having the steam drill revealed to be... Bumblebee. Once they get to know each other, he and John become BFF.
Close Myth And Legends / Folklore
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.
- Or simply superceded by Truth In Television; since that sort of relapse is a fairly common occurrence with many types of cancer, including breast cancer (this troper having two friends who suffered that exact same progression of breast cancer).
- The Dick Tracy "Crimestoppers Guide" feature that runs with the Sunday strip provided a number of generally helpful crime prevention tips. However, they often were, if not broken, then at least hypocritical in the face of the main action: It reminded that "you cannot spot a criminal by their facial features", while the strip is best known for its grotesquely ugly villains. Exhorations for people to "get involved" when they see a crime committed are shown, while in the strip, helpful bystanders tend to quickly end up dead, and so forth.
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.
- I've lost count of the number of recent versions of Little Red Riding Hood I've read (having a 3-yr old) where the wolf disgorges the child and granny unharmed and is mildly chased away "never to be seen again" or somesuch. In the original story the wolf is quite definitely filled with large stones and drowned. Since a lot of these books seem to be published by the Disney Corporation, I name this trope "Disnification".
- We already have that.
- 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).
Tabletop RPG
- The Old World of Darkness combines this with Family Unfriendly Aesop. In the oWoD, science is generally associated with the principle of Stasis, which serves as a sort of Well Intentioned Extremist to the Complete Monster that is Entropy - it's not actually evil, but if it gets its way it will remove change from the world and steal everyone's freedom. This idea gets a bit jarring at times, since science has historically been responsible for most of the changes to human society, and those changes has resulted in the average person having far more freedom and choice than ever before. Conversely, the default heroes in the games that has this theme (mainly Mage, Werewolf and Changeling) are assumed to represent the freedom-loving, change-embracing principle of Dynamism - despite being members of extremely hierarchal societies that hasn't changed for the last several thousand years.
- To be fair, for Changeling it was less "we represent Dynamism and Science is Static" than it was "Science is rigid thinking, and we represent imagination and limitless possibilities; the triumph of science equals the death of imagination and magic".
- This Troper feels that those who cannot see the potential of science lack imagination themselves.
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.
- But the show does muddy the waters on this one because its characters either keep their integrity and starve, or earn money and sell out. The show never explores the possibility that they could make money legitimately from their art, or keep their integrity while still finding paid work.
- 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.
- This could be the point of the play. Angel and Collins's relationship is the only 100% happy and emotionally healthy one in the show. After Angel's death, many of the characters start to realise that none of them have ever been as happy as Angel and Collins were, which precipitates them to stop their sniping and finally start living.
- And then there's Angel: percussion genius, representation of unconditional love,...and canine-killer-for-hire.
Video Games
- The anti-war message of Ace Combat 5, constantly rammed home by your Technical Pacifist squadmates is kinda lost as they talk about hating war while shooting down cargo planes full of passengers. Acceptable targets or no, that's still a couple dozen humans you just slaughtered there, Scooter.
- 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.
- Well, being a hypocrite is easy, isn't it?
- They may not be genocidal, but when the Dwarves slaughter them, the Fairies blame humans. The same humans who just saved their lives, even.
- 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 point there was that because he was doing it explicitly for his own personal glory, he never stopped to a, think about it, or b, mention it to anybody else because they might have stopped him and taken away his chance for heroics. The party was mad because his selfishness and stupidity killed thousands of people, though it was partially their fault for keeping him Locked Out Of The Loop. They were not mad in the other case because she didn't have a third option to take, and also was a twelve-year-old trying to help her parents. And note that while it did end in the death of one character (who was sickly and probably not going to live a very long life anyway), that character's death allowed another character to live. Either way, the motive is the point: one person was acting selfishly and killed thousands; the other was acting out of desperation and killed one. Not really seeing the broken here.
- 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."
- Heaven forbid that the hero returns in a genuine Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming...
- Uh, this troper recalls the game explicitly stating that the memories would be preserved, not that they would be wiped out. The issue is that no one is certain who the guy at the end is, Luke or Asch.
- Also from the Tales Series: Symphonia tries to use a "Racism is Bad" aesop, but it's 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.
- More like "Racism is bad, but killing everyone or turning them into soulless angels is worse." The heroes' continual efforts to end the racism are never cast in a negative light.
- Tales Of Legendia has a hard time with this, too. The Aesop seems to be "it's wrong to judge an entire class of people on the actions of a few." This, in and of itself, is fine. But right at the end of the main story, Maurits reveal the Orerines came from space and enslaved the Ferines, creating land on the planet in the process. The player characters, who had suddenly been touting individual accomplishment, suddenly are so shocked and disgusted at their ancestors, they stop fighting.
- 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.
- Actually, "don't just leave your problems to the next generation" still works, because it's not the next generation alone that saves the day... it's effectively three generations working together: the oldest generation being Snake getting the Mk. III into the final area and defending it, the current generation being Raiden, Meryl, and Johnny making sure they have time to do so, and Sunny's virus (also a multi-generational collaborative work) allowing it all to come to fruition. So the aesop is upheld because the rest of it is "work with that generation to solve the problems".
- In Star Ocean: The Last Hope, 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.
- Valkyria Chronicles. The game's primary theme revolves around the idea of unity and harmony surpassing individual power, which would be totally consistent, except Alicia's Valkyria power are the only thing that allows Squad 7 to beat the Marmotah, and she's leagues ahead of anyone else in terms of power even without her invincibility, and can solo most levels.
- 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.
- Lost Odyssey has the Aesop of "Violence is bad, and ought to be avoided". The problem? it's a JRPG.
- Similarly, any RPG with a Darwinist villain. The one you can only defeat by growing stronger than your initial level, usually done by killing people and creatures that are weaker than you as you continue to develop...
- 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.
- Pokemon Gold and Silver repeatedly rams down your throat the message "Treat all your Pokemon with love and respect, whether they're weak or strong!". Yet the move Frustration exists purely so that making your Pokemon as miserable as possible can be beneficial.
- Not to mention that most of the Pokemon you catch for the Pokedex will end up rotting in the Computer for the rest of their lives simply because they're too weak to be useful in battle.
- Actually, Frustration may just be a good way to teach the aesop. The more you use and the more you win with the pokemon, the less effective it becomes.
- Legend Of Mana breaks its Family Unfriendly Aesop of "freedom is the highest ideal, therefore be true to yourself even at the cost of everything else" by calling on the player character to deal with the aftermath every time. (A case, perhaps, of the Accidental Aesop of: "It's okay if you screw up, because the Chosen One will fix everything!")
- Persona 4 has Void Quest. The dungeons in this game are created from the emotional problems of the people who visit the alternate dimension; one such person, Mitsuo Kubo, is a sociopath with a warped sense of reality. His dungeon has an 8-bit video game motif, and his variant of the "Search for the truth" theme of the game is "Don't confuse fantasy with reality." Of course, since it's, y'know, a video game, the whole thing is more of a You Suck than anything else.
Western Animation
- Family Guy had one cutaway that references this trope. A woman who is busy doing her very important job meets a man that says "In the next ninety minutes I'll show you that all your problems can be solved by my penis." Thats pretty much the entire plot of "The Devil Wears Prada" and dozens of other movies.
- 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.
- However, it is worth pointing out that when Timmy did his good deeds, he expected the people he did them for to be fauning over him...so they masked arrogance. And it could be argued that instead of going ahead and doing what he thought other people would want, he might have been better served if he asked them what favors they wanted done first, and then did them.
- Also, the lesson in "The Boy Who Would Be Queen" is that gender stereotypes are wrong, that you should look at members of the opposite sex as humans rather than a different species. Good lesson, except that Cosmo and Wanda, while gender bent, follow those same stereotypes.
- 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.
- Early in Disappearing Dragons, Orko's curiosity gets the better of him when he sees the treasure cache of the great dragon Granamyr. He opens a magic bottle and a hand pops out, pulls him in, and beats him up. The episode plot involves dragons being kidnapped to fight against each other for the entertainment of a powerful group of humanoids. At the end of the episode, Orko asks for a reward (or at least some recognition) for his part in saving the dragons. Granamyr's response is to uncap the bottle again, leaving Orko to get pulled in and smacked around again. As Orko gets beat up offscreen (and you hear him saying "OW! Stop! Let me out you big bully!"), He-Man jokes with Granamyr about how handy it would be if he had that bottle, not only condoning the act but basically stating he'd like to open a (literal) can of whoop-ass on Orko. And then the moral He-Man tells us in the very next scene? "There are no dragons in your world, but there are animals, and hurting or teasing an animal is no way to have fun." But apparently the nonhuman comic relief is fair game!
- 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?
- While some people will argue that two wrongs don't make a right, this troper feels it needs to be stressed that there's a large degree of difference between the two. Making fun of somebody's appearance may be rude, but it's a human offense (and presumably an ogre and donkey one, too), and certainly a lesser evil than actually prejudging and legislating against someone based upon their appearance. It also is important to mention that Shrek was victimized for no other reason than his appearance, whereas all of the mere wisecracks made about Farquaad were made by people who were also aware he was a jerk.
- 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.
- Except for Captain hook, the wicked queen, the puppeteer...
- 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.
- Really, that's just issues with the rules of succession of medieval European monarchies rather than just Shrek and so is more the inherent unfairness of the world they inhabit.
- An advertising Broken Aesop happened with the franchise as well. Around the time Shrek 3 came out, Shrek starred in some commercials promoting fitness and eating healthy. At the same time, M&M Mars put out special 'Shrek-size' extra-large candy bars.
- Fiona suffers from a Misaimed Marketing problem: while she has more screentime as an ogre than a normal human in the sequels, all the merchandise has her in human form, even when it depicts her with her fellow princesses, who were only introduced in the third movie, where she never appeared as a human. It kind of breaks the point of the actual series.
- 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.
- It wasn't Warren but Luur. Hoever, Aesop still is broken.
- 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.
- However, Ron becomes much more successful and popular after being forced to tell the truth, and the only really bad truths Kim told were insulting.
- 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...
- Of course, the movie ends with her being wrong about this, recognizing she made a mistake, and going nearly berserk to set things right, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the Aesop isn't still broken. Since her new boyfriend is proven to be an android programmed to infiltrate and wreck her life, Kim and Ron—and the audience—are spared having to really look at the harder questions. What if it actually was the case that her new boyfriend was a charming and nice guy who meant no wrong? Then the plot could more seriously address the issue of whether Kim went with one guy or the other, and whether it was really because she truly loved him or she was just falling in with tradition.
- So, the premise of the show is that girls can be tough and save the day, but the completely sincere Aesop of the Loony Fan episode is that Ron (an average boy who still follows Kim to the literal ends of the earth despite his fears and lack of talent) makes a better hero because Kim (a trained from youth, fearless superheroine) is too strong and perfect, and You Suck. Actually, the message wasn't broken; the show was just mistitled. At least they were polite enough to hang a lampshade on it.
- 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
- This short from Mad TV fixes the whole thing. However there's arguably a broken aesop in that the snowman says that one should keep one's mouth shut, but he's telling you the story, which leads to the aesop that one should keep one's mout shut about dirty business, unless it's entertaining. Or maybe I'm overthinking this...
- 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.
- It was hilariously parodied in one episode of W?atcy Móh, Polish South Park-like cartoon. Teacher tells main characters that there's no Santa, making them all depressed. When one kid tells it to his zombie friend, he gets pissed, dress up himself as an Santa, beats the teacher and restores the kids' faith. Later he meets real Santa, who's revealed to be total dick who punchs him, and leaves him as only one who doesn't get anything for Christmas.
- Technically, he is a real-life saint: St. Nicholas. Santa is derived from saint; "Claus" comes from "Klaus" which comes from "Niklaus," which is German for "Nicholas."
- While he does not really deliever presents, he has appeared to people (and in one report, saved someone from a concentration camp), and his bones are able to produce perfumed water. Really, look it up.
- 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!
- That was the moral? I thought it had something to do with why they misbehaved and where little hooligans. I mean everyone knows they are little hooligans in the movie and it's because of this and some serious neglect by their mother that they act that way. Mind you it wasn't exactly a great movie, but I don't think they where going for African Americans shouldn't be judged as hooligans at all. I mean it seems to me they where bad kids because frankly no one spent anytime with them, took care of them, and they just did what ever they felt like and watched out for eachother because no one wanted anything to do with them. It was kinda summed up that way when that old drunk tells the guy he was right to leave them all alone in what is obviously a terrible place to live without anyone to take care of them.
- 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.
- Or from the episode where Control Freak takes over the titan tv. Moral of the story was: Don't watch too much tv. Then it's pointed out that they only won because of Beast Boy's encyclopedic knowledge of television. Aesop successfully spoofed and shattered.
- 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 nearly so great a message for helpless kids.
- In fact, the Aesop is even more broken due to the fact that tough heroes like Sonic is supposed to be exist specifically for the purpose of dashing in to save the day for innocent-but-weak people who cry out for help. So the undertones are basically that Sonic only cares about defending himself, and couldn't give a rat's ass about defending others.
- In the Family Guy episode "Family Goy", Peter is an asshole to Lois because she's Jewish and they spend the whole episode building up to a moral of respect other's beliefs. Jesus even arrives to explain that it's wrong to persecute another's belief system. Seconds later the aesop is shattered to pieces when Jesus says that religion is crap and Brian agrees.
- HAHAHAHA! Seth MacFarlane telling OTHERS to be respectful of other's belief systems? Hahaha. He should rewatch some of his most recent episodes. I'm sure there are quite a few Christians who are wondering how that aesop applies to Not All Dogs Go To Heaven.
- An episode of Family Guy has an aesop of "Homosexuality isn't a choice", fine... except that the episode happened because Peter willingly 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.
- It was also one of the most offensive episodes simply because Peter almost instantly divorces Lois after becoming gay. Because, you know, leaving your jobless housewife and three kids is TOTALLY okay as long as you're gay. Oh, don't worry about the consequences, because your former wife will say this was the right thing to do.
- Oh, yeah, and being gay also apparently makes you want to bang ten people at once.
- 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.
- Another example is Brian convincing Meg that god doesn't exist despite the fact Brian has seen Jesus and God punished Peter for making himself as a false idol.
- And broken AGAIN when Brian's whole argument about God not existing was "Its because you exist, Meg." Ummm...Seth? You do know that Meg is just a cartoon character, right? S-shes not real, man!
- Also, Brian's argument that God isnt real because bad things happen could be ripped apart by any number of religous scholars or Christian apologists.
- Not just them. Any intelligent atheist would tear his hair out at the argument that god can't exist because someone is ugly. The predestination versus free will paradox is a favorite argument of intelligent atheists. There's no god because you're ugly is a favorite of idiots who are only atheists because they think it makes them look smart.
- Another example from Family Guy—-the gay marriage episode. Brian is campaigning to make keep gay marriage from being outlawed (because apparently it already was legal before this, for some reason), while Lois has a more moderate view, being in favor of gay rights in general but not gay marriage. Well, long story short, Brian takes out of a gun and holds the mayor hostage in order to force him to legalize gay marriage. Lois sees this on the news, and suddenly realizes that maybe Brian's right, since he apparently "feels strongly" about this issue and her parents can marry when they don't love each other (has she never heard of Vegas?). The moral? Acts of terrorism are not only okay, but actually make your opinion more valid. At least as long as it's a liberal cause.
- Your Mileage May Vary on Family Guy. To some it seems obviously deliberate and especially funny.
- 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.
- And technically he stays a cat because to save another girl, accidentally turned into a cat by the same wizard, who's only prepared to change on of them back.
- 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.
- Yeah that one wasn't a moral, that showed that they still hadn't learned their lesson. There was no morality speech at the end of it so we know that it's not really a moral and it was just a joke that they were once again being stupid pricks and not doing the right thing.
- 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?
- The episode "Cartman Joins NAMBLA" has the aesop that everyone is human, even members of NAMBLA. Or except for members of NAMBLA. Or something...
- Sometimes it can get confusing. One episode (Gnomes) settled on the lesson that large corporations are good, since they get that way from giving the public a quality service. This is undermined in a later episode (Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes) where the moral seems to be that small towns suffer from large corporations and smaller businesses should be supported instead.
- That's not the Aesop at all. The Aesop is that people should take responsibility for their actions and that blaming others for your own lack of self-control is wrong; if they don't want Wall-Mart in town, then they should buy from the more expensive, less useful smaller businesses. Just a little bit of self-control would go a long way to making sure Wall-Mart didn't take over the town, but none of the residents were willing to make the sacrifice (excepting the kids sans Cartman).
- One of the most recent episodes (The F Word) is laden with Unfortunate Implications. The moral is that "The word f** has pretty much already changed its definition at this point and people shouldn't be so offended by it." The problem is that last season the exact opposite moral was given in regards to the N word because nobody else can understand what its like to be called that. So, let me get this straight, saying f** is okay but saying the N word isn't? Make up your mind!
- 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.
- Captain Planet himself is given too much credit here. True, he likely technically breaks the Aesop, but not enough to destroy it and prevent people from understanding the message. For one, the Planeteers have the vast majority of screen time in each episode, working with most of the problems presented to them while Captain Planet is pretty much around for only two minutes, and for the sole purpose of dealing the final blow. Captain Planet can't even be summoned without all five Planeteers in place as well, and as the show tended to show, conflict within the members has caused separation of members to be a problem for this reason.
- Captain Planet also has a problem with a broken Aesop regarding green technology. We're told that relying on fossil fuels and nuclear power is badwrong and instead should be using such things as solar power. But the only ones who have solar power in the energy densities required are the Planeteers (their craft actually flies on the power generated by solar panels). So... why aren't they giving this technology away, if it will help? So the Aesop is: "Use green technology, but never actually give it to anyone who would benefit."
- They don't have the capacity to mass-produce the, and their efforts are best served fighting those who would keep the technology down.
- They could have sold patents to one of many environmentally conscious corporations, which would have become biggest in their business thanks to such advanced technology, probably forcing all other major companies to follow suit - and then they could have bought vast tracts of land for nature preserves with the money. And this is why having futuristic technology in a show that's problems require technology more advanced than what we have to solve is a bad idea.
- This troper feels that the most fundamental flaw of most-if-not-all of Captain Planet's Aesops is the way it takes a real issue and blatantly misrepresents it. The truth is that yes, the planet is being damaged, and yes, it may well be near its breaking point. However, the show fails in its portrayal when it anthropomorphisizes the issue into a crusade that's not green, it's black and white. According to Captain Planet, everybody who pollutes the planet is necessarily evil and does so for no good reason, and conversely there are also heroes that can save the day from these villains without much effort. The truth is that much of the historical damage to the natural harmony of the planet came as an expense of the betterment of human living conditions, and now, there are no answers to the problem nearly so easy as the ones in the show. People identify saving the rainforest as good, but they also identify being prosperous as good, so real attempts to save the planet are necessarily centered on the difficult question of when one good thing should stop being pursued at the expense of another; a far cry from the simple good vs. evil message delivered by the show. That the question is difficult obviously doesn't mean it should not be pondered, but if it is portrayed as a clash of titans far-removed from oridinary people, well, that doesn't help encourage ordinary people to ponder it, and it is on them that the issue rests.
- In the Thunderbirds episode Atlantic Inferno, Jeff leaves confident son Scott in charge of International Rescue - cue 'bad decisions', Jeff's ire, and an apparent Aesop of "being in charge is more difficult than it looks". However, Scott makes sensible decisions based on expert advice. Jeff unreasonably censures Scott without listening to the evidence, leaving Scott unable to function. The Aesop sadly becomes "adults are always right, even when they are wrong".
- In "We're Back: A Dinosaur Story", the movie is framed as a morality tale about the importance of family, but the actual movie doesn't support this at all. The two kids never reconcile with their parents, nor do they have to learn that family is more important than they thought; they save the dinosaurs from Screweye, and... their parents come back.
- In one episode of the Power Puff Girls where Townsville was invaded by Broccoli people from outer space, the moral is to eat your vegetables. That's fine, or it would be if it weren't for the fact that if any of the kids had eaten broccoli, they would have been hypnotized and the invasion would have succeded.
- It looks like the moral of Scooby-Doo and the Witch's Ghost is going to be "Witch hunts were driven by fear and hatred and they punished completely innocent people. Look more deeply before you judge." Except that the woman who was killed for being an accused witch is revealed, after historical investigation, to have ACTUALLY been an evil witch, meaning that the townspeople were justified in hunting her down. Also, the current-day mayor, who stirs up the witch rumors to attract tourists does get a tongue lashing for "Dragging an innocent woman's name though the mud and screwing up the historical record to get tourist dollars.", except that it turns out everything he claimed was actually true. So what's the moral, again?
- To be fair, the mayor didn't know she was a real witch, and though it's probably a Broken Aesop, This Troper thought the twist was a nice subversion of the usual Anvilicious version of the story.
- From Phineas And Ferb: This Troper always thought the Doofenshmirtz subplot of "Dude, We're Getting the Band Back Together!" was kind of a Broken Aesop. If Doofenshmirtz is a good dad for trying to throw Vanessa a party every year, he was a good dad before he and Perry accidentally blew it up. And if Doofenshmirtz is wrong for not taking Vanessa's own personal tastes into account, he's wrong even after he and Perry accidentally blew it up. An attempt to satisfy both those possible morals, however, just falls flat if you think about it for a minute.
- Lampshaded in an episode of Jackie Chan Adventures:
Jackie: You see Jade? Slow and steady wins the race.
Jade: But you're using the rabbit talisman to get super-speed? I'm getting mixed messages here!
Web Original
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.
- On Nickelodeon in Australia in the late 90s, there were two PS As which had identical background music and the exact same format. They even had the same title (What it was I forget, something like "Kids Talk' or "Someone says" or something) And both featured footage of kids aged roughly 10 to 16 in some school playground expressing basically the same opinion. These two ads had two different messages; "Supermodels are bad because they promote the idea that everyone should starve themselves" and "Fast Food is bad because it makes you fat". Which is it?
- Not necessarily a contradiction, if you allow for the fact that there are reasons other than fashion to avoid gaining weight.
- False Dichotomy. There's a middle ground between starving yourself and becoming fat.
- This Troper once saw an BBC documentary about cigarette smuggling that argued smuggling was bad because they availibility of cheap black market cigarettes meant that people who would be encouraged to continue smoking and not give up because of the lower prices. But then the documentary also claimed smuggling was bad because people who were buying black market cigarettes weren't buying cigarettes in local shops and those shops needed the revenue from cigarette sales. So which is it?
- The Think B4 You Speak ad campaign is an attempt to get people to stop calling things "gay," as in "That's so gay." Unfortunately, their posters compare saying "That's so gay" to saying "That's so Jock who can complete a pass but not a sentence," or "That's so gamer guy who has more videogames than friends," in an attempt to gain the viewer's empathy. However, it is pretty much equating being gay with being stupid or antisocial. Nice job, guys.
- IIRC the commercials were better because it had people saying things like, "That's so girl in a white shirt." Therefore making the point that using gay to mean stupid is demeaning to gay people.
- One of the problems with those commercials is that one of them uses Wanda Sykes. You know, a comedian who I'm sure has used that word in her routine and has probably said somethings that might be offensive to other people.
- In many instances of Ugly Guy Hot Wife or Give Geeks A Chance there will be the aesop that one should look beyond appearance and be with the less attractive, geeky guy with a big heart. All well and good, except that in, oh, a good 99 percent of these stories the women are ridiculously beautiful, and according to the story, this makes them worthy people. Try and find how many of these ugly and geeky men are ever willing to settle for a- God forbid- average looking, or similarly geeky girl. Go on, we'll wait...
- In Raine Dog the title character is reviled to be a vegan and goes on about how it's natural. Which of course comes off as "carnivores don't really need to eat meat" which is something PETA belives and have tried many times (they all died of course)
- Parson Weems tried the "always tell the truth" moral with the story of Washington and the cherry tree. Which is completely made up. Besides, lies are bad, but chopping down trees without permission is okay?
The Cat Returns
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