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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, Bearded Idiot: 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 spoof " 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 drama, 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", but ends up delivering "Don't try to better yourself; it'll just end badly" or the circular inverse " If you're a good person you'll become rich or smart or super-powered".
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."
- Most notably in Gundam Wing? Gundam 00 is perhaps the most blatant in actually having this work into the very premise.
- Gundam SEED has its own Broken Aesop: its attempts to preach racial equality between the Coordinators and Naturals is rapidly undermined by the fact that Coordinators are portrayed as Born Winners and are the only ones to accomplish anything significant in-universe. The spin-off manga Gundam SEED Astray actually shows effective Naturals and useless Coordinators, but the anime plays it straight.
- 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 prophesied 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.
- xxxHolic is made by CLAMP. Of course it's twisted!
- 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.
- The dub also breaks the "It doesn't matter how you're born, it's what you do with your life" aesop. In the original Japanese version, Mewtwo wants to essentially wage war against all natural-born life (not just humans) since it feels that clones (such as himself) are being oppressed. Of course, 4Kids replaced this with a "Humans are evil and must die" motivation for Mewtwo....and made him want to take over the world (OF COURSE!!!)
- Not to mention the dub also removes the fact that Mew views Mewtwo as inferior. Yes, in the Japanese version, Mew claims that, since it is naturally-born, it is superior to Mewtwo. Again, 4Kids removes this aspect of Mew, replaces it with your average "Strength comes from the heart" speech, and effectively breaks the Aesop yet again by making the natural-born Pokemon right (Mew) and making the clone wrong (Mewtwo).
- I am not sure what you were watching but the Aesop in the Dub version was not that fighting itself is bad but fighting over who was genetically superior was. This was shown by having both sides fighting to a standstill.
- Count how many times each character in the dub says something about fighting being wrong during the clone vs natural born scene. Jessie and James give an entire speech on it, if I remember correctly.
- 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.
- 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. And she's a powerful Otome for the same reason: she has inherited the genes and the gems from Lena.
- 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 villains 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.
- Also, there's the fact that the souls of innocent people will be lost forever if he loses.
- And the fact that neither mind reading or soul shuffling is against the rules
- 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 any 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.
- Tima was essentially a sleeper agent; her human side was dominant until the evil programming was triggered instead. So from there she's just a Bradbury-esque metaphor for humans being destroyed by their own technological progress. But hey, haven't we had enough Frankenstein stories already?
- 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.
- What makes this even worse is that Nana is walking proof that Diclonii are not necessarily naturally savage creatures.
- 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 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.
- At the end of the first Slayers, copy Rezo asks whether he lost because he's just a copy. Lina tells him that's not it, he lost because he had no goal except winning the battle (to prove he'd surpassed the original). So what do Lina and Gourry say two minutes later when Sylphiel asks them what they'll do now that they've won the battle? "Haven't even thought about it!"
Comic Books
- Superman: At Earth's End, which is the comic referenced by the quote at the top, has one of these. Superman loses (most of) his powers and has to rely on a gigantic machine gun to solve his problems. After using his gun to kill two Hitlers and a Batman zombie (don't ask) he tells his allies (some little kids with guns) that he's dying. The little kids then bawl and say that guns killed Superman before throwing all of their guns into a bonfire. Of course, no one bothers to point out that guns also saved the kids from two Hitlers and a Batman zombie!
- 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 abuse 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
- 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 the main heroine quits the school basketball team, because she feels guilty about the advantage her powers give her. Which would be okay, if she hadn't knew that and still been using those powers in play for over sixty issues.
- 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".
- This story is very heavily based off the folklore of Sun Wukong, the Monkey God from Journey to the West.
- Marvel's Civil War storyline featured the superheroes favoring registration fighting the superheroes opposing it. Apparently, the Anti-Reg side was in the wrong; but due to different writers and such, it was hard to sympathize with the Pro-Regs. And Iron Man, the Pro-Reg leader, became a borderline Facist Nazibot for most of the storyline, resulting in Character Derailment so bad that it took a popular feature film and a year's worth of jobbing to everyone else and feeling sorry about his actions to fix. The whole thing was basically a titanic Idiot Plot where everyone held the Conflict Ball.
- In continuities as old as Marvel and DC's, the inevitable retcons often break initially intact aesops. For example, many of the older X-Men storylines involving Nightcrawler made it anviliciously clear that Fantastic Racism is bad, that we shouldn't judge people by their external appearance, and that having horns and a tail doesn't necessarily make you the antichrist. Enter Chuck Austen, and it turns out Nightcrawler really was half-demon all along.
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: The movie is about how you shouldn't discriminate against gay people... but every gay character in the movie is a flaming stereotype, and Adam Sandler seems to be terrified of typecasting himself. He plays the character as being such a Casanova that he can't even walk around without tripping and landing in someone's vagina. It's like he's yelling at the audience, at the top of his lungs, through a megaphone, on national TV, "NOT GAY! Being gay is okay but I'M TOTALLY, TOTALLY NOT GAY! DON'T F***ING CALL ME GAY!"
- His character, as well as his "husband," are supposed to be depicted as not even vaguely gay, to make their plan appear more outlandish.
- 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.
- If this is true, it's understandable on his part. Adam Sandler is known for basically playing himself with slight variations in movies, so it could confuse people about his sexuality if he played a gay person. Still breaks the Aesop, though.
- 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.
- Should be noted this is the same man the refused to kill all the Borg when given a chance (they found a damaged drone that Starfleet was planning to send it back with a virus, think that one time on Battlestar Galactica) on the grounds they even they have the right to live, this by the way is after he was assimilated.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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: A True Underdog Story, 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!
- 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."
- If you were going to make a movie about an ordinary girl fitting into the fashion industry with all the tall skinny models, you probably shouldn't have cast Anne Hathaway as the "normal girl".
- 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 paid 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.
- The more you think about The Incredibles the scarier it becomes...
- Provided you take a greedy, mass-murdering, selfish, egotistical, reckless Jerk Ass at face value.
- How about the fact that the anti-conformity aesop is broken by the resolution of Violet's plot. At the beginning, she's shy because she's embarrassed about being a Super and wants to be just like the normal kids. She eventually ends up being proud of her powers. So what does she do with her newfound confidence? She... starts dressing and acting just like the other girls. Now wait a cotton-picking minute! She's now proud of being different and yet we're supposed to believe this is the personality she was hiding behind her shyness all along? Really, Pixar? The fact that she ended up looking like a 3D Trixie Tang added to the bad taste in my mouth.
- They spoof this trope in The Incredibles bonus features on the DVD. One feature had one of the superheroes who has a particular affinity toward children (not the perverted kind, mind you, but the healthy "keep them safe and give them a good education" kind of affinity) give a speech about how important it is to stay in school, since the superhero in question dropped out. However, he quickly realizes he is mangling the aesop with him saying things like "stay in school, or you'll end up like me," since he is famous and well-beloved and has superpowers. He does not quite know how to proceed once he figures out that this is not sending the correct message.
- 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 men's 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.
- 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. Moreover, he wants to create more weapons to stop the bad guys.
- 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 judgment 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 perceives 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 perceiving 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 habit 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.
- 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.
- People weren't offended by Bruno's antics because he was "homosexual", they were offended because the acts were calculatedly offensive. Neither giving your lover a blowjob in public with children watching, nor borderline sexual assault (trying to force your tongue down a woman's throat or shove your crotch in her face), is inherently "homosexual" behavior. Portraying it as such is itself virulently homophobic.
- 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 Christmas, 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".
- Not to mention the overall "CONFORM TO THE GROUPMIND NO MATTER WHAT' vibe.
- 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 neighbors 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.
- Monster's 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.
- Bruce Almighty: If God wasn't going to do anything anyway, and Bruce wouldn't have done anything either after learning the "moral" of the story, then why give him the powers back?
- The Anarchist's Cookbook is pretty much Broken Aesop: The Movie. Pretty much to be expected when the conservative right tries to understand the liberal left.
- An argument could be made that this was the ultimate outcome of the Star Trek trilogy of The Wrath Of Khan, The Search For Spock and The Voyage Home, just purely by demands of the storyline. In Khan, Kirk, explicitly for the first time comes to the realization that his actions have consequences — because of his cavalier treatment of Khan, he inadvertently engendered a desire in the once noble adversary for a large amount of payback against the Admiral, and this cost him the life of Spock. He even himself ruefully acknowledges this, by explaining how he had always tried to con his way out of the lesson that the Kobayashi Maru was set up to teach — in effect, he'd never legitimately taken the test until then, and Spock paid the price for the solution. In Spock, Kirk continues to suffer the consequences of his actions, by losing both his ship and his son, indirect results of his confrontation with Khan. But at the end of Home, when he and the rest of the crew are court-martialed for mutiny, assault, destruction of government property, sabotage and theft, the punishment basically boils down to " We're taking away that rank of Admiral that you didn't want anyway, and here's a new Enterprise. Don't screw it up this time," completely shredding the aesop of the first two movies.
- Oh and by the way, the stated Aesops of Wrath of Khan are "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one" and "You can't save everybody, and character is shown in how we deal with death." The next two movies have Spock's Heroic Sacrifice undone by his resurrection, and Kirk & Co. risking their lives and careers to save him. In fact Kirk outright states that "sometimes the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many."
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. Thus, this trope is Older Than Print.
- 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 that 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 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.
- There is 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".
- 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).
- One of the lessons in Dr. Seuss' Daisy-Head Mayzie is "What good is money without all your friends?". Wait, friends? You mean those bratty children who taunted her in school about her daisy (which was every single one of them, by the way. No one defended her!). All the adults in town singled her out too. Oh, but suddenly they all love her again once she's back to normal, so... yay for conformity? I think there's a reason Dr. Seuss didn't get this published initially.
- 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 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.
- I don't know why I continue to try and defend Goodkind, but posts like this hardly help... you're drastically oversimplifying the situations. Richard invites people to think for themselves and question him, but he doesn't like it when his direct orders to his guards are gone against... it kind of undermines the whole "ruler" thing. He doesn't punish them for it, though. He allows anyone to stop serving him if they want, but he doesn't just let them betray him and his people to The Big Bad. It's also kind of hard to argue that Richard "forces" people to join his empire, when that's exactly what he doesn't do. None of the countries that joined him were forced to. He openly declared that the countries could join his empire and retain their individuality, or they could stay on their own and face the coming horde of pillagers on their own. Quite a few decide not to join him, and he simply leaves them to their fate, as he said he would. The torture thing though... yeah. That was bad. Though later on they kind of come to their senses in that regard, so maybe it's a character development thing.
- There are examples of them letting people stay neutral, and them meeting their Karmic Death because of them not going along with Richard. There are others where they flat-out threaten and murder people for not obeying them and do all the things mentioned.
- 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 MacGuffin 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 it's 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.
- In the Dune books written by Frank Herbert morality is not black and white. Prescience is as much as a trap as thinking machines or religion. There are only two characters in the six books who aren't corrupted by power—Stilgar and Duncan Idaho, but even they are tragically flawed because the things that keep them from being corrupted are a set of ideals (Stilgar holds onto the old Fremen ways, Duncan holds onto his loyalty to the Atreides) that prevents them from facing the changing world they live in. Ultimately, in Dune, the only laws are the laws of evolution.
- 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?
- In the seventh installment of Harry Potter, when confronting Papa Cloud Cuckoolander Xenophilius Lovegood about his belief in the titular Deathly Hallows, Hermione endears herself to skeptics everywhere: "I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist!" This is a fantastic lesson to teach young people who are still formulating their schema of the world, but its credibility is shot to hell when it turns out that the Hallows were real all along.
- Basically a case of If Jesus Then Aliens. The aesop of this is that since completely insane stuff like animated chocolate frogs and timetravel-necklaces are real, being a skeptic is pretty stupid — which fits with Hermione's role as both the Straw Vulcan and the complainer.
- How The Grinch Stole Christmas would have a far more convincing Aesop if, you know, it was a true story. While it's easy to understand Dr. Seuss's message was that Christmas should be more about enjoying the company of other people than materialism, promoting the message by implying that all people truly believe it is quite a stretch. Based upon normal behavior around Christmas time (from shopping becoming Serious Business to the way many a family gathering quickly turns into Dysfunction Junction), real-life reactions would be far more negative.
- The Jim Carrey update of the story does make its moral more solid, especially as social commentary on the modern era. Instead of a villain, the Grinch here is more of an Anti Hero, and it is revealed up front that the reason he hates Christmas is because the joy of togetherness that still made everyone else happy in the original version had always been denied to him because Whoville is a society of bigots who cast him out. From there, the Grinch doesn't even hate Christmas just for the materialism anymore; he hates it because of the hypocrisy of Dr. Seuss's original cause of Christmas joy. Then, it actually takes the one person who is sympathetic to him to remind the people what Christmas is all about; initially there is panic. Altogether quite a radical departure from the original, but if you think the original Aesop is broken, it probably is Adaptation Distillation. If you don't, it's Adaptation Decay — and critics such as Sight and Sound's who argued as much pointed out that the merchandising/tie-ins the film got also broke the book's Aesop in real life.
- Neil Strauss' The Game. The whole book is basically a buildup to a "power corrupts"- aesop, as the main character becomes bored with being a chick magnet and all of his fellow pickup artists are shown as complete losers whose lives are falling apart. Then Strauss goes on to encourage the cult that is being built up around the book, and publishes a handbook based on the tricks depicted in The Game So Yeah...
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 romantically logical thing to do. It wouldn't 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."
- But then they did it again, in the Deep Space Nine evolution of the evil empire mirror universe: Bearded Spock led a pacifistic revolution, and then all the formerly oppressed aliens turned right around, and conquered and enslaved the humans.
- "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 trouble with this Aesop is that they're trying to put the shoe on the other foot, by alluding to past attempts to
brainwash "cure" gay people (yes, really) as if they happened to straight people instead. But since not that many people remember or know about it, the story became Freakier Than Fiction and the point was missed.
- Another Sexuality Episode ("The Host") resulted in two arguable Broken Aesops in the process of disposing of a Temporary Love Interest. Dr. Crusher falls deeply in love with a handsome male humanoid alien, but (surprise!) the alien's mind and personality actually belong to an intelligent slug-like parasite living inside a nonsentient humanoid body. When the host body dies, the creature has to be 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 appearance she associated with him, and worse - it now has the appearance of a close friend. After considerable angst, she finally accepts her feelings and even gets intimate with the Riker+Creature combo (Riker's mind is implied not to be present, of course). Aesop #1 is clearly that true love is a thing of the mind and the heart, transcending body and appearances. But at the end of the episode, Crusher refuses to continue her romantic involvement with the creature in its current shape when the new body arrives and it's female. Crusher says that humans aren't emotionally equipped to cope with constant body changes like this, but this justification comes off as rather flimsy after the 40 minutes you've just spent hearing how pure and beautiful her love for this creature is and that she shouldn't be Squicked out by Riker's body because true love is of the soul. More, the timing of her rapid change of heart also seems to break previous Aesop #2 against treating homosexuality as aberrant. The Unfortunate Implications could have been easily avoided by having the new body be male.
- Kashimashi provides an excellent contrast for how to not break this Aesop. It knocks Tomari for a huge loop when Hazumu gets changed to a girl, but she eventually realizes that her feelings haven't changed. Having to redefine her beliefs and go completely against her biological instincts is accurately presented as a huge obstacle, but Love Conquers All. It helps that sexuality in Kashimashi is limited to kissing; ST:NG did itself no favors by choosing an Aesop about how love transcends the physical body and then focusing on sex.
- In fairness to Crusher, drastic body changes do wreak havoc on relationships in real life. The stories of Iraq and Viet Nam war veterans who come back missing limbs provide far too many painful examples. If this kept happening to the same person, at some point reality would intrude and Love Conquers All would have to give way to
Break The Cutie Break The Marriage.
- Finally done right with the Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode "Rejoined", which used the Trill race introduced in "The Host" for a much better Gay Aesop: regular Trill character Jadzia Dax falls in love with another female Trill. No-one has any problem with that, but their previous hosts were married, and the Trill have a taboo against such reassociation. Obviously, since the other Trill is a Girl Of The Week, they don't stay together, but this is because of the prejudices of society. (On the other hand, this facet of Trill society completely contradicts everything about "The Host".)
- 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 consistent 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 why some fans consider the series 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 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.
- More than a few Star Trek TNG episodes had members of the Enterprise's crew caught up in planetary rebellions. In at least two of them, crew members were specifically targeted for abduction because they were Federation citizens, and the Federation had access to plentiful weapons and supplies that they hoped would be traded for the hostages. In all cases, Picard refused to provide any significant aid to the party opposing the ones that took his personnel, citing the Prime Directive as his reason. The problem with that is that the abductors had committed an act of war against the Federation. One group came very close to stealing or destroying the Enterprise, the flagship of the fleet. So the moral of "You have to solve your own problems, rather than finding someone else to solve them for you", became "The strong and principled are good targets, because they won't fight someone so much weaker than them."
- Out Of This World: Evie uses her powers to pass her driving test, with the result that she gets a license despite not being able to parallel park. This is, obviously, a reprehensible thing, and consequentially, she gets in a car accident the very first time she takes the car out. Everything's reasonable so far, except for the fact that the tester was being a jerk and demanded she park in a space visibly smaller than the car. So the moral is "It's not fair to use your superpowers to succeed at something that would be physically impossible to do without them."
- And then there's the episode "Cinderella Evie", whose moral seems to be "Sometimes you need to say "no" to your teenage daughter, even if there's no good reason to and you don't actually have any problem with saying yes, because it's good for them. The thing you choose to put your foot down and say no about can be safely chosen at random."
- 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.
- "iGo Nuclear" is a very good example. It's supposed to be a Green Aesop, but it's broken when Freddie and Carly, who built a composter and an electric scooter, are failed, yet Sam does nothing and passes.
- 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.
- True Blood. The vampire rights movement seems to parallel every oppressed 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.
- Also, all that stuff about taking control of the victim, penetrating it and using it for your own gratification — vampires are the archetypal metaphor for rape, fer chrissakes! Of course this is a broken aesop, except if you want to imply that gays and sexual predators are somehow equal. The fact that there are people who masochistically enjoy this stuff doesn't really change that, because there are many, many women who have sexual fantasies about being raped and nobody in his right mind would say that this makes it okay somehow.
- An Aesop in the early Stargate SG-1 episode "The Torment of Tantalus" is broken later in the series. Dr. Ernest Littlefield represents what would become of Daniel if he stayed on the planet and tried to figure out the Meaning Of Life Stuff. Littlefield was old, lonely and crazy because, in pursuit of knowledge, he got himself stranded on the planet for several decades, no one on Earth had any idea how to help him and the stargate couldn't easily be used to leave that planet. In Jackson's case, though, people already knew a lot more about the universe. It was only one season before the SGC made allies with spaceships capable of interstellar flight, and by Season 6, Earth had their own. Even if the program mission didn't proceed as successfully without Daniel's help, it's entirely possible that they would have rescued him somehow.
- An episode of Sex And The City had an Aesop about how you can't change a man. However, in this same episode, every male character who appears changes in some way.
- In one episode of Sex And The City, one of the women dumps her boyfriend because he keeps asking her for a certain sexual favor. This is played up as the guy being a somewhat-forceful pervert, and the woman's choice is shown as being correct. Yet, in a later episode, one of the women dumps a man because he wouldn't do her a sexual favor. In other words it's bad if guys ask women for blowjobs and keep asking after she says "no", but if it's a guy refusing to give oral sex, then he's a pile, and should be dumped right away. In other words, whether or not a relationship works depends entirely on whether or not the woman enjoys the sex.
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.
- Except that Beauty didn't endure any of the Beast's crap. She only fell in love with him after he got his act straight and started acting more civilized. My take on it isn't just about a love story of Beauty seeing beyond appearances because of love, but also because the Beast knew Beauty fell in love with his goodness and wanted to keep her love so he changed in order to finally be happy
- 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 innocent. 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.
- 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.
- And ditto in Mercedes Lackey's 1890's retelling, The Fire Rose.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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?)
Newspaper Comics
- The Dick Tracy "Crimestopper's Guide" feature that ran 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. It also had exhortations for people to "get involved" when they see a crime committed, while in the strip, helpful bystanders tend to quickly end up dead. And so on.
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".
- 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. Bowdlerization ruined the whole damn point of the story, apparently.
Tabletop RPG
- The Old World of Darkness combines this with Family Unfriendly Aesop. In the setting, 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 have 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.
- Partially averted as well.
- In Werewolf, the forces of Dynamism are out to (at best) undo everything that happened since mankind came down from the trees because Humans Are Bastards.
- In Mage, Stasis (and Entropy, for that matter) are explained to have their good points (namely, Stasis helps to protect people and makes things easier, while Entropy recycles matter, energy, and space), and the Traditions are more about protecting the balance than advocating change for its own sake. As a matter of fact, out of the four Essences, the Marauders (crazy reality warpers) are Dynamism, the Technocracy (well intentioned extremists) are Stasis, the Nephandi (complete monsters) are Primordial, and the Traditions are Questing, that is, the right balance between the other three.
- In Changeling, it's occasionally implied that real science, the kind that encourages you to experiment and revise your worldview, is in fact a force of Dynamism (in fact, there's several splats based on technology); it's just that most people aren't comfortable with that and prefer to ignore anything that doesn't fit into their beliefs.
- And largely discarded for the New World of Darkness (with some exceptions, Second Sight being a painful example). The science-minded generally get a better shake in the nWoD than they ever did in the oWoD.
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. But if you do happen to die, you can come back to life through The Power Of Rock.
- 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 CDs. Or, indeed, if Rent itself were to become extremely lucrative...
- For people who spend the whole time talking about love and loving life, the circle of friends seems to have a lot of cheating, poor communication, and emotional sniping at each other - no one is enjoying themselves very much, or following Angel's lauded example.
- Except for Collins, who indeed, lives every day for today... and ends up broken because of it.
- And then there's Angel: percussion genius, representation of unconditional love... and canine-killer-for-hire.
- South Pacific has gotten some flack for this. While its Aesop is anti-racism, the two main minority characters are mere stereotypes of Asian people, and Bloody Mary's ethnicity is Played For Laughs throughout the show.
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.
- Not quite. By the time of the mission in question, all three of the other pilots are showing definite signs of fatigue and stress. Remember, they've been on the front lines from before the first day of the war. Up until the invasion of Yuktobania, none of them question the necessity of the war. They hate having to do it, and talk about how they would like peace, but they recognize that they have to fight. Only after the conflict escalated did they start to really bitch about how terrible war is, which is also when the tactics used by their military took a much more vicious turn.
- 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".
- 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.
- 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. Therefore, 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 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.
- 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.
- 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 an insult to the player than anything else.
- Eikichi in Persona2 is one huge Broken Aesop. Abridging a lot, Eikichi got separated from his first love, Hanakouji, when he was a kid; since then he kept focusing on "becoming a true man" to be worthy of her. Problem is, Eikichi remembers Hanakouji to be a beautiful, slim girl, while she actually became overweight (though still pretty easy on the eyes) over the years. When he finds out, his reaction is pretty much that he doesn't care, since she is still herself, making the perfect Aesop of not judging people for their appearances. But then that goes to Hell when Hanakouji goes unmentioned for the next 3/4 of the game, only to reappear and become slim through magical powers, and only after that is their relationship resolved. So, true beauty is on the inside, but being slim is still important.
- The moral of the original NES A Boy And His Blob is, basically, an anti-junk food one: "Don't eat lots of candy, and healthy foods are better for you. The bad guy is even a blob of what you could call sapient fat. The problem is that your main weapons to stop him? Are jelly beans. Which give your blob friend magical powers. And extra lives are peppermints. Whose side is that game on, anyway?
- Valkyria Chronicles has Welkin making a dramatic speech about how they don't need to rely on Alicia's Valkyria powers to win the day and beat the Marmotah, continuing the game's thematic Aesop of "teamwork always beats individual excellence", but the only way Squad 7 is able to even get onto the thing is after those exact powers have been used to blow a hole in its armor plating; before that happens, it's completely hopeless.
Western Animation
Web Original
- Parodied in Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series.
Yami: Bullying is just wrong! Destroying people's minds with magical powers is A-Ok!
- Played unfortunately straight in Gaia Online's recent ban on smoking-related items in avatars. Major NPCs and even Lanzer himself have been seen smoking in the plot comics, several Evolving Items and Monthly Collectibles (and the Johnny Gambino doll) have tobacco-related items...
- They un-banned it when everyone pointed this out.
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.
- They've since started admitting that the little squeaky doughnut and so forth look cute, and then it depicts them spray-painting teeth. This still doesn't quite get the message across.
- On Nickelodeon in Australia in the late 90s, there were two PSAs 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.
- 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 99.999 percent of these stories the women are ridiculously beautiful, and according to the story, this is the only thing that 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 revealed to be a vegan and goes on about how it's natural. This comes off as "carnivores don't really need to eat meat", which is You Fail Biology Forever. YMMV on whether this Aesop was meant to apply to humans, who are omnivores.
- Vegan cats die noticeably sooner then cats that are fed a diet that is more designed to their metabolism (meat). Vegan humans can usually get about the same average lifespan as a non-vegan. This is because humans are only slightly less omnivorous then goats.
- Parson Weems tried the "always tell the truth" moral with the story of Washington and the cherry tree. Which is completely made up.
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