You want to have An Aesop about something that we should avoid at all costs. Trouble is, just by showing or describing it in lavish detail, you end up undermining your message by showing just how damn appealing it is and cause the audience to get the wrong idea.
This trope is especially easy to fall into when a piece of media aims for a realistic portrayal of why people get lured into things like smoking, doing drugs, fighting awesome action sequences, etc., thereby identifying to the audience what others see in it, possibly causing them to view it in a light they hadn't previously seen it in. Conversely to this trope, if you gloss over the very real appeal, you end up with a bad habit that it seems no rational person would ever pick up (akin to an ad reading "Stop Punching Kittens"). The trick is finding the balance between getting the audience to understand the appeal and understanding why these things are bad. If the negative aspects don't come across as outweighing the appeal, this trope comes into effect. This makes the vice into Forbidden Fruit and therefore much more appealing when the audience is told not to do it.
A sub-trope of Broken Aesop. Sometimes the result of an Accidental Aesop or an Alternate Aesop Interpretation or Poe's Law. Can overlap with Clueless Aesop or Family Unfriendly Aesop. Sometimes a Spoof Aesop may attempt to show this trope in-universe. Can lead to cases of Strawman Has a Point.
This can be caused by, and often leads to, a Misaimed Fandom. Can also lead to No Such Thing as Bad Publicity, Rooting for the Empire, Sympathy for the Devil, Springtime for Hitler, or Unfortunate Implications.
But Not Too Evil is often invoked to prevent this trope. You Bastard is another option, whereby the creators let you enjoy the Cool Thing that's being Done, then try to make you feel bad by showing the horrific consequences.
See also Evil Is Cool, Evil Is Sexy, Forbidden Fruit, and The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything.
Compare/contrast Stealth Cigarette Commercial for when this is done intentionally.
The trope was formerly called "Truffaut was right", named for French director François Truffaut who noted that you simply cannot make a truly anti-war movie.
Examples
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Media in General / Common Tropes
War Is Hell. Anti-war works suffer badly from this. The formerTrope Namer was French film director, François Truffaut. He once said that "There is no such thing as an anti-war movie" because it will invariably look exciting up on screen. Another old saying is; "Soldiers love anti-war movies but never the way the maker wants", though these descriptions actually apply to war in other media as well as film. Plus, Truffaut's theorem isn't the only problem. Even if the work is intended to show how horrible war is it almost always backfires. While certain aspects of the war can be portrayed negatively, it's near impossible to make a work that is completely anti-war, regardless of what approach the creator takes, to the point where trying to make an anti-war work is nothing short of futile. There's a couple of reasons for this;
The fighting ends up looking or sounding cool. If it doesn't, and the battles aren't exciting, then the work can't get its message across because no one will want to see/read/listen to a war work with boring battles.
Even if #1 is avoided, and the work doesn't show any fighting and instead focuses on other negative aspects of war, such as the suffering of civilians or atrocities committed by one of the sides, it's a bit difficult to get the message across. Without showing the fighting, which is the actual war part of anti-war, the work can't actually show why the civilians are suffering or why the belligerents are committing these horrible crimes.
While the war itself is meant to be seen negatively, the works often go out of their way to portray at least one side fighting it in a positive light. In addition to seeing the troops fighting cool battles, the audience sees them committing selfless acts of bravery and maintaining strong willed attitudes of hope and perseverance. So the very fact that war sucks brings out the best in people.
Even if #3 is avoided and the work does focus excessively on the negativity of war besides just the battles, and shows demoralized troops driven committing horrible atrocities, there will inevitably be at least one character who withstands it and never breaks. So no matter how bad the war gets, hope always survives.
A.) If only one side involved is like this, then it's only anti-war for that side. It's extremely pro-war for the other side because all it's done has justified them fighting, and the audience wants them to fight against the evil side.
Junk food is one of those things that it is hard to have An Aesop about because of how colorful and tasty it always looks. Any diet commercial will backfire horribly if they show the foods you shouldn't be eating and say that you shouldn't be eating them.
British TV chef Jamie Oliver tried to avert this by showing people their weekly intake of junk food all dumped together into a huge unappetizing mess. As Charlie Brooker pointed out, the resulting message was "don't eat your food that way".
This backfired again on Jamie Oliver as he tried to explain to children why chicken nuggets made from mechanically separated poultry are terrible and non-nutritious, as he carefully cut up a chicken and used the leftover carcass to make nuggets. The kids happily scarfed them down, to his sad amazement.
Dara O'Briain mocked this one as well, talking about Gillian McKeith's tendency to show people a table covered in all the crap they shoveled down their throats over the course of the week - and noted that the looks on their faces tended to be a mixture of pride and lust.
Any piece of anti-tobacco propaganda where the smoker/chewer actually looks pretty hot with a cigarette in his or her mouth or while chewing. Especially when it emphasizes someone trying to look cool by smoking or accuses the Tobacco industry of glamorizing the use and then clearly identifies how they've played up tobacco usage to look cool, which the viewer may not have noticed before.
Drugs Are Bad. Anti-drug propaganda suffers heavily from this. Many works spend the first half detailing just how fabulous the wild and crazy world of drug-fueled parties are or throw in things like a funnystoner character or a Mushroom Samba. It's hard to take it seriously when they conclude with "Drugs are bad. You shouldn't do drugs."
Hilariously, there are multiple studies saying that anti-drug propaganda, both fictional works and real anti-drug programs, like DARE, not only fail to decrease the rate of drug and alcohol use among the participants, but in some places the rates actually increase. There are a couple of reasons as to why this is;
They expose kids to drugs at an earlier age. How many wouldn't even have known about these evil and destructive substances if they hadn't been told about them by the very propaganda trying to keep them off drugs?
It makes drug use seem far more prevalent than it actually is, making kids think it's normal, especially when they place emphasis on resisting peer pressure, which a lot of kids take as "everyone is doing drugs but you" and also "if you don't do them, prepare to be bullied and ostracised."
When the kids get older and find out that some of the information given to them had been, at the very least, exaggerated in order to Scare 'Em Straight, (e.g. one joint of marijuana or one pill of ecstasy will kill you) they assume that all of it was and decide to try out drugs. For the kids to discover this, all it takes is them knowing one person who uses or has used drugs and didn't die or become a desperate junkie.
Even when being honest, describing the effects doesn't exactly make them unappealing. "Marijuana makes you feel happy and makes things funny. LSD and mushrooms makes you see bright colors and patterns. PCP turns you into Superman."
The Aggressive Drug Dealer doesn't exist, so if a kid does get approached by a drug dealer, they won't feel nearly as much pressure to buy from them and will realize that real drug dealers, even if they aren't nice, are much nicer than the ones on TV and may feel more inclined to buy from them.
Some anti-drug programs even tell students the current street value of drugs. Which instead of resulting in "Oh, I would never do that that's too expensive" sometimes results in "Hey, *insert drug* is not badly priced."
Normal youth rebellion. Your parents and teachers don't want you to do this stuff, but they said that about all the good music, movies, and video games too.
Almost any video game that tries to remind us that violence is wrong. OK, here's your Godslayer Blade, Shootemup 6000 and a ridiculously complicated combat system that you must learn in order to see the story. Oh, and don't kill people, unlike the villain.
plastickiwi's submission: Wait... so you're telling me people download and burn their own DVDs... for free?
In addition, pirating your DVDs is a good way to be freed from that annoying anti-piracy trailers.
And work around the region codes in a No Export for You situation. At least when you do not have to worry about a language barrier.
Video game DRM can get even worse - certain developers seem to take "aggressive DRM" to mean "everyone is a pirate, especially if they legally bought it" and nearly make their games entirely unplayable for non-pirates. To the point where people are willing to pirate a game just so they don't have to deal with it.
And one of the same companies that are pushing anti-piracy also distributed file-sharing software, promoting the ability of the software to download copyrighted media illegally: [1]
It does not help their cause that a lot of the people involved in the anti-piracy side of things tend to do downright rotten things in order to try enforcing their viewpoint. For instance, trying to sue a young woman in need of an organ transplant for sharing a whopping ten songs, and support the creation of legal measures like SOPA. Far from raising public awareness, actions and tactics like these just make the anti-piracy groups look at best like they are over-reacting, at worst like they are money-grubbing jerks out to squeeze every dime they can get from both customers and artists.
Teen Pregnancy or out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Shows like 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom, The Secret Life of the American Teenager have been accused of glorifying or promoting it. We can argue all day about whether or not this is the case, but if the shows are trying to discourage it they are not doing a very good job.
The cameras step into the house of a teenage girl whose life was ended by pregnancy only to find that, somehow, her life goes on. It's harder to fear something with which you've become more familiar.
It doesn't help that most of the "struggling teen mothers" portrayed in many of these media are rich, white girls who don't have to get jobs or miss out on school or social events to take care of their baby, and can often still get a guy (whether or not he's the father of their child) to go out with them.
There's almost inevitably- especially in documentary versions- a statement somewhere about how- at least in her own estimation- she's become twice the person she was and how it's really matured her, and how one just doesn't know what love is 'til one is a mother. Yeah, kids, don't do it!
Meta-wise, it's literally having the opposite effect on its audience; because of the recent focus on fame and recognition as being the most important value among teens and tweens, there have been instances of young teenagers who want to (or did) get pregnant because they think they will appear on television.
Anything against acquiring excessive material goods, whether it's discouraging greed or if it's anti-consumerism or anti-materialism, can easily fall into this. The story often has to show all the material things that people shouldn't be so greedy for, shouldn't waste their money on, or shouldn't define themselves by, and it's extremely difficult to portray these things without them looking cool. This goes double when the message is aimed at kids.
This happens a lot in Christmas works that try to reinforce the true meaning of the holiday; about family, about giving to the less fortunate, and how it's better to give than to receive, which is then undermined by showing all the awesome presents we shouldn't be so focused on getting. These also tend to end on Sweet and Sour Grapes, where the person is resigned to the fact that getting [awesome toy] isn't what makes a happy Christmas; only to receive it after all.
Body weight related issues, either getting too heavy or becoming too thin.
For example this ad warning about the dangers of anorexia shows a cadaverous-looking young woman◊ (Warning — NSFW image). However, while people without weight issues might be disgusted by sights like these (but it's not like they were going to suddenly become anorexic or obese anyway), they can also give grounds for denial: "I'm not anorexic/obese: I don't look like that!"
With weight loss in particular the works can become icons as a goal to reach, or for viewers/readers blaming themselves. "Look at her, I couldn't even go as far as she did!"
In the case of some who have gone through the experience of having an eating disorder and managed to "beat" it, a lot of times they used pictures like these as "thinspiration" and seeing those images may trigger a relapse.
Going the other way, fat/body positive messages that are supposed to tell people who are seen as "large" by society's standards but are actually at a decent, healthy weight that there is nothing wrong with them could be used by actual obese people as an excuse to keep living an unhealthy lifestyle.
Sex Is Evil. Works that make arguments against sex or portraying it openly, whether its discouraging sexual immorality and promoting abstinence or if it's arguing against the objectification of women.
The work inevitably has to show some sexual imagery, and it's pretty much impossible to show it in a non-appealing light, so it either the sex or the portrayal of women off as appealing.
With works that promote abstinence they often get screwed up by trying to balance out the message of how evil and dirty pre-marital sex is with how great and wonderful sex is once you're married. Unless the work resorts to outright lies, it really has no argument to show any differences between sex within marriage and sex outside of it other than, "It's bad/sinful/immoral".
A.) It's no coincidence that the virginity pledge movement and abstinence trends like purity rings have coincided with rising rates of oral and anal sex among teenagers. While individual leaders and parishes have given their opinions on oral and anal sex, the churches of each sect have yet to take an official position on them. Because oral and anal sex can't result in pregnancy, this leads kids to believe they're just a little bit less sinful than vaginal pre-martital sex, and that it doesn't technically count because it's not the same as vaginal sex.
B.) Even with vaginal sex, kids can still find other loopholes, such as being engaged or being "spiritually married". They're not actually married, but they believe that you can still do it as long as you get married later. That part's prettymuch in the Bible: ancient Israelite (precursor to Jewish) law specified vaginal intercourse between a man and woman who were both unmarried as being exactly equivalent to marriage vows, the couple becomes instantly married (modern equivalent being "common law" marriage). Hence what seems to be a punishment for premarital sex (marriage) is actually a logical consequence (and hence no ban on fiancee sex).
Fewer half measures. Sure, total abstinence is a more reliable way to avoid pregnancy and STDs than using a condom, but using protection is way better than nothing. Programs that primarily preach abstinence tend to condemn protected sex as well, so when the kids give in to their lust they almost certainly won't already have a condom on them "just in case", may not know how to get and use one, and may be unaware of how effective it is and thus not think it's worth the trouble.
Along the same lines, prostitution is devilishly difficult to portray in film without glamorizing it. Sex Sells, after all, and it's difficult to show a hooker plying her trade without showing what some of the appeal of that trade is. At the same time, if you do succeed in making prostitution look unappealing (via perhaps showing the cruelty and perversion of the customers or maybe the dangers of the trade), you're very likely to make your film rather unappealing as well, and then no one wants to watch it.
Advertising
Anti-drug ads tend to fall victim to this, especially the ones aimed at kids and teens. In general they have the same problem as Stealth Cigarette Commercials. That is, the ads are considered so stupid and lame and insulting to one's intelligence, that people who watch them will want go use drugs simply out of spite. This is far from their only problem, however.
Some ads try to send the message of "Drugs aren't cool" or "Not doing drugs is totally cool". Except some of them do this by showing a person who does think drugs are cool, and the ad intentionally goes to great lengths to give them the traits typically associated with being cool, which usually makes the drug user look a lot cooler than the other person in the ad who chooses not to use drugs.
Ads like this one that show embarrassing things happening to people who get too drunk or too stoned at parties. Hindered by the problem that telling your friends all the crazy antics you did while drunk or stoned makes you look so cool.
There are ads that show the dangers of driving while under the influence of drugs. While these ones are more honest and may actually discourage people from doing so, the message that viewers get from this is "Just stay home and use drugs" or "If you're going to get high, be sure to take a cab or have a designated driver."
The UK government attempted to steer kids off drugs in The Eighties with a series of TV advertisements featuring emaciated youths in dingy surroundings. The kids in question are reputed to have thought they looked really cool. It doesn't help this was during the second wave of Goth pop music! If only they had known "heroin chic" was an existing underground fashion trend waiting to break into the mainstream.
Ads that show an accident happening because someone was using drugs, such as one where a kid picks up a gun and accidentally shoots his friend while high, or one where a little girl is shown getting into a pool unsupervised and a narration says, "Don't feel bad. Just tell her parents you weren't watching her because you were getting stoned. They'll understand." The only message that viewers get from this is "Make sure you're more careful than these people while using drugs".
An ad from the early 2000's depicts two kids in the bathroom at a concert getting high before a cop comes in and busts them. A caption appears on the screen saying "Marijuana can get you busted. Harmless?" It's telling viewers that the reason marijuana is bad because it's illegal, which leads to the viewer to think that there would be no problem if it was legal.
Another ad from the early 2000's depicts dealing with peer pressure. It shows a kid walking into a room and getting offered some weed by a laid back stoner. The kid makes up an excuse, and the scene repeats several times with the kid walking into the room again, each time offering a different excuse. Finally he tells the stoner, "It's just not for me." to which the stoner simply shrugs and replies, "It's cool." The ad certainly portrayed the stoner as much more relaxed and laid back than the uptight other kid.
The Gruen Transfer pointed out that most anti-drinking ads look almost exactly like what advertising agencies would do for actual alcohol ads if they could get away with it.
There is the famously counter-productive anti-drug ad featuring Rachael Leigh Cook. The ad itself isn't so bad, but after watching it, how many people associated "drug use" with "Rachael Leigh Cook in a tanktop and tight jeans"?
An elementary school created and distributed customized pencils for their students to use. The pencils were emblazoned with the words, "It's Not Cool to Do Drugs." This lasted until a student pointed out that, as the pencils are sharpened, they begin to read "Cool to Do Drugs," and then later, "Do Drugs."
Some anti-tobacco and anti-drinking billboard and radio ads emphasize the percentage of kids locally who don't smoke or drink. Apparently the adults who create these ads have completely forgotten how being "cool" works and think it has something to do with being in the majority, as if the Fonz was cool because everyone else wore leather jackets. If you want to be different, they just told you how.
One of the worst car advertisements ever was a magazine ad, "An Unfair Comparison Between the Javelin and the Mustang." And boy, was it unfair: anyone could look at the huge, detailed photos of each car and see the Mustang was more attractive and better designed. Which worked out badly for the makers of the Javelin, who placed the ad.
Although car makers are heavily prohibited from glamorising the performance aspects of their products most television car advertisments need the disclaimer 'Professional Driver on Closed Course. Do Not Attempt' to try to counter the fact that driving across a frozen lake or a desert or round a racetrack looks pretty damn fun.
Which is oddly extended to such crazy actions as driving normal speed down paved roads with leaves on it.
This upbeat commercial for Gofer Cakes, a fictitious snack cake akin to Ding Dongs. Aimed at children and teens, it is a PSA for The President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports; the kids in the ad end up all sloppy and lazy from eating too much junk food. Unfortunately, many ads for real junk food work along similar principles — the real ones try to say "this food is so tasty that it's worth being anti-social over!" The comments on the PSA confirm that the satire element went over most kids' heads, and seems to have turned a lot of youngsters on to Gofer Cakes.
A lot of anti-gun PSA's and arguments. They start out by inflating the power and lethality of weapons currently available on the civilian market. Then they show someone somebody being victimized by a criminal with that powerful gun. Wouldn't you sleep better if you had a weapon of your own to use if someone scary like that came at you?
The ad has a bit of notoriety in the gun community for three reasons. Number one: The large magazine used is the 33 round aftermarket mag, but the guy only fires seventeen shots. Number two: The marksmanship and general handling is actually pretty good. Number three: having lived through the Assault Weapons Ban era, it becomes joke fodder because it seems as if anything can now be deemed to be an assault <insert noun here>.
This ad◊ attempts to show buying counterfeit products as bad...by showing that they look great on a rather attractive woman. To someone just casually passing the ad and not reading the text the message can easily come across as "counterfeit goods can make you look great!"
Anime and Manga
The Black Cat anime took great pains to try to show the viewers that the way of life of an assassin was wrong, and that people who have pacifist ideals are, in the end, stronger. However, all this effort was undermined when Train was shown to be infinitely cooler and stronger when he was working for Chronos. His sleek black clothes complete with an awesome Black Cloak, the way he managed to effortlessly defeat every single person who ever stepped in his way, and the way he tended to remain calm and collected all made him seem like he was much better off before he became a pacifist. After he becomes a pacifist, he constantly ends up having to be saved by others, wangsts and throws temper tantrums, and wears clothes that aren't nearly as cool. One can understand why Creed goes to such lengths to make him go back to being the way he was when he was an assassin...
Most entries into the Gundam metaseries are meant to have an anti-war message - and many, especially those by Yoshiyuki Tomino do a decent job of depicting how war can utterly ruin people's lives. At the same time, it has beautiful, brightly coloured weapons of mass destruction that move with the grace and artistry of the Bolshoi, plenty of Magnificent Bastard villains you can't help but admire, gorgeouscostumes on the forces of dangerous space-fascists, and perhaps worst of all, some of the protagonists actually find some kind of meaning to their lives through the war that they may not have had without it.
And the Gundam models, let's not forget the models of those "beautiful, brightly coloured weapons of mass destruction."
Averted by an earlier production not involving Tomino by the same company, Armored Trooper Votoms. If anyone remembers the comical and disgustingly hideous suit of armour the bank robbers came up with in Yahoo Serious, this is essentially a macronised version of such suits. Everything about this series is gritty and depressing and practically uber alles (because anything else gets you killed). It doesn't help the hero begins the series just recovering from his own My Lai (he was ordered to flambé a group of children and did so unquestioningly), because their black ops unit worked on a principle of 'no witnesses.' Throughout the series he delves deeper and deeper into conspiratorial military intrigue on both sides, and also when his troupe runs low on funds, as a side venture he winds up being hired into the role of a mercenary in a civil war far more nasty and hateful than the war he just got out of. It is essentially taking all the cynicism Gundam at times lacks (especially in the more recent post-Tomino era), and piles it all into a single series. Because of the way the series starts, it leaves the price of Chirico's badassness always at the back of one's mind, which probably dumps out a lot of the people who would be on the fence about warfare. This was oddly in direct contrast to the manga, which played it more straightforwards, and were it not for the clunky ugly mechas, could be easily mistaken for Wing Commander The Comic. Bleakness thy name is Votoms.
Throughout the entire Mazinger trilogy -Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger and UFO Robo Grendizer- and alternateseriesGo Nagai tried to send the message of War Is Hell. Cities were destroyed and burnt to ashes, innocent people was hurt and suffered or died in horrible ways (there are several instances of genocide) or lost their loved ones or were enslaved or brainwashed... And victory always had a high price. Unfortunately, he did so by showing real cool battles between colourful, awesome Humongous Mechas and impressive, imaginative monsters duking it out among them with spectacular Weapons Of Mass Destruction, so a lot of viewers kind of missed the point.
He did manage to successfully get his point across in Devilman, when he showed that war has no real winners by killing everyone the viewers came to know and love.
Dan, the protagonist of Basquash!, succeeds at this within the show itself. He wants to destroy the popular sport "Big Foot Basketball" (Basketball... with giant robots!) because of a personal vendetta but also because the sport is really lame (the player robots move sluggishly, use basic moves and tend to fall down; the broadcast has to spice it up with special effects to interest people). Dan manages to obtain a Big Foot and crashes a public game, showing off real moves... then gets arrested and put away in juvie for a year. He's convinced he's "killed" BFB, only to find, on his release, his stunt showed that you can do kickass moves with a robot, thus making the game more popular than ever! He's not happy.
The original Astro Boy story "The Greatest Robot on Earth" attempted to have an anti-war message while still being a shonen fighting robots series.
The original manga of Ghost in the Shell carries often painfully apparent warnings about the consequences of unchecked accumulation of power among not just government offices—including Section 9 itself—as well as commercial interests and, thanks to cybernetics, individuals themselves. The television series caries this further, demonstrating what happens when technology advances at a faster pace the law can hope to keep up with. And yet, the Major and her comrades come off as supremely professional and awesome, even as they consciously abuse the powers vested in them by the state.
The manga of Dominion Tank Police comes right and says it: any society that not just uses tanks to police itself, but feels as though it has no other option, has crossed a line from which there is probably no easy return. Masamune Shirow acknowledged that he made the mini-tank Bonaparte deliberately smaller and cuter than practical as a concession to the misery of having tanks driving around, trying to establish some semblance of order.
Neon Genesis Evangelion has similar War Is Hell themes and deconstructs the whole "Spunky teenagers piloting cool giant robots" trope by showing that they're basically Child Soldiers. The problem is, the Humongous Mechas the kids pilot are extremely cool and have been immortalized in tons of video games, toys, model kits and other merchandise. So even though the show is trying to say "No sane person would ever want to pilot an EVA," quite a few people walk away thinking it'd be awesome to be an EVA pilot.
A major theme in the Area 88 manga and OVA is that War Is Hell because it devastates countries and turns soldiers into broken men. The problem is, the pilots look awesome as they engage in aerial combat.
It actually seems to toy with the trope, Mick is War Is Glorious personified, but Shin, who is War Is Hell personified winds up the best pilot, and also the one with the most adaptability and forethought. Basically, Mick believes in War Is Glorious because he's an empty shell with nothing to look forwards to anymore except more combat. Shin, the fully fleshed out character, has many things to think about at home, and wants to end the war to do so. You can see this in the other pilots as well. The cast of characters slides from one end to the other. Boris is like Shin for instance, while Greg is closer to Mick's side of the coin.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica has this going on both in-universe and out. Mami constantly tells Madoka and Sayaka that being a Magical Girl is very dangerous, while she skillfully beats the crap out of Eldritch Abominations with awesome giant magical guns. They clearly don't take her warnings very seriously, and even though Mami dies in action, Sayaka's decision to make a contract was partly for the cool factor. In the fandom, wanting to become a Puella Magi is very common, despite the nasty revelations that show up later in the story (which are partially negated by the ending, but not completely).
The Aesop was something along the lines of "If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide." Not a good aesop to use when your main readers are nerds, and (in America anyway) Liberal nerds who distrust the government on social issues, Conservative nerds who distrust the government on economic and Second Amendment issues, and Libertarians who REALLY distrust the government on ALL issues.
It also doesn't make much sense independent of the audience's political leanings. Where none of us perfect, so we're all doing something wrong and all have something to hide.
And in addition to all of the above, the "intended" pro-registration aesop of Civil War goes completely against the anti-registration aesop that the X-Men comics had been running with for decades. Marvel spent years preaching to their audience that mutant registration is wrong, and then turned around and tried to argue that superhero registration is good...without making it at all clear that that was what they were going for. And then they acted all surprised when the audience sided with the anti-registration side.
The Invisibles attempts a subversion—it shows us memorably exciting action sequences, and then gives us equally memorable depictions of the suffering inherent in that flashy violence, most notably a Day in the Limelight showing us the sad life of one Mook.
Powers goes for something similar. Many of the characters have rather cavalier attitudes towards violence, indulging in black humor, but on-screen violence can be very uncomfortable and jarring despite (or because of) the cartoony art style. Word Of God has it that Bendis and Oeming want viewers to be faced with something unpleasant and ugly when characters get violent. Despite all that, the darkness of it can be compelling because Powers relies on a grim-and-gritty, street-level view of supers as its driving premise. If the whole work is Darker and Edgier, then showing that the violence is dark and edgy is not necessarily gonna work.
This was very much the reason for crime comics in the 1950s, particularly EC Comics. This got them (and American comics in general) busted and led to the Comics Code being imposed.
In Batman #1, Batman had Robin fight a bunch of unarmed crooks to see how tough they really were without their guns. Robin trounces them with ease, leaving one of the crooks to say "If only I had my gun!" Batman breaks the fourth wall to point out that the readers shouldn't emulate crooks. Sadly, the aesop and the story were probably over shadowed because the comic book also introduced The Joker, one of the most popular, and psychotic, comic book characters of all time, and Catwoman, one of the most popular Foe YayAnti-Hero characters of all time.
DC Comics' war books were often gritty, dark, and featured tortured protagonists (especially those written by actual veterans, such as Joe Kubert and Robert Kanigher). They often ended with the sign-off, "MAKE WAR NO MORE!" But they were and are exciting adventure stories.
Chick Tracts fall into this quite heavily to the point where they have been believed to be parodies, and Jack Chick has had to point out that this is not the case.
In general, the antics in the tracts often send the unintended message of "God is a dick who will send even good people to hell for not accepting my religion, meanwhile serial killers who do get off with no punishment." "You can kill as many people and steal and burn as many things as you want, if you accept Jesus right before death, you'll be marked as a good person and thus won't have to face any consequences."
Depending on the tracts, he'll even make the devils funny or sufficiently clever to provide comic relief... until the Big Boring White Guy In The Sky throws them into hell in the last panel.
The notorious "Dark Dungeons" made roleplaying out to be an exciting life-or-death scenario that introduced real occultism and gave players fabulous supernatural powers that they can use to brainwash their parents to... gasp... buying them stuff. Also, apparently it's a great way to meet women since most of the players in the comic are female. More than a few roleplayers love the tract and it has been parodied and affectionately referred to in innumerable ways among the subculture.
In his anti-Catholic tracts, he shows very little downside to being one of those dastardly papists, since they seem to have nothing but crazy sex parties, oodles of cash, and secretly run the world.
The Contract: Feel free to make a Deal with the Devil; you won't have to hold up your end.
Wounded Children: You should do what a demon tells you. No, really. When some people attack Brian, the demon tells David to help him. Brian dies because he didn't..
Fan Fiction
Tiberium Wars tends to depict intense, action-packed battles that nonetheless also contains a rather deep-down moral that War Is Hell. Some reviewers picked up on this, while others simply read it for the visceral combat.
Poke Wars depicts the gritty, brutal, gory and just nasty side of war and there is a fairly obvious War Is Hell message. Unfortunately, few of the reviewers notice this, instead choosing to focus on the dazzling fight scenes.
Films — War
As these examples should demonstrate, Truffaut's assertion that there are no anti-war films seems to be right.
Apocalypse Now.Francis Ford Coppola tried to make an anti-war movie, but the best-remembered scenes of the film are Colonel Kilgore's cavalry carpet bombing a village to the rousing tunes of "Ride of the Valkyries," then strutting around and giving a badass speech about loving the smell of napalm. Kick ass! The scenes are often quoted and imitated without irony by soldiers.
Aliens is mostly remembered and beloved today for the awesome Space Marines and their dozens of quotable lines showing off their confidence and boasting how they're the ultimate badasses. Most seem to forget the film was basically a Vietnam movie IN SPACE! and the entire thing from the first encounter with the Xenomorphs on shows how underwhelming the Marines firepower is in the face of the alien threat; and after most of their squad is taken out, the comparatively subdued and borderline post traumatic stress suffering performances of the surviving troops shows off how most of their bravado in the first part of the movie was just that, and they're just as mortal and hopeless as the defenseless colonists they were sent in to rescue. That doesn't stop the fact most people who remember the movie have their entire understanding of the struggle of the marine characters begin and end at "LETS ROCK!"
The author of the novel Das Boot complained that the movie, grim as it was, undermined his anti-war perspective by being too engaging. (This is one of the tiny handful of examples where the fans disagree with the author, as Das Boot is generally considered to be one of the most horrific depictions of modern warfare ever committed to film. Nobody ever marched to war due to this film!)
Dr. Strangelove has a strong anti-war, anti-military message... but the scenes of Major Kong and his bomber crew are pure awesome. SAC crews (that is, people who fly bombers) were some of the biggest fans of the movie. The way you're sort-of rooting for Kong and his crew, even though the completion of their mission would mean the end of the world, is actually neatly summed up by the film itself in this scene.
A Few Good Men isn't a war film, but it is a military movie that falls victim to this trope on account of issues related to war. The point of the film is to show that even service members who are Just Following Orders have an obligation to question those orders when they go too far and tries to portray Colonel Jessup as bad in this vein for ordering the Code Red on PFC Santiago. Yet the film falls headfirst into Strawman Has a Point. While Jessup is wrong for lying about the incident and leaving Downey and Dawson to take the fall, when he finally does confess, he gives a very good argument in defense of his actions. He explains how the purpose of militaries is to fight wars, and they need to be as prepared and ready as possible to fight them, and how Santiago was hindering this preparation. The credibility of his argument is given a huge boost by the fact that he's a naval academy graduate, a Vietnam veteran, a highly decorated senior officer, and just comes off as an all-around badass (the fact that he's played by Jack Nicholsondefinitely helps), so he probably knows what's he's doing in this matter. The film's argument is hurt by how it tries to portray Santiago as a sympathetic character on account of his having a heart condition; it ultimately fails because it reveals him to be a screw-up and a burden on his unit. Plus the message is further hurt by trying to portray Lt Col Markinson as a sympathetic character who opposes Jessup's actions, feels incredibly guilty over Santiago's death, and appears to want to try to rectify this mistake, yet he loses a ton (if not all) of that sympathy when he's Driven to Suicide before testifying in court hence, clearly failing to rectify it.
Full Metal Jacket drove director Stanley Kubrick crazy because of this trope. He wanted to make his idea of an objective anti-war film. He got viewers enjoying things like the helicopter door gunnershooting civilians. However, unlike the other war films on this page, the film's battle scenes don't get too elaborate, but rather, this trope comes into play because of the attitudes of the characters; they're quite positive for a war movie, especially for a Vietnam one. The door gunner is shown shooting civilians and clearly enjoying it, which is supposed to be horrible, yet because he's enjoying it and making funny comments about it, the audience ends up enjoying it as well. Additionally, none of the Marines in the film are ever really shown lamenting the fact that they're at war or in Vietnam. Even when characters are killed, not too much drama is made of their deaths, such as when Cowboy's squad is shown standing over the body of two killed Marines, and Cowboy just comments on how one of them was a chronic masturbator. Joker responds to being informed about the severity of the Tet Offensive with a humorous comment. Rafterman laments being stuck in the rear and wants to see combat and is incredibly happy when he gets his first kill.
This trope also applies to the boot camp segment of the film as well as the Vietnam segment. While it's not meant to be an attack on the US military, it is intended to show how people have to become dehumanized in order to be effectively trained for war, and in the case of Leonard, is so bad he ends up going insane and committing a Murder Suicide. Despite this, the film is hugely popular among the US military largely because of the badassGunnery Sergeant Hartman.
For that matter, the popularity of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman is an example of this - he's become such an iconic character that pretty much everyDrill Sergeant Nasty in fiction since has been based on him (95% of them even being played by the original actor), despite the fact that getting shot and killed by one of his own recruits (who he continued verbally abusing despite the loaded rifle in said recruit's hands) means he's a demonstrable failure of a drill instructor.
Similar to the helicopter door gunner example above, some audiences even laughed and hooted while the allies were being slaughtered. Laughter, she is an infectious drug, is she not? And the funniest part is that both reactions were probably predicted and intended.
Jarhead also lampshades this trope. It's largely about that and the mindset of the Marines (such as author Anthony Swofford) stoked up and eager to lose their battlefield virginity with a kill. When they hear that they're about to be sent to the Persian Gulf, they rent a load of war movies to watch the cool battle scenes, including Apocalypse Now, where the irony of liking anti-war movies for the violence is explicitly pointed out and reveled in. In a Double Subversion, this was misinterpreted by audiences, who cheered along with the Marines. Additionally, the film ends with none of the main characters killing any enemies in the war, which they are extremely disappointed about. In the book Swofford points out how "It doesn't matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are anti-war. The actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not.".
At the time Platoon came out, Roger Ebert opened his print review by mentioning the Truffaut quote and adding that "If Truffaut had lived to see Platoon, the best film of 1986, he might have wanted to modify his opinion." Since this film has encouraged people to recruit, apparently not.
Saving Private Ryan falls victim to this trope, partly because of Misaimed Fandom who have no personal war experience watching the visceral first 30 minutes for the violence, but also because of the increasingly melodramatic last half of the film, where the Armchair Military character temporarily freezes up, only to kill the assailant later, and the main characters sacrifice themselves one after another in Rambo like fashion to rescue one man. In this case, while the film is clearly anti-war, it does also try to encourage the viewer to understand and respect the soldiers who died during the war, but it goes a bit too far and falls into this instead.
Starship Troopers: The film is anti-war/anti-militarist, intended to be a parody of the fascist elements in our society, but many viewers couldn't see past all the cool bug killing scenes (or the co-ed shower scene). Even for the viewers who are paying attention, the message is further hampered by Poe's Law. There are obvious spoofs of the Federation propaganda, but the rest of the movie is easy to take seriously because it suggests that the Show Within a Show is understating the Federation's case.
Considering the book's portrayal of the Federation, it's unsurprising. Heinlein intended the book to portray the positives of civic duty, necessities of war and capital punishment, etc. This led Heinlein to be accused of fascism, among other things. The movie's creators decided to remake it as a Take That against militarism and fascism, but by even superficially sticking to the book, they made the 'evil, fascist government' look awesome.
Even at the end of the sequel, when a recruiter jokes about a newborn male infant as being "new meat for the grinder."
The Guns of Navarone, written by leftist screenwriter Carl Foreman, is clearly intended (in its film incarnation anyway) as an anti-war movie. Hence David Niven's many speeches about the futility of war and Gregory Peck's callous actions as team later, or the scenes of Navarone's civilians being subjected to brutal reprisals. Balance that however with lots of exciting action, a cast of near-indestructible heroes overcoming impossible odds, villainous Nazis and the message gets lost.
The Dirty Dozen is an even more extreme example. Casual viewers treat it as a straightforward tough guy action flick with rowdy but lovable prisoners killing loads of Nazis. Never mind that the criminals are mostly violent offenders (including murderers and rapists), or that they're mass murdering vacationing German generals, along with women, which point up a much more subversive intent.
Come And See is one of the few films that gets all the way to point 5 on the above list describing why there are no anti-war movies. For starters, there are no awesome battles. The entire movie is pretty much about the German Einsatzgruppen committing horriffic atrocities against the Soviet civilians, and the protagonist joining the partisans to fight them. By the end the protagonist is completely broken by what he has seen. However, only the Germans are unambigously evil. Since the movie takes place on Soviet territory, no German civilians get slaughtered, and the Soviets only kill captured German soldiers because of the atrocities that they committed. It shows that the Germans needed to be defeated, not that war itself is bad.
On the other hand: most of the "Germans" are actually Belorussian who have joined the Nazis to fight off the partisans, it is outright stated that if Florya had not dug up that rifle his village would not have targeted in the first place, most of the partisans themselves are shown to be far from sympathetic and it is heavily implied that they would have acted the same way as the "Germans" to their enemies if they had been in the the same position. Of the only two actual Germans we get to know one seems noble and utilitarian, but warped by hatred and ideology, while the other appears to be kind and good-natured, but having had to separate himself from his own actions to the degree that he have become completely detached from reality. Ultimately the theme of the film appears to be that no matter how good intentions you may have had going into it, war will eat away at you innocence and sanity to the point that your original intentions would be worthless and Florya, the main character, only comes off as sympathetic in the end by realizing that at one point even Hitler had been innocent.
Downfall depicts Hitler as a broken, delusional madman. Other top Nazis are just as bad. The war effort is denounced as a pointless waste, as untrained conscripts are being sent to die in a clearly hopeless struggle. Nevertheless, many neo-Nazis praised the film for depicting Hitler in a positive light, and for showing the tenacity and loyalty of the German people. This is counter-acted by the Memetic Mutation of gag-subtitlingthe "Hitler Breaks Down" scene, turning him once again into a figure of mockery by making it seem like he's losing his mind over the price of the PS3 or the latest Game Of Thrones episode.
Films — Gangster
History has demonstrated time and time again that this trope could easily be called "Mobsters Love Mob Movies".
Angels With Dirty Faces has this happen In-Universe. The lead gangster and one of the two main characters, Rocky Sullivan, steals the show and makes being a 1930s-era gangster look awesome, and the other main character is trying to get him to stop making impressionable kids look up to him. But even during Rocky's few (mostly halfhearted) attempts at this, the kids all still think he's cool and want to be like him.
The Godfather, as stylized and operatic as it was, was meant to be about the horrors of the mob. Instead, it kicked off a new generation of fascination with organized crime and even inspired actual mobsters to model themselves after it.
Goodfellas was intended in a way to be the anti-Godfather. It was based on a true story and portrayed most mobsters as uneducated, crude, petty, sociopathic, and oftentimes downright incompetent and brutal. But it wound up having the same cultural effect as The Godfather anyhow. The gangster that Robert De Niro's character was based on was reportedly thrilled such a great actor was portraying him, and kept trying to get in touch with DeNiro from prison to give him pointers. Similarly, the real Henry Hill wrecked his witness protection because he couldn't resist bragging about the movie.
This one might have been partially because of the weird mixed messages the movie was sending. While the mob characters were usually portrayed as not so bright, unnecessarily violent, what have you, but Henry Hill's own comments at the end of the movie make it very clear that he wishes he was still in the life, and one would go as far as to say that getting caught is the only thing he regrets about being a gangster at all.
Scarface. Even though the entire film is set up to show that Tony's destruction is inevitable, even though he ends up losing or killing everyone and everything he cares about, and even though he ends up floating in his own fountain, it's hard to watch the movie and not want to be him. Especially during the Good Times Montage, set to Paul Engemann's "Push It to the Limit" showing all the material wealth Tony is acquiring, which pretty much gives the audience a picture to give to their own If I Were a Rich Man fantasy. The movie is also very popular in the hip hop community due to this appeal and had a huge following among crack dealers in the 80's. (Hence the What If?video game in which you get to be him, and you get to survive, learn your lesson, and win by rebuilding an even bigger and better criminal empire.)
Johnny Dangerously a gangster movie parody, pokes fun at this with a deliberate Broken Aesop. The title character uses his life story to convince a young puppy thief that "crime doesn't pay"... and then has him hop in his expensive car with his beautiful gangster's moll wife and confess to the audience "OK, maybe it pays a little."
Little Caesar attempts to show that hard, honest work will lead to success whilst crime does not pay. It makes the gangster cooler, more interesting, and more important than his straight-laced best friend.
Some critics complained that the Mark Wahlberg film Contraband promoted this message as the protagonist and his family end up with a better life at the end as a result of his criminal activities even though he was trying to resist going back to crime in the beginning.
The Sting manages to have this problem in the first few minutes. It opens with a shot of the bleak, wind-swept streets of Chicago, with everyone loafing around and looking miserable and depressed because, well, it's during The Great Depression. Into this scene steps an expensive pair of shoes, from which the camera then tilts up to show an expensively-dressed guy headed somewhere with a purpose. It's then revealed where he's headed: some kind of mobster outfit where everyone is really busy because business is doing better than ever. So don't go into crime, kids, even though you'll always be able to find paying work if you do.
Films — Others
American Beauty is a scathing indictment of suburbia with such gorgeous cinematography that it makes suburbs look, well, beautiful. Someone forgot that Beauty Equals Goodness.
American History X: The film's message is "racism is bad," but it portrays the opposite in some ways. Derek is portrayed as physically dominant over his adversaries, fiercely proud, and articulate about his beliefs. Derek and some of the other Nazis make arguments about race issues, which while hurt by being taken to their logical extreme, still have at least some basis of truth in them and are never refuted despite ample opening to do so. With the exception of Fat Idiot Seth, the Neo-Nazis are never shown to be weak, stupid, or foolish. The Aryan Brotherhood in prison are villains, but they split with Derek over not being racist enough. Ultimately the film ends with Derek's younger brother murdered in cold blood by a black youth. It's not hard to imagine neo-Nazis and other racists enjoying this film for unintended reasons.
American Psycho's message on the banality and meaninglessness of mindless consumerism and dedicated following of fashion was undercut somewhat by how glamorous and stylish the characters looked strutting about their swanky penthouse apartments in designer suits. This is an interesting case as this trope only emerged in adaptation: in the source novel, the clothes the characters were wearing were described in exhaustive detail, but any reader who knew anything about contemporary fashion would realize that their outfits were clownishly mismatched. Its related point about the dark side of modern masculinity was also not aided by members of the audience cheering Patrick Bateman on while he gleefully murdered another prostitute.
Christiane F is a sad case. It's a rather depressing film about a 14-year-old girl who becomes a prostitute after getting addicted to heroin (with several other drugs along the way). But it has a performance and soundtrack by David Bowie! Many youngsters got curious about drugs—including heroin, the one drug about which the film is unambiguously negative—due to the movie.
Reefer Madness is a classic example of this backfiring, as the film is considered better to watch when high. It's modern popularity is directly attributable to Keith Stroup, the founder of the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws (a pro-marijuana advocacy group).
Trainspotting. Renton and his friends have quite a lot of fun and hijinks in the early parts of the film. The villain of the film is the only one who doesn't use drugs. Although the film includes a sequence in which we see what a difficult and disgusting process going cold-turkey is, in the end of the film he has no difficulty turning his back on both drugs and his former lifestyle.
Limitless. The wonder-drug Eddie takes immediately makes him a high-functioning genius, but is shown to have awful side-effects that include blackouts and debilitating dependency. However, audiences probably latched on to just how awesome a magic pill like that would be. Nor is the message helped by the shiny ending for Eddie, where he weans himself off the drug in controlled doses and still retains the intelligence and special abilities gained by taking it in the first place.
A Clockwork Orange features scenes of violence and rape intended to be morally repulsive, but actually inspired some real-life copycat crimes. The director and the original author of the novel Anthony Burgess both renounced the film for its sensationalized violence.
The Condemned. The Stone Cold Steve Austin star vehicle, revolves around a shady producer who arranges for death row inmates from around the world to be dropped on 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 brutality and seneseless violence. To top it all off, it culminates with this quote: "All of us who watch... are we The Condemned?" (to which several critics replied "Yes. Yes we are.")
Confessions of a Shopaholic spends so much time lovingly showing off gorgeous, high end fashion that it's a bit hard to take seriously its moral against irresponsible Conspicuous Consumption. A TV promo on TBS said over the end credits of Sex and the City says something like "Can't decide what to wear? Go see Confessions of a Shopaholic, now in theaters!"
The Count of Monte Cristo (2002). In the final scene Edmond professes that his revenge was not worth the steep moral and physical price he paid to achieve it. On the other hand, we just spent two hours watching him enjoy every minute of his bloody revenge and it was awesome.
That's probably attributable to his line in the hospital, though - it makes his character actually have a concrete purpose.
The Joker: You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan." But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!
Unlike most villains, he's also audaciously brave. He walks right into a meeting full of gangsters and kills the first person to come near him. Evil, sure, but takes a lot more courage than many of Batman's actions in the film, a lot of which involve hiding in the shadows.
Conversely, until his true plan is revealed, Bane in The Dark Knight Rises seems to come off as the world's biggest advertisement for right-wing politics since the Cold War. He's a far-left supervillain with libertarian views, with ideals of freedom and liberty for all - including criminals. Then he pops one of Bruce Wayne's vertebra out of position.Hell, he even starts ordering the harassment and murder of the innocent wealthy 1% of Gotham that allegedly leave the majority of the city with high crime rates, poverty and squalor!
His views actually were more Marxist. His lack of belief in private property and that everything should be shared "by the people" thus taking away individuality and freedoms is very Marxist. This is even shown when Selina Kyle's in the home and comments. "This was someone's home." Her friend then replies, "Well now it's everybody's home."
Death Sentence pulls this off, and rather clunkily at that. The film is a beautifully shot ode to violent vigilante justice, that tries to speak against violent vigilante justice. It was made by the director of Saw. It doesn't come off right.
To say nothing of its Spiritual Predecessor, Death Wish, which glorified vigilante killing to the point of making several sequels, and turning actor Charles Bronson into a cinema action hero icon for decades to come. For better or worse, [author] Brian Garfield absolutely loathed the movie adaptation of Death Wish for this reason, while being relatively satisfied with how Death Sentence turned out.
Fahrenheit 451. François Truffaut himself directed a film adaptation of the novel which is about an anti-book dystopia. The film makes a world without written words look attractive even as our protagonist rebels against it. In fact the book also does this to some extent, aided by an intelligent, charismatic Well-Intentioned Extremist villain.
Fatherland shows a Europe where Germany won World War II. It is prosperous, clean and green, with posters advertising a concert with "Die Beatles" on the walls. Europe seems to be doing quite well, now without half of its economy ruined by communism. While German rule eventually falls because the American president refuses to sign a peace agreement, so that the strain from the continued war against the remnants of the Soviet Union somehow brings down the whole empire, it certainly doesn't look like a doom-and-gloom world to live in.
Curious, because the book did a much better job of painting the Nazi Empire as place you could probably live with but would much rather be here - not East Germany, not today's world - but had a different and less black and white ending.
Fight Club: Tyler Durden is presented as an articulate counter-culture rock star. He even lampshades the fact in the end. In spite of being the villain, many viewers took his message as the aesop of the film. In fact, the film is not recommending terrorist cults against consumerism no matter how cool or fun it might be.
Heat. The go-out-in-a-blaze-of-glory actions of the criminals in the movie have been suggested as one of the reasons why, in the real-life 1997 North Hollywood Bank Shootout, the robbers caused unnecessary mayhem and provocation with the police, rather than making a swift getaway.
I Spit on Your Grave. All those extended rape sequences, just to say that rape is bad? Roger Ebert noted to his horror that some of the audience members at the screening he attended actually cheered on the rapists.
Jurassic Park. The novel was intended as a warning about the dangers of playing God and tampering with nature. But let's face it: When it was adapted to film, thanks to improved special effects of the time and an epic score from John Williams, most people walked out of the theater after seeing it thinking, "Awesome! I wish we could bring dinosaurs back to life! Get cracking, scientists! Increase dinosaur DNA research!"
Kidulthood: the scene where Trife and his friends get revenge on school bully Sam is a favorite with fans of the film who often comment how cool what they do is despite their actions leading to Trifes death.
Lolita While the novel suffers plenty of its own issues with this trope (see the entry for it below under Literature), the two film versions also end up hurting its message. It's intended to be a condemnation of pedophilia with Dolores being 12 years old in the novel. However, in both of the film versions her age is raised to 14, which was to lessen the potential heat from the censors and the Moral Guardians, a move supported by the novel's author, Vladimir Nabokov, who said "To make a real 12-year-old play such a part in public would be sinful and immoral". While the age difference may seem small, it can end up making a huge difference in the minds of the audience. The line between pedophilia and ephebophilia is a very thin one, yet the age of 13 is typically considered that line. While someone may still consider ephebophilia to be sick and wrong, they may consider it to be just a little less wrong than pedophilia, and this move certainly sends that message.
It didn't help that the actress in the first movie looked about 16 (and indeed the actress was chosen in part because of her large cup-size), and that the second Lolita was 16, which isn't an uncommon age to start having sexual relationships. These days, the abusive relationship between Humbert Humbert and Lolita's mother in Kubrick's movie appears to many far more disturbing than even ephebophilia.
The first Mad Max film was meant to depict the dangers of reckless driving. The hoons and rev-heads who saw it left feeling that their lifestyle had been legitimised.
That isn't entirely a straight example though, since the aim of the movie was to point out that the media is fascinated with serial killers. That it ended up contributing to said media isn't unexpected.
RoboCop, another film of Paul Verhoeven, suffers from this, much like his film, Starship Troopers (listed above under Films-War), and like the latter, also on account of Poe's Law. Verhoeven intended the film as a spoof of 80's action films and the factors frequently found in them; gore, violence, fascist tendencies, mindless consumerism, and shameless pandering. However, he ended up creating a film considered one of the best action movies ever.
The novel The Running Man was intended as a warning as to what happens when society goes too far in thinking that violence is entertainment. The nation's most popular show is one where contestants compete for their lives and can be killed legally, live on television nationwide. Yet, in the film version, it ends up making this evil show look pretty damn cool and entertaining. A show where Arnold Schwarzenegger takes on gladiators trying to kill him? Sounds awesome. It's also hurt by how, in the novel, all the contestants are volunteers who willingly choose to be on the show, whereas in the movie, the "contestants" are criminals who are forced to be on the show, and the show is advertised as giving them "exactly what they deserve". While in the movie, the audience knows they aren't deserving of, the idea of this show being real and using criminals who actually do deserve it can certainly come off as appealing.
The German movie, Das Millionenspiel, based on the similar novel The Prize of Peril by Robert Sheckley (which probably also inspired Stephen King to write The Running Man), plays this straight. The movie is made extremely realistic, featuring a known TV moderator of the time as moderator of the show and barely any unnatural camera positions. Creating an extremely convincing illusion of watching an actual show. The protagonist looks just like an average guy and so do the killers hired to stop him. In fact, when the movie aired, people phoned the channel and asked if they could be "hunters" or "hunted" in the next show. Sadly because of filming rights problems between this movie and The Running Man, it's forbidden from being aired, having only been shown 4 times on German TV. So don't go looking for an illegal copy of this tantalizingly interesting forbidden show.
Further evidence suggests it outright inspired the Japanese show Run For Money Tousouchuu and the British Show Wanted.
Saturday Night Fever portrays the protagonist's disco lifestyle as shallow, violent and ultimately pointless. It didn't stop millions of new fans from being drawn into disco culture after watching the movie.
Scream 1996. Director Wes Craven made the first film to kill the slasher genre once and for all, by parodying its tropes and making it impossible to take seriously anymore. Not only was it a smash hit, it revived the slasher genre, spawned three successful sequels, and kick-started a wave of post-modern teen horror films (many of which were, you guessed it, slashers) that ran for the rest of The Nineties and much of The Two Thousands.
The slasher genre was arguably already pretty much dead before Scream came along, as the only films bieng made in the mid-90s were really cheap DTV efforts (Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday being the last slasher film to get a theatrical release up to that point)
Discussed in the 1934 film Search for Beauty, in which the publishers of a health magazine, realizing that Sex Sells, starts publishing steamy romance stories with "just enough morals to sneak them through the mails." Their female readers see right through the tacked-on "paying the price" endings.
The Sex and the City movie ostensibly had a message about how we shouldn't let labels (both in the designer sense and for relationships) determine how to live life — Carrie gets married in a label-less vintage dress in the end. But the rest of the movie is a love letter to designer labels and fashions, with a practically orgiastic scene of Carrie trying on designer wedding dresses.
U.K. Film critic Mark Kermode backed up this sentiment in his podcast review of this movie.
"The film has the gall to shove handbags down your throat for 120 minutes and then turn around and say "Hey, we aren't just handbags, you know."
The Stepford Wives remake was obviously aiming for the message that the men were in the wrong for replacing their wives with robots but the three main characters are utterly horrible human beings. Joanna is a Corrupt Corporate Executive who could care less about the welfare of her own family, Bobbie is a moody Deadpan Snarker who can't speak a civil word to anyone and demeans her husband all the time, and Roger is an over the top Camp Gay stereotype who embarrasses his partner in public constantly. Soo with three unlikeable characters the movie seems to be saying "hey, we replaced three bad people with nicer robots". Plus add in the ATM wife and the resizable boobs and the movie seems to be suggesting how cool it would be to have robot spouses.
Super Size Me. Morgan Spurlock's documentary exposing the evils of junk food. The film tries to make it look unappealing, but some viewers will inevitably get a craving for some burgers.
The Terminator series was intended as a warning that technology will eventually destroy humanity. While it does if a good job of showing a future Crapsack World, the problem comes with the robots who cause the apocalypse and want to wipe out humanity. They're AWESOME. The T-800's, T-1000's, TX's, HK's, and others; ask someone if they think it would be cool if these existed in real life or if they want their own. What do you think their response will be?
Some critics believe there's one thing worse than a Torture Porn film - a film that tries to make a point about torture porn by focusing on long, drawn-out, salacious shots of human suffering, such as Funny Games or Untraceable. "Oh, Jesus, look upon the sensationalization of violence and despair, HERE HAVE A MAN BEING BOILED TO DEATH IN BATTERY ACID."
Parodied in regards to various drugs in Walk Hard. Dewey frequently opens a door to find Sam behind it, indulging in some illicit narcotics in the company of some beautiful women. Sam always insists that Dewey wants no part of it, only to then insistently list all the benefits of doing that particular drug. Dewey inevitably ends up hooked on it.
But he really doesn't want none of that stuff that gives you a boner.
"It's marijuana, Dewey. You don't want no part of this shit." "It's cocaine, Dewey. You don't want no part of this shit." "We're doing pills— uppers and downers. It's the logical next step for you.""I want me some of that shit!"
Pink Floyd's Rock OperaThe Wall, both in movie and in music form, depicts an unstable rock star named "Pink" who builds a metaphorical wall around himself to defend himself against things that emotionally hurt him. He then becomes insane, delusional, "comfortably numb" and consumed with anger and fear as he gradually cuts himself from society. Onstage, he turns his concert into an almost Neo-Nazi rally, leading his "Hammers" to destroy the city and terrorize all those that Pink mistrusts. Although this is meant to show the horrors of shutting yourself off from the world and becoming antisocial and paranoid, many true Neo-Nazi groups were formed around the "Hammers", based on the film The Wall and Gerald Scarfe's Deranged Animation depicting literal marching hammers smashing things and people to pieces.
Further Misaimed Fandom involves interpretations of Pink's frustrations with women, particularly Pink's unfaithful wife, which is depicted in the animations as shrewish and snake-like.
Shoot 'Em Up a 2007 action film, could be easily be the Trope Codifier, since it is possibly the most egregious example of this. The film is both a parody of the genre it takes its name from, and by Word Of God, an anti-gun movie; an extremelyanvilicious 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 Broken Aesop page quote, the hero, Smith, solves every single problem he's faced with using guns; saving the baby? Guns. Beating the bad guys? Guns. Defending his new family? Guns. By itself this wouldn't be too bad. After all, someone can be extremely anti-gun but still believe a gun can be used for good if in the right hands or that using one in self defense is still justified. However, the movie takes it Up to Eleven in several ways, and if it's meant to turn its viewers off of guns, it fails in levels equivalent to trying to put an abstinence message into a porn movie.
1.) The whole reason the movie is anti-gun is because of who it's villains are; they're the hired muscle (led by a wonderfully hammy Paul Giamatti) for a gun manufacturing corporation that wants to stop gun control laws from getting passed. Again, not too bad by itself. After all, that's what corporations do; use politics to protect their interests. Except they cross the Moral Event Horizon including killing pregnant women and babies and making statements that are anything but subtle in regards to guns such "Guns don't kill people, but they sure help".
2.) Don't think saying "Smith solves every single problem he's face with using guns is an exaggeration. It means just that; Smith solves every. single. problem he's faced with using guns; not just for self defense and beating the bad guys; he also uses guns for common everyday activities like opening beer cans and spinning a merry-go-round. Oh, and not just guns; lots and lots of guns. Lots and lots of extremely powerful guns''. For an anti-gun movie, Smith and everyone he cares about sure would be dead a lot of times over if he didn't have enough guns to arm an entire military.
Well, he does use carrots a couple of times...
Ferngully is a rather infamous example for many a 90's kid. An animated film that shoves its message of "save the rainforest" down your throat without a trace of subtlety has, as its main antagonist, a charismatic, smooth, and stylish incarnation of pollution. Voiced by Tim Curry. Who has the best musical number in the movie. And is, according to many viewers, the movie's only likable character. He makes pollution seem more than just "fun," and when he turns into a black skeleton wearing a cloak of tar, who cares about the dumb faeries and their dumb forest anymore?! His Villain Song alone, "Toxic Love", could make even the staunchest environmentalist want to chuck some chemicals in the ocean.
Maybe not as bad as the examples below, but a lot of teen flicks about an average girl/guy who manages to climb the social ladder becoming popular to realize popularity isn't everything, tend to get lost when you show the before undesirable loser being invited to cool parties, surrounded and courted by The Beautiful Elite, all while walking the school aisle in cool clothes. This is lampshaded in Can't Buy Me Love by the character Kenneth, when former geeky looser Ronald Miller gets shunned by the popular crew after discovering he paid the Lovable Alpha Bitch to pretend to be her boyfriend. Sure, now he is a "social leper" but he was that before, and during a few months, he went out with the most beautiful cheerleaders of the school.
The film adaptation of Going Postal wants to beat you over the head with An Aesop about smoking: Moist feels bad when he finds out his cons drove a man to suicide and caused the deaths of several others, but he feels really bad when he discovers that this set the man's daughter to smoking. But damn if she doesn't look good with that long-drag cigarette. Particularly with the melodramatic flashback, it's possible this one is something of a parody. But it could be of either genuine anti-smoking campaigns or of Stealth Cigarette Commercials thanks, at least in part, to Poe's Law.
Parodied in Seven Psychopaths, where Sam Rockwell's character, trying to come up with an ending for the screenplay Colin Farrell's character is writing, pitches a cool slow-motion gun fight set to beautiful music in a graveyard, claiming that it will show how terrible violence is.
The Bad Dream, which was about how being an obsessive fanboy and having a Gotta Catch Them All mentality for all the toys will lead to nightmares...somehow. But damn if those action figures didn't look cool.
Get the Gimmies, where we all genuinely wanted those toys, games, and candies that Brother and Sister acted like hellions in public in order to get.
The Trouble With Junk Food. All the candy they learned was bad for you was so colorful!
Slaughterhouse Five. In-universe. Discussed early on. Vonnegut's war buddy's wife is pissed that our narrator is writing 'another war book'.
"You were just babies then. But you won't write it like that, will you? You'll write it like you were men, and you'll be played by men in the movie, and everyone will think it's wonderful and have more wars and send more babies off to die, like those babies [their children] upstairs."
It works out OK though. He promises her that it will be called Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade (which is indeed the full title of the book), and no one reading it gets any idea that war is good.
"I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that."
The scenes of sinful revelry and luxury (like the island of Acrasia) in The Faerie Queene are, to many, the most appealing parts of the work. This is largely due to Values Dissonance.
According to C. S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love that was the way it was intended-in a complex manner. Spencer was influenced by Puritans who thought married sex was real cool but were down on both the Courtly Love and the Celibate Hero traditions. He was saying effectively that Good People Have Good Sex; when it's good sex that is.
One of Disney's kiddie books featured Donald Duck eating a poorly balanced, junk-filled meal...that the mouth waters just in childhood memory of it.
John Milton's Paradise Lost has infamously run into this problem with its Misaimed Fandom. Satanis intended to be appealing, but Milton expects his readers will be mature enough to realize that underneath all his charisma, Satan is a vain, petty and incestuous bully who picks on people smaller than him because he lost the fight against someone bigger than him. Sadly, Milton expected too much of his readers. Many just drool over Satan and think he's The Hero.
Not helped by a strong case of Strawman Has a Point, where satan's arguments are actually quite logically sound even if his motives aren't pure. Compounded by the fact that satan is presented as fallen (i.e. human), meaning that his flawed motivations can easily be attributed to heroic flaws instead of overall weak character.
Basically, Milton's intended point is somewhat undermined if his readers know more about the classical references he's making and contemporary philosophy than he expects, as well as if they know less.
K.J Parker's The Scavenger Trilogy and Parker's work generally. There's just so much detail and vivid fightin' action that the anti-violence message can be obscured at times.
The first series of Warrior Cats covers the early life of a "kittypet" as he struggles to fit into his Clan, overcoming all of the racism and prejudice he faces because of his background as he grows into a hero. Of course, in order for this to work, the majority of the cast has to express some racist sentiments, meaning a lot of the more popular characters twist this lesson into "racism is good".
The same could be said for the battles, which, combined with their irrational hatred for a pacifist character, doesn't just inspire reactions of "War is cool and pacifism is for pussies", but the occasional "Any book that doesn't contain as many gratuitous fight scenes as possible instantly sucks".
The latter lesson can probably be connected to their love of The Darkest Hour, the most violent book in the series. It is indeed one of the best books in the series, but not because it's the most violent.
Songmaster by Orson Scott Card ends up making a young boy and his male pedophile master seem sympathetic and his novel was criticized heavily by conservatives for glorifying homosexuality. Anyone who knows Card's opinions on homosexuality will know that this was not his intent.
In an interview celebrating the launching of his most recent book, Imperial Bedrooms, Bret Easton Ellis recounted how many fans of his work would come up to him and say "You're the guy who wrote Less Than Zero, that's the book that made me want to live in L.A." Anyone who's read the book in question (or indeed anything by Ellis) will appreciate just how ridiculous this is.
One of his aims with Imperial Bedrooms was to respond to all the readers who perceived Clay as the hero in the first book, by emphasising far more his near-sociopathic narcissism. YMMV on how much it worked, although Ellis certainly shows him doing some horrific things, but gives him one or two very small Pet the Dog moments.
A weird borderline example in Interesting Times. Rincewind describing sticking fireworks up his nose is followed by a footnote saying Don't Try This at Home ... which goes on to describe official municipal firework displays in a way that makes it clear they're very boring.
Of course Terry Pratchett is on record as saying that if stupidity kills, then it's better if it kills the stupid firstnote In the Mappe Of Lancre. This could be a stealth joke on that.
Deliberately invoked by the entire Lesbian Pulp Erotica paperback market of the 1950s and 1960s. It was a cultural requirement that the lesbian characters end badly, either dying, getting imprisoned, or turning straight. However, the point was to sell lesbian erotica, so the "consequences" are always jammed in the last chapter, with the rest of the book glamorizing things as much as possible.
Anthony Horvath's book Richard Dawkins, Anthony Flew and Mother Theresa Go To Heaven is supposed to make Dawkins look like an arrogant Jerk Ass, while Flew and Theresa are supposed to be viewed as good. However, the way it's written, Theresa comes across as a pathetic sycophant and Flew like a doddering simpleton, while Dawkins sounds downright courageous and noble as he stands in defiance of this frankly unsympathetic deity. It doesn't help when Heaven is depicted as a place where everyone spends the rest of eternity unable to do anything except praise God, and that's supposed to be desirable.
Happens in-universe to a Nazi spy in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay. He starts out reporting to his superiors about a dangerous series of American comic books, but his later reports become more or less reviews of his favorite comic book series.
In Epic, the Aesop is that you shouldn't get so involved in virtual worlds that you don't do things that need to be done in the real world. However, you can't deny that the game Epic would be freaking awesome if it were real. And the idea that doing well in video games = getting a good education and being rich is an appealing one to gamers out there.
Robert Heinlein intended the message of Podkayne of Mars to be that parents should take better care of their children and not let them go gallivanting around the Solar System getting involved in espionage intrigues and having awesome adventures and ultimately being heroes by saving an entire planet from a villainous plot... because that would be wrong. Or something.
Lolita. The whole book is one big condemnation of pedophilia (even the pedophile, narrator Humbert, can't stand his actions), and yet it's a Trope Namer for a fetish for underage girls. This is because Humbert is Unintentionally Sympathetic and is probably the accidental Trope Codifier for Lolicon. Humbert comes off as a completely nice guy despite his despicable actions because throughout the whole book, he casually explains his actions to the reader, and while it may not be meant to justify them, it certainly can. This book has a huge Misaimed Fandom among pedophiles and child molesters who have undoubtedly used it, not only to justify their actions, but for tips on how to avoid getting caught (ie be sure not to write down your attraction for young girls and your plans for them in your diary, and if you do be sure to do a much better job of hiding it).
Now, plainly Humbert did a very wicked thing. There is no doubt that the author knows this I have just quoted him calling Humbert a pervert. Humbert himself knows it, too, through the fog of his solipsism. He refers to himself as a "monster" or a "maniac," wearing "polluted rags," and so forth. "But never mind, never mind, I am only a brute, never mind, let us go on with my miserable story."
To drive the point home Nabokov inserts oblique, but cumulatively unignorable, references to the fact that the sexual relationship causes pain and perhaps actual physical injury to the object of Humbert's "love." And yet this cruel tormentor is redeemed a little in our eyes by the surpassing power of his creator's art, a thing any educated person in 1958 could understand. In an interview, Nabokov said that he thought Humbert should be given one day's vacation from hell every year, to stroll a green country lane in the sunlight. Such a judgment makes sense only from a grounding in some mature moral vision. It cannot be fitted at all into the infantile who-whom dogmas of our own time.
If The Hunger Games is meant to be a condemnation of reality TV culture... well, all the action that the in-universe audience is revelling in is the same stuff that we're enjoying as readers. We are supposed at once to feel contemptuous of the audience for lapping up the romance presented to them betwen Katniss and Peeta but also care about the same romance as readers. While no one at this point would wish for death-based reality tv shows (probably), there are many Hunger Games fans who would love to see a non-lethal version of the Games brought to reality.
From Star Wars, we have the Darth Bane trilogy. Where there are (allegedly) attempts to make Bane look bad. Instead a lot of readers get caught up in how much cool seems to radiate off of everything he does.
Matched is a dystopian trilogy about an evil totalitarian government that arranges the matches between its citizens. It has as widespread and ardent a shipping fandom as any Star-Crossed Lovers story.
Live Action Television
Then there is the case of 24, which might have led to soldiers in Real Life being too violent towards prisoners, especially the earlier seasons. Violence towards prisoners existed before, but the government originally backed this series. But when the hero routinely saves the world using questionable techniques in a glamorous fashion, when those techniques rarely backfired (the one person who lied to him that we know of, he shot), and when the scandals of Guantanamo Bay Delta Camp and Abu Gharib became public during the middle of the series' run, conclusions were drawn.
Although bigoted, Alf Garnett from Till Death Do Us Part was intended to be a figure of fun showing the stupidity of racism. He became a cult hero for misogynists and xenophobes.
The same goes for the show's loose American remake. All in the Family was, officially, intended to show that bigotry is bad, but Archie Bunker came across as a fairly fun, likable guy in spite of it. The more progressive "Meathead" often came across as self-righteous.
Mad Men is about deconstructing the myth of the good ol' days and is supposed to be about the 'dark side' of social conformism, corporate careerism, and white male privilege in Fifties white collar America. The show demonstrates this by endlessly displaying hot (and frequently undressed) women, acts of debauchery, plentiful alcohol, smoking without guilt, fabulous outfits, and snazzy Jet Age decor. Wait, there's a dark side to making tons of money and being able to tell people what to do?
Life On Mars, series one. The impression the viewer gets is that the first series of Life on Mars was written to paint Sam's contemporary attitudes as what the viewer was supposed to sympathise with, but the public response was overwhelmingly in favor of Gene Hunt's Good Old Ways. The second series and all of Ashes to Ashes was written accordingly.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a subtle anti-smoking message for the first season or two — every character who smoked either turned out to be a villain or died soon after they were introduced. But Spike, who started out as a villain, ended up being a regular and a well-liked character... who often smoked cigarettes. Sexily. Faith took up smoking in the last season.
The fourth season episode "Beer Bad" tried to show that beer was evil by turning anyone who drank it into cavemen. But the transformation ends up mostly positive for Buffy, who finally gets over being dumped after a one night stand because of it. The concept might be seen as parody, but the episode was written as a sincere grab for government anti-alcohol PSA dollars. (It didn't work.)
The show Manswers, on Spike TV, when talking about illicit drug use or other criminal activities or dangerous acts, will include a disclaimer to not do so. But if you do do it, you can laid, according to them.
Fox News, while more fiscally conservative than socially conservative, pays lip service to the Moral Guardians by doing stories on sexual perversion (especially on The O'Reilly Factor). But they punctuate these condemnations with lurid video clips and bring on Ms. Fanservice-type anchors and nagging correspondents who are more amused than angry. Thirty years ago, much of what we see on Fox News would have never been shown on basic cable. No, not even CNN.
Most daytime Talk Shows are guilty of this, especially if the episode is about people (mostly attractive young women) scandalized to discover that someone had been secretly recording them. They then have no problem when they SHOW THE VIDEO ON NATIONAL TELEVISION so that you can see the evils that are in the world. As a bonus, you get to see exactly what the pervs next door were so interested in.
Even if they don't show the video, doing a story on it will guarantee that the number of people looking it up on the internet will skyrocket.
When CommunistRomania broadcast Dallas, the idea was that the people would be disgusted with the pettiness and decadence of capitalism. This was, in fact, part of the reason the series was created in the first place — you probably are supposed to be vaguely disgusted with the way the Ewings live. It didn't work in either country. What was seen was, "Ooh, shiny! I want!" In a few years, communism fell and the USA had a Misaimed Fandom for Wall Street.
Dollhouse: Turning people into objects is bad! Even when they're hot, attractive objects with blank stares and bare feet... oh hey, it's time to show Sierra getting raped again!
Done intentionally on an episode of Community. The main characters put on an anti-drug show for a group of elementary school children, but they love Pierce's performance as "Drugs" so much it backfires. The situation is ultimately remedied by forcing Pierce to leave and replacing him with Chang. It ends up being a more effective portrait of addiction as a result, because the children loved drugs then drugs turned on them.
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has been accused of this by some. The show focuses on the investigation of and effects of sexual-based crimes such as rape, sexual assault, child abuse, etc. The show usually goes out of its way to point out that these are horrific things with terrible effects, it has been accused of getting plenty of lurid and sensationalist entertainment value out of such offenses.
The Wire: For all of its social criticism on the disfunctions of modern society, a significant portion of the show is given to the gang wars waged between extremely colorful and badass drug lords. While almost all of them come to bad ends, the big shot dealers sure seem to have a lot of fun while they're on top.
Similarly, Breaking Bad has the same effect of showcasing the appealing aspects of the drug business, even when the bad parts are fueled with endless paranoia, and by contributing to the business in some form or fashion, you'll hurt so many different people along the way. And oh yeah, Drugs Are Bad. But boy is it tough not to reap the rewards of selling pure meth, ain't it?
In-universe example in Arrested Development when George Sr. is invited as a "Scared Straight" speaker to talk teens out of commiting crimes and going to jail. He accidentally picks the wrong Scared Straight tent and ends up talking to a group of gay teens who feel increasingly hornier at the thought of being locked up in a jail full of bad boys.
The Sopranos was even MORE realistic and de-glamorized than Goodfellas. It lampshaded that mobsters love The Godfather and Goodfellas. Guess who loved it? And many viewers who weren't gangsters also missed the point and saw Tony and crew as heroes and anyone who ratted on them as deserving of death.
Mandy Patinkin left Criminal Minds because he felt that this trope was in play. Criminal Minds is about people who catch horrible criminals by figuring out the mindset of those criminals — how they think. It is a long-running, popular show. Patikin thought that the show was becoming sick fantasy fulfillment for people and couldn't be a part of it any more.
Occasionally played with on Top Gear when, for instance, the presenters solemnly (and with perfect insincerity) state that they strictly obey the speed limit at all times, or state "this is something we mustn't do" before engaging in impromptu drag races on public streets.
In-universe in Malcolm in the Middle; Hal would tell his sons about his youthful escapades, supposedly as cautionary tales. As Lois puts it, "Cautionary tales do not end with 'It was so cool!'"
MythBusters has become the living embodiment of this trope, the hosts and cast reminding the viewers multiple times per show not to attempts the awesome and ridiculously dangerous experiments they show. Adam even promised to track down and kick the ass of anyone who tried to reproduce the million match heads burnout experiment. Their cold open and ad break cards have become "Do not try this at home" warnings after the first few seasons.
A great example would be when they were test whether drafting behind a big rig to see if doing so could increase mileage. Despite the fact that they spent nearly as much time stressing how crazy attempting to draft a big rig is as they did actually testing the myth, for some people, that's just not quite enough to balance out the simple fact that it actually works.
On Degrassi, Ellie's storyline was meant to show people how cutting is not okay and should never be done no matter what the circumstances. However, despite this, many fans were inspired cut after seeing Ellie do so.
Saturday Night Live's false ad for "Amazin' Laser" was full of this. While Chris Elliot exalted the virtues of using this precise, powerful and ridiculously powerful disintegrator raygun, subtitles gave more and more precise instructions. "Do not use Amazin' Laser on live targets." "Terrorists, please do not use Amazin' Laser." "On second thought, please do not buy Amazin' Laser."
On the Investigation Discovery channel, this happens often with the dramatizations of real crimes. The most egregious examples are the shows Sins and Secrets, Wicked Attraction, and Deadly Women. They usually discuss how sick and wrong the killer(s) are, but they then show reenactments of their scandalous affairs by attractive actors in about as much detail as you can have on cable TV. It's so bad that some of the shows have Content Warnings. Sometimes the softcore is accompanied by the narrator and interviewees going on about the unfaithful spouses' sexual needs and how they were being awesomely fulfilled by their lovers. And also that cheating and murder is bad, really.
Downton Abbey can really make living in The Edwardian Era look appealing, despite occasional attempts to portray how bad women and the lower class had it. It doesn't help that most of the servants are portrayed as perfectly happy and content in their jobs, and with the sole exception of Gwen, the few who aren't are either petty and cruel, or stupid.
In-universe example on Everybody Loves Raymond: Frank pays off his mortgage and invites the family over to celebrate. As he burns the paperwork, he declared that the bank can kiss his ass. Debra reminds him that the grandchildren are listening, and Frank replies, "Oh yeah. Kids—don't say 'ass'".
Power Rangers Wild Force has strong environmental themes, as do a lot of Power Rangers seasons, but, as Power Rangers is also a marketing vehicle for toys, quite a bit of screen time is devoted to how awesome their motorcycles are and making riding motorcycles like that look fun and cool. A motorcycle even defeats Serpentara. The message to reduce the carbon footprint is somewhat undermined by showing how great it is to drive around in fast vehicles like this.
In all fairness, motorcycles generally get much better MPG than cars and trucks. Promoting motorcycle use could work for an environmental aesop.
Played with in the anti-alcohol episode of Glee. The Glee club is asked to perform a song showing the dangers of underage drinking, but they end up getting really drunk, having a great time but screwing up the assembly. The attitude of the episode is best summed up by Coach Beaste, who tells their teacher Will that drinking is fun, and kids are going to do it and it'd be hypocritical of him to lecture them on the dangers of drinking when he himself falls into the same pitfalls the students do. The lesson? Drinking is cool and fun, but you have to be responsible about it.
Which is probably the most effective lesson to give kids on alcohol. They're just going to go grow up to drink anyway, but you can teach them to do so in moderation.
Lampshaded and played with in an episode of The War At Home, first with Dave's speech at the beginning:
Dave: ''When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was sneak into "R" rated movies. In my mind, "R" stood for "really good." Nowadays, there's warnings and ratings on everyhing; video games, music, booze, cigarettes. You think these warnings would keep kids away from all these things. When, actually, it's sending up a flare saying, "Hey, look. Good stuff over here."
(Disclaimer appears on screen: "Due to the mature subject matter, the following episode may not be suitable for all family members.")
Dave: (Glances down at disclaimer) See? Makes you wanna watch even more, doesn't it?''
Then the main plot of the episode involves Hilary and her friend Brenda getting drunk off her parents liquor, then Vicky worries that they're drinking is a bad influence on Hilary and to Dave's annoyance, implements a rule that no one in the house can drink. Vicky only lasts two days before secretly drinking in the garage, then both Dave and Vicky get drunk off free liquor and make a scene in front of Brenda's parents, causing much embarassment and end up lecturing Hilary that they can drink because they're the parents
Professional wrestling is built on this. See that awesome 720 corkscrew suicide dive? Don't do that.
Music
Anti-war songs are just as susceptible to this as anti-war films. The message of the song may be about the awful aspects of war, but it may have either too subtle of a title or a catchy, positive or cool sounding beat, as well as Lyrical Dissonance to keep it from getting its message across. This goes double if it's a popular song that many of the listeners only know the chorus too without knowing any other of the lyrics, often leading to cases of Isn't It Ironic.
Edwin Starr's "War". The lyrics denounce the act of war quite anviliciously, but it sounds like a good song to kick ass to. It was used for fight scenes in Rush Hour, Small Soldiers, and Agent Cody Banks 2.
Metallica's "For Whom the Bell Tolls". Despite being about the futility of war, it's a totally kick ass song that gets your adrenaline pumping.
Rise Against's "Hero of War" is definitely intended as an anti-war song. It tells the story of a teenager who joins the military because he'll get to see the world, carry a gun, and he'll even get paid. The war psychologically destroys him, going through brutal basic training, being involved in the beating and humiliation of a POW, and finally killing a surrendering civilian woman by accident during a firefight. However, along the way he makes friends, learned a lot, came to love his country, become a decorated veteran, and at home everyone respects him.
While not exactly a "catchy" song per say, Bob Dylan's "With God On Our Side" tends to get people thinking that it's a patriotic statement, despite being more about how having God on your side is little more than an excuse to go to war and force your ideals upon others because both sides will always claim this.
Black Sabbath. Many of their early lyrics dealt with the horrors of things like violence, war, Satan and so on. This has inspired legions of metal bands to write lyrics about how awesome these same things are.
Ozzy Osbourne's attempt to clarify this in a 2004 magazine interview didn't really work. He claimed that he and his bandmates "were the last hippie band. We were into peace." Disingenuous, no? After all, if they wanted to be seen as hippies, why didn't they perform "hippie-style" music?
In the documentary, Metal: A Headbanger's Journey the band members talk about how they just fell headfirst into this trope. The audience saw what they wanted to see rather than what the band was really saying. They intended to portray Satanism as bad, but their use of satanic imagery and satanic references in their music made it seem a lot more awesome than bad.
Marilyn Manson, oh dear god, Marilyn Manson. The fact that his concept albums aren't obvious to non-fans have created so many problems. Half of his songs on the album Mechanical Animals are from the point of view of the character of Omega (pronounced O-ME-ga), who is a space alien fallen to Earthand forced to be a rock star who sings empty anthems of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll and has retreated into copious drug use to cope and has cut himself off from emotion. The other half are by Alpha, who is just beginning to feel emotion and is curious because of it. So, of course, most people listen to Omega's message, ironically doing the same as the mindless sheep In-Universe. It's not much better with Antichrist Superstar, in which the title character ends the universe. It's not supposed to be supported, people. Mr. Manson himself was so pissed off by this that the song This Is The New Shit is about the fans that do this, with the chorus containing the lyrics "Do we get it? NO! Do we want it? YEAH!" just to make the point more obvious, and this this is the song that starts with "Babble babble, bitch bitch, rebel rebel rebel, party party party, sex sex sex and don't forget the violence". It doesn't help that people have their own preconceived notions of Satanism (which are wildly inaccurate) and he's an ordained Reverend in the Church of Satan. So yes, properly, he is Reverend Marilyn Manson.
In fact, a lot of heavy metal bands of note either treat these themes negatively, ironically or with a sort of horrified fascination; while a lot may seem like they glorify violence or death, it's often necessary to tune into the particular subcultural lens of heavy metal to understand them properly. Unfortunately, some of the fans (especially for bands that hit the mainstream) and more than a few of the bands don't seem to get this.
Megadeth's album "Peace Sells...But Who's Buying?" led to a rumor that the band members were Satanists or endorsed Satanism due to nearly half of the album being explicitly about Satanism. But all three songs detail horrific things happening to those who dabble in it. The songs stem from a bad experience that Dave Mustaine had with "black magic", where he put a hex on someone and was convinced it worked, plaguing him with guilt. After that incident, he tried to make songs warning against the dark arts, but they ended up so badass-sounding that the message was ignored.
Slayer "Angel of Death" is often called a pro-Holocaust song, but guitarist Kerry King notes that the lyrics are as brutal as they are to reflect the real horror of the Holocaust, not to glorify it. The band is not trying to glorify the Holocaust — but they're not trying to dispel it, either. They enjoy causing controversy.
Bruce Springsteen's "Born In the USA" is about the issues faced by returning veterans of The Vietnam War. Because of the refrain, the subtle title, and it being one of the catchiest songs musically The Boss has ever done, it's constantly mistaken for an American patriotic song. It is frequently played at 4th of July events. US President Ronald Reagan — a president who had threatened Mutually Assured Destruction on the Russians — wanted to use it as his 1984 campaign theme.
Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" is about the class bias of The Vietnam War — lower and middle class kids being sent to fight and die while rich kids get to stay home. This doesn't stop it from being extremely catchy, and many listeners don't really get more than the first couplet of the lyrics. It also gets mistaken for a patriotic song, thanks largely to the opening lines of "Some folks were born, made to wave the flag, ooh, the red, white, and blue".
Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" is a sarcastic song that, if taken unironically, would send the message, "If you're a girl who follows the Rule Of Cooland likes a taken boy, it's okay to throw yourself at the guy and steal him away because you know he likes you back, and his girlfriend is 'like, so whatever.'" The video points out it's okay to humiliate said girlfriend because she's a nerdy girl with glasses. Lavigne has said it's criticizing shallow boy-crazy girls who act like that. But the song doesn't make this clear, and try telling it to the song's Misaimed Fandom.
The Dropkick Murphys cover of the old Irish anti war song "Johnny I hardly knew ya", when viewed on a particular AMV, makes one want to go to war.
The same tune was reused for "When Johnny Comes Marching Home", a song from the American Civil War that glorifies soldiers returning home from war.
Gangsta Rap.
The videos for gangsta rap in particular are guilty of this. What was said above re: gangsters in film & television goes double for many gangsta-rap music videos. Even when the lyrics are explicitly about the dangers and harshness of street life, expect the videos to be full of images of diamond studded cars, gold jewelry everywhere, beautiful women, and champagne overflowing.
This was on account of the standards of MTV and other "music" channels at the time. They refused to allow any video with gunplay or shooting imagery regardless of context. This was particularly notable in the 1990s during the genre's rise to prominence (since they were airing more videos then).
This trope is deliberately invoked in Juvenile's song "Ha". The lyrics are a Take That against the glamour of rap excess (the chorus says, "You're a paper chaser, you got your block on fire, remaining a G until the moment you expire"), and in the video itself, the scenes are of poor and near-homeless residents living in housing projects in New Orleans...except during the chorus, when Juvenile and his crew visibly sing in front of expensive cars, stacks of money and visible jewellery.
Atmosphere has written a few songs attempting to address this issue too, including "Apple" which has a repeated refrain of "Just cause you're an MC doesn't mean you get to be an asshole" and "National Disgrace" which begins with the following dedication:
Peace to Rick James, Anna Nicole Smith, Bill Clinton, and Mötley Crüe, and anyone else who has ever utilised their 15 minutes of fame to realise their true dreams of being an absolute jerk-off, just to keep the masses entertained. This goes out to learning from the mistakes of others.
Visual Kei as a genre has this problem: the point of the genre is artistic freedom and using shock value to express your artistic message. Except a large percentage of the fans, looking at the beautifully stylized bandmen, seem to be convinced that to be truly Visual Kei, one must be as pretty as they are - thoroughly breaking at least one of the major aesops in a belief that art is only for the beautiful and sexy. The second problem, especially with Eroguro Kei, is the Misaimed Fandom factor - people that don't get that some of this stuff is meant to shock and disgust, not glorify. Which can be a very big Unfortunate Implications minefield with, say, the Gazett E's Taion, which is meant to be a condemnation of rape and a lashout at the Japanese society for allowing such a rape to happen. When people start singing along, though... Squick.
Sabaton has several songs about the futility and savagery of war. Unfortunately, their music is raw high energy power metal that's great for getting pumped up to.
At the beginning of the track "Tipsy", J-Kwon makes a short statement: "Yo, teen drinking is really bad!"note (I got a fake ID, tho'!)
The Beastie Boys' "Fight For Your Right To Party" was intended as a parody of party anthems and to mock lazy and unmotivated people with a "party all the time" attitude. It ended up become a party anthem as well because...well no one can deny the narrator is having fun, and his attitude is a lot more fun than actually doing homework, chores and going to school on time. That the video looks like so much fun too is another big factor.
Stand-Up Comedy
Ricky Gervais. In one of his routines, he 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 points out that, thanks to the Rule Of Three, the moral of the tale of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is not "never tell a lie", but rather "never tell the same lie twice."
Norm MacDonald pointed out the problem addressed in anti-smoking ads mentioned above under "General" with showing the effect of smoking on organs.
MacDonald: My doctor tried to scare me out of smoking. He showed me a picture of a smoker's lung. Oh! It was gross and disgusting. Then he showed me a picture of a healthy person's lung. Oh! It was gross and disgusting!
Theater
In Wicked, the "Dancing Through Life" song is meant to paint the singer as having the wrong idea about life in general; but it also seems to go out of its way to make his philosophy sound appealing.
'Dancing through Life' can be seen as a song about always and unconditionally being in the moment, rather than thinking about the future.
This is true of Ben Jonson's plays. Both Volpone and The Alchemist make fraud look fun, although in the former play, harsh punishments are dished out to all the "villains" right at the end.
The musical Catch Me If You Can runs into this — it's supposed to be ultimately condemning Frank Abegnale, Jr.'s, fraudulent and lawless life, except that the songs involving Frank's wild con artist life are much more enjoyable than the ones preaching strict Lawful Goodness. It's the same problem as Wicked, above — you're trying to send the message "Stay within the law, don't be outrageous and dashing" — in a musical?
Hanratty's opposing viewpoint song "Don't Break the Rules" is pretty much Made Of Awesome, though.
West Side Story does a fair job of showing there are consequences to the gang life... but then it has "Jet Song" and "Cool" and "Officer Krupke", all of which are a lot more fun than the more serious songs.
''When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dyin' day
''When you're a Jet, let 'em do what they can, you got brothers around, you're a family man
Video Games
Many would argue that the idea of an anti-war war game is even more inherently hypocritical than that of an anti-war movie. See, games are generally expected to be fun; if they're not fun, nobody will want to play them, let alone spend money on them. This means that if you make your game well, all the people playing it will find your profound messages about the futility and destruction of war to be significantly diluted by the fact that blowing shit up and killing Nazis/Russians/terrorists/aliens by the dozens is such a clearly enjoyable and gratifying activity. (If you don't make your game well, no one will hear your messages in the first place because no one will play the game.) Multiplayer games are particularly susceptible to this brand of hypocrisy, since there is little to no story to provide context to the action and the entire point of the game is to compete with and kill your opponents (and presumably have fun doing so). The Moral Dissonance created by this is cleverly satirized in this video.
The Call of Duty series as whole is a bit guilty of this hypocrisy due to the bizarre decision of the developers to include the appearing of anti-war quotes on the screen after the player gets killed in campaign mode. While not all of the quotes are anti-war, it's quite humorous reading the ones about how terrible war is while you're right in the middle of mowing down or blowing up dozens of human beings.
There is probably no better example of this than finding the hordes of people on message boards raving about how how much fun the infamous "No Russian" level was and how they'ved to shoot people crawling to escape or dragging their friends, even though the whole point of that level was to drive home just how horrifying warfare has become.
Not helped by Video Game Cruelty Potential after all those arn't really people they're lines of data on a disk so who cares if you mow them down they don't have lives or families.
Spec Ops The Line manages to escape this effect for some people, much to their horror. According to the developers, several of the people in their focus groups just stopped playing after they accidentally killed civilians with white phosphorus. Though others were less affected, as they felt that given that the game dosen't give you any other option other then to use said phosporous, that the actions of the protagonist were somehow justified
Ineptly done Anti Poopsocking features have a high chance of being one of these. In an attempt to limit peoples' gameplay rewards sharply drop after a certain amount of time. The hope is that instead of the player spending four hours a day on a game they only spend two after they realize that the third and fourth hours don't give much of a reward. This leads to some particularly dedicated players increasing gameplay time to SIX (or more) hours in order to keep up.
Even a correctly done measure can have this effect regardless. World of Warcraft encourages players to log off and rest by providing Rest Experience: for 8 hours your character spends logged out at a city or rest area, that character will gain twice the monster killing experience for one xp bar bubble (or 5% fragment of your experience bar) up to a maximum of ten days worth (or a level and a half). This has led players to level up multiple characters at once, cycling through them to level up a single character as long as any rest experience remains and then switching to the next rested up character.
The Metal Gear series (particularly from Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake and onward), which is heavy on anti-war messages in the plot, avoids this trope by making it possible (albeit extremely difficult) to complete each gamewithout killing anybody (intentionally, at least). On the other hand, there's tons of cool-looking, stylized violence in the cutscenes and collectible weapons just begging to be used, and most of the boss characters talk about how Snake is an honorable warrior and, if they die, do so in glorious, noble and/or bombastic ways. So really, it still has it both ways.
The conceptually similar Balance of Power, from 1985, also tried hard to portray nuclear armageddon as a bad thing. If the player failed to prevent war, the game ended abruptly with the text "You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure."
Unfortunately, it didn't reward success, either - your reward for shepherding the world through eight years of brinkmanship was a message stating "You have kept the peace". Maybe the real message was "Running a power bloc is difficult and unglamorous."
In Army of Two, protagonists Salem and Rios eventually realize that the Security and Strategy Corporation, the Private Military ContractorMega Corp they work for, is doing a lot of evil things in their attempt to get the US government to pass a bill that will dissolve the US military and replace it with a completely privatized one. To do this, they're attempting to discredit the US military by working in league with anti-American terrorists, as well as leaking sensitive troop information to insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and even trick Salem and Rios into killing a US Senator who opposes the military privatization bill. However, after you spend the majority of the game as a badass mercenary using the PMC's awesome weapons (which you can upgrade and stylize to make even more awesome) and using them to take down hoards of enemies, the game certainly manages to makes private militaries look totally awesome and badass. Additionally, SSC's executives do make numerous good arguments to justify increased military privatization, which while undermined by the fact that they're using them to justify an evil plan, are valid points nonetheless and receive very little refutation. Then to make it even worse, it's only in the second to last level that Tyson and Diggs catch on to the scam, and the whole taking down your bosses to prevent their evil plan is crammed into the final mission. And to top it all off, the game ends with Salem and Rios starting their own PMC business which they use in the sequel to do the same badass stuff again.
Metal Gear Solid 4 takes place in a future where the military has become mostly privatized, and the world's economy is dependent upon continuous war. While this time, the player isn't a PMC, and the game does a good job of showing the Crapsack World this has brought about, it again manages to make PMC's look extremely cool, thanks largely to the awesome technology they use, such as the Gekko robots, as well as the nanobites that turn ground troops into super soldiers.
Max Payne does a pretty good job of getting its point across well, assuming that its point is that a Roaring Rampage of Revenge is lots and lots of fun. If it's trying to be anti-violence, not so much.
Valkyria Chronicles: War Is Hell, everyone suffers, and the bad guys feel pain too. Except it's a strategy war game where the good guys are all adorable, everything is rendered with a soft, unthreatening watercolor filter, and half the fun of playing the game is watching your squad's Potentials activate and listening to the stuff they say as they turn enemy mooks into greasy stains on their darling cobbled streets.
Lampshaded by Unskipable's commentary on the game.
Paul: You know, I know people are dying and stuff, but with these pastel colors and fuzzy frame... I can't help but think everything is going to be okay.
Played straight by other gamers who cheerfully laughed while mowing down the civilians, because it's fun shooting NPCs who can't defend themselves. Subverted by some players who refuse to shoot any civilians and "fake" it by shooting over the civilians' heads (or, perhaps, by not shooting at all). Subverted differently by other players who, regardless of how they play the scene, find it a genuinely disturbing way of saying "This is where you're headed when you start believing morality is obsolete in the name of security." Then there's the people who just say "It's a game." and went through the level with some impatience for a challenge. Averted further by people who use any of the game's numerous opportunities to avoid and skip the level.
Though it's far, far less infamous than No Russian, there are some players who see General Shepherd as a total badass and don't understand why we're not supposed to root for him because of it. For that matter, a good portion of the people who do realize they aren't supposed to be rooting for him probably only realized so after he shot Ghost in the face.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance tries its damnedest to paint staying in Ivalice as a bad thing and Marche's desire to destroy it and bring back the real world as a good thing. Unfortunately, all the characters from "our world" that we see are better off in Ivalice, and the world itself is portrayed as a wonderland outside of the Jagds. Alternate Character Interpretation raised its head, and the result was "Marche the Omnicidal Maniac". (Supposedly this was less of a problem in the original Japanese, but even there the trope applies.)
Even the Jagds themselves could be an example of this. Towns where laws have no effect aren't really a bad thing when the law system is so incredibly anal that you can be arrested for using certain attacks or even dealing damage to monsters. Sure, your characters will be gone forever if you don't revive them by the end of a battle, but is whipping out a few Phoenix Downs before you finish off the enemy really that difficult?
Fridge Horror definitely applies. There you are, bleeding and struck down upon the ground, waiting for your party leader to use a Phoenix Down, to save your life. Unfortunately, he forgot to stock up before coming, leaving him no choice but to let you die.
It's the same debate that took place in The Matrix circles, and was implied in the films themselves. One realm is far less "desirable" than another realm whose existence the writers try to vilify, but the former realm is more "real" than the latter. Hence "real Crapsack World" versus "imaginary paradise."
Grand Theft Auto IV has plenty of anti-criminal motifs, it shows how crime and lust for money destroys the lives of opportunist gangsters and how it affects their friends and relatives. However, the missions involving murdering, stealing, and in general causing mayhem in the city, are done in such a way that instead of making crime repulsive, actually makes it look attractive and fun. The characters we encounter, though they are criminals, are often comedic and very likable and not like those we are afraid of in real life. And thus the game became very popular, being one of the best selling games of 2008 and it's still played by millions of gamers who seem not to get its anti-crime message.
Ace Combat insists often and firmly that War Is Hell. However, you play as an Ace Pilot, arguably the most glamorous combat role in existence, your arrival bringing hope to allies and sparking fear in enemies. Your distance from your targets means you never see in gory detail the aftermath of your passing and as a Featureless Protagonist you are spared the direct effects of deaths in the family. All these combine to dull the effect of the message.
Homefront somehow manages to mostly avoid becoming this trope. It bluntly and plainly shows that War Is Hell and since there is more focus on characters and the action is of a lower octane than in the Modern Warfare series, it really does deliver its antiwar message well.
Iji: A poster on the TV Tropes Fora stated "I like kicking the bugs to death" (though admittedly the player who said this hadn't gotten very far into the game).
Iji is actually much more successful at averting this than most games because it's completely possible to play through the game without killing anyone. Also, if you do kill everything in sight like a normal game, the dialogue will make you regret it unless you're very callous.
Then there's the MS Paint Forum Adventure adaptation, which takes a killer run of the game and plays it as Black Comedy mixed with Gurren Lagann-inspired awesomeness, complete with quotes and Iji being reinterpreted from a Reluctant WarriorWoobie to a Hot BloodedCaptain Ersatz of Simon. And the writer has stated he's played through thrice before and knows perfectly well it's supposed to be antiwar. To be fair, it was partly intended as a Reconstruction.
In a meta example, this is what led to Destroy All Humans! being made. Matt Harding pitched the idea because he was thoroughly fed up with making typical shoot-em-ups and proposed the exact opposite of the game he would like to make. Naturally, it was approved and Harding effectively sabotaged his career, which led to him quitting his job and making Where The Hell Is Matt. Not that we're complaining.
Saints Row 2 perhaps does an end run around this trope by avoiding the moralizing and continually plays up the fun and rewards of violent crime. Then the player character grinds a few rather sympathetic characters into the Moral Event Horizon, to demonstrate that he/she is every bit the vicious bastard the player is encouraged to be. Even some unsympathetic characters get terminated with much more cruelty than necessary.
Dane Vogel also suffers from this. He's cool, manipulative, wealthy, spends most of the game in complete control of the situation, and his plan would have solved Stilwater's gang problem. The fact that he's a ruthless, self-serving Corrupt Corporate Executive who simply wants profit and is out to crush anyone in his way to get it — especially the poor and disenfranchised — and that his plan to eliminate the gangs involved making things much, much worse before they got better tends to be forgotten because he's awesome.
Armored Core has you play as a mercenary mech pilot who works for all the wrong reasons (money and being the strongest). The earlier games tend to end fairly positively, but it's pointed out repeatedly most Ravens do not give a damn about how much carnage they cause on the job. Just because your client is an evil Mega Corp doesn't excuse you from responsibility. In Nexus, your final mission results in millions of suicide robots devastating the planet. In 4, the mecha are Walking Wastelands and are ruining the world, and in 4A, you've got the option of killing millions as one mission. Despite that, piloting a mech is goddamn fun, and you're only ever called out on your actions once,note kill those millions and you earn yourself a fight against your Mission Control, the Big Bad, the Dragon, and your Worthy Opponent. They hate you that much. In other words: That coworker you just murdered? What was his name again? His bounty earned you money for new parts for your infinitely customizable robot. Yay!
Cooking Mama, The Unauthorized PETA Edition shows Mama brutally killing and gruesomely preparing a turkey with cartoonish graphics. Game developer Raph Koster explains that his kids found it gleeful fun.
Even Majesco Entertainment apparently found it amusing, given that their response was to have Cooking Mama herself put out a press release complaining about it. It's like they said to themselves, "Nobody's going to get their message from it, we aren't going to worry."
Wings arguably subverts this; the game DOES use World War One for entertainment, but is stated to be dedicated to those who died in it, and also calls attention to the foolishness of various aspects of it.
Fable III has a morality system like the others. The system completely breaks when you are forced to raise funds to save civilians. The kingdom has 6.5 million people and they can be saved at the cost of one gold each (convenient). So that means if you give 10 gold to a begger it is a morally good act but if you put it into saving 10 lives it is morally neutral. The biggest problem comes when you can choose to build a brothel. The net profit will save 1.5 million people but it is considered immoral. Why is this relevent here? Because every load screen shows you the projected casualtys. Saving a comunity of hippies or 300,000 people's lives? The whole section teaches that being a tyrant is the way to save your people... well that or buy every property in the kindom and rent them out which could be argued is also a form of economic tyranny.
Although calling it a "morality" system seems to wrong, the system could be said to be expressing the view of your subjects to you. That falls down because, well, if you had just explained "hey, guys, there is a horror beyond your comprehension coming to kill you all. I need money to help fight it. One coin per person should do" then some things seem less objectionable. The main fall of this is basically saying "hey, you're in charge of protecting the kingdom and need money to do so." This leads to the logical choice of gathering money to protect the kingdom, but it presents the "morality" in a way that basically says "if you do things that would normally be considered greedy to get this money so everbody can live to see another day, you're an ass, but if you give money to people or refuse things that might get you money you're a good guy, despite wasting what could be better put to saving the lives of your subjects" And making a huge grey area out of the morality.
In Pokémon, both the games and the anime, treating Pokémon as tools is "wrong". The evil teams and the rivals all lose because they treated their Pokémon bad, you won because you WUUUUUV them. Except the best strategy is to dump all the crappy Pokémon you catch into the PC forever and push the ones you keep in your party to their limits. Sure, they get sad if they faint and they get happy if you use Potions on them...but Happiness is a mostly useless stat and unless you horribly suck as a trainer they will simply be happy enough as time passes. The "best" competitive players even breed new Pokémon to raise as weapons from the day they're hatched and throw the parents forever into the PC.
And any newborn that does not meet the expectations of the trainer (ability, nature etc.) is usually thrown into the wild without a second thought. Trainers can burn through dozens of baby Pokemon before they find the one that could become the perfect killing machine.
Though, to take the edge off the implications, the Anime shows that Pokémon "left in the PC" instead live in a natural wide open enclosure.
Similarly, Sonic series has the Chao. Despite being mostly a sidequest for less than a dozen emblems, you can spend endless hours on raising and breeding Chao to generate one with the elusive status of All-S grades. This usually involves throwing away quite a few that are less than ideal, since the way the stats are generated are such a crapshoot.
One of the main points of Ryoujoku Guerilla Gari (Suck My Dick Or Die! in the English release) is that Lt. Prosper is an evil person for abusing his position and authority to rape women, and that in his bad end, Haresu is just as evil for buying into Prosper's lies. The problem is that, as an eroge, the sex scenes are a big part of the draw, and the most extreme ones are the rape scenes from Prosper's perspective and Haresu's bad end...so, "join the army, meet interesting women, and rape the hell out of them"?
In-universe-parody in Kingdom of Loathing, with a chest labeled: "Magic equipment. Do not put on skeletons or they will come to life and it will be totally awesome."
Deliberately invoked in Night of the Raving Dead: as part of their plan to discredit Jurgen the vampire in front of his minions, Sam and Max turn a Very Special Episode of Midtown Cowboys into an endorsement for the garlic-flavored cigarettes they're supposed to be talking about the dangers of. Since the show is a big hit in Jurgen's homeland of Germany, he can't help but smoke the cigarettes even though the garlic makes him ill and embarrasses him in front of his zombie army.
Web Comics
Gunnerkrigg Court: Gleefully used. Just look at those efficiently designed, finely crafted, aesthetically appealing savage tools of destruction... Tea in her fencing suit and wide smile objects to your unhealthy fascination with swords! Though it doubles as foreshadowing, as later "enjoy, but don't forget what it's about" became a good plot point.
Invoked in thisSomething Positive with Davan's response to a gang of The Rocky Horror Picture Show fans protesting a stage-play adaptation of Shock Treatment. "Think of every movie or video game someone else protested that you immediately went to check out. Now you're doing that for us."
Jason Love. "Warning◊" from Jason Love's cartoons.
Western Animation
Beavis And Butthead. Spoofed in the Season 4 episode, "Safe Driving" The boys watch a grisly driver's-ed film featuring two guys who seem to be grown-up versions of themselves (albeit handsomer). Naturally, they think it's cool and get into the same accident seconds after taking the wheel.
Futurama spoofed this. Bender did a return-from-commercial gag where he stated the show does not support the "cool crime of robbery."
Bender (on TV, while lighting himself on fire): Try this, kids at home!
(on-screen subtitles): Don't try this, kids at home.
Later, during his speech against himself, Bender gives the following golden lines:
Bender: Do smoking and drinking on TV make me look cool? Of course! What about committing crimes and violence? Again, the answer is yes. But do we really want to teach our children these things?
Home Movies: Parodied in an episode where Brendon makes an educational video telling kids not to put marbles up their noses. The kids think the idea is cool, so...
Made even funnier because *everybody* who saw the film immediately tried to put marbles up their nose, even the teacher and Brendon's mom.
There's a similar situation in Little Men where Jo tells the children a story about a mother who warned her children not stick beans up their noses, prompting them to do just that. Jo says she stuck pebbles up her nose after hearing the story.
The Powerpuff Girls parodied this in the episode of "Mojo Jonesin'," where the mad genius chimp Mojo tempts a group of children with bootleg Chemical X which grants them superpowers. The first dose was free but to continue their addiction, they have to follow his orders. It's an obvious send-up of a don't-do-drugs episode complete with an ending when the kids decide to give up Chemical X and warn their classmates against "X abuse." Then another kid asks what it was like. "It was AWESOME!"
The Simpsons directly spoofed this trope: Lisa is shown a short film where rap stars in costume represent tooth decay: they stylishly and violently set about some giant teeth, rapping all the while. Lisa comments that while the film is against tooth decay it also kinda glamorises it.
Also parodied when Bart's class is shown a sex-ed video. "So now that we've shown you how it's done... don't do it."
In the episode where Bart is working for the Mafia and leaves at the end: "Sorry Fat Tony, I've learned that crime doesn't pay". Fat Tony replies "Yeah, maybe you're right" and then leaves in an expensive limo filled with women. His henchmen have their own limos.
South Park Another in-fiction example: In the episode "Pinkeye," when Mrs. Cartman sends her son to school dressed as Hitler, the principal shows him an educational film to scare him straight. However, the film consists solely of the message "Adolf Hitler was a very, very naughty man," followed by (untranslated) clips of his speeches and goose-stepping, saluting Nazis. There's no mention of anything evil he actually did. Cartman thinks the movie is "cool", to the point of seeing himself in place of Hitler in the video, and asks to see it again.
However, given Cartman's stated Anti-Semitism, he'd probably have thought it was even cooler had it been translated.
"Major Boobage": "Schoolchildren are often experimenting with dangerous ways to get high, like sniffing glue, or huffing paint, but they're all bad, m'kay... male cats, when they're marking their territory spray a concentrated urine to fend off other male cats, and that can get you really high... like really, really, high... probably shouldn't have told you that just now, m'kay? That was probably bad."
"Butt Out'' also parodied this but in the opposite way. An overly upbeat anti-smoking group called Butt Out, which incorporates elements of terrible dance and hip-hop into its routine, performs at the school. All the students think it's really lame and disturbing. At the end, Butt Out enthusiastically calls out "If you don't smoke, you can grow up to be just like us!" Directly after they say this, the boys start frantically smoking.
In "Sexual Healing," some of the kids ask what autoerotic asphyxiation is. The man they ask says he doesn't want to give them any ideas...but then describes it in detail, adding that it supposedly feels "really, really awesome." Three guesses how Kenny died in that episode.
"Kick A Ginger Day" is not something that should ever have been Defictionalized!
The Iron Giant tries to present the message that the use of weapons of mass destruction is wrong, and in fact, it was the Trope Namer for I Am Not A Gun. Problem is, when you represent weapons of mass destruction by a Humongous Mecha, it's hard not to make them look cool.
Though it IS helped in that the movie is never anti-Humongous Mecha, just using them as guns. Hence the Trope Namer.
Archer: And I advocate its use. As a potential role model, I advocate it.
Family Guy spoofs the trope in one episode where all the students at James Woods High are lectured on why having sex before marriage is a sinful act. Instead of taking the lesson to heart, the kids decide to have ear sex because it doesn't count and thus they still remain pure in God's eyes.
You know the saying: once you go black, you go deaf.
The Boondocks lampshades this in the episode "The Trial Of R. Kelly" where R. Kelly is on trial for urinating on a 14-year old girl on video, and a news reporter mentions that said video is "widely availible on the internet" and of course Riley Freeman immediately wants to see it.
Real Life
There was a case where some cops took some pictures of an accident scene and, without the family's consent, started showing them to kids, apparently wanting to Scare 'Em Straight. Instead, the kids thought they were cool and posted them on the internet. The family's attempts to get them taken them down have simply invoked the Streisand Effect.
Content Warnings can have this effect. They're supposed to serve as warnings to parents about what's appropriate for kids, but it's impossible to stop the kids from seeing them, and all they think is, "If I'm not supposed to be exposed to it then it must be totally awesome." Indeed, back in The Nineties when the Parental Advisory warning on CDs was just becoming well-known, TV advertisements for rap albums would proudly flash the "Tipper Sticker" as a point of pride, and George Carlin even recorded an album titledParental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics.
The Meese Report on pornography. The commission's conclusions on the harmful effects of porn were transparently determined by the prejudices of Edwin Meese et al. rather than actual analysis, while the report also included plenty of excerpts and juicy descriptions of otherwise hard-to-find material.
PETA wants to put a mural on the Mexican border fence to "warn" Mexicans not to come to the US because they'll get fat from all the junk food and meat. The painting makes the USA look like a Carnival-land made of candy and barbecues, turning the actual message into "Hey, we've got all the awesome delicious food you could ever want!" Yeah, that'll scare 'em away.
Combine this with the explosion in the last few decades of cheap, fattening, nutrient-free junk food, and you have, for the first time in history, a situation where the poor are fatter than the rich on average. Indeed, many health workers in the developing world have witnessed cases of people who are simultaneously obese and malnourished because of just how awful the local diets have gotten.
Studies have suggested that kids who went through the D.A.R.E. (to resist drugs and violence) program were actually more likely to do drugs than if they hadn't; the suggested explanation is this trope. This led to a joke backronym for the group, Drugs Are Really Excellent.
This trope can explain a part on why negative peer pressure is so prevalent.
The failure and subsequent explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in STS-51 was cheered initially by audiences, since most viewers did not know what a proper Shuttle Launch looked like and thought the fireball was the separation of the Solid Boosters. Spacecraft sometimes have this problem for outside viewers, since when a rocket works right, it becomes very hard to see after it passes higher than 100,000 feet, and if it goes wrong, it's a giant tube filled with thousands of tons of high-explosiveshurtling out of control. (At which point, the best solution is then to blow it up in a controlled manner before it falls on something.) Rocket failure is very bad, but it doesn't stop people from thinking that said failures are spectacular to watch.
Similarly, while nobody wants to see anyone die (one hopes), it is a bit of a joke that the only reason anyone watches NASCAR, Formula One or any other high-speed racing sport is to see spectacular vehicle crashes. Many a televison program that covers these events has a "crash of the week" segment, catering specifically to this mindset.
During the Cold War some Hollywood films were approved by the censors for release in the cinemas in the countries behind the Iron Curtain. Films were approved if they showed the US government in a bad light (evil CIA agents in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or the authorities in the first Rambo) or they featured evil capitalistic corporations (Aliens) or had any theme that could be portrayed in an anti-west manner (the West caused a world-wide apocalypse in Terminator). Inevitably the audience would end up impressed by the western living standards.
Newspapers often carry lifestyle or entertainment features that glamourise trends that their political journalism, editorials and opinion articles condemn. In Britain this is particularly pronounced in left wing newspapers: Editorial: "Global warming sucks!", Feature: "Look at all these glossy photos of a new super-car!". How much of a problem you think this is depends on how much you think the rational part of the brain is influence by the impressionistic part of the brain.
One of the Nazis' biggest propaganda mistakes was sending their "Gallery of Degenerate Art" on tour around the whole country so that all good loyal German citizens could see just how degenerate this art was for themselves. In terms of turnout, the tour was a smashing success: people turned out in droves in order to see for themselves just how degenerate all this art was. In terms of messaging, however, it was an abject failure: for some reason, this well-nigh pornographic degeneracy was always much more popular with people than the morally wholesome state-approved art the Nazis thought their loyal citizens ought to prefer.
Bill Lee is a former Chinatown gangster who has written about his experiences. When his own son got involved in a gang, Lee told him about his experiences to keep him out of the gang. The son's reaction was basically "My dad and granddad were gangsters! Awesome!"
During the heyday of gangsters in the 1920s and 30s the public often viewed them quite favorably. One reason was them going against the unpopular prohibition. Furthermore, during the Great Depression, gangsters seemed to be still doing quite well. As such, people looked up to them as an example of the American dream, the self-made man. Also, fighting against government order could be seen as fighting against the impersonal market forces which caused the depression.
Another reason for this is that, as an intentional measure to get the public on their side, many of the Depression-era gangsters made considerable donations to public services like soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Al Capone in particular would routinely give away hundreds of free turkeys on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Working for a gangster, while morally reprehensible and dangerous, also meant getting paid. Meanwhile, the government did not really do anything for the people until FDR's New Deal programs started to take effect. Its a tactic that has since caught on. Minority gangs, such as the black gangs in Harlem in the 60's and 70's would use these same tactics to get the residents of their neighborhoods on their side, which admittedly was not difficult given police relations with minorities in these areas.
