Basic Trope: A character makes sure another one learns An Aesop.
- Straight: To teach Bob that Drugs Are Bad, Alice threatens to make Bob eat nothing but his least favorite food for three years if he does not give up drugs.
- Exaggerated: Alice threatens to kill Bob if he does not give up drugs.
- Downplayed: Alice threatens to make Bob eat a whole lot of the food, but not for three years.
- Justifed: Bob is incurring health problems from the drugs.
- Inverted:
- Alice tries to make sure Bob doesn't learn the Aesop.
- Instead of a stick like a hated food, Alice uses a carrot, like the example of his strong, happy, healthy sister Betty, to teach Bob that Drugs Are Bad and that he'll be better off if he stops using them.
- Subverted: She gives up.
- Double Subverted: But then Charlie takes over.
- Parodied:
- Alice's middle name is Elizabeth and last name Sop, making her A.E. Sop.
- Alice hits people who refuse to learn their lesson with a marble bust of Aesop.
- Bob refuses to stop doing drugs, so Alice pulls her cellphone and calls Aesop himself to come, and he proceeds to beat up Bob.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Sometimes Alice tries to push Bob to give up drugs. Sometimes she doesn't.
- Alice gives up, but then Charlie takes over. He gives up when he has no more success than Alice, but then Adam tries ... and then he quits and Carol takes over ...
- Averted: There are no Aesops or no pressure to learn them by other characters.
- Enforced: They had to introduce Alice as a Determinator and a Nice Girl and throw in An Aesop as well.
- Lampshaded: "I will stop at nothing to make sure Bob learns that Drugs Are Bad!"
- Invoked: Charlie recruits Alice to the official position of Aesop Enforcer at Morals 'R' Us.
- Exploited: Bob would be Too Dumb to Live if it weren't for Alice.
- Defied:
- Alice refuses to make Bob learn anything.
- Bob refuses to learn, keeping up doing drugs out of sheer spite, hurting or killing Alice to get her off his back, or embracing whatever lifestyle Alice forced him into to try to make him change.
- Discussed: "Wow, Alice sure is determined to make sure Bob learns the moral of the week."
- Conversed: "Wow, that character is the offspring of the Determinator and the Soapbox Sadie."
- Deconstructed:
- The characters find Alice naggy and annoying.
- The way Alice tries to teach Bob the lesson carries problems of its own. For example, making him eat only one food for three years will cause nutritional deficiencies sooner or later, leading to, yes, health problems.
- It's not the presentation but the example. If Bob is using something with unproven effects, he has Plausible Deniability as to whether this drug is, in fact, bad. Or if Alice tries to get Bob off drugs by showing him how Betty has a good life without them, Betty might reply cheerfully that she does drugs all the time with no adverse, or even beneficial, side effects, causing Alice's statement to come off as a Broken Aesop to Bob.
- Reconstructed:
- To Deconstructed #1: Just because Alice is annoying, doesn't mean she's wrong. The other characters acknowledge this and learn their lesson.
- To Deconstructed #2:
- Alice saves her presentation by showing Bob that drug use is a (loose) cousin of an unbalanced diet.
- Alice gives Bob many reasons to stop using drugs, both positive and negative, both forceful and persuasive.
- To Deconstructed #3: Alice invokes the precautionary principle
to teach Bob the same lesson, or she finds the genuinely drug-free Barb to pull Bob towards clean living.
- Played for Drama: Alice threatens to kill Bob's family if he doesn't learn that Drugs Are Bad.
- Played for Laughs: Alice's way of teaching Bob that Drugs Are Bad is by giving him a narmy, anvilicious Scare 'Em Straight presentation. He's legitimately terrified but also amused.
- Played for Horror: Alice's Scare 'Em Straight anti-drug presentation to Bob goes into excruciating but entirely accurate detail about all the possible negative consequences his habit confers, with no sugarcoating. He has nightmares about it for the rest of his life.
- Implied: Bob was hopelessly addicted to one or more substances before he met Alice. Now he knows her and he's clean as a whistle.
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