many examples don't seem appropriate: Family Unfriendly Aesop

This page seems to have a lot of problems. Some of the examples on the page are better suited for Spoof Aesop, and many come from works that do not necessarily contain Aesops at all. The page even qualifies that "not everything needs or has an Aesop. A depiction is not an endorsement," but perhaps it needs to go further? An Aesop defines it as a moral or a lesson learned by the end of a work. Unless it is a fairy tale, a cartoon from the 80s, an after-school special, or a Chick tract, it seems very YMMV whether a work contains one or not. Pirates of the Caribbean, Avenue Q, The Wire? Do works belong here when they are meant to be escapist or satirical, or to raise more questions than they answer? I could just go through and strip out examples I disagree with, but I think it might be more helpful to decide how didactic a work must be before we include it on the page and add that to the definition. I don't really feel qualified to decide that on my own.

The page is also full of Natter, for those who are bothered by that (apparently everyone but me). I haven't seen most of the works in question and don't know who is "right." I think, though, that if so many people can't even agree on what the Aesop is, it probably means the example doesn't belong on the page. An Aesop would be something hard-hitting and obvious, right?

Finally, I don't think there should be any Real Life examples at all. Real Life doesn't have Aesops, Family Unfriendly or otherwise.

This is my first time posting in this forum, so I apologize if I haven't done this properly.

Agreed on real life. Seriously, what the hell are those examples doing there?

I moved Real Life examples to the Troper Tales page, although really I don't think they belong anywhere.

A good point on the nature of this trope is whether it should be descriptive or proscriptive.

Descriptive examples are like the Wire example: its trying to present an honest look at how things are, but not neessarily saying this is how things should be.

Proscriptive examples are the ones that show the morally questionable stuff as the most desired option over other decisions.

So should we limit this trope to proscriptive morals only and get rid of ones that are just trying to put out the message that "You can't change how things are" as opposed to "You shouldn't try to change how things are"?

Or even, in some cases, it's "This is how things are" without even making a point about changing them.

I think by definition an Aesop is trying to teach in some way (correct me if I'm wrong, though). Though I think the sentiment described on the page fairly neatly says a lot of what The Wire says, for instance, I wouldn't agree that the show is trying to teach that sentiment so much as point out (quite cynically) that this is what happens (if The Wire has an aesop, it's more like "Shouldn't you be doing something to fix this?"). As such, I agree that's not a very good fit. I think the descriptivist/proscriptivist difference is a good one to use, and that we should try to stick to proscriptivist aesops.

Meanwhile, I think Avenue Q has a couple of perfectly legit aesops (the song "For Now" is really quite sincere in its message, and the message "it's OK to be gay"), and a bunch of spoof aesops. I don't think it has any Family Unfriendly Aesops at all.

edited 8th Feb '11 10:11:00 PM by Duckay

Proscriptive vs. Descriptive seems like a pretty good way to make a distinction between works that actually have a Family-Unfriendly Aesop and which just have Grey-and-Gray Morality or a Downer Ending. If this distinction gets wide support, I think all of the Aesop pages might benefit from it (except Spoof Aesop since those are intended to be improper).

I've just had a look and the examples on An Aesop, while not as numerous or contested as Family-Unfriendly Aesop, seem a little scattershot as well; many of them are subversions or SpoofAesops. Actually I'm not sure if An Aesop needs examples at all or if it would be better served as just a definition and index page.

That's not the only problem with the trope. How do we check what is and is not family-friendly? Look at this example from the Family-Unfriendly Aesop entry on Star Trek Voyager:

'"Mortal Coil" gives us the message that there is no afterlife, you won't see your dead loved ones again and that the only way to find any meaning in all of existence is in others. The fact that the scenes used to hammer this in consists of Naomi's adorable antics gave the episode a What Do You Mean Its For Kids vibe.'

Directly under that:

'Definitely a case of Your Mileage May Vary. Only those who put all their hopes in an afterlife would be disturbed by that episode; humanists and others who value life more out of the belief they only get one would find it extremely family friendly.'

So we've got an entry, then we've got a slightly snarky response explaining why it's family friendly to certain other people. Which is the family-friendly one?

Now I don't intend to spark a debate about religion, but it's a good example. Is Good Girls Avoid Abortion family-friendly or not? What about a Gay Aesop? Our own beliefs disregarded, how do we tell which argument of a controversial topic is believed to be family-friendly?

edited 9th Feb '11 2:47:48 AM by halfmillennium

It should be YMMV. (There's even a note on the page that says Your Mileage May Vary because of Values Dissonance between cultures.)

Agree, throw it at the YMMV index.

Well, in either case the trope really deserves one clean-up. Basically, beyond "non-aesops" also aesops that are family friendly in the culture where they were written. The description says:"This list is for morals that were family unfriendly even for the culture that they were written in."

The voyager example is a good example of Repair Dont Respond. It exemplifies how the aesop is unfriendly depending on your personal beliefs (i.e. if you're a cynical heartless bastard, these aesops fit your worldview perfectly).

Hey! My parents were married for years before I was born!

As the description points out, many of those are valuable lessons and good advice, they're just not nice, where you would normally expect nice.

edited 9th Feb '11 6:11:54 PM by Daremo

I assumed not nice was the key part of being family unfriendly.

Regardless of the example cleanup, I think that the proscriptive vs. descriptive concept should be applied to all of the Aesop tropes. There's a few examples out there that don't really resemble an aesop at all, and others only have one when you apply Death of the Author - which I think is a concept that doesn't fit well with aesops in general.

I would suggest that instead of making it YMMV, you get rid of the "family unfriendly". It never should have been renamed to that in the first place. The name is leading to a lot of the problems—of course nobody agrees on whether an abortion lesson is family friendly.

I don't think this trope is about teaching morals at all in the narrow sense of "this show was specifically made to teach the lesson that greed is good". I'd argue for something closer to what has been called "proscriptive" above: The show isn't trying to teach that greed is good, it assumes that greed is good. Since it's an assumption, it's not technically a moral, but the show is still implying that greed is good in a much stronger sense than just "greed works in the real world".

So laconically—Warped Aesop: A story is based on a moral principle in opposition to one that is overwhelmingly more common.

This is no more subjective than any other trope. And I wouldn't count the abortion or gay aesops either way, because there are plenty of stories on both sides of the issues, such that neither side is overwhelmingly more common.

What he said.

Well stated, arromdee.

Agreed. Get it out of YMMV, and either rename or rewrite the description.

It's still subjective because it relies on an interpretation of the work rather than being explicit within the work itself.

Regardless of definition this runs into a problem a lot of the aesops variations have, it's based on interpretation of what the story is trying to "say" and often runs into the same thing on the Better Than It Sounds page. People are going to word the supposed aesop according to how they want to portray it.

Hell, I'm quite religious myself and I don't find anything offensive about the Star Trek Voyager example because I don't interpret it the way the example gives it. The context of the aesop goes that Neelix was clinically dead for something like 18 hours and he didn't receive a "light at the end of a tunnel" or anything that supported his spiritual beliefs. He grew depressed and suicidal until Chakotay explained that what you do here and now is more important than your spiritual beliefs and faith in an afterlife. Wording it to imply they are saying "there is no afterlife, guaranteed" is misleading.

I'm not saying that we should cut examples that we don't agree with, but certainly cut those that blatantly ignore key story points surrounding the aesop, barring Word of God saying that it was the intent.

Whatever it takes to get it out of YMMV, I'm already tired of that section.

YMMV has become like Wikipedia's notability or reliable sources rule. It keeps getting shoehorned in by people who 1) like to overclassify nearly to the point of OCD, 2) just want to kill the trope, or 3) both.

Almost all tropes contain subjective elements to some extent. It's entirely possible for there to be, say, a borderline Clingy Jealous Girl who is only perceived by some of the audience as clingy and jealous. That doesn't make the trope into a subjective trope. The basic element of this trope is that the moral involved is not one you see often. It is of course true that such morals are also likely to be ones which you would call bad but that is not really part of the definition. It may be fuzzy around the edges like almost any other trope, but ultimately "there are 999 stories which teach not to be greedy and 1 story which teaches that greed is good" is not subjective. Just fix the title so people stop thinking the trope is about judging the trope's morality.

You basically summed up my feelings on the YMMV section.

And yeah, I agree that this trope can be objective - A moral that you don't see very often and is a bit off-putting compared to conventional mainstream thinking.

I would like to keep it out of YMMV if possible for above-stated reasons. So let's try to improve the title and description instead.

Ultimately, I believe we want a title and description that emphasize that "Surprisingly different from other Aesops" is the key, and NOT "an offensive or negative Aesop." Whether something is offensive or negative is much more subjective than whether it is rare and surprising.

—Title has been criticized for being vague and misleading. What should we call it instead to indicate that this trope has little to do with "family values" (which in America at least is redolent of a certain take on, for example, abortion and gay issues as mentioned above) and more with being shockingly different from dominant Aesops of that culture? I'm not very familiar with renaming rules but I see that there is already a redirect from Warped Aesop and I wonder if that might be sufficient. It is kind of boring though, and possibly sounds too similar to Spoof Aesop. Not Your Grandmas Aesop? That indicates that it's different from tradition and possibly shocking, though it still has the problems of the family connotations. Surprise Aesop? Emphasizes that it's the fact that the Aesop is different from others that matters, and not the content of the Aesop so much.

—The description already states "Depiction is not endorsement" and "Not every story has or needs an Aesop." I want to emphasize this but I am not sure how to do so without being redundant. Would adding proscriptive vs. descriptive language help?

I also think "A story based on a moral principle in opposition to one that is overwhelmingly more common" is a good laconic (the current one is "A dubious moral that may be right in some respects.") Again, moving away from "negative/offensive" towards "surprising and different" as the standard.

edited 21st Feb '11 2:46:44 PM by EphemeralToast