many examples don't seem appropriate: Family Unfriendly Aesop

Can anyone honestly say whether any specific country is, mostly, secular or religious (and if so, which religion), pro-life or pro-choice, pro- or anti-gay marriage, pro- or anti-green movement, or conservative, liberal or somewhere which doesn't fit onto that graph?

Umm.. yes. Soft as it is, sociology is an existing branch of science, that uses critical analysis, and empirical evidences.

For example, it tells us that none of the things you listed would be overwhelmingly shunned anywhere in the western world (or Japan), (in fact, most of them have support close to 50%, making them especially bad examples for you) so they wouldn't be examples of the trope.

edited 22nd Feb '11 6:29:21 AM by EternalSeptember

Sociologists can and do disagree with each other, agreement doesn't necessarily mean the results are accurate, and people would 'correct' the page if they think it's incorrect.

If we can't talk about religion, abortion, gay marriage, the green movement or politics because they're too divisive, what's the point of the page?

edited 22nd Feb '11 7:14:07 AM by halfmillennium

If we can't talk about religion, abortion, gay marriage, the green movement or politics because they're too divisive, what's the point of the page?

It's for things other than those, of course.

It's not about morals which are bad ones, it's about morals which are very atypical for stories. Like "greed is good" or "you should give in to peer pressure". It doesn't matter whether greed is actually good in order for "greed is good" to be an example.

And to the person who asked if you can say whether a country is mostly pro-gay-marriage or whatever, "mostly" has nothing to do with it. It just has to be common enough—it can be a minority opinion and still common enough to count. Morals for gay marriage and morals against gay marriage would both be ineligible, because both of those are common morals (or at least moral assumptions).

What else is there that's worth making an aesop for?

I know it's about morals which aren't typical and I know it's not about what's good and what's not, but the last bit loses me. If there's no 'standard' (or a 'mostly') of what is family-friendly, there's no family-unfriendly aesop unless it's YMMV, which would solve everything.

edited 22nd Feb '11 9:25:29 AM by halfmillennium

On the one hand, Family-Unfriendly Aesop suffers from the same problem as Unfortunate Implications in that it is vulnerable to false positives of people reading too much into things. So the instinct is to make it YMMV.

On the other hand, Atlas Shrugged. I mean, really.

How about we say that:

1. We can call "aesop" when a character following it is rewarded as a direct consequence of doing so; or a character defying it is punished as a direct consequence of doing so; or the narrative outright says following it is good; or the narrative outright says not following it is not good
2. An aesop is Family Unfriendly if it is an inversion of a Stock Aesop that isn't, itself, also a Stock Aesop

Stuff like "all the straight guys get hooked up, the gay guy gets nothing and is beat up by the guy he tries to hit on - aesop: Being gay is bad for your love life!" can fall under Unfortunate Implications, or maybe under some sort of Circumstancial Aesop trope. It's not an aesop per se.

edited 22nd Feb '11 1:15:42 PM by TripleElation

One of the biggest problems I see is people cramming broken aesops or aesops they disagree with on there with no justification.

• Maryoku Yummy has had a few episodes where Maryoku uses trickery to teach someone a lesson, such as "The Muddle Puddle," where she pretends to be befuddled to show Ooka and Fij Fij that they don't need to rely on her all the time. However, when you realize that at least three episodes have had the explicit aesop of Honesty Is the Best Policy, her actions become a little suspect, to say the least.
• In an episode of Bravestarr, a young boy from a poor family is told by Bravestarr that he should be thankful that his mother loves him enough to force him to constantly wear his expensive Sunday-best clothing instead of giving him a few pairs of cheaper but more comfortable & practical clothing like other kids his age wear. Because clearly it is way more important for the mother's pride not to appear poor than it is for the boy to be able to play with his friends as it would damage his fancy clothes to do so.

"Put your mother before your friends" and "Don't lie" are pretty much the opposite of a Family-Unfriendly Aesop. How well they were executed or how "fair" they are to the characters in-story is irrelevant.

TE, with a bit of title reworking, that's probably the best idea in this discussion. That could work.

edited 22nd Feb '11 2:00:45 PM by halfmillennium

So...any action?

"Put your mother before your friends" and "Don't lie" are pretty much the opposite of a Family Unfriendly Aesop. How well they were executed or how "fair" they are to the characters in-story is irrelevant.

I disagree. In the first example, the point is that other episodes teach "don't lie", but this episode teaches (or at least, assumes) "you should lie when it is for a good cause", which is a family unfriendly aesop that opposes the more typical "don't lie" which is even found in other episodes.

But then, the other episodes teaching "Don't lie" don't have any relevance to the example. This sounds more like Aesop Amnesia or a Broken Aesop to me.

I'd say this trope is YMMV for three reasons.

• It relies on audience perception; in this case, how the audience perceives a "moral" that isn't even explicitly stated in the show.
• It relies on determining which aesops are "unusual," which heavily relies on cultural standard and is subject to Values Dissonance.
• Finally, it relies upon divining a moral from an original work that didn't have a moral. Ergo, it's audience interpretation.

But whatever. If it does become an objective trope in the future, some things really will have to change, especially the name (Family unfriendly does not sound like just like "unusual values"), and there will have to be a cleanup of the examples/natter.

If I understand correctly, there are two problems:

1)The question of whether some Aesops, like "abortion is good" (or "abortion is bad") count as family unfriendly.

2)The question of whether an entry should be included if we don't know whether the moral was intended.

For Question 1, I think a good principle is to treat this as the very opposite of the Captain Obvious Aesop (even though that entry is much more recent than this one). If we have a moral that "pollution is bad," people roll their eyes and say duh, what an obvious moral...even though everyone keeps on polluting. The Family-Unfriendly Aesop is the reverse. If we have a moral that "lying is good and necessary," people are surprised and amazed that such a moral could be on a TV show...even though they practice it, and may actually agree with it.

So things like "abortion rights are necessary" or "abortion is wrong" will, in the modern USA, be neither.

For Question 2: A lot of the other aesop tropes (like Clueless Aesop) seem to run on the principle of Death of the Author; we count it whether the author intended it or not (since we can't really know the author's intentions). However, if it looks like the author specifically didn't intend it, that's a Broken Aesop. The risk we want to guard against is (as the entry says)taking a Spoof Aesop seriously, or regarding virtually any event in a story as an unintentional moral.

Digging into the history again: The reason I changed it from Warped Aesop is that pretty much everyone agreed that it was being used as "Aesop that you don't like," and the name change was part of a huge clean-up that dealt with similar issues in Moral Dissonance and Broken Aesop. (I believe it was Dragon Quest Z who suggested the new name after I discussed the intentions, but I could be remembering wrong.)

The inspiration was originally Degrassi The Next Generation, which routinely had morals like "squealing to the principal is always wrong, no matter what the bully did to you." It was just so odd to see morals like that on screen, but many people believe exactly this. It isn't Values Dissonance because this isn't an idea that only foreigners have; it's a very real attitude in the West, but not one that you expect to see on TV.

It may be, in hindsight, that a huge part of the problem is the fairy tale section. It looks solid, because cultures back then did not support acting like Puss In Boots or Prince Ivan on a daily basis, so they had the same "shadow culture" role that a moral like "don't squeal" does today...but it's still a much thinner line with Values Dissonance than the rest.

It relies on audience perception; in this case, how the audience perceives a "moral" that isn't even explicitly stated in the show.

Instead of Square Peg Round Trope, you have Square YMMV Round Trope.

Not everything which requires people to make a judgment is YMMV. We don't say that Absurdly Sharp Blade is YMMV simply because it requires that a blade cut through "almost anything" and various audience members can disagree about whether "X and Y, but not Z" qualifies as "almost anything".

This is one of the hazards of the current treatment of YMMV: People sticking everything into YMMV because at some point, in some edge case, it depends on an audience reaction. That is not what YMMV is.

Maybe I should propose a page for Square YMMV Round Trope.

But then, the other episodes teaching "Don't lie" don't have any relevance to the example.

The fact that this specific show has the opposite aesop in other episodes has no relevance. But the fact that shows in general have the opposite aesop is relevant. It's just using an overspecified example for that.

Not everything which requires people to make a judgment is YMMV. We don't say that Absurdly Sharp Blade is YMMV simply because it requires that a blade cut through "almost anything" and various audience members can disagree about whether "X and Y, but not Z" qualifies as "almost anything".

No.

"Almost anything" is an expression. The trope, at its core, is about a blade that can cut through more things than a normal blade would be able to.

This trope, at its core, is about finding unusual morals in a work without an explicit moral, so the subjective audience interpretation is necessary to the trope. Consider Unfortunate Implications, which is also about finding supposed values in a work.

edited 2nd Mar '11 11:46:06 PM by Scardoll

Why do you keep saying the trope is about finding morals in a work that doesn't really have any? The page itself says that isn't what it's about and that examples like that shouldn't be added.

edited 3rd Mar '11 12:16:10 AM by Jerrik

The page itself is a complete mess which seems to claim about three different things at once, hence the discussion.

This trope, at its core, is about finding unusual morals in a work without an explicit moral

This is not true.

Where did this idea come from, and how do we get rid of it? All the Aesop pages are riddled with people trying to find a moral in a work that isn't necessarily teaching one. Death of the Author has it's place, but this is ridiculous. Family-Unfriendly Aesop is really only the worst of a bad lot.

edited 3rd Mar '11 9:37:17 PM by nrjxll

There is a subjective nature to Family-Unfriendly Aesop, IMO but I think there's a bit more of a objective trope. Who can argue that say, "telling the truth always" is a pretty standard non-shocking moral compared to a Family Unfriendly Aesop which would be something like "The truth doesn't always set you free"?

We could use it exclusively for a set of aesops which are that common.

Really, I think all this needs is a good clean-up and a curator to avoid being banished to YMMV hell. I think the distinction of "trying to teach a moral" needs to be clarified some because I think that was also causing some issues like "no this episode WASN'T trying to teach anything! and "Nu-UNH YES IT WAS" and such.

I don't think it should have to teach a moral, if it's based on one. A story that assumes that greed is good (not just a story which shows that being greedy works, but one which actually assumes that it's good) may not necessarily be trying to teach anything at all.

I'm wondering if there should be a separate thread on this issue for all the aesop tropes, because the big bone of contention here is between those Tropers who feel that the moral of the story should be what the author intended (and anything else is silly), and those tropers who feel that Death of the Author applies in full and the moral is whatever people read into it. The current default on TV Tropes seems to be the Death of the Author approach, which is the source of almost all the natter and craziness on this site — but I'm inclined to it, simply because if there's a principle of "it doesn't count unless it's intended," the things to write about are mighty slim.