many examples don't seem appropriate: Family Unfriendly Aesop

Again, I think a good approach is that you can call it a moral if you can draw a direct line of cause and effect between the someone's actions and their (un)just rewards. If the frog hadn't trusted the scorpion, it wouldn't have drowned.

edited 4th Mar '11 11:35:03 AM by TripleElation

I think that is a good distinction, plus it'll cut down on the wrong exmaples.

We have a trope for "reading An Aesop into a woork that the author didn't intend," but this isn't it.

This is two overlapping but not identical tropes:

1. The objective trope of "a moral that's not generally the sort of thing you see presented as a moral"
2. The subjective trope of "a bad or warped moral."

For the first, Trip's "the inverse of a Stock Aesop that isn't itself a Stock Aesop" is, if not right on the nose, an excellent first-order approximation.

In any case, for the purpose of this trope (or these tropes, I wouldn't be opposed to a split along the lines I said), I think we should encourage people to err on the side of assuming an unstated moral is all in their heads, again as Trip laid it out.

When you say "the opposite of a Stock Aesop," do you mean the opposite of an aesop that is actually listed on the Stock Aesop page?

I'm finding that what is happening with a lot of YMMV tropes is that they are conceived as objective and are described as objective, but when a judgement call has to be made (especially on things of moral standings) the community turns the trope subjective. This is what happened to Complete Monster and Moral Event Horizon.

Basically, an aesop is easy to spot when a character spends a moment monologuing about some sort of moral. There is no debate when that happens, but I'd say 9 out of 10 aesops have some sort of monologue within the story and the rest are "gleaned" by the audience. An Accidental Aesop is expressly said to be unintentional by the writers, so it is entirely gotten by an Audience Reaction.

A Family-Unfriendly Aesop with an actual monologue tends to be the opposite, about 1 out of 10, with the rest being "gleaned" by the audience. Because it is formed from interpretation, that makes it largely subjective.

I got the impression from the name Family-Unfriendly Aesop that it was the kind of aesop that the Moral Guardians would tend to disagree with. "Family unfriendly" isn't an objective label, but it's pretty clear where that label would tend to be coming from...

I think the name is sound, no matter what culture or viewpoint you have, there's a certain set of morals you'd expect television to teach instead of the more ambiguous ones.

Whilst it was 3 pages ago. I feel this troper has a point.

I'm not exactly convinced that "warped aesop" sounds any less subjective. If anything, it's probably even more so, as one can consider an aesop family-unfriendly while still agreeing with it.

If the idea is to make it sound more objective, a different name might be in order.

I don't like really like Warped Aesop, I think Family Unfriendly fits a bit better. Maybe Aesop Outta Nowhere? Abnormal Aesop? I got nothing.

Maybe we should even drop the "Aesop" part, since part of their point is that they are not "moral" in the traditional sense.

Normally, the aesop of the story is supposed to be both practical, and moral. The two are not placed above each other: they exist in an idealistic worldview, where how things work out for you, and how things ought to be, are the same thing.

If a stroy only demonstrates how you will get by, but doesn't comment on how things should be ideally, it is not the moral of the story, but another form of lesson.

It's not called Family Unfriendly Moral. It's Aesop. We can define Aesop to mean whatever we want—it ought to have some connection to morals, given its origin, but it needn't be exactly the same as "moral"; defining it as a supertrope of moral is not beyond the pale.

As for the title, how about Unusual Aesop?

Like other people have noticed, there seem to be two tropes here:

1. An Aesop that is odd or unconventional.
2. An Aesop that Moral Guardians wouldn't like.

Neither of these are subjective; what Moral Guardians like and what Aesops are conventional are well known, and for their respective tropes we can just reverse them.

But I think a lot of the confusion is that these are assumed to be the same thing but aren't. For example "abortion is a good thing" would be 2 but not 1; on the other hand stuff Jack Chick writes would be 1 but not 2.

There are plenty of Moral Guardians on both teams in the abortion debate; despite the misuse, a Moral Guardian doesn't have to be a conservative, religious American. There'd also be grey areas between well-known and not well-known.

I'm not saying I have a better idea; I'm just saying it's not feasible to use that system.

edited 16th Apr '11 4:30:56 PM by halfmillennium

It is obviously about what self-proclaimed Moral Guardians would tend to like or dislike.

As for them not all agreeing on the same thing, the ones who consider themselves Moral Guardians tend to be of the more religious-traditionalist-slightly conservative viewpoint, so it is pretty obvious from the get-go what they would or would not tend to consider family-friendly. (For example, Harry Potter has the good guys using witchcraft. Despite this being an issue that would not come up in reality, since witchcraft does not work, it contradicts religious dogma with respect to withcraft and therefore constitutes a Family-Unfriendly Aesop.)

edited 16th Apr '11 4:31:09 PM by neoYTPism

Well, if someone with a good working knowledge of world religions could explain exactly what the 'religious-traditionalist-slightly conservative' belief system is, go for it.

edited 16th Apr '11 4:40:11 PM by halfmillennium

It is simple. Their "liberal" counterparts, whatever similarities there may be, have such considerably different approaches and attitudes to their own activism that if they count as Moral Guardians, they are an altogether different category thereof.

Why is that relevant? Well, the traditionalist ones are all about, well, tradition, which would tend to imply their aesops and attitudes are more long-established. As such, ones that they do not like will tend to be less traditional, and in turn, less conventional.

EDIT: As for religion, I was referring to Christianity, which in the western world is a pretty close approximation to religion in general.

edited 16th Apr '11 4:40:56 PM by neoYTPism

This is true (except the last part). However, as far as I know, we can't say a specific set of beliefs can be considered 'traditional' everywhere. If that's not what other people think, fair enough.

edited 16th Apr '11 4:45:06 PM by halfmillennium

Well, just to be clear, I'm not claiming to speak for people other than myself. As for tradition, it is not quite the same everywhere, but traditional attitudes with respect to morality in particular tend to be pretty similar through most of the western world. (Which I presume is where most TV Tropes users tend to live.)

As for the Moral Guardians trope including politically-correct liberals, I don't quite agree with that, as I think they are, again, a very different style of activists. However common or not their views may be, they are relatively less traditional than those of the conventional Moral Guardians and in turn have different implications when attempting to "enforce" them.

It is obviously about what self-proclaimed Moral Guardians would tend to like or dislike.

I don't agree. It's about what is usually depicted. It just has a bad name—it's not really about being family unfriendly in the political sense at all.

Harry Potter would not be one just because it shows the good guys using magic. Good guys who use magic happens fairly often. It certainly happens a lot more often than saying that you should be greedy, or cheat, or disobey your parents.

An Aesop has 2000 wicks and 3000 inbounds, and subtropes also have thousands of links. It's way past the point when we can just arbitarily redefine the meaning of the entire family of tropes, just to justify one particular bad snowclone.

A story based around the assumption that it's good to lie isn't quite the same as a story that directly teaches that it's okay to lie, but it's pretty close. If we cannot actually put them in a trope called "Aesop" we need a new name that covers them.

How about two birds with one stone, reference the snowclone family, but make clear that it's not a part of it:

If "the moral teaching of the story" is called An Aesop, then "the immoral teaching of the story", would be an...Anti-Aesop.

It's presented like an Aesop (something that the story preaches), but it's actually the opposite of an Aesop.

edited 27th Apr '11 7:15:59 AM by EternalSeptember

Using "immoral" there has the same problem as "family unfriendly"—it's considered subjective and would lead many people to force the trope into YMMV. It doesn't quite fit, anyway. For instance, I wouldn't call it immoral to lie when necessary—it's just that "you should lie when necessary" is something we don't expect a story to teach.

That's depending on the context, for example "It's OK to lie to save someone's life" would be a very reasonable Aesop, but "It's OK to lie for personal gains" would be an unusual/family unfriendly lesson exactly because it is normally considered immoral.

No matter how we define it, this trope is always related to the percieved lack of morality, and there is no reason why that couldn't be objective.