Soft-split into "type 1" and "type 2"? Argh!
I don't really see a problem in the distinction between the tropes, as both pages are fairly clear on this.
Space Whale Aesop: Mundane action (with serious real world consequence) is given an exaggerated and unnatural negative consequence to enforce An Aesop. (Kill all whales, space aliens kill you)
Fantastic Aesop: An action that by definition can not be done in the real world is given an arbitrarily negative conseuqnce to enforce An Aesop. (Resurrect the dead, they eat your brains)
edited 4th Jun '12 7:54:54 PM by Earnest
"is not applicable to Real Life" how? Impossible to do technically? Physically? Noone thought of it? Morally unthinkable, but that can happen in real life?
Also, the trope is divided, based on other tropes. But the examples are separated Type 11 and Type 11. Why?
edited 4th Jun '12 8:00:14 PM by spacemarine50
Type 1 and type 2 are quite different cases that both happen to go by the name "Fantastic Aesop".
Type 1: The story uses fantasy as a metaphor for real life - vampires for socialists, or magic for drugs. But the metaphor fails, undermining the aesop.
Type 2: The story aims for an aesop about fantasy e.g. don't resurrect the dead, don't change the past. To create the aesop, the story creates its own rules regarding the fantastic element (resurrection will kill innocents, changing the past will destroy the universe); these rules don't exist in the real world, undermining the aesop as either an actual message or a metaphorical one.
Interestingly, the current title omits a pretty important qualifier: this page is for failed fantastic aesops.
edited 4th Jun '12 8:17:45 PM by Routerie
I mean that the trope page itself is about failed attempts of realistic Aesops while other pages use a wider meaning. A rename to Fantastic Aesop Failure may prevent this misunderstanding. I'm also not opposed to splitting it.
Ravenous Sophovore
Clocking due to lack of activity.
Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.
I have made a crowner: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/crowner.php/PageAction/FantasticAesop
edited 24th Jul '12 1:54:53 PM by Lophotrochozoa
Ravenous Sophovore
Crowner glued to thread.
Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.
I'd like to poll those voting for "leave it alone" and ask them, "What are correct references? What is this trope's definition?"
I think that most of the supposed type 2 aesops are still type 1. A story where resurrecting the dead has horrible consequences is usually still an aesop about real life: "you must learn to accept death". While the example in the story uses resurrection and so couldn't happen in real life in that exact form, the aesop isn't really specifically about resurrection, it's about death.
Likewise, stories where you can't change the past to stop a bad event are usually the more generalized aesop "you must learn to accept tragedy". Again, the specific example in the story can't happen in real life, but the moral expressed by the example can.
Yes, a Fantastic Aesop may still be a good moral that you can apply to your everyday life. But it still fails as a message in the story that applies equally to real life, and it fails for either of two very different reasons.
1. Fantasy World Real Morality. In this story, the characters can change the past without bad consequences but they are told not to because we must accept the past as it is. In real life, this is a good message, because actions are irreversible so we must learn to accept them. In a story where the past is reversible, this message is neither logical nor good. Why must we accept the past? If there's no reason, the moral breaks down (though it continues to apply in real life).
2. Real Morality Fantasitc Cosequences. In this story, the characters change the past - and disaster ensues. The butterfly effect kicks in, and it's horrible, so the characters learn that they must accept the past. In the story, this is a good message, because changing the past puts Hitler in power. In real life, you can't change the past at all, so this lesson does not apply. It is still important to accept the past - but not for the reasons that the story stated.
For comparison, a story may fantastically offer an aesop without taking either of these courses. A character may invent a time machine and try to undo the past but discover that she's in a Stable Time Loop so must accept the past. This moral - the past cannot be changed, so we must accept it - applies equally well to real life.
This page is a textbook case of why it's sometimes a good idea to split tropes, even if they seem really similar. This page is 100 times harder to read then it should be. We just need 2 simple trope pages for each type. If someone wants, they could convert the majority of the description into some kind of "different ways of handling real-world aesops in fantastic settings" analysis, but it doesn't belong in a trope description.
edited 25th Jul '12 4:10:27 PM by abk0100
Routerie: Okay, that makes sense... I would say that those are both about the real world though.
They are. If the current page suggests that anyone things otherwise, it does a bad job of explaining itself.
Eg. "don't summon demons you can't control, they will eat you" — the second part is a logical consequence of the first, assuming you could summon demons. But, well, you can't, so...
(I know it's a somewhat silly distinction, but if we're splitting it it's important to make sure we describe the tropes correctly in the pages it gets split into!)
Tbat's an important point. The problem with our current emphasis is that "Don't literally summon demons" is not an actual aesop, because, as the article so clearly states, it has no application to the audience. If a story features someone summoning demons they can't control, it's either a story with no intended aesop or an allegory for real life. The demons represent real-world things you can't control, and the actual aesop is "don't act without being prepared for the consequences" or "don't overreach your grasp" or "mind the loyalty of those in your employ" depending on how the story goes. We'd be awfully superficial to label the aesop as inapplicable to our own demonless lives.
The current page already makes that clear. Other pages are the problem.
From my reading of it: 1. Is an aesop that is arbitrarily adhered to in a universe where it would not exist in the first place. IE: There's no such thing as Came Back Wrong on ressurection, the characters just decide it's not the right choice, for some reason.
2. Is an aesop in that while more fantastic than our own, still have rules that make the aesop apply. The aesop apply to the setting and real life equally well, but the story would make a messed up illustration of the point.
If this is correct, then I agree that there are two separate tropes here that just happen to be used in fantasty/scifi settings.
Rule of fanworks reviews: The amount of constructive criticism a work receives is in inverse proportion to the amount it needs.
Madwoman Apparent
The link here from Spoof Aesop suggests that this trope is about Aesops that are completely useless, as do the quote AND the picture. This is very confusing.
Also, the whole thing seems like a list of subtropes for Broken Aesop. I say we use the name for what it sounds like, and give what's here a name like Aesop Broken By Genre or something.
After posting this thread I have realized that Space Whale Aesop is a subtrope, possibly even a duplicate, of type II. How should we define it to distinguish it from general type II Fantastic Aesops?
Edit: Perhaps not. The Space Whale Aesop page says that Space Whale Aesop is about fantastic consequenses of realistic actions while Fantastic Aesop is about fantastic actions.
edited 9th Sep '12 12:46:12 PM by Lophotrochozoa
Space Whale Aesop is very similar to type II fantastic aesop. I recommend merging them.
A Space Whale Aesop is when a story takes a real-world lesson ("save the whales") and applies fantastic consequences ("...or a space whale will attack.") A type II fantastic aesop takes a fantastic lesson ("don't raise the dead") and applies fantastic consequences ("...or they will eat you").
Phrased like this, the difference seems significant. However, the latter case's fantastic lessons are generally real-world lessons portrayed in a fantastic way. "Don't raise the dead" is a lesson equivalent to "move on after a loved one has died." In that sense, both tropes are "a real-life lesson taught by exaggerating its consequences in a fantasy setting."
Examples where the lesson is not meant to apply in real-life at all ("make sure you always stab the vampire with wood") are not actual aesops. Maybe they're spoof aesops.
I think that's still a difference. A Space Whale Aesop would be about an action that is exactly the same as real life, and a type 2 would be about an action that's a non-real-life example of something which can be done in real life in a generalized sense.
So "raising the dead is a bad thing because you must accept death" is type 1.
"See, if you raise the dead they'll eat you. So you have to accept death" is type 2.
"If you don't accept death, a monster that feeds on grief will attack you" is Space Whale.
The Space Whale Aesop involves the exact action that we think must be done/not done in real life (not accepting death). The type 2 involves a non-real-world action associated with the real world action. (you don't accept death, and you try to raise the dead).
There is a difference. We could keep them separate. Far less separates them though than, say, type 1 and type 2 of Fantastic Aesop.
For example, I would think that "save the whales or whales will invade and kill us" is the basically same trope as "save the popplers or popplers will invade and kill us" (i.e. "preserve species"). But yes, there's a difference.
It looks like we have:
- Fantastic World Real Morality (Fantastic Aesop 1)
- Fantastic Morality Fantastic Consequences (Fantastic Aesop 2)
- Real Morality Fantastic Consequences (Space Whale Aesop)
edited 9th Sep '12 1:22:13 PM by Routerie
Given that Aesop pages in general have too many instances of people reading in messages that may not have actually been intended, I have to wonder how we're suppose to prevent this sort of thing
Crown Description:
What would be the best way to fix the page?
The laconic subpage and Space Whale Aesop (and possibly other pages too) suggest that the trope is about any Aesop that is not applicable to Real Life but the page itself (both description and examples) is about making such Aesops when trying to make realistic ones. Which meaning should it have?