Doktor von Eurotrash: Cut this from the Music section:

• The whole Chris Brown/Rihanna domestic violence situation is full of this, suprisingly. Because Rihanna was the initial aggressor in the incident (hitting him first), many people feel she doesn't deserve much sympathy because "you shouldn't start fights in the first place, so you being beaten is your consequnce." The aftermath saw a lot of people also forgiving Chris Brown (who actually had a very good reputation before the incident) saying "You should always give people second chances no matter what they've done," which is on the Idealism side of the sliding scale.

Real Life events don't have An Aesop.

Cutting this:

• The Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In gives some unfriendly (but effective) advice on how to deal with schoolyard bullies: "Hit back. Hard." To ends, tear them to bits.

The aesop only "works" because of the fantastic element, but even so it's missing the point. When Oskar follows Eli's advice, he does get some time off the bullies, but it's only temporary. If she didn't appear at the right time, he'd be either drowned or with an eye less(which is the reason he asked "but what if" after she gave him that advice).

In short, the real aesop here would be much family friendlier: don't answer violence with violence. Or maybe the less friendly "bad people will be always bad".

• Bunta Fujiwara's parenting style in Initial D, if not his whole character, is a delivery vehicle for Family Unfriendly Aesops about skill and honor in illegal street racing.

I don't know - Aesops about skill and honor seem pretty conventional, even if they are in a family unfriendly setting.

Should any of the Fairy Tales be in here? It seems more like Values Dissonance, since these are long-ago cultures.

From the Frog Prince example:

• All things considered, the 'inadvertently' part might have been a condition of the curse, and the Prince's actions Batman Gambit. After all, wouldn't it have been easier for everybody if he'd simply asked her to do just that, politely?

Interesting WMG, but doesn't belong here.

• Nightmare Before Christmas has "Going against your nature/set place in life will result to destruction."
  • The monsters DID start to understand what "real" Christmas was like when Santa gave them snow for the first time, but we never hang around long enough to find out if they managed to see past their own Halloween-myopia.
  • Talk about Completely Missing The Point. Wasn't the reason Jack caused destruction is because he give gifts that attacked the kids?! So the moral is more "going against your nature/set place in life without knowing what the hell you are doing will result to destruction", which is a pretty Family Friendly Aesop.

Yeah, Not An Example.

• The Disney version of The Little Mermaid is full of such gems as "It's prefectly all right to run away from home at age sixteen to get married, especially if this person is someone you barely know" and "The best way to get a man is to have a beautiful singing voice, but barring that, you must be extremely beautiful. Actually getting to know the person and having a conversation is completely un-necessary."

Neither of these is An Aesop. Ariel gets in trouble because she runs off stupid, and the Prince gets in trouble because he only pays attention to humanmode-Ursula's voice.

• The Pagemaster apparently is meant to give small children the impression that being interested in math instead of sports is bad and that if a father wants his son (who has a fear of heights) to go into a tree house then the son should go into the tree house. Also it's apparently alright for creepy old men to put children in serious danger as long as they learn to love fiction.

No, it's that you shouldn't be scared to experience things, living your life based on dry, mathematical second-hand accounts. And I'm not even addressing that last sentence; it's a Completely Missing The Point for the entire kids' fantasy genre.

• Crossing Delancey: After your dreamboat turns you down, settling for the nice schlub that your meddling grandmother has tried to pair you with is the key to happiness.
  • Not really. The message is more like, "Your dreamboat could turn out to be an egotistical jerk and the guy you think is a schlub could turn out to be a soulful romantic."

Yep. And a fairly conventional message at that; thus, Not An Example.

• The primary message in the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz is "Never dream of a better life. Just accept things as they are, even when your life is full of suck."

...what? Um, no. At what point does anyone dream of a better life - or explicitly not do so? At what point do people get punished for doing so, or rewarded for not?

• Any Coming of Age/High School comedy or drama where the lead is an outcast fringe-dweller who just wants to be accepted and popular, date the shallow Jerk Jock (who often then becomes the Jerk With A Heart Of Gold) or The Libby, and/or get chosen as best in a popularity contest (Homecoming royalty, study body president, etc.); and manages to achieve it by dropping his or her "weirdness" or nerdiness, turning away from the "freak" crowd he or she is hanging out with, and becoming a conformist and adopting the looks and/or attitudes of the popular crowd. Which is the vast majority of them, especially those aimed at a younger crowd. Often combined with an Unnecessary Makeover; it's usually a failed attempt at a Coming Out of the Shell plot.

First of all, I've hardly ever seen this; rather, I've seen this happen a hundred times... ninety-nine times ending in it all going wrong and the actual Aesop being Be Yourself. Second, if it's "any", it's probably a conventional Aesop.

• Ice Princess falls prey to Disney's infamous issue with the moral of obeying your parents because your fifteen years of life has given you far more knowledge and experience than their forty-something. In this one it's okay to give up a place in a really good college and a chance to use your brilliant mind in a well-paying job! Who cares that in a few years after you're too old to look good in an ice skating outfit you'll be left jobless and potentially broke, at least you did what you really loved.
  • Thankfully there's at least a partial subversion at the end when its revealed that not only will the girl be going back to college she will still be able to ice skate. It does mean that at least the next four years, and maybe 8, will be ungodly difficult since she will pursue a math degree and attempt professional ice skating.

Again, "do what you love" is a conventional Aesop, even if it's not done well in this case. This trope is not Complaining About Shows You Dont Like.

• The Marquis de Sade wrote two books, Justine and Juliette, which are practically made of this trope. The message is, to an extent, "morality and virtue are overrated." Given that this is the man from whose name we get the word "sadism", it isn't that surprising.
  • The Marquis de Sade was a libertine. He saw no use in morality. Also, ever heard of The 120 Days of Sodom?
  • De Sade was much better person than he is given credit. He deliberately delivered Broken Aesops that represented what he actually saw around him: ruthless exploitation of the weak by the strong, and near-masochistic submission by which the weak reacted to this state most of the time. He didn't write about how things should be, but how they are. In his letters he among other things demanded a full range of rights for all women in the 18th century! He didn't hate morality itself, but how the conventional morality serves the strong and keeps the weak in their place.
  • During the French Revolution, De Sade was appointed an official of the revolutionary government (since he'd been in the Bastille, he must have been a political prisoner, right?) He quickly resigned in protest against the inhumane and unconscionable crimes of the revolutionaries.

If these are intentionally Broken Aesops, then this is Not An Example.

• The Dr. Seuss story "Daisy Head Maisy", which was never published until after his death and was subsequently made into a direct to video cartoon, was about a little girl with a daisy growing out of the top of her head. She becomes a minor celebrity for this, but eventually faces a good amount of hostility from her parents, teachers, peers, and even the local government to remove the flower since it is "unnatural" and strange. After the flower is gone, everything goes back to normal for her. This could be interpreted as "celebrity/notoriety isn't all it's cracked up to be", but it seems more like if you're different, you might get some superficial attention for being "exotic", but you are ultimately unacceptable as an actual person within your community and you must conform. This is probably why the story wasn't initially published, even though it was written several years before Dr. Seuss's death.
  • It might also be that Authority Figures will never let you be who you are and will oppress you into thinking that Status Quo Is God.

Um, yeah; considering the oppressors aren't treated as in the right at any point, methinks it's the first one.

• The perennial picture-book favorite If You Give a Mouse a Cookie seems to teach that you should never give anything to anyone, because if you do, they'll just keep freeloading off you until you stop giving them things. It's like Ayn Rand for kindergartners.
  • This was parodied in an incredibly over-the-top manner in Robot Chicken, where a mother tells her kid a version of the story where giving the mouse a cookie ended up cases a nuclear apocalypse. She then tells him she killed his dad for giving mouse a cookie.
  • The point may be to discourage kids from feeding mice and other stray animals, which can be fairly dangerous for a kid.
    • It's fairly dangerous for the wildlife, too. At best, it leads the animal to lose its ability to fend for itself and what is, overall, a healthy fear of humans if the animal is not going to be domesticated. In its usual form? Well, they're having to kill wildlife for being really dangerous when a human does not cough up the obligatory handout/tribute—which they'd never have been demanding if somebody hadn't started feeding them. You thought those "Don't Feed The Bears" signs were just because the Park Guards were Stop Having Fun Guys?

Apart from the long tangent, this seems to fall under "Just because it happens in a story doesn't mean it's An Aesop".

• Since the Un-Man wasn't going to quit until he'd won, God ordered Ransome to be The Combat Pragmatist and destroy Weston's corpse before that happened. The point was that when defeat is unacceptable and the enemy doesn't play fair, sometimes you've got to screw the rules. (YMMV, of course.)

You guys know you don't have to justify the stuff here, right? Tropes Are Not Bad. Similarly, from the Robert Silverberg entry: "Not necessarily a bad Aesop, mind you, but rather an unconventional one."

• Starship Troopers in the film section, above? Okay, now imagine it's not a satire. The book actually is a love letter to militarization. Unless you serve in the military, you are a second class citizen in the eyes of the government. What's more, not only does no one find this abhorrent, it's presented as some kind of great cultural achievement by the characters. Of course the movie flipped the aesop by taking away the power-armor, super-mechs, and tanks, and turning the MI into cannon fodder.
  • The internal political organization of the human Federation is an utterly trivial matter compared to the REAL Family Unfriendly Aesop of the book: "Racial survival is the only universal morality." In other words, life in the universe is essentially a zero-sum struggle for Lebensraum, and when that is at stake, no species has any rights that any other is bound to respect. Peaceful coexistence is not an option. This is actually part of the doctrine that Federation officer-candidates are taught at the Academy. It cannot be stressed enough that the book, unlike the movie, presents this without the slightest trace of irony or satire. It is plain, pure Author Tract on Heinlein's part.
    • Whereas the Starship Troopers military was well in advance of the 1950s in admitting people of all races, and well in advance of the 2000s in allowing women to serve as combat pilots.
    • Indeed. At worst Starship Troopers in book form could be accused of being anthropocentric in that it made clear that mankind's survival was of greater importance to the body politic than "good relations with aliens." But the book also made very, very clear that absolutely nobody could be denied entry into public service (note: it is public service, not the military, the book states clearly that only a small minority of those who enlist for service do military duty), the protagonist is apparently Filipino (named Juan Rico, speaks Tagalog, so maybe Spanish/Filipino?), and women are not only permitted to do service, but eagerly sought after as pilots. The only conclusion is that Your Mileage May Vary on whether this is really a family unfriendly aesop; after all, being dutiful, patriotic, and egalitarian, and working for the good of humanity, aren't exactly considered family unfriendly morals in most circles.
      • It is disputed as to whether "Federal Service" is "Military Service" or just "Public Service". Word Of God, as stated many years after the publication of the book, states that it is more like civil service, but it has been argued that there is little support in the text for that position, implying the Heinlein changed his mind on the issue sometime after publication.
    • To be more fair, the book does not portray the bugs as evil or the humans as good. They are described as being unable think the same way at a species level due to the differences in their biology. Note that both the humans and the bugs ally with the skinnies, who can apparently understand the thought processes of both. And the humans have planet killing bombs that they rarely use, because they want the bugs to capitulate instead of wiping them out. Humans aren't the good guys but this isn't exactly Warhammer40000.
  • Not that any of this is new, of course; it's just the concept of the citizen-soldier, one which dates backs to Classical Greece, with the relationship between service and citizenship altered somewhat. Traditionally, citizenship comes first and military service is a duty resulting from citizenship, while in Starship Troopers citizenship is a reward, of sorts, for entirely vountary military service. Given that much of Europe made us obligatory military service in the post-war period, that Israel continues to do so today, and that even fairly progressive states like Sweden and Norway make use of an obligatory form which includes non-military service, it's not quite as hellish as it sounds.
    • As of July 1st 2010, Sweden no longer has obligatory military/civil service for either gender, and even before that, the end of the Cold War brought about a severe decline in the number of draftees, to the point where military service was essentially voluntary, though the physical and mental tests were not.

Pulling out this mess of Natter and trying to make something readable out of it.

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is hilarious, but it has to be admitted that from the destruction of Arthur's house at the start of the first book, to the Vogons destroying all possible Earths at the end, that overriding theme, the overriding message, if any to be found, is that bureaucracy is absurd, stupid, and not minutely evil... but always wins. Indeed, it is perhaps the most consistent theme of Douglas Adams' oeuvre.

  • Probably a very British theme. It's basically also the message of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister.

  • Perhaps the message is more "Good/Smart doesn't always win", basically disproving the converse of "Might makes Right". At one point during the series, one of the character remarks about "the incompetent malevolence of the universe." That little phrase seems to sum up the world of Hitchhiker's Guide perfectly.

I'd say that anything based on the final book can't really serve as An Aesop for the series; it intentionally broke the rest of it, and bureaucracy is defeated many times through the series.

have we got anything better? it doesn't ever make sense.

Wait, what about TV Tropes Wiki? There are some tropes that teach bad lessons. Take Ambition Is Evil for example. That trope teaches viewers that trying to improve your lot in life is something only bad guys do.

I'm going to advocate that the 'Zatch Bell' example be included in here, because it really irked me when it happened in that the series and I think it narrowly fits.

Sherry after going to such desperate measures to 'free' Koko from any mind-control or manipulation so she could be true to herself, just goes ahead and forces Zofis to manipulate her anyway? How is that NOT hypocritical? Well Koko's unconscious and has no say in it, before or after she's brainwashed the 2nd time?

Just like the digimon example, it's teaching that manipulating and (in that case) lying to people is ok as long as they don't hurt themselves. So forgetting your troubles and being oblivious is preferable to dealing, striving with your problems like a regular human being? (Sans those who aren't intoxicated in mind-numbing drugs and alcohol)

It's detrimental to Sherry because she's holding back Koko's potential for development by over-coming or coming to terms with such a thing, and thus better allowing her to appreciate what Sherry did for her. It's detrimental to Koko because it's not having her face reality, it's just keeping her ignorant of what happened to her instead of just realizing that it wasn't her fault and it could have gone a million different ways. And it's detrimental to the entire cast because they all just watched and went along with it rather than anyone questioning whether re-brainwashing Koko would be right or not.

Did anyone even consider that Koko well being controlled, was technically still human and not some doll or puppet, (Like the others) and could probably be reasoned or talked to once her book/power was stripped from her? That even under mind control, she still had emotions, (abit warped) and was still capable of feeling love or anguish? (Which she did express with her misinformed view earlier) She was shown eating in one episode, so she still needed food didn't she? That wasn't something that stopped happening. So obviously she still needed the things any other human being would. And Sherry/Zofis stripped her of many of those things when they decided to choose the outcome of her life for her. I have thought and dismayed over this particular topic for so long, and at the very core of it, it's so wrong ,even it it's not a black and white issue. It's essentially negative character-development which people accept for a character that barely got any in the first place. (Despite being the prime motivator of one of the main characters which only served to make her motive all the more shallow)

Removed the Avatar example because that was not an example. It only counts as an example if it was blatantly trying to teach that lying was good, not just showing a character lying without facing consequences

Despite the page saying "Family Unfriendly", there are some example from adult works. I think we should take those examples and move them to a new trope called Cruel And Unusual Aesop. We already did that to Family Unfriendly Death, so I think we should to that to this page too.

I edited out some natter from the Rumpelstiltzkin bit, the text of which is here:

• So, the only reason we need to take a child away from its mother is that there is no actual proof that the person kidnapping it will cause it harm? After he got the promise from her when she was in danger of her life? Given that he had accepted a ring and a necklace earlier, the price is exorbitant. At law, this is called an "unconscionable adhesion contract" and the court can refuse to enforce it on that grounds.
  (Note that in The Three Spinners, where the women who save the heroine get what they asked for: to be treated at the wedding as relatives of hers. They aren't trying to cut her off from her child.)

There is a good point being made here, and some good information, but it belongs HERE, not there.

I think this should be deleted:

The Aesop behind the Phineas and Ferb episode The Wizard of Odd is that you should ignore the explicit directions of trust-worthy, responsible people and instead take the more interesting route.

It's completely false. Isabella was not responsible, given that she was telling everybody to take the yellow brick road. In fact, the road led to some incredibly dangerous places. The Aesop was more along the lines of "It's okay to have fun every now and then" or "Don't limit yourself to one path just because one person told you to, especially if it leads you to creepy forests".

I removed the How I Met Your Mother entry. For one thing, it was a Lost Aesop example and not a Family Unfriendly Aesop, since it involved 2 episodes where Marshall makes opposite choices. But for another, "Understand that not everything needs or has an Aesop. A depiction is not an endorsement.", it really didn't provide opposite Aesops anyway - it just had Marshall change his mind.

In Spongebob Squarepants episode abrasive side spongebob was a spineless person who couldn't say no to anyone because the plot required it, so he orders a product that (called an abrasive side) that lets him tell people no, unfortunately it makes him a huge jerk. in the end [[Anvilicious he tells us the aesop]], which is that he should just let people take advantage of him because that is just part of who he is. do you guys think this is a family unfriendly aesop?