Space Whale Aesop

Lesson learned. Kill all the chickens first.

Buffy: I told one lie. I had one drink.
Giles: Yes, and you were very nearly devoured by a giant demon snake. The words "Let that be a lesson" are a tad redundant at this juncture.

— Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Reptile Boy"

There is an important Aesop being set up for the audience. Events are placed in motion, there's a course of action that needs to be taken or avoided, and there will be tragic consequences of not doing the correct action.

The trouble is realistic consequences, while they may be serious, aren't the sort that can easily be made to fit the Rule of Perception. Maybe it takes decades to show up, if they show up at all. Maybe any subtlety will be lost so that it's hard to show why the action should be taken. Worse, maybe there isn't yet agreement on what the real consequences are. How can we be sure what will happen 3 to 300 years after certain choices are made?

So the determined consequence is improbable and highly unforeseeable to scare you into complying.

When done right, the improbable consequence will remain a close analogy or a sharp metaphor to the probable one — just increased in scale, speed or concreteness. You know irreparable damage will be done, but not what irreparable damage; and so arrange it so audiences can comprehend that unknown consequences is still something to be afraid of.

When done wrong it muddles the connection it has with the action, causing a division on how the message is presented. Usually either a fantastical situation with a mundane consequence or a mundane situation with a fantastical consequence. Often, how well it comes off depends on how close you're looking and (if the consequences are still unknown) what you believe.

This is pretty common when used with Green Aesop as consequences of poor environmentalism tends to result in Gaia's Vengeance. Environmental conservation is an important subject but one that tends to see changing results over a long period of time, and showing a monster preying on polluters makes the issue immediate. Similarly tends to overlap with Abusive Advertising if the message is "Buy our product or you'll meet with a grisly end somehow." A Spoof Aesop can happen when the author is more interested in the space whale than the Aesop.

Named for (and derived from) the plot of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which can best be summed up as "Don't let whales go extinct, or else an alien probe will eradicate the planet."

This is not necessarily an indefensible trope. If your purpose is to both teach the audience a highly applicable lesson and to entertain them with a fantastic scenario, then a Space Whale Aesop is probably the best way to go. And speaking about entertainment, Rule of Funny may also be a huge factor in some more complicated cases. Also, sometimes you just can't fit the realistic consequences of an action into a twenty-three-minute episode or a 120-minute film, so you need to speed things up a bit. It also helps if the fantastic consequences can be interpreted as a metaphor for the realistic ones rather than trying to portray a real-world result.

Compare Clueless Aesop, which is when the message is poorly done due to the limitations of the work (contradicting series precedent, more mature or complex than it could handle). The difference is a Space Whale Aesop can be well done and avoid these problems by being an allegory for something that otherwise wouldn't fit the work. However it can overlap with Clueless Aesop if the fantastical consequences or circumstances introduces aspects that undercut the intended applicability of the allegory.

Not to be confused with Fantastic Aesop. The Fantastic Aesop promotes or discourages a course of action which can't even be attempted in the real world (e.g. "Never use black magic to resurrect your dead dog") by showing a reasonably plausible (in the fictional world) set of consequences ("Poor beloved Tropey Came Back Wrong"). The Space Whale Aesop promotes or discourages a course of action which can be attempted in Real Life ("don't perform nuclear tests") by showing consequences that strain credibility ("radiation from the tests will awaken a giant monster that destroys Tokyo") instead of a more realistic but not quite as dramatic example ("it can burn whole buildings if someone is careless").

Before posting anything think for a second: "Is this supposed to be an Aesop?" If it was not intended as an Aesop then that is an Accidental Aesop.

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Examples Subpages:

• Western Animation

Other Examples:

Advertising

• A series of DirecTV Network advertisements intentionally invokes this trope for comedy with such aesops as:
  • "Switch to DirecTV or you'll get angry, go play raquetball, get your eye injured and get an eyepatch which thugs will use as a reason to beat you up, knock you unconscious and leave you in a ditch." So remember kids, go satellite for your safety!
  • "If you have cable, you'll pound your table in frustration with how terrible it is, which will cause your daughter to copy that behavior and punch the lunch out of her principal's hands when she gets older, which will get her expelled, which will cause her to hang out with street toughs, which will cause her to marry a street tough. 'Don't have a grandson with a dog collar.'"
  • If you have cable, you'll throw your remote in frustration, which will just barely miss your wife's head, which will make her assume you have anger issues, which will make her leave you, which will leave you all alone, which will make you grow a beard and become an animal hoarder.
  • If you have cable, you'll get depressed, go to self-help seminars, get motivated enough to go to Vegas, where you lose everything and are forced to sell your hair to a wig shop to make some money.
  • If you have cable, you'll get unhappy, go to Happy Hour, get happy enough to try a Turkish Bath House, where you'll meet Charlie Sheen and start re-enacting scenes from Platoon.
  • As a defense attorney, if you don't have DirecTV, you'll be distracted, which means your work will suffer, which will cause your innocent client to get convicted, which will cause him to become obsessed with your failure to get him cleared, which will cause him to blow up your house when he gets out.
  • If you have cable, the massive price of the bill will make you feel powerless. So you'll want to feel empowered, which will lead you to signing up for karate classes, which will lead you to become a superhero known as the "Fist of Goodness" which will have you jumping on rooftops. And when you jump on rooftops, you'll crash through a skylight into a dinner party.
  • If you wait a while for the cable guy, you'll become bored, look out your window and see things you shouldn't see (the disposal of a body, in this case), so you'll need to vanish, fake your death, dye your eyebrows and attend your own funeral as a guy named Phil Schiffly.
  • If you pay too much for cable, you'll get depressed, stay at home a lot, and lose your job. The new guy will mess up at doing your job (Zoo worker), accidentally let a gorilla escape, and said gorilla will body slam you while you pick up the paper the next morning.
  • When your cable goes on the fritz, it causes you to be tense, which in turn means you have trouble falling asleep at night, which as a delivery driver causes you to fall asleep behind the wheel and have a car crash. You have to survive in the wilderness and your only food to eat are these wild berries. You eat them then end up chasing imaginary butterflies into something highly illegal that you just happen to stumble upon.
  • When the tech support for your cable company keeps you on hold for a long time, you begin to feel trapped and have a desire to free. So you decide to go hang gliding. But in the process, you crash into some power lines and cause a power wide blackout in your city, causing crime to spike and culminating with your dad getting punched over a can of soup.
• Buy Duracell, or you'll trip down a hill in the woods, become entangled in a tent that gets set on fire, and roll into a mud puddle.
• An insurance ad indicates that if you have the wrong car insurance, not only will your experience with the company be much more annoying than it otherwise would be, but your girlfriend will break up with you in favor of... a pig.
• "Never Say No to Panda": Buy Panda Cheese, or a panda will appear before you and destroy whatever you're doing to Buddy Holly's "True Love Ways".
  Nostalgia Critic: This is how every one of them goes. And it's kinda scary as hell! The way he appears out of nowhere, the way he stares at you, that eerily creepy song, everything about this is a world of no. Most of the time it's him destroying something, but here it's attempted murder!
• "No Pressure": Agree to cut carbon emissions, or someone will press a button and BLOW YOU TO BLOODY BITS! So Anvilicious it's ridiculous. Many of the YouTube commenters (amongst other people) have taken the message to be "do as we say or we'll murder you".^note Not to mention the fact that whatever they're using to blow you to bloody bits probably puts out a ton of carbon emissions, thus wrecking up the message along with the planet.
• From PETA: Fish eaters may experience turnabout.◊ Sharks eat humans, so we should voluntarily stop eating fish? Surely we should eat more fish, especially shark fin soup!
• Use Poo-pourri, and it will save your relationship. Don't use it, and you'll set your girlfriend's bathroom on fire and suffocate, go to a meeting with toilet paper stuck in your trousers, your boyfriend's grandma will tell everyone you pooped in a bush, and children will post pictures of Santa on the toilet on Instagram.
• In California, there have been some PSAs in designed to discourage texting and driving, the concept being that texting and driving will turn you into a zombie.
  • In a somewhat similar vein, a road safety PSA promises that wearing your seat belt will protect you from traffic accidents and zombies. Okay...
• Caprisun's "Respect the pouch" ads. Throw away your punch pouches with reverence or else you'll be the victim of a nightmarish Forced Transformation!
• Buy and play Sega Saturn, otherwise a judo-expert will come and beat the ever-loving shit out of you.
• The message of one hoax/parody PSA is right in the title of this article about it: stay in school or else you will die a bloody death, specifically from landmines in a well-marked danger zone. (Could be hyperbolically justified if the implication was that the characters skipped so much school they were actually illiterate.)
• Eat Sultana Bran, or else, at school, you will not be able to hear your teacher properly and you'll hallucinate that everything has fur and become illiterate.
• The Wilkins Coffee commercials that Jim Henson made in the 1950s were approaching this with obvious irony long before irony in advertising was a thing. "People who don't like Wilkins Coffee just blow up sometimes!"
• A positive (albeit still amusingly weird) example of a Space Whale Aesop. Apparently, drinking Coca-Cola will turn you into the ultimate altruist.
• Vivo Fibra destrave's line of Brazilian commercials follows the logic that, if you don't buy it, elements of what you are watching/playing will invade and destroy your home. Among them we have coyboys invading your home, orcs invading your home, jungle man invading your home, etc.

Anime and Manga

• Attack on Titan: Racism is bad! Because people of minority races are immune to the Government Conspiracy's magic memory wiping that they use to cover up where the man-eating giants are coming from! It's possible this was meant to show how some often-persecuted minorities are more aware of when governments are being oppressive.
• Batman, from its story "The Revenge of Professor Gorilla": don't abuse apes in circuses and in scientific research, because then when your mad science accidentally gives them superhuman intelligence and psychic powers they'll try to exterminate humanity.
• Parodied in the Cowboy Bebop episode "Toys in the Attic". "Clean out your fridge or its contents will become a Blob Monster and start attacking people."
• The final arc of Earth Maiden Arjuna features a Broken Green Space Whale Aesop. "Save the environment, but don't use advanced human science to save the environment from human-produced garbage, or else giant worm monsters will exploit your invention to send corrupt modern society back to the Stone Ages." If you look more closely, though, you see something different. Using human science isn't the problem. The heroes use human science to aid in their efforts and it works great. The issue is that humans weren't attentive enough and so things have now got to a point where human science is not enough and the earth basically has to go through a cycle of destroy and repair (there's a very strong analogy to the inflammatory response in humans). So really the aesop is "If you don't save the environment while you can, the Earth will revolt and take over repairing itself, while humans will be powerless to do anything except watch."
• Junji Ito is pretty fond of these:
  • Gyo has the Aesop "Remember to acknowledge the atrocities your country was responsible for in the past, or else the ghosts of their victims will use farting robot zombie fish to destroy you!"
  • Remina is all about how you should think for yourself instead of blindly obeying your elders and superiors. . . because if you don't, you'll be eaten along with the rest of the world by a giant monster from outer space.
  • If the protagonist's nightmare is any indication, the intended Aesop of The Enigma of Amigara Fault is "persecuted indigenous peoples deserve your respect, because otherwise they'll use human-shaped holes to trap the descendants of the people who mistreated them in the past and turn them into Noodle People."
• Anvilicious "revenge is wrong" moral in Naruto reaches this territory by the end of Pain invasion arc, when Naruto confronts Nagato after the battle. His crimes so far include killing Jiraiya and Kakashi as well as many Konoha ninjas, almost killing Hinata and turning entire Konoha into rubble. Naruto himself admits that he would love to kill him but refuses to. After some pep talk Nagato performs a Heel–Face Turn and uses Sacrificial Revival Spell to bring all dead people in the village back to life. Lesson ends up being:"If you refuse to kill the bad guy all his crimes will be cancelled, and bad guy will die anyway ".
• Paranoia Agent: Take responsibility for your own actions and don't lie, or you'll conjure a tulpa with your Psychic Powers and almost destroy your city.
• The underlying lesson of Pretty Cure seems to be "it's good to have friends who are different from you, so you can defeat monsters from another dimension." It gets spelled out in the first DX movie, in which the girls are fighting a monster with an Assimilation Plot on its mind and give a rousing speech about how their differences make them stronger because everyone brings something different to the table.
  • The distant spinoff Power of Hope ~PreCure Full Bloom~ has the message that human selfishness and laziness cause climate change, and because of that, the collective actions of all eight billion people on Earth will piss off the local Guardian Angel enough to make her overrun one city in Japan with shadow monsters. So don't contribute to global warming, or this could happen to you.
• An episode of the hentai Sex Craft demonstrates that you shouldn't break up with the guy you're dating just because he's too shy to make the first move, because... if you do that, his unquenched desire will escape his body in the form of an evil ghost thing and go on a rape spree.
• Squid Girl teaches us not to pollute the ocean or a cute, harmless Squid Girl will come to the surface and try to invade it! Wait, that's every reason to actually do it...
• Tobacco Chan: Don't smoke or you'll wind up with a Moe Anthropomorphism of a cigarette who won't leave you alone.
• Trigun: Don't practise slavery, otherwise a Human Alien Ubermensch will slaughter half of your species with his giant knife arms.
• ×××HOLiC pretty much runs on these kinds of aesops since it assumes All Myths Are True: don't lie or you'll get so paralyzed by them that you'll be run over by a car, don't cut your toenails at night or a giant insect will chop your head off, don't kill someone or your act of murder will be reenacted on every photograph and video that has you in it…etc.

Asian Animation

• BoBoiBoy: The moral of "Game On!" is "don't play too much video games." The consequence that BoBoiBoy and Gopal face for disobeying it is getting sucked into the game they play by a villain.
• The Motu Patlu episode "Snow Man" is about Dr. Jhatka creating a satellite to melt the snow being caused by global warming, only for it to bring to life a snowman that had been built by some children earlier and torments the main characters. The moral of the episode, as delivered by Patlu at the end, is along the lines of "don't do anything that may cause global warming, or it will create a monster that will attack you".

Comic Books

• Chick Tracts do this by giving his transgressions explicitly magical consequences, since the real consequences of the behavior he warns against are both intangible and heavily disputed. And worse, the author seems to honestly believe these are all perfectly realistic consequences.
  • For instance, "don't let your kids play Dungeons & Dragons, or they might become actual witches, or commit suicide because their character died" is probably the most famous example (who knows what he thinks of World of Warcraft).
  • Another strip seems to suggest that you shouldn't go to parties because the bartender might actually be Satan, and yet another that believing in Santa and the Easter Bunny will turn children into God-hating, terrorist serial killers.
  • Chick was keeping pace with the times: his tracts suggested that reading Harry Potter will make you into a full-fledged Satan worshiper with demon-summoning powers.
• The E.C. horror comics frequently used this trope to demonstrate the consequences of many immoral acts, ranging from "Don't screw your business partners" (or when you try to escape to South America, your plane will become trapped in the web of a Giant Spider), to "Don't cheat on your wife" (because when she and your mistress find out about each other, they may decapitate you and use your head for a bowling ball and your eyeballs for golf balls), to "Don't murder your spouse" (they will come back from the dead some time later and murder you back).
• The Gargoyles comic plays this for laughs when a time-traveling Brooklyn breaks the fourth wall to teach a lesson to the audience:
  Mary: Don't you know what is going to happen?
  Brooklyn: Too much TV, too few history books. (points at the reader) You never know when a giant flaming magical time-traveling bird is gonna swallow you whole and spit you out in the tenth century. So hit those books, kids!
• Grimm dipped into this trope frequently, due to its method of having the main character try to teach someone an "important lesson" via reading a fairy tale. One of the biggest examples being the Rumpelstiltskin, when an unwed teenage mother-to-be is taught to not get an abortion (a fairly controversial Aesop to begin with) via a story about a woman who gets threatened with death unless she can spin straw into gold and is forced to promise her firstborn to the title dwarf unless she can guess his name. Only it's a trick, and by saying his name in an attempt to save her baby, she instead releases Rumpelstiltskin from his curse (which is then passed on to her baby). And the lesson to all this is apparently that if you're ever in a position where you're forced to choose between giving up your firstborn baby to a stranger or die, you're actually screwed either way.
• Johnny the Homicidal Maniac does this for laughs.
  Johnny: Kids, don't do drugs. They'll only turn you into a hideous little freak troll-baby with exploding eyeballs.
• Lobo: Lobo: I Quit is another deliberate example played as comedy. Shortly after Jonas Glim lectures Lobo on the dangers of his constant smoking, Lobo gains a wheezing cough and a shadow on his chest X-ray, suggesting not even his healing factor can keep up with the damage he's doing. At the end of the issue, Lobo has completely cured himself of his habit, a fed-up Jonas slugs him in the stomach for accidentally punching him—and Lobo coughs up the harmonica he swallowed in an earlier fight with a street gang dressed as a Salvation Army band; turns out he never had cancer in the first place, to which he promptly celebrates by smoking the tobacco the rest of the gang was smuggling. The moral can best be summed up as "Smoking is bad for you, unless you're the Main Man".
• Perhaps lampshading the trope, My Little Pony: Friends Forever #28 features a unicorn whose magic talent is a seemingly useless spell that turns flesh and muscle invisible (though leaving their skeletons visible). The talent proves itself useful, and provides the issue's Aesop, when the main characters encounter a flying "Mirrorca", an orca with a mirror-like skin, that can only be defeated by turning its skin invisible and making it vulnerable to magic attacks.
• Super Agent Jon Le Bon completely inverts this in episode 4, by teaching to readers that bees need to be preserved and avoid going extinct. During a story about stopping a false prophecy for an apocalypse and the cult trying to enact it. Even Big Beaver, the one responsible for said prophecy, states that his plan/hoax has nothing to do with the bees dying out.
• Superman:
  • A Mind-Switch in Time teaches you should get real therapy to fix your psychological issues instead of resorting to emotion-eating metahumans who could become drunk with power.
  • Titano's Post-Crisis origin says that animal testing is wrong because it causes the animal unnecessary pain and makes them grow gigantic and wreck the city.
• 2000 AD: Played for laughs in Tharg's Terror Tales stories. Smoking weed will turn you and your friends into zombies, being a horndog will make Starfish Aliens rape you to death, going to a rock concert will result in monster cops cracking down on everyone, etc.
• Uncanny Avengers gives us "Don't be racist or else giant men from space will appear and blow up the Earth." Odin even gives his son an extended speech about how while the Celestials pulled the trigger, it was ultimately humanity's own inability to stop fighting over petty differences that caused them to deem us a "failed experiment." Though there were a few extenuating circumstances, such as one of those giant men having been murdered by a human mutant was what kicked off the crisis.
• There was a Wolverine arc which involved a South American country with a ruler who suffered acute superhero envy backed up by an ex-Nazi cyborg. Either of them sound like an awesome main villain? The final villain was evil crack from the dawn of time which drove its victims insane and, at one point, absorbed Wolvie into its horrifically bloated gooey true form. The message was Drugs Are Bad. It even gave us The Kingpin expressing distaste for drug dealing, making it not just a Space Whale Aesop, but an Anvilicious Space Whale Aesop.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes riffed on the traditional "scare tales" for children, namely "Don't make that face or it'll stick like that." After hearing that warning from his mother, Calvin was thrilled at the prospect of becoming a horrific freak. He only stopped making the face when he realised that people weren't as shocked as he'd hoped.
• Dilbert: Invoked by the main character in this comic. Apparently, this is the only way to assure his clueless managers make reasonable decisions.
  Dilbert: If we don't upgrade our servers, a herd of trolls will attack our headquarters.
  Manager: No trolls!

Fairy Tales

• There are great many fairy tales and ancient legends about how you should be nice to strangers, especially because they might secretly be angels/gods/witches/whatever who will use their magic to grant those who treated them kindly with fantastical rewards beyond their wildest dreams while inflicting horrifying curses on those who treated them cruelly, selfishly, or apathetically.
• "The Boy Who Cried Wolf'': Don't lie, or else a wolf will eat your sheep, and possibly you too.
• "Chicken Little'': Don't jump to conclusions, or a fox will eat your friends, and possibly you too.
• "Goldilocks": Don't break into other people's houses, or else bears will chase you away.
• "Little Otik": Don't wish for offspring or else you will be eaten by a baby monster.
• "Little Red Riding Hood": Don't talk to strangers and/or stay on the path (depending on whether Little Red goes off the path in the version you're reading or not), or else a wolf will eat your grandma and possibly you too.
• "The Three Little Pigs": Put effort into the structures you build, or else a wolf will either eat you or come very close to eating you.

Fan Works

• The End of Ends: You can never truly change who you are, and even if you do change, you are who you are and that can't change. It had to take an Omnicidal Maniac who was destroying the universe to hammer that into Terra's head.
• Invoked by Makarov in Fairy Tail and the Beanstalk where after seeing the guilds' children throw away their beans so they wouldn't eat them and skip ahead to dessert, Makarov sets up a giant Beanstalk in Magnolia knowing the kids would try and climb it, then pretends to be a giant that eats fairies. After they get away from the "giant", Makarov chops down the beanstalk and tells them to always eat their vegetables unless they want this to happen again.
• This fan video for Incredibles 2 has its moral said at the end: "Don't eat too much candy, or else you'll get sick or worse, turn into a giant Gummi bear."
• The lesson of one plot arc in the The Avengers fanfic "Multicolored," which deals with Bruce Banner's Dark and Troubled Past and the psychological aspects of the Hulk, is "be sensitive to other people's PTSD, because if you insist on dredging up traumatizing subjects and trigger them too hard, they could turn into a giant technicolor rage monster."
• Read the Fine Print (Evangelion): Do NOT sign strange contracts you find on the internet because you might accidentally sell your soul.
• In Shadow Snark:
  Sometimes you have to tell your friends they suck at everything, otherwise they'll blow up a laundromat.
• The Wrath Of Topaz: If you prank somebody and it ends with them being punished for someone else's death, your victim will come after you in twelve years, steal your stuff, destroy your weapons, and then murder you.
• In-universe in Thanks, but no after the akuma Jadeite is defeated and exposed as Lila, she is further exposed by Scarabella about lying of being her best friend and a reserved Miraculous hero. Nadja ends the report telling kids not to lie unless they want Hawkmoth to come after them.
• You Got HaruhiRolled! gives the moral of always being nice to minor characters, lest they befriend the bad guys and destroy the world. Also a Spoof Aesop because it's a Crack Fic.

Films — Animation

• Alice in Wonderland: In-Universe, Tweedledum and Tweedledee tell Alice not to be curious, then recite "The Walrus and the Carpenter", in which curious oysters get Eaten Alive by the eponymous walrus and carpenter.
  Alice: "A very good moral... if you happen to be an oyster."
• The beginning of Beauty and the Beast: Don't refuse shelter to elderly strangers in inclement weather, or they'll turn you into a monster and your servants into Animate Inanimate Objects.
• Coraline: Be grateful for what you have or else a spider creature from another dimension will try to eat you.
• Invoked by Grug in The Croods, who thinks curiosity is bad, writes stories in which characters who are curious die.
• Frankenweenie has the moral, delivered by a teacher, that science is morally neutral—whether it turns out good or bad depends on how you use it. The thing is, it portrays that message very literally: the main character resurrects his dog out of love and the dog is fine, if still less than fully alive. The Designated Villains do the same experiment to win a science fair, and all of their pets Came Back Wrong.
• How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World: Humans should get along, because if they don't, the dragons won't come back.
• Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius: "Don't talk to strangers or aliens will kidnap every adult in town, including your parents." Or "appreciate all that your parents do for you (or they'll be abducted by aliens and fed to a giant chicken)."
• Mars Needs Moms: If you obey your parents too well they'll be abducted by aliens.

Films — Live-Action

• The film version of 2010: The Year We Make Contact is interpreted this way at its end by the protagonist, Dr. Heywood Floyd. The events at Jupiter surrounding the Monolith and HAL, leading to Jupiter igniting into a second Sun for the solar system, have resulted in the United States and the Soviet Union standing down from impending nuclear war. As a result, he sees whatever intelligence that sent the Monolith as an overseer for life in the solar system. Both on Earth, and seemingly now on Europa. The message that heralded Jupiter's ignition expressly states that humanity can have the other moons of Jupiter, but Europa is off-limits.
  Dr. Heywood Floyd: We are only tenants on this world. We have been given a new lease—and a warning—from the landlord.
• The Abyss (director's cut): Yet again, but with awesome special effects. Also: If you make up with your estranged wife, then you can prevent submarine aliens from killing everyone.
• The Arrival: Take care of the environment, or aliens will come and start a hostile terraforming program because you don't deserve to live here anymore.
• Avatar gets its strong pro-conservation message across by inventing the world of Pandora, a flawless alien paradise untainted by technology. On Pandora, deforestation is depicted as evil because it nearly leads to the destruction of a sentient organic mind-linking supercomputer that lets the resident aliens communicate with their dead relatives, and nearly everything that humans had to develop through technological advances—medicine, transportation, shelter, and even data storage—is naturally provided by the living ecosystem. It's easy for the Na'vi to preach about respecting the environment when their environment apparently supplies them with all the perks of an industrialized society.
• Bad Hair: Ladies, your natural hair is beautiful as it is! Don't try to change it in any way, and especially don't get hair implants, because those hair implants will possess your body and drain the blood from anyone that gets in their path.
• The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms: Nuclear testing is bad because it will awaken giant man-eating dinosaurs carrying deadly prehistoric illnesses that were frozen in suspended animation. Variants on this anti-nuclear theme with unlikely direct consequences would be copied by many, many films following this one (most famously, Godzilla).
• Birdemic: If you contribute to global warming, birds will develop acidic spit and WWII bomber engines, and attack people at random.
• The horror anthology film Body Bags does this in the segment "Hair". Being so insecure about hair loss that one is willing to try out mystery experiments will result in becoming a host for parasitic wormlike aliens who will snack on your brain.
• Bride of the Monster teaches us that if you toy with nature (or, as the film puts it, "tamper in God's domain"), you might end up blowing up in a nuclear mushroom cloud.
• 1965's The Crack In The World warns in the utmost seriousness that atomic testing could literally split the Earth in two.
• Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life, don't ever look at even the softest of softcore porn or your girlfriend will dump you, you will suddenly suck at whatever you were good at before and the kids you thought were cool will beat the shit out of you.
• The Day After Tomorrow: Cut down on greenhouse-gas emissions or the Earth will enter a new ice age and New York City will freeze solid—By the end of this week. And deadly sub-zero frost lines that instantly turn anyone into a Human Popsicle will hunt you down! Furthermore, in case that wasn't a tangible enough deterrent, said ice age will also cause wolves to escape from a zoo and come after you and your family. Also (once you've learned your lesson), Earth's entire climate will start being nicer to you again if you'll start being nicer to third world countries.
• Daybreakers makes this work by making it a rather broad Aesop: "Conserve your resources and be nice to the people who produce them for you, or your society will descend into chaos and you'll end up a lot like all these starving vampires." Granted, you won't be starving for blood specifically, and that descent into chaos probably won't involve a Zombie Apocalypse like theirs; in all other respects, however, the point stands.
• The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) warns that atomic testing could send the Earth spinning out of orbit towards the Sun. The bad science is somewhat offset by the 'documentary-style' realism of the story.
• The Day the Earth Stood Still: the original called for humanity to abandon its reckless nuclear aspirations if it ever wants to travel into space without getting obliterated by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. The remake? Aliens just want to obliterate humanity to "help the environment". In the original, Klaatu even states that his race didn't care in the slightest what humans did on their own planet…but human affairs officially became their problem when the first space missions were launched with humanity capable of creating nuclear weapons. Seems the reason for the change might be, that real life humanity got the message from the original and decided to give up space travel beyond low Earth orbit.
• The pterosaurs in The Dinosaur Project are said to have left their own habitat because of environmental damage. So, deforestation will cause undiscovered predators to emerge and eat cryptozoologists (and offscreen villagers).
• Standard in horror movies with a Sex Signals Death message, since showing real negative consequences of sex is often non-dramatic (even deadly STDs take years or decades to kill) or, worse, X-rated. These aesops range from "have sex and Freddy or Jason will kill you" to "the Sealed Evil in a Can can only be opened by two people having sex on top of it (even if they don't know what it is) to "if you have sex, then you will shock and horrify your six-year-old sister whom you didn't know was watching, causing her to becoming depressed and making her vulnerable to Puppeteer Parasite".
• Eli Roth films: stay at home, around people you know, because if you go anywhere on vacation, you will either catch a flesh-eating virus or be dissected alive for sport.
• Gamera vs. Zigra: Pollute the oceans and a Nazi space fish will attack the planet, supported by a Brainwashed Japanese woman in Fanservicey clothes. Also our only hope for surviving this attack is a giant monster. There are, shall we say, certain issues with trying to mix philosophical discussions with Kaiju beating the snot out of each other.
• Godzilla:
  • The original film and its fellow giant monster movies can be perceived this way: The use and/or testing of nuclear weapons invariably mutates ordinary creatures into horrendous monsters that are almost as destructive as, well, a nuclear weapon. (But against your side!) Of course, the Japanese audience of Godzilla didn't need to be persuaded against atomic bombs, so that particular movie is as much an allegory of the known effects as it is a warning; the American imitations are thus closer to this trope.
  • Mothra vs. Godzilla: Take care of the earth and don't be a greedy jerk or two giant moths will destroy your city.
  • Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!: Don't forget the sins of your past or else a giant atomic zombie dinosaur powered by Vengeful Ghosts will come to annihilate your country.
  • Godzilla (2014). As usual to the franchise's origins as a metaphor. Building up nuclear arsenals results in the awakening of ancient creatures who feed off of radiation, and any attempt to harness or fight back nature is met with a swift fate—and in the end, only the balance of nature itself (Godzilla) saves the world.
• The Happening. Preserve the environment, or else the plants may get pissed and release a deadly neurotoxin into the air that makes you kill yourself.
• Harmless is about a sentient Porn Stash that harms its owner's family. Say what you will about the moral itself, but it breaks down somewhat since real porn stashes, um, aren't sentient.
• Lippy: Don't shoplift, or else you'll be made to cut off one of your fingers, and then be made to join a group of clowns.
• Mary Poppins: The main moral of the story is to realize the value of work and play... because if you don't value play, then your kids' new nanny will turn out to have powers, and when you tell her off for using said powers to play with them instead of teaching them important lessons, she'll trick you into taking them to work, and then you'll get fired. On the other hand, if you don't value work, you'll be forced to levitate forever and need to deliberately get sad to go back down.
• The Naked Witch: Treat your lover well, or she will turn into a witch and murder your descendants.
• Nanny McPhee: The eponymous nanny invokes this by using her powers to teach lessons:
  • From Nanny McPhee:
    • Go to bed when told and say, "please", or else you'll be unable to control your body, and nearly catapult your baby sister into a pot of stew.
    • Don't play sick to get out of getting up, or you'd be glued to your mattress all day, get sick for real, have to take tarry medicine that moves on its own, and be fed thin gruel with potato peelings in.
    • Don't be an aloof dad, or else your kids will become out-of-control and a babysitter with supernatural powers will come over.
  • From Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang:
    • Don't fight with your cousins, and apologise if you do, or you'll be forced to beat yourself up (literally).
    • Have faith... in your ability to get by without a supernatural nanny.
• The made-for-television holiday film "The Night They Saved Christmas" is not terrible, but it's based on this kind of Aesop: Don't drill in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge because you might harm Santa's workshop. And then it goes ahead and breaks its own Space Whale Aesop!
• Passed over rather quickly in Pacific Rim: Geizler mentions that the Kaiju's creators' initial attempt to take over the planet failed owing to a lack of compatibility with the atmosphere, but now that humans have sufficiently polluted our planet, it's ripe for a batshit insane monster takeover. Go figure.
• Plan 9 from Outer Space: We must control our urge to develop a Bigger Stick in our Lensman Arms Race, or a small group of incompetent aliens will attempt to wipe out our species by raising the dead so they'll attack us, thus preventing us from developing a bomb that can destroy the entire universe.
• Prophecy teaches us that if you let paper mills pollute nature, it will create killer mutant bears that will hunt you down.
• Reefer Madness is an interesting example because, while the effects of marijuana were not widely known when the film was made, the guesses the film made are known today to be an exaggeration at the best of times, and often plain wrong.
• The Trope Namer: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The intended aesop is "don't assume you can use up Earth's natural resources without consequence, since someday your survival might depend on them," but an early draft involving a plague in the 24th century whose cure was lost in the destruction of the rain forests was considered unworkable, and director Leonard Nimoy found whales to be majestic, so the much more entertaining aesop of "save the whales or else a gigantic Space Whale probe will appear out of nowhere to destroy Earth" was born.
• The Steam Experiment: We have to take global warming seriously because if you lock six strangers in a sauna, they'll kill each other.
• Teeth evokes an old Space Whale Aesop: "Don't rape a girl, or the teeth in her vagina will bite off your dick." Also, "...and the audience will cheer her on because you deserve it!"
• Invoked in-universe in Watchmen. Adrian's message to earth: stop fighting or Dr. Manhattan will come back from space and make you DIE.
• Waterworld basically shows the potential consequences of global warming by exaggerating the whole "flooded coasts" thing.
• W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism: Have sex, or else you will become a psychopathic murderer.

Folklore

• Parents sometimes use these to scare their kids straight.
  • The Krampus of Central Europe is one such bogeyman with his own page on this wiki.
  • The residents of Jasper Fforde's "Cautionary Valley" come from these scare-tales. Fforde's interpretation of the Scissor Man is fairly tame, though. He's a pussycat compared to the one in Hogfather — an emu-like being composed entirely of scissors.
  • The Ancient Romans famously used Hannibal Barca as their resident bogeyman, telling their naughty children that "Hannibal ante portas" (Hannibal is at the door). It must be a bit of a let-down for one of the greatest military minds in history to be reduced to a children's fable.
  • Sometimes, parents tell their kids not to swallow seeds, or else a plant will grow in their stomach.
• In his book Wisdom of the Elders: Sacred Native Stories of Nature, David Suzuki recounts a Chewong fable of the perils of disregarding the natural order. A childless man and wife were walking through the forest when they spotted a squirrel. In their loneliness, they unwisely disregarded that this animal was part of the natural order, and brought it home with them as a pet. Suddenly, the hundred-foot-tall snake god Taloden asal burst forth from her eternal subterranean slumber and ate their souls. The end.
• One Maori legend has the Aesop "don't speak ill of the moon, because it's actually sentient and will make you live on its surface forever".
• Many Urban Legends have a moral, and if they do, they usually qualify:
  • The one about the couple who hired a teenage girl to babysit their baby, but she accidentally killed him due to mistaking him for a turkey because she was high. The moral is either "Drugs Are Bad" or "Don't trust strangers with your kids".
  • Various urban legends about horrible things found in food started as people trying to put others off the food, especially if it's fast food.
  • The one where the woman dies in a tanning bed has the implied moral of "don't be vain".

Literature

Authors

• Phil Roxbee Cox's cautionary tales end with this:
  • Don't be a bully or you'll be abducted by aliens.
  • Don't steal or you'll be Eaten Alive by a snake.
  • Don't tell lies or a Giant Wall of Watery Doom will wash you far away.
  • Don't be greedy or you'll end up in a herd of Messy Pigs.
  • Say "please" or an eagle will take you to its nest.
• Roald Dahl was rather fond of these.
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Don't be a glutton, a gum chewer, a spoiled brat, or a TV fanatic, or you will get sucked up a pipe, inflated into a blueberry, fall into a trash chute, or get shrunk, respectively.
  • The Magic Finger: Don't hunt ducks, or you will wake one day as a winged human the size of a duck while the ducks will become humanoid and hunt you for sport.
  • Matilda: Don't be a mean teacher, or your smartest student will develop psychic powers with which to torment you.
  • The Twits: Don't be jerks to your pets, or they will trick you into gluing yourself to the floor and then you will shrink into nothing.
  • The Witches: Don't trust strangers, because they might be witches who want to commit genocide on all children.
  • Revolting Rhymes: Jack and the Beanstalk: Bathe every day so giants can't smell you. Guess you'll have to deal with those witches (who are attracted to human scent, and so bathing gives you away).
  • Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator: Don't be foolish with medication, or you'll either be forced to stay seven hours in the toilet per day, or de-age into a "minus" (i.e. somebody who is not born yet).
  • Revolting Rhymes: Goldilocks and the Three Bears: Respect others' property and don't climb into someone else's bed with grimy shoes, or else a bear will eat you.
• Dr. Seuss:
  • Steak for Supper: Don't say anything while walking home from school (yes, really) or else some made-up creatures might like the sound of that information and follow you home despite you and your family not being able to cater to them.
  • The Strange Shirt Spot: Stay out of the dirt, or else you'll get a strange blue stain on your shirt that sticks to everything you clean it with.
  • Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose: Don't be a bad guest, or else you'll end up stuffed and mounted on a wall.

Works

• The Adventures of Pinocchio: "Don't skip school and have endless fun (that is, if you don't find school fun), or else you'll change into a donkey." Then again, "Don't slack off or you'll turn into an ass" is a pretty valid aesop.
• Adventures Of The Rope Warrior tells us you should exercise regularly and eat right. That way aliens can't harvest your body for the impurities a sedentary life inflicts to fuel their intergalactic drug trade, and the Space U.N. won't decide destroying the entire planet is an acceptable price to pay for getting rid of the drug dealers.
• Animorphs: The moral of Book #28 seems to be "Don't support slaughterhouses or animal testing, because they may be alien plots to mind control you through the beef you eat." This was the work of the book's ghostwriter, causing K.A. Applegate to write a final chapter to the book where the Animorphs happily learn nothing from the adventure and go out for burgers.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: a lot of stories that use this trope as their premise basically end with "A.I. research is dangerous, since A.I. will invariably become homicidal tyrants determined to enslave or destroy the human race." Parodied in John Sladek's Roderick At Random, which is told from the point of view of the world's one artificially intelligent robot. One conversation he has goes (roughly):
  Scientist: Well, of course we can't risk researching A.I. We've run simulations, and it could turn out they get so smart that they realize they don't need humans and decide to wipe us out.
  Roderick: Or, they could get so smart they realize wiping out other species is pointless.
  Scientist: Oh, I didn't say there were no counterarguments.
• In Arthurian Legend, the origin of Merlin involves his mother (a nun) being raped by an Incubus at night... because she had an argument with her sister and neglected to say her nightly prayers that night. So don't forget to say your prayers, and don't argue with your siblings, or you'll be raped by demons. This may be a case of beliefs changing over time; the moral would make sense for people who believed that demons are real and saying prayers really will protect you from them, which people likely did back when the legend was born.
• From the children's book A Bad Case of Stripes, the moral is to not let peer pressure prevent you from being yourself, especially if it comes to your favorite food, or you will become a multi-colored, multi-patterned, multi-growthed monstrosity that changes to the whims of everyone else.
• Bang Bang I Hurt the Moon is often criticized for its rather weird Aesop: Don't play with guns, because if you do, even if pretend, you might shoot the Weird Moon and cause it to fall from the sky.
• In the "Beauty and the Beast" Setting Update Beastly, don't play cruel pranks on the ugly, weird, unpopular girl in school because she might actually be a witch and put a curse on you.
• The Bible, Books of Kings: Don't make fun of someone's baldness because they might call upon God to summon bears that will maul you and your friends.
• From the kids' story Bruin the Truant Bear, don't play truant or else a bird will hang you from the TV antenna.
• The Candy Shop War has the rather straightforward don't take candy from strangers as its message. It's even flat out said by one of the characters in the books—who then explains that these strangers might be wizards who are handing out magical candy and can very easily kill you. It also doesn't help that those strangers owned a candy shop and a ice cream truck. Almost makes it into a Space Dentist's Aesop: Don't eat candy or wizards will kill you. Who needs cavities when you have that?
• Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants: Don't make fun of people's names, or else they'll shrink you to the size of a bug and make you change your name to something absurd to make themselves feel better. Although this could just be a way of saying, "Don't make fun of people, because what goes around comes around." This is lampshaded by the characters at the end as the only time their story had a moral, but the narrator then points out the Fantastic Aesop driving the entire story: never hypnotize your principal or he'll believe he's a superhero every time he hears the sound of someone snapping their fingers.
• You should take away from Carrie that you don't ever, ever, EVER laugh at the misfortune of others. Or actively pull pranks on those showing abundant signs of being really close to the edge. Seriously, don't, they'll kill you with their telekinesis. At least, that's the only real comeuppance Carrie's bullies received.
• The book Chocolate Fever by Robert Smith does this. It's about a boy who eats chocolate with everything and then one day he breaks out in a chocolate rash.
• The Chocolate Touch by Patrick Skene Catling: "Don't eat too much chocolate, or everything that touches your lips will turn to chocolate."
• Consider Her Ways by John Wyndham: genetic engineering has the potential to wreak enormous destruction on human reproduction, such as the extermination of all men. This would be bad because women would restructure society into a dictatorship resembling an ant's nest. And there would be no men for women to fall in love with.
• Quite a few novels for children have the admirable goal of wanting children to appreciate the importance of learning history and/or appreciating their parents. The method they use is to have the juvenile protagonist get stuck in the crapsack past because they dared not to want to learn history or didn't appreciate their parents. So you have books like The Devil's Arithmetic (Nazi death camp) Tune in Yesterday (racism in 1920s) and lots of books about being a slave in the 1800s.
• In Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the narrator's dad is fond of delivering these to his son in-universe:
  • Always remember your responsibilities, because if you had been a pioneer boy and forgotten to tighten the wheels of the cart, they'd have fallen off and your parents and brothers would have been eaten by wolves, but somehow you'd have survived and had to bury them.
  • Learn how to open the packets for microwave burritos or else you might starve due to being stranded on a desert island with adequate water, but no food save for a million microwave burritos.
  • If you get out of bed again tonight, you'll probably run into Shel Silverstein in the hallway. (It Makes Sense in Context, since that happened after a very young Greg had seen a very threatening photo of Silverstein◊ on the back cover of The Giving Tree.)
• Due to the Disney villains being involved in the Disney Chills stories, several of the moral lessons boil down to things like 'don't ask a sea witch to become popular because it will ruin your life.'
• Pretty much every punishment in Dante's The Divine Comedy, especially, of course, those featured in Inferno. One that hits Values Dissonance is the "sodomites" -homosexuals- being condemned as "violent against nature", and having to run around a burning desert as fire falls from the sky. It's a harsh fate for those who were in a loving, mutually-desired relationship.
• Doctor Dog: Don't let your father/father-in-law eat too many baked beans and drink too much beer at the same time, or else he'll fart the roof off.
• The children's book Don't Do That: Don't pick your nose, or else it'll stick up there and your teacher, headmaster, a stage magician, and a rocket scientist will be unable to get it out. Your brother will manage to remove it by tickling, but your nose will end up looking very inflamed.
• A Fish Out Of Water (and another Dr Seuss story Gustav the Goldfish): Don't overfeed your fish or he'll grow really huge.
• Felicity Floo Visits the Zoo: Blow your nose before petting animals at the zoo (which you shouldn't do anyway) if you're sick, or else you'll accidentally get them covered in your snot and they'll catch what you have.
• For Your Safety: Protect the environment, or the robots will rise up, conquer mankind and imprison them in a Gilded Cage, and do it themselves.
• Galaxy of Fear: The Planet Plague teaches that obsessing over Revenge for your Doomed Hometown is not Jedi-like, and if you have The Virus it can speed your transformation into a Blob Monster—when you're fighting, it's better to focus on what you're fighting for and The Power of Love.
• The kids' book Georgie Grub: Don't hide from your mother when she tells you to take a bath, or you'll end up hiding in a trash can and being taken away by the binmen.
• Goosebumps: Evidently the moral of the story of Go Eat Worms! goes beyond "Treat others the way you'd want to be treated" and up to 11 with "Don't mistreat insects or a giant version of one will come to your house and kill you".
• The Great Grumbler And The Wonder Tree: Don't be a complainy Picky Eater, or your wife will grow a magic food tree and when you reject the food that grows on it, it will come to life and chew you out.
• Heartlight. Nothing lasts forever, and you had better accept this or else you could destroy the universe.
• Heavy Object: Keep consumerism in check, or else the military will build giant combat robots heavy enough to stop the earth’s rotation.
• The Howard B Wigglebottom book about too much of a good thing: realize that there can be too much of a good thing, or else you'll get a tummy ache from one ice cream sundae, recover but have so much gum in your mouth that you won't be able to speak, and end up floating through a storm with too many balloons.
• In The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the lesson we're supposed to learn is "Don't be greedy and sell out your town in exchange for wealth and power, or your town will be corrupted and your kids will turn into Fish People once they reach a certain age and rejoin them in the open ocean," or more specifically, "Don't be greedy, or you'll doom your whole town to giving birth to Half-Human Hybrids."
• The tale of King Midas has the message "If you desire gold too much, you'll turn your loved ones into statues." Only if you read it very literally, which is not the point of Greek fables. The actual moral is "If all you care about is wealth, then wealth will replace all you care about". It's a mundane Aesop made fantastic.
• A possible take away from Edmund's story in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is "If you betray your family to the bad guys, you won't get any presents from Santa." Or alternatively, "Don't take candy from strangers."

• Little Women: Beth contracts her near-fatal scarlet fever, which permanently ruins her health and eventually leads to her death seven years later, because only she bothers to visit the poor, stricken Hummel family, while Meg and Jo, who had the fever as children and are immune, are too lazy to go. The message, therefore, seems to be "Take care of the poor, or your family member who's forced to do it in your place could get sick and die."
• Logan's Run: Don't become a hippie. Hippies want to get everyone stoned, destroy the family, raise children in creches, revoke age-of-sexual-consent laws, and kill off everyone over twenty-one (raised to 30 in the movie).
• Some of Enid Blyton's stories for younger children. For example, The Magic Lemonade: "Don't torment insects, or you might get shrunk by magic so that insects can torment you". The Ant Bully has this same trope, sans lemonade.
• The Marvellous Land of Snergs: Invoked. At the end of the story, the author, unsure as to what the moral of the tale is, suggests the message is: "If you run away from home (because you have been rightfully grounded) and happen upon an ogre who claims to be not a man-eater anymore, pretend to believe him as you search for a weapon; and then aim for the head."
• Pretty much any and all Be Careful What You Wish For stories end this way, most notably The Monkey's Paw. Among other examples, wishing to have money resulted in the family having their son die in a terrible industrial accident, followed by them receiving tons of money in compensation from the factory. Wishing you had more money is not wrong or dangerous just because a cursed artifact interpreted the wish to negative results. If anything the real Aesop is "Genies are jerks." In the case of The Monkey's Paw, the Aesop intended by the character who created the paw was "those who defy fate do so to their sorrow." Because apparently fate is a Jerkass.
• The Mr. Men book Little Miss Bossy spells it out directly: don't boss people around or they will put magical shoes on your feet that force you to dance until you apologize.
• Mr Wolfs Pancakes: Be neighbourly, or else your neighbour will eat you.
• My Teacher Flunked the Planet, a children's book. Stop all war and feed the hungry, or else aliens will destroy Earth. The first two books (My Teacher Is an Alien, My Teacher Fried My Brains) were suspense/adventure books with no moral to preach, but the preachy moral showed up in the third book, which has at least one good, long Author Filibuster about how Humans Are the Real Monsters. Although there was also a hidden one in here—TV rots the mind. Specifically, an alien taught us how to make TV to slow down our technological development, in hopes that we might resolve societal problems before we got to space.
• Intentionally used in Edgar Allan Poe's short story "Never Bet The Devil Your Head", as part of the Spoof Aesop. The reason it provides for the eponymous moral is that the devil might one day come to collect.
• Not Now, Bernard: Pay attention to your children or they may get eaten by a monster.
• The moral of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is "be compassionate towards all creatures and don't go around murdering innocent seabirds, or else you'll wind up stranded in the middle of the ocean, all your friends will die, their corpses will torment you, and when you eventually make it to land you'll be forced to constantly wander the world telling your story instead of being able to live a normal life." Bruce Dickinson put it best. "And the moral of this story is: This is what not to do if a bird shits on you."
• J. R. R. Tolkien has a similar story to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in The Silmarillion. The curse thing is somewhat more justified in this story because the "bird" in question was a transformed woman. Also, it's not the mariner who gets cursed but the guy who tried to kill the mariner's wife, while her twin sons were watching, over a really pretty jewel. The Aesop ends up being "don't let greed stop you from being compassionate, or you'll be cursed to be homeless forever". Which downplays the Space Whale Aesop, in that if you are nice to people they are more likely to help you when you're in trouble. Tolkien undermined the Aesop slightly by making the characters who did this wicked deed rather too sympathetic.
• Sam, Bangs & Moonshine: Don't lie or else your cat and your human friend will nearly drown.
• Sarah's Little Ghosts: Don't keep secrets, or else ghosts will come and repeat the secrets ad nauseum until you spill.
• State of Fear: Don't give in to people believing in global warming, or ecologists will destroy the planet with their weather-control machines. And do not blame the civilization for all evil or you will be eaten by Papua-New-Guinean cannibals. Attack a Sci-fi author's book because you disagree with his doubts about global warming, and he'll give you a cameo as a child molester in his next book.
• Pretty much every moral lesson in the German moral children's book Struwwelpeter works this way.
  • Thumb-sucking summons up a scissors-wielding tailor who snips off the offending digits; fussy eating habits result in death by starvation; racially abusing black people causes a giant to cover you in ink; and going out in a rainstorm to play leads to being hurled away to your doom by a sudden gust of wind. There is also a girl who ends up as a pile of ashes after playing with matches despite admonitions from her parents and her two pet cats. And many similar.
  • Deconstructed in Jasper Fforde's The Fourth Bear, one of the Nursery Crime series, with "Cautionary Valley." The series takes place In a World… where fictional characters come to life; the valley is a favourite haunt of Aesop-delivering Space Whales, led by the aforementioned scissors-wielding tailor. Children raised in this neighborhood are well-behaved to a downright creepy level. Prior to the events of the book, the parents were perfectly fine with it.
• Take a Good Look by Jacqueline Wilson: Obey your grandma's instructions not to go out alone, or you'll end up being taken hostage by armed robbers.
• The Tale of Mucky Mable: Mind your table manners, or you'll be accidentally swapped for a literal pig.
• There's a Lion in the Library: Never lie, or else a lion will eat you.
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells is based on his socialist beliefs, and the central message is that, if the upper classes continue to oppress the working classes, the upper classes will evolve into pampered babies while the working classes will become cannibalistic monsters. At the time it was published, it was less space-whaley—both socialism and evolution were in their infancies at the time, and it seemed entirely possible that forcing people to work in unlit factories would turn them into cave-dwellers. Now, Science Marches On, and The Reveal seems rather less plausible.
• Todds TV: Don't watch too much TV, or else the TV will come alive and try to adopt you.
• Un Lun Dun: Don't pollute, or else the smog will become sapient and take control of people's minds, making them destroy a fantasy world and then ours.
• Babette Cole's Winni Allfours has quite a bad one for parents. The heroine's mother and father won't buy her a pony and make her eat lots of vegetables. Except that Winni works out that by eating all her greens, she'll turn into a pony! Once that's done, she's no longer dependent on her parents. So what kind of moral can we learn from that? "Don't try imposing limits on your kids, because they'll still succeed and it'll be all the worse for you?"
• Whatever: Don't be nonchalant, or you'll get eaten by a tiger.
• The aesop of the series Woodwalkers is "Don't kill wild pumas or the shapeshifter who was in love with one of them will try to destroy humankind with a bunch of other racist shapeshifters."
• There's a picture book called You'll Be Sorry by Josh Schneider in which the parents of a girl named Samantha tell her to stop hitting her little brother or she'll be sorry. She ignores them and the little brother cries so much that he floods the entire town.

Live-Action TV

• Pretty much the general moral that would result in death in 1000 Ways to Die. Stealing a woman's purse? You're impaled in the heart with a screwdriver. Making fun of fat people? They'll crush you to death. Shooting a dog all because its barking was annoying you? You'll fall about ten feet from the attic and smack your head on the hardwood floor. Being a bad, immoral, or otherwise stupid person in general? Well... you get the idea...
• Invoked in-universe in Arrested Development, as part of Michael Bluth's Hilariously Abusive Childhood. George Bluth, Sr. apparently thought that the best way to teach his children important life lessons was to hire an amputee to pretend to lose an arm whenever they screwed up, teaching them that every mistake would lead to a man having his arm ripped off. Yelling too much while on the boat? A man will lose his arm. Forgetting to leave a note when you run out of milk? A man will lose his arm. Leaving the door open with the air conditioning on? A man will die.
• One episode of The Big Comfy Couch had the aesop "Eat your vegetables, or else they'll torment you in your sleep...as in they'll literally stare at you from your headboard and sing about you being a picky eater".
• "The Waldo Moment" is widely considered the weakest Black Mirror episode because its message, "use your vote responsibly", is undermined by the far-fetched premise of a cartoon bear coming second in a UK by-election and eventually becoming the figurehead for a Fascist, but Inefficient global government that takes over the world. Of course, assuming there was a campaign to get Kek/Pepe elected President of the US as a write-in candidate, some might think this is exactly what would happen (unkind comparisons to unnamed real politicians could be made too).
• Breaking Bad: The creators would have us believe that protagonist Walter White is to blame for the Twist Ending of season 2. Ergo, the moral of the season is: don't deal drugs, kill people, and turn someone on their back while they're in a drug-induced sleep thus allowing them to choke to death on their own vomit, because that will inevitably lead to a mid-air collision which kills 167 people. Even the creator lampshaded the Diabolus ex Machina in an interview.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • The episode "Beer Bad" combined an anvilicious message about the dangers of alcohol with a plotline about cursed magical beer turning college kids into cavemen. It does lampshade it at the end, though:
    Xander: And what have we learned about beer?
    Buffy: Foamy.
    Xander: [beat] Good. [cut to credits] I'm glad we had this talk.

This episode was actually made with the intention of getting a grant from the Office of National Drug Controller Policy which would be paid to shows that had an anti-drugs or anti-alcohol message but was rejected due to being "otherworldly nonsense".

• There's also this delightful exchange from "Reptile Boy":
  Buffy: I told one lie, I had one drink.
  Giles: Yes, and you were very nearly devoured by a giant demon snake. The words "let that be a lesson" are a tad redundant at this juncture.

• Doctor Who:
  • "The Underwater Menace" has a "Lesson of the Day" Speech where the Atlantean chief decides that religion and superstition was what got them into the state where they were following an Obviously Evil Mad Scientist, and decrees the temple should be buried and a new age of enlightenment should follow... "without gods. And without fish-people."
  • "The Idiot's Lantern": Don't structure your life around what you see on television or your face will be sucked off by Maureen Lipman.
  • "The Lazarus Experiment": If you don't test your new medical procedure before using it on yourself, you'll turn into a giant human-eating scorpion monster.
  • "42": If you accidentally use sentient creatures while mining for fuel you will be possessed by their angry kin so they can stalk your friends and family like a serial killer before falling into the sun. Also, the Doctor will yell at you. Bonus for implying things like the BP oil crisis or rainforest devastation aren't caused by big corporations killing things slowly, but by the equivalent of seven guys in a beat-up truck who didn't know anything was there to begin with.
  • It is ironic that the actual episode showing a space whale, containing a full-fledged Aesop, cannot be considered an example of this.
  • "The God Complex": Be careful what you believe in, because a monster that feeds on faith may eat you.
  • "The Bells of Saint John": Don't use strange Wi-Fi accounts or you'll be uploaded onto an alien computer server in the Shard.
  • "Arachnids in the UK": Don't illegally dump toxic waste, or you'll create an infestation of Giant Spiders.
  • "Spyfall": Giving large tech companies all of your personal information will let them allow extradimensional aliens to rewrite your DNA.
  • "Praxeus": Humans need to responsibly manage our plastic waste in order to stop it entering the food chain - and also because it's turning the planet into a haven for a body-hijacking alien disease.
• In-Universe on Frasier: When Frasier challenges his father to give him a reason when perjury could be justified, his first response is "what if a comet was hurtling towards Earth, and the only way you could stop it was by lying under oath?" Subverted, though, as he goes on to give a very personal example from his own experience (unfortunately it relies upon Hollywood Law).
• Future Ted in How I Met Your Mother sometimes gives these out: the reason they're fantastic is because they're ridiculously narrow because they're all about the five main characters ("Don't fight with Uncle Marshall, he's nuts." "If you hang out with Uncle Barney, you'll have great stories to tell.") and will only ever apply to his kids (and perhaps Marshall and Lily's kids).
• As a parody of "scared straight" programs, the Key & Peele sketch "Consequences" has former gang member Donnie Herrera talking to an auditorium at a high school. He tells them how he did bad things (stealing, hanging out with tough kids, etc.) followed by him dealing with the consequences of this. The problem though is that the "consequences" are so wild and unconnected with the deeds he is guilty of that nobody takes any of it seriously.
  Donnie: So I got really deep into crime. I did a drive-by at my own daughter's quinceaera! Yeah, shot up everybody— dead, killed! Yeah! Yeah! Then I got sucked into a wormhole. Consequences!
• LazyTown:
  • "Sleepless in Lazytown": Get enough sleep, or else you or your friend will lose a bet and have to leave town.
  • "Sportacus Who?": Always have a reminder nearby, or else you'll be in deep doo-doo when someone gets amnesia.
• An in-universe example in Misfits: Simon tries to persuade the others that giving up their powers is a bad idea, but since he cites the example of Superman II, the rest hear "give up your superpowers and General Zod will destroy the Earth." It fails to persuade them.
• On My Name Is Earl, Joy tells an In-Universe tale to her kids to get them to behave and stop whining about having to do homework in the "Creative Writing" episode. She (a beauty queen) flies the kids to the Crab Shack, and makes Earl fumble through one of those "If a train is going at X mph..." math problems. He gets it wrong, and they witness "Old Daddy" get hit by a train (the Crab Shack turned into a desert with train tracks.) Then they go back to the trailer, and they witness Randy being The Pig-Pen. Because he doesn't clean up, Randy gets Covered in Gunge on which moss grows, attacked by mice, and then everything from buildings to the Rocky Mountains sticks to him until he gets too heavy and falls off the Earth onto God's desk and gets crushed by God's coffee mug. (And of course God tells Joy how beautiful she is.)
  • Apparently, strict gun control isn't always good because you never know when you'll need to shoot a couple of weather balloons to keep two men from floating too high and dying.
    Darnell: Yes, okay, when two men are floating away on a lawn chair tied to big balloons and one of them has left his parachute behind, that MIGHT be an okay time to have a gun!
• "As we often learn at the end of an episode of MythBusters, everyday objects can, in fact, be made lethal if Jamie builds a gun to shoot them."
• The One Step Beyond (1959) episode "Forests of the Night" taught us that dabbling in the occult will cause you to turn into a leopard. The Twilight Zone episode "Jess Belle" is similar.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "Lion's Den", the Lewisborough High School wrestling team take a performance enhancing drug which transforms them into Cat Folk who devour people.
• In Plutón B.R.B. Nero, the starship crew succumbs to the pleasure offered by a mysterious alien monolith, to the point of disablement. When recovered and asked what they learned, the moral is "I won't rub myself on a monolith ever again". Then the monolith reappears and all of them jump on it.
• Power Rangers Wild Force had the initial message that humanity polluting the Earth helped make the Org spirits strong enough to return. It got even more Space Whaley when Animus showed up. "Humanity polluting the Earth will make our Mecha God mad and cause him to leave the world with the Power Animals and put Princess Shayla into a deep sleep forever." Other Power Rangers series often had Space Whale Aesops in filler episodes, like that if you tell lies all the time no one will believe you when an invasion of the body snatchers occurs and that sort of thing.
• Power Rangers Dino Fury: One episode seems to be going for the aesop of "don't break the rules because you think you know better." But due to the circumstances, it comes out as "don't break the rules because you think you know better, or your coworkers will walk in on an alien attack and you'll have to save them."
• From an episode of SCTV—Jesus has magic healing booze.
• Sesame Street:
  • "If you don't eat anything but cookies, you'll turn into one"—then again, that was Cookie Monster's dream.
  • "If you don't eat your food, it will tell you off".
  • The Harry Potter movie parody has the moral "listen, or else a giant spider will trap you in its web."
  • The Star Wars movie parody has "control yourself...so you don't eat your best friend" (the best friend was a cookie).
  • "Don't skip breakfast, or you'll get tired": Never mind the fact that you'll probably get hungry first.
  • The James Bond parody has "Don't interrupt, or you'll get hit by falling chickens."
  • One episode had the moral "Accept that you can't always get what you want, or you'll annoy everybody when you use your friend's magic wand to change the weather".
  • One episode had the Aesop "When an adult is too busy to play with a kid, it's because what they're doing is important". They had Big Bird learn this by making a wish which causes Gordon, Alan, and Maria to turn into children.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • In "Up The Long Ladder" Riker's killing of his not yet fully-developed clone was actually intended as a pro-choice message by writer Melinda Snodgrass and showrunner Maurice Hurley. However, the way it's handled—Riker casually kills the clone, later comments that he did it because "one Riker is unique," then the matter is never brought up again—completely obscures the intended message, and even with the necessary leaps in logic could actually be interpreted to mean that abortion should only be legal in the case of rape victims. It's an Aesop that has aged poorly, because pro-choice arguments thirty years on largely focus on the iniquity of requiring a woman to allow another creature to inhabit her living body against her will, and sometimes even claim that if pregnancy could be ended safely without harm to the fetus then that would be preferred. The idea that you should be able to destroy your own offspring, were it able to exist without harm to you, isn't a factor in the discussion. Ironically, the Aesop would have aged much better if it was meant to be taken literally, as the decades that followed saw advances in cloning science and debate over the ethics of cloning. The following decades also saw the increased prevalence of frozen embryos, resulting in many legal battles over the ethics of discarding such embryos, which is much closer to the morality of destroying not-yet-activated clones.
  • Conversely, in retrospect Riker's other clone is a Fantastic Aesop: Don't beam down to a planet with a strange atmosphere, or you might end up with a transporter clone that gives you existential agita and eventually joins the anti-Federation rebels.
• Several Star Trek: Picard storylines revolve around discrimination, but the conclusion of the first season turns the message into something along the lines of "Don't oppress minorities or they'll Summon Bigger Fish and kill you all."
• A bizarre inverted example from Summer Heights High: drama-teacher Mr G. performs an energetic dance for his students, dressed in what looks like a giant white pillowcase. He asks his class what the dance represented. The correct answer was: peer pressure.
• The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "Stopover in a Quiet Town" has Rod Serling delivering one of the most hilarious space whale aesops ever, in the smirking, self-aware tone that only he can. The episode deals with a married couple who awaken after a drunken car crash and gradually realize that they've been abducted from Earth and are now being kept as pets inside a giant alien child's model town. Sterling was very fond of the Ironic Hell.
  Rod Serling: The moral of what you've just seen is clear. If you drink, don't drive. And if your wife has had a couple, she shouldn't drive either. You might both just wake up with a whale of a headache in a deserted village... in the Twilight Zone.
• The Twilight Zone (2019): For "Not All Men". Men are inherently violent testosterone-driven brutes who just need an excuse to become insanely violent (toward women, each other, or random objects), and it's only the rare few who can rein themselves in from this behavior. Also, that all men — regardless of whether or not they can even suppress their urges — still have it as an innate part of themselves. It's shown by a fallen meteorite supposedly affecting them, but that's actually a placebo, they just needed it as an excuse to cut loose. A placebo that gives them red eyes and tainted veins (which does not make medical sense), to deliver a rather unfortunate aesop by a very fantastic method.
• A sketch on The Whitest Kids U' Know features a kid Adolf Hitler being the nicest person in the entire town. In the last ten seconds of the sketch, he takes one bit of marijuana and suddenly wants to kill Jews.
• The X Factor also has this trope applying to it as seen here. Probably the biggest Space Whale Aesop the show has given out as a message—become a contestant and have your dirty laundry literally launched into the limelight.

Music

• Adam and the Ants' best known song, "Antmusic", features a moral possibly inspired by the Enid Blyton example above:
  Don't tread on ant, he's done nothing to you
  There might come a day when he's treading on you!
• The Aquabats!' song "Cat With Two Heads!" tells the very important Aesop that if you use your scientific knowledge to create a two-headed cat in an effort to make the world a better place (you can pet one kitty's head... and pet the other kitty's head!), you'll wind up with a two-headed man-eating monster.
• Georges Brassens has a song titled "Le Gorille" ("The Gorilla"), which describes a horny gorilla escaping from the zoo and raping one of the visitors. Believe it or not, the song has a moral: the death penalty should be abolished! In the end, the victim the gorilla ends up picking is a judge, and his screams and pleas during his ravishing are, in the final lines of the song, compared to those of a man he'd given the death penalty to earlier that day.
• Eminem's Relapse, a Concept Album homage to Slasher Movies, has one of these in keeping with the genre — 'don't do drugs, or Shady will fucking kill you'. Of course, the allegorical nature of the songs suggests that Shady represents fame-induced drug addiction in general, which definitely can kill you.
• Final lyrics of Ghoultown's Drink With the Living Dead point out that the only moral lesson to take from this song - don't kill a man to steal his drink or God will curse you to walk the world as Revenant Zombie until someone beats you at a drinking contest - is this and also the thing it warns you from doing isn't very common either.

There ain't no fancy moral to go with this I fear

Unless you aim to kill a man and drink down his last beer!

• "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" reminds us not to give a license to "a man who flies a sleigh and plays with elves." Okay, then.
• The children's song "Little Rabbit Foo-Foo," whose Aesop is if you hit field mice on the head, you'll be turned into a "goon." You've been warned.
• The Lonely Island's song "Boombox" explains how proper use of a boombox can bring people together, but abusing it might lead to an elderly people orgy.
  "This was a cautionary tale, A BOOMBOX IS NOT A TOY!!!"
• Big Tent Revival's arguably most popular song, "Two Sets of Joneses": No matter how hard you work or how much your wife's father likes you, your marriage will fall apart very quickly if you don't have Jesus.
• Voltaire's "The Mechanical Girl" leaves us with this very special message: "Never take a child away from a loving parent. Especially not ones who make children who shoot rockets from their eyes."

Music Videos

• Mastodon's music video for "Curl of the Burl": don't snort the sawdust from a forbidden tree to get high or women will turn you into a log and set you on fire by flashing their breasts at you.
• Fanservice aside, the message of ZZ Top's "Legs" video seems to be, "Be nice to people, or ZZ Top and three hot women will magically show up and rescue those people you mistreated and make you pay for the bad things you did to them."

Poetry

• "There Was a Boy, His Name Was Jim": Don't stray away from your nurse while on walks or else a lion will eat you.
• "My Mother Said I Never Should": Don't play with nomads, or else either your parents will punish and disown you, or you'll become a nomad yourself.
• Poems from Poetry 4 Kids:
  • "Scrawny Tawny Skinner": Don't skip dinner, or you'll grow so thin you'll disappear.
  • "Nathaniel Naste": Don't eat glue, or you'll get glued to your chair, and then everyone on Earth will end up glued to you.
  • "Bradley Bentley Baxter Bloome": Clean your room, or you'll suffocate in your own trash.
  • "Wendy Wise": Exercise, or you'll die from a feather landing on your head.
  • "Rose Marie Rassmussen": Don't wear clothes made from animal hide, because the animals might actually be still alive and kill you.
• "Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout" by Shel Silverstein: Take out the garbage, or else garbage will fill your entire street.
• "Rebecca, Who Slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably": Don't slam the door, or else a bust of Abraham Lincoln will fall on your head, killing you.
• "Godfrey Gordon Gustavus Gore": Shut doors when asked, or your parents will send you to Singapore.
• "Matilda, Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death": Don't lie, or else your house will catch fire and not even the fire brigade will believe you, so you'll burn to death.
• "Pierre": Don't be bratty and apathetic, or you'll be swallowed whole by a lion.

Radio

• Parodied in one episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978): be careful what you say, because your words might travel down a freak wormhole, get misheard by alien leaders at a conference as something insulting about one of them's mother, they'll end up going to war, eventually deciding the source of the problem is Earth which they team up to invade, and due to bizarre miscalculations of size, end up getting swallowed by a small dog. And all because Arthur Dent is having terrible trouble with his lifestyle.
  • And this is the series where a real whale appears in space as one of the unintended consequences of pushing a button.
• Garrison Keillor plays with this in one of his Lake Wobegon speeches on A Prairie Home Companion. The "moral" is: spare the ant in your yard, or else radiation might mutate all of the ants into giant mutants that will trample your house.

Tabletop Games

• Monsterpocalypse, drawing from B-movie sources, is built on this trope. The most obvious examples are the Radical factions, the Terrasaurs and Empire of the Apes. Respect the environment and live in harmony with nature, or a giant monster (supported by hippies with rocket launchers and apes with jetpacks) will eat you.
• In The World of Darkness (both old and new): don't be a jerk, or invisible spirits will be unfriendly and at worst start attacking you. Conversely, be polite to your elders and don't even do harm in self-defense, because it will cause invisible spirits to like you and occasionally give you an hand.
  • The Karma Meter itself can get like this in some splats due to the odd way that sins are ranked and the penalties involved in decaying humanity: in a werewolf game, don't hunt for sport, because you will degenerate into a near-mindless brute restricted by a mystical ban on arbitrarily-chosen behavior. Mitigated somewhat in the games where you're playing as a non- or former human, where it's made clear that these are rules for these creatures which do not necessarily align with human rules.

Toys

• BIONICLE has a message to politicians: if you're governors, then please do your job instead of appointing others to do it for you while you dedicate your life to something else, otherwise those appointed leaders may start a war, and your planet will explode. That actually sounds pretty logical.

Video Games

• Asura's Wrath: Hey, don't overpopulate or pollute the planet or else a magma monster representing the will of the planet will mutate all of the planet's animals to kill all of us! Ultimately averted though. Turns out the Gohma were created by Chakravartin, the creator God of the universe, to train the deities, and specifically Asura, to become the new God of Gaia. The real moral is "do not mindlessly praise your superiors, because anyone can be a dick - even God".
• BioShock: Be wary of Objectivism, or else your society will be overrun with mutated zombies. Or less succintly: completely unregulated Objectivist capitalism is all fun and games until someone discovers that sea slug goo, processed through the stomachs of little girls who've been converted to creepy glowy-eyed bloodsucking freaks, can give people the power to shoot bees from their hands but also turns them into superstrong homicidal mutant addicts, and you'll be forced to sacrifice your ideals, become a tyrannical dictator, and command your artificially-aged brainwashed offspring to murder you just to really underline the drama of your final speech.
• In Cassette Beasts, Felix's personal quest teaches that creatives shouldn't be embarrassed of their old work; even if it's not up to your current standards, it still laid the grounds for your current skills. If you reject your old work, though, when she comes to life and hears you talking smack about her, she'll be driven to do dangerous things to try and impress you before she eventually tries to kill you.
• Dazzeloids is meant to teach kids not to watch too much TV and seek out different forms of entertainment, and exaggerates the consequences of TV addiction. In the backstory, Anne Dilly Whim's sister literally died after watching a re-run of a TV show.
• Dragalia Lost: Adventurer's Guide #10. Link your game to your Nintendo account in case a dragon ever eats your phone.
• Kid Icarus: Uprising: Try talking things out first, or you might end up freeing the most evil creature in existence, who will turn you into a ring for three years, possess a god, and start trying to wipe out humanity solely because it lives to spread destruction and chaos.
• Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep: If you and your family and/or friends don't communicate well, a Satanic old man will get to ruin your lives and start a decade-long plot to conquer the ultimate power in the multiverse.
• Life Is Strange: Become more confident in making decisions and accept their consequences, instead of trying to control everything in your life. Otherwise, you'll have to decide between your hometown getting destroyed by a massive Clock Roach tornado (killing many people) or sacrificing your best friend and love interest to prevent said tornado.
• Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom reminds us not to pollute, and not to become greedy and power-hungry. Because if you do that, an Eldritch Abomination will cause all your pollution to become sentient and corrupt everyone in the country into violent indestructible tar-monsters driven by their basest desires.
• The sponsored "Covert Ops" tasks in Marvel: Avengers Alliance tend to have these, particularly the latest one, which was "Don't use knockoff cosmetics bought from shady street vendors, or you may get super-powers."
• Mass Effect 2 gets one with an anecdote from DLC character Zaeed on the dangers of smoking:
  "You smoke, Shepard? Don't. That stuff'll kill you. Knew a kid once, half your age. Smoked too close to a cache of explosives. Tossed a butt, blew himself sky-high."
  • The trilogy's overall aesop can be summed up as "Don't mess around with artificial intelligence, or kilometer-long ancient, sentient starships will descend upon the galaxy to harvest your DNA."
• While it's not a use of Scare 'Em Straight, Mega Man Star Force offers fantastically positive consequences of following its Aesop about The Power of Friendship. Why are friends important? Because they give you Hit Point increases and special abilities! Also, if you're lost in space on a dead satellite, they can direct you back home with electromagnetic friendship laser beams. Not that the franchise doesn't have more traditional examples. Mega Man Battle Network 4: Red Sun and Blue Moon, for instance, explained that you should be good, because if you're bad, an asteroid controlled by a sentient computer program will destroy the planet.
• According to the Grand Finale of the Riddle School series, you should always stay in school—because if you don't, you'll set off a time-stop mine and inadvertently almost doom the entire planet to annihilation by an alien race.
• In Nexus Clash, the fact that smoking is bad for you is illustrated by cigarettes that do a few points of damage for every puff, such that it's quite easy to smoke yourself to death in a manner of minutes by smoking just a few packs. Given the nature of the series this may be ridiculous on purpose.
• Similar to the Star Force example, Persona teaches us that you should befriend everyone you meet as quickly and efficiently as possible... Else you won't be able to stop the apocalypse. There's also Persona 2's "Spreading false rumors is good, as long as it benefits you directly when the God of Chaos makes them real".
• The moral of Ratropolis is: Don't get obsessed with greed, or else you'll cause a Zombie Apocalypse.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2006): Be a strong leader who never cries in the face of adversity and trials... because otherwise, you'll release a demonic monstrosity that was sealed within you and tear apart the space-time continuum.
• The moral of Super Energy Apocalypse is: Don't pollute, and do conserve energy, or else you'll be attacked by giant eyeballs.
• Super Mario Bros. 2 teaches us how vegetables are good for you—they can be used to kill enemies! This also can be interpreted a bit differently...
• Super Mario Sunshine:
  • "Always remember to brush your teeth!" Said straight after cleaning the teeth of a giant eel boss with a water filled jetpack because it was polluting an entire bay with purple poison.
  • "Remember, always be kind to your pets." If you're not, they'll turn into fireballs and cover the village in flaming goop. (Although those particular pets were treated kindly, they were just sick with fevers; their owner was clearly upset over how sick they were, which is why she forces you to help out.)
• Tales of Vesperia: If you don't use environmentally friendly technology, a technicolor interdimensional ghost squid will come down from space and eat everybody.
• Undertale:
  • The Genocide route is still incredibly horrific and effectively deconstructs the concept of grinding in RPGs and killing characters you otherwise love in subsequent playthroughs just to see what happens, but the very last scene turns the message of the playthrough into 'don't go murdering innocent people otherwise you'll get possessed by the first fallen human and be forced to destroy the entire world whether you want to or not'. Made worse by the fact said creature possesses your character in every subsequent playthrough and preventing you from ever achieving the Golden Ending ever again, throwing a layer of Fantastic Aesop on top of that by implying 'you can't always use time travel to escape the consequences of your actions'.
  • For the pacifist run: try to resolve issues not with violence, but by talking them out, or else you will be leaving an entire race to be trapped underground because they would not all gather by the end so that the villain could use their souls (and six previous human souls) to have enough power to break the barrier keeping monsters trapped in should you talk him out of throwing reality in an endless reset loop to play with you because he confused you with his adopted sibling.
• World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria: Colonial superpowers shouldn't bring their wars to a foreign land, or they'll awaken an ancient evil that feeds on hatred and violence and that will corrupt their soldiers and the land itself.
  • Or, more seriously, you should always strive to keep your 'noble and just' rulers in checks and balances, or they'll eventually be corrupted by power, stress, and violence - or in Garrosh's case, willingly allow themselves to be corrupted by the heart of an eldritch god and then travel back in time to build an army to conquer you.

Visual Novels

• Snatcher: Trust other people and be open to them, or a mad Russian scientist responsible for wiping out most of Asia may take advantage of the culture of suspicion around you to trial a new plan to replace people with killer robots indistinguishable from them except for a tendency to get skin cancer and they'll start killing everyone and then the government will want to nuke your island to get rid of them before they spread and then you'll be sorry.

Web Animation

• Baby Bus: One episode had the lesson of "don't drink soda before bed without brushing your teeth, or else Monstrous Germs will literally mine on your teeth, with pickaxes".
• Bob's shorts on Weebl & Bob tend to veer into this. According to "Penguins", you should "never leave your penguin unattended" in case it spontaneously combusts, and according to "Doods", the principle of "safety in numbers" will prevent you and your friends from being mauled by lions.
• "The Lie Monster": Don't lie, or else nature will "cry" and therefore turn Deliberately Monochrome.

Webcomics

• One story in Jack teaches the following moral: Don't get consumed by anger against people who express bigoted views about you, or your partner might die from a demonic brain tumor that feeds on your anger.
• Doghouse Diaries: Don't run with scissors provides the trope image. Why should you not run with scissors? Because a guy wearing a chicken suit might bash you in the face with a club.
• El Goonish Shive has Read or the Owl will eat you.
• Freefall: According to Sqid legend, playing with fire is a bad idea because it makes gods come by and hit you on the head.
• Gunnerkrigg Court has a chapter that seems to be leading up to an Aesop about treating others the way you'd want to be treated, but instead it ends with this:
  Never let sixty angry kids use a herd of laser cows to take over your house.
• Homestuck:
  • This is exactly why babies should not be allowed to dual-wield flintlock pistols.
  • Taking drugs to solve your problems and get around developing will result in you becoming a sugar-high monster with a permanent grin that goes around trying to get your friends in to a four-way marriage and having an obsession with fancy Santas.
• "The Impact Of Your Words": If you're polite and understanding to a person who's expressing their thoughts to you, the two of you will relate and become a couple who together fend off an alien invasion. If you're rude and demanding to your partner instead, you'll be abducted by aliens.
• The first strip of minus.. Don't bully the new kid, she might be a Reality Warper who will imprison you with trees that appeared out of nowhere.
• Double Subversion in Rusty and Co.. Mimic starts to tell the Princess that she shouldn't smoke. Princess says that, A, her lungs, her choice, and B, they live in an RPG Mechanics 'Verse so she can just get somebody to cast a healing spell. Then Mimic explains that monsters hunt by smell as an otyugh comes up behind the Princess.
• Sam & Fuzzy: No, the moral not "killing in self defense is justified". The moral is apparently "killing an assassin from an ancient ninja organization is justified" because it is so weird that morality stops applying, or something. (i.e. if things gets so weird like they only happen in comics, do as you please.)
• Sinfest explains that pornography is harmful because it makes you and your furniture crash through walls.
• Slice of Life gives us:
  Pumpkin Cake: I learned not to accept favors from semi-omnipotent beings of pure chaos.
• xkcd: If you use GOTO, you get attacked by a Velociraptor.

Web Original

• On this Bored Panda piece on lies parents told:
  • When you lie, you get a red spot on your forehead.
  • Don't talk too much, or you'll use up your monthly words.
  • If you don't learn how to read, your voice will disappear. (This backfired when the boy got laryngitis)
  • Don't touch something at a store, or a kitten will die.
  • Don't swallow gum, or your poop will bounce.
  • Hold hands with an adult when you cross the street, or you'll get run over... and become one of the oil stains.
  • Never misbehave or a truck will take you away.
  • Don't press the "reset" button or the house will explode.
  • Don't lie, or Jesus will get the poops.
  • Eat all your rice, or you'll get a dent on your face for each discarded rice grain.
  • Never stray away from your grandma, or you'll be made into sausage.
• Played for laughs in CollegeHumor's Extreme Anti-Smoking Ad: Smoking will cause a Robot War. It's also combined with Do Not Do This Cool Thing. Quite a few commenters found it awesome if smoking turns them into badass killer cyborgs.
• Cordyceps: Obey people in charge who say they can't tell you something for your own good, or you will be killed by alien brain parasites that kill humans who think about the existence of said parasites.
• The website Kids-in-Mind doesn't do actual reviews but only a full list of material parents might find objectionable in a film, including violence, sex, profanity et cetera. Because one category for each write-up explains a movie's overall message, the site tends to offer up Space Whale Aesops when forced to find the "message" in explosive action movies, gory slasher flicks, and other genres famous for not really having many teachable moments. For instance, the message of the Evil Dead (2013) remake is "consult a professional before staging an intervention." Because if you don't, you'll unwittingly unleash an ancient evil and all your friends will die horribly and messily, you see.
• Perfect Sympathy by "J.B. Burro" has the aesop "Don't mistreat your horse" or you will suddenly wake up one day in your horse's place and your horse will be the abusive owner.
• The Protectors of the Plot Continuum ask that you avoid making overpowered characters, respect the intellectual properties of others and use clear writing in your fan works. If you don't, you'll be tormenting the characters to live out your horrible stories forever and destroy their worlds and lives as your typos and lack of clarity cause reality to warp around them.
• Played for laughs in Two Saiyans Play. When Krillin is forced to play Slender: The Arrival, he suggests there's an environmental message in the Abandoned Mine level. Don't sell your land to mining companies or a faceless monster will murder you and set up shop there.
• Springhole: Writing Better Stories With Morals & Messages advises writers to avoid this trope (at least if the fantasy consequences for whatever it is aren't a clear metaphor for the real life consequences), arguing that people are unlikely to take a story's moral seriously if the only consequences they see are things that have no chance of actually happening to them.
• On Vampire Reviews, Maven notes that she first saw Buffy the Vampire Slayer on a church camp. The point was to open up a discussion about priorities in a person's life, but she interprets it as "If you're a shallow bitch vampires will slaughter everyone you care about. Be nice!"
• According to the r/nosleep story "Feed the Pig," if you commit suicide, you will end up in a hellish place called the Black Farm, and the only way to get back is to be gruesomely devoured by a giant pig.
  • "A Recipe for Happiness" is another r/nosleep story with a moral: Many of the saddest moments of your life are also some of the most important ones, so don't feed your painful memories to an Emotion Eater, or you'll forget all of the things you really care about. It's somewhat less Space Whale-ish, though, if you read it as a metaphor for using alcoholism and drugs to cope with trauma.
• Mr. Money Mustache has a flood of rather far-fetched "Get Rich With X" articles, including "Get Rich With Bikes", where you could be FILTHY RICH simply by... riding a bike! Granted, bikes are far cheaper in cost and maintenance than a car, but there are far more steps to take (e.g. income) if you actually want to be rich.^note Partially justified in that he defines "rich" as having enough passive income (investments, etc.) to retire young and live the relatively modest life prescribed throughout the blog. Even by that standard, however, many people would need to substantially increase their income to reach that goal.
• Phelous once reviewed GoodTimes' Miracle in Toyland, evaluating that its moral is "if you have an absentee father, toys will come to life to help you save him, and teach him the lesson that you should actually give a remote crap about your kid! If that doesn't happen, it just means your heroes don't love you."

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