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.
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. Perhaps the real-world analog is still evolving, such that making an analogy is difficult when the best choice is still unknown. Or efforts to include subtlety loses the immediacy, making it hard to show why the message is important. Worse, there possibly 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. At face value the whole series of events seem patently absurd, especially if a Green-Skinned Space Babe is included in the works. How well it comes off depends on how close you're looking and, if the consequences are unknown, what you believe.
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. It may benefit from a Kirk Summation, letting everyone know in plain terms what to take away from the story.
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 (the Monster of the Aesop is resolved through vegetarianism) or a mundane situation with a fantastical consequence (smoking weed gets you drawn into a vampire fraternity). Here any moral may seem tacked on at the end to try and qualify as Edutainment.
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.
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.
Examples Subpages:
Other Examples:
- 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
- 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!"
- In fact, the moral for pretty much all of Jim Henson's commercials was "Buy our stuff or The Muppets will kill you! no, really, they will literally and immediately kill you."
- 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.
- Got Milk?:
- Always have some milk handy, or else a ghost will cry
or your cats will attack you
.
- Drink milk, or else your bones will become so frail that your arms will snap clean off
.
- Don't take someone else's milk, or old people will beat you up
, or a family will bake you alive
.
- Always have some milk handy, or else a ghost will cry
- 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.
- Racism is bad! Because one of the oppressed people would eventually gain enough power to kill you all and the only people who could save you belong to the same people you oppressed.
- 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.
- Roujin Z: Elder care should always have a human touch, or else well-meaning nurses will accidentally turn robotic beds into Humongous Mechas with Blue-and-Orange Morality that will indulge their senile pilots’ fantasies.
- 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.
- 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 (2012) 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".
- 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.
- Dudão was a Christian comic book where each story had a different life lesson being taught to the reader, although some of them were executed in a rather outlandish manner. "O Homem Que Derreteu" presents the Aesop of "always greet people" by having Binho dream of his neighbor Seu Alvarino, a Grumpy Old Man who always ignores everyone who greets him at the street and does not speak to anyone; for each person Alvarino ignores, his body slowly starts to melt until he dissolves into a complete human puddle. After Binho wakes up of this dream, he is so paranoid of melting that he starts greeting everyone and everything he comes accross, including animals, plants and inanimate objects.
- 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 The Prophecy of Four, 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.
- Worlds Finest #250 teaches the reader that mental illness is an awful thing that should be recongized and treated, but that treatment is something that should not be rushed. Fair enough, but in the reader's world it is unlikely that rushing mental health treatment will result in the destruction of the universe while dragging an innocent bystander from an Alternate Universe down with it.
- 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!
- 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.
- After the Events in Deep Cuts
(based on The Loud House) — Don't be mean to your brother, or he'll try to kill you.
- 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.
- Invoked at the end of The Scottish Play
, where Nashville, Brooklyn and Katana's son, claims that finding Shakespeare boring was what saved him from getting pulled into the Weird Sister's revenge plot against Goliath and allowed the teen gargoyle to save his clan, their allies, and their enemies. He soon changes his mind when Stagheart reveals that Lunette, Gnash's crush, enjoys Shakespeare.
- 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.
- Why did you target Adrien's school?!
shows that Hawkmoth frequently akumatizing the students and staff at Collège Françoise Dupont was his attempt to Invoke this trope on his son, so he'd "learn" that the outside world is dangerous and go back under his father's control. Natalie takes apart his plan as not only are brainwashed friends not a normal outcome, but that the police noticed the school was an akuma hotspot, that Adrien was one of the two students that haven't been akumatized, and from there that his father had the motive of his missing wife to go after the Miraculous. Likewise, Ladybug and Chat Noir are similarly pissed that Gabriel would deliberately endanger his son for his so-called lesson, and Chat punches his father in the face when he tries to justify himself.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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".
- Plenty of older urban legends seemed to be trying to encourage abstinence from sex and/or masturbating, implying that if you engaged in them you could be purposely infected with AIDS, get stuck in your partner, get mutilated, or be murdered by a maniac with a hook for a hand.
- 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.
- "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."
- The folk song "Mad Jenny" says that you shouldn't cheat on your lover, lest they go insane and use Weather Manipulation powers to murder people.
- 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."
- "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.
- "Scrawny Tawny Skinner
- "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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The Great Ace Attorney: Don't ever manhandle museum exhibits, or else the curator will knock you out with whatever you just stole.
- 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.
- 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.
- Manga Soprano: The aesops imparted by the series range from simple Stock Aesops to outright implausible and oddly specific.
- Be Yourself. Trying to act out a "cute/clumsy/weak" persona to attract a partner will backfire in the long run. If another girl who genuinely has the traits you're trying to imitate enters the picture, the guy(s) already fawning over you will eventually realize you're a faker when you try to bring her down. Moreover, the guy you're trying to attract may already see right through your charade and expose you.
- If you steal your sister's husband, any kid(s) she may have from him will lie to you about her new man next time you try. The fact they are tricking you into undergoing rape by deception will be nothing compared to what comes after, be it disownment, robbery, destitution, single motherhood, Domestic Abuse, or even outright rape after the realization. Furthermore, you will deserve all of it for trying to ruin your sister's happiness.
- Don't you try to befriend well-off housewives to mooch off of them, especially for free meals in luxurious restaurants. Either their Wise Beyond Their Years kids will intervene and put a stop to your behavior, or the housewife will be at a different venue than the one you thought she'd attend. And if that happens, you will have to Work Off the Debt for the "free meals" you tried to mooch off of.
- Don't force the "plain" girl into a Beauty Contest just to embarrass her and thus make yourself even prettier in comparison. The "plain" girl you've just bullied will receive a pep talk from the guy you're after and thus reveal she's far prettier than you, ruining your plan, and the guys who once pined for you will pine for her instead. Moreover, if you make the mistake of blowing up at her for winning, those same guys will despise you for it.
- "After being taunted with a wheelchair on a graduation trip and left at a train station"
: Don't bully the one girl in a wheelchair and hijack her graduation trip to Disneyland with a special discount. She may be from a Zaibatsu family with connections to one of the most powerful companies in the world, and therefore you'll end up screwing yourself out of the discount and slave away at a part-time job after your parents front you for the original price.
- "My parents left me on a deserted island, and ten years later I became a yakuza"
: Don't single out, enslave, and eventually abandon your older daughter in an uncharted island just because she's illegitimate. Otherwise, she'll find a home among the Yakuza and marry the leader, who will enslave you along with your beloved younger daughter for all the abuse you heaped on his wife.
- Misadventures of Apu: There will often be a reasonable life lesson, but with a bizarre context (e.g. “Stay safe around sharp objects, so you don’t die from blood loss after cutting off your own member.”)
- Murder Drones: Remember to properly dispose of your electronics, or else they might get possessed by a demonic computer program that will eventually wipe out humanity.
- 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.
- This is exactly why babies should not be allowed to dual-wield flintlock pistols.
- "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.
- 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.
- If you assume someone is giving you the right-of-way on a congested traffic line, you risk getting killed by a time-travelling assassin who is only pretending to concede their turn so they can ram your car and make the crash look like an accident.
- If you use GOTO, you get attacked by a Velociraptor.
- 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.
- Tomorrow's Teachings:
- "Fake Kid Tricks Nerd Friend, You Won’t Believe It!": Don't be bigoted to your child's transgender partner, or they might turn out to be possessed by a demon and attack you. Alternately, the main character's father (being a Priest) manages to exorcise the demon out of his son's girlfriend in the end, so perhaps the moral is that he was right to be judgemental in the first place?
- "Evil Dad Throws Newborn Baby In Trash Can, You Won’t Believe IT": Don't cheat on your wife, because the person you slept with might have ties to aliens, resulting in the baby from the affair being an instrumental part of the eventual Alien Invasion that envelops the Earth.
- 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 leave is to be gruesomely devoured by a giant pig, which has an approximately equal chance of either bringing you back to life or sending you to Hell, depending on how it feels about you. And yes, as bad as the Black Farm is, Hell is supposedly even worse.
- "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.
- "A Recipe for Happiness
- 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
- 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."

