Aesop Cleanup

The aesop tropes garner a lot of misuse, including FamilyUnfriendlyAesops being mistaken for bad aesops, BrokenAesops being added when the episode clearly built up to those aesops, and more. This thread aims to fix those problems. Please report problems as you see them.

Courtesy link: An Aesop. All of the tropes under that index fall within this thread’s jurisdiction.

“Now! Let us engage in the art of deduction!”

I'll be searching for misused examples, because there are a lot.

I think Family-Unfriendly Aesop would benefit from a renaming (Hard Truth Aesop, for example), since the term "family unfriendly" sounds like it's teaching a bad lesson, when it is supposed to be a lesson that has some truth to it, even though it goes against conventional wisdom. For example:

• Conventional wisdom: Violence should be avoided at all costs.
• Family-Unfriendly Aesop: Sometimes violence is necessary to protect oneself from harm, as some people cannot be reasoned with.

Or:

• Conventional wisdom: True Beauty Is on the Inside.
• Family-Unfriendly Aesop: Appearance does matter, at least to some extent, as being well-kempt is a sign that you have good genes, are healthy and can take care of yourself and others.

One example of misuse off the top of my head is the example listed for God's Not Dead:

• So, basically, not being a Christian makes you retroactively "evil", while being a Christian gives you the right to belittle/discriminate Non-Christians?

Anyone who's not a Christian (and probably even the majority who are) would probably say that this is complete bullshit. Thus, it's not a Family-Unfriendly Aesop, it's just plain bad.

Edited by thecarolinabull01 on Oct 15th 2019 at 9:27:09 AM

^ I'd agree, but that'd need TRS.

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Posted a proposal in TRS, but it hasn't gone anywhere yet. Not sure how to speed up the process, or if it's possible.

Found some more questionable uses on the YMMV subpage for Arthur:

"Two Minutes" sends the message that it's okay to lie for the sake of a temporary truce. (Kind of makes some sense, but unresolved feelings aren't good)

• "Meek For a Week" seems to have the Aesop "being nice makes you explode, is bad for you, and makes you boring". (Can be true, but no one likes an asshole either).
• "Friday the 13th" seems to say that you should play along with what the larger crowd is doing and saying even when you know their beliefs are misplaced or even if you have no interest in whatever they follow. (You shouldn't sacrifice individuality to please others, even though sometimes you have to. Maybe this one could benefit from a simple rewording.)
• "The Pride of Lakewood" sends a similar message: the idea that you're not part of a group if you don't conform to all of its rituals. (Maybe if the group is a cult...)
• "Buster Gets Real" seems to justify Buster's bizarre logic that it's wrong to like something that "isn't real", which is already extremely out of character for someone as spacey as Buster is. Also very little issue is raised on his or the Read family's obsession with a reality TV series that like Bionic Bunny isn't exactly grounded in reality either.
  • Finally, at the end it seems to reinforce the notion that in order to remain best friends, you have to have most, if not everything in common with each other. (No two people have everything in common and that's okay).
• "Arthur's Big Hit" is the least-liked episode of the show due to being a big source of this. Your friends will never be exasperated by your little sibling's behaviour and think s/he deserves it. If you punch your sibling, getting punched by someone entirely different for an entirely different reason isn't bullying, it's Laser-Guided Karma. (Someone bitching about an episode they don't like, which is poorly-written in just about every way.)
• "Prove It": If you can con your older brother into taking you to the science museum, then go for it, even if it means taking money from kids and knowingly lying to them. (Bullshit)
• "Besties": Inside jokes are bad unless you're in on them. Then they're fine. (Jokes at someone else's expense are never good.)
• "Arthur and D.W. Clean Up" has Arthur and D.W. forced by their parents to help clean up each other's rooms, with their dad claiming that "Many hands makes light work". The message seems to go against this, saying that sometimes teamwork is detrimental, and, essentially, "if you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself". (Not too bad, but sounds more like a Broken Aesop)

Edited by thecarolinabull01 on Oct 15th 2019 at 10:00:22 AM

Eh, the thread will probably be opened once the backlog is cleared.

Anyway, agree with your take on the Arthur examples.

Edited by WarJay77 on Oct 15th 2019 at 9:56:47 AM

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• Family-Unfriendly Aesop: The film blames poor people for their own lack of birth control and low levels of education, all while conflating class, wealth and intelligence. This is remarkably mean-spirited for a film which allegedly wants to aspire to a better world. Idiocracy's take away is that the poor are to blame for the state of society (despite having little to no control over the circumstances of their lives) and that success comes from "common sense" (rather than the chance circumstances of health and education a person is born into).

From YMMV.Idiocracy, another "awful aesop" misuse example.

Edited by WarJay77 on Oct 18th 2019 at 9:29:33 AM

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BrokenAesop.The Emoji Movie needs a thorough sweep-through.

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@Carolina Mind posting a link to the TRS when you can?

Found another "Aesop sucks" example from YMMV.Family Guy S 10 E 2 Seahorse Seashell Party:

• Family-Unfriendly Aesop: To the point that it feels intentional. The moral of the episode is that it's worth staying in an abusive relationship so your abuser will be happy. The fact that the very next episode "Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q" had the exact opposite moral makes the show's attempts at having a moral code come off as shallow and hypocritical.

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Pull it.

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I added the "Besties" example for Arthur, so let me justify it a bit: the episode's plot is that Arthur thinks two of his friends, Buster and Ladonna, don't like him anymore when they go to the movies and witness a funny event with popcorn. They reference it and make jokes about the popcorn, which annoys Arthur. At the end of the episode, after Arthur, Buster, and Ladonna become friends again and the misunderstanding is cleared up. Then something funny happens at the zoo, which Arthur proceeds to tell about to Francine and Muffy, even saying the same thing that annoyed him when Buster said it ("I guess you just had to be there").

Who gives viewers bad morals under the sea? SpongeBob SquarePants!

• Broken Aesop:
  • "Squirrel Jokes" is supposed to be about racist jokes being uncool. However, when SpongeBob does another stand-up routine at the end of the episode, while he doesn't tell any more squirrel jokes, he tells jokes about different sea creatures instead, sponges included. The crowd eats it up just as much as they did the squirrel jokes. So the message comes off less as "don't tell racist jokes" and more as "if you're gonna tell racist jokes, do it for as many races as you can, and throw in some Self-Deprecation for good measure". I think this counts. The episode shows that the squirrel jokes do make Sandy feel bad and make everyone else think she's stupid, and SpongeBob even agrees to just not tell squirrel jokes.
  • In "I Had An Accident", SpongeBob decides to stay inside forever after having a painful sandboarding accident; naturally, Sandy and Patrick try to convince him that going outside is healthy, necessary, and usually perfectly safe. Leaving aside that becoming a shut-in seems to have no negative impact on SpongeBob's life (he has friends, even if they are inanimate objects, he can still work from home, and since he can filter feed, he has no need to worry about running out of food), the outside world proves to be every bit as dangerous as he was worried it would be; Patrick gets stung horribly by jellyfish, and the only reason SpongeBob has to go outside in the end at all is to save Sandy and Patrick from a gorilla attack. When he does, the gorilla literally tears him in half; SpongeBob only manages to save himself and his friends by accidentally scaring it away. As far as the episode shows, all three of them would have been better off never going outside again. Except... you know, that's unrealistic. Nobody can live inside their house for their entire life. And what's the aesop of this episode supposed to be in the first place, anyways? Can it break an aesop it doesn't have?
  • The moral of "Tea at the Treedome" is that if you need something, you should just ask. This would be fine, except that SpongeBob does ask for water fairly early on, and Sandy ignores his request completely. For a lot of the episode, SpongeBob brags about how he can breathe air, so I wouldn't blame Sandy for believing it. He only asks once, and it's kind of quietly.

Edited by Grotadmorv on Oct 28th 2019 at 9:16:14 AM

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You forgot to mention Broken Aesop also being misused as “bad aesop” too, but anyways...

I used used to wonder what bad aesops could be, untill you all shared its magic with me.

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My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S3 E4 "One Bad Apple":

• Don't try to stand up to a bully. If you do, you're no better than whoever is picking on you.
  • If you tell an adult about your bullying problem, they will make it stop immediately. However, whether this Aesop is done well or is unrealistic still arouses heated debate. That's all we gotta say.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S7 E19 "To Change a Changeling":

• Pharynx's rude and violent behavior towards the rest of the hive, and to Thorax as a kid, was all to get them to toughen up and stop being so wimpy. Additionally, he helped Thorax drive away the maulwurf by playing the "stop hitting yourself" trick on it that he used on Thorax as a child. Thus some have taken the episode's resolution to condone bullying, as it was Pharynx's bullying tactics that saved the day and in doing so vindicated his behavior

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S8 E14 "A Matter of Principals":

• If someone is petty, passive-aggressive, and endangers others, the best thing to do is appease them

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S8 E18 "Yakity-Sax":

• If somebody has a hobby that they’re bad at and annoys everyone around them greatly, it’s better to suck it up and let them continue than risk making them unhappy.

Western Animation:

• "The Mysterious Mare-Do-Well" came under a lot of fire because of its concept of humbling someone being interpreted as "If your friend is being an obnoxious braggart, rather than talking to them, you should anonymously take them down a peg or twelve". It wasn't helped by the fact that the ponies who were involved proceeded to brag about themselves out of the costume.

• "One Bad Apple" has Babs Seed getting away with bullying the Cutie Mark Crusaders because she was also bullied in her hometown of Manehattan. When we find out why Babs has been picking on the CMC, we get An Aesop that "standing up to a bully will make you a bully as well".

• "Winter Wrap-Up" has Twilight being put in charge of the Wrap-Up for her organizational skills, after proving herself disastrously incapable of everything else. Of course the show puts it in its best possible light (the final lesson is "Anything is possible with teamwork!")...but it's still a story about a privileged employee being promoted to supervisor because she's completely incompetent at everything else. Good luck finding a harsher truth about adult life in a kid's show.

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The last one doesn’t make any sense because Twilight was the one who helped the committee get their shit together and had spring arrive early. (At least from what I remember from the episode). Like the whole theme of Season 1 was Twilight finding her place and getting used to Ponyville, this the focus she got in that season.

But yea, considering My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic runs on aesops, I figured there’d be plenty of misuse there.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Oct 29th 2019 at 1:49:32 PM

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I can't remember all of the aesop tropes; several of the MLP examples seem like "poorly-executed aesop," some are "this aesop is bad in real life and/or contradicts other episodes," and then the last one is simply a complete misinterpretation of the episode's message. As you said, it's not about nepotism, it's about Twilight finally finding her place.

BrokenAesop.Live Action TV

• The infamous "Ice Cream Sexuality" animation from ''Series/BillNyeSavesTheWorld''. It ''tries'' to conclude with a "It's okay to not be straight don't be such a prude" message, but instead portrays [[UnfortunateImplications far worst messages]] like "If you're LGBT you're a depraved ExtremeOmnisexual who engages in massive orgies," "Straight people are just LGBT people waiting to be converted," and "It's okay to sexually harass a HeteronormativeCrusader to try and change their mind."

I intend to cut because it doesn’t explain how the moral is contradicted by its internal logic. Aesops coming off as something different than intended isn’t this. Plus uncited Unfortunate Implication entry. Objections?

Update: I'll remove it on the 5th per Three-Day Rule unless I hear back.

Edited by Ferot_Dreadnaught on Nov 3rd 2019 at 7:42:03 AM

Needs evidence on how the ice cream animation show the morals.

SpongeBob SquarePants S6 E14: "Dear Vikings"/"Ditchin'" has an entry for Broken Aesop:

• The moral of the story is don't skip school, but it turns out Spongebob had the best day of his life after ditching boating school to go hang out with Patrick. He got to meet Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy (again) to get his Mermaid Man & Barnacle Boy origins comic book autographed, gets free ice cream for the rest of his life, got to go jellyfishing, and bested Sandy at badminton. So the moral is paraphrased as don't skip school, but if you do, you will have the best day of your life.
  • From SpongeBob's perspective, it's not broken at all. While it seems like the best day of his life, he'll supposedly slip into a lifetime of vice. The fact that he spent the entire episode making tiny excuses and small justifications that added up to hours of tardiness only reinforced the idea in his mind. Obviously still broken from our perspective because he ran back to school before anything bad could (permanently) happen.

That Natter doesn't help. Anyways, this isn't really right. SpongeBob does have good stuff happen when he skips, but he can't actually enjoy it because he feels guilty about skipping. He gets sidetracked and distracted on his way back to school. And he almost dies in a tar pit because he skipped. After he learns that he could start a life of crime for skipping school, he tells Mrs. Puff that he'll never skip school "again." So... the moral isn't really broken after all. Should I remove it?

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Yes. Nuke it.

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Not to mention being in the YMMV section when it’s supposed to be in the main trope page...

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Broken Aesop also has a problem of frequently being put on the YMMV page when it belongs on the main page. This is probably due to Broken Aesop being inherently negative, so it's often assumed that it must be a negative Audience Reaction, and also because Broken Aesop is often misused as "bad aesop," which is based on opinion.

The Simpsons S 10 E 8 Homer Simpsons In The Kidney Trouble:

Clueless Aesop: The episode doesn’t really seem to have a point. The aesop isn’t redemption because of the fact that Homer runs away in the end. It’s not being Played for Laughs because of the serious way Abe’s illness is being depicted and they make it clear that Homer left his father to die. And the situation isn’t Up to Eleven so it can’t be Black Comedy. It seems to only point of the episode is to depict Homer as a Jerkass and even then Hibbert and the others aren't that better as they take the kidney without consent and Grampa even gloats about it.

I'm pretty sure Clueless Aesop is supposed to be when a work awkwardly handles a serious subject.

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It is! Not knowing what the moral is seems more like Lost Aesop.

For every low there is a high.

I'm uncomfortable with this example from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S7 E14 "Fame and Misfortune":

• Clueless Aesop: The Aesop hinges on the fans and critic being wrong for directing their fervor at "real ponies" over their real life happenings, unfairly infringing upon them. But it's meant as an allegory for such directed at the shows creators, who's job is to create satisfying fictional characters and stories, causing the applicability to not hold up.

Besides trying to sneak in some complaint, I'm not sure it fits with Clueless Aesop, which is for short "the show can't handle the message it tries to transmit". Maybe it could fit in a different trope...

I added that. It seemed the best trope to fit the issues fans took with it as it's not broken, but the real-life thing it's meant to represent lost the intended applicability when translated into the fictional scenario. My impression is that Clueless Aesop isn't just something the work inherently can't do, but failed to do so (works can surprise with how well they handle an Aesop). Is there a more fitting trope and/or less complainy way to put it?

When I check the episode pages for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, I’m surprised to find they don’t have Broken Aesop listed on the pages that have them, despite them being listed on Broken Aesop’s page. Is there any reason why?

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Nobody bothered to crosswick?

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