Aesop Cleanup

This entry from How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? always struck me a kinda complainy or otherwise a poor fit. I'd like a second opinion, though:

• Broken Aesop: The main moral is that any ordinary person can get fit with some hard work — is offset by the fact that Hibiki is not particularly dedicated (she consistently eats poorly, for instance), yet still has impressive physical gifts. Your ordinary person is not going to be able to punch boxing bags so hard it breaks the chains or effortlessly defeat a world arm wrestling champion with only a few months of training, even if they work much harder than Hibiki does throughout the series. And of course, most of the other characters are simply not ordinary to begin with, being either fitness buffs (Machio, Akemi) or top-tier athletes (Ayaka, Gina). The characters that are the most ordinary, Satomi and Kutaro, are frequently made the butt of jokes relating to their lack of athleticism despite by all appearances being serious about their fitness, which makes one wonder how productive the manga is really being about trying to make ordinary people hit the gym.

Kutaro is the butt of endless jokes, BTW (the weakling t-shirt), but Satomi's athleticism or lack thereof isn't fodder for too many jokes (mostly her age is the target of the jokes).

From We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story.

• Accidental Aesop:
  • Animals who behave like animals are stupid, vicious monsters.
  • Carnivores are smart, while herbivores are dumb.

This sounds like Warp That Aesop.

I agree.

A Broken Aesop example:

• “One Coarse Meal” was meant to teach viewers that it is not okay to bully other people to the point of suicide and that it is also not okay to take advantage of another person’s fears to use against them as shown when Mr. Krabs dresses as his daughter Pearl to take advantage of Plankton’s fear of whales and almost drives Plankton to suicide by bus in the process. SpongeBob calls Mr. Krabs out for this and reveals the truth to Plankton. However, Plankton decides to get revenge on Mr. Krabs for the bullying by taking advantage of his fear of mimes. The issue here is that Plankton is deemed the one in wrong for this and is depicted as the villain by doing that despite the fact that Mr. Krabs did the same thing and was being given a taste of his own medicine with the mimes. Even worse is that SpongeBob defeats Plankton by tricking him into thinking a pod of whales are near by using a projection of whales and that moment is depicted as good. This turns the moral into a total mess by implying that it is okay to bully others if you perceive them as evil.

As much as I think that episode is weirdly dark (though it's a dead horse by now), I definitely don't think the aesop was "don't bully people to the point of suicide." The entry outright says Plankton was meant to be the villain in this episode, and I think his suffering was meant to be exaggerated for comedy — not part of some greater lesson about bullying. I don't think it has a lesson. It's just cartoony antics with a few weirdly dark jokes thrown in.

100% cut.

Another Broken Aesop example, this time for iCarly.

• "iMeet Fred" has a very confused moral about not expressing your opinions online in public forums. Freddie politely says he doesn't think Fred is that funny. He doesn't say he hates the character, but just says that the humor isn't his cup of tea. Then Lucas Cruikshank, Fred's creator and actor, declares Fred's dead due to Freddie's comments. After, Freddie's relentlessly bullied by pretty much everyone in school, as apparently they're all fans of Fred. When the gang all travel to Idaho to confront him, it's revealed that Lucas did it to start an internet fight between iCarly fans and his to boost their ratings. Before this, Freddie refused to apologize on the grounds that he doesn't think Lucas deserves it. That is until Sam beats the apology out of him with a Tennis racket. What should've been a story about sticking to your opinions, especially when you're proven right or not wrong for having them, becomes an episode about the exact opposite of that. Neither moral holds up because Lucas was a major Jerkass to them by not informing them of his plan and not even apologizing for all the pain he caused Freddie. On top of that, Fred wasn't always seen as comedy gold back when he was popular and is now seen as a laughingstock of the early days of YouTube, so Freddie was ultimately proven right in the end.

Like the "One Coarse Meal" example, this seems like complaining about an infamous episode that didn't actually have a moral. There's enough Gushing About Guest Stars in the episode to make me think they didn't want us to see Freddie's opinion as right. As such this is just an Informed Wrongness example.

There is this one under Clueless Aesop, in the category Comic Books for X-Men:

• In retrospect, Mikhail Rasputin's quasi-introduction falls into this category by Fridge Logic—Peter Corbeau compares his death to the real-life Apollo 1 fire... except that it was later revealed that Mikhail hadn't actually died, but had been sent to another dimension, gone insane, and come back as a supervillain. Addressing real-life disasters is hard in a comic that's so big on bringing people Back from the Dead.

I do have two main problems with this.

First, Mikhail (Colossus's brother) having died is just an element in Colossus's backstory to explain why he is so afraid of getting into a spacecraft very much like the one his brother died. I don't see how it is an Aesop. Seems like the troper saw the above entry in the page about how they totally botched things with the infamous Spider-Man story about 9/11 and thought superhero comic book stories even mentioning real life tragedies is bad.

But the Spider-Man story at least was trying to be an Aesop (several Aesops, actually) and failing, while this old X-Men story wasn't.

Second, it seems bizarre to say a story written in The '70s by Chris Claremont, when X-Men stories still didn't have lots of characters returning from the dead, has a Clueless Aesop, because it was contradicted by a story written 20 years later, in The '90s, when Death Is Cheap really started to take hold, by a different writer to boot. Death Is Cheap has all sorts of bad effects, IMO, but does it really apply retroactively to destroy a small moment in a story written so much earlier? Actually I kinda see the point here, but then we should list every single death in every single superhero story as... I dunno... some sort of "X in hindsight" trope?

Edited by renenarciso2 on Apr 16th 2024 at 6:48:08 AM

It's 100% not an Aesop.

For the iCarly one, yeah, I don't think there was any moral there. It was just an episode of people bullying Freddie with a confusing ending.

Okay, I've cut the Mikhail example.