Opening but clocking as the case is a little weak.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
I can't even decipher what the trope even is by reading the description. Basically it's an aesop that makes sense in a fantastic universe, but is meaningless in the real world. But does it have to be an allegory?
And you can't really do "Trope X but done Bad" and vice versa, which this is currently soft-split into.
Edited by ccorb on Nov 7th 2020 at 7:03:22 AM
Rock'n'roll never dies!
I think I know what this trope is supposed to be, based on the definition, and I don't think the allegory stuff is part of it. It makes for way too much overlap with Space Whale Aesop and is almost certainly the reason why the description is so whiny.
(Though by that same argument, you could make a case that it actually is a core part of the current definition. God, I get tired sometimes of old tropes.)
Edited by nrjxll on Nov 7th 2020 at 6:50:47 AM
I think part of the problem is that the trope is currently split into two entirely different concepts:
- A moral lesson that is impossible to apply in real life (e.g. do not resurrect the dead). Or,
- A moral lesson that can be applied to real life, but due to Fridge Logic, is rendered moot by the work's fantastical setting (e.g. you can resurrect the dead with no consequences, but the work still tries to teach the aesop of letting go of dead loved ones anyway).
There's also the fact that aesops tend to use allegories, so even if the elements involved in the aesop doesn't have an exact real world equivalent, you can derive real world implications from it: e.g. Fantastic Racism in a work used to teach that "racism is bad", but the race in question poses a legitimate threat against humans, so Fantastic Aesop gets used to basically complain that "this work failed to convey its moral lesson in an appropriate way."
Gentleman Troper!
The confusing and overly-lengthy trope description notwithstanding, I get the impression that almost all examples on the page would fit under Broken Aesop, Lost Aesop, or Space Whale Aesop.
I suggest we can move all those, cut this page, and redirect to An Aesop.
Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!
groovin'
A lot of the aesop tropes have terrible descriptions that need to be rewritten. These are the definitions of the mentioned tropes as I've interpreted them:
- Fantastic Aesop: A moral about things that can't be done in real life.
- Space Whale Aesop: A moral established by showing improbable consequences.
- Broken Aesop: An intended moral undermined by other parts of the work.
- Lost Aesop: A moral contradicted by later parts of the work.
Ignoring for now the overlap between Broken and Lost Aesops, they all seem distinct from each other.
It does need a total description rewrite, possibly removing the internal split, and an example de-complain-ifying.
Edited by JXZ on Nov 7th 2020 at 11:23:20 AM
my brain is a computer with 4k of ram. this is a jokes wiki
Gentleman Troper!
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
An issue is that "things that cannot be done in real life" generally serve as a metaphor for things that can. So just because something is not possible in real life, shouldn't make it a different trope.
Bonnie's Artistic Cousin
I mean...what about Artistic License?
Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
groovin'
That's just an Aesop with a metaphor. Fantastic Aesop is when there isn't a metaphor, so there's no realistic situation where the "lesson" would be of any use to the audience.
I think Lost Aesop is a bit broader than JXZ is arguing it. I think it's simply "an attempt is made to convey a moral, but it's unclear what the moral is actually supposed to be". Vs Broken Aesop what you're supposed to take away is made clear, but it's contradicted by parts of the story.
Easier to spot when it's acknowledged in-universe or goes along with Let Me Tell You a Story.
"It's just a show; I should really just relax"
The part of Fantastic Aesop's description about "Failed Metaphor" needs to be removed then, because that's clearly allowed under the current definition.
Edited by Adept on Nov 8th 2020 at 10:05:23 PM
I also think this should be turned into "Aesop that is completely inapplicable to the real world" and the failed allegory stuff should be removed. That all could probably be moved into Broken Aesop or Space Whale Aesop depending on which fits better.
However, I think that the description needs a rewrite no matter what, since the current version is too confusing and complain-y.
Agree on redefining it to "Aesop that has no applicability in the real world."
I thought that was the intended definition? Regardless, I agree.
I'd like to apologize for all this.
The main thing we need to do is rewrite the description to make it clear, and see if any examples are salvageable.
Rock'n'roll never dies!
Extending clock.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Maintenance?
Okay, to add support for keeping this thread open, here's a Fantastic Aesop wick check (50/374, 53 distinct instances):
- Characters.Yu Gi Oh Ancient Egypt: Never massacre an entire village of peasants and melt their blood and bones into the Millennium Items. One of their survivors will end up merging their soul with an ancient demon and try to destroy the world.
- Ludd Was Right: Metal Gear Solid 2 used this to make Anvilicious swipes at gaming fans more than anything (particularly railing on gamers who think they're experts in some field as a result of extensive video gaming -- including combat), but came up with an odd Fantastic Aesop in "Snake Tale E: External Gazer" — Snake's VR machine destroys other universes to function and therefore should never be used. It gets weird when the games hammer home how VR simulations are as realistic as the real thing, and more customizable to actual combat situations.
- Laconic.Hatoful Boyfriend: Dating pigeons is nothing but suffering and madness.
- VideoGame.Guilty Gear: Don't tamper with genes and turn creatures into magical weapons of war... because they will wipe out the Japanese.
- Manga.Delicious In Dungeon: Eating monsters is a much better idea than trying to survive on nutritionally limited rations from the surface.
- Film.Troll 2: Only the power of goodness can defeat the goblins. Of course, a double decker baloney sandwich always helps.
- PlayingWith.Space Whale Aesop: Spencer learns a Fantastic Aesop like "don't Time Travel".
- Cure for Cancer: For some reason (half Fantastic Aesop and half Status Quo Is God), the cure often has some horrific side effect—it causes zombies, is made from people, or what have you.
- TabletopGame.Eclipse Phase: The Fall gave us "Don't let a self-aware, adaptive alien digital virus infect your Seed AI-controlled defense system, or else it will run amok with advanced technology, completely devastate the Earth, wipe out 92% of the human race, and disappear after going through a singularity event."
- Recap.The Nostalgia Critic S 9 E 7: The Critic invoked this when he tried to recap the film's moral in the end.
Critic: If a clone of you wants to turn your bar into a casino, don't let him.
- Webcomic.Sinfest: Played straight and combined with a Fantastic Aesop with the fembots. Buying one is not only evil and sexist, but will also lead to violence.
- BetterThanItSounds.Webcomics: Basic Instructions: A Cut and Paste Comic featuring a bald guy with a goatee teaching us how to do things we probably will never have to or how to do things in ways that we'd never think of or could actually make things worse.
- YMMV.House Of The Scorpion: Child labor is immoral. Killing one's clones to prolong one's existence is immoral. Turning people into computerized zombies is immoral.
- Recap.The Simpsons S 6 E 6 Treehouse Of Horror V: When Homer accidentally travels back in time, he quickly recalls what Abe told him on his wedding day.
Abe: If you ever travel back in time, don’t step on anything! Because even the tiniest change can alter the future in ways you can’t imagine!
- YMMV.The Spectacular Spider Man: Every time the show hands us a lesson about great power and responsibility and the right thing in conjunction with Peter's keeping his identity secret, it ends up telling us that secret identities are a stupid idea and nothing good can ever come of them. Which is more or less true, if largely inapplicable to our daily lives.
- Recap.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic S 6 E 21 Every Little Thing She Does: As Rainbow Dash simply and punctually puts it, don't cast mind-control spells on your friends.
- And Knowing Is Half the Battle: At the end of the Power Rangers parody "Super Strong Warner Siblings" Yakko tells the audience playing with giant bugs isn't cool.
- MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic.Tropes E To K (2): As Twilight said in "Inspiration Manifestation", "Never, ever, ever, EVER take another book out of the library at the castle without asking!" (Or three Princesses might have to spend their entire day cleaning up your mistake. Shame on you.) Gets funnier when you realize Spike ate the book and Twilight doesn't even think it worth mentioning.
- Anvilicious.Western Animation: Lampshaded and played for laughs at the end of the episode where Ron gives a speech to the viewer about how mutating your DNA is bad, and you should never do it.
- WesternAnimation.The Book Of Life: (Learned by Joaquin) If you are immortal and invincible, a willingness to fight isn't really courage.
- FanFic.Rebellion: Turned Against Their Masters.
- Drugs Are Bad: In Worm, Weaver deconstructs this trope when talking to middle-schoolers, explaining that drugs don't instantly ruin people's lives like they say, and that Lies to Children claiming they do just discredit people talking about the progressive harm they do. She then segues from this into an explanation of why being a supervillain sucks in much the same way.
- Series.Out Of This World 1987 (1): In one episode Evie uses her powers to pass her driving test, with the result that she gets a license despite not being able to parallel park. This is, obviously, a reprehensible thing, and consequentially, she gets in a car accident the very first time she takes the car out. Everything's reasonable so far, except for the fact that the tester was being a jerk and demanded she park in a space visibly smaller than the car. So the moral is "It's not fair to use your superpowers to succeed at something that would be physically impossible to do without them."
- ComicBook.One More Day: The story is essentially a result of Quesada wanting to split up Mary Jane and Peter, but at the same time didn't want to imply a "divorce is okay" aesop. Apparently, he was just fine with implying the impossible "making deals with the devil is okay".
- Theatre.Shrek The Musical: "Freak Flag" starts out with your typical Be Yourself message, but it kind of gets derailed halfway through.
Pinocchio: We may be freaks, but we're freaks with teeth and claws and magic wands...and together, we can stand up to Farquaad!
Humpty-Dumpty: We've got magic! We've got power!
Who are they to say we're wrong?
All the things that make us special
Are the things that make us strong! - Headscratchers.Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (1): So... if they were so certain that they could bring Nia back from the dead with spiral energy, couldn't they just have used it to change her from the Anti-Spiral energy being whateverness back to a human?
Because it's a Fantastic Aesop. In real life we can't bring the dead back to life, so we are taught to accept and come to terms with death. However the idea of accepting death has become detached from the fact that bringing back the dead is impossible, so people think that it is good in and of itself, rather than simply a coping mechanism. The Gurren Lagann writers, being human, fell prey to this misconception like anyone else (although in the translation that I watched it sounded more like they were speculating about should they do it if they could do it, not explicitly stating that they could). I think that, in the future, when we finally do figure out how to resurrect the dead, there will be a lot of idiots who will insist we should accept their deaths, for this reason.
- BullyingADragon.Comic Books: It happens very frequently to mutants. X-Men was supposed to be about how racism is wrong. It always seems to come across as bullying a dragon since most of them can easily kill you. Yeah, there are some that don't have good powers, and picking on them is kinda like racism. Picking on the guy that can shoot lasers from his eyes? Not so much. It's like the difference between someone picking a fight with a Jew, and picking a fight with a Jew while he's holding a loaded shotgun. In fact, this happens to the Friends of Humanity so often, you start to wonder just why joining them seems so appealing.
- YMMV.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic S 3 E 13 Magical Mystery Cure: "A True, True Friend" delivers the intended Aesop about helping friends find their true selves in musical. But the prominence and fantasticness of the cutie marks/destinies swap caused many to see it as "don't blindly follow perceived destiny, especially if you're bad at it/it makes you and others miserable" and/or "you can Screw Destiny and be who you choose/want to be" despite more-or-less contradicting the happenings of the episode.explanation
- Discount Lesbians: Note that they're Discount Lesbians only if they're included in the story in a way that obviates the need to address the associated issues of sexuality. Characters used to draw attention to those issues are inversions, although this can still fall into Fantastic Aesop or Space Whale Aesop.
- Funny.Honest Trailers 2017 Episodes: The narrator's Alternate Aesop Interpretation teaches, "Don't text and drive, because you might end up turning into a wizard."
- Memes.Advertising: You wouldn't download a car. Explanation
- Series.Out Of This World 1987 (2): Commonly taught "Don't use your special powers to do X" aesops. Should you ever gain the ability to stop time, don't use it for personal gain, or directly to make other people happy. (Using powers to triage a friend's problem is sometimes okay, but just magicking your best friend a cute date is right out.)
- WesternAnimation.My Little Pony TV Specials: Also from Catrina. Remember kids, stay off drugs, or else you'll become a lightning spamming giant that tries to enslave pastel-colored hairballs and ponies! After a while, even your long time shapeshifting Lizard Folk enabler will grow tired of you, turn into a bull, and knock you into a pit of the stuff to drown in your own habit!
- Awesome.The Rescuers: Cue demotivational posters about Disney encouraging minors to drive vehicles. "Remember, kids: never drive a boat through a swamp if your abusive guardian is behind you on crocodiles."
- Music.Brental Floss: "The moral of the fable is do not eat a baby, 'cuz he'll become your friend one day, maybe!" Not to say it's a bad lesson in general, only that it's one with much more relevance in the Yoshi community.
- Digital Piracy Is Evil: In "I Dated a Robot" those who facilitate illegal downloads will also unleash killer Lucy Liu-bots to protect their sinister racket. In this case what's being downloaded illegally is personality imprints painfully derived from heads-in-jars being held prisoner for the purpose. Slightly different from a normal recording. Downloaded from Kidnappster.com!
- Literature.Lady My Life As A Bitch: Don't annoy tramps kids...Or you might get transformed into a dog.
- Humans Are Flawed: If the story has a Fantastic Aesop against removing one of the above human flaws to better mankind, this trope is usually invoked as the reason why it's wrong.
- Do Not Do This Cool Thing: In Worm, Taylor uses this to her advantage when talking to middle-schoolers about why being a supervillain sucks. She explains that while, if you're one of the few who make it big, you can make truly insane amounts of money, the chances of dying are also high.
- There Should Be a Law: Century City was set 20 Minutes into the Future, so it often did this for issues that haven't come up yet, either seriously (clones need rights) or less than seriously (surgically created Hermaphrodites are disgusting).
- MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic.Tropes E To K (1): The show is generally pretty good at avoiding this, but it still runs into it on occasion. "The Cutie Mark Chronicles" is a good example, as its moral is that friendship is important because everyone has a special connection with their friends, even before they've met. Which is a nice thought, and may very well be true In-Universe, but in real life it's entirely possible to become really good friends without having ever crossed paths in the past.
- Recap.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic S 1 E 21 Over A Barrel: It's easy for your enemies to make peace with you if you fight them with Edible Ammunition.
- Mind over Manners: So how do you justify people like Professor X or Martian Manhunter being good guys, without having them solve the plot and mind-wipe the Rogues Gallery, all while avoiding sappy Fantastic Aesops intended to hold back the phlebotinum?
- YMMV.Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Green Aesop that was widely seen as Anvilicious in Power Rangers Wild Force existed as early as this series. The reason people don't complain about it here, however, is that it was eventually toned down, not to mention that it was more presented as the rangers raising awareness, as opposed to a motive to fight the villains. While Wild Force isn't entirely to blame, since the aesop was a result of the show being a direct translation of Hyakujuu Sentai Gaorangernote .
- DarthWiki.Hello: And it's still broken.
- Gush.Anime And Manga: This troper really liked Darker than Black and wishes another season would be made (although difficult given the series' ending). It has competent (often badass) and sympathetic characters and makes one of the best uses of the "X-Men" Fantastic Aesop.
- This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: The backlash against this trope may well be the biggest reason Only the Pure of Heart has started to fall out of favor. It doesn't help that so many examples of it treat the pure-of-heart character as the most vital team member of an otherwise robust cast, so you've got good guys who are worldlier, stronger, smarter, better at strategic thinking, etc., but all of them pale in importance next to the character who is... the most innocent. Because lessons.
- Series.Charmed 1998: Too many to count.
- WesternAnimation.Static Shock: The most prominent ones focused on racism ("Sons of the Fathers"), guns at school and bullying ("Jimmy"), dyslexia ("Where the Rubber Meets the Road"), drug addiction ("Power Play", with a Fantastic Aesop spin to it), and poverty ("Frozen Out").
- BrokenAesop.Comic Books: This is a common issue in Batman comics, and superhero comics in general, when they attempt to provide the moral that "vigilante justice is bad" - overlapping with Fantastic Aesop. It's true that in real life, attempting to be a vigilante on the level of Batman is a terrible idea, but when it's a fundamental fact of the genre that vigilante justice not only works, but is usually the only way to solve the problem, any reader can look at Leslie Thompkins ranting to Batman about how he shouldn't be putting these people in danger and taking the law into his own hands, and then recall the seventeen times that year alone that Batman's activities saved the entire city, country, or the entire planet.
- CloningBlues.Western Animation: In the Kim Possible episode "Kimitation Nation", Dr. Drakken creates an army of duplicates of Kim, Ron, and classmate Bonnie. When discussing it with Wade, she comments that cloning shouldn't work like that according to science class. He agrees; it's not "really" cloning, but they'll refer to it as such to simplify things. The clones were merely used in a Fantastic Aesop and killed off by soda. He'd originally wanted to clone Shego, but she had a no-cloning clause in her contract. When he kept pressing the issue, she walked out on him for the rest of the episode.
- Headscratchers.Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (2): So... if they were so certain that they could bring Nia back from the dead with spiral energy, couldn't they just have used it to change her from the Anti-Spiral energy being whateverness back to a human?
The chance of this situation actually coming up is pretty darn unlikely.
- Literature.Theyre Made Out Of Meat: Overlaps with Fantastic Aesop.
Edited by LaundryPizza03 on Dec 14th 2020 at 9:19:21 AM
I'm back!
Nicely done. Although I have to question whether some of the entries in that "correct" folder (Aesop unapplicable to Real Life) are actually meant to be An Aesop in the first place. A lot of them merely reads as "fantastic things that happens in a fantasy work leads to dire consequences", regardless of whether or not there's an intended aesop against that fantastic stuff going on.
Edited by Adept on Dec 15th 2020 at 5:08:10 PM
Some of them (such as the Hatoful Boyfriend one) seem like Warp That Aesop.
Rock'n'roll never dies!
I thought Fantastic Aesop was for when there's an attempt at a metaphor for a realistic lesson, but it's undermined by the details of the fantasy stuff. Which could, in many cases, be thought of as a subset of Broken Aesop.
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
I agree with making this about Aesops that are inapplicable in real life, due to how often it's already used to mean that. The description is such a mess that I don't know exactly what it currently is.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 13th 2021 at 12:43:31 PM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
The problem there is that if a work simply appears to be presenting an Aesop that's inapplicable in real life with no attempt at a metaphor/allegory for a legitimate real-life Aesop, there's a good chance that it was never intended to even have an actual Aesop as such (in the Aesop cleanup thread, it was stated that there's a problem with Tropers who don't seem to understand that not every work is intended to have an Aesop).
For the intent behind Fantastic Aesop as I understand it, I would think the "flawed attempt at metaphor/allegory for real-world issue" would be an important distinction. As to whether that ought to be merged with Broken Aesop, I'm not sure.
What is a good example of "aesop inapplicable to real life", anyway?
Don't try to resurrect the dead, don't use time travel to screw around with history, don't use magic to avoid hard work, don't treat sentient robots like mere equipment, that kind of thing.
Anyhow, I rewrote the definition of Fantastic Aesop on An Aesop to reflect how it's described on its own page, and put it as a subset of Broken Aesop. What do you think?
The TRS thread
for Bad Writing Index found that this trope has an unnecessarily complainy and confusing description that is written like a Playing With subpage; it overlaps significantly with Space Whale Aesop. Examples can attract complaining and natter as well. A comment on the discussion page
suggests that the instance where this trope goes wrong may be tropeworthy in its own right (as an inversion of Space Whale Aesop).
I'm back!