BrokenAesop and YMMV/Audience Reaction

If Broken Aesop ceases to relate to An Aesop, redefined or otherwise, I'm not even sure it'd be tropable, because then it's literally just "complaining about a story (supposedly) contradicting itself".

If we want to disentangle Broken Aesop from An Aesop, that's a possibility. But I think this is a much larger issue than just Broken Aesop and Clueless Aesop and affects all Aesop tropes. And we'd have to rename them if we do disconnect since the Aesop in the title would be misleading.

Edited by amathieu13 on Apr 14th 2023 at 1:11:52 PM

What amathieu13 said — I think it would make the situation worse because we only stray further from defining what An Aesop even is, and thus we only get the "complaining" aspect of the "Broken" half of Broken Aesop.

I don't think we have to make the An Aesop trope strictly limited to the classic literary definition a la Aesop's Fables, because that would be disqualifying a huge swathe of tropes that are valid, in part because the aren't to do with complaints. We haven't mentioned this until now, but the index lists plenty of specific/Stock Aesops that I think don't quite fit that definition but are very much valid, a la Green Aesop, Be Yourself, A Weighty Aesop, Honesty Aesop, etc. Perhaps not all perfectly handled like with most tropes, but do deserve documentation, usually because they are actual central messages tied to the broad work they're a part of.

I suppose we could sidestep the issue of how it relates to An Aesop by renaming without changing the definition, along with any other proposals. The misuse already provides a reason to rename.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 14th 2023 at 12:26:04 PM

I think there's a difference between being a theme and being an aesop. Be Yourself is written as an aesop, but the message/theme of Be Yourself is much broader. It's often used as an aesop by children's shows because it's a simple enough message to get, but it need not be considered an aesop to be valid.

And that goes for most of these tropes. Many of them are used as Aesops and as broad themes. Green Aesop for example includes this line: "Can be done with subtlety or done blatantly." If it's done blatantly/ Anviliciously at the end, then that's a valid aesop subtrope. But the subtlety part is functionally the same as a trope called "Protect the Environment" about works that can be interpreted as having a pro-environemnt messaging. Mad Max: Fury Road is listed on the example page for Green Aesop when even the example admits it's not the main theme of the work and is mostly referencing a discussed theme, for example.

Basically, even with these other aesop tropes, I think some of them are genuine aesops but most are just using the term "aesop" to mean "theme" and can either be converted into non-Aesop trope pages or split into aesop specific and general theme trope pages if the use of the aesop, like with Green Aesop, is really common.

Edited by amathieu13 on Apr 14th 2023 at 1:39:57 PM

That still doesn't change that there is plenty of rampant misuse — go down the "Related" pages of Broken Aesop as it stands from alphabetical order, and even beyond documenting examples in work pages, Broken Aesop is currently a massive Pothole Magnet used to accentuate whatever negative YMMV opinions folks have. Here, quick mini-wick check:

• A Threesome Is Hot: The whole trope, when exaggerated, gives off the Broken Aesop that women should be bisexual but men mustn't explore this side of sexuality, mostly because male bisexuality is a much less comfortable subject for straight male viewers than female bisexuality. That doesn't "break" any moral lesson, it just gives off a skeevy implication about sexuality.
• Aardvark Trunks: In the first Arthur book, Arthur the aardvark had a long nose but he looked more like a brown tapir (or a giant anteater, without the stripes or the plumes of hair on the tail) than an aardvark, with a medium-sized pig-like snout pointing downward. In the second book, he had a long face with his mouth at the end of it (but not an accurate snout). In following books, his nose was gradually shortened until in his later design (and in the animated series) Arthur and his family had absolutely no snouts at all, making them not even look like aardvarks. Awkwardly, said first book was entitled Arthur's Nose, in which Arthur faces bullying for his long nose and learns to accept himself as he is, making for a rather Broken Aesop. Nothing morally hypocritical, it seems more like it got lost over time between entries due to Early-Installment Weirdness — each story is otherwise morally consistent with themselves.
• Above the Influence: Subverted in Dumbing of Age, where Danny refuses a girl's advances in the spirit of this trope and is later told off by Ethical Slut Joe because there was no influence, and assuming a woman doesn't know when she wants sex wasn't the respectful option at all. Though telling someone that they should have had sex with someone else when they had reservations about it isn't good advice, either. Just complaining about a certain way to interpret the actual lesson, no outright contradiction.
• Acquired Situational Narcissism: In "Richie's Flip Side", Richie falls into a job as a DJ and his ego grows with every scene. He contemplates quitting school and grows a ducktail. His friends hate him so much that Fonzie orchestrates a total snub by everyone at Arnold's during a live remote. Richie's crushed, learns his lesson, and quits his job. The moral of the story? No matter what you do, you will never be as cool as the Fonz. Again, no moral contradiction, just a cynical complaint of how the story goes.
• Alcohol-Induced Bisexuality: Glee: In "Blame It on the Alcohol," Blaine, who's gay, gets drunk at a party and makes out with Rachel. He later tells his boyfriend Kurt that he somewhat enjoyed it, and wonders if he might be bisexual. Unfortunately, Kurt comments that "bisexual" men are just gay guys pretending to be straight; Blaine calls him out on this, but a Broken Aesop occurs regardless when Kurt is proven right about Blaine being gay at the end of the episode. Ignoring the lack of context on how one exactly proves Blaine is only specifically gay ("proving a negative" and all that), it's also not clear if Kurt's point actually is meant to be taken as the moral lesson the episode itself is trying to push, not merely as just a character's action in the moral (again, "depiction" =/= "endorsement"). There is an argument to be made that it is the case, but this entry presents it as fact.

I see what you mean, but I think there is room to accept "Aesop" as a colloquialism for a very specific and narratively-intended theme and intertwined moral message. I would honestly argue that the Mad Max Fury Road example is misuse because the environmental theme of that film is only there insofar as having a Gaia's Lament beat about the destruction of the environment, not actually trying to impart "we should actively help to fix the environment."

Edited by number9robotic on Apr 14th 2023 at 10:48:03 AM

Yeah, there's definitely an issue of people not being able to discern what's an actual aesop and what's a theme and what's just sort of something that happens in the work (i.e, Accidental Aesop).

I don't know if distancing Broken Aesop from it would work, because as a concept, the idea is solid — a work has an aesop, but the narrative contradicts it. We can all agree on that much, hence my argument on the TRS thread about how Broken Aesop itself has no unique definition or misuse issues to solve that aren't tied back to aesop. The issue comes in when people interpret everything to be an aesop, but if we retool Broken Aesop, what would it become?

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 14th 2023 at 1:41:52 PM

Yeah, I think these pages were created and written with a clear vision but An Aesop fell into Trope Decay due to users conflating "aesop" with "theme/message" when it's a specific presentation of that theme/message, which rippled out into all of the sub and related tropes.

I honestly don't think we fix the issue without hammering down what we want An Aesop to be.

I suppose we could take the nuclear option and make most of these pages def-only, but it wouldn't solve everything.

I don't even think that works since "aesop" used in this way isn't used outside of the site/derivatives of the site.

So, any ideas?

I suggested that we fix An Aesop before making a decision on any of its related/subtropes

Edited by amathieu13 on Apr 15th 2023 at 4:09:18 AM

One thing for sure is that if there is any change to what An Aesop is defined as, it's gonna require a substantial cleanup just because Aesop tropes are so common, and likely require individual evaluation as to whether or not they belong on the main page or just getting zapped as matter. Even just porting examples of the likes of Broken Aesop to YMMV will need a lot of attention just to identify derisive potholes.

So in defining An Aesop and setting up a potential threshold for entries to be based around, I'm gonna reiterate what I proposed on the last page: it must be tangibly relevant to the "whole" narrative of a work (whether it be the story of an individual episode or the series at large), not merely a particular aspect of one. Not a perfect proposal and there could always be room to fudge around the specific wording, but I think this will largely cover examples of moral messages in works that are in of themselves "the point" while curbing out unnecessary implications and themes that may still be retained elsewhere, but perhaps not as "Aesops". After reevaluating the Green Aesop trope, it appears that a vast majority of entries (at least on its example page) don't actually use the trope the "intended way" (mostly illustrations of environmental decay, never actually pointing out the story going "we should save the environment, and so should you, viewers!") and this probably should be renamed and/or merged into Gaia's Lament.

I don't believe the answer is to merely reduce An Aesop to its very traditional meaning of "the moral platitude given at the end of the story,” in large part because fiction and audiences have become more sophisticated since Aesop's Fables (less Trope Decay and more Evolving Trope), and moral lessons written with intent and purpose by the author do deserve to be recognized as part of the work. Again, it's primarily a matter of relevance — if we were able to slap a "requires narrative relevance" stipulation on Foil, I don't see why we can't do the same for An Aesop.

Edited by number9robotic on Apr 15th 2023 at 1:57:38 AM

Related, I think there may be a missing supertrope for the general idea of "theme".

I think going back to the narrower concept is better because it can be clearly defined. I edited this to my earlier post but I'll add it here too. An aesop is a narrative framework in which the author communicates a particular message in a clear, pedagogic/moralizing way at the end of the story so that the audience (usually kids) can easily understand/know what to take away from the story they just heard.

Modern stories have played with this framework, but that doesn't mean the framework itself doesn't have a tight structure. That formulaic structure is what made Aesop's fables unique enough to codify the entire genre of Fable.

Edited by amathieu13 on Apr 15th 2023 at 5:03:24 AM

That makes more sense, though I think the wording perhaps makes it come off as more of a subjective matter than mine, as the barometer hinges more around what the troper assesses as authorial intent and action than narrative relevance. Then again, mine also requires a degree of subjective assessment in determining something close, but not easily identified as an objective fact of the text, so I'm not totally sure haha

Though something else that pops out that may or may not need to be addressed by this discussion is whether this makes for Anvilicious bait, because the definition feels much along the lines of that, except the troper doesn’t visibly have a problem with it.

Edited by number9robotic on Apr 15th 2023 at 2:38:49 AM

Maybe the real issue is that we have no trope for the generic, non-explicit moral. At least I don't think so.

Perhaps it's a kind of Motif?

Since most of us at least seem to agree with making it YMMV, at least we know that we can (hopefully) cross that bridge later.

Re An Aesop, I feel if the protagonist near the end isn't delivering a short speech about the theme of the series (or something of that caliber), pretty much all An Aesop examples are made up by tropers (which is why High Concept was made def-only).

"Greed is bad, friends are good" sounds obvious, but if there isn't a quote for it, it may be a speculation if that's the indeded message. Which ironically makes it indistingushable from Accidental Aesop.

If we don't have a criteria what counts as An Aesop, it'd be difficult to discuss related tropes.

Edited by Amonimus on Apr 15th 2023 at 9:36:52 PM

This was the point I was trying to make about why making Broken Aesop YMMV before understanding what An Aesop is doesn't make complete sense. Because if An Aesop requires an obvious, direct to the audience explanation of the moral of the story (and I think that's actually what An Aesop was meant to be), then figuring out whether An Aesop is broken is not necessarily YMMV. Once you clearly can establish the aesop, then you can determine if the work did "break" it in one of the several ways outlined by the description. After all, what started this thread was a disagreement about whether or not a work even had a particular Aesop to begin with to break, not so much on the ways it was undermined or broken.

Somewhat surprisingly, the notion that the moral has to be Anvilicious in some way is not directly present in the oldest copy of the page in the Internet Archive. In fact, before the wiki had even moved to the tvtropes.org domain, the page was expanded to add the line about "the issue that the writers want [the audience] to ponder", though, as is typical for the early wiki, not quite describing what that means, but still suggesting that the page doesn't necessarily cover just explicit morals but even works that might not take a side on "the issue" at all. Notably, not only is the part about "obvious morals" that Amathieu quoted taken from the Aesop's Fables page, not the trope page, but the actual Aesop page claims that naming the trope after him is a bit of a misnomer, albeit because of the assumption that Aesop would not have explicitly stated his tales' morals, which would support Amathieu's reading.

SoYouWantTo.Write An Aesop says that "An Aesop is what we call the moral of a story", and I think that's pretty much what everyone has assumed has been the case, that you can swap "moral" in for "Aesop" and it'll usually if not always work. The current description is not quite that simple, but because of the age of the page and this widespread assumption, I'm not sure the page has ever had a truly coherent definition. But I suspect that if the wiki's Founding Fathers were presented with Amathieu's interpretation, they'd say "we have Anvilicious and And Knowing Is Half the Battle for that", and if it was deemed worthy to be a separate trope it would be considered separate from An Aesop as a whole as well, though the modern wiki might deem it The Same, but More Specific.

The point that a narrow definition that requires the moral to be clearly stated or otherwise very explicit would be the clearest definition in terms of defining what "counts" is certainly a valid one, and we do have Central Theme and related pages for merely thematic messages. The question I have, though, is what sort of definition An Aesop can have that wouldn't just make Anvilicious The Same, but More. Yeah, Anvilicious is YMMV, but that just means it would come off as An Aesop Done Badly, when Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped has already had problems with being seen as Anvilicious Done Well.

Meanwhile, the oldest version of the page the Internet Archive took from tvtropes.org lists Broken Aesop as one of four "variations"... but the definition it had at the time sounds more like what we'd call And Knowing Is Half the Battle, which also existed at the time, though the Archive didn't save a copy of it until 2007, and in any case the rest of the original Broken Aesop description sounds like what was intended was closer to what we have now.

So here’s where I’m at: If we go by reclassifying An Aesop by Amathieu's interpretation as a closing moral message directly delineated in the text with purpose by the author, that makes And Knowing Is Half the Battle redundant, as well as invites use as a neutral, main page form of Anvilicious as documenting an intentionally placed, unsubtle message, consequently making Anvilicious itself as a YMMV trope turning into “An Aesop, but I think this intentionally placed, blatant message is ‘forced’ and ‘unsubtle’”, and there’s no real direction that documentation beyond that point really goes other than “I have a problem with it and here’s why”-type complaining.

If the “relevance” factor is too subjective a matter to balance aesops around, then perhaps we do need to split “Aesops” into tropes — or more likely broader super tropes — distinguishing between “moral-based themes” and “actual moral messages”, the degree of separation being:

• Themes involving moral/philosophically/politically/etc.-motivated behavior that act as story motifs that may not necessarily qualify as the Central Theme but are at the very least intentional narrative flavor that is relevant to the story and gives the work depth. A surprisingly large amount of tropes on Stock Aesops qualify for this, many not inherently being a lesson of the holistic work (the likes of The Anti-Nihilist, Naïve Animal Lover, and False Friend are usually just character specific tropes, Think of the Children! and Love at First Sight are starting points but rarely the actual final moral).
• Explicit messages intended by the writer to impart a lesson regarding the aforementioned themes regarding whatever moral matter they’re on about. This specific category is more about the storytelling rather than the elements within, and could likely cover more subjective/YMMV tropes discussing how those messages are told and hold together (which Broken Aesop or whatever successor title it’s called will go, along with other message-critical tropes like Anvilicious).

Perhaps in order for such a split to work, we may need to abandon “aesop” as a term collectively just because it’s so loaded in being so vague and subjective. That’s just my thought though.

Edited by number9robotic on Apr 16th 2023 at 3:27:35 AM

Technically And Knowing Is Half the Battle refers to a separate segment entirely devoted to delivering the moral, but that could be considered The Same, but More Specific based on the proposed definition. I associate it with morals that don't actually have anything to do with the preceding episode, but the description says otherwise.