Discussion Main / AccidentalAesop

I'm seeing a lot of examples that sound like they're used to complain about Unfortunate Implications without that trope's need for a reliable source or inability to be added to YMMV pages.

• The Angry Birds Movie: If someone new comes to your land, they're probably thieves who are going to steal your children.
• The Bad Guys (2022): If you want to be accepted in society, turn yourself in to the same people who discriminated against you and made you turn to crime in the first place, even though it proves to that same racist society that they were right about you the entire time and see you nothing more than a criminal for the rest of your life.
• Me Before You has, especially with the release of The Film of the Book, been interpreted as having the Unfortunate Implications of if you're a quadriplegic, your life isn't worth living, so the best thing you can do is commit suicide and have it benefit the (abled) ones you love.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Unquiet Dead" was perceived in some quarters as an attack on immigration (since the episode features aliens who come to Earth on the pretense of finding a new home after their planet was blown up, but are actually attempting to invade), even though the subtext was entirely unintentional.
  • "Hell Bent" features a groundbreaking moment where a Time Lord, previously seen as male, changes gender upon regeneration. This was seen as a watershed moment opening the door for the eventual regeneration of the male Twelfth Doctor into the female Thirteenth Doctor. Which is great except for the fact "Hell Bent" establishes into canon that the gender change is considered an inconvenience and something to be treated as a joke and also something that is temporary. This implication did not sit well with some transgender fans of the show who don't have the option of a) anything being "temporary", and b) treating it like a joke or inconvenience. In addition, the General outright notes that it was the only time she'd ever been male, which also drew controversy from the fandom.
• Monster Loves You!: While the game can be called a morality tale, the way its morality system works can create results implying that being evil is better than being nothing at all. This may be part of the reason some versions of the game changed the name of one ending from "Dissolve into Mediocrity" to "Modest Legacy."

And that's not getting into the Spoof Aesop examples that nobody would take as instructional.

• The Yu-Gi-Oh! anime's version of the Dungeon Dice Monsters arc is meant to be about the futility of revenge and how friendship is better, but another moral is "be patient and always check your email." If Otogi had waited a day before going out for revenge he'd have seen the contract from Pegasus and never gotten into conflict with Yugi at all.

This assumes that Industrial Illusions (Pegasus' company) didn't send the contract because of the stated world-wide coverage of the game (aka free and major advertising) between Duke, game creator, and Yugi, recent champion of Duel Island. Pegasus was out for the count due to his Eye being stolen (better than the manga, where he died), so it was someone below him who sent the contract.

Since contracts are pages and pages of legalese, the contract would have had to be completed by the time Duel Island started, since Pegasus would've been too busy to complete it during the tournament and in no condition to do so afterwards.

Death of the Author...Just Death of the Author. Reading this page hurts my English major soul.

I wonder, would this be the exact opposite of the Broken Aesop?

An Accidental Aesop = The story wasn't intended to tell the Aesop, but nonetheless fits well with one.

Broken Aesop = The story was intended to tell an Aesop, but doesn't really mesh well with it.