Discussion Main / LostAesop

Removed this:

• Star Trek: The Next Generation: Throughout "The Best of Both Worlds", Riker realizes that if he wants to become a captain, he has stop measuring himself up to Picard and be his own man. It's learning this lesson that ultimately helps him save Picard and beat the Borg, but after this episode, he goes back to being a Commander and second-in-command of the Enterprise, not having his own command again until Star Trek: Nemesis. And it's even worse when you consider the Expanded Universe, which had Commander Shelby becoming a captain before him.

...because it appears to be a Broken Aesop rather than a Lost Aesop.

Removed:

• The Invention Of Lying: A world without lying is a sad place where everyone everyone is bluntly cruel and shallow. In a world with lying, however, religion becomes the opiate of the masses, tricking people into feeling good about life, but it's all a sham. So are religion and lying good or bad for us?
  • Perhaps that there's a time when lying is the better option, but that we should also value the truth, and know when to stop a lie before it goes to far? Or maybe we're all just reading too far into it.

The film is all about how lies comfort us, and that religion is the ultimate extension of that concept.

I don't know how to put into words what I'm thinking about Chobits message or if I'm answering the question or just delving off into pointless drivel. So I'll post here, someone better than me can put it into words.

Part of the problem in the lost aesop is the discrepancy between the manga and anime. Where the manga points out that Chii is nothing more than a computer running a program and asks if Hideki can love her anyway. Taken along with Shinbo's speech to Hideki that the problem Miss Shimizu faced was that her husband wasn't devoted to HER and it didn't matter whether he was addicted to Persocoms or ... I dunno, John Deere Tractors, it was the same. Nor did it matter whether Miss Shimizu was human or a persocom she deserved his attention. The aesop then becomes 'don't be a dick to your wife/robot girlfriend.'

I think that was lost in the anime version where both Chii's question to Hideki whether he can love a computer simply responding to her programming and Shinbo's speech to Hideki were cut which leads us to a lost aesop.

Removed examples that dealt with a consistency of portrayal across episodes. These fail in several ways.

• The actual individual Aesop of each episode is normally very clear and avoids the writing mistakes that would actually make up a Lost Aesop.
• If you actually took two episodes with conflicting messages and stuck them together to make one episode with two conflicting morals then that would actually be Broken Aesop.
• The point of Aesop being named after Aesop's Fables is that it is the simple short moral at the end of a singular short tale. The overarching theme or message of a large body of work or series of installments is not An Aesop.
• Some were from series which no continuity across their episodes (Family Guy, The Simpsons). Trying to take any sort of message from across the entire series is pointless.

So there you have it. You should not confuse LostAesops with BrokenAesops nor confuse overarching themes with An Aesop nor expect an overarching theme when there isn't one.