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Aesop Collateral Damage
- 273 statements
- 50 feature instances
- 50 referencing feature instances
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Sometimes in mythological, religious and fantasy works, somebody does or says something that shows he's in need of an attitude adjustment. Either a being (often a deity or similarly powerful creature) or Fate itself will act overtly to teach this lesson. Unfortunately, the direct victim of this tutelage will often not be the person in need of the lesson, but rather one or more persons close to him, who have not been shown to have done anything wrong. Typical victims of this twisted situation are parents, children, spouses, and colleagues of the culprit, and the suffering often involves their deaths. In light of this, the culprit expresses remorse and either changes his ways or gives way to grief. Either way, he won't be making that mistake again. It is rarely, if ever, mentioned that the entirely innocent suffer the most. This is quite common in many mythologies, where the gods teach someone a lesson by cursing his entire family — but not necessarily them — or setting up his descendants for misery. Sometimes this is the result of severe Values Dissonance. In comic books and the like, the purest form of Stuffed into the Fridge sees female supporting characters die so that male heroes can learn vague lessons about the price of heroism, after which said heroes usually find new love interests and generally get on with their lives. It's also a core part of It's a Wonderful Plot stories, given that the people around the hero have to suffer in the alternate timeline to persuade him that he needs to return to existence; however, the unfortunate facets are softened by the fact that the hero's innocent social circle are saved and blissfully ignorant of what happened by the end. It's definitely part of The Punishment where the punished usually becomes some kind of monster that hurts innocent people. This often overlaps with Revenge by Proxy and Misplaced Retribution. Naturally, the Innocent Bystander is an aspect of this trope. Generally a result of Protagonist-Centered Morality. Can be considered a Hard Truth Aesop in its harshness — the culprit is taught that their actions have consequences that affect other people. For cases when the aesop-learner themselves cause the damage, see Kick the Morality Pet. Also compare Special Aesop Victim. |
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Aesop Collateral Damage / int_11b7db91 | type |
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In the Adventure Time episode "Ocarina" Jake's son Kim Kil Wan intends to teach his father responsibility. However, he also drags in Finn, his uncle, into the lesson as well. Finn has to endure sleeping on the ladder to the treehouse, and being arrested because Kim Kil Wan rented out the bathroom and Finn tried to use it. | |
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Adventure Time | hasFeature |
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Aesop Collateral Damage / int_1e533773 | type |
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Beauty and the Beast (2017) tries to deal with the implications in the Disney version by having the servants take some blame for the Prince's behavior since they did not protect him from his abusive father after his mother died. However, this still does not explain Chip (a child) and Garderobe and Cadenza (performers who were hired and simply happened to be at the party that night). The opening scene makes it look more like the curse just hit whoever didn't get out of the room in time. Even worse, once the last petal falls the objects will turn inanimate, effectively killing the servants and others who got caught in the curse. Belle's town is also collateral damage as they all magically forget about the nearby castle and all its inhabitants which includes family members and loved ones for the duration of the curse. No wonder the Enchantress shows up herself to fix things once the last petal falls right before Belle can say she loves the Beast. A cut scene even has LeFou call her out on it! | |
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Aesop Collateral Damage / int_20028d77 | type |
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In John Ostrander's take on The Spectre, this was sometimes used to illustrate the dangers of the Anti-Hero protagonist's extreme Black-and-White Morality, which bordered on Blue-and-Orange Morality at times. In one example, the Spectre threatened to slay every living person in the state of New York if an innocent man was executed, since technically the State of New York passed the sentence. The children, anti-death-penalty protesters, and the man's defense attorneys would presumably be among those killed. | |
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Aesop Collateral Damage / int_227431b6 | type |
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In Runaways, whenever Nico needs to face consequences for a bad decision, said consequences usually involve something bad happening to one of her teammates. Her decision to kiss Chase indirectly led to Gert getting killed. Her hasty use of magic against the Light Brigade caused the Runaways to become scattered until it was too late to effectively fight the Brigade, causing Xavin to hand themselves over in exchange for the Brigade sparing the rest of the team. And her decision to quit the team in order to join A-Force (which in turn led to her becoming a wanted fugitive) led to the Runaways' hideout getting raided and Klara being hauled away to foster care. | |
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Aesop Collateral Damage / int_261c8d3f | type |
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This is parodied on The Simpsons: The "Treehouse of Horror XII" story "Hex and the City" had a fortune teller curse Homer's family and friends because he insulted her. They suffer through freakish transformations, and Bart, Lenny, Carl, and Moe actually die, but Homer goes on refusing to reverse the curse by apologizing because none of it is happening to him. It's especially cruel of Homer because the apology wouldn't just reverse the curse, it would even resurrect Bart. | |
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Aesop Collateral Damage / int_271c1469 | type |
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Happens throughout the entirety of Death Parade, as Decim learns about the importance of empathy and the weight of judgement through the suffering of his guests, which he often enforces to begin with. This is most evident in the finale with his assistant, as he finally gains empathy and realizes how much his cruel games and judgments have been making people suffer by witnessing her suffering at his hands. | |
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Aesop Collateral Damage / int_32a01588 | type |
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Disney's Pinocchio. Pinocchio plays hooky from school and ends up being kidnapped and taken to Pleasure Island. His creator, the kindly woodcarver Gepetto goes looking for him and ends up getting trapped inside Monstro the whale. Pinocchio learns a lesson about being a good boy from the experience. | |
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Aesop Collateral Damage / int_34fd3cf6 | type |
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Parodied in Aqua Teen Hunger Force when Master Shake fails to lay the electrical bills, and Frylock refuses to pay them instead so that Shake will be forced to learn his lesson no matter how much all of the Aqua Teens suffer. As it turns out, Shake's too much of a lazy, selfish bastard to learn from his mistakes, and he just starts mooching off of Carl instead, while Frylock continues to refuse to pay the bills for the sake of Shake learning the aesop. | |
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Aqua Teen Hunger Force | hasFeature |
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RWBY: This is ultimately the source of everything wrong with the world. The gods punished Salem for her hubris in trying to trick them into resurrecting her love by giving her Complete Immortality. Whether that is a reasonable punishment is up for debate, but at least it only affected the guilty party. When she gathered an army to attack the gods, they decided to punish her by wiping out all of humanity, leaving only her alive. Furthermore, the God of Light resurrected Salem's lover Ozma with instructions to unite the remnants of humanity; once he believed he had succeeded, he was to summon the gods back, who would either restore humanity's full magic to them or destroy the entire planet. Ozma was at least given the option to refuse, but the rest of humanity has no idea they're caught in the middle of a massive Forever War between two immortals on behalf of the gods. | |
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Ancienverse: One of Gladion's biggest issues is how he refuses to work with others. He learns just how important this is when his stubbornness results in Lillie getting kidnapped by Lusamine. | |
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Aesop Collateral Damage / int_3ac755dd | type |
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In Disney's Beauty and the Beast, an enchantress curses the prince into a Beast for his lack of hospitality, but also turns his household staff into Animate Inanimate Objects. The Broadway version and live-action remake (see below) soften the collateral damage by having the staff discuss that they were the ones who had let the Beast turn into a Spoiled Brat in the first place, however it still doesn't justify turning a seven-year-old into a teacup. Not to mention that the idea of a low-ranked servant like a kitchen maid being allowed to wield any kind of moralising influence over their master without retribution or punishment, essentially acting as if they were above their station, is improbable at best. Considering the original fairytale was written in 1740, this isn't as strange as it seems to a modern audience: the King or Prince effectively is the kingdom and the royal staff are bound to him. The sovereignty of the citizen is a very republican idea. | |
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Aesop Collateral Damage / int_4098209c | comment |
Exaggerated and parodied in Reservation Dogs; Bear's lesson about how his criminal lifestyle is bad is conveyed by a guy the gang stole from suffering the most cartoonishly melodramatic and disproportionate consequences imaginable; he gets fired, his wife leaves him, he goes bankrupt because of her emptying his bank account, he runs out of food except for a bag of sugar, his diabetes flares up because of eating the sugar, his leg has to get amputated because of it, and he declares that he's probably going to die as a result of it. | |
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The Last Adventure of Constance Verity: Harrison sends Connie a file of the various allies she's made over the years to her that reveals that they have been dying on mass after she had her spell lifted, reasoning that her actions had led to all of their deaths (or worse) as the price paid for her new normal life. Having suffered the deaths of friends before, not to mention finding Harrison's reasoning tenuous at best, Connie isn't effected by his attempts at a dire warning. | |
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Aesop Collateral Damage / int_43662a49 | comment |
Parodied in Yin Yang Yo!: A fairy creates a villain that grows every time Yin and Yang lie. At the end, she shows up and congratulates them on learning their lesson... only to have the townspeople angrily point out that she destroyed the city in the process. | |
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Wulfrik: For most of the book, Wulfrik is trying to undo the curse he brought on himself through his hubris (boasting that he was the greatest warrior in the world, which the Dark Gods demanded he prove endlessly or be tortured by daemons for eternity). Once he has finally learned that You Can't Fight Fate, everything he used to want, leadership of the Sarls, the death of Viglundr, the hand of his daughter Hjordis, has been destroyed by his hand. He sets Viglundr up for destruction by multiple tribes, leaving him alive to see it, and reluctantly sacrifices Hjordis to the gods. He reflects that he has lost a lot in trying to escape his fate, his tribe, his love, his friends, but it made him even more famous and powerful than if he had succeeded (he never wants for volunteers on his flying teleporting longship which he also obtained thanks to his curse). | |
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My Name Is Earl: Earl develops a gambling addiction. He takes Catalina to a seedy underground "casino," and lends her his car because she's late for work. She ends up speeding to make up for lost time, gets pulled over, and the cops discover that her driver's license is a fake. She ends up getting deported back to her homeland (at this point, assumed to be Mexico, later called "Guadelatucky.") Earl has to go down there and bring her back to Camden. | |
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Aesop Collateral Damage / int_5d4da196 | comment |
In Spider-Man, Peter refuses to stop a fleeing criminal as petty revenge against the fight promoter, who refused to pay Peter his award, and subsequently the hero's beloved Uncle Ben is killed by that criminal, teaching our hero that valuable lesson that With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. This lesson is flipped on its head in the third film when we see that Uncle Ben wasn't shot by the man that Peter let escape but by the man's partner, and, in fact, the shooting was a complete accident for which the shooter felt tremendous remorse. | |
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Aesop Collateral Damage / int_66b144ad | comment |
The Sunset Limited (2011). Black recounts his story of finding God after being being shivved in the jailhouse and includes a part where he busted open the head of his attacker and gave him permanent brain damage. White is unimpressed. | |
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Marvel Cinematic Universe: Happens a whole lot to Wanda/The Scarlet Witch. She learns that Revenge Myopia is a bad thing when her Mind Rape of Tony Stark pushes him to create Ultron, who then proceeds to destroy her country and kill her brother. When she gets reckless dealing with Crossbones, she accidentally gets a lot of people killed in his suicide bombing (albeit this one is shared with the rest of the Avengers). When she finally learns for good that she can't get a family by force, it comes at the cost of hundreds of people who tried to stop her and severely traumatizing an alternate Wanda and her family. | |
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In Scribblenauts Unlimited, Lilly gets turned to stone by an old man after Maxwell gives him a rotten apple. | |
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The Doraemon movie, Doraemon: Nobita and the Tin Labyrinth has an aesop for Nobita to stand on his own feet for once and stop over-relying on Doraemon's gadgets, and to facilitate that aesop, the story have Doraemon attacked by Napogistler's soldiers, captured alive and electrocuted to the point of unconsciousness before being dumped into the oceans of Chamocha until Nobita finds him. | |
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Batman: Dr. Leslie Thompkins purposely let Stephanie Brown die just to demonstrate to Batman the dangers of letting kids fight crime. The subsequent Retcon held that it never happened; Dr. Thompkins faked Steph's death and lied to Bruce about it. | |
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Since the late 1990s, this has been played up frequently in Daredevil, as his supporting cast start to notice that they're often the collateral damage that teaches Matt Murdock a lesson about something or other. | |
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Romeo and Juliet themselves are this to the Montagues and Capulets. Their endless feuding and public violence has gone on for far too long, yet a member of each of their families was able to find love and try to avert or escape that nonsense. They fail, and in their naive efforts, they either get killed or succumb to despair. This, and the deaths of several others, is what finally gets the two families to bury the hatchet. | |
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The Pied Piper of Hamelin involves a town that has a rat problem, which the title character proceeds to help them with by using a set of magical pipes with which he lures them into a nearby river and drowns them. The town refuses to pay him for his service, which gets the piper pissed enough to come back on a church day and play the pipes again, this time taking the town's children away. Many versions differ on what fate befalls them, but in the darkest ones, the kids meet with the same fate the rats did. | |
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Looking for Alaska is one of the most famously gut-wrenching examples in teen literature, featuring the friends of the eponymous Hard-Drinking Party Girl encouraging her self-destructive behavior due to seeing it as endearingly rebellious rather than a cry for help, and learning their lesson after the ultimate result is her being killed while driving drunk. | |
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Rise of the Third Power: The writing makes it clear that Rowan's alcoholism is ruining his life and causes him to be unreliable to others. Sparrow/Brooke gets him to talk about his party's movements while he's drunk, leading to Arkadya locating and wiping out his Resistance allies, with only Rowan and the rest of the party as the survivors. This is what convinces Rowan to empty his bottle and take life more seriously. | |
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Parodied in Nobody: when the titular Anti-Hero protagonist angers the Russian mob, they decide to teach him a lesson by sending two hitmen to kill his nursing home-bound father. The resulting scene plays out like a classic example of this trope, complete with the somber background music hitting a gutwrenching crescendo as the old man's eyes widen in knowing horror at the price he has to pay for his son's recklessness... only for this supposedly helpless invalid to turn the tables on the seasoned gangsters in the most Bloody Hilarious way imaginable. | |
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Nobody | hasFeature |
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Mystery Science Theater 3000, though most famous for mocking corny sci-fi films from the '50s and '60s, also featured a lot of corny crime films from the same period, which employed this trope in spades due to the standards of The Hays Code mandating that criminals could not be shown profiting from their misdeeds, something Joel, Mike, and the Bots laid into with utter glee. Standout examples include The Girl in Lovers' Lane, where the title character is raped and murdered by a stalker mere minutes after her boyfriend decides to resume his life as a drifter, rather than settle down with her (and the boyfriend himself is nearly lynched by her vengeful father, who believes he is the killer, for good measure); and High School Big Shot, where a hapless teenager's intended-to-be-bloodless attempt to lift some mob money from his boss' safe to impress his crush abruptly blooms into a gory Mexican Standoff between his group of thieves, the mobsters, the cops, and the girl's sociopathic ex-boyfriend that leaves most of the participants dead and everyone else shipped off to jail. | |
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Little Women uses this trope a few time in its first half: Amy falls through thin ice and nearly drowns because Jo was angry with her and didn't warn her the ice was thin. This teaches Jo a lesson about controlling her temper. Beth's pet bird Pip dies of starvation when Beth forgets to feed him, teaching her a lesson about responsibility. Beth asks Meg and Jo to visit the Hummels in her place when the baby has scarlet fever, thinking they could take care of him better than she can, but both older sisters decline out of laziness. Result? Beth goes through the horror of having the baby die in her lap, and that night she falls seriously ill with the same disease. Of course realistically, she probably contracted the fever a few days earlier, as it has an incubation period. But Jo still blames herself for not having gone to the Hummels instead, and both she and Meg learn to be more responsible. |
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Puyo Puyo!! 20th Anniversary: Playing tricks isn't good, but playing matches is! Then you possess Satan to make your point... | |
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The Bible frequently focuses on how the sin of one person can harm many more, so naturally it is full of these: King David has sex with the wife of one of his generals and gets said general killed in battle to get away with his adultery. God inflicts an illness on the child coming out of this affair. David repents and God forgives him. The king, that is. To really teach David that justice has to be done, the child however still has to die from the illness. David, and his new (stolen) wife have another son though, the future king Solomon, and seem to live happily ever after except for that David's oldest son rapes his half-sister, and another son goes to war against his own father. The general Jephthah hastily pledges to sacrifice the first creature he encounters after an upcoming battle if God helps him to win it. His army is victorious, but the price for his hubris is quite terrible: As he's returning home, his daughter runs out to meet him. A tragic example occurs in Joshua, when he warns the Israelites who have just conquered Jericho not to take any of the treasure for themselves, but to deposit it in the treasury. Unfortunately, Achan takes a Babylonian garment, 200 silver shekels, and a gold ingot weighing 50 shekels for himself, and after the Israelites are defeated at Ai, lots are cast, indicating that Achan was the one responsible for taking part of Jericho's plunder for himself. As a result, his wife, children and livestock suffer as they are stoned to death along with Achan. The story of Job is actually not an example, though it might seem so — it goes one step further, and beyond the trope, in that even the person who is "punished" by having his loved ones die is innocent. Job loses everything, including his family, but though his friends insist he must have done something to deserve it, he's in fact innocent and God is just (sort of) testing him. Still, the logic is much the same in terms of collateral damage — he even gets new children in the end. This is considered a happy ending, but not for Job's first kids. Though given they are likely in Heaven, it is still downplayed. Some have noted that technically, the Biblical narrative never says they died—just that messengers TOLD Job that they did. This has led to an alternate interpretation that the two sets of kids are actually the same. As Mark Twain points out, there had to have been the usual proportion of children born to the people of Noah's generation. Then God sent the rain, "and drowned those poor little chaps". Though admittedly with the state of the world, it is tragically unlikely the children would have turned out better than their parents. Still doesn't explain why most of the world's animals also had to die despite not being sinful. It is very common in Biblical stories that innocent descendants (even if they lived centuries after the crime in question had happened) are punished for what their ancestors did. One example is when Noah puts a curse on his innocent grandson Canaan and his descendants, since Ham (Canaan's father) had encouraged his brothers to mock the drunk Noah's naked body! note The Canaanites would become the enemies of the Israelites for several centuries in later books in the Bible, so that is probably why they were believed to have a cursed origin. And in the end of the Book of Genesis, when Jacob is proclaiming his last blessings to his sons, he brings up Simeon's and Levi's violence and wrath (he is probably referring to how they had killed all the men in a city, because one guy had raped their sister), before he proclaims that their descendants (who are not even born yet and thus had nothing to do with that event) are cursed to be scattered among the other Israelites. note Simeon's tribe must have been forgiven at some point, because they did get as much land as any other tribe. Levi's tribe had to become landless priests though, so they would have to live among other tribes and never got any property of their own. And that is only two examples from the first book! |
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Happens a lot in Chick Tracts. A particularly nasty example is Mean Momma, where the title character and her delinquent sons commit various crimes, from petty grudges to robbery. What follows is that the elder son dies in a crash, driving a truck he stole, then the middle kid immediately hangs himself for hearing that the late son was his mom's favorite. Then, while the mother is away from town to buy medicine for her feverish baby, a tornado razes their house with the baby still inside. All happened with the implication that it was God's handiwork, so that the mother will repent. And the mother thanks God for his kindness in saving her, ignoring that the children whom she raised to be hateful and bitter individuals are now burning in hell. | |
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God of War, in a nutshell, is two angry gods trying to kill each other with this. | |
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Spider-Man: Uncle Ben's death teaches Peter that he should use his powers with responsibility, and most versions of Spider-Man across the multi-verse, (non-Peter versions of Spider-Man replacing Uncle Ben with another character, like Peter for Spider-Gwen or Miles Morales,) and in most adaptations of the comics, have this tragedy as a central feature of his backstory. | |
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Season 2 of Infinity Train introduces Grace Monroe, a teenage passenger who leads a group of fellow child passengers called the Apex; they are shown to actively be trying to make the numbers on their hands go up (when the numbers are actually supposed to go down so they can leave the train), and do so by frequently attacking the train's native denizens. Season 3 sees Grace and her best friend and second-in-command, Simon, get separated from the rest of the Apex and have to find their way back, working together with a little girl named Hazel and her denizen companion, Tuba. It turns out to be Grace's Redemption Quest, and at the end of the season, she's made a Heel–Face Turn, convinced the rest of the Apex to do the same, and they're all working to get their numbers down so they can go home. However, it comes at a great cost: Simon murders Tuba just as Grace is becoming attached to her; Hazel (whom Grace had come to love like a little sister) is so traumatized by her time with them that she leaves them forever; and Simon jumps off the slippery slope, becomes worse than ever, tries to murder Grace even after she saves him from falling off the train, and then dies a gruesome death in front of her. Though Grace is becoming a better person, it's clear by the end that she's quite emotionally worn down by everything that happened to reach that point. | |
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Lost in Camelot: Kilgharrah eventually reveals that the deaths of the other dragons were effectively this: the Blood King cursed them in order to punish Kilgharrah for attempting to assist the underfae in an attempted rebellion. | |
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In the cheesy sci-fi movie R.O.T.O.R., the protagonist Barrett Coldyron eventually learns a valuable philosophical lesson, albeit at the cost of his robot killing or maiming several people. | |
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Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest: For every official quester who's thrust into the Call to Adventure, there are wannabe questers who go to quest landmarks (monster lairs and death-castles and so on), only to die tragically. Questers are almost always the last person to make it there, the corpses keeping them cautious enough to ensure their survival. Because of this, a lot of questers heading to the same landmarks will become paranoid over who goes first and will inevitable turn on one another. | |
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7 Yüz: Happens pointedly in the episode "Refakatçiler". To prove her point, Vildan draws Serdar's attention to Semih's new car, which seems a tad too expensive for his family's income bracket. Jumping to immediate conclusions, Serdar storms to Alihan's apartment in a rage, accusing the father and son of shamelessly stealing from him. Alihan and Semih are naturally hurt and offended by the accusation, and the unpleasant incident prompts them to sever their relationship with Serdar, who while regretful, seems too proud to apologize. | |
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In the final segment of the full version of the 1970s UK educational film Play Safe, a boy who partakes in vandalizing electrical equipment causes his sister to die in a traffic accident via being struck by a car due to said vandalism causing the traffic lights and streetlights to not have power as a way of driving home the fact that vandalizing electrical equipment is dangerous.note This segment of the film was not broadcast on television on its own unlike the previous 3 segments of the film. | |
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Coward Trilogy: In Hero, Lance decides to punish Josiah for hacking Scar in by killing off Josiah's entire team and rendering Josiah a quadriplegic. | |
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In Hellblazer, John Constantine constantly pisses off powerful beings like Heaven and Hell and flips them off when he's satisfied. Though his enemies can't touch him, his family and friends substitute to pay the price which was supposed to be his in the first place. He ends up mourning them afterwards. Though given Constantine's usual luck, even if he explicitly tries to keep his loved ones safe, that generally means that they die anyway from something that isn't his fault. | |
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Clash of the Titans. Queen Cassiopeia says that Andromeda is more beautiful than the goddess Thetis herself. The goddess says that Cassiopeia will repent of her boast and demands that Andromeda be sacrificed.note The original myth is not an example, since the pissed-off god in question (Poseidon, not Thetis) sent a sea monster to kill everyone, including Cassiopeia. Andromeda was sacrificed to it because an oracle said it would prevent the rampage. | |
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Linda Fischer in Blubber is bullied to the point of tears to set up for the protagonist's eventual fall from popularity so she can learn a lesson. Unfortunately, the lesson doesn't seem to have much of an impact on the protagonist and Linda never receives any sort of compensation or remotely happy ending after all she went through. | |
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In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the beast-man Enkidu is the gods' response to the people's complaints that Gilgamesh is an abusive king. He's civilized without his permission, forcing him to lose his friends among the beasts, and becoming Gilgamesh's counterpart leads to Gilgamesh taking them on a quest to kill a forest demon that results in Enkidu's death—all so that Gilgamesh can experience friendship and grief, thus learning to care about someone other than himself. | |
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Merlin (2008) has an episode, which is about Prince Arthur being cursed after he killed a unicorn and didn't even show any remorse. Which would have been fine, except for that this just leads to his innocent subjects suffering from hunger and thirst (all the crops suddenly wither and all the wells also dry out at the same time) until things are back to normal by the end of the episode. Unusually, it is actually stated in this case that this is completely unfair. The innocent poor people shouldn't have to lack both food and water, just so their prince can learn a lesson about not being arrogant! | |
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In a Sabrina the Teenage Witch episode, Sabrina's boyfriend Harvey is turned into a beast by her saintly but ugly cousin Susie, who has green skin and warts, to teach her a lesson about shallowness. Cousin Susie is treated as entirely justified in teaching Sabrina her lesson, while everyone ignores the fact that the blameless Harvey is the one who finds himself growing fur, claws and tusks. | |
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In Voyage of Wisteria, most of the adults in Pallet Town decides that Ash needs to be knocked off his supposed pedestal with A Lesson in Defeat. Their efforts to punish him nearly get a dozen innocent children killed by the forest fire they set. | |
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Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Q Who". Irritated by Picard's arrogance, Q sends the Enterprise light years across the galaxy to an unexplored region of space and then disappears. They run into the Borg, who kill eighteen crew members. Picard learns his lesson, but eighteen innocents die for it: Picard calls Q out on what he has done and says that while he understands the lesson and appreciates its message, there must've been a way to teach it that didn't result in the deaths of eighteen people, to which Q retorts "If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you should go home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here, it's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But, it's not for the timid." Later episodes revealed that Q actually did this in part to provide the Alpha Quadrant with a disguised warning about the existence of the Borg so that Starfleet could start mobilizing and be ready before they arrived. | |
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