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Broken Aesop
- 319 statements
- 54 feature instances
- 786 referencing feature instances
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This trope is under discussion in the Trope Repair Shop. Most children are familiar with the line "Do as I say, not as I do." A Broken Aesop is this in aesop form. A Broken Aesop involves a work presenting a lesson or viewpoint, but with the events within the work contradicting the presented lesson or viewpoint, whether it's because the lesson/viewpoint is at odds with prior events, or whether an event later in the work goes against the lesson/viewpoint. Basically, it's a story where a 'moral' presented just doesn't match the original moral that the story actually contains. Sometimes the resulting moral feels tacked on or just plain hypocritical. Not to be confused with a Hard Truth Aesop, where the lesson is supported by the work, but it's something that parents probably wouldn't want their kids to learn. Also not to be confused with a Space Whale Aesop, where the lesson has no application outside of its fictional context (though the two can overlap). Compare Analogy Backfire, which is when an analogy (which may or may not contain an Aesop) makes a point that is the opposite of what it was supposed to. Do Not Do This Cool Thing is when the Aesop of "this thing is bad" fails due to clumsy presentation. See also Values Dissonance. For intentional Broken Aesops Played for Laughs, see Spoof Aesop. Important Note: as tempting it may be, please do not add meta-fictional examples (while they may be a Clueless Aesop, they constitute an Ad Hominem argument). Only add examples where the aesop is broken within the narrative itself. This means do not add examples such as: "How many trees got cut down to produce that book warning us about deforestation?" "How much money did that film with the message against being greedy or about money not being everything or the anti-capitalist message gross at the box office?" "How great looking were the actors in that work telling us that looks aren't everything or that it's what's on the inside that counts?" "How much does the creator for that work with that Snicket Warning Label spend on advertising the work?" "Why is a television show/video game giving An Aesop about how people need to watch less TV/spend less time playing video games?" "Why is this movie/TV show/song telling us about how the entertainment industry is evil?" "If this movie/TV show/song/video game is calling me a bastard for enjoying it, then what does that say about the people who are making money off of it?" "Why is this movie/TV show/video game telling me that Ludd Was Right despite being made using modern technology?" "Why are these celebrities telling me that Celebrity Is Overrated?" "Why is this producer who was criticized for not paying their employees enough to even afford their rent telling me I should treat my employees decently?" "Why is this children's book arguing that political activism shouldn't be targeted towards kids when the book itself has a political message?" Another thing to note is that an author cannot directly invoke this trope. The whole point is that it's unintentional. The only way to directly invoke this is through other characters criticizing it via Breaking the Fourth Wall or a Show Within a Show format. |
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Parodied in Act III of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. While Designated Hero Captain Hammer is notionally singing a rousing, inspirational anthem to the homeless in "Everyone's A Hero", every verse manages, through either Metaphorgotten or just plain dickishness, to insult its audience and demonstrate how Hammer thinks of himself as superior. | |
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RENT: We are told we should all live our lives to the fullest because we could die tomorrow, and there is no day like today. But if you do happen to die, you can come back to life through The Power of Rock. The concept of there being "no day but today," which is sung about a lot, is subverted in the second act through the use of passage of time: the first act, in which the mantra occurs extremely frequently, takes place in one day while the second takes place over the course of a year (in which the mantra is shown to be faulty at best). For people who spend the whole time talking about love and loving life, the circle of friends seems to have a lot of cheating, poor communication, and emotional sniping at each other - no one is enjoying themselves very much, or following Angel's lauded example. And, for that matter, Collins, who spends his time loving Angel and loving life with Angel ends up broken because of Angel's death. |
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Channel Awesome: Because of a Creator Breakdown and Real Life Writes the Plot, "The Review Must Go On" had Doug's past consume what was meant to be his masterpiece, the direct opposite of what Demo Reel's Earn Your Happy Ending episode said. ("Don't let your past consume you and be happy for the future".) This seems to be intentional, and the commentary for it says that it's not supposed to be a happy ending. Doug Walker once made a plea in an editorial, "Is Parody Dead?", that parodies should not just be references and that they all need to be a clear understanding of what you are spoofing. A good message, yet in most of his own videos, including Nostalgia Critic, Demo Reel and his anniversary specials, he makes countless random pop culture references and spoofs that often don't even tie in with the plot of that episode. He and his actors often just dress up as well-known franchise characters, sometimes to avoid copyright issues, but more commonly for no real reason. To Boldly Flee in particular comes uncomfortably close to films like Disaster Movie at points, randomly tossing in characters, scenes, and ideas from various sci-fi properties for no real reason. Discussed in the Walker Brothers' "Honest Thoughts" review of the Care Bears movies: Rob notes that while lots of shows talk about The Power of Friendship, they still end their conflict by defeating the villain with violence. He credits the first two movies for not going that route, but actually befriending the villains and thus prompting a Heel–Face Turn. note Technically the Spirit is trapped back in her book, but only because they convinced Nicholas to turn against her. |
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The Achewood story arc where Philippe finally gets to live with his mom again ends with the moral that nothing lasts forever and everyone has to grow up sometime. But as readers have emphatically stated, Philippe will always be five! | |
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Dhar Mann has its own page. | |
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Questionable Content: in-universe. As a child, Clinton was careless with some fireworks and lost his hand as a result. However, Clinton is such an AI fanboy that he's psyched to get a robotic prosthetic as a replacement and cheerfully tells people he's glad he did it. | |
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In the 1970s there was a well-meaning anti-smoking PSA starring Yogi Bear and friends, while they had been seen smoking in their cartoons, and sold merchandise featuring smoking◊. | |
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In Melanie Martinez's "Lunchbox Friend", Melanie complains about people judging her for smoking weed. However in "Dollhouse", she treats the brother smoking weed as a character flaw. | |
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We Will Rock You depicts a future where people have become mindless consumers who all consume the same band fashions, music and lifestyles. Our heroes are the Bohemians, underground rebels who oppose the mainstream and wish to reclaim the old ways. At the end of the show our heroes realize that to defeat the villains they have to perform an awesome song, mainly Queen's "We Will Rock You". They decide to also broadcast the performance so that the whole world will see and then become Bohemians too. So, mindlessly following trends was bad when it was pop music and bright colors, but it's okay when the stuff you like is what is being consumed. Nice. | |
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Lovely People: The comic and its afterword both criticize the Social Credit system depicted in the story for suppressing freedom of religion and expression in the name nominal ideals of "equality" and "correctness". However, both also come across as telling the reader that the brand of Christianity that the author adheres to is the only correct alternative to the system. | |
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A Princess Pi comic had Princess Pi learn to believe in herself and not let bullies' insults bring her down. The Aesop breaks when she starts believing her most mediocre attempts at fulfilling her royal duties suffice, and doesn't let her subjects' complaints bring her down until they tar and feather her. | |
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Wicked: Wicked's primary question, 'what makes one wicked?,' and all the messages that go with it, end up mildly broken due to the Lighter and Softer adaptation. For all of Elphaba's problems, in the musical, she is never truly wicked, so the musings seem kind of pointless. Also, the (admittedly depressing) aesop of 'No good deed going unpunished' is broken by Elphaba getting a happy ending in contrast to the extreme Downer Ending of the book. |
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E.C. Segar's Thimble Theater, where Popeye first appeared, sometimes had an And Knowing Is Half the Battle segment in which Popeye would teach morals. In one of them Popeye seriously teaches kids not to be lazy with their language and mispronounce words ("sumpin' for "something", for instance). It was originally used as an occasional gag, but after Segar's untimely demise, other writers sometimes forgot that it was supposed to be ironic. | |
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Homestuck: The trolls have different-colored blood ranked on a spectrum; the closer your blood is to purple, the more power you have in society, while the closer it is to red, the less authority you hold, the rationale being that highbloods are superior due to the fact they're viewed as stronger. The author stated that he made the opposite ends of the spectrum so close to show how meaningless the whole thing was, and true to form, the audience is clearly intended to view the practice as wrong and side with the trolls opposed to it... except trolls do not differ only in blood color; it is shown that highbloods actually are stronger, more psychically resilient, and longer-lived, albeit more violent (which the trolls would probably consider a good thing anyway) but compensate by having less powerful psychic abilities than lowbloods. The metaphor for racism fails because blood color actually does matter in several ways. The aesop is broken again when another alien race is introduced that has its blood color as an indicator of their alignment. Green-blooded members of that species are benevolent and red-blooded members are malevolent, and from the four examples of them givenSpoilers Calliope, Caliborn, and both of their parents none of them challenge this at all. They do not have a caste system based on blood color, but their blood color still does matter more so than trolls since it either gives or indicates whether they're "good" or "evil". After watching the B2 players fall victim to Trickster Mode, subsequently using it as a shortcut to progress in their quest, and then dealing with Caliborn demanding they do it again, Hussie tells him that the characters can't just wave a magic lollipop juju around and solve all their problems. He compares it to Mario grabbing a starman and plowing through the level with no challenge, making the argument that it's terrible for his personal development. True enough, the players are worse off afterward, but at least they're still on the road towards their Character Development. The aesop falls apart when the biggest Wham Episode in the comic is simply written out of existence by using another juju to bring Vriska back to life, and have her bully the other characters out of their personal problems and into action, all while simultaneously inflating her own ego. The biggest offense is that Vriska being alive was completely unnecessary, John simply needed to use the juju to keep the ring of life out of Aranea's hands. Fans who were waiting for the other shoe to drop (i.e. the biggest Break the Haughty session for Vriska, followed by John and Roxy returning to the old timeline and fixing things there) were disappointed; the comic ends with only John and Roxy completing their character quests, Vriska avoiding karma, and the other characters followed throughout the story dead, while alternate versions who had an easier way out finish the story for them. The Trickster portion also depicts Trickster Mode, where the characters become colorful, more-superpowered, "happier" versions of themselves with No Sense of Personal Space caused by juju-magic, as a cheap, artificial, creepy thing that does not solve problems. The problem is that the story breaks this when alternate versions of Rose and Davesprite respectively become Jasprosprite^2 and Davepetasprite^2. Colorful, more-superpowered, "happier" versions of themselves caused by mystical sprite fusion with the former having no sense of personal space. This time, however, readers are just supposed to take these sudden transformations as them being happier and a resolution for their personal issues at face value. |
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Glasnost: The Game is a Risk clone that requires you to disarm all your territories to win the game in an anti-war aesop. You need to first build arms so you can conquer territories. | |
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Inverloch dealt with racism through interspecies prejudice. None of the sentient races like each other, with the civilized but animalistic-looking da'kor suffering most due to humans pushing into their territory and abducting young males for arena battles, and the elves carelessly reneged on a promise to help. Acheron is the exemplar for da'kor not being violent barbarians except that the character everyone thinks is Acheron is really an elf's soul transposed into his body, while the real Acheron is in an elf so he can seek revenge for his murdered father. And ultimately, the solution found to protect the da'kor from being whittled to nothing is for them all to uproot from their home to live segregated on a faraway island. | |
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The Scott The Woz episode "You're Not an RPG Guy" ends with Scott accepting that there is nothing wrong with disliking another game genre (in his case, RPGs) as long as you are respectful of those who like them and aren't afraid to occasionally dip your toes in. This, despite a previous scene where Scott meets God, the latter decrying the existence of RPGs and proclaiming that he had created humanity with an innate instinct to hate RPGs. | |
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Sonichu is ripe for the picking of Broken Aesops. One of the most well known is when Sonichu and Rosechu preach forgiveness... shortly before Rosechu viciously maims Jason Kendric Howell. For throwing a pickle at her. | |
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Shortpacked! constantly complains about fandoms (particularly the Transformers fandom), as do author David Willis' newsposts. Willis is not only a prominent part of said fandom, but also embodies many of the issues he complains about. This is often Played for Laughs. | |
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The music video for Disturbed's The Vengeful One, a song about blaming the media for mass shooters, has the band's mascot/avatar... going on a shooting spree against the media, breaking into the news building and gunning down as many of them as he can. It even includes phrases straight out of a psychotic active shooter's manifesto, like "I'm the hand of God, I'm the dark messiah". It turns the aesop from "Stop giving mass shooters attention, it just creates more of them" to "Mass shootings are okay and actually very cool as long as you pick the right target". | |
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Pro wrestling is, at best, a weird place to promote anti-bullying sentiments and at worst, actively undermined by the content of the product (where even the biggest babyface is still going to be using violence and trash talk to resolve his problems) but WWE soldiers on anyway in the interest of doing some good in the world. However, they are still a pro wrestling promotion, and WWE was called out on the dissonance of their anti-bullying campaign "Be A Star" in 2011 by The Wrestling Observer Newsletter awards by "winning" the award for "Most Disgusting Promotional Tactic" due to their mistreatment of Jim Ross at the time of this campaign. Others have pointed out that WWE have a long history of enabling or even actively encouraging extreme bullying and hazing not only between wrestlers but also towards other employees. Although supposedly toned down from the old days it is allegedly still going on, to the point that some people have been driven out of the company. |
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In Dreamgirls, Lorrell's plotline involves her affair with the married Jimmy "Thunder" Early, the singer who gave the girls their big break by hiring them as his backup singers. It's a continued source of frustration for Lorrell that Jimmy won't commit to her because he's married, and eventually she breaks up with him when she's sick of his crap. This is supposed to be a crowning moment of awesome for Lorrell, showing that she is finally standing up for herself. However, as much as Jimmy is cast in a negative light for engaging in a years-long affair, Lorrell is never called out for willingly taking part in it. She only breaks up with him because she's not getting what she wants, not due to the immorality of the situation. | |
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Not Always Working has several stories where the affluent submitter of the story goes into a classy and expensive shop, only to get treated like dirt by the employees because they think the person cannot afford anything, based on appearance. The submitter always believes this to have a "Don't judge a book by its cover" aesop. The thing is that the submitters always walk into these stores in extremely dirty clothes, often covered in mud, manure, or even oil, and smelling extremely badly. They completely ignore the fact that their dirty clothes, and skin, can lead to them damaging the merchandise, and end up coming across as just as bad as the employees. | |
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Michael Jackson's Ghosts, according to Word of God, is a story of how True Beauty Is on the Inside, and how just because a person is "different" from others doesn't make them bad. Unfortunately, the two characters Jackson plays both break the aesop. The bigoted Mayor — a fat, middle-aged white guy — is mocked throughout, with no redeeming qualities. The ostensibly good Maestro — effectively Jackson himself — magically imprisons the angry mob confronting them and tortures the helpless Mayor, proving he really was the dangerous "freaky boy" the Mayor accused him of being! Even if you ignore the Mayor and the mob of paranoid parents, the Maestro is still a necromancer who regularly summons a bunch of undead to do his bidding. That's a legitimate concern for an otherwise normal suburban neighborhood. | |
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Sinfest has a weird history of going from a gag-a-day comic to a sequential art comic with hardcore extreme feminist narrative and themes. Some of these narratives do not mesh well with what the comic is attempting to preach as constantly showing problems that the female characters deal with being solved by accident or with no actual input from them. Case in point: one story arc features a brothel in which the braindead males go to for kicks, and the women don't want to be there. One of the characters attempts to try and leave, and the pimp who owns the brothel refuses... only for him to get unexpectedly run over by a passing car. The women are shocked and happy at their freedom, and the men who frequent the brothel simply lament at their loss. The confusing this about the narrative is that female empowerment is important, but the problem got solved by pure accident. The women were incapable of solving this problem themselves, and rather had to wait for the problem to be solved on its own. It cuts the female empowerment message the comic shoves down your throat by undermining the abilities of the very group it portrays and giving them victory by pure accident. | |
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Starlight Express: According to the finale, electricity and diesel fuel will eventually run out, but somehow steam power is sustainable. What exactly are we burning to get this magical steam? Also wood/coal burning steam engines are better than environmentally friendly options like solar and nuclear power. This last one may be because it was written in the 1980s. In the closing number "Light At The End Of The Tunnel," the characters do briefly consider solar and nuclear energy, but then dismiss them because 1) How is one supposed to make use of solar power at night? and 2) People would get poisoned by nuclear fallout. Legitimate complaints, oversimplified, to be sure - but, then, this is a children's story. Richard Stilgoe, the show's lyricist, knew full well that steam engines polluted the environment; he claimed that it was far easier for audiences to sympathize with a steam locomotive than a diesel or electric one, since steamers had more of a historical precedent. But the finale, according to him, is meant to symbolize the triumph of "old-fashioned craftsmanship" over new technology. Take a moment to consider why a steam locomotive is not a suitable representative of "old-fashioned craftsmanship." |
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Vegan Artbook has many examples: The series continually denounces killing animals for meat is violent, but the protagonists often have been shown willing to hurt (in Sterk's case, kill) people who disagree with them. It has frequently talked about how animals tend to practice pretty horrific actions, then goes back to its typical message about being compassionate towards animals and scornful of humans. Brie Plausibell is supposed to live by the motto of "Live and Let Live", however, every time her brother Shawn allows her to tolerate each other's lifestyles she rejects his offer and refuses to see eye to eye with him or any other non-vegan, due to believing that respecting the right to eat meat is equal to supporting victimizing animals. The narrative treats this hypocrisy as adhering to her views, and frames Shawn as being "anti-vegan." The author continually advocates against bodyshaming, and often depicts Shawn engaging in making fun of those who are thin or fat. However, she portrays pre-redesign Cuntons and Tommy—two of the three recurring characters who are overweight—as grotesque, and implies that their girth is due to eating meat. Even her positively-portrayed vegan, fat girl character, Mike, is a junk-food junkie (which can be seen as enforcing stereotypes about fat people being obsessed with food) whose weight is attributed to what her mother fed her before she went vegan. The characters and narrative speak out against the evils of bigotry, while displaying disgust for anyone who isn't vegan, objectifying women to spread an anti-meat messagenote One strip involves a character using a photo of a naked woman to represent a pig on a farm, and using sexual orientation as an insultnote One strip involves two girls insulting Shaun by saying his leather outfit will lead to him being Mistaken for Gay. Killing and eating animals is decried as preying on the weak and defenseless, however, this doesn't stop stronger vegans like Rohit from beating up on weaker non-vegans in order to take out their anger on them. One of the main messages of the series is how animal agriculture or hunting is inherently cruel and abusive. But support forcing inherently carnivorous species (such as a fennec fox in one strip) to go vegan, which can actually be seen as an abusive practice due to how dangerous it can be to them. In addition, it also contradicts the message about how people shouldn't force their wills on animals. In this case, the vegans are forcing animals to comply with their lifestyle, even if it can harm them. When called out on the vegans' many assaults and murders, Yerdian excuses them as being fictional, and therefore no big deal. Yet when a non-vegan does something harmful, it's treated exactly as heinous as it would be in real life despite also being fictional. Her "Evolution of Man" comic blows its anti-violence aesop by showing the human in the "Good" version of evolution wielding a spear. The comic seems to say that being an Animal Lover is the way to go, while Bad People Abuse Animals— yet one of the main villains, Cuntons, is portrayed as loving cats, Elise is meant to be a Hypocrite for giving the burger to Tommy but not a cat (telling the cat the burger is unhealthy), and Sterk has killed a cat in one strip, which turns the message into "animals are great... except for cats (and the aforementioned humans)". |
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Jack: Hell Is That Noise is the story of Todd, a soldier who obeys an order to kill children, commits suicide, and ends up in Hell. He argues that he had no choice and Fate had already decided what would happen in his life. The story and everyone in it judges Todd for refusing to take responsibility for his actions, but that order came from Satan disguised as a general, meaning that Todd was a Cosmic Plaything after all. The non-linear nature of time in Hell tends to screw around wildly with the concept of free will and personal choice; the Devil often resorts to directly manipulating the circumstances of the past and future to compel his victims to act, and then blame them for it all. This is most notable with Drip: It's his own fault that his parents are dead because the Devil has him in a Stable Time Loop: he's sent to live with his grandmother after his parents die, his grandmother abuses him until he becomes a violent rapist, and when he dies, the Devil trades him a memento of his dead mother for a favor: the murder of his own parents. This has the added bonus of making the angels complicit in almost everything Drip does, since they only refrain from saving any of his victims because "it has to be his choice". Central is later shown to have murdered Bob and Lisa specifically to prevent them from turning away from their life of sin, meaning that actually, choice doesn't matter at all. The correct course of action is the one that generates the most rape scenes. And then there's the part where furries have replaced humanity, but for some reason, are repeating human history exactly, so we still have events like the Vietnam War re-enacted by furries. This means that we still get furry Charles Manson and furry Jeffrey Dahmer, too. And that would be fine, except that God is deliberately enforcing the re-enactment and is sending billions of furries to Hell for their part in it. This means that God not only deprived every living furry of free will, she also had full and absolute knowledge of what she was forcing them into doing to themselves and each other and what Satan would do in response, but did absolutely nothing to stop it. In other words, she condemned countless innocent people to eternal suffering to punish them for something she forced them to do. The entire comic is about choice and personal responsibility, but the only character who has unquestionable free will is God herself, and there are no consequences for anything she does, ever, because she's in charge of the entire universe while everyone else can just go to Hell. The general lesson being taught to all those sent to Hell is to realize their own sin and allow them to atone for it, and that Hell exists to force them to confront their misdeeds in life, but they're too busy being tortured to contemplate the philosophical implications of the torture itself. Even the ones who do realize their sin and repent never make it out of Hell, and it's impossible for them to successfully do that unless agents of Heaven intercede on their behalf and the agents of Hell don't prevent it. One of the afterlife's options is Purgatory, an idealized Earth that lacks the oneness with the divine that Heaven boasts, and also doesn't house the kind of sanctimonious goody-two-shoes types that go to Heaven or the assholes that go to Hell. People who go there are offered a chance at reincarnation, a chance to "try again" at life in the hopes that they'll earn entry into Heaven next time. Like all things in Heaven and Hell, it has to be a matter of personal choice to be meaningful, and so to give the choice meaning, returning to Earth after Purgatory means God will intentionally force a second life to be harder than the first and ban all further entry into Purgatory. This all but guarantees that a reincarnated soul who's been to Purgatory is going to Hell, but the choice is there. And then that moral gets shattered into pieces because God is happy to send angels to Purgatory on a mission to "remind" them what kind of awesome sex they're missing out on, by offering sex and not taking no for an answer. The comic loves to remind the reader of how important personal choice is, but only if the personal choice is the correct one. |
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Kat McSnatch has "Don't Be a Racist", Played for Laughs, which starts with Kat advising about the song title, only for her (and her rapping partner) to burst into full-blown racism. | |
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The animated music video for Teddyloid's ME!ME!ME! is pretty intense and is subject to a few varying interpretations, but the message is laid out fairly clearly no matter which one you go with: mass-produced, consumer-driven sexuality is damaging and unsatisfying compared to real relationships. For all the otherwise well-done and disturbingly powerful imagery, it contrasts the mass-produced Moe sex kittens with the "real" girl by... having the real girl look more or less exactly like them, except she dresses modestly and is crying helplessly and in danger. It's really not helping the message to design your bad-girl villains according to the emotionally-manipulative design tropes of the Moe type, and then use those same emotionally-manipulative design tropes to make your good-girl damsel more sympathetic to the audience. | |
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In The Scarlet Sails, the intended aesop of not letting go of your dreams falls somewhat flat. The musical aims at praising hope, dreaminess and the power of imagination, like the original book did. However, the book's dreamy heroine who manages to have a fulfilling life despite the ostracism she faces is turned into a borderline lunatic whose entire life is centred on her dream of the scarlet sails. The bullying she faces is depicted in grim detail, her relationship with her own father is dysfunctional, and the one time she is shown to be cheerful is when she decides to lay her dreaming aside and attend the local tavern. Likewise, the original book's hopeful message of dreams coming true is preserved in the musical but severely undermined by the changes made to the book's plot. Assol's imaginary Prince Charming really turns out to be a charismatic, kind-hearted Rebel Prince (well, nobleman) in the book, while here, he is Demoted to Extra and first appears as just a random sailor having fun at a brothel. |
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Early on in Selkie, the titular character offers Todd her favourite food, fish eyes. Todd refuses on account of being a vegetarian, but later Todd's dad says that "part of being a dad is knowing when to suck it up and eat the eyeballs". This is meant to convey a moral about putting your child's happiness before your own, which on the face of it is a sound moral, but the problem is that it only really makes sense when the happiness the child gets is greater than the unhappiness experienced by the parent. This is not the case with the fish eyes because seeing Todd eat the eyes would have only given Selkie a small amount of pleasure (she seems disappointed when he refuses, but only very slightly) while it could have upset Todd a lot more due to conflicting with his moral views. This Aesop is further broken by the webcomic's overarching moral "accept people who are different to you, even if you don't understand them or their culture". According to that, Todd should be accepted for who he is, not forced to eat foods which make him uncomfortable based on the whims of an eight-year-old. |
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In Ctrl+Alt+Del, the comic makes it clear it's wrong to be a "console fanboy," in one strip even having God personally squash one. However, there are issues with this, since the fanboys are always Gamecube fans, the evil Gamer King in an early strip used a staff with a golden Gamecube controller on top (versus Ethan's Xbox one), Ethan playing a Gamecube is referred to as a "sin against the gaming gods"; he mentions that turning the Gamecube into a robot would result in a girl robot, and doing the same to a Playstation would produce a gay one while the Xbox appears to be perfect and sinless. | |
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In the fluff of Warhammer 40,000, a beloved minor character was Ollanius Pius, the name given to an unknown guardsman who sacrificed himself by heroically charging at Horus in protection of his Emperor and defiance of the Dark Powers. Though Pius was immediately vaporized, he was held up as a shining example of a Badass Normal and what makes the Imperial Guard what it is (and the sight of Horus deliberately destroying a man who was objectively no threat to him is what finally convinced the Emperor that Horus could not be saved). Until he was retconned as being a superhuman Space Marine, and then a member of the Adeptus Custodes (who are to the Space Marines what a Space Marine is to a human). When he was eventually brought back into canon, he was turned into a Perpetual, a sort of Super-immortal who can regenerate From a Single Cell that had been alive since ancient earth. Needless to say, this kinda undermines the idea of him being a normal man who bravely spat in the face of Chaos. | |
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In El Goonish Shive, while doing their review show, Elliot and Susan discuss a movie that undermines its own moral. | |
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The Wizard of Id does an annual Veterans Day strip where it pays tribute to the US military, using the Id army as a metaphor for them. However, the rest of the year, Id's military, and especially their commander-in-chef Sir Rodney, are depicted as incompetent, bumbling cowards, so the compliment comes off as backhanded at best. | |
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In 20 Socially Unacceptable Things by Matt Santoro, Matt says that it's bad to pick your nose and flick the booger onto the carpet. At the end, he does this. | |
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The Lemon Demon song "Geeks in Love" has a fairly good (if tired-out) message by itself, that it is better to be unique and spend time with the rare person who shares your own interests than to be hip and hang with the crowd. However, its music video by Albino Black Sheep functions largely as a tribute to every other annoying Internet fad in the world, and aligning them with the interests of the eponymous couple. It's not really individualism when you swap one dull set of pop-culture icons out for another just like it. | |
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The Dick Tracy "Crimestopper's Guide" feature that runs with the Sunday strip provides several generally helpful crime prevention tips. However, they often are, if not broken, then at least hypocritical in the face of the main action: It reminds that "you cannot spot a criminal by their facial features", while the strip is best known for its grotesquely ugly villains. It also has exhortations for people to "get involved" when they see a crime committed, while in the strip helpful bystanders tend to quickly end up dead. And so on. | |
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Aesop's Fables: The Satyr and the Peasant is about a satyr who meets a poor traveler lost in the woods, and invites him to his home. He notices the peasant first blowing on his hands to warm them, then blowing on a bowl of soup to cool it off. The Satyr immediately kicks his guest out, declaring that "a man who blows hot and cold in the same breath can't be trusted", metaphorically meaning that someone who frequently changes his mind to avoid committing to a conclusion or to align himself with both sides of a conflict. The problem is, obviously, that the man isn't blowing hot and cold in the same breath, his breath is the same temperature every time. It's just that his breath is warmer than his cold hands and cooler than his hot soup, meaning he was actually being consistently moderate. |
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Queen's song "Radio Ga Ga" is all about how music video is ruining music and we should all just listen to the radio instead. The accompanying music video features lavish sets and costumes, footage from the film Metropolis (the restoration of which it was made to promote) and a montage of clips of music videos from earlier Queen songs. | |
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The Quintessential Mary-Sue has the message that such characters are bad, and turn every story in which they appear into a Crapsack World. Unfortunately, there is the slight problem that the Villain Protagonist's amnesiac good half, once she reclaims her memories, is just as unrealistically talented, but is a genuine hero whom the audience is rooting for. It's then further broken by the fact that the Sue is only able to win and create a Villain World by blatant Diabolus ex Machina, breaking the previously established rules of the setting, and somehow usurping God, even after she was explicitly defeated and killed. That said, the author does recognize this, and includes a disclaimer at the end of Part 2 suggesting that readers disregard the third part if they want the story to have a happy ending. | |
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xkcd, "I Could Care Less": The author dislikes Grammar Nazis. In this strip, one character corrects the form of what the other just said. The other goes on a long explanation about ambiguity and language and human connection and ends with: "I assume you're giving me tips on how to interpret words because you want me to feel less alone. If so, then thank you. That means a lot. But if you're just running my sentences past some mental checklist so you can show off how well you know it, then I could care less." So the moral is that you shouldn't criticize the way others say things, because of all these things that are more important about communication — but the character who talked about this was really only invoking these deep issues to make the first character feel bad about what she saidnote at least provided the first character had the wrong kind of motive in saying it, but that "I assume..." doesn't sound very sincere in the light of what follows. (It's also a False Dichotomy, but that's another issue.) | |
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Sabrina Online had a series of strips in December 2010 which were a reference to the sequence in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back where the two heroes go on the road and beat up everyone who ever criticized them on the Internet. It works in the film because it's entirely in-character. In the comic, however, it's a series of Take That!s against the strip's critics. One notable strip involves Zig Zag, the viewpoint character for this sequence, beating up a guy who said mean things about her because he thinks he can say anything on the Internet without consequences. This isn't exactly true, but that's not the Broken Aesop. What's broken is the fact that Zig is the owner and star of her own porno company. You know, the industry that has historically relied on First Amendment rights to stay in business? And the "consequences" bit doesn't work either, because legally, Zig Zag committed real-world, premeditated, first-degree assault against a guy who knows her name, her face, and could easily press charges. The implication in the comic is that she'll suffer no repercussions at all. When Sabrina brings this up later, Zig Zag admits that it cost her a small fortune to settle all the legal issues. (But it was "worth it.") Although the incident does get mentioned during her trial◊ for assaulting Sabrina's mugger. And we eventually learn◊ that Zig was convicted, paid a fine and entered court-ordered anger management counseling. | |
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In Dragon Ball Multiverse, when Vegito says his daughter, U16 Bra is too unstable to be kept alive, the heroes dismiss his concerns and say he should attempt to redeem his target, not kill them. Word of God later seconded this point. The problem is love does not prevent Bra from going berserk in Super Saiyan 2 (it didn't the first time, before Vegito's death threat), nor does love shake her out of her berserk moments—only physical force or regret. What really makes this a Broken Aesop is how U16 Bra's control issues get solved before this by Babidi taking over her mind and somehow making her able to control Super Saiyan 2 without going berserk. If anything, the answer wasn't using more love, but more force. | |
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Sly Cooper: Thief of Virtue tried to introduce an objectivist Aesop on how everything was a matter of choice, and that the characters made their choices and brought the results on themselves, but both the fact that the crystals influenced the judgement of anyone who was using them as demonstrated through how Torus' behavior was altered by the crystal he was carrying in the chapter "Wrath of the Wolf King" and key details in the later-released side stories about what lead to the insanity of Ice and Snow undermine the entire point the author was trying to make. | |
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The musical aims at praising hope, dreaminess and the power of imagination, like the original book did. However, the book's dreamy heroine who manages to have a fulfilling life despite the ostracism she faces is turned into a borderline lunatic whose entire life is centred on her dream of the scarlet sails. The bullying she faces is depicted in grim detail, her relationship with her own father is dysfunctional, and the one time she is shown to be cheerful is when she decides to lay her dreaming aside and attend the local tavern. | |
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The music video of "Bad" has Michael being bullied by gang members for being a pussy because he refused to "rob" people and doesn't hang down with them a lot. Michael confronts them by — suddenly appearing in a leather outfit and doing an impressive sing-and-dance routine where he boasts about how "bad" he is. In the end the others who doubted him do respect him. So... what was the message exactly? Give in to peer pressure? It's good to be "bad", because you would rather be called that than being called a coward? Being "bad" equals being a good singer and dancer? It seems that Michael was Comically Missing the Point the gang member was trying to make. | |
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The heavy "racism is bad" morals in Goblins don't really work for a few reasons, but the biggest one is that the comic attempts to attack the idea of the Guilt-Free Extermination War by having it be treated as wrong for the humans to slaughter goblins. This is fine in a vacuum, but the eponymous goblins also carry out wholesale slaughter of humans regularly, which is dismissed with a Hand Wave of "all those humans we killed were evil" - a common justification for the guilt-free extermination war that the comic tries to attack. In general, the story also pushes Humans Are the Real Monsters (there are only two sympathetic "civilized" characters and only one evil goblin, who is motivated by something humans did to her) to such a degree that, were one to turn the goblins into humans and the humans into goblins, the narrative would likely come across as a completely standard paean to goblin genocide. The series reconstructs the moral by showing that the goblins are just as diverse and disunified as humans; the tribe that regularly slaughters the most humans and enslaves other goblins is explicitly shown to be goblin-supremacist, and the other goblins act in appropriate revulsion. Later on, Minmax makes peace with the goblins he vowed to kill earlier in the face of a real threat, the Big Bad - who is revealed to have discovered an exploit that makes him immune to anything that would normally react to his regularly evil ways, proving there is no hand wave strong enough to justify Black-and-White Morality. |
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One Subway ad features a popular character acting as a spokesman for the restaurant. The problem there is that the spokesman in question was Peter Griffin - you know, a morbidly obese borderline sociopath. Even if he did appear in the short-lived ads purely out of irony, both fans and detractors of the show alike voiced their displeasure with the hypocrisy of the ads, with concerns ranging from accusing the show of selling out to confusion over why a fat guy is a spokesman for a restaurant that (supposedly) encourages a healthier lifestyle. | |
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John Cena's "Rise Above Hate" slogan is understandable but still troublesome. Kane was deliberately trying to get Cena to break this Aesop and "Embrace the Hate"... but if you examine the two characters of John Cena and Kane carefully, you'll see that a problem has existed there from the very beginning. After all, Cena is hardly brave for refusing to surrender to feelings of hate when he is world-famous, absurdly successful, fabulously wealthy, and is loved by at least a bare majority of the WWE Universe - and thus, has no reason in the world to experience hate. Conversely, is Kane really such a monster for being so full of hate when he was nearly burned to death as a child, suffered years of psychological trauma that left him unable to speak for a long time, accidentally killed his high school sweetheart in a car crash (and had this revealed on live television, along with the lie that he killed the girl on purpose and then had sexual intercourse with her corpse), lost the unborn child he fathered and was betrayed by his wife, was tricked into causing the death of his father, and in general is loathed and ignored by the better part of the human race? | |
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Every episode of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared has an In-Universe example. The "lessons" taught are misinformed and incorrect, which the puppets begin to pick up on by the fourth episode. For instance, the episode on how great it is to be creative has almost no actual creative activities being taught, while actual creativity is generally squashed. The episode on the Power of Love defines love in a bizarre, conditional, and inconsistent fashion. And the episode on eating healthy ends up providing terrible dieting advice while labeling seemingly every food on the planet to be bad for you. | |
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In a case of a perfectly decent moral being killed by a followup, the ending of the original The Phantom of the Opera was the Phantom letting Christine go because he recognized that she wouldn't be happy with him, because he's a psychotic murderer and she isn't. Moral - "If you really love a person, recognize their right to turn you down." There's also the fact that the Phantom is a pariah because of his appearance, and the main reason he is the way he is owes to this unfair ostracism. Moral - "Bad people are, often, only victims of their environment and could change if they were ever shown kindness." But in Love Never Dies, the distant sequel, it's proclaimed that Christine actually was pining for the Phantom, they have an illegitimate kid, and her life with her actual love interest Raul is shown to be unhappy. Meanwhile, the Phantom has become incredibly wealthy and is surrounded by an entourage and admirers, but he's just as much of a violent possessive weirdo as ever. This pretty handily breaks both morals; turns out that the Phantom was right to try to keep Christine to himself forever, and he'd be an asshole no matter what. | |
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As seen on Superdickery.com, in this PSA "The Kool-Aid man tells kids to buckle up, and then proceeds to walk right into the path of a moving car." And here's another one, about the War On Drugs: | |
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