Worst cases of a Broken Aesop

[hareluyafan1]

For anyone unfamiliar with the term- https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BrokenAesop

Basically a Broken Aesop is when the writers of a story try to include a moral lesson to the audience but the events of the story don’t fit said moral or even contradict it entirely.

Note that a Broken Aesop only applies from an in-story perspective. Something like for example, making an animated movie about forest conservation when trees need to be cut down to make the paper used for animation, is NOT a Broken Aesop because that’s looking at it from an out-of-universe perspective. The contradiction must come from the story itself.

The worst example I can think of is from the “Power Rangers Ninja Steel” episode "Grave Robber." In the episode the Rangers decide to play a board game except for Levi the Gold Ranger who declines as he doesn’t like board games and leaves. The game turns out to be a trap for the Rangers that forces them to fight while various handicaps are inflicted upon them. Meanwhile Levi is chastised for not playing with the others so he returns and manages to save them.

Why is this a problem? Two reasons. First if Levi had stayed and played the game with the others then he would have been caught in the exact same trap. The episode claims he was wrong to go off on his own, yet he was only able to save the day because he did just that.

Second, the moral is supposed to be “you can‘t always expect people to do what you want to do.” But that’s not what Levi did. He didn’t try to stop the others from playing their game, he didn’t try to make them do something else or make them feel bad about playing it. He was perfectly happy for them to play while he went off and did something else. Because of this the intended moral of “you can‘t always expect people to do what you want to do” now comes across as “you should do things you don‘t want to because other people are doing them.” In other words, “give in to peer pressure.” That’s a horrible moral especially for a kid’s show.

[Totoro Man]

Naruto is probably the first one I can think of... amusingly enough, it gets an entire page devoted to how it fits this description!
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p...enAesop/Naruto

I thought Naruto was a great title right up until the Valley of the End. I honestly felt like that would have been a perfectly fine place to end the series.

it's what takes place AFTER that story arc where we start seeing multiple broken aesops threading themselves throughout the story. some of them only get worse as the story progresses!

[Guy1]

Injustice: Killing is wrong unless you're Harley Quinn and then you can get off scott free no matter what atrocities you commit.

[LordMikel]

Raya and the Last Dragon.
If someone betrays you, then you should give them a second chance as they might surprise you and not betray you again.

I was so mad watching this movie and hated the moral.

[Postmania]

A couple things in the Sword of Truth series iirc

[Guy1]

Lying Is Bad Unless I Do It!

[Nik Hasta]

I'm gonna just remind everyone to be somewhat careful in this thread. We do have a loose policy against threads that are specially conceived around dunking on stuff and, so far, that seems to be all we're doing here.

[T51R]

Raya and the Last Dragon.
If someone betrays you, then you should give them a second chance as they might surprise you and not betray you again.

I was so mad watching this movie and hated the moral.

I am pretty damned convinced that the entire movie was a build-up, and a almost-lifelong setup by Raya to pull a Shinzon at the Kumandran reunification ceremony: kill all the other leaders and seize the complete kingdom for herself, all in one go.

[The Drunkard Kid]

Raya and the Last Dragon.
If someone betrays you, then you should give them a second chance as they might surprise you and not betray you again.

I was so mad watching this movie and hated the moral.

That technically would be a bad moral (Family Unfriendly Aesop is the trope, I think) not a broken one, unless the movie had been trying to push the moral "never forgive or trust anyone who has previously betrayed you" to that point. Or if the betrayer still betrayed Raya after being trusted again, I guess.

[The Drunkard Kid]

I kinda feel that Deku getting All Might's Ultra Quirk and unlocking even more of it than he did and discovering that being Quirkless actually makes I've *more* compatible with said super Quirk kinda diminishes the apparently intended message that even people who aren't naturally gifted can be heroes.

Anyone know if there's a similar series where the "Quirkless" character just goes "hey, there are tons of heroes whose powers barely have any offensive capabilities and tons of heroes who use anime martial arts and tech to make up the difference, so screw it, I'll just become manga/anime Batman/Iron Man."

[Masonicon]

how about this example: my Request-spamming of my fanart ideas(even when I hardly attack anyone that says no to free requests, there's something that keeps me from completely redeem myself from this and what keep myself from fully-redeem this was: Deviantart neglecting people like me in favor of promoting "Bigger" users there) where here's Aesop that I personally broke(cuz Deviantart's favoritism of promoting more bigger/popular/professional people there)

back to fictional examples of this, does this count: even Batman/Ironman-type Characters(in terms of having no innate powers) can be considered metahuman from having magical weapons at their disposal?

[Tami]

This thread might fit better in Community or maybe the Writers Forum or one of the other forums. It seems out of place here.

[BitVyper]

So according to TV Tropes, an Aesop involves a piece of media very directly summing up an episode/chapter/short story's moral point, like a PSA or an old sitcom dad talking to a sitcom child. I think basically 99.9% of entries on the Broken Aesop page completely fail that test and are nothing more than audience projection and expectation. Things happening in stories doesn't mean they are telling you how to live or that they should.

I think pretty much everything about Aesops is just the TV Tropes community following its worst impulse, abstracting a simple concept to the point where people just start listing literally anything that happens in a show, and putting a bunch of unreasonable expectations on media.

I kinda feel that Deku getting All Might's Ultra Quirk and unlocking even more of it than he did and discovering that being Quirkless actually makes I've *more* compatible with said super Quirk kinda diminishes the apparently intended message that even people who aren't naturally gifted can be heroes.

Like here for instance, is that really "the intended message?" 'Cause I have a hard time thinking of evidence for it on examination. Deku is quirkless for like two episodes and All Might telling him he can be a hero is just All Might recognizing him as a One For All successor. He doesn't like, turn to the camera and say that you can be a superhero without powers, he basically just tells Deku that he's got the heart for it. Deku being quirkless is part of his character arc and informs who he is, but it's not part of anything I'd call an aesop. There's certainly themes about talent and moral character and complacency, and lots of conclusions you can draw from it, but that's kind of it. If it relies on inference, I don't think it qualifies as an Aesop.

[Nik Hasta]

I think basically 99.9% of entries on the Broken Aesop page completely fail that test and are nothing more than audience projection and expectation.

You could apply this ratio to most of TV Tropes. While I get that it's a fun way to look at patterns, it really hamstrings people's media literacy.

[Postmania]

You could apply this ratio to most of TV Tropes. While I get that it's a fun way to look at patterns, it really hamstrings people's media literacy.

Well they did used to have a page just for Missing the Point