Broken Aesop/Playing With
Basic Trope: An Aesop is broken through hypocrisy.
- Straight: Murder In The Streets has an Aesop saying that guns are bad. The climax is Alice shooting Zeke with a gun.
- Exaggerated:
- Every problem is solved with guns despite the preaching of anti-gun use.
- Even problems that couldn't logically be solved with guns
- Justified:
- Alice learns that the Aesop does not apply in these times and decides to break it.
- Shooting Zeke was the worse of two evils, and this becomes clear.
- "Do as I say, not as I do."
- Inverted: The story has an obvious aesop, despite the author's insistence that life is too complicated to draw simple lessons from.
- Subverted: Alice was about to shoot Zeke, but remembers that guns are bad.
- Double Subverted:
- Until Zeke provoked her to attack.
- ...So she uses other means to kill Zeke.
- Parodied: Bob says, "Remember kids, don't smoke!" and then whips out a cigarette.
- Deconstructed: Alice goes through a Heroic BSOD after shooting Zeke because she is not practicing what she preaches.
- Reconstructed: But then, Alice remembers that shooting people that use guns as well is a good thing after all.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Alice resolves things without resorting to guns.
- Enforced: "Wait...what were we teaching again?"
- Lampshaded: "Alice! You are a god damned hypocrite!"
- Invoked: Zeke provokes Alice to abandon her anti-gun message and prove to her that guns are good.
- Exploited: The writer revolts against the show and throws in Broken Aesops as a Take That to the show and its producers
- Defied: Alice drops the gun and proceeds to tell Zeke to shut up.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "Wait a second, did Alice just shoot him? I thought this episode was all about how guns are evil!"
- Plotted A Perfectly Good Waste: Alice's shooting of Zeke makes her jump off the slippery slope, and eventually cross the Moral Event Horizon.
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