Broken Aesop/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


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:
  • 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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