Family-Unfriendly Aesop/Video Games

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Examples of Family-Unfriendly Aesops in Video Games include:

  • Dragon Age is full of those and sometimes lampshades them. For example, at the mage starting quest you get several of them, the most prominent being that guile and trickery are sometimes preferable to trust and altruism.
    • The overarcing story in Orzammar delivers the message that a progressive-minded individual who is personally a manipulative, sleazy jerk sometimes makes a better leader than a kindly, democratic individual bound by stagnant social traditions. Another aesop, perhaps more family-friendly, might be that every person is a mix of good and bad, and shouldn't be judged on first impressions alone.
      • Indeed, that's one of the recurring themes of the series - first impressions of people or situations are often deceiving, and hasty judgments lead to tragic consequences. Don't trust the surface; dig deeper before making a decision.
      • In fact, with the exception of the Mage Tower every one of the four main quest zones past Lothering has the actual villain of the piece turn out to be the person who looked like the hero on first introduction.
  • Valkyria Chronicles. If you're overwhelmed by a major change in your ability to handle your problems, don't carefully examine your feelings, weigh your options, or take your situation and your resources into consideration; just jump to whatever wild conclusion comes to mind, because your boyfriend is just waiting for the right moment to bail you out with common sense.
    • That one actually shows up twice. Alicia freaks out and tries to kill herself (and her friends) with her Valkyria flame, Captain Varrot almost murders a captured enemy officer because she's in a good position to do so; they both have to be talked out of it by their future husbands.
  • Some people believe that Tales of Vesperia glorifies vigilantism and murder.
  • Fallout 3. There is a quest called Tenpenny Tower, about a luxurious hotel inhabited by prejudiced humans and a nearby gang of civilized ghouls (a form of monstrously mutated human) who want to live in it. There are three ways to solve this quest -- Two of them involve killing either party and being rewarded by the other for it. The final option is, through a lot of tedious diplomacy, to convince the humans to let the ghouls live alongside them, and it ends with the two species coexisting peacefully and happy-happy. Except, a few days later, all the human inhabitants have been slaughtered by the ghouls. Sometimes the oppressed, when presented with the opportunity, can be just as inhuman as the oppressors.
    • It's debatable whether you could have known that that would happen in the first place, so this could also function as an Aesop about how even noble acts can bring unforeseen and unpleasant consequences.
    • Or "you just picked the peaceful option because in all video games this gives the best rewards, didn't you? Welcome to the real world, newbie."
    • By the way, if you want to do so without gaining negative karma ( because you killed Roy Phillips and his followers), goad all three of them -- Michael Masters, Roy Phillips, and his wife -- into attacking you via dialogue. You do not get negative karma for this, which raises a few questions in itself. For more moral dissonance, check out the game's own page.
  • Deliberately invoked in Knights of the Old Republic II: Kreia is full of these. Think you've done a good deed by giving that beggar some spare change? Think again! Kreia promptly shows you a vision of the poor sap getting mugged by another beggar- his newfound money stolen, and himself being left to bleed in the street. The moral of this story? Keep your misguided "charity" to yourself, lest you cause even more suffering by extending your generosity!
    • Although Kreia is a Sith so she gives a 'bad' advice. Not much dissonance in that. Furthermore, possibility of playing bad guy is or some actually a whole point of the game.
      • Good in theory, except Kreia goes out of her way to criticise EVERYTHING you do. Was ultimately making a point that both the light and dark sides of the Force are ultimately damaging, and justifies her cause of destroying the Force, but still massively irritating during play.
    • The game's Aesop is the very family-friendly, "good actions breed good from others, while evil does the same." The game not only reveals Kreia is the Big Bad, but also then shows how the evil, selfish actions of a dark side character lead to destructive, evil ends for all involved while a light side character's selfless, noble actions lead to a heroic, bittersweet ending. Additionally, the player character is handed an Idiot Ball every time Kreia attempts to teach a lesson. In the above example, anyone with half a brain should be able to point out that while well-meaning actions do sometimes go awry, all choices must be made in uncertainty and she's cherry-picking a bad outcome from a kind act - and laying the blame on the kind act, rather than the later decision of the muggers. Within the narrative of the game, Kreia is fundamentally wrong, regardless of whether the player plays a light or dark side Jedi. With the sole exception of the case with the mugger, all of a player's good actions yield good consequences, and all their evil actions yield suffering and woe for others. All of the Sith Lords, including Kreia, are destroyed by the evil drive they chose to embrace.
      • To be fair to the game Kreia is shown on-screen to explicitly have the superpower to force someone's brain into cognitive dissonance, witness what she does to poor Disciplie. The reason your character clutches an Idiot Ball every time she talks is because the woman actually does temporarily make people stupider via Force poking them in the brain.
  • Legend of Mana, especially in the Faeries story arc, repeats the message: "freedom is the highest ideal, therefore be true to yourself even at the cost of everything else". Great, except Irwin the Demon Lord is an Omnicidal Maniac, and the one person who could talk him out of it absolutely refuses to do so because she claims that she loves him too much.
  • While Red Dead Redemption has a few over-arching Aesops, the side quests mostly promote a philosophy of "Be careful doing nice things for people, because it may not end well for all involved". While there are some examples of a good deed having a genuinely good outcome, most do not follow this line of reasoning. Give an inventive aviator the means to create his flying machine? Congratulations, you just gave him the means to fly off of a cliff to his doom. Rescue a seemingly love-struck Chinese immigrant from cruel indentured servitude? Good job, you find out later his "love" is an addiction to heroin. Decide to rescue a mountaineer from rampaging Sasquatch? Nice work, you just single-handedly reduced a peaceful species to a single suicidal survivor. This even applies to minor side-activities, where stopping to help someone on the side of the road can get you either killed or left horseless. While mostly played for the sake of dark humor, the general message is the same; people will manipulate your sense of justice, honor or altruism to deceive you and sometimes the worst thing you can do for a person is giving them the help they seek.
  • Parodied with an in-universe example in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. In order to join the Dark Brotherhood, you have to complete a quest from a little boy who wants you to kill the cruel headmistress at the orphanage he was being held in. If you do, he'll proudly proclaim that he now wants to be an assassin when he grows up and decides that you can solve anything by getting a person you don't like killed.
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