Killing the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|The Very Big Stupid is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D department.

|[[Frank Zappa]]|The Real Frank Zappa Book}}

 

{{examples}}

== [[Film]] ==

* The original fable was adapted by Russian filmmakers in 1994's ''[[Assia and the Hen with the Golden Eggs]]''.

* ''[[Chicken Run]]'' shows this trope, albeit with ordinary chicken eggs instead of goose eggs. The Tweedys run a farm where they collect eggs from the chickens as a rooster named Fowler guards them. As soon as one hen stops laying, she's taken to "the chop" and eaten for dinner. Mr. Tweedy is fine with this way of life because it's how his family has done chicken farming for generations. His wife, on the other hand, is tired of being "poor" and decides to slaughter all the chickens for a new pie business. {{spoiler|Thanks to the chickens escaping in the climax, the Tweedys are left with a blown-up farm and no poultry for eggs ''or'' pies.}}

 

* In ''[[Misery]]'', Paul Sheldon discusses this when Annie presses him for details on the book she's coercing him to write. Paul already isn't in a great mood after she chopped off his foot and is trying to bribe him with a hot fudge sundae as an apology. He shouts that he can't tell her what happens because he doesn't know, saying that if she keeps pushing like the farmer with the golden eggs, there will be nothing left of him.

* In the first book of Gail Carson Levine's ''[[Princess Tales]]'', ''The Fairy's Mistake'', shows a take on this with the fairy tale "Diamonds and Toads". A girl named Rosella gets a blessing where precious stones fall from our mouth while her twin sister Myrtle is cursed where bugs fly out of her mouth. When a prince marries her, it's not because Harold loves her, but rather because he sees the dollar signs. Cue him making her read books for days so he can fill the royal coffers, until she falls ill. Myrtle agrees to help in exchange for ''not'' having her curse removed and keeping some of Rosella's jewels.

 

== [[Oral Tradition]], [[Folklore]], Myths and Legends ==

* In the mythology of Hawaii, the princess Hainuwele was always retreating to a private place and coming back with jewelry, dishes, and other precious items. Some greedy people killed her to raid her private stash. They discovered only a privy, as she had been [[Solid Gold Poop|defecating the valuables]].

* One Hindu folktale has a variant of this: when a Brahman dies and leaves his family destitute, he is reincarnated as a bird with golden feathers. To ensure that his family won't rely on charity, he comes every day and gives his wife a golden feather. The wife starts enjoying a life of luxury and becomes greedy; she snatches the bird and plucks all the feathers against her children's protests. They promptly turn into white, ordinary feathers. He reveals that the reason why he gave one feather at a time was that more than one would end the enchantment. When his feathers do grow back, they are white and he feels he no longer has a place. So he flies off, and she eventually runs out of money.

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* ''[[Dragon Quest IV]]'' features Rosa, an elf-maiden who cries [[Solid Gold Poop|rubies as tears]]. She's killed by a group of humans who hunt her for her ability. Her death is the [[Big Bad]]'s [[Start of Darkness]].

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

* ''Golden Yeggs'' (Warner Bros, 1950) is another film adaptation of the original story.

* ''[[Adventures from the Book of Virtues]]'' adapted this story. A farmer and his wife fall on hard times, being so desperate they prepare to slaughter their only goose. The goose starts laying golden eggs, saving her life for a few months. The wife then comes to a logical conclusion: all birds stop laying eventually, so it's better to cut open the goose and get all the eggs. Turns out when she does kill the goose, it has no golden eggs.

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

* Narrowly averted by [[OnlyFans]], which started going down the same road as tumblr in 2021 but apparently was able to learn from tumblr's example -- within two weeks of announcing its intent to restrict "adult" content OnlyFans abruptly reversed course, stopping a similar user base flight which had begun with the initial announcement.

* This is the basic modus operandi of the classic corporate raider, who does it to ''other'' people's Golden Geese for their personal benefit: Find a company that is marginal, making a small but reliable profit, buy it, then dismember it and sell off its pieces and assets for an immediate profit, killing the company in the process. Frequently justified with the claim that if the company didn't have the money to defend itself from a hostile takeover, it didn't ''deserve'' to keep operating.

* As many commentators (including [[Frank Zappa]] in the page quote) have noted over the past few decades, the tunnel-vision focus Wall Street has on next-quarter profits over any other benefit or metric has proven to be to the detriment of any public company that attempts strategic long-term planning. Companies that were trying to be the next IBM or Sears with a century-plus lifespan have been driven out of business either by sacrificing less-profitable but necessary divisions to satisfy their investors' demands for immediate dividends and higher share prices, or by having their stock prices tanked when they insist on planning and investing for the long term in defiance of their shareholders -- assuming the shareholders don't vote the forward-thinking officers out and replace them with someone more amenable to fast cash at the cost of everything else.

 

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[[Category:Fairy Tale Tropes]]

[[Category:Greed]]