Public Service Announcement/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Basic Trope: A government or other organization has An Aesop for the audience.
  • Played Straight: An anti-smoking campaign ad features a comparison of a diseased lung from smoking and a healthy lung from avoiding smoke, and a long list of the actual ingredients of a cigarette.
  • Exaggerated: The anti-smoking campaign shows someone lighting up a cigarette. They then explode.
  • Inverted: The anti-smoking ad shows someone who didn't smoke becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, Happily Married with two great kids, winning the gold medal at the Olympics, being crowned in a beauty pageant, etc, all because they don't smoke.
  • Justified: The ad producers are trying to motivate the audience, whether by using the Scare'Em Straight angle, Reverse Psychology, etc.
  • Subverted: The ad begins with someone lighting a cigarette and going about his/her day.
  • Double Subverted: Only to show them at the end of the ad, dying of cancer.
  • Deconstructed: Like anything else, these can be done well or poorly. The producers must be careful to get their message across in a believable way, otherwise it becomes a Lost Aesop, which is Completely Missing the Point.
  • Reconstructed: They aren't any more Anvilicious than necessary, and the message is believable (no Compressed Vice or Space Whale Aesop or Can't Get Away with Nuthin' here!) so the audience actually learns something.
  • Parodied: The ad is too full of Narm to be taken seriously.
  • Lampshaded: "This is your left lung. This is your left lung after 20 years of smoking. Any questions?"
  • Averted: No such ads were made because They Just Didn't Care.
  • Enforced: Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped
  • Invoked: A government agency or other group is alarmed by an increase in teen smoking.
  • Defied: The group decides to allocate money towards larger problems, seeing teen smoking as an issue for parents and schools to deal with.
  • Discussed:
  • Conversed:
  • Played For Laughs: Someone raises their hand and says, "Yeah, what about the right lung?" or "Yeah, but that's after 20 years of smoking, not after just one cigarette."
  • Played For Drama: The ad shows the smoker slowly wasting away, and his/her family and friends dying from exposure to secondhand smoke. At the end, Everybody's Dead, Dave