Lost Aesop: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|''"You know, it's an interesting thing when you consider... The Earth people, who can think, are so frightened by those who cannot: the dead. Well, our ship should be regenerated; we'd better get started."''
|'''Eros''', ''[[Plan 9 from Outer Space]]''}}
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This is when the audience is clearly presented with a lesson, only to have that moral contradicted, then reinstated, then forgotten about, then addressed, then ignored...you get the picture. It gets so messy that it's no longer clear exactly ''which'' Aesop has been broken and which one did the breaking. At some point, certain viewers or readers will begin to have doubts about whether the writer knew what they were doing.
The most usual form of this trope is when the audience is [[Anvilicious|whacked over the head]] with the moral-of-the-story, only for the plot to ignore that moral and set off in pursuit of another
Another common variant is where the '''Lost Aesop''' comes about as a result of a writer going deeper into a subject than they could really afford to. Their characters examine all the angles, discuss possible outcomes and argue with each other, but then the writer realizes that ''they themselves'' don't know the answer to the question being posed... or they realize that they've run out of time and have to wrap things up in a hurry... or the issue is one that's so polarizing that they can't really pick a side without [[Broken Base|getting a lot of people]] [[Flame War|mad at them]], so they pick a random Aesop and stick with it, [[Plot Threads]] be damned. The most successful resolution is usually to opt for a [[Golden Mean Fallacy|"middle road"]] between the two conflicting lessons. However, if the logic of the story has become too confused, or several Aesops are vying for the top spot, the author might simply choose the one that makes for the simplest ending. It might work, or it might come off as a half-hearted [[Ass Pull]].
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