http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AccidentalAesop

Please don't list this on a work's page as a trope. Examples can go on the work's YMMV tab.

Peter Chiykowski, Rock, Paper, Cynic ◊ "Aesop's beast fables do not teach us to be wise or honest or kind. They simply show us what will happen if we dick around with talking animals."

When a writer intends to simply write a piece of fiction without An Aesop but someone reads something into their work that they didn't intend.

This seems to stem from some people always assuming Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory, which leads to them gasping "What Do You Mean Its Not Didactic" when you tell them as such. This also generally requires the Word of God to clear things up — if, indeed, even that helps; don't count on it.

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Like Misaimed Fandom (where readers fail to catch the moral or satire intended by an author), an Accidental Aesop may result from poor authorial communication or, indeed, the Unfortunate Implications that come with poor use of common symbols.

Compare: Alternate Aesop Interpretation, where a work is intended to have an An Aesop, but people just manage to find a different one; Broken Aesop, where a work's moral is contradicted by its delivery; Clueless Aesop, where a work fails to get its moral across; Hard Truth Aesop, where the moral goes against accepted wisdom; What Do You Mean Its Not Didactic; and Death of the Author. Occasionally these unintended Aesops have Unfortunate Implications. However, tropes are not bad; just because a text wasn't intended to be a commentary doesn't mean it can't work perfectly well as one.

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If you want to assign a work one of these aesops for comedic value, head over to Warp That Aesop.

See also Denied Parody for other unintended elements/interpretations of the work.

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

At first, Gunslinger Girl's disturbing depiction of the horrors and abuses its innocent little girl protagonists faced and how their lives were completely destroyed was lauded by many fans as a Deconstruction of the lolicon genre and/or a commentary on the use of Child Soldiers. Nope. Turns out it's straight-up Author Appeal. Many of the more subversive elements and Fan Disservice of the early part of the series were apparently to make it more palatable to a mainstream audience and probably weren't even the creator's idea. As time went on and the series' popularity grew, the creator gained Protection from Editors, and it became decidedly more Fanservice-y and disturbing for totally different reasons. And then there's the straight-out porn, drawn by the creator, of the girls being intimate with their handlers, consensual or otherwise. Incidentally, the fact that the first season of the Anime has this Aesop but the second doesn't is likely part of the reason why the latter season was critically panned by comparison.

Western viewers of Interviews with Monster Girls often see the demi-humans can be a metaphor for people who are different. As a result, this series can be seen as An Aesop on diversity and labels. While most see that as a valid interpretation, opinion is divided on whether this is Petos' intent, as they are previously known for being drawing Cute Monster Girl doujinshi, which implies they may be writing it completely out of Author Appeal.

Princess Sarah was released at the time when bullying was a hot-button issue in Japan. Combined with Lavinia's behavior towards Sarah, this led many fans to believe that the series was covertly dealing with this issue. However, director Fumio Kurokawa says that this was purely unintentional. In the interview, he points out that some fans went overboard with this — one fan even sent the writer a razor blade, with the message "Stop bullying Sarah!"

In the interview, he points out that some fans went overboard with this — one fan even sent the writer a razor blade, with the message "Stop bullying Sarah!" The Yu-Gi-Oh! anime's version of the Dungeon Dice Monsters arc is meant to be about the futility of revenge and how friendship is better, but another moral is "be patient and always check your email." If Otogi had waited a day before going out for revenge he'd have seen the contract from Pegasus and never gotten into conflict with Yugi at all.

Comic Books

Even though The Smurfs's book "The Black Smurfs" was just a fun story about a Zombie Apocalypse (though family-friendly and luckily reversible), some people tend to consider it an allegory of black immigrants. They were made purple rather than black in the Animated Adaptation to avoid those Unfortunate Implications.

Galactus from Marvel Comics is a godlike being who eats the life force of entire planets to survive. Obviously, every time he eats, potential billions if not more die. Galactus rationalizes that he's got to eat and the inhabitants of those planets are far below him on the universal pecking order. His entire character might be the greatest Accidental Aesop in favor of vegetarianism ever... or was, until it was revealed that Galactus is required for the universe to properly function. There's also the oft-forgotten fact that Galactus actually only needs to feed on planets that are capable of supporting life; he actually goes out of his way to only eat planets that actually do support life as a last resort. Furthermore, that's one of the reasons he has a herald to forewarn of his coming; so that those species who have the capacity to up sticks and go somewhere else have time to do so.

A lot of comics written by Mark Millar seems to have pro-family messages. Several of his characters have issues that can be traced to their family lives. For example, Ultimate Red Skull and Spider-Girl in Old Man Logan are both despicable psychopaths because they had an absentee father, toward whom they hold a grudge. Hit-Girl is completely messed up because of her psychopath father. The Unfunnies' Troy Hick has a Freudian Excuse in the mental breakdown he suffered after his wife left him, and Millar's run on Fantastic Four portrays Reed and Sue Richards as perfect and extremely happy with their lives. However, Millar has said he never intentionally put any sort of message into his works, so all of this is either completely accidental or subconscious on his part.

In-Universe example from Archie Comics: One story had Mr. Weatherbee assigning Archie to give a speech to the male students on a subject that interests them. He chooses inflation and has Betty, Veronica and Ethel help him demonstrate its effects. Big Ethel is shown in an early 20th-Century swimsuit that covers her whole body, Betty in a standard one-piece suit, and Veronica in a bikini to symbolize "The Shrinking Dollar." Mr. Weatherbee compliments Archie on his speech, but tells him, "There's only one problem, Archie. You have the entire class looking forward to further devaluation." In other words, there won't be much on the next girl if the dollar shrinks more.

A common observation on X-Men's attempts to utilize Fantastic Racism is that they don't actually make a lot of sense—in particular, "why are people prejudiced against mutants but not Daredevil or the Fantastic Four?" Some commentators have observed that, while this is mostly a result of inconsistent writing, it's actually a pretty good message on prejudice: bigots generally don't have a consistent cause-and-effect for why they hate their targets, because bigotry is senseless, petty, and cruel by nature.

Asterix: The narrative generally lionizes the simple country life lived by the Gauls as honest and fulfilling while denouncing the metropole-dwelling Romans as greedy, ambitious and decadent and depicting their striving for power, wealth or glory as nerve-wracking, superficial and in the end meaningless. However, in Asterix and the Cauldron, Asterix' and Obelix' ignorance about monetary and economic matters proves almost fatal when they, in spite of their supernatural abilities, continuously fail to earn money when they suddenly have to. While it could be argued that they never would have slipped into that situation to begin with if not for the deceit of a greedy rival chieftain, the message the average reader most likely takes from the story is, especially on rereads, that at least some skill with money and trade is indeed useful, even if you live outside the economic hotspots.

Fairy Tales

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Films — Animated

Films — Live-Action

Literature

Live-Action TV

Newspaper Comics

Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts, due to its popularity and long run, often ran into this trope: Schulz said he only created the Great Pumpkin as a fun idea: "What if someone believed in a Halloween Santa Claus?" Many saw Linus's efforts as a mockery of the foolishness of religious people, but Schulz himself was quite religious, at least in the early years. note Around the 1980s, Schulz became a secular humanist and he stopped going to church, but The Great Pumpkin was introduced in 1960. Linus's statement that you should never discuss "religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin" was intended to show that he doesn't view the Great Pumpkin as his religion per se (Linus quotes the Bible in other strips, which he seems to believe in, so he's presumably a Christian-the Great Pumpkin appears to be unrelated). There's a strip where Linus asks Lucy about what would happen if a baby was in heaven waiting to be born but its parents decided that they didn't want any more children. Lucy decries his theological and medical ignorance. It was meant to be a parody of people who ask really weird hypothetical questions, but people on both sides of the abortion debate seized on it as proof that Schulz supported them and asked him if they could have permission to reprint it in their literature. He said no. It may or may not be coincidence that Rerun, younger brother to Lucy and Linus, was born a few years later. In an anthology, 1960s letters written to Schulz about his new African-American character Franklin are reprinted; because he was introduced during the Civil Rights Movement, people assumed Schulz was trying to make some sort of statement. No, he said, Franklin's just black by coincidence. However, when some Southern newspaper editors told him to stop showing Franklin in the same classroom as white students, he consciously chose to use Franklin even more.



Video Games

Web Comics

Web Original

From a Nezumi Man review "GAH! See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Smoke, and all your skin falls off".

"GAH! See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Smoke, and all your skin falls off". If the way reincarnation works in the Reincarny webgame series is to be believed, the safest way to prevent criminals from committing crimes again for a long time is to give them life imprisonment without parole, since executing them will just allow them to escape from Hell and be reincarnated as adults who immediately start doing the same things they did before. (The game series is at least 90% of the way toward the cynical side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism)

Twitch Plays Pokémon Red became an almost debate of democracy vs. anarchy as well after democracy was implemented.

The Nostalgia Critic's episode of Princess Diaries II came off like "fake geek girls are real and they're bad" (because Hyper was using boy toys that she didn't like and pretending she did to get Critic to sleep with her). Later episodes focused on the kidnapping and whatever else she did bad to him to maybe dilute this.

H.Bomberguy, in his review of The Room, explains how he believes that the film is a close impression of how Wiseau saw an actual breakup. This means it (unintentionally) works very well as a statement about how bad relationships warp your perceptions, with the nonsense characterization, rampant misogyny, and Random Events Plot being a symptom of the fact that Wiseau's viewpoint wasn't healthy or accurate.

Maggie Mae Fish, when talking about Cats (both the play and the movie), she mentions how, in a weird way, the two work as a parody of fascism. T. S. Elliot, the man behind the source material, was a royalist whose fascist beliefs bled into his work, and elevating his original poems into this weird, fever dream-like works, while keeping the stuff that made it fascist-like, like the death cult, make it seems like an ode to how his beliefs were flawed and crazy to begin with.

Western Animation