Broken Aesop examples on The Simpsons.
- Kirk and Luann Van Houten's divorce in "A Milhouse Divided" was all just one big aesop about Homer needing to respect his wife, which is what Kirk tells Homer after losing his home, his job, and his car. But the way losing Luann caused those was utterly contrived: he lost his home because he apparently got absolutely nothing in the divorce settlement, he was fired for being single, and his car was stolen by a woman he met on the rebound (which was his fault, but was more general incompetence as he was dumb enough to hand over his keys to someone he just met while waiting in a bar).
- In "Homer's Enemy", Word of God said they wanted to show that a real person could not survive in the show's universe, except they did it by making Homer look worse than he really was in order to make Frank Grimes look better. What's worse is that Frank's breakdown and death, which was supposed to be caused by Homer, was really his own fault. Homer had offered to make amends with Frank, but he didn't want anything to do with it, and he immediately put everything into destroying Homer. It doesn't help that they made Frank's life excessively miserable before he even met Homer, and the circumstances surrounding Homer's attempts to make amends hit Frank in exactly the wrong way to get the right point across. Or that Grimes' motivation quickly turned from proving that the one responsible for plant safety was dangerously incompetent to proving that he's a better person than Homer.
- Parodied in "Million Dollar Abie": Lisa wants Grandpa to set the bulls free instead of hurting them, but the bulls hurt other people when they get set free.
- "Barthood" is an episode that covers Bart's life, from six years old to him being a young adult. Many recurring themes throughout the episode include Lisa always overshadowing him, and Homer being a bad father. When Bart blows up at Lisa for always one-upping him in everything, Lisa retorts that he can't blame her for everything wrong in his life and he needs to get over his shitty life to move on and become a successful artist. He shouldn't hold a grudge and pick at every success she has. The aesop is solid, but it breaks because a) Homer frequently compared Lisa to Bart and always treated her better (though this isn't her fault), and b) Lisa constantly showed him up for no reason, with some of it being on purpose. To compound things, there are quite a handful of episodes where Bart is succeeding at life, but Lisa will grow jealous/resentful and the episode will end with Bart giving up what he loves to make her happy. So while Bart's terrible lot in life isn't her fault, Lisa still ruined chances for him, and was insensitive towards all his problems. He's right to blame her for some of his problems, and he is right to be angry because she's never made to see fault in her own behavior. To drive this home further, the final part of the episode shows that Bart was able to become a successful artist and bike shop owner, moving past his grudge against Lisa in order to succeed... Except he was able to succeed after he essentially cut her out of his life and avoided her. So he succeeded even with the grudge, and getting away from her not only helped him, but would later go on to help repair their relationship.
To make it even worse, there's plenty of episodes that show that Lisa will easily succeed at the things she tries out, but Bart is biologically held back from what he wants to do. In "Lisa the Simpson", Abe Simpson tells Lisa that Simpsons lose their intelligence around her age, and she worries about it, until she's told she's safe from this. The episode reveals the Simpson gene only affects male Simpsons, and it will affect Bart. Bart is destined to fail because of his genetics and there's not anything he can do about it. - In "Bart the Fink", Krusty gets into trouble because he committed tax fraud, but since the IRS is the Designated Villain, his decision to commit insurance fraud at the end of the episode in order to end his tax woes is seen as a good thing. Notably, at no point in the episode does anyone tell him, "Well, you should have paid your taxes." The closest Krusty comes to realizing this was when he initially refuses to return, saying, "I learned that I don't need money to be happy" (which he then ignores). He does, however, learn not to commit tax fraud, as the later episode "The Trouble with Trillions" shows him filing his tax returns... and expressing frustration that he waited until the last possible moment to do so.
- The Aesop of "Forgive and Regret" is that performing a Deathbed Confession is essentially being a Dirty Coward as Grampa was trying to use his death as a way to be Easily Forgiven for his actions. The problem with this that it ignores the fact that Mona did basically the same in "Mona Leaves A" in that she died shortly after Homer finally called out her constant abandonment of him. You can’t even use Abe's Smug Snake after he recovered since Mona pulled Thanatos Gambit by manipulating Homer into stopping a nuclear silo using her dying wish which nearly gets him killed. All in all it just comes across as Double Standard.
- "Homer's Night Out" has the aesop of "Don't objectify women." Not a bad message, but the way it's conveyed is a sheer mess. Bart receives a toy spy camera and secretly takes a photo of Homer dancing with a stripper at a work party. The picture gets copied and passed around his friends at school and eventually makes its way into the adults' world (essentially it went viral before social media was a thing). Mr. Burns finds it and scolds Homer, claiming that he's making the power plant a hostile workplace for the female employees, even though we don't see anything happen to prove his claimnote ; Marge also finds it and is utterly pissed and throws him out of the house. When he begs for her forgiveness, she claims that she's upset at him not for dancing with a stripper, but for letting Bart think it's okay to treat women like objects, forcing Homer to track the girl down to have her tell Bart that she's a person with a real name and real goals and interests. Four problems here: 1. She was mad at him before she knew Bart took the picture; claiming that he set a bad example came across as an excuse to guilt-trip him when in reality she was jealous. 2. At no point was the dancer disrespected at the party. She was hired to perform, and none of the men ever touched her or verbally demeaned her in any way. 3. Homer had no idea Bart was there. 4. Bart was already taking inappropriate photos of women before the incident, which had nothing to do with Homer as Bart took a picture of Marge shaving her armpits, which Marge caught and called Bart out for. If anyone had explaining to do, it was Bart for sneaking into an adult party where he might not understand the context of what was going on, and taking a photo of people in a compromising position without their consent.
- "Lost Verizon", Yes, Marge keeping an eye on the boy who did a transparent act of vandalism the whole episode is smothering.
- "Girls Just Want to Have Sums", After achieving an award for being an outstanding student, Lisa revealed herself as a girl by taking off her disguise. In her speech, Lisa briefly talks about how the boys do face a different kind of injustice to girls. After the boys start fighting, she also says that whatever the answer is to gender politics, she's happy to be a girl who's good at maths. Her entire speech is "Gender politics does not matter as long as you get the results you want".
- The episode, “Brake My Wife, Please” teaches that husbands should treat their wives with respect, especially through very tough and stressful times, as shown with Homer learning to respect Marge because she has to do all the driving after Homer loses his license. However, the episode ignores the fact that Homer actually was helping Marge with her newfound burden by taking up walking so she would not have to drive him to and from work. Even more baffling is that a lot of the stress Marge goes through with the driving has nothing to do with Homer as she gets stressed out by Bart when he and Milhouse distract Marge with fighting frogs from Peru in the car while Homer is at work.
