Do Not Do This Cool Thing / Literature

After all that, antacids are the bear necessities.

• Happens in-universe to a Nazi spy in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. He starts out reporting to his superiors about a dangerous series of American comic books, but his later reports become more or less reviews of his favorite comic book series.
• An In-Universe example in Animorphs: Many of the first twenty books in the series open with the Animorphs engaging in comedic shenanigans using their powers while in the process breaking a wide range of laws, from breaking-and-entering to theft to assault and possible murder towards people they judge as deserving it. Skip ahead to the David trilogy and the team contracts a shared case of Moral Myopia, with Jake threatening new Animorph David for the relatively tame sin of breaking into a hotel room. Though David wouldn't have known about most of the stuff they got up to before he met them.
• In Epic, the Aesop is that you shouldn't get so involved in virtual worlds that you don't do things that need to be done in the real world. However, you can't deny that the game Epic would be freaking awesome if it were real. And the idea that doing well in video games = getting a good education and being rich is an appealing one to gamers out there. It also strays into a Broken Aesop as the reason everyone plays so much is because they have to, as Epic is the colony's source of livelihood.
• The Berenstain Bears series sometimes falls into this.
  • The Bad Dream, which was about how being an obsessive fanboy and having a Gotta Catch Them All mentality for all the toys will lead to nightmares... somehow. But damn if those action figures didn't look cool.
  • Get the Gimmies, where we all genuinely wanted those toys, games, and candies that Brother and Sister acted like hellions in public in order to get.
  • The Trouble With Junk Food. All the candy they learned was bad for you was so colorful!
  • Not to mention the disastrous sleepover that took place in one of the books, where the kids pretty much trashed the house and the police were contacted. Though the chaos of the party was only shown on one page, and there were consequences for the kids' actions... it still DID look pretty awesome.
• Coda (2013) avoids this with the distinction between the Corp's mass-produced tracks and Anthem's band's music.
• Different Seasons: The plot of Apt Pupil begins with an In-Universe example: Todd Bowden first acquires his morbid fascination with The Holocaust when he discovers World War II-era magazines condemning the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis... right next to advertisements peddling Nazi paraphernalia. This inspires him to discover his elderly German neighbor was once the commander of a Nazi concentration camp, and things go downhill fast.
• One of Disney's kiddie books featured Donald Duck eating a poorly balanced, junk-filled meal that the mouth waters just in childhood memory of it.
• The scenes of sinful revelry and luxury (like the island of Acrasia) in The Faerie Queene are, to many, the most appealing parts of the work. This is largely due to Values Dissonance.
  • According to C. S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love that was the way it was intended—in a complex manner. Spencer was influenced by Puritans who thought married sex was real cool but were down on both the Courtly Love and the Celibate Hero traditions. He was saying effectively that good people have good sex; when it's good sex that is.
• Joe Abercrombie's The First Law is built on this. The point is constantly made that a life of violence will make you end up broken, alone, and despised by all decent people... but the scenes of grizzled badasses chopping each other to pieces are just so cool. Abercrombie seems to be aware of it too, as he mentioned in the foreword to The Heroes that the novel is not so much about how War Is Hell as about why, seeing as how War Is Hell, stories of it still fascinate us.
• The Game (2005), which chronicles the author's experiences in the "Seduction Community", leads the reader to the conclusion that the teachings of the pick-up artists will serve only to become a dehumanized "social robot" and that the techniques are worthless for finding true love; however, after seeing how the author transformed from an "average frustrated chump" to a pick-up artist capable of seducing almost every woman he desired, it's no wonder why this book became the go-to source for men for becoming initiated on the "Seduction Community".
• Go Ask Alice is more or less written as a screed against the evils of drugs, and to a lesser extent, just about everything else teens did that the author disapproved of, like questioning their parents, foul language, casual sex, or bisexuality. This made it a very popular choice for "scared straight"-type storytelling. Like many a "scared straight" attempt, it ended up being many kids's first real exposure to these things, and made them curious, especially when they end up being by far the most interesting parts of it. It certainly doesn't help that the author tried to pass it off as a real account despite it being completely fictional, giving it an air of "well, if she lied about this, what else did she lie about?"
• The Help Me Be Good series by Joy Berry are juvenile books that examine a Compressed Vice in each title such as fighting, tattling, destroying possessions, and overeating. Each book would talk about the misbehavior, explain its aspects, how it hurts you and others, and strategies for overcoming it. While intended as education and self-help, some Moral Guardians have protested that the books glorify and promote the bad behavior by showing kids how to misbehave.
• If The Hunger Games is meant to be a condemnation of reality TV culture... well, all the action in which the in-universe audience revels is the same stuff that we're enjoying as readers. We are supposed at once to feel contemptuous of the audience for lapping up the romance presented to them between Katniss and Peeta but also care about the same romance as readers. While no one at this point would wish for death-based reality TV shows (probably), there are many Hunger Games fans who would love to see a non-lethal version of the Games brought to reality. Not to mention that the movies inspired a whole raft of merchandise, including make-up based on the Capitol's aesthetic.
• In an interview celebrating the launching of his then-most recent book, Imperial Bedrooms, Bret Easton Ellis recounted how many fans of his work would come up to him and say "You're the guy who wrote Less Than Zero, that's the book that made me want to live in L.A." Anyone who's read the book in question (or indeed anything by Ellis) will appreciate just how ridiculous this is.
  • One of his aims with Imperial Bedrooms was to respond to all the readers who perceived Clay as the hero in the first book, by placing far more emphasis on his near-sociopathic narcissism. YMMV on how much it worked, although Ellis certainly shows him doing some horrific things, but gives him one or two very small Pet the Dog moments.
• A weird borderline example in Interesting Times. Rincewind describing sticking fireworks up his nose is followed by a footnote saying Don't Try This at Home... which goes on to describe official municipal firework displays in a way that makes it clear they're very boring. Terry Pratchett is on record as saying that if stupidity kills, then it's better if it kills the stupid first^note In the Mappe Of Lancre. This could be a stealth joke on that.
• An in-universe example in Jabberwocky: The boy's father tells him to beware several dangerous monsters, and his immediate response to these warnings is to grab a weapon and go out to kill them. Downplayed, in that the father is very much proud of his son after his success.
• Lolita. The whole book is one big condemnation of pedophilia (even the pedophile himself, narrator Humbert, can't stand his actions), and yet it's a Trope Namer for a fetish for underage girls. This is because Humbert is Unintentionally Sympathetic and is probably the accidental Trope Codifier. Humbert comes off as a completely nice guy despite his despicable actions because throughout the whole book, he casually explains his actions to the reader, and while it may not be meant to justify them, it certainly can. It doesn't help that while Humbert's arguments really don't add up when you think about them or try to tie them all together, most readers just aren't smart enough to do that. This book has a huge Misaimed Fandom among pedophiles and child molesters who have undoubtedly used it, not only to justify their actions, but for tips on how to avoid getting caught (i.e., be sure not to write down your attraction for young girls and your plans for them in your diary, and if you do be sure to do a much better job of hiding it).
  • In the words of John Derbyshire:
  Now, plainly Humbert did a very wicked thing. There is no doubt that the author knows this — I have just quoted him calling Humbert a pervert. Humbert himself knows it, too, through the fog of his solipsism. He refers to himself as a "monster" or a "maniac," wearing "polluted rags," and so forth. "But never mind, never mind, I am only a brute, never mind, let us go on with my miserable story."
  To drive the point home Nabokov inserts oblique, but cumulatively impossible to ignore, references to the fact that the sexual relationship causes pain and perhaps actual physical injury to the object of Humbert's "love." And yet this cruel tormentor is redeemed a little in our eyes by the surpassing power of his creator's art, a thing any educated person in 1958 could understand. In an interview, Nabokov said that he thought Humbert should be given one day's vacation from hell every year, to stroll a green country lane in the sunlight. Such a judgment makes sense only from a grounding in some mature moral vision. It cannot be fitted at all into the infantile who-whom dogmas of our own time.
• John Milton's Paradise Lost has infamously run into this problem with its Misaimed Fandom. Satan is intended to be appealing, but Milton expects his readers will be mature enough to realize that underneath all his charisma, Satan is a vain, petty and incestuous bully who picks on people smaller than him because he lost the fight against someone bigger than him. Sadly, Milton expected too much of his readers. Many just drool over Satan and think he's The Hero.
  • Not helped by a strong case of Strawman Has a Point, where Satan's arguments are actually quite logically sound even if his motives aren't pure. Compounded by the fact that Satan is presented as fallen (i.e. human), meaning that his flawed motivations can easily be attributed to heroic flaws instead of overall weak character.
    • Basically, Milton's intended point is somewhat undermined if his readers know more about the classical references he's making and contemporary philosophy than he expects, as well as if they know less.
• In Phenomena, Alk kills a soldier (in self defence) in the 6th book, who taunted him and made him afraid, much like a bully including that he wants to kill Alk, while laughing at him. The fact that both Millian and Kheiko say it's natural and he would probably have to learn how to do it soon anyway making it seemingly natural for one to kill one's bullies, which of course is very tempting, but also very wrong to do. Made worse by that Alk had so far been a Vanilla Protagonist, and him doing this made him somewhat cooler...
• Robert Heinlein intended the message of Podkayne of Mars to be that parents should take better care of their children and not let them go gallivanting around the Solar System getting involved in espionage intrigues and having awesome adventures and ultimately being heroes by saving an entire planet from a villainous plot... because that would be wrong. Or something. To be fair, in the original plot she dies from those adventures. Heinlein was forced to change the ending by his editor because the book was intended for adults but made too good of a teen novel, and Heinlein himself seriously worried that changing the ending would undermine the Aesop. He was right.
• Ready Player One lavishly describes the OASIS: a virtual world that is not only the ultimate in entertainment, but a hyper-efficient means of communication, education, and even jobs… before condemning the entire concept as “a self-imposed prison for humanity. A pleasant place for the world to hide from its problems while human civilization slowly collapses, primarily due to neglect.” There is little consideration that making every intellectual resource ever created by the human race accessible to every human being alive just might be the only reason civilization still exists despite the sad state of the environment and the scarcity of physical resources.
  • Not only does the OASIS seem like an objectively useful piece of software, it also looks really cool. There's a reason that all the advertisements for the film dwell on the mess of pop culture characters, the car chases, the adventure. Sure, the creator of the OASIS was ultimately a deeply miserable dude who couldn't properly live in reality, but he was also fabulously well-to-do. Just about every point the book tries to make for any reason whatsoever is undermined by both its own text and the entire reason that anyone is reading the book.
• Anthony Horvath's book Richard Dawkins, Antony Flew and Mother Theresa Go To Heaven is supposed to make Dawkins look like an arrogant Jerkass, while Flew and Theresa are supposed to be viewed as good. However, the way it's written, Theresa comes across as a pathetic sycophant and Flew like a doddering simpleton, while Dawkins sounds downright courageous and noble as he stands in defiance of this frankly unsympathetic deity. It doesn't help when Heaven is depicted as a place where everyone spends the rest of eternity unable to do anything except praise God, and that's supposed to be desirable.
• Ringing Bell: The book and the film present the moral that revenge is totally not cool. The film in particular goes out of its way to hell and back to nail the message, but judging by the fact that Chirin's training montage song sounded motivational and his adult design having been considered to be horrifyingly awesome, it didn't exactly work.
• The Running Man: Shows what will happen if Reality TV shows go that one extra step and actually start hurting people.... but probably directly inspired the British Game Show Wanted and the Japanese Game Run For Money: Tousouchuu. Or the 2016 American series The Runner.
• K.J Parker's The Scavenger Trilogy and Parker's work generally. There's just so much detail and vivid fightin' action that the anti-violence message can be obscured at times.
• The Secret History: Many fans will tell you that the book made them want to have a Bacchanal and possibly murder someone because of how cool it sounded.
• Slaughterhouse-Five. In-universe. Discussed early on. Vonnegut's war buddy's wife is pissed that our narrator is writing 'another war book'.
  "You were just babies then. But you won't write it like that, will you? You'll write it like you were men, and you'll be played by men in the movie, and everyone will think it's wonderful and have more wars and send more babies off to die, like those babies [their children] upstairs."
  • It works out OK though. He promises her that it will be called Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade (which is indeed the full title of the book), and no one reading it gets any idea that war is good.
  "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that."
• Songmaster by Orson Scott Card ends up making a young boy and his male pedophile master seem sympathetic, and the novel was criticized heavily by conservatives for glorifying homosexuality. Anyone who knows Card's opinions on homosexuality will know that this was not his intent.
• Star Wars gives us the Darth Bane trilogy. Where there are (allegedly) attempts to make Bane look bad. Instead a lot of readers get caught up in how much cool seems to radiate off of everything he does.
  • All of the Star Wars baddies radiate this. The 501st Legion is the world's largest costuming fan club. The stories were originally entitled "The Adventures of Luke Skywalker" and changed to the "The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of Anakin Skywalker" when the prequels were released.
• In the kids' book Sweet Tooth, the main character is meant to be in the wrong for having a Sweet Tooth, yet the wedding cake he's seen trying to eat looks delicious.
• The Triflers by Mumkey Jones actually manages to avert this in regards to the school shooting of the book. The main shooter, for all his issues within, is portrayed as a colossal jackass with delusions of grandeur, and while one can relate to him to some extent, his goal is far from justified with a personality that’d drive anyone away from liking him. His ultimate shooting that he planned to get vengeance doesn’t even happen, and he’s pathetically killed by his own grenade, taking out a grand total of one kid that happened to be nearby.
• The first series of Warrior Cats covers the early life of a "kittypet" as he struggles to fit into his Clan, overcoming all of the racism and prejudice he faces because of his background as he grows into a hero. Of course, in order for this to work, the majority of the cast has to express some racist sentiments, meaning a lot of the more popular characters twist this lesson into "racism is good".
  • The same could be said for the battles, which, combined with their irrational hatred for a pacifist character, doesn't just inspire reactions of "War is cool and pacifism is for pussies", but the occasional "Any book that doesn't contain as many gratuitous fight scenes as possible instantly sucks".
    • The latter lesson can probably be connected to their love of The Darkest Hour, the most violent book in the series. It is indeed one of the best books in the series, but not because it's the most violent.
• Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War: While Victoria is explicitly intended as a warning against the evils of liberalism by showing what it (supposedly) leads to when put into practice, this message is somewhat undermined by the fact that at least some of the "liberal" villain factions can easily come across looking better, or else just cooler, than the heroes.
• In Worm, Taylor uses this to her advantage when talking to middle-schoolers about why being a supervillain sucks. She explains that while, if you're one of the few who make it big, you can make truly insane amounts of money, the chances of dying are also high.

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