Basic Trope: Values in a work are made to reflect the value of the setting even if they don't match with the author's or the audience's.
- Straight:
- The Tale of Alice and Bob is a work of Historical Fiction set in the 18th century. Alice, a mistreated black child-slave, is purchased from her abusive owner by Bob, who frees her and raises her. Eventually, they fall in love and get married... when Alice turns fifteen. Other characters have a low view of their marriage, not for this reason, but because of the racial differences, and Alice suffers all manner of abuse and racial slurs as a result, which are not censored out. At one point, Bob even kills one in a duel as he sees it no less a violation of honour than if Alice were white and free-born.
- The Adventures of Cathy and Denise in the 23rd Century, a kitschy Science Fiction novel set in a Free-Love Future, features the titular couple as a pair of bounty hunters engaged in the job of "scrapping" rogue sapient androids, and having numerous sexual liasons with various third parties of all possible genders along the way.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob marries Alice when she's only twelve.
- Oh, and did we mention Cathy and Denise are also sisters? And that they occasionally date aliens? So frackin' judgemental, you trog!
- Blue-and-Orange Morality (where the values are so alien they defy any normal conception of right or wrong)
- Downplayed: The Story of Eddie and Frank features the two main characters as a gay couple in The '80s, where they are able to live mostly normal lives and carry on their relationship legally, but are still subject to a good deal more homophobia than they might in the 21st centruy and have to be careful who they come out to.
- Justified:
- The circumstances of the story are perfectly in keeping with the values of the period, and to have characters showing them is true to life.
- Values change over time, and that naturally includes into the future.
- Differences in values make sense in the context of the setting- for example, in a time where infant mortality was high, and there existed neither reliable birth control nor paternity testing, marrying your daughters off at the onset of puberty and expecting them to have as many kids as possible, whilst taking a dim view of female promiscuity, might be understandably more acceptable than it is now. Slavery might seem to make sense in an era when times were harder and there were few options for dealing with war captives and those who had fallen into debt or hard times, other than to kill them or let them die, and assuming slaves had some limited rights and the possibility of manumission.
- Inverted: Eagleland: A Cultural Study of 21st-Century America is a Mockumentary style work satirizing present-day American cultural norms from the point of view of The Future.
- Subverted: ???
- Double Subverted: ???
- Parodied: ???
- Zig-Zagged: ???
- Averted: The characters all behave in accordance with contemporary values of the culture it is written in. Politically Correct History, Eternal Sexual Freedom, etc.
- Enforced:
- The executives believed that The Tales of Alice and Bob needed a certain degree of realism, as it is a Historical Fiction work, and that executives recognized that the audiences would find it difficult to accept the characters living in the 18th century to live by 21st century morals.
- The Adventures of Cathy and Denise was originally set in the Present Day and featured the titular pair as cold-blooded assassins with very human victims. This was rejected by mainstream publishers as they thought the characters were "unlikeable" and "unbelievable" (especially for women) so the story was retooled into a futuristic sci-fi where their victims were "just androids", whose rights were successfully sold to a genre publisher.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: Bob has a disagreement with his friend Samuel concerning Alice, reflecting what the audience is probably thinking:Bob: Sam, I have told you many times how I long for the day when slavery may be abolished and the Negro race might be free to live among the white man as brothers! Do you think I should consider them but brute savages in league with the devil? Why should I care for the judgement of others?Sam: For Christ's sake Bob! That's not what I meant at all... you speak of love, but what kind of love can it be between a master and servant? Who is raised to do as he pleases? What of free will?Bob: Have a care Samuel, for whom you blaspheme! Is that not the love of Christ for His Church? Is that not the love of Adam for Eve, who bore the curse of Eden? Is that not the love of a man for any woman?
- Conversed: Cathy and Denise are seen reading The Tale of Alice and Bob on their iPad 5467 and remark to each other on how ridiculous the mere concept of race is and how creepy they find a man marrying a 15-year-old who started out as his property. But hang on, that's what the author meant you to think when he wrote it 200 years ago!
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