Warp That Aesop / Literature

WELCOME, ladies, gentlemen, and tropers, to Darth Wiki's Favorite Game Show...

WARP... THAT... AESOP!!!!!

Booky Boogy! Ready.... GO!

Visit entries from: Main Page || Anime & Manga || Comic Books || Fan Works || Film - Animation || Film - Live Action || Literature || Live-Action TV || Music || Music Videos || Professional Wrestling || Tabletop Games || Theatre || Toys || Video Games || Webcomics || Web Original || Western Animation || Tropes

Subpages

• Dr. Seuss
• Fairy Tales And Nursery Rhymes
• Harry Potter
• How to Train Your Dragon
• Land of Oz
• Roald Dahl
• Twilight
• Warrior Cats

General

• Darker and Edgier and cynicism is REALISTIC!
  • Want to make someone morally ambiguous? Make them absolute douchebags. The only reason the readers will root for the hero is because the narrator says so.
  • You should never try to be a good person - because if you do? Then you'll get killed to show how bad the world truly is.
  • All people of the cloth are sheisters and scam artists who actively hate their religion.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains. If someone is rude? They're worse than the people who are actual monsters.
• You should always be friends with that nerdy kid - because you never know if they may be The Chosen One!
• You should dread living with your aunt, uncle, grandparents, or any member of your extended family because they will never truly love you.
• Adults Are Useless - especially if children are snooping about.
• Children are either innocent cherubs, mischievous little scamps, or the root of all evil. There are no in-betweens.
• Teenagers are either Surrounded by Idiots or monsters.
• Fantasy:
  • The middle ages were a great time.
  • Everyone will have lots of sex in the Middle Ages. Yet they will still somehow have only one to three children.
  • The middle ages had literacy rates of less than 20%. Despite this? Everyone still spoke in Purple Prose.
  • Farmers are the most respectable occupation in the world - not because of what they contribute to society, but because there's a pretty good chance one of them might be The Chosen One or become the hero.
  • If a prophecy says something will happen? Don't work to minimize the damage or even reduce it... prevent it outright and cause that person to get revenge and fulfill it.
  • Monarchy is great. If it's not working? It's because the wrong person is in charge. Never question "Why even have a dictator at all?" and just hope for the right person.
    • The Rightful Heir is often a member of the former ruler's bloodline. No exceptions.
    • When you see monarchs and nobility abusing their power? It's okay - there's nothing wrong with the very idea of letting anyone have that much power.
  • The concept of "war crimes" hasn't been invented yet, so feel free to commit them all you want.
  • It's far more important to keep up The Masquerade to the point where any "Magical" races should be oppressed by basically being forced to live away from everyone else (While the mundane people get the rest of the world) than actually try to seek diplomacy.
    • Anyone who wants to break The Masquerade is evil and should be stopped. Even if they have actual reasons.
    • Take a small group of people - such as wizards, witches magical creatures, et cetera and segregate them from the world. Incest or genetic drift won't ever happen. It's not worth breaking The Masquerade for the better of people.
    • Ordinary people with no magic power or vampires werebeast genes will just oppress the "Magicals". So it's better to stay hidden.
  • You'll always end up being sent to a magical fantastical world where your dreams will come true. And you will be seen as an idiot for wanting to go back to the world you know.
  • Rulers don't need practice or education to learn how to rule or anything like that. Sometimes? They can even just be some random kid who got Trapped in Another World.
  • Who gives a shit if you have a life? Who, for that matter, gives a shit if you fall in love, get a job, change the world? So long as the MAGIC CHOSEN ONE(s) survives and is kept happy, you're basically cannon fodder. If you've ever been in proximity of the MAGIC CHOSEN ONE(s), you're cannon fodder with makeup and a voice.
  • Additional: Being the MAGIC CHOSEN ONE also gives you carte blanche to be a whiny jackass in many cases. Don't worry; being the MAGIC CHOSEN ONE means everyone has to put up with you.
  • If you're a mentor, teacher or friend to the MAGIC CHOSEN ONE. Congrats! You are officially above the law and don't have any obligation to tell the MAGIC CHOSEN ONE or anyone else the truth. As long as you can thinly disguise your actions as being for the greater good then life will bend over backwards to justify your actions. If the MAGIC CHOSEN ONE whines about this tell him he's stupid until he gets back in line.
  • Cheer up orphans! Your family didn't abandon you because of abuse, neglect, tragic accidents, or socioeconomic reasons, it's because you're the MAGIC CHOSEN ONE, and your family just left you behind because they wanted you to rise to greatness! You should hold out for the mysterious bearded guy who will come any day now and whisk you off to train to be the MAGIC CHOSEN ONE, because he's trying to find you.
  • Dark Fantasy: "Morally Ambiguous" means "Complete Monster".
  • All Myths Are True... except for ones with millions of followers in the real world like Hinduism, Judeo-Christian, Islam, Buddhism, and potentially even Shintoism. Better safe than sorry.
    • Unless it's the author's religion!
  • It's completely okay to Flanderize the Greek gods. Nobody worships them anymore.
    • Hades is an alright guy - even though the Everyone Hates Hades trope actually does have some basis in ancient Greek Culture but it was more out of fear of the inevitability of death. But nah - he's either despised, or he's completely alright.
• Science Fiction':
  • Science and Technology SUCK and will inevitably be used to oppress and control people.
  • And if it isn't used to control and oppress? We'll create some monster or something that will cause the downfall of humanity.
  • Humans Are Bastards.
  • Feudal Futures will inevitably appear after we nuke ourselves.
  • Ecosystems are yours to exploit.
  • Ludd Was Right.
  • Radiation can be used to create all sorts of cool mutations instead of the observed mutations it actually causes.
  • Nuclear power is bad.
  • If people who augment themselves with cybernetics exist? They should immediately be treated as second-class citizens because they are not actual people. Even though they can run faster, live longer, jump higher, and do things better than us.
• Military Science Fiction:
  • Might Makes Right.
  • Non soldiers just get in the way of the real "Fighting Men" and you should never listen to them. They don't know what they're doing.
  • Science and Technology are actually really really cool... but only if it can be made into a weapon or a way to cause devastation.
  • Who cares about War Crimes? You're just following orders (And that's your job) after all. Besides, we're the right people so the ends justify the means.
• Dystopia:
  • The people behind the Despair Event Horizon are right. There is no reason to have any hope for this world. Everything in the world going wrong or badly right now will only go on to go wrong and worse forever.
• Romance:
  • Stalking? Kidnapping? Blackmail? Extortion? All other sorts of creepy and even criminal activities? Completely fine - as long as you have a nice body.
  • It's alright to want to bang people who are teenagers - as long as you wait until they themselves are eighteen and above.
    • Lolicon and Shotacon are bad. But they turn 15? Suddenly it's okay for people to go after them.
  • It's alright to seduce people who are married. They're unhappy with their relationship anyway.
    • If you are homosexual? Go for married people especially if they're in a het relationship. Het Is Ew after all.
    • Did you just seduce someone who is in a relationship, and their partner is angry at them? That person is a controlling asshole and this is a sign that person should leave them.
  • It's not okay to be fat or have any facial hair. Unless you're gay - then that's all people want!
  • As long as you and your loved one are happy, who cares what else happens to the world? They can go fuck themselves.
  • A person who wants to break all sorts of taboos for you will in fact respect your own boundaries despite them showing that they 100% will not.
  • Incest is completely fine and not taboo for a reason.
• Mystery:
  • Every solve it yourself mystery ever: If you don't like the way someone phrased an answer? They're probably lying.
  • Amateurs will always find what people who went to school and took actual forensics classes and have experience cannot!
    • Especially if those amateurs are people like old ladies, stay-at-home mothers, or even children!
  • Who cares if you broke into peoples' houses? That evidence will surely not be thrown out in court.
  • Private investigators will investigate murder.
  • Everywhere is the murder capital of the world. Yes, even when it's a suburban area or a small town in someplace that has less than a million people.
  • Anyone with any kind of fetish is just one step away from murder. No exceptions.
  • White Collar Crime doesn't exist, unless there's somehow a murder related to it.
  • Forensics are either magic or absolutely useless.
• Literary Fiction:
  • True Art is taking an autobiographical story, changing the names of everyone involved, and marketing it as fiction. Anything else is low brow, formulaic kids’ stuff.
  • Imagination completely ruins a story. True fiction is as realistic as possible.
  • Genre fiction can become literary fiction once your English teacher likes it.
• Almost every Christian book ever:
  • Christians are oppressed in modern day America - when they are some of the most overrepresented groups in government, wealth, land ownership, and social privilege.
  • Religion makes authors very bad.
  • You’re either a good Christian, or an evil atheist on the side of Satan. No other religions exist.
    • You also can't be a good person if you're not a Christian.
  • You cannot be a Communist and a Christian. Despite Jesus having many communistic leanings.
• Any Brave Books:
  • Being conservative makes you a really really bad author!
  • Only birds can sing!
  • Furries are bad... but when WE use furries in our books? It's okay.
  • Being transgender is bad... though it's okay if you're a female peacock or a colourful bird in species where the females are usually grey looking.
    • Conservatives are indeed the experts in biology... unless it comes to animals.

# and A-D

• 1632:
  • Make sure you stock up on firearms and keep a local copy of Wikipedia just in case you get transported into the Seventeenth Century.
  • The United Mine Workers of America are tougher then any Prince in Europe.

• Nineteen Eighty-Four:
  • Humans are naturally inclined to kick any number of dogs for any cause they believe is right; therefore, fear, hate and cruelty are the only rational ways to run society. Also, you can make anybody believe anything provided you torture them enough.
  • Life sucks. Get used to it or thought police will find you.
  • The state is theoretically capable of producing a utopia where everybody benefits, and has had this capability throughout all of history. The reason that no such utopia has ever existed is only because politicians are all utterly evil and delight in causing cruelty and suffering for its own sake.
  • When tyranny made itself a home once, it has no chance of ever disappearing from there again. So don't even try to fight it - the authorities will get you anyway, since everything always works out for a dictatorship.

• A Bad Case of Stripes:
  • If you just Be Yourself, you're still only human. Let other people define you, and there's no limit to what you can become.
  • Don't Be Yourself, or you'll be throwing away the one thing you can potentially exploit to become a powerful shapeshifter.

• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian:
  • Your entire community is bullying you and harassing you for a really stupid reason? DEAL WITH IT!
    • And don't even bother trying to stand up for yourself, they'll probably stop after your grandma dies anyway.
  • It's perfectly normal and rational for an entire reservation of people to shun and belittle a 14-year-old disabled boy just because he goes to a different school than the rest of his peers.
  • The racist bully at your school will instantly respect you if you punch him in the face.

• The Abyss:
  • When you're gay, don't be Camp Gay.

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:
  • If you use your imagination too much, you'll just end up offending all the figments of your imagination. Better stick with the real world even if it's not as interesting.
  • Young children who cry a lot deserve to be drowned.
  • Women in power are psychopaths.
  • Bottles of poison are always clearly marked as such, so drinking the contents of every random bottle you find won't do you any harm at all.
  • Abusing infants is justifiable if they were going to transform into a pig anyway.
  • An adult man’s inappropriate relationship with a young underage girl is a wonderful basis for a timeless classic fairytale.

• Alice, Girl from the Future:
  • If you are a girl in her preteens/early teens, never call the authorities or even tell the adults at all when you find out a crime is being committed. Run to investigate it yourself, and drag several other children along for good measure if possible. You will solve everything and be praised to the skies.
  • Sending a girl in her preteens/early teens on high-risk missions is perfectly acceptable and, indeed, the best way to accomplish said missions. If her parents protest, they're just being ridiculous.
  • Border and customs control is for losers.
  • If you are wary of the idea of Free-Range Children, you are terribly narrow-minded.
  • A prehistoric humanoid should be treated as a person only when you need him to do some work.
  • A child trusting an eccentric stranger while even the latter's neighbor says he shouldn't be trusted is absolutely safe and will lead to an exciting adventure.
  • Someone attempted to kidnap a child from the hospital where you work? Just forget it, it was probably a hallucination.
  • Guys who tried to kill, kidnap and/or rob you multiple times in the past are being nice to you for once? Treat them like your good old friends. Guys who also tried to kill you but whom you only met a few days ago? They are Beyond Redemption. On a related note, a weak-willed Dirty Coward is also Beyond Redemption: though it's implied he is murdered, don't spare him a single thought.
  • If one likes to play the drum, one is definitely not Beyond Redemption.
  • If you are going to rescue your husband from some mysterious, faraway hostile place which is cut off from all communications, take two twelve-year-olds with you because they want to go there so much.

• All Quiet on the Western Front:
  • Crossing the Despair Event Horizon just makes you tougher.
  • War is the best place to make friends for life.

• Animal Farm: Communists aren't people — but they can become people, if they betray their comrades and their principles and become everything they hate. Capitalist Humans Are Bastards, though, so this transformation won't actually be a good thing. In the end, everyone sucks!
  • Overthrowing your tyrannical leader will only result in an even worse leader taking over and making your lives a thousand times worse. So don't even think about it.
  • All pigs are evil and/or communists.

• The Animals of Farthing Wood:
  • The life of every animal is important, and so predators should never even consider eating another animal- except fish and invertebrates, they don't even count as alive, right?
  • Any bird which is not a bird of prey benefits from humans being around because humans occasionally put out food for garden birds. Never mind the real-life small bird species which are in decline right now because of the impact of humans.
  • Pool water is perfectly healthy for animals to drink, as is alcohol.

• The Animators: Dear straight people; Never befriend a homosexual. They'll pull a series of stupid stunts to cope with the fact that they're secretly in love with you.

• Animorphs:
  • Trials over war criminals (read: chiefs in command of the defeated side) are nothing but mockery. And everyone is a war criminal
  • If you were the one responsible for that and then ran away for years, all you have to do to be forgiven is abandon your new family and do something awesome and all will be forgiven.
  • You should always hand over your only tactical advantage to the enemy, because it will make them willing to surrender and negotiate for peace.
  • Regardless of species, teenagers make the best soldiers.

• The Works of Piers Anthony (all of them):
  • A man's word is his bond. Always. Once given, it is binding and inviolate. It doesn't matter if the Big Bad forced your promise at literal gunpoint, or blatantly lied to you about the circumstance of said promise. Keep your word at all times, even if the promise was given on your behalf before you were born by someone with neither legal nor moral right to do so in your society. Or suffer ill-defined, barely alluded-to consequences!
  • A woman is only as good as the man she's banging.
  • The natural state of man is Knuckle-dragging Rape-Brained Lout and men should be praised for not succumbing to the natural urge to be a Mr Hyde-like rape monster.
  • Marriage is the only way to find happiness. Anyone who thinks they can find fulfillment in research on the nature of the world, doing important work for the benefit of pretty much everyone else, or living a pleasurable life of bachelorehood just needs to find the right person to find their significant other and then they can forget the whole thing and settle down to a life of wedded bliss.
  • It's perfectly okay for women to try and sexually molest men. Any man who tries to defend his personal space is a jerk.
  • There's nothing wrong with adult men banging barely pubescent girls.

• Arabian Nights: Insane psychotic tyrants always find the best women to marry.

• Artemis Fowl:
  • Don't be afraid if you cheat an ancient race out of a metric ton of gold, everything will turn out alright in the end
  • It's okay to cut off limbs from people. They can be reattached, even if you don't do it, or the one who does it doesn't want to.
  • Your bodyguard can do anything. AT ALL
  • Magic's only good for making people do what you want and healing. Unless it's not yours.
  • Using a Smart Bomb which kills literally everything in its area of effect is so much more honourable than using conventional bombs, because those also destroy the surrounding area. I mean, think of the poor bricks!
  • Toilets are disgusting. Shitting outside is natural and therefore better, sanitation be damned.
  • Acting like a criminally inclined snot-nosed brat is cool, actually!
  • Humans are bad because they damage the environment. Shame them for it - don't offer any alternatives.
• The Asian Saga: For white men living/working in Asia, Mighty Whitey and Mellow Yellow is their prerogative.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • This is a cautionary tale about the evils of overthrowing monarchy. Everything bad happens once the exalted dynasty is overthrown. The wildlings in the north are the most hostile to monarchy, and look how they turned out: ice zombies bent on destroying the realm. While in the east, a woman overthrows nobility and thereby causes cities to starve and fall victim to a plague. It is up to a chosen band of nobles to set things right again. Beware, commoner.
  • Women in the position of power are capable of any number of cruel and/or foolish things in the name of protecting their children. However, none of those things is actually going to prevent said children from dying in a cruel way.
  • Treating your deformed dwarf of a son like something you found on your shoe will turn him into a good person. Probably.
  • If you have the temerity to be born attractive and/or to do well in life, you will invariably a disgustingly self-centered and evil individual.
  • Even if all you own is a patch of rocky ground with a shabby tower to live in, you can still hit it big and make it to the king's court. So long as you are a ruthless murderer and two-faced liar.
  • Don't genuinely fall in love, unless you want to become the principal character in an epic tragedy. We acknowledge you have no control over this, but if you do end up falling in love, for god's sake don't act on it. (Mentioning your love counts as acting on it.)
  • Getting tortured, maimed, and/or horrifically traumatized will help make you a better person.
  • If you are a good person, you will die horribly.
  • If you are a bad person, you will die even worse.
  • If you are a morally grey person, you're still likely to be traumatized so badly you'll wish you were dead.
  • So, try not to be a good, bad, or morally grey person.
  • If you're the sort of sentimental fool who doesn't want to murder children because of the crimes of their parents, your weakness is probably going to invite a civil war in which far more children will be killed. So do the merciful thing and just behead those brats already.
  • Redheaded people have atrociously bad luck.
  • It's okay to behead people, as long as you do it yourself rather than making someone else do it for you.
  • If you're polite to people? You'll be seen as "The good guy" even when you start a war that gets thousands of your own people killed - while the people who did the same are "The bad guy" because they weren't polite.

• Atlas Shrugged:
  • If you're born to great wealth destroying your family business and behaving like a worthless playboy makes you a hero. Bonus points for pulling pranks that cause immense damage to innocent people and wipe out millions of dollars of railroad stock.
  • You can make more in industry by sucking up to government that you can by working honestly on the free market. And if you get enough regulations imposed on your honest competitors they'll all run away to a Hidden Elf Village leaving the market entirely to you.

• Auntie Mame: Life is a banquet—-if you've been lucky enough to inherit a fortune that allows you travel to exotic places and spend a mint on your own kooky hobbies. If you're poor though, you're pretty much out of luck unless you can land yourself a rich man.

• The Awakening: If you feel unhappy in your relationship, you shouldn't tell your husband. You should Wangst about it, have an affair, Wangst about it, have an affair with another guy, Wangst about how the first guy wants to run away with you, then kill yourself. Never mind that your children and husband are going to suffer for your actions, as long as you can go swimming, it's all good.

• Battle Royale: If a bunch of delinquents are ruining your schools, send them to a remote island where they have to kill each other in order to survive; that oughta teach 'em. Not that they'll live long enough to put what they learnt into action.

• Beauty: A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast:
  • Homely girls and hideous men will both become conventionally beautiful once they find true love.
  • Sweet, pretty Girly Girls are all interchangeable and bland. Only plain, scrappy, tomboyish Bookworms are unique and interesting.
  • The ideal romantic relationship is between a teenage girl and a man old enough to be her father, or older. (This applies to Robin McKinley's works as a whole.)

• The Belgariad:
  • Compassion and kindness are for pussies. Don't try to help the Chosen One through his many crises involving family and the nature of his powers, just tell him not to be such a wimp and keep throwing him at new obstacles, that'll make him tough.
  • Oh, and lest we forget, forcing him into an arranged marriage with a spoilt, uptight bitch is perfectly all right! He'll just have to live with it.
  • Real friends will love you no matter how much you snark and bicker at them. If someone betrays you, it was probably just Because Destiny Says So.
  • Marital rape is perfectly A-OK! Not only that, but if the victim complains, she's the bad person!

• Belisarius Series:
  • The best way to advance civilization is to kill hundreds of thousands of helpless peasants.
  • Almost all your enemies are stupid and incompetent. Those that aren't will change sides and join you.

• Beowulf:
  • The only way you can be a cool manly man is to kill everything that gets in your way. If you don't do that you're a pathetic coward and deserved to be shamed for the rest of your life.

• Bored of the Rings: If you want to get rid of a sore head, taking a Bromo won't help. Serutan is also no good. Goddamit!
  • If you are king, foul methods work just as well as fair, and assassination and subterfuge are just as good means of power than courage and leadership.
  • If you are a lowly peasant, never get involved in the meddlings of the great and the powerful but mind your own business
  • If you are an incompetent wizard, bluff your way to success - everyone will interpret it as powerful magic anyway

• Brave New World:
  • Judging people by their appearance and/or history is bad. That is unless you're a woman, a Native-American, or a from a lower class system. Then it's perfectly fine.

• Bridge to Terabithia:
  • Be a coward. It'll save your life!
  • ALWAYS remember to invite your friends to art museums. Or they'll drown.

• Brokeback Mountain: You shouldn't attempt to establish any meaningful commitment with your lover. If they ever ask about living with you, you should avoid the issue by having sex with them. Also, rape is love and adultery is okay if you're queer.

• Captain of My Soul (Whitney G. Williams):
  • Sorority members, go ahead and exploit prospective members’ desires to join a sorority by hazing, bullying, and finessing them out of their money. Only because you won’t receive any comeuppance for your actions.
  • Rejects of NPHC greek organizations are all just bitter and envious. It's not like some of the members are insufferable and stuck up.

• Captain Underpants:
  • Constantly bullying, berating, emotionally and physically abusing elementary school children is a good way to keep them from misbehaving! Never think of punishing said children instead, because being a Sadist Teacher and/or staff member is A-OK!
  • There's nothing weird about a grown man running around in his underwear. Nobody will be grossed out at all!
  • Toys advertised at the back of comic books really work.

• Carrie:
  • Sometimes, Violence Really Is the Answer.
  • Being kind to a social outcast will destroy your entire town.
  • You should be kind to the social outcast because they might be a psychic.

• Catch-22: Being a Grade A coward who will let friends in the same situation die around him is the only good way to conduct yourself in war. After all, it doesn't have anything to do with you, who cares about stopping Fascism and fighting for human rights?

• Charlotte's Web:
  • People will believe anything a sign says.
  • Alternatively, people will believe anything they see in print.

• Chasing the Moon:
  • Life can only get more and more confusing and intimidating and dangerous and there is nothing you can do about it.
  • The world is doomed and everyone thinks you're crazy for wanting it not to end.

• The Chemical Garden:
  • When a virus threatens to destroy humanity, don't dissect corpses of its victims for research on a possible cure. 'Never.' That may have been common practice in medical research for centuries, but it's evil.

• Children of the Corn:
  • Children are crazy cultists plotting to murder you one day. Solution? Don't have them.
  • If you ignore the previous warning and have kids anyway or already have them, best to kill them before they kill you. Or move to the city.
  • Don't grow corn. Eldritch Abominations that will compel your kids to kill you will hide in it.

• The works of Agatha Christie:
  • Love at First Sight, unless its object turns out to be a murderer, will always lead to Happily Ever After. Fourth-Date Marriage is the way to do romantic relationships.
  • If you have committed any crime less serious than murder and want to be Let Off by the Detective, fall deeply in love. Even attempted murder can be Easily Forgiven in such a case.
  • If an amateur detective tells you what they say is the solution to the crime, believe them. Either they are absolutely right, or they are letting the criminal get away because the latter is sympathetic.

• The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • Only the pure, mindlessly faithful will survive.
  • Meta: The best way to evangelize your religion is to base a High Fantasy series on it. This will definitely make your religion seem more realistic.
  • Adults don’t deserve to go to a fantasy world. Once you hit puberty you’re too old for escapism.
  • The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: Humans cause global warming.
    • Global warming is good, because winter and everything associated with it (except for Christmas) is symbolic of evil.
    • Aslan died for your sins.
  • The Last Battle: organized religion is twisting true and honest faith with it's lies, use false, perverted image of loving and real god to justify slavery and murder, the pope is a monkey, the only god you can find in a church is an Eldritch Abomination that will eat you or make you revert backwards in evolution and atheists are either evil manipulators behind organized religion who use it to control mindless crowds or it's victims.
  • Battles are ugly when women fight. However, if a woman turns away from battles and towards girly things, like looking pretty, she deserves total condemnation.
  • Being drafted as child soldiers for a borderline abusive furry trickster figure from another world who certainly could readily handle things himself but just can't be bothered to is totally the greatest thing since sliced bread, and even if you die you'll just end up in paradise together unlike those nasty doubters and unbelievers who are just in willful denial anyway.
    • However, paradise isn't all it's cracked up to be either, as nobody does anything there except run and eat fruit.
  • If you overhear somebody badmouthing you it's your fault for eavesdropping.
  • Atheists aren’t skeptical due to a lack of evidence. Instead, they hallucinate that the indisputable evidence of God’s existence isn’t real.

• The Chronicles of Prydain:
  • Wanting to fight and die in a war for a good cause makes you a bloody young fool.
  • Don't try to help a girl in any way, or you're sexist.
  • If you're a strong girl who completely and repeatedly belittles a boy who's smitten with you, he'll still fall for you in the end.

• Circle Of Magic: "The children of monsters become monsters too."

• A Clockwork Orange:
  • Rehabilitating psychopathic criminals doesn't work, and incarceration is inhumane, so you might as well let them murder and rape and hope they get bored eventually.
  • All teenagers are murderous psychopaths. That's OK, though, because they'll grow out of it.
  • The free will of murderers and rapists is more important than the lives of innocents. Don't try to prevent criminals from ruining people's lives, that would remove their free will and that's bad!
  • The best books are the ones where half the words are made up.

• Codex Alera: All members of a democratic assembly are automatically delusional, Smug Snake Obstructive Bureaucrats.
  • If you have been persecuted all your life for being on the wrong end of a meritocracy, what you should do when you get the chance is reverse that meritocracy to favour you. As long as you're on top, who cares about equality, or democracy, or sparing innocent people the discrimination you yourself have endured?
  • Your intelligence level and nothing else, defines your importance to society. You can't compensate for stupidity using, say, compassion, or strength, or magical ability, or creativity. Intellect is the only thing that matters and the only trait that will ever give your life value.
  • Raw talent always wins out over skill. There's no point in spending years training to hone your magic, because someone who's naturally gifted in the element opposed to yours will always defeat you.

• The Color Purple: Lesbian sex grants confidence and self-esteem.

• Confessions of a Video Vixen: It's completely okay and reasonable for you to sleep your way to the top in the entertainment industry. Your just doing what it takes to advance your life/career/business whatever. If people disagree they're either naive, unrealistic, or jealous of the success that you got from it. Things like cars, jewelry, money and job opportunities (that and the fact you got to sleep with tons of famous, powerful, celebs). In fact sleeping around is just another form of "networking" . (Interestingly enough this is actually what some people got from the book.)
  • Since your parents were abusive towards you growing up, it's okay for you to treat your kid the same way.
  • Women are only valued for their sexuality.

• Constance Verity
  • General: Being Good Sucks, but what else is there?
  • The Last Adventure of Constance Verity: You have to be a self-sacrificing hero fixing everyone's problems, or you're the asshole.
  • Constance Verity Saves the World: Don't be nice to the lonely weird kid or else you'll have to deal with the pressure of being the only good thing in his life.
  • Constance Verity Destroys the Universe: It's your own fault if people want to kill you.

• Coraline: You should be perfectly happy with whatever parents you have, even if they never have time for you, feed you with something barely eatable and then expect you not to disturb them when they are at home. At least they don't lock you inside the mirror, try to sew buttons onto your eyes and feed off your life energy. Parental Neglect is not really a problem!

• Corpus Delicti:
  • Don't take care of your health.
  • A country with a working healthcare system is something utterly screwed-up.
  • Stop medicine from advancing any further right now.
  • Suicide is the go-to solution for any problem.

• The Crucible:
  • If you speak up, you don't deserve to live.
  • Also, if you're caught doing something against the law, you should confess immediately, but while doing so, you should also accuse several innocent bystanders of doing the same thing (bonus points if they're upstanding citizens that you happen not to like). Not only will the authorities forgive you immediately, but they'll let you testify against the people you accused. And anyone who doesn't follow your lead may be publicly ostracized and executed.

• Cthulhu Mythos: Different=Bad. Anything that you don't understand or is not like you is by definition horrifying, and all non-whites are either simple lower-class brutes or members of dangerous cults.
  • Books are dangerous and evil and reading them may result in madness, your death, and/or bringing about The End of the World as We Know It.
  • Never examine your family tree too closely—you don't want to know.
  • The only defense against an incomprehensible horror from outside time and space is to summon up another incomprehensible horror from outside time and space.
  • If you're dreaming weird things it will become important later.
  • If it turns out that you have a weird ancestor you should murder your entire family and then commit suicide.
  • If you come from a family with a dark past, you are doomed to be just like them.
  • Religious people are evil, evil, evil!
  • The Call of Cthulhu: never be afraid to underestimate a incomprehensibly powerful monster since it can easily be defeated by your trusty motorboat.
  • The Shadow Over Innsmouth: Listen to the crazy drunk man. He knows what he's talking about.
    • If you discover a town full of people that are "undesirable" / different from you then you should blow it up.
    • Liking glass beads makes you as bad as a cannibal.
    • Racism is understandable because foreigners are weird.
    • If you go to the government with a crazy story they'll automatically believe you and even wage war on your behalf.
    • Ugly people are evil, no exceptions. Same thing applies to loners.
    • Meta: Having Welsh ancestry is a terrible thing.
  • The Outsider (1926): If you're ugly or different, no one will ever accept you. You might as well just accept that everyone will fear you and you'll always be alone.
  • The Thing on the Doorstep: Never stick your dick in crazy.

• Damnation 101:
  • Life sucks? That's the whole point.
  • Calvinism was right. Everyone is going to Hell to be tortured forever, there is no point to it and there is nothing you or anyone can do about it.

• Damned: All humanitarianism is just narcissism.
• Doomed: Interracial marriage, same-sex marriage, women's rights, social welfare programs and Sesame Street are pure evil. Encouraging The End of the World as We Know It is good.

• Daniel X: Polluting is wrong...unless you're dumping every electronic device in a small town in a lake in order to wipe out the evil, potentially parasitic offspring of a sadistic alien. Hey guys, I think I just found a way to perform a Logic Bomb on Captain Planet!

• The Dead Zone: Don't vote for independent political candidates. They might end up triggering a nuclear conflict For the Evulz.

• Death in Venice: That weird middle-aged man who watches and follows your incredibly attractive underage son around? Completely harmless. In fact, he’s actually concerned for your family’s well-being! Remember, he warned you about that encroaching cholera epidemic? There’s no need to alert the authorities!

• Deenie: "I wanted you to have it better than I did" is a perfectly valid reason to push one daughter into being a supermodel against her will and punish another for liking a boy who isn't her intellectual equal.

• Demons:
  • Revolutions always create worse regimes than the original tyranny. There are no exceptions.
  • The Tsar deserves to rule, because all his opponents are mass murderers.

• The Devil and Daniel Webster: It's perfectly okay to cheat your way out of your end of a contract after the other guy's already upheld his, since the other guy is clearly evil.

• Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
  • Touching a rotten slice of cheese is the worst thing you can do.
  • Rock and roll will ruin your brain.
  • If you get up past your bedtime, you'll run into Shel Silverstein in the hallway.
  • If your belly button somehow gets untied, your butt will fall off.
  • All ice cream trucks are driven by clowns who spank children caught outdoors.
  • Don't get sick on school picture day or else your second-grade picture will get into the yearbook instead.
  • It’s perfectly reasonable for a 12-year-old to write a 200 page diary with at least one illustration per page over the course of a week.

• The Disaster Artist:
  • Mark Damon, Angelika Jolie and Johnny Dapp are among Hollywood's brightest stars.
  • Spending six million dollars just to make out with a girl is pretty pathetic.
  • No one in L.A. will give you water!
  • Domestic violence is a laughing matter.
  • God doesn't help Communists.
  • Deers are easy to confuse with monsters.
  • Tommy Wiseau built a steel building with his two hands.
  • Greg is here. Greg is here.
  • Continuity is in your forehead.
  • Somebody's chicken.
  • "You think it's good, do you?" isn't a sentence a native English speaker would even say.
  • Owning a Mercedes-Benz is apparently all the evidence needed that you've done alright with your life.

• Discworld:
  • Equal Rites: You can become the trailblazing first of your gender in a prestigious work if you then sneak off to your office and never show sign of your existence to your colleagues.
  • Hogfather: If you don't believe in Santa Claus, you're not human.
    • No, that's the original "Yes, Virginia" monologue. Seriously.
  • Night Watch: Protesting a corrupt, repressive government will just make things worse.
    • Well technically, that was the Aesop of Les Misérables, which it's clearly based upon...
    • Truth in television: Military revolutions against a corrupt dictator often lead to a new government that's just as bad.
  • Going Postal:
    • If you want a job done well, you should give it to a wanted criminal.
    • All-Natural Snake Oil really does have healing powers.
    • Impersonating the dead is okay if it gets your business rival shut down.
    • If you want people to implicitly trust you, you should dress like a pirate.
    • "Do what I want or die" is still technically a choice.
    • A good way to prevent depression in prisoners is to encourage them to escape.
    • If you always promise more than you can logically achieve, the world will bend over backwards to let you actually pull it off.
• Dogs of the Drowned City:
  • If your followers want to spread propaganda declaring you the infallible, godlike savior of mankind, let them!
  • If you defend your pack against a human (even bark at a helpful human), you're a great big bully and you need to change your rightfully wary attitude!

• Don Quixote:
  • If you're nuts, you'll be the only person in the entire universe anyone remembers.
  • Book burning is often the right course of action.

• The Draka:
  • Slavery works really well, and we should bring it back.
  • Africa has the potential to lead the world culturally, technologically, and militarily - just as long as they're controlled by white people.
  • Even in an Alternate Universe, white South Africans will always, always be racists.

• Dune:
  • A drug addict should rule the universe as long as he proves it by killing lots of people, forcing a princess to marry him, and then ignoring her while having sex with a desert barbarian who wears smelly clothes. His mother will be very proud of him.
  • Teenagers who threaten to destroy civilization are really cool.
  • Never trust your doctor?
  • People who live in countries with lots of water like reading about how wussy they are.
  • Hallucinogenic drugs are just awesome.
  • A civilization that's dependent on computers is abhorrent and weak. It should instead depend on drug addicts. And a drug that can only be manufactured on a single planet in the whole universe.
  • Leading a galactic drug cartel is just plain awesome.
  • Holy war is totally badass.
  • Do you want mathematical abilities like a supercomputer? Try smoking!

• The Dresden Files:
  • Everything in the Fantasy Kitchen Sink is out to get you. Personally. It's probably for the best that you don't tell anyone about the dangers, they won't believe you anyway.
  • If they stole your girlfriend, you should attack the royalty of another nation. If it's in the name of love, it's alright.
  • If someone threatens your family, you are perfectly justified in DESTROYING THEIR ENTIRE SPECIES.
  • You can make large-scale use of The Dark Side, and no one will care as long as it's cool enough.
  • Also, if a woman shows attraction for you, run. There's at least a 95% chance she's mind controlled and/or wants your soul.
  • If you're male, being willing to do anything to save your daughter from a horrific, undeserved death is a bad thing. (If you're a woman, it's perfectly fine and will be considered admirable.)
    • Similarly, if a budding mage brainwashes people and thus causes the death of multiple innocents, you should risk your life to protect her from those trying to execute her for breaking the law. It's The Moral Thing to do, and anyone who disagrees with you is Lawful Stupid.
  • If a friend of yours attempts suicide and continually shows signs of depression, don't tell anyone else or suggest that he see a therapist. He can probably take care of it on his own.
  • People who let emotional trauma influence their decisions in any way are reckless and selfish for doing so. It is your moral duty to talk down to them until they feel guilty.
  • Christians are either selfless paragons of morality or tyrannical Knight Templars. There is no middle ground.
  • If you manifest strange, unearthly powers that you don't understand, the first person you should tell is the mysterious, bloodstained warrior who shows up occasionally at your house.
  • Even if a group of self-righteous extremists have made your life hell for decades on end, you are still morally obligated to rescue them from trouble and uphold their laws with that life.
  • Clearly, a person who threatens to rape you can be trusted with your life and Undying Loyalty. It's just common sense.

E-H

• Earth's Children: Sexual compatibility equals true love.
  • Also, feel free to date a Nice Guy for several months, agree to marry him, and then ditch him at the altar. Doing so is an act of compassion. He'll understand. In fact, he'll feel sad that he doesn't get to marry such an awesome woman as you- not angry or betrayed or used at all.
  • Don't worry if he's self-centered, bigoted, prone to violence, and insanely jealous. The only thing that really matters about a man is the size of his schlong.

• The Elenium:
  • Sure, trick the guy who raised you into marrying you- why not? It's not like he's got a real reason to object- if he does, just act depressed until he gives in.
  • The Tamuli: Benevolent dictatorship, in the form of absolute monarchy, is the only good form of government. You are justified in using tactics up to and including continent-wide mass assassinations in order to dismantle the bureaucracy and return total power to the monarch.
  • It's totally ok to keep an entire race in slavery. Even they will insist that they love it, even to the point of calling their owner an idiot for trying to free them!

• Ella Enchanted: The fact that your own personal life is hell is no reason to disobey those in authority. Only if your love interest in threatened should you act independently.

• The An Ember in the Ashes series:
  • Redheads are evil.
  • The children of revolutionaries are required to follow in their parent's footsteps. Regardless of their personal choice or safety.
  • Iron and steel are the most powerful substances on earth.

• Emperor Mollusk versus The Sinister Brain: Doing terrible things is justified if either good things come out of it or if you didn't do it personally.

• The works of Enid Blyton:
  • Boarding Schools are wonderful places...as long as you meet the criteria to be a popular girl:
    • You can't be too plain...or too pretty, because very pretty girls are dumb, self-absorbed and sometimes cruel, and plain girls are dull.
    • Don't be shy or unconfident, but if you're overconfident, you also won't be accepted. You should be jolly, cheerful and completely willing to go along with pranks (even if they're dangerous or disruptive) or else you're boring.
    • You should excel at something, but don't be too proud of yourself about it.
    • Never show any distaste towards swimming, lacrosse or equestrian sports or else you are a sook.
    • Don't get upset if the popular girls are teasing you, you probably deserve it.
    • Are you on the chubbier side? You're definitely stupid and probably a terrible person too.
    • Academic success is very important, and if you don't excel, that's a mark against your character. Unless you're one of the popular girls, and were simply being 'scatterbrained', because you had a nobler calling (i.e. some artistic pursuit or horses).
    • You should ideally be English. French people are amusing and silly, and Americans are airheads. If however, you should have the misfortune to be one of these categories, you can be redeemed, by trying to become as English as possible.

• Enchantress from the Stars: A woman should never use her abilities against the enemy. Rather, she should teach those abilities to her Love Interest, then willfully put herself in danger, so her love interest can save her with those new powers and win the day. Doing so will make you a Strong Female Character

• Enduring Love: Evolutionists are down to Earth intellectuals, while Christians are bat shit crazy stalkers.

• Foundation: According to mathematics, unless you're literally not human, you can do nothing to change the course of history and even if you think you're changing the course of history, you're just helping it along. Unless you know the mathematics yourself. Which is a good reason to keep it secret.

• Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man: In general, science is bad.
  • Ambition, and wanting to use science to make the world a better place are stupid ideas. Stupid ideas that will get you, and everyone you know and love brutally murdered.

• Fifty Shades of Grey:
  • Violent bondage sex is romantic and the ideal relationship for all females.
  • So long as you're hot, you can get away with stalking, abusing and raping someone. Don't worry, it's even considered romantic. Always. If someone would call you out on that, put them at their place. Women secretly want men who don't listen to "no."
  • Bondage Is Bad, and people who engage in it must have had a twisted childhood/Dark and Troubled Past.
  • It's ok to rape someone in retaliation for a joke.
  • For you ladies out there, the ideal relationship involves you signing a contract filled with things you don't know well enough to properly consent to. Your consent or lack thereof should be overridden by that, so not only does your new master not have to worry about that pesky habit you have of saying no, you don't have to worry about how wanting sex ever actually makes you a dirty filthy slut, because he's fully in charge. It doesn't matter if he only wants you for sex, doesn't care about your relationship needs, and wants to control everything about your life from your diet and exercise to the medications you take, to the point of purchasing the company you work at because he doesn't want you obeying another man. That's just how romance ought to go. Double points if he thinks you look like his mother, who he insists upon calling the "crack whore" instead of her actual name. That's hot as shit.
  • It doesn't matter if someone had the most obscenely rich upbringing for the majority of their life- if they were hungry when they were a tiny baby, that means they can do anything and it's not their fault.
  • If a sex worker is in an abusive relationship with her pimp, and he kills her in front of her son, it's her fault.
  • Literally nothing could go wrong with an older woman engaging in hardcore kinky sex with a fifteen-year-old boy with issues with affection, and any relationships the boy enters in the future are going to go great.

• Fight Club:
  • Reactionary Masculism is the only cure for the consumerist malaise of The '90s. Anyone who says differently gets castrated!
  • If you have a personality disorder, shooting yourself in the head will solve the problem.

• The Giving Tree:
  • If you really love someone, you should give them everything they ask of you without requesting anything in return - absolutely everything, right down to your whole existence. You should be happy to do this, even if they take everything from you, show not the smallest scrap of gratitude, and eventually leave you without looking back, because eventually, when you have nothing left to give, they'll come back.
  • And on the other side of the coin: all your relationships are to be looted for all possible benefits. They are nothing but resources, even if they don't know it yet. Oh, but don't worry. They never, ever leave you and will always take you back.
    • If your mummy doesn't give you everything you want, she doesn`t really love you!
  • Trees only grow to a certain point, and after that never grow anymore. They won't even replace branches that have been cut off.

• The Good Earth: If you have any ambitions above subsistence agriculture, you will inevitably become decadent and corrupt.

• Good Omens: Disease is an irrelevant concept to us because we have penicillin. Never mind that antibiotics like penicillin don't affect viruses, or that some bacteria naturally resist penicillin, or that a growing number of bacterial species are gaining resistance to antibiotics due to their overuse, or that there are diseases that aren't even caused by pathogens (cancer, for example).

• Gone with the Wind:
  • If a man rapes you, it's just a sign of his overwhelming love for you!
  • Also, slavery wasn't that bad.
  • Do whatever it takes to get to the top, no matter how bad the consequences are.

• Gossip Girl:
  • Sex, fashion, and high school gossip are the only things that really matter in life; anything involving actual thought processes is superfluous and irrelevant.
  • You can get away with anything and get anything you want if you're rich, skinny, and blonde. If anyone gets in your way or objects, then they're just jealous.

• Gossip Magazines: It's perfectly fine to pry into people's private lives if they're famous.

• The Grapes of Wrath: All attempts at honest work are futile and will bring you nothing but misery.

• The Great Divorce:
  • Only the pure, mindlessly faithful will survive.
  • Loners deserve Hell.
  • If you hold a drug that can instantaneously and permanently cure a raving madman of all his delusions, but he wants you nowhere near him due to his delusional belief you’re part of the Ancient Conspiracy crafted entirely to torture him, it would be entirely immoral for you to administer the drug to him in his sleep because doing so would violate his freely willed choice to remain seriously mentally diseased for the remainder of his life.
  • Everyone you don’t like is just a karen, and as such has no concept of Enlightened Self-Interest or even of self-preservation.
  • Liberal theologians are wishy-washy namby-pamby hypocrites who don’t believe that any objective reality exists.

• The works of Greg Egan: Science and technology will eventually lead the human race to utopia, but at the cost of everything that makes us human in the first place.
  • Rich people are all sociopaths.
  • Permutation City: Even if it were proven that God exists, God would not exist.
    • It is better to run away from your problems than to try and fix them.
    • Always trust the paranoid schizophrenic, no matter what.
  • "The Planck Dive": Even that aforementioned utopia is only delaying the inevitable, so you're better off not pursuing any scientific knowledge so that you don't know the horrors of the universe. Also applies to "Oceanic".
    • It's fine to be a sanctimonious prick to those with different beliefs than you. After all, you are right and they are wrong, and they have no excuse for being wrong, because they have already decided to be willfully ignorant of The Truth (TM).
    • No artist could ever appreciate or understand science.
  • "Border Guards": Even if that utopia does come to pass, it's inhabitants will all be emotionally stunted Man Children.
  • "TAP": Feel free to alter a child's neurological and cognitive development at a young age despite not knowing what the effect will be; there won't be any negative consequences. In fact, you'll be doing the kid a favor, despite making her completely unable to relate to any of her peers.
    • On second thought, don't bother trying to make the world a better place. The ruling class will spend all their resources into killing or discrediting anyone who holds your views, so that they will never lose power. And they will get away with it, every single time.^note We could argue whether or not this is Truth in Television until the cows come home, but that doesn't change the fact that compared to Egan's other work, this is a very warped Aesop as it goes against everything else in his oeuvre.
  • "Glory": Sometimes, censorship is a good thing.
  • "The Moral Virologist": Education is bad. A fundamentalist will just ignore the refutation of his beliefs, and instead will learn how to more efficiently kill millions.
  • Orthogonal: Soft science fiction is internally inconsistent and has no right to exist.

• Hannibal:
  • Kidnap, torture and mind-rape is acceptable if the crazy guy gets some.
  • A mentally ill serial killer who's a psychology expert? Respect to the guy. A mentally ill dropout with no specific talent? Damn them to hell!

• Any novel written by Harold Bell Wright:
  • Nature is good and pure. Cities or any form of civilization are evil and corrupt.
  • All wealthy people are evil.
  • Sexual desire is evil. Any man who feels the slightest bit of lust towards a woman, even if he never acts on it in any way, is brutish and cruel.
  • Any woman who takes pride in her appearance is evil.

• Heidi: It's okay to destroy handicapped people's only means of support as a form of therapy.
  • Also, don't ever feel sympathy for disabled people. They choose to be disabled. They choose to live a painful, frustrating life. If a person can't overcome crippling injury or lifelong illness through sheer force of will, then they must not have wanted it enough.
  • If you force a kid to move to another town against their current guardian's will, it will all work out in the end. They'll make great friends and learn plenty of new things and you'll suffer no consequences!

• Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest: You can ask all the questions you want. Just don't expect any answers, or at least any good ones.

• The Hickory Limb by Parker Filmore: Skinny Dipping is OK for boys, but not for girls.

• Hidden Talents:
  • Starting fires, cheating, insulting people and breaking things are all perfectly okay if you didn't mean it. On that note, you should go and befriend a bunch of hooligans who do all of those things and more, because they'll turn out to really be good people inside.
  • Playing sports with a secret unfair advantage is not reprehensible in any way.
  • Adults Are Useless so if someone if picking on you, violence is the only solution.
  • Everyone around you has superpowers, even if they deny it. You're not crazy, they're crazy!
  • It's fine to keep calling an unhappy person with low self-esteem an insulting nickname because you can't be bothered to use his real name.
  • Attacking the biggest insecurities of people in authority is okay, even if they're trying to help you. Doing the same to your peers makes you a Jerkass.
  • Having superpowers is crap, be glad that you're normal.
  • Ostracising people will never backfire on you. When you decide that you want to be friends with them after all, they'll immediately accept you anyway.

• The High Crusade: Military technology is for wusses. True Englishmen conquer the galaxy with longbows.

• His Dark Materials:
  • Mind Rape for the greater good is wrong, but murder for the greater good is a-okay!
  • The greater good...
  • A single evening's conversation with a man you find attractive is all the justification you need to not only break your nun's vows, but stop believing in God altogether.
  • Spending the rest of your days separated from your soulmate (whom you're sure you've found at the ripe old age of thirteen) is worth it to make absolutely sure the multiverse doesn't deteriorate infintessimally faster because you left one freakin' gateway open.
  • Where you're born is where you belong, get out of my country! Er, I mean world.
  • The only possible counter for Anvilicious Christian allegory is even less-subtle, more-Anvilicious atheist allegory.
  • If you are a Christian, Jew or Muslim, your god is the most ruthless tyrant the universe has ever seen. Bureaucracy makes everyone evil, even angels.
  • It's ridiculous to believe in a god, and anyone who says otherwise is deluded. But spirits, witches, and destiny are totally real.

• Honor Harrington:
  • Half blind women who talk to cats, think they are Horatio Hornblower and commit ghastly acts of violence are the mark of true civilization.
  • So there is this country where women are still caught in the roles of housewives and mothers? No worries! Do one great deed for the country and they will make you their first female ruler ever.
  • Have issues with an assassin? Just sicc your cat at them!

• The Homestuck Epilogues:
  • Polyamory is just an excuse for jealous women to manipulate two men in love to involve her in their romance.
  • Never eat candy, or you'll end up in a loveless marriage.

• Hoot:
  • A pancake restaurant franchise is demolishing a vacant lot that just so happens to have a endangered species' habitat within? Don't go to city hall and convince them to alert the company to the issue and convince them to find a new property to build on, just vandalize the construction equipment being used, because guerrilla eco-activism is far more effective than contacting the proper authorities!
  • Singing "This Land Is Your Land" is a proven way of stopping construction of an environment-ruining development dead in its tracks, and totally won't get you arrested for disturbing the peace.

• Horatio Hornblower: Englishmen are way cooler then anyone else. Frenchmen are evil. Spaniards are lazy. Arabs are...

• Horus Heresy: Starting a war that kills untold billions is a normal response to having a bad parent.

• House of Leaves: Literary analysis can induce insanity if done correctly.

• The House of Night:
  • Forcing teenagers into your cult by afflicting them with a deadly disease is perfectly fine. Everyone troubling you because of this only does it because they think you are Satan.
  • Moral hypocrisy is just a sign of maturity and wisdom for someone's age.
  • It isn't sexism when it happens to men.

• How To Teach Filthy Rich Girls: If it's the only way to get certain people to like and trust you, it's okay to lie about your entire life and identity as long as you plan to tell the truth once you succeed.

• The Hundred and One Dalmatians/The Starlight Barking:
  • Women are either incapable of grasping basic logic like the concept of right and left, or they can grow up to be the Prime Minister, but are so feeble and delicate they have to be carried by others. Meanwhile, men can be both physically strong and accomplish feats of cleverness far beyond the standard for their species.
  • Women, however, are more "metaphysical" than men and can therefore use magic more easily.
  • If you're fat and accident-prone, you should never marry or have children.
  • If you find a group of nearly a hundred kidnapped and abused children you are obliged to adopt them all.
  • The first person you meet who is the same colour as you is your One True Love.
  • If someone offers you infinite happiness with only minor drawbacks, don't take them up on their offer.
  • Stars are actually sapient and can give you magic powers.
  • Taking care of over 101 dogs every single day is easy and won't lead to the dogs being neglected at all.
  • If someone starts attacking you, it is wrong to defend yourself.
  • Dogs can live off a diet of jam, buttered toast, peppermint creams, and cake.

• The Hunger Games:
  • All you need to take down evil governments is a 16-year old girl and backup consisting of less than 10 people.
  • Murder solves anything.
  • If you can't choose between a childhood friend and a guy who has been brainwashed into trying to kill you, although has been cured with occasional relapses, that choice is simple: choose the latter.
    • If you don't want kids, have them anyway. It's your duty as a woman.
  • Anyone who is attracted to a handsome man is shallow and stupid. If you're not, you're the flawless protagonist.
  • People living in the capital are evil.
  • It's okay to brutally attack your best friend and try to kill her. In fact, doing so will make her realize how much she loves you and wants to be with you.
  • It's perfectly ethical to join a rebelling army that kills many innocent people and bombs population centers. But if someone you personally cared about was killed, you are morally justified in killing their murderer.
  • There is nothing strange or disturbing about a teenager being violent towards other people, not even if they show signs of severe mental instability.

• The Hunt for Red October: Mutiny, treason, and the stealing of multibillion dollar pieces of equipment from your employer are admirable activities.

I-N

• The Icelandic Sagas: Feuding, piracy, and savagery are an honorable way to live.

• The Iliad:
  • Marital problems should be solved by burning cities down.
  • It's worthwhile to start a war to rescue one adulterous woman, but afterwards, you should kill her for letting you fight a war over her.
  • The Odyssey: If you disappear off the face of the Earth for 20 years, you have every right to be infuriated to find that someone tried to marry your wife when you eventually DO get home. The best thing to do is disguise yourself as a hobo, get everyone drunk, then beat them all to death so that you can reclaim your throne.

• Inheritance Cycle: Unleashing years of warfare on peasants is acceptable if you are tied to both of the master races. Also, women, except those belonging to the aforementioned master race, are useless.
  • Eragon: Mercy and sympathy are for suckers (though true sometimes on different scenarios). Who cares that the enemy soldiers you slaughter enmasse are conscripts with no say in the matter, or that your brother is magically compelled to work for the Big Bad, or that you've doomed a species to extinction and the last survivor's final request is for the memory of his race to continue, or even that the guy completely at your mercy had fairly understandable reasons to do what he did. Hell, don't even consider that the city your allies are about to destroy hates the Empire and committed no crime beyond cutting down a few trees, like every city needs to do to survive. Nobody will ever call you on it. Also, the only reason the Big Bad is any worse than you, your allies, or the old order everyone's so fond of is because he's not an elf or a worshipper of elves.

• Inferno (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle):
  • People who fight injustice are equally as bad as those who willfully spread it and are deserving of the same punishment for the same crimes.
  • All humanitarianism gets you is eternal torture.

• The Irregular at Magic High School: There is nothing wrong with bringing a nuke to school.

• Jane Austen:
  • Pride and Prejudice: Breaking promises leads to Happily Ever After. ~ Elizabeth
    • No, it's that telling people not to get engaged is guaranteed to make sure they will. ~ Mr. Darcy
  • Emma: Shipping is evil.
  • Persuasion: Taking your friends' advice is always right... ALWAYS, regardless of the results, regardless of circumstances. Especially if you're a woman. ~ Anne Elliot

• Jedi Academy Trilogy:
  • No matter what a complete monster you are, Luke will forgive you.
  • Legacy of the Force: Paedophilia means redemption.

• The Jungle: You know how people call America the land of opportunity? That’s a total lie.

• Kiesha'ra:
  • People accused of rape should be put to death immediately. Without trial. It's not like someone might be trying to frame them or anything.
  • Don't trust your boyfriend's ex-girlfriend. She may seem amiable and understanding, but secretly she's plotting to assassinate you and start a war.
  • It's okay to put your life and the lives of everyone you care about in the hands of a mentally ill woman who has frequent hallucinations and is openly loyal to an enemy country. People like that are always trustworthy.

• The Last Children Of Schewenborn: Fulda (Hessen, Germany) is the most important city in Europe and by this reason a number-one target to get nuked. So better, don't ever get too close to that place.

• Left Behind:
  • The UN is a lot more powerful than it actually is!
  • Babylon is in the middle of a desert instead of near Baghdad, Iraq.
  • It's okay to do horrible things - because if you were good? You would have been raptured.
  • Sexual predators and utter jerkasses make role-model Christians.
  • Pacifism is evil and comes maybe directly from hell. We should never, ever achieve world peace.
  • Never trust handsome Romanians. Or pacifists. Or children of gay men.
  • A flattened Earth, eternal sunshine and mountains that bleed wine are heaven. And Hebrew is spoken there.
  • Christianity makes for horrible writing.

• The Legend of Drizzt:
  • Sure, 99.9% of your race are chaotic evil, but this one person will change your view on them.
  • Drizzt is "One of the good ones".

• Les Misérables:
  • If you ever attempt to change society, you are doomed to fail.
  • A policeman who chases the logical but incorrect suspect or is obsessive about his work should go to Hell.
  • Gals, let men control your life. Odds are, you'll be a victim, a villain, a whore or a characterless rich man's daughter, so there's little or no chance that you'll ever do anything important - except maybe just dying.
    • Whoa, did you just say that villains aren't important?
    • Gals, being a villain is the only way you'll be important.
  • The pretty rich girl always wins out over the poor girl, even when the poor girl has known the guy for much longer and the guy in question is a revolutionary who supposedly doesn't care about issues of class.
  • An ex-convict never deserves to be happy. No matter how thoroughly he's cleaned up his life, no matter how many selfless heroic deeds he does, and even if he only stole a loaf of bread to feed starving children, he's still tainted by his past and needs to be separated from his daughter and suffer Death by Despair.
  • Ex-convicts, sex workers, Street Urchins, victims of mental breakdowns, revolutionaries who try and fail to end oppression, and Ambiguously Bi alcoholics - in short, anyone who's oppressed or doesn't "fit in" - are all better off dead. The only people with lives worth living are the ones who get rich and reach the top rung of society, either because they're evil Karma Houdinis or thanks to the Heroic Sacrifices of everyone else.
  • Don't directly attack your enemies, get them to commit suicide instead! Much cleaner that way. (True anyway if they are scum).
  • Everyone can be redeemed... Except for people who want to do the right thing but are misguided or go too far. They should kill themselves.
  • People who buy children from their sleazy foster parents are saints and will always do what is best for the child.
  • Keep your daughter locked up away from the world, no matter how much she dreams of more. If she falls in love, she'll abandon you after marriage and you'll only see her for a last few minutes as you're dying.

• Little Women:
  • If you do something unbelievably cruel to a friend or loved one (e.g. burn a manuscript they've written) and unsurprisingly don't get forgiven right away, put yourself in mortal peril and everything will be alright.
  • Writing genre fiction that your readers love to pay the bills means you're not being true to yourself as a writer.
  • If a girl has social anxiety and traits suggestive of autism, it means she's destined to die young because she doesn't belong in this world.
  • No woman is ever fulfilled without a husband and children.
  • A handsome, passionate rich boy will always choose a beautiful ladylike girl over a homely, unconventional tomboy in the end. Unconventional tomboys have to settle for equally homely, penniless, unromantic professor types.

• Lord of the Flies:
  • Since Humans Are Bastards, creating a stable society is impossible.
  • Religion turns people into asthmatic murdering savages.
  • If you're adamant on remaining a peaceful pacifist your friends will end up being killed.

• The Lord of the Rings:
  • It is impossible to use your enemy's own weapons against them. Even considering it will screw you over.
  • If the only way to destroy a dangerous artifact is to drop it in a volcano, use two disguised peasants to carry it there by foot, not the sentient gigantic eagles to fly it there.
  • The Return of the King: People with addictions should at first be pitied, but only so that their addictions can be used as bait when you need to kill them.
  • And if your country has a lousy leader, the best thing to do is bring back a King, since monarchs are inherently better rulers, even if he's done nothing but roam around the woods his whole life.
    • That may be an intended aesop.
  • No matter what form of government you have had for 2,500 years, as soon as a guy wanders in saying that he's the last descendant of the long lost royal family, you should abandon that government and lifestyle in favor of putting him on the throne. After all, it's not like that family was directly responsible for unleashing a WMD on a pastoral nation and bring about cycles of warfare for over two millennia, right?
  • The Saruman vs. Ents subplot: Don't harm nature... or the trees will kick your ass.
  • The best strategy is to put a doomsday weapon where your enemy can capture it.
  • All those swarthy people to the East and dark people to the South may not be inherently evil, but they are highly susceptible to being conscripted into The Horde by the local Evil Overlord, so you're better off conquering and ruling them for their own good sooner rather than later. All the quality people went as far West as they could get as fast as they could get a long time ago.
  • If you have an ultimate weapon of evil that is guaranteed to destroy anyone's mind who holds it, and you need to destroy said weapon, and the only place in the whole of the universe to do that is INSIDE the Big Bad's fortress nation, then it is perfectly fine to send a pair of helpless innocents alone into the fortress. It's not like you have an almost unbeatable nearly magic army or seven you can use.
  • Genocide is a perfectly valid solution with the enemy Slave Mooks.

• Lord Of The World:
  • Atheists will instantly abandon their skeptical principles and convert to a new religious movement as long as it isn’t Catholicism. ^note This is probably an intended Aesop.
  • The royal houses of Europe really do rule by divine right. If you’re a commoner, on the other hand, God hates you.
  • Supporters of the Labour Party are Orthodox Marxist-Leninists who abhor all that is good.
  • If you try to improve the world, you will only make it worse.
  • You cannot ever be friends with someone of different political or religious opinions to you. Anyone who disagrees with you serves the Devil.
  • Only the pure, mindlessly faithful will survive.

• The Lottery: Small towns are full of backwards rednecks who murder each other. Avoid them at all cost, and stay in the city, because stuff like that never happens in an urbanized area!

• Luna: Transgender people are burdens to their loved ones and should leave their families behind for their families' own good.

• The Magic Toyshop:
  • You should get together with the smelly guy who hasn't washed in months, brushes your hair and kisses you without your permission, and has even put a hole in your bedroom wall so he can spy on you. He loves you really, promise.
  • A logical response to finding out your wife has been cheating on you is to burn your house down.
  • Muteness can be overcome by just growing a spine.
  • There's nothing at all wrong with incestuous cheating.
  • If you break something owned by your parents, that makes you responsible for their deaths.
  • If your brother-in-law tries to rape your girlfriend you should respond by getting drunk and burying his stuff in a park.
  • It's mentally healthy for kids to be so obsessed with a single activity that they do nothing else and completely disregard the real world.
  • If you're going to cheat, at least don't do it in the middle of your husband's kitchen.
  • Five year olds still sleep in cots, barely speak and are carried everywhere.
• Magical Warfare: The best way to fight evil is to follow in its footsteps.
• Mc Teague:
  • You have a deformed wife who wants to save money rather than spend it? Beat her to death with your bare fists! It's more than perfectly okay to do that!
  • It's also more than perfectly okay to run your family like a military and beat the ever living shit out of your youngest son because he started whining. Everyone else will either ignore your abusive behavior or actually condon and mimic it! To hell with the kid's emotional and mental welfare!

• Memoirs of a Geisha: If you see a little girl in trouble, arrange for her to become a glorified call girl. When she grows up, she'll be more than happy to repay you with hot lovin'!

• The Metamorphosis:
  • Don't bother helping your struggling family. Chances are they really don't need your help after all and are just using you for convenience.
  • Your family's troubles are your fault. You should die so they'll finally be able to pick themselves up and make better lives for themselves.
  • Don't count on family or loved ones to help you in your time of need, especially if your appearance has been drastically altered. They'll lock you in your room and try to kill you if you leave.
    • Knowing Kafka, all of the above are the intended Aesop, actually.

• Misery:
  • Even a man with two broken legs can still easily fight off a woman.
  • Don't go investigating alone. It'll get you killed.
  • Killing someone with a lawnmower is funny.
  • Always tell people where you're going.
  • Don't be an author. Just don't.
  • Becoming a mutilated drug addict will make your writing better.
  • Always write what the audience wants, not what you want. In time you'll come to realise that your passion is immature and the only thing that matters is money.
  • If you're captured by a mad person, don't bother trying to escape. It'll just make things worse for you.

• Mistborn:
  • Hey kids, eat flakes of metal and you'll get awesome superpowers!
  • Do you constantly hear a disembodied voice telling you to kill everyone you meet? Don't worry, you're not crazy - that's just Satan!
  • It doesn't matter that the absolute monarch killed everyone who opposed them to rise to power, but as long as it's the right guy? Things will be alright.
  • Democracy is bad if it doesn't favour the nobility.

• The Avalon Series: Blondes are trouble, especially if they're also agoraphobic monotheists.
  • It's okay to force a woman into having sex with strangers. If the woman feels anxious about this or tries to escape being pimped out, she's a selfish bitch.
  • A woman can't truly be confident or empowered unless she considers herself superior to all men.
  • A woman can't truly be confident or empowered unless she worships the One True Goddess. If she follows a different religion or, Goddess forbid, no religion at all, then she's just a poor deluded sheep.
    • Related: It's wrong to try and force other people to change their religious beliefs...unless you're trying to convert them to the religion you follow, which is The One True Way.
  • A woman who judges people solely on their gender is wise and spiritually enlightened. A man who does the same is unfair and misogynistic.
  • Your personality and destiny are solely defined by who your parents were. So if your life doesn't turn out the way you wanted, blame Mom and Dad!
    • The flip side: Don't choose a partner based on compatibility or lifestyle- just who you'll have the best babies with.
  • It's perfectly okay to let a group of elitist strangers control your sex life. In fact, if you ever try to make your own choices or Screw Destiny, it will lead to a Bad Future in which everything ever dies.
  • A religion that forces you to have sex with strangers or even your own half-brother, unknowingly for some sort of breeding program is a-ok as long as it is ruled by women and aboriginals; but patriarchal newcomer religions are always evil.

• Mogworld: Life is a game and you aren't a player. You are just a playing piece superfluous to the game at large with no say in the matter.

• The Mortal Instruments: It's not incest if you didn't know he was your brother.

• My Sister's Keeper: If it happens to be your lot in life to make sacrifices for your sibling, up to and including your kidney, suck it up. If you try to assert yourself, fate will intervene and your braindead body will end up being used for parts anyway.

• Naked Lunch: Drug-use is perpetuated by actual lizard people.

• Needful Things: All Lesbians are Communists and all Communists are Lesbians.

• The Neverending Story:
  • Give a fat, bullied geek muscles and good looks, and he will gradually turn into a megalomaniac warlord who won't stop at threatening his best friend.
  • His imaginary best friend, when he stops admiring what- for lack of a better word- is his creator (or at least the reason for his existence in the first place).

• Night of the Assholes: Fighting back in self-defense in any way is the same as being a Hate Sink.

• Norse Mythology:
  • Fighting all day and drinking all night is Heaven.
  • There is nothing that can't be solved by crushing someone's skull.

O-Z

• Of Mice and Men:
  • Engaging in pleasant small talk with a woman while on the job will inevitably result in all of your and your friends' future dreams and goals being destroyed.
  • Mentally disabled people are basically just animals and should be referred to as such in your writing.
  • Mentally challenged people can't make it in society; they're much better off dead.
  • You're disabled friend got accused of a crime? Feel free to take him out the back and shoot him! Even if you didn't see the crime happen, have no idea how it happened, and have no proof he actually did it.

• On a Pale Horse: Don't shoot at The Grim Reaper unless you or your girlfriend have a Fetish for her getting kidnapped and having Electric Torture on her breasts.

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest:
  • Native Americans are secretly the Hulk.
  • Nurses are just power-hungry sadists who want to torture their patients.

• Orlando: A Biography: If you ever find yourself in a situation where you spontaneously switch sexes for no apparent reason, you should just shrug it off and immediately get on with your life as if nothing had changed.

• Percy Jackson and the Olympians:
  • If you feel neglected by your parents, you have every right to join forces with an evil dictator.
  • If you want a little freedom and not have to look after your little brother who is only a couple years younger than you and leave him with people you know will take good care of him, you will die soon after.
    • The Heroes of Olympus: If you are cursed and your only hope is for someone to fall in love with you, be mean to them. Treating them nicely won’t get you anywhere and only end in rejection. The first guy you act cranky towards will fall for you and be the one to help you.
  • If someone ever accomplished anything of note in history, then they were actually part of a race of Semi-Divine superhumans - George Washington, Aemelia Earhart, you name it. No normal human has ever shaped history on his or her own, that's for demigods. Although if you do poorly in school, you might be unknowingly part of this demigod race.

• Peter Pan:
  • Having childlike innocence means having no intelligence, maturity, or morality whatsoever. But it's still preferable to growing up.
  • It's not at all creepy to capture a young girl and force her to be your "mother".

• The Princess Diaries:
  • It's okay to establish a hate site to trash your best friend, humiliate her in public, and generally make her life hell, as long as you feel really, really sorry about it years afterwards.
  • Don't make friends with social outcasts unless/until you become one of them. Popular opinion is always right, except for when it turns against you.
  • All feminists are sexist, man-hating freaks who can't appreciate pop culture or enjoy modern music.
  • All men want sex. All the time. There is no such thing as an asexual man, or a man who abstains because of his religion, or a man who simply has other things on his mind. They all want sex, and if your boyfriend isn't pressuring you to sleep with him, he doesn't really love you.
  • If your teacher doesn't give you an A, she's automatically a cruel, judgemental Philistine who's crushing your dreams and doesn't want you to succeed.
    • Also, talent always equals skill. If you're naturally good at writing, you will never need to grow as a writer or further hone your talent. Any teacher who tells you otherwise is crushing your dreams.

• The Program:
  • Therapy against depression strips the patients from any personality. So don't even try to cure people of depression. Let them kill themselves, it is what they want in the end.
  • Parents who want their mentally ill children to stay alive and send them to treatment due to this wish are evil.

• Quintaglio Ascension:
  • Priests are liars and cannibals.
  • It's impossible to naturally just not like being touched. If you do hate to be touched and don't like people in your personal space? It's because of mental trauma from when you were a baby.
  • People are naturally racist.
  • Abortion is great!

• The Railway Series/Thomas & Friends:
  • Bullies will keep coming back to torment you, no matter what you or the adults in authority try to do about it.
    • Sadly that's Truth in Television.
  • In addition: Technological progress is bad and we should do everything in our power to stop it.
  • Your worth as an individual hinges on the judgement of a how useful you are to a fat man in a top hat.
  • Diesel engines are evil incarnate.
  • If you got into a serious accident, whether some trucks had played tricks on you or if someone messed with your controls which caused you to crash into a building, you got no one to blame but yourself.
  • If you complain about being overworked, bad things will happen to you.
  • Goods wagons are sociopathic assholes.
  • You can tell all the engines are great friends when they always laugh at each other's humiliating misfortunes.

• Rainbow Fish: Self-mutilation will make you happy and popular.

• Rainbow Magic: Screw training, talent, luck, and a number of conspiracy theories, the only reason anything happens and that anyone is successful and happy is because an entire kingdom of fairies runs things behind the scenes. Also, the only reason anything bad happens is because a decidedly not handsome but still oddly liked version of Jack Frost likes to mess with the fairies; when this happens, just relax, the problem will be fixed within a week by a couple of preteen girls.

• Raymond Carver:
  • A person is completely unable to form a meaningful connection with any other person, so don't bother trying.
  • Your life WILL SUCK.

• The Reader:
  • Mass murder is understandable if the murderer is illiterate and female.
  • Illiteracy makes you evil.

• The Redemption of Althalus: Nobody cares that your father was murdered and you have to work with his killer. It's not like your feelings matter when it comes to saving the world, and you think he's hot, so what's the problem?

• Redwall:
  • If someone was born into the wrong race (aka, the ones with accents that aren't either upper-class British or good solid working-class fellows) then they are definitively the worst, there's no redemption for them, and they are not to be trusted. Even if you adopt one of their babies, they're going to turn on you eventually, because that's just what Those Kinds Of People do.
  • Mice, in spite of their size and weight, can hold heavy swords without falling over.
  • All rabbits talk like World War II Royal Air Force pilots.

• Ringing Bell:
  • If someone kills your loved one, just let them get off scot-free. Retaliating will make you just as bad as them!
  • If you look scary, nobody will be grateful of you saving their lives.
  • Don't even bother trying to redeem yourself. You'll only ever be remembered as a villain.

• Robot Series: Slavery is fine and dandy.
  • “Feminine Intuition”: Men are idiots. Only women are smart.

• The works of Jean-Paul Sartre: Sure, nihilism is not the answer, but you should still be a misanthropic Jerkass because everyone else in the whole world sucks.

• The School for Good and Evil:
  • Beauty Equals Goodness is an unbreakable law of the universe. You can't be ugly and good unless you turn out to be Beautiful All Along. So, if you're born ugly then you're either going to lead a meaningless peasant life or turn into a villain.
    • This rule does not exclude people with visible disabilities. They are also destined to be evil.
  • Always help your friend no matter how many times she uses you, betrays you and tries to kill you. Make sure to abandon the guy who loves you for her, too.

• The Secret:
  • The victim is always to blame. It's completely your own fault if your life sucks; just think happy thoughts and no matter how dire your situation you'll become a millionaire!^note Truth in Television: When Shakti Gawain peddled this stuff in the 1970s, she wrote that poverty and starvation existed because people "believed in them", and that children were dying because they didn't "love themselves enough".
    • Yep, if Holocaust victims had just tried to think a little more positively, they wouldn't have been in such a negative predicament.
  • It's not hundreds of years of slavery, another century of segregation, and decades more of oppression coupled with economic inequality that holds African-Americans back from being on an equal level with white Americans, it's just negative thinking! Also, there's basically no such thing as white privilege. It's the Law of Attraction!
  • Being born rich doesn't give you any advantage over someone born poor, it's all about positive and negative thoughts. If the poor just daydream some more they'll be rich.
  • You have to concentrate on positive thoughts very hard for months or years before anything good will happen to you, but one negative thought, or even standing next to someone thinking a negative thought, and your life is ruined.
  • If you have clinical depression, just get over it.

• Shadows Of The Dark Crystal:
  • Never do anything your friends or family tell you. Always go your own way, even though your own way has nearly gotten you and your traveling buddy killed several times.

• Shannara: A nuclear war will eventually lead to a fantasy world. See also: Adventure Time.

• Sherlock Holmes:
  • Go on kids, take cocaine. It will totally turn you into an intellectual badass, equally adept at both deducing a man's entire life from the stain on his left sleeve and whomping people's asses in bar fights. Only downside - you may forget whether the sun revolves around the earth or vice versa.
  • Alternatively, social skills, cultural literacy, basic concern for one's health, and any attempts to have a meaningful social (let alone romantic) life are merely distractions. Overspecialization will turn you into a total badass, and even if you're a bit of a jerk, fate will find you a compatible long-suffering life partner.
  • Are you a rich, smart detective with the backing of Scotland Yard? Know a group of plucky orphans who could use a good home? Use them as your spies, pay them to put their little short lives in peril to satisfy your curiosities and give them some group name. Don't bother using your clout with the Scotland Yard police to give them a second chance at a better life.

• The Silmarillion:
  • "Quenta Silmarillion":
    • Three baubles are a perfectly good reason for starting a world war.
    • Immortality and stupidity go hand in hand.
    • If you are immortal, humans are basically Cannon Fodder for you, since they will die anyway.
    • Never steal more than you can carry.
    • The only deity who really cares about you is the evil one. The good ones are indifferent at best.
    • Genocide is a perfectly good solution for resolving the issues with enemy Slave Mooks.
    • No good deed ever goes unpunished.
  • "Akallabeth":
    • If you are not on the side of the Elves, you are against them. If you are not against the Big Bad, you are on his side.
    • If you grow powerful enough to challenge the nigh hostile and indifferent deities, the Creator will punish you for such impudence.
    • Deities care only for the immortals. The plight and suffering of the mortals are not of their concern.
    • Earthly paradise is reserved only for the immortals.
    • Humans are so wicked that the gods want nothing to do with them.
    • Preferring the vernacular language over Latin means you’re evil.
  • The Children of Húrin:
    • If you fall in love with the wrong person, suicide will solve everything.

• The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries:
  • It doesn't matter how badly you treat all the men around you, they will want you.
  • It doesn't matter how horrible someone is as long as they are hot.
  • Reading minds is completely horrible and ruins your life- unless you're blond and pretty. Then you can solve mysteries that are tenuously, at best, connected to you.
  • You should stay in a house you can't really afford, in a town where the people who don't treat you with pity, scorn and/or fear can be counted on one hand (fewer still if you remove any supernaturals), even when you had several chances to leave with help from others (who actually like you). Why? Because that's where you belong.

• Sophie's Choice:
  • Sons are important, daughters are worthless.

• Space Pirate Captain Mactaggart:
  • Any sort of unifying federation for different star systems is bad and fascist!
  • Science is incorrect about everything, why even bother fact-checking unless it’s about trains?
  • Scottish people are the best in the world, and don’t you forget that!
  • Metroid is bad for DARING to suggest that space piracy is evil, galactic federations are good, and there could be intelligent anthro bird aliens out there! NINTENDO IS THE DEVIL!
  • Anime is weird and should be ridiculed!
  • Foxes are either Nazis or imperialists who need to die en masse!
  • Terraforming is perfectly fine because aliens either don’t exist or are inferior to oxygen-breathing lifeforms!
  • TRAINS ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING OUT THERE AND STEAM TRAINS ARE THE BEST
  • Hip hop is objectively bad, rock music is good.
  • There’s nothing weird about watching Thomas & Friends as an ADULT.
    • If you have autism, you automatically are nerdy about steam trains.
  • Essentially being a reality-warping despot over a whole galaxy is fine as long as you dispose of two others to get there!
  • Referring to Japanese people by ethnic slurs is fine if you’re Scottish!

• The Space Trilogy: Space travel necessarily implies the genocide and subjugation of nonhuman species. All humans who wish to advance our scientific knowledge are, therefore, evil.

• Spirit of the Wolves: Diplomacy is really just the total submission of one side to the other. Cooperation of any sort is possible only by totally abandoning your culture, self-sufficiency, and freedom to become your enemies' glorified slave.

• Spoonbenders: People with special talents go unappreciated. People without special talents can't use them for anything but panhandling. Everyone's fucked, really.

• Starship Troopers: We shouldn't outlaw corporal punishment, because banning spanking will lead to the establishment of a xenophobic totalitarian one-world government.

• Story Of An Hour: If for some reason you're mistaken for dead, don't bother showing up alive. Your wife was happy that you died and will have a heart attack as soon as you return.

• The Stranger: Arabs are not really people. In fact, no one except you is really a person. Their lives don't matter. Nothing matters.
  • The best way to argue for existentialism is to argue for nihilism instead.

• The Sword of Truth series:
  • If you come to believe in your own moral infallibility, you will at best become a frothing Knight Templar who cheerfully butchers pacifists. At worst, you'll wind up as bad as possible. (Which is actually a pretty good Aesop, just not what the author intended.)
  • He has a couple more really warped ones: organized sports, especially the general concept of athletes being treated as highly desirable sexual partners, are evil. Organized religion is evil. Pacifism is evil.
  • And Richard suffers from the whole "Magic Chosen One" thing listed above.
  • Chickens are evil.
  • It's okay to break a child's jaw if you think she's possessed by an evil spirit.

• Tairen Soul: There's nothing wrong with causing magical rape en masse.

• Thinner: Running over an old woman is the most effective weight loss programme you'll ever find.

• To Kill a Mockingbird:
  • Judge a species' worthiness of life based on how pleasant its behaviour is.
  • Even THAT makes no sense! Mockingbirds are MEAN motherfuckers!
  • Judge a species' worthiness of life based on its singing ability. The members of said species could be incredibly cruel, but they sound pretty.
  • Never believe women.
  • Adult male strangers will always help young children in danger.

• Tortall Universe:
  • Song of the Lioness:
    • A man who starts flirting with you when you're eleven and he's eighteen is your ideal soul mate. Also, Stalking is Love, and it's okay to jump into a new romantic relationship when you've only just broken up with, or never officially broken up with your last boyfriend.
    • Nomadic tribes are backward cesspits of sexism and bigotry, which need a Mighty Whitey heroine to improve their culture and a Mighty Whitey king to become their political and spiritual leader.
  • The Immortals:
    • Having magic that forces animals to like you and to be willing to die for you is the same thing as being friends with them, and if any of them balk they should be forced into compliance.
    • A Teacher/Student Romance with a fourteen-year age gap is an ideal relationship.
    • Non-white empires are evil, decadent places of slavery and world-threatening villainy, which only the white heroes can stop.
    • Girls, if you're offered a position of power (e.g. as a goddess), always give it up for your man.
  • Protector of the Small:
    • A strong female role model should always act like an Emotionless Girl, because emotion is weakness.
    • Misogyny and oppression will always reign supreme. Even liberal leaders will always cave to the conservatives' demands, and even after eight books' worth of apparent social progress, the lives of women, minorities and the poor will still be an uphill struggle.
  • "Trickster Duology'':
    • Brown people chafing under the oppression of white colonizers can't manage to change things themselves and need a Mighty Whitey who puts on brownface to tell them what to do.
    • A romance between a human girl and a crow in human form who doesn't really understand human things is ideal.
  • Beka Cooper:
    • Don't mix social classes. Nobles and ex-hill bandits should remain apart.
    • Knowing someone for a month and growing close in that time isn't cause to start a relationship that may become lifelong, it's reason to propose and get married without further delay.
  • Tortall and Other Lands:
    • Lost: A kid who's abused and neglected by her father doesn't deserve it. Not because children don't deserve bad treatment, because this particular one is a mathematical genius.
    • Nawat: If there's a disagreement between parents about how to raise children and one insists that the (very human-shaped) infants are actually crows and shouldn't be subjected to diapers, but should be held out of windows to relieve themselves, clearly he's right and this isn't dangerous or absurd at all.

• The Trial: When anybody tells you that you would be arrested after just waking up, don't ask for their police ID or anything, but trust them. Asking questions will only make matters much, much worse.

• The True Believer: All movements to change the world for the better invariably lead to mass executions. Only narcissists want to join such movements anyway, so if you’re dissatisfied with society, just Quit Your Whining and stop having such an inflated opinion of yourself.

• Uller Uprising by H. Beam Piper:
  • Native populations who don't immediately fuse their culture with yours must be crushed underfoot and, if possible, nuked.
  • The Fuzzy series: The natives don't stand a chance of surviving without help from us civilised folks.
  • Space Viking: it's OK to do horrible things to countless people, so long as you eventually begin grafting together a few measly trade agreements.

• Victoria: People disagreeing with your opinions will lead to the collapse of civilization. ...No wait, that's an intended Aesop. Making America great again entails making a mockery of everything the country holds dear, including the Bill of Rights? ...Wait, that too is intended. The only bad thing about the Nazis was their support of industrialization? ...No, even that is intentional. Slavery is only bad when Muslims do it? ...What, even that? Okay, how about, "it's acceptable to take credit for someone else's accomplishments if they're of a hated minority." ...You've got to be kidding me, the book supports that too? What about "America in the Great Depression had no problems and we should go back to it. That means women and minorities better know their place." ...Wait, that's literally the premise of the whole book. Environmentalists are literally Too Dumb to Live? ...Why am I not surprised that's deliberate by now? Cold fusion works? ...You've gotta be kidding me!
  • All right then, how about, "Since humans prefer to defend the first worldview they hear about, instead of changing their beliefs to accommodate the facts, ideologies are inherently bad, and even if yours is in favor of freedom and civilization, fighting to defend it will inevitably make you no better than those who promote totalitarianism and oppression." What, that seems like a genuine Aesop whose advice one ought to follow? That's why it's warped.
  • How about "If you don't like a city, you can always just nuke it." Finally, an Aesop both TV Tropes and William S. Lind will find morally abhorent! At least, we think Lind will find it abhorent. Or, more accurately, hope he will. Not entirely sure about that.

• Waiting for Godot: Life is banal, repetitive, and hopeless, so go hang yourself.... Nah, don't. There might be vegetables in your pocket.

• The Wheel of Time: Do what your betters say - especially since one of them might be The Chosen One.

• Who Moved My Cheese?: Mice are smarter than people.

• Wind on Fire:
  • Valuing intelligence is evil.
  • Metal contraptions that make strange noises will save us all.
  • If you don't bring an obnoxious idiot who will be a huge burden to you with you on your quest to save your city, you are evil.
  • People who spend their entire lives high and covered in faeces are much nicer than people who don't.

• Wings of Fire: There is nothing wrong with keeping humans as pets.
  • Blind trust in something that isn't true is the best way to save the world
  • All the negative stereotypes about your race are true. You can only defy them if you've been raised separately from the rest of your race from birth.
• Wuthering Heights:
  • Gypsies are nothing but the unholy spawn of the Devil.
  • Who cares about marrying for true love? You should settle down with the rich boy next door and forget about your soulmate.
  • Anything is justifiable if you do it for love.
  • True love is destructive, insane, and unhealthy. Anything less is settling.

---