Aesop Collateral Damage

In mythological, religious and fantasy works, somebody does or says something that shows he's in need of an attitude adjustment. Either a being (often a deity or similarly powerful creature) or Fate itself will act overtly to teach this lesson. Unfortunately, the direct victim of this tutelage isn't the person in need of the lesson, but rather one or more persons close to him who haven't been shown to have done anything wrong. Typical victims are children, spouses and colleagues of the culprit, and the suffering often involves their deaths. In light of this, the culprit expresses remorse and either changes his ways or gives way to grief. Either way, he won't be making that mistake again. It is rarely/never mentioned that the entirely innocent suffer the most.

This often overlaps with Revenge by Proxy. Naturally, Innocent Bystander is an aspect of this trope. Generally a result of Protagonist-Centered Morality.

Examples of Aesop Collateral Damage include:

Comic Books

• The origin of Spider-Man is all about this: he refuses to stop a fleeing criminal, and subsequently the hero's beloved Uncle Ben is killed by that criminal, teaching our hero that valuable lesson that With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.
• Batman: Dr Leslie Thompkins purposely let Robin die just to demonstrate to the youth of Gotham the dangers of letting kids fight crime. The subsequent Retcon held that it never happened; Dr Thompkins knew Steph hadn't died and just lied to Bruce about it.
• In Stuffed Into the Fridge's purest form, female supporting characters die so that male heroes can learn vague lessons about the price of heroism, after which said heroes usually find new love interests and generally move on.
• In John Ostrander's take on The Spectre, this was sometimes used to illustrate the dangers of the Anti-Hero protagonist's extreme Black and White Morality, which bordered on Blue and Orange Morality at times. In one example, the Spectre threatened to slay every living person in the state of New York if an innocent man was executed, since technically the State of New York passed the sentence. The children, anti-death-penalty protestors, and the man's defense attorneys would presumably be among those killed.
• Since the late 1990s, this has been played up frequently in Daredevil, as his supporting cast start to notice that they're often the collateral damage that teaches Matt Murdock a lesson about something or other.

Literature

• In the children's story "Sam, Bangs and Moonshine", Sam is warned that her habit of making up false stories will get her into trouble. She tells her friend, a little boy named Thomas, that her mother is a mermaid who lives in a distant cove. Thomas believes her and goes off to the cove (followed by Bangs, Sam's cat) and both are lost at sea in a storm. Sam is very remorseful about their loss and learns An Aesop about not lying to people. Thomas and Bangs are eventually recovered alive, but Thomas is ill from his ordeal.
• A horrific and intentional example of Aesop Collateral damage is found in Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story Hell Screen. An obsessive and sadistic painter cannot paint anything he hasn't seen, so when he is commissioned to paint a picture of Hell by the tyrannical Japanese lord he serves, he tortures his apprentices to get the references he needs. Finally, he decides he needs to have a carriage set on fire and the woman inside to burn alive. The lord agrees. The victim? A pure, innocent and intelligent young woman ...the painter's daughter, and the one thing on Earth he truly loved. According to the servant narrating the story, the Lord does this to teach the painter a lesson about putting art above all other duties and concerns. However, the servant is unlikely to be telling the precise truth, out of fear of or devotion to his lord, so it seems more likely that this was the lord's twisted revenge on the daughter, Yukimi, for spurning his advances...advances that the narrator claimed never happened, despite witnessing his attempted rape of Yukimi. After the execution, the painter finishes his screen and is is Driven to Suicide - the lord is a Karma Houdini.

Live-Action Film

• Clash of the Titans (1981). Queen Cassiopeia says that Andromeda is more beautiful than the goddess Thetis herself. The goddess says that Cassiopeia will repent of her boast and demands that Andromeda be sacrificed.
• Since it's very loosely based on the biblical book of Job, the film A Serious Man does this...only the Aesop is deliberately unclear, perhaps even absent.
• Common in the Lifetime Movie of the Week genre, as when an Aesop needs to be broken out, the heroine is always a bit removed from the consequences for MAXIMUM DRAMA!

Live-Action TV

• Star Trek the Next Generation episode "Q Who". Irritated by Picard's arrogance, Q sends the Enterprise light years across the galaxy to an unexplored region of space and then disappears. They run into the Borg, who kill eighteen crew members. Picard learns his lesson, but eighteen innocents die for it.
• In a Sabrina the Teenage Witch episode Sabrina's boyfriend Harvey is turned into a beast by her ugly aunt to teach her lesson about shallowness. The ugly aunt is treated as a Purity Sue, entirely justifed in teaching Sabrina her lesson while everyone ignores the fact that the blameless Harvey is the one who finds himself growing fur, claws and tusks.

Radio

• The old-time radio show Diary of Fate had as its constant Aesop, "Choose evil and you will be destroyed." Okay, but often three or four people other than the main character would die in the process of him learning that lesson, without having chosen evil at all.

Religion and Mythology

• This is quite common in many mythologies, where the gods teach someone a lesson by cursing his entire family—but not necessarily them—or setting up his descendants for misery. Sometimes this is the result of severe Values Dissonance.
  • Possibly the most famous example is the biblical Job. He loses his health, sons, daughters, house, animals, everything. In the middle section, as Job sits on the ash heap and is "consoled" (if you could call it that) by his friends, Job begins questioning God's actions. God arrives and speaks from a whirlwind to scold Job for presuming to question His actions when he (Job) is not a deity. This whole thing is troubling in part because of the dialogue between God and the Adversary that explains that Job was tortured to grotesquely cruel levels and his family killed as part of an exercise to prove Job's faith. It is true that after Job repents of his questioning and prostrates himself before God, his prosperity is returned even better than before and he gets a new family, but that means his original family is STILL DEAD. What of the originals? Are people that interchangeable?
• A strong example to modern eyes is the story of the Minotaur. The gods sent King Minos of Crete a white bull intended as an offering to Poseidon, but he decided to keep it as the prize in his herd instead. Aphrodite retaliated by making his wife fall in lust with it and arrange to play the part of a cow. Sure, Minos was stuck with the result of that union, the human-eating Minotaur, but that just inspired him to lock it away in a labyrinth and occasionally feed innocent Greeks to the beast until Theseus finally killed it. Minos's wife, the Minotaur, and the innocent Greeks suffered, but Minos himself, not so much—he kept the bull, stayed king, and even became one of the three judges in the paradisical section of the Greek afterlife.
  • Niobe and her children is another example from Greek mythology. She boasted about them, compared herself to Leto and condemned people for worshiping Leto, and Leto's two children (the deities Apollo and Aretimis) slay all 14 of hers by shooting them with arrows. Niobe's husband Amphion either committed suicide or was also killed by Apollo for wanting to avenge his children's deaths; Niobe herself so grieved that she turned to stone with a stream flowing from it said to be caused by her tears.
  • Also from Greek mythology is the story of King Midas, who accidentally turned his daughter to gold, as shown in the page image.
  • Again from the Greeks is Laocoön, who interfered with the original Trojan Horse because he was Genre Savvy enough not to trust it. For jeopardising their plan, the gods sent a serpent to kill him and, inexplicably, his two sons.
• According to some maltheists, the idea that everyone is burdened with "original sin" inherited from Adam and Eve is a variety of this trope.

Western Animation

• Disney's Pinocchio. Pinocchio plays hooky from school and ends up being kidnapped and taken to Pleasure Island. His creator, the kindly woodcarver Gepetto goes looking for him and ends up getting trapped inside Monstro the whale. Pinocchio learns a lesson about being a good boy from the experience.
• In Disney's Beauty and the Beast, the household staff are cursed, as well as the Beast himself. The musical version softens the collateral damage by having the staff discuss that they were the ones who turned the Beast into a spoiled brat in the first place.
• This is parodied in a Simpsons example: A "Treehouse of Horror" episode had a fortuneteller curse Homer's family because he insulted her. They suffer through freakish transformations, and Bart actually dies, but Homer goes on refusing to reverse the curse by apologizing because none of it's happening to him. It's especially egregious given that the apology would even resurrect Bart.