Default Moral

Give me a break, give the audience some credit, and give yourself a five-year vacation from storywriting.

A lesson that's been done to death. These Default Morals are most at home in shameful franchises who aren't afraid to rely on Eye Roll UnTrashes. They aren't restrained to these low-grade stories, though, and can appear anywhere Weak Writing makes itself known. Default Morals include believing in yourself, not letting the world's opinion get you down, standing up against issues when no one else will, following your dreams, daring to be different, and not allowing defeat to overcome your determination. Once a story sets any of these tired morals or their friends as its Main Idea, it dooms itself to losing the audience's respect and interest. Although a franchise may mean well with these Default Morals, for its own sake, it's best to leave the past hundreds of stories to regurgitate them. A central concept doesn't need to be overdone by many different franchises to become repetitive. A truly incompetent series can adopt this UnTrash as a Custom Trope through sickening overplay and refusal to treat the audience like individuals with existent brains. Going on and on about the greatness of having a loving family or circle of friends can grate on the viewers' patience and soon drive them away out of sheer irritation.

Default Moral is an offshoot of Sledgehammer Message. Like its parent UnTrash, it depends on the maddening recurrence associated with it to work its Pure Evil. As if being reduced to a cliché worthy of eyerolls weren't enough, it fails in its foremost mission, which is to teach the audience a valuable lesson through the events of the story they experience. No real person can apply the theme of Default Moral to their everyday life and expect great things to naturally crop up. Taking the idea of "hard work always pays off" as an example, someone could focus on a single goal all day and all night and yield Absolutely Nothing in the end other than a nice, tasty middle finger to their whole reason to live. Another overused lesson, one innovative modern-day creators know as a Dirty Lie, is "good always triumphs over evil". For starters, the concepts of "good" and "evil" aren't a thing in the real world. Secondly, righteous individuals in society aren't guaranteed success in their battles against the corrupt groups who stand as the spitting image of Saturday Morning Cartoon Edition Evil Incorporations. This UnTrash's singular objective is to get the characters to act a little differently from how they were in the beginning of the plot.

There are no upsides to playing Default Moral. It degrades the story's cast to finger puppets who stand for thoughts and actions relating to the Main Idea. Taking the characters in such a lamentable state seriously is nearly impossible for the audience. In addition, roles like the Super Evil Bad Guy are given a chance to surface from the shadow realm, their rightful home. The ironed-out characters will join the story in depravity in originality that also had its depth and meaningfulness sucked out by this UnTrash. Default Moral is also an UnTrash that sins against Show, Don't Tell. Playing it almost certainly comes with the cast blathering about how they (meaning the audience) should act and what else they (not meaning the audience) learned. Direct references to the Main Idea are a huge no-no if your goal is to send a message smoothly and realistically. The audience must be allowed space to ponder over what the real meaning of the story is at best and have it loosely described to them at worst.