Cautionary tale

The German language anthology, Struwwelpeter, contains tales such as "Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug" (The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches); it is fairly easy to deduce the ending from the title.

The framework of the cautionary tale became a cliché in the slasher films of the 1980s, in which adolescents who had sex, drank alcoholic beverages, or smoked marijuana inevitably ended up as the victims of the serial killer villain.

Hilaire Belloc in his Cautionary Tales for Children presented such moral examples as "Jim, Who ran away from his Nurse, and was eaten by a Lion", and "Matilda, Who told lies, and was Burned to Death".

Lewis Carroll, in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, says that Alice: ... had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked "poison", it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.In The Complete Tribune Printer, Eugene Field gave cautionary tales an ironic inversion, as in The Gun: This is a gun.

Run quick, Jennie, and pick up Susie's head and Charlie's lower Jaw before the Nasty Blood gets over the New carpet.Some films, such as Gremlins, satirized this framework by imposing very arbitrary rules whose violation results in horrendous consequences for the community by not taking responsibility.

In the story, a man has to eject a young woman out of the airlock, otherwise the fuel of his rocket will not suffice to deliver some badly needed serum, without which everyone at a small outpost would perish.