What Do You Mean, It Needs Fixing? (Cleanup thread for pages on the What Do You Mean, It’s Not An Index? index)

I question the implication that The Lion King would be inappropriate to show to preschoolers.

I feel like it overestimates how much kids can handle. It's not like they show Scar graphically killing anyone. If kids can handle the normal movie, they can handle the show.

Granted, Lion King 2 also has the WDYMIFK example, but it at least makes some sense there. It straight up does not here because the The Lion Guard is very much still Lighter and Softer in many ways in spite of the few dark moments.

Heck, that one seems pretty stretchy too but it does at least make some sense given Simba's PTSD and the way certain characters die and stuff.

I think the example can be valid if condensed if only because this is aimed at a younger demographic than even the original movie. I'm not familiar enough with Guard to say if it feels older than it is, but I've seen lore and examples floating around that felt surprisingly complex and/or mature for its demographic. I also know one episode about death had a Content Warning attached.

What is the exact demographic for each supposed to be? Since I know for a fact that I watched The Lion King as a toddler (and it just kinda bored me lol). Isn't the only older-demographic Disney movie The Black Cauldron due to it being PG? All of the others are G, designed to be watched by anyone of any age.

That's kinda what I was thinking. I haven't seen The Lion Guard yet, but I do know that it's rated TV-Y and airs on Disney Junior, and I feel like the fact that at least one episode had a Content Warning might make it count for something. I have heard that it's the only Disney Junior show where characters have actually died, and I think that topics like death are rarely dealt with on shows aimed at that age group (barring the occasional Very Special Episode).

That being said, I also agree that the entry shouldn't be listing everything in the show that might not be suitable for younger children, and could be condensed quite a bit.

Wikipedia lists Disney Junior’s target demographic as 2 to 7. Given that it skews as low as toddlers, pretty much everything on it is very clean, and overarching plots are rare in TV-Y entrainment (the only other big one I can think of is MLP:FiM). I also think there’s a valid case for the entry; it just needs to be trimmed significantly.

WhatDoYouMeanItsForKids.Western Animation has a shorter entry for The Lion Guard (under the Disney folder) - maybe the YMMV entry could use that one.

I mean, yeah maybe it's fine. It's just hard for me to wrap my head around it somehow having a younger demographic than The Lion king, which is already watched by toddlers. Maybe they're not the primary target I guess, but they're not excluded either.

Though considering the Disney Jr thing, I'm not against it that much.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 6th 2024 at 3:51:16 PM

On WhatDoYouMeanItsNotForKids.Video Games, the Borderlands series is listed, and honestly, would anyone really mistake it for a kid's game? The only real argument it makes on how one would make that mistake is being "beautifully cel-animated," but that means a parent would have too see this cover art◊ first, which does not look like a kid's game at all.

While at that, I would like to bring up the Fable entry as well. The only arguments listed for why one would mistake it for a kid's game is because of "cartoony graphics and a generic fantasy setting." The latter is something that appears in a lot of works not made for kids (like The Elder Scrolls), and as for the former, are the games really that cartoony-looking? It feels like basically any M-rated game that isn't grimdark all the way through would count as this based on this entry's logic.

For Fable, I could see how the first game could be mistaken for something family friendly due to the box art with a Kid Hero on it. In fact when the game came out from the box art I sort of assumed it was meant to be Xbox's Alternate Company Equivalent to The Legend of Zelda until I saw the rating. I don't see how anyone could make that mistake for Borderlands and the other Fable games, though.

Edited by ninjamitsuki2 on Feb 25th 2024 at 4:52:14 AM

I guess that's true. Even then, the Fable entry hypes up the sequel as an example of this rather than the first game.

I'd also like to bring up Read or Die that's also on the page. I haven't watched the whole thing but the concept doesn't really seem all that kid-geared, the art style isn't particularly cutesy (beyond the bog standard BESM anime style) except for the Token Mini-Moe character, and there's nudity in both O Ps. Sure, Animation Age Ghetto is a thing... But that would mean every adult animation ever made would be on What Do You Mean It's Not For Kids.

Edited by ninjamitsuki2 on Feb 25th 2024 at 4:58:54 AM

x4 and x3

A similar discussion can be made regarding Palworld vs. Pokémon given that the former is a much darker deconstruction of the latter. Like Fable, Palworld is also M-rated. I find it odd that Palworld is not listed in WhatDoYouMeanItsNotForKids.Video Games, though to be fair, Palworld is a 2024 video game and is probably too recent to add it.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Feb 25th 2024 at 9:20:20 AM

^ Palworld is rated T, not M.

To be honest, from what I played it doesn't seem that inappropriate. The violence is just as cartoony and bloodless as Pokemon and while it does run on cynical black comedy there's plenty of kids properties that also have that as their bread and butter.

Honestly in my opinion Digimon Tamers and Ghost Game were darker than Palworld (namely, they didn't play the dark subject matter for laughs), and those are unambiguously kids shows.

Edited by ninjamitsuki2 on Feb 26th 2024 at 3:37:50 PM

Thanks for the clarification.

From YMMV.YIIKA Postmodern RPG:

• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The quirky colors and presentation inspired by the likes of EarthBound are offset by the fact that the game is rated M for a reason. There's a surprising amount of explicit cursing, nightmarish visages particularly in the Mind Dungeons, a lot of suicide and death context including a couple areas with a heavy amount of violence and Rory committing suicide off-screen if you're a dick to him, racial issues brought up, and a generally massive amount of Mood Whiplash between surreal humor and dark subject matter.

I don't think children would be interested in YIIK of all things because of its graphics but what do I know

I think that was brought up before on this thread. Either way, like I said before, the fact that the entry uses being inspired by EarthBound as a point doesn't help, since most fans of that game are probably adults in all honesty and that game's darker elements are arguably the most famous part about it.

From YMMV.Xavier Riddle And The Secret Museum:

• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The show and its accompanying book series Ordinary People Change the World can slip into this territory at times due to covering topics not a lot of other preschool shows/books do such as racism^note In "I Am Rosa Parks", "I Am Martin Luther King Jr", "I Am Jackie Robinson", and "I Am Harriet Tubman", slavery^note "I Am Harriet Tubman" again, sexism^note "I Am Marie Curie", "I Am Susan B. Anthony" and "I Am Billie Jean King", war,^note "I Am George Washington" (book only, not the episode) etc, to the point where Moral Guardians and Heteronormative Crusaders deemed the series inappropriate for kids. Also, in the I Am Madam President special, Berby dies and drifts off into space. You read that right, a PBS Kids show killed off one of its main characters. She did come back though.

There's definitely several things off about this entry. I highly doubt a children's show about history is going to skip over its more unpleasant aspects, and by that same note, presumably doesn't go into too much graphic detail. It also puts a lot of emphasis on the fact that a character dies by (seemingly) non-natural means, which might have been noteworthy if it wasn't for the fact that said character is a non-anthropomorphic robot◊ who, according to the show's character page, just speaks in robotic gibberish. Maybe not all that expected for something aimed towards a young demographic, but not only does it occur towards a non-human subject, said ends up a Disney Death.

(There's also the claim that "Moral Guardians and Heteronormative Crusaders deemed the series inappropriate for kids", which, while far from unheard of, seems a both a little factually-questionable and also unrepresentative of how dark the show actually is, given how Moral Guardians are.)

Wizards of Waverly Place

• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?:
  • This show is pushing the limits on what can be shown on Disney Channel due to some content (werewolves, vampires, Alex's Anti-Villain tendencies).
  • They've also killed off quite a few characters (such as Stevie) and react rather coldly to their deaths—they go on as if nothing ever happened and really don't seem to care.
  • The dark angels who wanted to invoke some sort of Apocalypse, before they got there halfway. The same episode had Max maliciously turning the girls from the sleepover into fruit the family was going to eat. The final scene is the family listening to the fruit tell jokes. The audience is left to assume they changed them back to girls and wiped their memories or something, but there was some pretty dark humor in that scene, when Jerry practically threatened to put them into a blender.
  • The cynical humor, especially in later seasons is definitely not "kid-friendly".
  • There's a very dark sense of humor always underneath the surface, certainly where Harper's characterization is concerned, and the relations between Theresa and Jerry, or the parent Russos and their children are concerned. The dysfunction is often Flanderized and/or Played for Laughs.

This is all a lot of Fridge Horror that isn't uncommon in kids' shows, since the werewolves and vampires, IIRC, weren't very bloodthirsty, and the "dark humor" was mostly one-off lines (I forgot Harper even had a Hilariously Abusive Childhood). The deaths might be something but generally this was a pretty kid-friendly fantasy sitcom with occasional dark humor that usually invokes What Measure Is a Non-Human?.

Mason did eat a guy once. But really, they were just goofy, family friendly monsters. (And being an Anti-Hero is hardly something kids can't handle)

There’s this example on VideoGame.Lethal Company:

• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: The game tasks you with collecting scrap in unsafe working conditions, and slaps you with increasingly high profit quotas. If you fail to meet quota, you're fired (jettisoned into space) and just generally seen as expendable. These elements are in place to put forth the game's Black Comedy, but it was also released around the same time that many corporate game development studios were exercising a series of mass layoffs. It certainly doesn't help that many of them were also being exposed for unfair treatment in the workplace, and that the game was released in the middle of the then-ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike.

I’ve never heard of this take before. I mean I know the game makes some jokes about how the teams are working for a corporate Eldritch Abomination, but it seems like a stretch.

Is there anyone to say this was common, or at least was expressed?

Edited by CanuckMcDuck1 on May 12th 2024 at 6:23:08 AM