Unfortunate Implications - Television Tropes & Idioms

This turns up a lot in ad-generators based on page content, such as the ones at the top and side of this page. For instance, the Religion Of Evil page will sometimes turn up an ad for... a Muslim dating site. If The Advertisement Server has become sentient, one hopes this is Dead Baby Comedy.
- The same page also frequently brings Scientology advertisements...
- ... and a 'discover Israel!' holiday ad. This Troper took a screenshot.
- The ad generator also puts an ad about sex offenders in gay-related articles, this troper is currently looking at it on the Psycho Lesbian page.
- The Idiotofthe Week page generates ads for Sarah Palin's new book and Anne Coulter.
This advertisement for Intel.
Many old commercials for the PlayStation Portable are almost painful to watch due to their obnoxious dustball and squirrel mascots who act like thinly veiled racist stereotypes of Mexicans and blacks, respectively.
- An even worse example was this infamous campaign for the white PSP.
There is a local restaurant chain in the Philippines known as the "Adobo Republic" (adobo refers to a local type of cuisine). Said restaurant chain has a rather◊... unfortunately designed logo◊. Who knows how many tourists it unwittingly offended.
Any ad that features weight loss and swimsuits. Of recent note, the Valerie Bertinelli Nutri-System ads and a spot for Kellogg's "Special-K Challenge". They probably mean to say "With our products, you'll have the confidence to sport that skimpy bikini", but in practice, they scream "One-piece suits are for fatties." Or if you're feeling more charitiable, "One-piece swimsuits are for those with something to hide."
- Especially since the actresses for most of those ads rarely appear overweight to begin with, implying that if you're larger than these women you should never consider wearing a bathing suit at all.
The mascot for the Transformers toy company Takara was a black skinned creature called "Dakko-chan". It was retired in 1990.
UK mobile phone network "Phones 4 U" has recently embarked on an advertising campaign where they show a particular group of people (scout masters, yo-yo specialists) then claim that their phone rates would be wasted on such people because they have no friends (unlike their target demographic, one would assume). Aforementioned groups were not amused.
A Jack In The Box ad in the 1990s attempted to spoof the Taco Bell chihuahua, with an antenna-ball clown telling the Spanish-speaking dog that he only wants Taco Bell because "it's not like dogs are picky," which was subtle enough until the alleged punch line, when the clown-ball sniffs and says, "All right! Who's been eatin' beans?" Supposedly it was merely implying that Taco Bell patrons are flatulent, but the obvious "beaner" implications didn't sit well. The ad didn't run for too long before it was pulled.
A recent Starburst commercial drew the ire of several sociologists since it showed an apparent "contradiction" of two Korean identified characters dressed and acting like stereotypical Scots, which on its own wasn't too bad... until they then brought in an albino life guard as a comparison, as in someone who might be physically harmed by their job. Hmm.
A short lived TV spot for the candy "Clinkers" in New Zealand made by Pascalls: Clinkers are a mix bag of three flavors of hard candy coated in chocolate so you don't know what flavor you'll get until you eat one. The ad contained a stylized animation of a man parachuting and having his 'chute fail. He was then shown 3 options: landing on power lines, a sewage works or the hard ground, accompanied by the Clinkers (then) catchphrase "you don?t know what you'll get." The implication that eating Clinkers would result in death, with a 33% chance of drowning in human effluent, led to the ad being pulled almost as soon as it was aired.
This recent advert in the UK targets young people and tries to show them the consequences of knive crime. A very noble and worthwhile advert, but made a little unfortunate by the prisoner being interviewed right at the end just wanting some chicken...
One ad for Noodle Box features a picture of a little girl on the grass, a spilled box of noodles beside her, screaming in mock shock/horror. Underneath is the caption: "If you're HOT and FRESH, EVERYONE WANTS YOU!"
- To be fair, the caption appears in several posters with less unfortunate pictures — they obviously just didn't think about putting these two specific parts together...

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Black people aren't prevalent in Japan, so when a character has black skin and thick red lips not too many people complain. Importing these characters tends to cause a stir in the US until essays are written on Jim Crow stereotypes forcing character's skin to be changed to purple, which makes much more sense. Jynx from Pokémon (ironically enough, Jynx was not intended to be black, but to be a ganguro, but was eventually changed to purple anyway), Mr. Popo from Dragon Ball and the unfortunately named Oil Man from Mega Man Powered Up are some examples. There was also a side-character in One Piece who was made white.
- The lack of unfortunate associations with blackface in Japan has lead to entirely innocent, well-meaning blackface in Japanese stage musicals. (To be fair, they do tend to go more for "dark brown skin and realistic lips and eyes" than "minstrel show", so the lack of malicious intent is easier to see than the caricaturing of blacks that goes on in anime and manga.)
- In Viz's release of Dr Slump, there's an gag in which Arale, playing baseball, knocks the ball an astounding distance. In the US version, it lands on a couple of fanged, pointy-eared aliens. However, in the original, it actually landed in Papua New Guinea, beaning a stereotypical Polynesian who is wearing camo fatigues, bearing an AK-47 (with a stone axe-head attached), and wearing a ring of shrunken skulls around his neck. Yes, it is exactly as cringe-inducing as it sounds.
- In Cyborg009, 008 was at first partially this — while being the most battle-ready and serious of the team, he was portrayed at first in blackface style, however this was only due to that being the popular portrayal in Japan back then.
- Shootfighter Tekken recently introduced a character who works for the American Mafia as an enforcer, with impossible ninja attacks and a total disregard for human life, and raised (literally) as an animal. The (black) character's name? Dark Monkey. Ouch.
Bafflingly, quite a few anti-4kids YouTube videos suggested that 4kids was being racist for editing out a black person, rather than seeing said minor character as a racist stereotype.
In Code Geass, the only indisputably black character who shows up in the series dies in two seconds.
- The English dub managed to add in some Unfortunate Implications in the infamous cat-chase episode. When Milly announces that the prize for catching the errant cat running about campus is a kiss from a Student Council member, we get a shot of a group of girls Squeeing at the thought of a kiss from Lelouch. Then one girl quietly remarks, "I think I'd prefer Miss Milly...". In the original Japanese, she's chastized with "Hey now, is this the best time to come out?"; unfortunately, the dub replaced this with "Why do you have to be so different?" Whoopsie.
- There are actually two versions of that line; they probably caught onto their mistake and redubbed it. Another version has the other girl saying "Could you get back in the closet, please?"
- The final battle while supposedly between the UFN and Britannia, is pretty much just Britannia vs. China and Japan, the belief that Japan must unite the East Asian countries against the West was one of the driving causes of the Pacific War portion of World War II.
- And then there's the basic premise. British people are evil Nazis who want to take over the world...
The evil Hollows in Bleach all have a Spanish theme to their names and abilities. Add in the fact that the only Mexican describes his powers as "being similar to a Hollow's", and you have some interesting implications if you think about it too much. It gets worse, if you do think about it too much. Much worse.
In Ranma ½, girls who like other girls (it would seem to be lesbians due to No Bisexuals existing) are perverts. At least according to Akane, who appears to have... issues. When female Ranma and Akane are trying to show kindness to the transvestite Tsubasa, the former assures "her" that she'll find a boyfriend soon enough despite Tsubasa clearly stating he liked Uky? because Uky? was a girl. The latter, when having tea with Tsubasa, said they needed to focus on finding "her" someone more normal (in other words, a boy). And then there's the matter of Ranma going on a date with Tsubasa in boy form, in an attempt to "lead her onto the correct path".
- Akane might have derived her issues from Shampoo deliberately egging her on: the first time Ranma was stuck as a girl, Shampoo offered a cure; Akane, reasonably wary of whatever Shampoo and Cologne had to offer, cautioned Ranma about it. Shampoo then stated right out that Akane was a pervert for wanting Ranma to stay as girl.
Choco of Shaman King.
- The good news? He's got a well-thought out backstory, a cool powerset, no stupid accent and an interesting philosophy for a character in a fighting manga. The bad news? Um... his name, for one thing, and the fact that he's the only character drawn with lips for another.
- (In the manga only), at least he's the most powerful shaman in the group, more than the freaking main character, but it doesn't help either that he was in a gang, killed a guy and his oversoul is called Jaguarman. He's not the only character drawn with lips, though, but the others who have them clearly do so to achieve a Gonk look.
As a general rule of thumb if the Abrahamic God appears in an anime, at best he's a complete asshole, at worst he's basically the Christian view of Satan. The only time God has been portrayed in a positive light was in Princess Knight, which was made in the late 1960s. This generally leads to Christians either being just the religion of Shinto with nuns replacing Shrine maidens or the Inquisition.
In One Piece, in the 4kids dub of the Alabasta Arc, Miss Father's Day, who wears a frog costume, was given a French accent, presumably a joke about the French being called "frogs". Since 4kids often gives accents based on what the characters look like (Robin, who often wears a cowboy hat, got a Southern accent), it's possible they knew what they were doing.
While the story pages of Elfen Lied contain enough High Octane Nightmare Fuel to last several lifetimes, the chapters' cover pages are rife with Unfortunate Implications, as many of them feature the ladies of EL in states of dress and undress, and sometimes in coquettish poses. For the nearly-adult women, like Yuka and Lucy, this is one thing, but for Nana and Mayu - both of whom are barely pubescent at best, and one of whom is canonically a rape survivor - it is completely another.
Eyeshield 21 features an black athlete named Panther. In the manga, his coach feels threatened by the natural athletic superiority of black people, and refuses to let Panther play, but makes him clean up after the white players even though he's one of the most skilled players they have. His fellow teammates don't argue with the coach until it's plot-relevant — when this has presumably been going on for a while.
- But to be fair, none of the teammates ever aproved of the coach's actions, and never argued because they were afraid he would kick Panther out of the team as retaliation.
Really it's difficult to find anything about the Transformers manga 'Kiss Players' that ISN'T an Unfortunate Implication...

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The Great Ten, a team of Chinese "super-functionaries" in The DCU, are almost all at least partially built from East Asian stereotypes. These range from the Accomplished Perfect Physician, who has a bit of the "old Asian master" about him but still manages to be a rounded character... to Egg Fu, Fu Manchu as a big yellow egg; and the Mother of Champions, whose power is having lots of Super Soldier babies. Egg Fu is a known Grandfather Clause dating back to some really horrible Silver Age "Yellow Peril" Wonder Woman comics. God only knows what the hell they were thinking of with Mother of Champions, though. A superpowered Asian Babymama? One imagines the thought process went along the lines of "there are a lot of people in China, how can we make that into a superpower?", a creative direction unlikely to lead anywhere but "over the line".
It seems like there's not an element of Freedom Ring's death that wasn't an unfortunate implication. Less than a month after Marvel cites him as a positive example of a gay male character in Marvel Comics, he's killed off in a graphic and somewhat suggestive manner◊. And then his powers end up in the hands of his decidedly straight friend and sidekick◊.
Speaking of gay male heroes at Marvel, Northstar (the first gay hero to come out of the closet at Marvel) was killed by Wolverine in Wolverine #25 with an attack he probably could've dodged. A bit bad, but people die in comics. Then, one month later, Northstar is killed off in two alternate universe comics, both released in the same week.
- At least he got better.
In the Young Avengers/Runaways crossover, the gay Hulkling, lesbian Karolina, and trans Xavin were captured and tortured, and the reason given for why they specifically were selected was that it would create less trouble because they're all aliens. No explantion is given as to why Wiccan, Hulkling's mutant boyfriend is brought along, too.
- At least the writers had the sense to have Hulkling's boyfriend change his super-hero name from "Asgardian". Say it out loud if you don't get the unfortunate implications of that name for a gay dude.
There was an extremely obscure DC Comics superhero born from the excremental Bloodlines Crisis Crossover of Black/Vietnamese descent named... Mongrel. Yeah. He died in Infinite Crisis.
Archie Comics is full of this, Depending On The Writer. One story involved Betty And Veronica going on a camping trip with Archie, who became increasingly irritated by their presence. They eventually realized the problem — they were managing to put up their own tents, etc. without his help, which was making him angry. They immediately began acting helpless and stupid, asking for help with every little thing, which gained Archie's affections once more. Wow. Then there is the aversion runs, like the one where Ron convinces Betty to play tennis to her best ability instead of pandering to Archie. Betty trounces Arch and Ron then does exactly what she called Betty on. In the end, Arch chooses Betty as his tennis partner for a tournament because he "needs a partner who is better than [him]." Like it was said, it depends on the writer.
During the early Chris Claremont run of X-Men, the team is literally sucked into Hell, or a Dante's Inferno replica. They meet the demon/judge Minos, who is a sleazy piece of work. Minos immediately hits on Storm. And then Nightcrawler. His response — "this is Hell — everything goes!". So in one shot, homosexuality is associated with the evil and the damned.
- This is made even worse by the fact that the entire point of X-Men nowadays is that discrimination against people based on race and or sexual orientation is a bad thing. If you're going to be homophobic X-Men is the very last series you should turn to.
- Until recently, the X-Men character Siryn was portrayed as an outlandish stereotype of Irish women. From her rude and flirtatious demeanor, to her red hair and severe alcohol dependency, the character was little more than an outdated ethnic caricature. However, recent incarnations of the character have abandoned her more offensive aspects and she is now portrayed as a much more well rounded character.
Grant Morrison's Final Crisis crossover features a plotline involving the villain Darkseid kidnapping female heroes and villains, and making them into his personal army by forcing them into macabre, mind controlling masks. Batwoman, a lesbian superheroine, is shown clad in a mask with an S&M ball-gag in the mouthpiece that prevents her from speaking. The implied connections between kink and homosexuality are somewhat unsettling, and the mask was heavily altered in the subsequent issues.
Lampshaded in Maus. Vladek Spiegelman is incredibly miserly, and his son wonders what people will make of a person who is advancing that particular stereotype about Jews.
Usagi Yojimbo — Probably the reason the foreigners including Jesus will remain They Who Must Not Be Seen for a long time. Either the only difference between them and the Japanese Funny Animals (which includes Gen the rhino, Lord Mifune the tiger, and Katsuichi-sensei the lion) is Wig Dress Accent or they're a different family of animal (reptilian missionaries would have a literal Crystal Dragon Jesus!). At least Space Usagi has the options of robots and aliens.
In the Batman series, all the members of the Batfamily to have ever been tempted by evil or too violent or depicted as incompetent are those whose parents were criminals. It's the case for Jason Todd (too violent, murderer), Stephanie Brown (incompetent), Huntress (tendency to disregard the one rule), Cass Cain (murderer, though it was retconned as More Than Mind Control), and Damian (murderer, has tried to kill members of the Batfamily).
Whether intentional or not, Marvel seems to be on a crusade to show that marriage is something young people should avoid at all cost, lest things end in tears (or a funeral). Apparently, dating keeps you young, vibrant, and hip. Marriage instantly ages you 15 years and makes the characters unable to connect with the readship.
- Justice and Firestar had been a couple for damn near a decade, and engaged for at least half of that. They split up in a badly written one-shot Valentine's Day special because Angelica — who was the one who proposed — decided she'd rather be a normal college student than the wife of a super-hero (she's one herself, so chalk up another Unfortunate Implication). A decision that was, as far as any regular reader of New Warriors or The Avengers was concerned was 100% out of the blue and out of character for the (formerly) mature and level-headed Firestar.
- Cyclops and Phoenix were the first couple of Mutantdom. Scott loved Jean enough to leave his current wife and son to be with her. (Hmm...) When Phoenix died (Again...), within six issues of that death, Scott was making out with Emma Frost — Jean's rival — literally on top of Jean's grave. Horrible imagery, even if it weren't the grave of Scott's wife. (It was hinted at the time that Jean's spirit pushed Scott towards that scene, to make sure he didn't leave the X-Men. So what's Emma's excuse?)
- Scott's younger brother Alex, more or less dumps his fiancee (for two decades plus) Lorna (AKA Polaris) at the altar for the new writer's newly introduced pet Muggle. Lorna reasonably responds to this by trying to kill the entire wedding party. The fact that the entire relationship was caused by the telepathic desires of said Muggle's mutant son to have a father does not help, considering this (unintentionally or not) implies that a little kid not only forced the pair together, but added to Lorna's already present insanity to get her out of the way. And yet the author expects everyone to agree that this is sweet, adorable, and romantic, and Lorna's clearly a horrible monster for legitimately losing her shit over it.
- Hawkeye and Mockingbird. Namely, their divorce after she allowed the man who kidnapped, drugged, and (by implication) raped her fall to his death and said that it was suicide. Hawkeye, who'd been told about this by the ghost of the dead man (who conveniently left out the drugging and raping part) wouldn't even let her explain herself and went off on her in a rage over how Avengers weren't supposed to kill for any reason, and he couldn't trust her anymore. While he eventually did hear the whole story and realize he'd been a dick, what relationship they have has still been extremely strained."
- One of the things that got people's ire up about the "One More Day" saga was the suggestion that Spider-Man's marriage to Mary-Jane 'aged' him, and made it difficult for readers to relate with him, with Joe Quesada's defense of this viewpoint being to suggest that people who supported the marriage would also 'want to see Spider-Man die'. Whilst the controversy about that story-line has been bashed out in great depth elsewhere, Quesada's suggestion (inadvertent or otherwise) that "marriage = death" has not gone unnoticed.
The now-infamous Avengers issue #200, in which Carol Danvers suddenly becomes pregnant and gives birth at impossible rate of speed, only to learn that her baby is in fact his own father, having used "subtle boosts" from mind control machines to impregnate her in another dimension, an encounter which she has no memory of. And the Avengers are just peachy with this, even allowing her to go back to the other dimension with him despite it being clear the mind control is in effect again. The fact that this entire story was presented as a good thing when it was published only made it a thousand times worse.
- Later writers seemed to recognize this: When Carol next met the Avengers, Carol treated them to an epic What The Hell Hero rant.
Carl Barks claimed he didn't see any of the Unfortunate Implications regarding Scrooge's relationship with Goldie in Back to the Klondike until the censors pointed them out, at which point he wondered what he was thinking. (A-hem...) Not that readers (including Don Rosa) disapproved once the whole story was restored... is that more unfortunate?
And then there's the newspapers. More specifically, there's BC. All the male (hominid) characters have names - Curls, Peter, BC, Wiley, Clumsy Carp, Grog. The women? They're known as "the cute chick" and "the fat broad". No names are ever given for the women.
- And don't forget about the infamous "Islam"◊ comic, or the one involving a menorah turing a christian cross while the final words of Jesus were displayed above it.◊
The Black Panther/Storm marriage. On of the biggest examples was Luke Cage. Not only did he suddenly suffer from great Character Derailment, but he became almost a black supremacist. At the start of Civil War, Cage opted to remain home and bother no one, as he felt that all people have a right to do so. Throughout the Civil War, Cage fought alongside Captain America, as he believe that he had to fight for the rights of his child and the country as a whole. Despite this, during the wedding, he suddenly wanted to just up and leave for Wakanda. To make things worse, he wanted to take all of the black heroes, and only the black heroes with him (his wife, too), and start a black Avengers team. Not only is that racist (bordering elitist), but it is as good as saying that the whole mess is just white people's fault, and that only white people should deal with it. Combined with the fact that when black protesters started to riot outside the White House (for no other reason than Black Panther left early), and a sentinel driven by Rhodey was downed & the protesters saw who he was, and they called him a traitor and sell out because he was black, the overall impression from the comic was that the Registration Act was anti-blacks, and that any black people who supported it were traitors to their own race. Also, when one of his collegues asked Rhodey his opinion on Panther, Rhodey called him a racist for no reason. The comic was so focused on race that it drew unfortunate implications against white and black people: that whites are the cause of America's problems & black people cannot associate with them and that all black people care about is people of their own race.
- Well that's Reginald Hudlin for you. He also gave us a story where Black Panther visited New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and saved the local black community from white supremacist vampires that were sucking them dry (subtle). And then there's the time Black Panther visited a world of alien shapeshifters... all the evil warlike ones had shapeshifted to look like white 1920s gangsters, and all the good peaceloving ones had shapeshifted to look like black Civil Rights leaders... oh and the evil ones were in control and made the good ones fight in a gladiator arena, basically as slaves (even more subtle). And then there's the time Hudlin retold the history of the world, retconning Panther's homeland of Wakanda into a black utopia that was thousands of years more advanced than anywhere else even back in the stone age, remaining ahead of the curve ever since, and eventually, in a flashforward to the future, taking over the world and ushering in a Golden Age, shortly after America elects Luke Cage president.
- There's also the recent suggestion that Wakanda has discovered a cure for cancer... and yet actively refuses to share it with the rest of the world. Because the rest of the world apparently doesn't deserve it.
Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) comments on this in one of his collections. One story had various personal items mysteriously disappearing from people's cubicles. Eventually it turns out that the Security Guard and the Janitor are the culprits. However, this happens in a Sunday strip, and Adams does not do the coloring personally, it's added by an editor at his syndicate. As you might expect from its inclusion here, both of them are depicted with decidedly non-caucasian skin tones. Adams says that somehow they pick the exact worst times to add diversity to the cast...

Close Comics

Song of the South is never coming out of the Disney Vault in North America (it's been available in Europe for some time now). Interestingly, when the film was first released, the NAACP acknowledged "the remarkable artistic merit" of the film, but decried the supposed "impression it gives of an idyllic master-slave relationship". Yes, the film was technically set after the Civil War. But really now, acting like Reconstruction was all singing bluebirds and joyous dancing and smiling beautiful White children for Black people is disingenuous at best. Lost in all the hubbub is the fact that James "Uncle Remus" Baskett was the first actor hired by Disney ("Song of the South" being Disney's first foray into live action) and that he won an Oscar for it. (An "honorary" one, because of racism, but still.) You rock, Mr. Baskett. Although he was banned from the film's premiere.
The "Pastoral Symphony" segment of Fantasia included a centaurette servant named Sunflower, who is part African human, part donkey, performing menial duties for the blonde, white female centaurs, and two attendants to Bacchus who are part African Amazons, part zebra. The servant has been excised from all prints in circulation since 1969, while the zebra centaurettes have always remained in the film.
- Also, while the zebra-girls look more exotic than anything else, Sunflower is the sort of big-lipped, pigtailed caricature that modern audiences find embarrassingly outdated at best and highly offensive at worst.
- Additionally, each centaur pairs up with a centaurette of exactly the same color: white with white, tan with tan, yellow with yellow. The one left over after the others have found their soul mates is a lonely blue centaur, who mopes until the little Eroses find him a blue centaurette. Because sexual implications are fine, as long as there is no centaur miscegenation going on.

Close Disney Animated Canon

The way Christian — the only gay character — in Clueless is deliberately left out of the final wedding scene. Amy Heckerling originally filmed it with him there, as we see in the behind-the-scenes features on the DVD, but took him out when it came to the editing.
In ''The Final Destination, whereas the dumb black-hating redneck received a spectacular and humiliating end in the opening 20 minutes of Number 4, a Korean war vet is fine despite lines like this:
Veteran: I'm not letting you put me in that thing (bathtub), you know how many of "your kind" I killed back in Korea?
Doctor: I'm Chinese.
Veteran: Oh, it's all the same.
- Apparently, it's only worthy of death to hate black people. Or it's to show death is arbitrary, but then why not another anti-black racist?
- Ironically, the vet likely did kill many of the doctor's "kind" in Korea, considering that China participated in the Korean War and is estimated to have suffered the most casualties out of all the participants.
The 1942 movie Holiday Inn... the musical number for February (Lincoln's birthday). Values Dissonance is one thing but this... Holy. Shit. A big blackface minstrel show about Abraham Lincoln. Naturally it gets cut when on TV. (Even in 1942, controversy forced Irving Berlin to alter the offending word "darky" to "negro.")
Rules of Engagement. Someone guns down a crowd of protesters in Yemen... and later on it's revealed that it was okay, because the crowd was all armed and attacking. Even a four year old girl is shown to be armed. Did we mention that when they show the crowd, they try to make all the Arab people as alien and as evil as possible? This may be an Unreliable Narrator at work, but it's all rather vague. As Mark Freeman said:
"The message of Rules of Engagement is the necessity to kill all those who actively oppose the United States and that the murder of women and children is acceptable in such cases."
- This example counts as something of a Shocking Swerve. Throughout the movie, the Marine's attack on the protesting crowd was presented as abhorrent as it was believed that only a few people in the crowd were actually armed and that the Colonel (played by Samuel L. Jackson) overreacted by ordering his men to open fire on the entire crowd, armed or not. It was only after finding the security videotape that the audience finds out that 90+% of the crowd was in on the attack and that Jackson was justified (legally if not morally) in opening fire on a crowd of civilians. That said, it still leaves the fact that an Arab four-year-old girl is still firing a gun at Americans out of hate. And one-handed, despite any recoil, but that's another trope.
- In the DVD commentary the director said the original scene was supposed to be unclear about whether the crowd was actually shooting, or if that's just what Samuel L Jackson convinced himself into believing. However, the test audience wanted a literal interpretation, so that's what the film ultimately got.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen caught a lot of flak for the twin Autobots Skids and Mudflap. The pair talk about busting caps in people's asses, swear constantly, have buck teeth and googly eyes, and have very redneck/"ghetto" accents. One even has a gold tooth.
- The first movie also had, uh, problems with black portrayals. Tyrese played a fairly average soldier, that was okay. But then you had Bernie Mac as a crooked used car salesman, Anthony Anderson as... well, almost every other character Anthony Anderson has played on the big screen, and Jazz, the Autobot who throws about B-boy slang, busts out a breakdance move, and is the only Autobot to be "killed" by Megatron.
  - Except that used car salesmen as a whole are pretty commonly portrayed as somewhat 'sneaky' in film and media and Tyrese Gibson's character wasn't just an 'average soldier'. If anything he was portrayed as pretty much the smartest of the bunch. As for Jazz, he was the first Autobot to die (not the first Transformer though), but much of his screen-time portrayed him as a very noble character and was killed by Megatron due to Heroic Sacrifice (he ordered the others to retreat whilst he stayed behind to fight him). The comment about Anthony Anderson was pretty much on the mark though.
As pointed out by The Nostalgia Critic, Kazaam has a scene where a white kid points out that he owns a genie played by Shaquille O'Neal (who, for those of you living under a rock, is black). Another problem is that the genie sleeps in his bed, showers in front of him, and even kisses him all over when the kid comes back to life. Somebody call child services, quick!
The James Bond movie Live and Let Die has this going on in more ways than one with Solitaire, who is a Vodoun priestess, a skilled cartomancer, and inexplicably the only white person in Dr. Kananga's employ. It's as if she existed to be rescued by Bond from the Scary Black Men. Also, somehow the entire population of Harlem, New Orleans, and San Monique (essentially Haiti) is in on the bad guy's conspiracy. The only non-villainous black cast member is Bond's CIA sidekick. Even the black Bond Girl was The Mole!
- The producers actually wanted a black Solitaire at first (even though she was white in the book), and considered Diana Ross for the role, but felt that it would have been far too controversial in the US and South Africa in the early 70's.
  - Keep in mind, that when compared to the novel it was based on, these are all HUGE improvements. Sure, all the bad guys were still black, but they at least spoke like they had completed Grade School.
- On the subject of James Bond, in order to blend in with the native Japanese villagers, You Only Live Twice had the 6'3" Sean Connery donning yellow-face. It makes him look more like a Romulan.
  - Even more baffling, is that it actually works.
  - It does? Don't you recall there were, like three attempts on his life specifically after he was "disguised"?
Stephen King novel turned film Firestarter had caucasian George C. Scott cast as Native American Big Bad John Rainbird.
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark: White guy sneaks into a South American rain forest and steals a religious artifact from an ancient temple despite the obvious displeasure of the natives. This is not only okay but is actually portrayed as cool and heroic, but when another white (French) guy in turn steals it from him, this is deeply unfair. The same guy later travels to Egypt and steals another ancient artifact, without the Egyptians' permission either. Yes, he stole it from the Nazis, but his intention was to bring it back to the United States, not to the owners of where it was found.
- It belongs in a museum!
- Considering anyone who gets a hold of the Ark has the power of god and could rule the world, it's probably for the best that Indy had it locked up in a government warehouse, not telling anyone what it could do.
  - There's still a hint of the Unfortunate Implications in the final scenes where, apparently, God doesn't really care whether you mess around with one of his sacred artifacts so long as you wear the right clothes and you speak the right words in Hebrew. Rather comprehensively stomped on, though, given God immediately fries the hell out of the guys.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is even worse, especially during the feast scene, with Indians eating live snakes, monkey brains, eyeball soup and giant bugs. A great many Hindus are vegetarians, and monkeys are revered in Hinduism. The film was actually banned in India for its "racist portrayal of Indians and overt imperialistic tendencies".
- The novelization has Indy noting this dietary discrepancy and getting his suspicions piqued for that reason.
  - Weren't said Indians all messed up on mind-control?
  - Not only that they were part of the Thuggee Cult, which was responsible for hundreds of thousands of murders in India during the Colonial Period.
- In the "Making of" DVD, it was revealed that Short Round, the Asian sidekick, was named after the screenwriters' dog.
David Lean's Ryan's Daughter is full of Unfortunate Implications. The supposedly Irish heroine is played by the very English Sarah Miles, given a name (Rosy) that conjures up the English "Rose" more than "Rosaleen", and contrasted heavily with the ugly, loud, cruel and stupid locals played by Irish actors and actresses.
Idiocracy is supposed to be a satire of crass popular culture but ends up advocating social Darwinism and/or eugenics. Individuals are portrayed as universally stupid to the point of being unable to properly function not because a lack of education or opportunity but because they are genetically inferior.
- How about this: why is it that the male lead's midwestern accent sounds intellectual and "faggy" to the morons of the future, but the female lead's accent fits right in?
  - Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that she was already a low class prostitute who spoke mild ebonics? Then again, that may open a whole new can of Unfortunate Implications by seeming to claim blacks are dumb, and then again toward the people who see that via a claim that all black people speak like that, and possibly again with, Oh god *head explodes*
  - You want your head to explode? Consider the implications of having the female lead (who's a prostitute) always saying that her pimp is going to find her — and then, after the credits, we see the pimp awaken from the same sort of suspension chamber she and the hero were placed into... only he's fully-dressed in his pimp-tastic oufit (complete with hat) and his first words are that he's going to find her. The implications? That the world is about to get worse because he's going to be able to operate better in it than the heroes... and that a Black pimp will probably end up ruling the world.
Pink Panther 2: Well, it's a Pink Panther movie, so it's expected that The Hero bumbles around and embarasses himself for the whole movie then redeems himself by figuring out the plan and apprehending the villain at the end. However, Clouseau is racist (at the very least, completely ignorant of political correctness). The Dream Team of inspectors from various countries, though portrayed as generally more competent than Clouseau, suddenly become bumbling idiots themselves in the film's final sequence in one dastardly Humiliation Conga and concede that Clouseau is truly the greatest inspector in the world. In other words, the incompetent racist guy is greater than the all the world's nations working together.
- Clouseau himself is a walking national stereotype, but affectionally played.
The "hopeless, sexless geek" Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles is reportedly absolutely infamous among Asian-Americans.
- Um... the "unfortunate implication" in this case being that if you're a hopeless, sexless geek, you can't get a girlfriend unless you're Asian? It's arguable that Dong winds up better off than the American geeks.
Happy Feet: All of Mumble's sidekicks are rather over-the-top Hispanic stereotypes, and the girls they talk to are likewise. These penguins are meant to be the the positive alternative to the rather over-the-top stereotypically religious and clannish elder penguins.
- To be fair Rockhopper Penguins do quite often live around the South American coast, so this isn't as outrageous as some might think.
300. You can see why Iran got mad at the portrayal of the Persian Empire as an army of insane deformed Camp Gay demons who also include black soldiers and dress in Japanese styles, while the heroes are a militaristic culture of athletic white men who kill unarmed messengers and view violence as an ends to war, rather than a means. To quote the New York Post: "But keeping in mind Slate's Mickey Kaus' Hitler Rule -- never compare anything to Hitler — it isn't a stretch to imagine Adolf's boys at a "300" screening, heil-fiving each other throughout and then lining up to see it again." In fairness, the movie is told by an Unreliable Narrator who is undeniably playing up the gung-ho nationalism, but it would be a stretch to call this film a satire on wartime propaganda.
Shallow Hal: It's all about the inner beauty of Gwyneth Paltrow's character, we're told, and her weight is irrelevant... but we should still laugh at an "apparently" thin woman weighing down the front end of a canoe like a seesaw and wearing a nightie that could cover an elephant.
- Not to mention the real, "ugly" appearance of some of the girls Hal falls for under hypnosis; apparently, those actresses were cast expressly because they don't look attractive.
- This troper was generally disturbed at the way the film implied that inner and outter beauty are mutually exclusive - all of the woman Hal finds attractive are described to be objectively ugly by third parties, leading to the implication that you can't be both beautiful on the outside AND on the inside (Or the opposite, as I am sure there are people who are ugly inside and out).
Bruce Willis' The Kid has its fair share.
- Unpopular at school? Oh, you're fat and have a speech impediment? Well, the only way to become a worthwhile member of society is to learn to fight, lose weight and get a speech therapist. Only then will your life have meaning.
  - The movie is aiming for a subversion of this; how well it manages to reach that is a definite variable milage moment. Specifically, the movie is pointing out that he hated his old self passionately and was trying to stomp it out of himself to be successful, but that only made him a soulless jerk. To become a whole human being he had to learn to love those traits that he had rejected.
- For bonus points, if you've managed to alienate the only woman whose ever meant anything to you through your insensitivity and all-round Jerkassness, then all you need to do is turn up in a Porsche with a sheepish smile and a puppy, and you get instant forgiveness! And possibly sex!
As the Nostalgia Chick pointed out in her review of the Baby Sitters Club movie, the one black girl is given no subplot or depth to her personality unlike all the other girls, most of whom are white. She also made a note that while the series is to be praised for portraying a group of enterprising, financially successful young girls, their business is structured around that of child-care, perhaps leaving the impression that girls are simply best suited for maternal work. She must have been in too much of a hurry to be offended, so we can't blame the Nostalgia Chick for missing the fact that girls too young to get work permits don't have a hell of a lot of career options to start with.
Aside from the more obvious controversy regarding Tropic Thunder (see the page image if you've been living in a cave), there was also a lesser one centered around the "Simple Jack" subplot. Said plot involved Ben Stiller's character playing an extremely mentally retarded character in one of his past films, which ended up being a complete flop. The intent was to mock the use of Inspirationally Disadvantaged characters as Oscar Bait by presenting one who was not at all inspirational; however, the "but not too disabled" subtext, that Jack was a box-office failure because the character was so extremely impaired, seemed to go unnoticed by the filmmakers (though not by disability activists).
- This is actually one of the jokes later on in the film, with Ben Stiller discussing with the "Blacked-Up" guy about why his film failed. He actually responds with almost the exact same words, saying he went "Full retard", and that you should "Never go full retard", citing that every other Inspirationally Disadvantaged character is quite mild in their disability so the audience can relate to them. Played For Laughs, but it actually addresses the point.
- True: the fact that Sam was too disabled, or perhaps too realistically disabled, was the entire point of that part of the movie. Hollywood loves disabled people but only when they act Hollywood Disabled — in other words, endearingly disabled.
  - The character wasn't even realistically disabled though, but an offensively simplistic caricature of a low-IQ personality. He calls dreams "head-movies", for example, even though the former would probably be a simpler to comprehend with limited mental faculties. Of course the movie bombed, which this troper took to mean that critics and viewers were offended, as well.
  - The reason why "I Am Sam" bombed was because the overall message is "if you have a parent that is literally unable to take care of you then you should stay with him anyway!"
In the live-action Aeon Flux movie, one of the minor supporting characters has had her feet surgically replaced with prehensile, hand-like appendages allowing her to manipulate items and climb in a monkey-like fashion. The character is black. (And in the original animated series, she was Russian...)
All the Catholic and/or Irish characters in Adventureland are portrayed in a highly negative manner. Sue O'Malley (who dumps a Jewish character because her family don't want her dating him), her brother Pete (a Jerkass lecher), Lisa P (a fickle Brainless Beauty) and unsympathetic adulterer and The Paolo Mike Connell. Admittedly the main character has an Irish surname too, but he comes across as Ambiguously Jewish.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest pulls a hat trick. During the "cannibal savages" sequence (one!), Will and the other white guys must outclimb all the ethnic people to reach the top of the ravine. They stop to avoid alerting a guard... and then the ethnic crewmembers flash evil grins and start climbing again (two!). But their rope snaps and the cage of bones they're in plummets into the ravine, leaving the crew to be composed entirely of white guys (three!). Oh, Disney.
- To be fair, there were some white crew in the other team, but still, it transformed the crew for 'totally diverse' to 'white only'. Also, it's probably worth pointing out that they weren't just cannibal savages, they were cannibal savages worshipping Jack as a god before they ate him. This is actually the example that made me realise that not all Unfortunate Implications are unintentional.

Close Films

In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien describes Orcs: "... they are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." Not to mention the fact that actual Arabs and north Africans...ish... are supposed to make up a goodly part of the (scary, foreign) human forces of evil. Sauron's human followers were at least acknowledged as human when Sam watches one of them fall in combat and wonders what lies and threats tore him from his family to die in a foreign land... but still, none of them are ever given names, dialog, or motivation.
- Tolkien struggled for his entire life with how to reconcile his strict Catholicism (which viewed evil as an inherently uncreative force) with a race that was Always Chaotic Evil. He never found an answer that satisfied him and apparently Hand Waved the issue by saying that the halfway-decent orcs are just not the ones we see.
- In The Silmarillion, it's directly stated that neither Sauron nor his older and far more powerful boss, Morgoth can create anything, at least nothing alive. As discussed in the movies, Morgoth just twisted some elves around, and after all the battles, some of the orcs must have escaped to the East (along with the rest of the wizards). At least, that's one theory.
- Also, not even the Big Bad Sauron gets any dialog or motivation beyond being The Dragon or The Antichrist to Morgoth. Tolkien went out of his way not to include much detail of the bad guy's side, believing that Evil Is Boring and that putting too much detail of the bad guy's thoughts was dangerous to both the reader and author. He was worried that C.S. Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters, and then furious that Lewis dedicated the book to him.
- Gollum is also described as being black-skinned in the books, never mind that he lived underground for centuries and never saw the sun in that time. The brief glimpse we see of him in the movie of The Fellowship of the Ring follows this, but he was made pale in the other two movies.
- Tolkien also said in Letters that he saw the dwarfs (he hated the word dwarves) as being the Jews, which doesn't mesh well with the fact that Tolkien was a cultural supremacist. Granted, showing slight signs of possible anti-Semitism was not at all uncommon at the time, but it is a bit cringe-worthy to read nowadays.
  - On the other hand, he wrote dwarfs as being uniformly badass. Hell, the whole motivation for the heroes in The Hobbit was to restore a fantastically wealthy and powerful dwarf kingdom.
  - Also from Letters: "if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people." "I do not regard the (probable) absence of Jewish blood as necessarily honourable (...) and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine."
A good argument can be made that HP Lovecraft's entire body of work can be traced back to a combined fear of sex, foreigners, and seafood. His later work tones down the racism, and now our "genetically inferior" villains are just deformed or inbred.
- Not all the unfortunate-ness of Lovecraft is implied. On more than one occasion he came right out and made statements showing a degree of racism shocking even for his era. A good (and shocking) example is this passage, the final twist of "Medusa's Coil" (ghostwritten for someone else, but it's his):
  "[She] was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe's most primal grovellers.... [T]hough in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress."
The "good guy" species in Redwall all speak perfectly civil, upper-class English... except for the moles, who have an accent that sounds like that of the West Country, an English region more associated with rural life and stereotypes (and, hence, the working class). The Always Chaotic Evil vermin? Lower-class, mostly Cockney, slang, for the most part, with the exceptions of mustelids. There are perhaps four vermin who pull the Heel Face Turn in the entire series. Only one of them survives. The upshot is not so much "lower class = bad", but that being working class is okay as long as you have the decency to be a nice, earthy country-type and not some inner-city urban thug.
- There's also an incident in Loamhedge that is... less than sensitive to wheelchair-users. Martha, who has been confined to a wheelchair all her life, gets up and walks to save the Abbot; she says afterward that she was only impaired by a lack of willpower.
- A majority of the Redwall books are not too bad, but the most recent, Eulalia, is So Bad Its Horrible because of all the Unfortunate Implications. Let's see, an innocent vole is forced to dress up like a vermin and used as a trick and the Redwallers badly hurt him. This would be fine if it acknowledged that it was an accident, that because of the disguise they thought he was an enemy, but they justify it because the vole was rude to a protagonist earlier. So even when the Redwallers realize that the vole had no choice he gets treated horribly, and then when he tries to steal the Sword of Martin as revenge for his ordeal... the Redwallers kill him.
A Noble Savage tribe in Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series are also called "mud people", but that's the name they proudly take for themselves; they took the name from their use of mud as camouflage (presumably after watching Predator).
The Chronicles of Narnia are more or less permanently under fire for two major issues. One controversy is the Calormenes, evil Arabs who embody most topical vices. The other one is about Susan Pevensie's absence from Paradise at the end of The Last Battle, sometimes interpreted as "being barred from Heaven for liking lipstick and nylons."
- Susan was absent from Paradise because she wasn't dead. The complaints about her stem from the fact that she's become materialistic and has stopped believing that Narnia is real.
- Lewis also has a mildly schizophrenic attitude towards women. On the one hand, Calormene treatment of women, particularly forced marriage, is treated with disapproval and most female protagonists are portrayed as fairly independent and capable (ineffectual women are treated with scorn). On the other, a generally patronising sense of "that's no good for a girl" pervades discussions of Lucy and Susan's participation in battle, and the most powerful women in the Narnian universe are antagonists.
  - Often the female protagonists are more mature and reasonable than their male counterparts. Susan is the one who abandons them at the end (saying that their trips to Narnia never really happened and were just childish games), up until then it's Edmund and Eustace who come across the worst.
- Lewis didn't like the idea of women in combat (Father Christmas says as much when giving Susan her bow), but saw no problem with them being competent in other areas. (This is slightly aleviated in the Disney film of Prince Caspian, where Susan Took A Level In Badass and actually puts that bow to good use.)
  - That's debatable, at least in the context of Wardrobe. Specifically, Father Christmas says "wars are ugly when women fight". It's not that women can't fight, it's that they usually don't unless things get bad. Warfare and battle are very much a men's sport in the Narnia books, and not treated as the carnage-and-bloodshed affairs we imagine today.
  - Anybody notice that in the film version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the visual imagery in the final battle suggests that the suspiciously Aryan-looking Peter is using tactics he learned from those guys who were bombing his home at the beginning of the movie? What were their names again?
- Since Lewis described Susan and Lucy as being incredibly beautiful as adults, it probably wasn't Susan's pursuit of femininity which bothered him more than the fact that she denied Aslan and Narnia. Remember, Aslan = Jesus and Narnia = heaven, so basically it's his way of sticking in the moral "if you turn your back on Jesus, you won't get in to heaven". Of course, she was the only one not to die at the end, but then one could argue that if she had still been a friend of Narnia, she would have joined in the plan to return to save Narnia and thus died with the others. Which leads to another Unfortunate Implication: mass deaths are perfectly alright, so long as you hold to a certain set of beliefs? Sounds rather creepy to this Troper...
- Then there's The Silver Chair, where Jill tells the prince that people "don't think much of men who are bossed around by their wives" where she's from.
  - Though given that "where she's from" is early/mid 20th century Britain, isn't this just a perfectly accurate statement of the time? It may have Unfortunate Implications to a modern audience, but few readers at the time it was published would have seen anything out of the ordinary with that statement.
  - For that matter, in early 21st century America (and probably Britain as well), it's still pretty accurate. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't true.
- Lewis also manages to communicate through his description of Eustace's parents and the school they send him to that he thinks "liberal" and "progressive" mean "a bunch of damn hippies who want to overturn the traditions that made Britain great". Examples of these sins include children calling teachers or parents by their first names and coeducational schools.
  - And a school which doesn't push religious values or use physical discipline is depicted as a hellhole with teachers completely blind to the fact that a group of bullies keeps the rest of the students under their reign of terror.
  - That one is probably based on his own experiences in an English school- in his autobiography, he talks about the "Bloods" (basically schoolyard aristocrats) being abusive and tyrannical without the censure and even with the support of school officials.
  - Also, there may be a crack at Eustace being Quaker, since refusal to bear arms is apparently another part of his jerkish, hypocritical ways.
  - Lewis also takes special care to point out the principal of Eustace's school is female, with the implication of either "isn't it just typical of those damn liberal schools to have female principals?" or "isn't it just typical of those damn female principals to run liberal schools?"
Ah, Unfortunate Implications. Where would Twilight be without you?
- Gender: Bella seems incapable of doing anything by herself without being almost killed/raped or without getting severely injured. She faints at the smell of blood, is ridiculously clumsy, must be rescued constantly, and is loved by every single male that sets eyes on her. On the other hand, a lot of the other female characters (with the exception of Angela and Esme) are either shallow, immature, self-centered, bitchy, or ditzy. Charlie, a man who has lived on his own for years, can't cook. Spaghetti. He messes up spaghetti noodles. Also note that werewolf or vampire males can have children, yet the females of both species are infertile.
- Race: The character Jacob is a Native American who turns into a werewolf (read: an animal).
  - The whole Cold Ones story, with its seemingly unironic use of the term "pale-faces", and basically the idea of inventing legends and customs for a real culture that already has them. Pretend Jacob was telling a "lost Koran story" involving the word "infidels" and you might see what we mean.
  - The perfect Cullens, and indeed all the incredibly perfect race of vampires, all have brilliant, beautiful shiny white skin (regardless of their ethnicity as mortals). Also, the simpler, more "primitive" werewolves are all Native American, and highly stereotyped at that.
  - The designated villains, the Vampires who do feed on humans in the first book, are described as wearing rags and their features are non-descript. This comes off as rich, beautiful people who don't need to survive as good while poor people trying to survive are evil. Definite unfortunate implications.
  - This is why the town of Forks wouldn't actually allow the movie to be filmed there — the Quileute tribe were too offended by their portrayal in the book. Who can blame them? Also, Stephenie Meyer obviously hasn't been to Forks, making her a victim of Hollywood Geography. Meyer's portrayal of the Olympic Peninsula is... well, it is wrong.
  - Meyer has been to Forks, only about a year or two after she wrote the book.
- Relationships: Stefanie Meyer has said she believes Edward to be the perfect guy. This is why he does things like telling Bella she's an idiot all the time, telepathically stalking her, listening in on her conversations, secretly breaking into her house at night and sitting in her bedroom so he can spend hours on end watching her sleep. She's flattered when she finds out, and happily lets him keep doing so. Locking her in her house and breaking her car so she can't visit her friends... hard to imagine a more perfect beau.
  - The recurring theme that love can conquer anything — even when one of the persons involved repeatedly tells the other to leave them alone lest they fly into an uncontrollable frenzy and murder them. Edward warns her. A lot. Bella persists, nonetheless.
  - Unfortunately, in both Twilight and The Host, Meyer tends to depict "love can conquer anything" as "If you just keep letting him abuse you and never fight back, eventually that will make him love you."
  - Jacob counts too. He decides that the best way to make Bella realize her non-existent love for him is... to threaten to kill himself if she doesn't kiss him. And it works! Turns out Bella really did have feelings for him! And it's not the first time he does it, either. When he first forcefully kisses her, Bella's own father laughs and congratulates Jacob. Then Bella forgives both her dad and Jacob. Even "perfect guy" Edward shrugs the reaction off, saying he was used to Bella being overly nice.
  - Sam and Emily: Sam and Leah loved each other until Leah's cousin, Emily, visited. Sam imprinted on Emily, and promptly dumped Leah. When Emily refused to go out with him, Sam "wolfed out" and tore half her face off. Sam offered to throw himself under a bus, so Emily felt sorry for him and decided to be with him. Guilt trips equal love.
  - Meyer attempts to handwave this by saying it wasn't an attack (the wolf forms are still sapient), but rather the result of being too close to the "fursplosion", with the guy spontaneously quadrupling in size while claws and teeth shoot out everywhere. But the entire setup is still incredibly disturbing, especially as the grounds for a romance. And especially considering even if it was an accident, he wolfed out because he was so upset with Emily refusing to go out with him in the first place, paralleling many real life domestic abuse cases.
  - "Imprinting": Love At First Sight? Potentially cute. One-sided obsession at first sight? Not cute. One-sided obsession at first sight where the target's expected to be flattered and eventually reciprocate? Waaaay not cute. One-sided obsession where the target expected to eventually give in and sex you up is a toddler? BAD TOUCH! ABORT! ABORT!
  - Actually, given that Jacob is drawn to Bella the first time he sees her and then inexplicably loses any and all romantic interest in her once her daughter is born, one can only assume he has imprinted on Renesmee while she is still an unfertilized egg. Good thing Edward and Bella decided to have the wedding when they did, because otherwise Jacob's soulmate never would have really existed...
- Age: Bella displays complete revulsion at the mere thought of being a day older than a teenager, at one point having a nightmare in which she is sixty-plus years older than Edward and treating it as one of the most horrible things that could ever happen to her. This is part of the reason why she's so desperate to become a vampire: so she can remain young and perfect forever. Because we all know things like personal maturity aren't as important as looking pretty.
  - Ewdard, on the other hand, is 100 years old. It's like Bella is dating an old man. But Edward doesn't look old, so it's totally not creepy.
  - I thought the reason she didn't want to get older wasn't necessarily because she didn't want to look old, but because she didn't want to be older than Edward. Because, you know, the man in the relationship is always supposed to be older.
  - Let's face it: Twilight sucks.
The Legend of Rah and the Muggles. Not only does the intro casually drop the phrase "ethnically impure" in a book intended to be read by six-year-olds, but the stunted, deformed titular creatures are supposed to have evolved from the various "ethnically impure" people left behind After The End. Not to mention the barely touched-upon inferred nuclear apocalypse.
The Robert Heinlein book Farnham's Freehold demonstrates the evils of racism by showing a future in which blacks are the dominant group and oppress whites in parallel to contemporary oppression of blacks. Unfortunately, the blacks in the story eat whites, which suggests a message that blacks really are savages deserving of oppression.
- Heinlein has been called racist, a claim based on stories such as The Sixth Column, which describes the Unites States under occupation by Pan-Asians (real-world mutual enemies Japan and China). The heroes save the day by creating a race-selective weapon that kills all yellow people. However, that story idea was from John Campbell, and Heinlein supposedly tried to tone down the racism. He was still unhappy with the lingering racist themes. In other books, Heinlein was explicitly anti-racist. In Tunnel in the Sky, for example, the protagonist is implied to be black, confirmed by Word Of God. Likewise, the protagonist(s?) of I Will Fear No Evil is/are a black woman. (Yes, yes, it's more complicated than that, but that's it in the simplest possible terms.) Another Heinlein novel, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress portrays lunar culture as being entirely post-racial, with a protagonist of mixed Celtic, Hispanic and Central Asian decent. Furthermore, the titular character of Friday is an Atificial Human made by taking chromosomes from 23 individuals of all ethnicitices and who is described in the text as looking vaugely Indian or Pacific Islander (of course, this didn't stop the publishers from makeing her Aryan in the cover art).
In The Wheel of Time, no couple can live happily ever after until the man is more powerful than the woman, or at least more dominant. Domon defeating Egeanin; Nynaeve marrying Lan after she learns to submit to saidar, and the marriage vows which mean that whichever one gives the orders in public will have to obey in private; Tallanvor and Morgase getting together after she's dethroned and working as a lady's maid; Bryne and Siuan. To name but several.
- And then there's the spanking...
- And the fact that most of the women are openly misandrist. Is it any surprise that everyone is dancing The Masochism Tango?
- And the cover of the second book, in which the artist depicted the Always Chaotic Evil half-animal half-human Trollocs as black men, while the heroes are all very white. Lovely.
Gone with the Wind. Goddamn. Period-Appropriate Racism, and all that, but... how exactly does that explain the fact that all the white people speak the King's English and all the black people speak in in a highly stereotyped dialect? Especially considering the dialect of the southern aristocracy wasn't even the King's English in Real Life.
- Malcolm X reported being humiliated in the theater at the "I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies" bit. To be fair, though, not only is that probably meant to suggest (in the book) how they simply sounded to the bigoted southerners, but there is also a rather stereotypical view of the white Irish.
You could fill a book with all the unfortunate implications that crop up in Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle. Most, but not all, of them are related to the elves that can't be argued with.
- Veganism is the way to go and anyone who eats meat is a horrible, horrible person who doesn't value the sanctity of life (thankfully, Eragon seems to be a little more reasonable about this lately).
  - However, the Dragons (who even the elves suck up to) think that their vegetarianism is ridiculous.
- People who put their stock and faith in gods and religion are morons believing in fairy-tales, and atheists are grounded squarely in reality despite evidence of magic and supernatural beings.
- A woman who is able to take care of herself is an unusual occurrence. (You're trying too hard, Paolini.)
  - Among human women, at least. All elf women are, like the rest of the elves, ten times as competent as any human, male or female. (Which in itself has some Unfortunate Implications.)
- The hero cannot truly face evil unless all evidence of his scars (both literal and figurative) and trials are swept under the rug and "cured"... and he's a half-elf. On a related note, not having scars makes you better than people who do.
  - Possible aversion, by the third book other major "Good" characters have hideous scars, including the leader of the Resistance and the brother of the Hero.
S.L. Viehl's Jorenians are monogamous (and invariably heterosexual) enough to make the Moral Guardians weep with shame. In the second book of the StarDoc series, the vengeful Ktarka — who's not allowed to marry, because she proposed to someone who turned out to already be engaged — is making advances on the heroine in between attempts to destroy her. Another Jorenian character seems nearly as shocked at the fact that Ktarka was putting the moves on another woman as at the fact that she had already killed several characters and was planning on killing at least three more, one of them a little kid. (Someone must have called Viehl on it: Later in the series, she paired up the gay secondary character Hawk with a male Jorenian...and tossed in an anvilicious message about how same-sex marriage is okay.)
In Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, everything is a symbol relating to an overall point about race relations. More than once a character who expresses a view different from Ellison's is revealed to be blind — because they don't see the truth, get it? One can't help but wonder whether the book's ever been printed in Braille...
TV series Red Dwarf releases a few tie-in novels. So far so good. First two are published as a single book in America. Also good. What's not good is that, in the cover illustration, the two black characters, Lister and the Cat, are replaced by a white guy and an actual cat, respectively...
Not even His Dark Materials is free of this, as a Reason.com review pointed out: Its kind of ironic that Phillip Pullman labels other works like Narnia as sexist and full of class snobbery, when Will the male hero, is the one who gets to fight the most and even becomes the chosen one in control of the mystical Subtle Knife, while Lyra's greatest feats are accomplished by "feminine" wiles like lying and manipulation; Also the class snobbery manifests in that Lyra is the (illegitimate) daughter of aristocrats and is vastly superior in intellect and wits than his friends in Oxford (who also happen to be the children of servants) and Will being the son of a Royal Marines officer.
Sir Ian Flemming's James Bond novels. Particularly Live And Let Die and Goldfinger
- Live And Let Die features a Scary Black Man as the Big Bad. Acceptable. He is also the Dictator of his own Caribbean islan, populated entirely by black people. Acceptable. All of the citizens of said island are apparently in on his evil plot? Unfortunate. As are all of the black people in New Orleans?? Uh...
- Auric Goldfinger's iconic Hench Man, Odd Job, is a Korean who likes to eat cats. Apparently cats are a delicacy to the Korean people.
  - Bond even gets an inner monologue about how Korean people are the most treacherous people in the world.
  - Oh, and all the lesbian subtext with Pussy Galore in the film? It ain't subtext in the book. Bond literally bangs her straight at the end of the book. Rape? Why, what's that?

Close Literature

Doctor Who: The Doctor's first companion, Susan Foreman, was originally not supposed to be related to him. The powers that be made her into his granddaughter because they feared he would come across as a child molester (50something man travelling with a 15-year-old girl. Or at least a girl who appeared to be 15, as Susan was from Gallifrey and probably older than she looked) In The Sensorites, the Doctor says that a young human woman is a few years older than Susan, so maybe not.
- The new series has its share as well. "Silence in the Library" had Miss Evangelista, a pretty woman patronized by her team for being pretty but dumb. She even says, perfectly seriously, that she was pleased when her father told her she had the IQ of plankton. After she is later killed, her "data ghost" is saved in the titular Library's data core with transcription errors that make her virtual reconstruction smart... at the cost of her pretty face. All of which seems to imply that pretty = stupid while smart = ugly. "Brilliant and unloved," eh?
- There's a blink and you'll miss it moment at the end when Miss Evagenlista with her face fixed replies "aren't we all" to the words "aren't I a clever girl", implying that when her face gets better she keeps the intelligence. But of course that leaves "If you are ugly no one can or will ever love you in any way."
- The promotional buzz made by BBC producers announcing Martha Jones (portrayed by Freema Agyeman) as "the Doctor's first ever black companion". Deftly ignoring the fact that Mickey Smith (Rose Tyler's ex-boyfriend, portrayed by Noel Clarke) had played a significant role in several Season One and Two stories, and had even travelled in the TARDIS for a few episodes.
- There are a whole lot of unfortunate implications with Martha when you consider that she's the first companion the Doctor has explicitly not-liked-as-much-as-the-last-one, where the last one was a moderately clever but undereducated blonde white teenager and this one is a highly educated black woman.
- In general, this troper has always been disturbed by the sexist implications of many Doctor-single female companion relationship in the classic series (particularly the Sixth Doctor and Peri) if we think of the opposite traits: Alien vs. Human, Brave vs. Scared, Smart vs. Dumb, all under Male vs. Female. See what I mean?
  - Hang on, are you saying that Leela and Ace were scared and/or dumb a lot? And most companions were dumber than the Doctor, except for maybe Romana.
  - Note the use of 'many' rather than 'all', It's perhaps fair to say that in many ways Leela, Ace and Romana were exceptions rather than rules when it came to female companions.
  - It's not just the classic series either; many have noted that once you move past the publicity surrounding how the new companions are more 'feminist' than the old ones, certain unfortunate implications can still arise about the male / female dynamic in the series, particularly as concerns the shipping: note how Rose eventually appears willing to almost completely subsume herself in the Doctor's lifestyle to the complete exclusion of everything else in her life (family, friends, her old life, etc) in order to stand by her man, or how Martha — apparently a talented doctor — is largely defined through her run on the show by her unrequited love for the Doctor.
Battlestar Galactica:
- Razor added a lesbian backstory to one of the series' biggest psychos (with her former lover being one of those on the receiving end of her hardcase-ness, subsequently losing it a bit herself). In the DVD Commentary for it, Ronald D. Moore admitted accidentally walking right into Unfortunate Implications territory.
- And now we've got another gay character on the show... and it's Felix Gaeta. The same Gaeta who unintentionally collaborated with the Cylon government on New Caprica, and as of season 4.5 is guiding the bloody Zarek-led mutiny into new depths of dickery. Mind you, it also turns out Hoshi is gay, and we've seen no villainy from him, but this makes, what, the second queer character who goes all nuts in military circumstances and believes the ends justify the means?
  - Possibly subverted slightly in the Series Finale, The one person Admiral Adama trusts to command the fleet in his absence as the New Admiral is Hoshi himself, who to This Troper seems to be one of the most level-headed characters accross the entire SERIES.
Firefly has a few:
- The portrayal of the Reavers who seem to be the analog of Native Americans in this pseudo-western verse. The Reavers do seem to fill the role usually held by Native Americans in most westerns by being inscrutable others who attack without warning or reason. The fact that they're referred to as "scalping" their victims at one point and all seem to have long black hair really doesn't help.
  - In the interests of fairness, they look more like dark-haired Caucasians than Native Americans, and scalping is one of the milder things they're accused of (they're reportedly cannibals, specifically cannibals who like their meat extremely fresh... as in, still living), which is not a particularly pervasive Native American stereotype.
- The whole "Half-Chinese fictional universe, with no East-Asian actors in speaking parts" thing...
The first episode of Phoenix Nights plays with this trope. A local folk band called "Half A Shilling" perform at the opening of the titular social club; their signature song "Send The Buggers Back" is ostensibly about sending back a pair of shoes but with Anvilicious racial subtext (the shoes were black when they should have been white). When Peter Kay's character realises this (with the help of a journalist covering the event) he goes into a blind panic and tries to get them off the stage.
Compare the original minority members of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers to the colors they were chosen to wear: a black as the Black Ranger, and an Asian as the Yellow Ranger. When the characters had to be replaced, the production made sure their respective roles got a Race Lift.
- Series developer Tony Oliver admitted when recasting Trini from the Hispanic Audri Du Bois to the Asian Thuy Trang after the pilot episode this genuinely never occurred to anyone in production. For whatever it's worth, Jason/Red's actor is Caucasian, Native American and Asian in varying degrees.
- Having learned their lesson, Rangers didn't have those race/color combinations again until Operation Overdrive (season 15). Considering that by then black cast members have worn many other colors (red, green, blue, yellow, everything except maybe pink or white — hmm), having one as the Black Ranger might have escaped notice this time... if they hadn't copied Super Sentai directly and made him a professional thief. *facepalm*
- Fun observation: A Caucasian has played a Black Ranger, but we have yet to see a black actor play a White Ranger.
  - Let's be fair; there has been at least one minority White Ranger: Trent of Dino Thunder was Hispanic.
  - Wasn't he evil for half of the show?
  - He was a Sixth Ranger... Of course he was evil!
  - Let's be really fair; there are already enough Unfortunate Implications to having a hero called the White Power ranger.
  - Sometimes a kid's show is just a kid's show.
  - This Troper also noted that the first Pink Ranger was - of course - a perky brunette girl named Kimberly.
An episode of Psych dealing with a haunted house: Gus' fear of ghosts came across as surprisingly similar to that displayed by Ethnic Scrappy black characters like those played by Stepin Fetchit and Mantan Moreland instead of Wrong Genre Savvy. Gus' character has been long established as less brave than Shaun (since childhood, even), but still. Not to mention that trait's gotten played up more as the show goes on.
- On the other hand, Gus' fear goes hand-in-hand with the inversion/subversion of Salt And Pepper that's the entire premise of the series. You can't win!
Heroes has a number of unfortunate implications in the series.
- Race:
  - The majority of black and Latino characters are criminals, or put in position of being criminals, Scrappies or Magical Negroes. A special mention should be made for season 3 villain Knox, a black man who is not only a criminal, but who has the power to...grow stronger by terrifying people. He also enjoys it.
  - Hiro's Flanderized buffoonishness, particularly the arc in which he mentally reverted to a 10-year-old, plays to some unfortunate stereotypes of Asian men. Ando's initial obsession with porn/Niki did too, but that character trait was fortunately phased out pretty early in the series.
  - In the episode "Cautionary Tales," HRG (a white man) accuses Mohinder (an Indian man) of getting too deeply involved with the Company, and finally concludes in shock and disgust, "You've gone native!" The problem? "Gone native" is a derogatory expression left over from the British Empire, used for white men who adapted too much to the "native" dress and customs of their colonial subjects, including... you guessed it... Indians. So Yeah.
- Gender:
  - The majority of empowered humans with abilities they can use to successfully fight off Sylar are male.
  - The majority of female characters are either manipulative or helpless, rather than proactive.
  - Candice used her illusion powers to fit a specific definition of beautiful, telling Micah [and the viewers] that she was fat and unattractive in her true form...which viewers only saw from the back after Sylar killed her. An official series webcomic showed that as a teenager she was very overweight with a stereotypical goth/"emo" look.
  - There's a pretty frightening amount of trophy or Disposable Women, or women just plain written with the intention of being sympathetic but not coming off that way.
  - And Maya hits both race and gender unfortunateness: her powers are triggered by a hyper-emotional state, which happens with irritating frequency, playing to both "hysterical woman" and "overly passionate Latina" stereotypes. The fact that she needs men (Sylar, her brother) to control her only adds to this. She's also victimized on a disturbingly regular basis.
The whole Dark Willow storyline in Buffy. Yes, the writers can claim that had she still been with Oz he would have died and she'd react in the same way, but we're left with what they put on screen: a scenario where one half of a lesbian couple is shot dead, and the other half goes crazy, as per many portrayals in less enlightened times. And it just happened to take place after a day of unmagicked, undisguised sex. Unfortunate? You bet. In addition, the writers blathering on about how they liked to use magic as a metaphor for lesbian sex. Didn't they consider that making Willow an abusive magic junkie might send out the wrong message?
- The show contains an awful lot of female empowerment, though it often goes too far and comes off as sexist against men. One of the most blatant examples is "Beauty and the Beasts", which told us that all men are literally hormone-driven, woman-beating animals.
Many episodes of MST3K are chocked with Unfortunate Implications, due to the sordid, dated, and low quality nature of many of their films. Probably the worst offender was The Wild Wild World of Batwoman, which featured an army of dim-witted, easily kidnapped women, a female character being led around on a leash by a lesser mook, and a painful seance that was frequently interrupted by a gibberish-speaking Chinese man. Other shameful moments of the series include:
- The "Hitler Building" sequence from Invasion of the Neptune Men. The fact that the filmmakers were using actual brutal WWII footage for their trite little space movie really stuck in the craw of many of the MST 3 K writers and cast members.
- Unless you count the entirety of the KTMA-era episode The Million Eyes of Sumuru, a film which packs the collective misogyny of 100 Bond movies into a mere two hours. The most offensive scene involves one of the title character's attractive female lackeys killing an innocent female prisoner so she could drag the hunky hero into her cell and make out with him. And this was played for laughs.
- What about Hobgoblins? The main character's virginal girlfriend is shrewish, unpleasant, and no fun to be around until she's mind-controlled into dancing at a strip club, and afterwards decides she likes the attention she gets as a sex object. As Crow says: "Yes, girls, this is the only way to make your boyfriends like you!"
- The extremely bizarre Mexican Santa Claus has Santa's workshop staffed not by elves but from children from around the globe. Apparently there are no child labor laws in the North Pole...
- The helpers from Africa wear sackcloths, bones in their noses and hair, and dance to drums. As Servo declared as one of the African kid actors: "Bone in my hair? I'm from Detroit!"
- Angels' Revenge features a Sassy Black Woman character, as well as a "Vietnamese" character named Keiko who uses a katana (while everyone else uses guns), teaches karate, and gets introduced with a gong noise. At one point Mike groans: "This is offending one-celled animals."
- The scene where the women actually torture a drug dealer for information by threatening to castrate him. This scene is played for laughs, with one of the titular Angels being a cop! There's a really, really creepy focus shot on the little 13-year-old girl who is smiling smugly during this entire scene. Yeah, heroines for the ages, these girls are.
- The short Once Upon a Honeymoon, where the wife is singing about her greatest wishes, which include the stove working properly, the sink not leaking and the refrigerator door staying closed. "Aim HIGH, sister!"
- Then there's Horror of Party Beach which features Eulabelle, the fretful, superstitious "Mammy"-style servant. "It's da voodoo, dat's whut it is!" Which made it all the more gratifying when Mike and the bots pointed out that Eulabelle was, probably accidentally, the only character in the film who was at all intelligent or likable.
Hogan's Heroes: Women are usually pretty trusting to the point of stupidity, much like every other non-Ally character on the show. In one episode Hogan forces his way into a woman's apartment with flowers, saying that he's watched and admired her from afar for months (even though she's only been in town a few weeks), tells her to turn the radio up loud, and proceeds to get her very drunk to the point of unconsciousness. When he leaves he stuffs a thousand marks in bills into her hand from the bank they'd robbed by drilling through her wall, which was the entire point of getting in there in the first place. Hogan doesn't seem to worry about what she's going to think when she regains consciousness.
In the Disney Channel Made For TV Movie High School Musical the leading male's Black Best Friend is paired off with the the leading girl's Black Best Friend in a classic case of Token Shipping. The sequel has The Libby batting eyes at said leading male and saying the line "We're skin tone compatible!" She meant that they both looked good in teal, but that does sound a little weird coming from a white girl who's romantic rival is Hispanic...
The final episode of Star Trek The Original Series, "Turnabout Intruder", in which a woman pulls a Grand Theft Me on Kirk to break through the glass ceiling, ends with a pretty blatant Stay In The Kitchen-ish aesop: "Her life could have been as rich as any woman's. If only... If only..."
- The anti-feminist anvil is hammered further with the ambitious woman being presented as an Ax Crazy Mad Scientist who immediately turns into a hysterical Umbridge after taking over. Even in the utopian future of Star Trek, it seems women cannot aspire to lives "as rich" as those open to men, and are barred from service as starship captains. This embarrassment has since been Ret Conned out by attributing it to one of the woman's delusions, despite Kirk's explicit on-screen acceptance of both the accuracy of her accusations, and the injustice of the policy.
  - if they ever examine it in the new movies perhaps they could make it so women can't captain deep space/first contact missions like the Enterprise's because of unknown native attitudes or something. Which would make her limited to less exciting, potentially less rewarding missions.
  - That has some serious Fridge Logic to it. Who's to say there wouldn't be species where males are seen as inferior? Of course, Most Writers Are Male, so...
- Let's face it, the entire original Star Trek series is pretty terrible about that whole gender equality thing. There are rarely, if ever female officers with ranks higher than Lieutenant. And really, it seems that female characters aside from Uhura exist to develope massive crushes on the main male characters.
Enterprise had the slightly unfortunate gimmick of the Andorians calling humans "pink-skins"... Apparently they didn't notice the black helmsman. But then, given Mayweather's, er, "prominent" role in the series, can you blame them? TWoP calls him "Maywho?" for a reason. Hoshi receives more attention than Mayweather, but that's not saying much. The two of them are so eclipsed by Archer/T'Pol/Trip that when their Mirror Universe doubles take over, killing all in their way, it looks like a Take That against themselves. Even the opening theme of Star Trek Enterprise falls under this. The montage in said theme was ostensibly supposed to show the "firsts" of human space exploration which would eventually lead to warp. Thing is, all of the scenes used were from the American space program, which would ostensibly be more familiar to the American audience. This, of course, doesn't take into account the fact that in Real Life the Soviets were ahead most of the time in the Space Race, especially during the earlier stages. Some Russian sci-fi fans were reportedly highly offended.
- Evidently, when asked why Yuri Gagarin (the first man in space) and other Soviet space heroes weren't seen as important enough to make the title credits, one of the creators suggested that the Soviet space program was important, because it spurred on the Americans to greatness. It veers right past Unfortunate Implications and into Unfortunate Shit Said Outright.
The creators of Star Trek always prided themselves on its message against prejudice, both through metaphor and example (the fact that a black woman is on the bridge with Kirk and no-one thinks it's unusual). One unanticipated consequence however was that gay fans of the show would take this lesson to heart and call for a gay character on Star Trek The Next Generation or its spin-offs, or at least have a reference to the fact that homosexuality exists in the Federation. Despite trying to fob fans off with a couple of Very Special Episodes on the subject, there was never any unambiguous sign that any main character, guest star, or expendable ensign had ever had or contemplated having sex with someone of the same gender. One argument by The Powers That Be was that they couldn't do it without belittling gays ("What would you have us do, put pink triangles on them? Have them sashay down the corridor?"). Then comes the Deep Space Nine episodes set in the Mirror Universe. Which sent the message that it is possible to be openly gay. But only evil people do it. Apparently only the Expanded Universe novels can get away with multiple gay and lesbian characters.
- Word Of God is, "Sexuality is a 20th-century problem — not a 24th one.". In that context, '"openly gay" people would be as silly as "openly straight" is today... and would stop the series from being greenlit.
- Which would have been easier to believe if almost every character hadn't been openly straight. Honestly... it's all about paying lip service to diversity while making sure any diversity that's the least bit transgressive is explained away as "not really existing any more, so we don't have to write about it and scare the insecure fanboys".
- It should be noted that there were plans to have an openly gay character in Star Trek: First Contact (Lt. Hawk, played by Neal Mc Donaugh), but the idea was scrapped at the last minute. Lt. Hawk is (purposefully and prominently) present, relationship and all, in the novel "Rogue", which is part of the "Section 31" series of books.
- One episode featured Guinan explaining love to a newly created android; Guinan's actress Whoopi Goldberg successfully changed the line from "when a man loves a woman" to "when two people are in love". An attempt to include a same-sex couple in the background of the same scene was scrapped at the last minute.
- And how about "The Outcast" where a race of mostly asexual/agendered aliens persecutes a woman for having a gender and entering into a heterosexual relationship with Riker? It doesn't help that all the aliens were played by female actors. Frakes himself has said the episode, which was supposed to be an allegory of homophobia might have worked a little better if his love interest had been a man.
- Let's not forget that every single human/alien hybrid has always had to struggle with his or her "heritage" from either side of his or her ancestry, no matter where and how said person was raised. Then there's also the tendency for non-human races to all act exactly the same way and have only one major culture. Echoes too closely to the racist belief that certain races are naturally predisposed to act a certain way just because they are members of said race rather than, y'know, trivial things like environment, culture, and personal tendencies.
- Spock can understand Romulan technology from the future no less because the two species share a common evolutionary ancestry? That's like me being able to perfectly understand a 12th century German text because humans are all from the same planet, right?
- There's an episode of Next Gen where Worf finds a planet with some lost Klingons "unaware of their heritage" and takes it on himself to immediately teach them to kill things, get drunk, sing, and follow the PROPER Klingon behaviors and religion. It's really quite odd if you stop to think about it. To the writers' credit, they did later bring this up with Worf's son Alexander having no interest in doing things Just Because He's Klingon, and Worf seemingly accepting that... until in DS 9 they reversed course again and declared that Worf and son could not possibly get along with Junior being anything other than a cookie-cutter Klingon. Argh.
Star Trek Voyager has a lot of Unfortunate Implications in the form of Chakotay. While the writers may have wanted to add even more diversity to the cast, their portrayal of Native Americans composed of a mishmash of several different (and often erroneously portrayed) cultural practices of several Native American groups. The end result is so stereotypical that it's bound to have come off as quite offensive. It doesn't help that the episode "Tattoo" basically reveals that a group of aliens visited the Native Americans in the distant past and "uplifted" them from being primitive savages by giving them culture. Sci Fi Debris derisively noted that the latter was essentially "Space White Man's Burden".
- Sci Fi Debris also mentions this trope and the site by name when he points out the Unfortunate Implication of having Kes (played by a white woman) as the only one who manages to calm down the increasingly escalating hostility between Tuvok (played by a black man) and Harry Kim (Asian-American actor) in the episode "Resolutions." This hostility between the two occurring only because Captain Janeway (again, white female actress) had to leave the ship.
  Chuck Sonnenburg: "Kes comes in to see Tuvok and, after a couple of minutes, Tuvok decides he'll try that plan of Harry's. There's a thing TV Tropes calls Unfortunate Implications, and this seems to apply here: The only thing stopping the black guy and the Asian guy from beating each other up are white women.''
An episode of Drake And Josh featured the titular protagonists going head to head with a group of five-to-seven nerds. The nerds are snobby, have an unwarranted sense of self-importance, and are revealed to be underhanded, dishonest thieves, vastly inferior to the talented and creative protagonists. Oh, all the nerds are Asian, by the way.
The Christian Grace from The Secret Life of the American Teenager is so Anvilicious that it's embarrassing that some viewers believe all Christians act like that.
The eponymous Sanctuary is uncomfortably zoo-like, and despite the good doctor's protests that these "abnormals" are sentient beings, even she doesn't treat them as in any way equal to human beings.
Lost gets a fair amount of complaints about the way it kills off far more notable female characters than male, especially since there are more men to begin with. Ditto with black characters (even Abaddon).
This clip is an example of the "didn't realize what could occur" version of the trope, showing that not even unscripted shows are exempt.
The sixth season of 24 features Kal Penn as a man suspected of being a terrorist simply because of his race, and violently attacked by some of his neighbors, in a scene where it certainly appears we're supposed to be on his side. Except not long afterward it turns out he really is a terrorist. The show's eponymous Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique has always put it in hot water, but this was perhaps the most offensive thing it's ever done.
Denji Sentai Denjiman's opening features the red leader beating up a Scary Black Man.
Robin Hood has quite a bad case in an episode where the Abbot of Kirklees is revealed to be working in secret on translating The Bible into English. When Friar Tuck discovers this and grills the Abbot over it, nearly all his questions are answered with a dismissive "You wouldn't understand!" or variation thereof, which is very strange given that Tuck is both a fellow man of God, and also a scholar who shows many signs of his advanced knowledge to the Abbot in their conversation. It's the fact that, in this version, Tuck is a black man that makes this really uncomfortable.
- The show has a far more troubling attitude toward its woman characters: Maid Marian was portrayed as a strong, competent, intelligent young woman, who doesn't take too kindly to either Robin's incessant flirting or Guy's overbearing attempts at wooing her. She rejects Guy's advances, and makes Robin work for her respect. So far, so good right? Well, in the finale of the second season, Marian is murdered by Guy of Gisborne after she inexplicably reveals her love for Robin to him. Guy impales her on his ~~phallic symbol~~ sword, in an erotically-charged death scene that writer Dominic Mingella described as the consummation of Guy and Marian.
- The reasons for choosing to kill off Marian were cited as a chance to "rock the show" and to "explore the darker side of Robin." In other words, it was a blatant mix of cheap shock value and a way of driving male characterisation further. But neither one of these opportunities were acted on. By the second episode of the third season, the show reverted back to Status Quo Is God and Robin becomes the most jaw-dropping example of Angst What Angst to ever appear on television. Children have mourned pet goldfish for longer than Robin grieves for his butchered wife.
- Guy also bounces back surprisingly well, though in a (very late) episode confesses his guilt to a young girl called Meg. No prizes for guessing what happens to Meg.
- Furthermore, the Twofer Token Minority character Djaq was written out of the show at the same time as Marian, and replaced with a (white) girl called Kate. Djaq was witty, compassionate and had a variety of skills. Kate was so useless it was embarrassing and needed the boys to rescue her from stupidity-induced danger at least once an episode.
- Finally, the character of Isabella is introduced as a woman who has endured seventeen years of an abusive marriage, and the show is none-to-subtle about the fact that she's been physically, verbally, emotionally, mentally and almost certainly sexually abused by her husband. She flees to her brother Guy for help, who more or less blames the entire situation on her, and attempts to drown her in a well after discovering she's been romantically involved with Robin Hood. Robin on the other hand, rescues her, threatens her, consoles her, dumps her, accuses her of murder (when it was in fact self-defence), breaks into the privacy of her own bedroom at night, and several times manhandles her by placing his hands on her throat or face and then wonders why the poor woman has a grievance against him. Isabella ends up being the derided villainess and Big Bad of the show.
The "Fagmalion" episodes from Will and Grace in which Will and Jack attempt to turn Straight Gay Barry into a "proper" homosexual — read Flamboyant Gay — and end up getting crushes on the finished result. At one point Barry actually calls them out on this and walks out on them, only to come back a couple scenes later, claiming that he'd rather go through it with them than do it alone... and that he wants to look like someone from "Men's Fitness".
In Torchwood.
- Tosh's storyline in "Greeks Bearing Gifts" essentially amounts to being used and screwed (pun intended) by an Evil Lesbian Seductress.
- The almost certainly unintentional implications become even worse in "Children of Earth", where Ianto's storyline involves coming to terms with his gay/bisexual/'only Jack' sexuality... only to die just as things seem to be working out. Since "Children of Earth" was meant to reach out to a whole new audience, taking this season by itself (as half the audience would have) makes it seem like an instance of Bury Your Gays, especially since the only character left alive and/or somewhat happy is Gwen, the heteronormative audience identification figure who's pregnant and happily married to a man.
- "Day One" implies that lesbian sex isn't really sex. The gay guy in the fertility clinic gets turned to dust having sex with the alien-possessed woman Carys, which makes Gwen kissing her earlier just because of the alien thing and not because of any latent same-sex attraction on her part.
In Kings:
- There are three homosexual/bisexual characters. One (Jack) is not a nice-guy and is called, not because of his personality but because of his sexuality: a disgrace, a mistake of character, and a faggot. His father compares the sexual acts he's done to being dirtier than a floor. One (Joseph) tried to out Jack, and then, killed himself. The other (Stu) is a very minor character but apparently had no qualms about flirting with Jack when Jack was engaged.
- Jessie, the hero's mom, is the only semi-aggressive, semi-regular female character who isn't morally dubious. Rose and Thomasina have people killed, the latter of which has herself pulled the trigger before. Katrina threatens to destroy the reputations of Jack or Michelle, forces Jack into an engagement, and is then killed. Michelle does fight aggressively for the public good, but she does it all within the system (that's not a complaint, just an observation) and is usually nice if incredibly boring. Lucinda is very demure and basically a non-character. And those five are the only women given significant screentime.
- Oh, and there are two significant black characters: Thomasina, a killer loyal to a tyrant, and Reverend Samuels, who was basically a Magical Negro, dies in a Redemption Equals Death scene, and comes back as an angel.
The makers of Red Dwarf were worried about this.
- Of the two black characters, the "blackest" one, the Cat, is in fact descended from a cat, and displays very "catlike" and otherwise animalistic traits, at least in the first few seasons. The other black guy, Lister, is a total slob, with "personal habits that'd make a monkey blush."
  - Lister is black????
- Craig Charles actually got the part of Lister after someone gave him the script to read, to see if he thought The Cat was too racist.
  - Thankfully, most Unfortunate Implications are neutralised by good characterisation and acting (at least in the earlier seasons). Whilst an unrepentant slob, Lister is also the most moral and empathetic character on the show, especially in comparison to the neurotic and selfish Rimmer.
On the one hand, the only major dark-skinned character in Merlin is Guinevere, who will eventually become Queen. On the other hand, in the series she's a servant of the rich white Morgana. In all fairness, Merlin couldn't do much better than it does and still try for some semblance of faux-historical accuracy.
- There are actually several black characters in the series - Gwen is simply the most important... and the only one to survive the series. Her father, Tom, appeared in 3 episodes, before he was killed, because Uther's a Jerk Ass, and there are two named black knights (not to be confused with Black Knights), Sirs Ewan and Pellinore. Ewan is killed by the evil Knight Valiant, Pellinore by the Black Knight.
- Then there's the fact that, as of series two, Gwen - who in series one was quite plain, and wore clothes that fitted with her being a servant - has been made Hotter And Sexier, with a new dress that shows off her cleavage, just in time for her romantic subplots. To all little girls watching the show: no man will ever love you if you don't get your breasts out (in this troper's opinion, she's at her sexiest when she's wearing trousers to fight off the raiders in Ealdor).
A recent promo for the upcoming continuation of the show Melrose Place features Lauren, the lone female Asian member of the group, who is shown to be working her way through medical school...by sleeping with seedy older men and getting paid for it.
- Either the writers got into this, or (HIGHLY UNLIKELY) they were thinking of something along the lines of enjo kosai.
Susan Boyle's appearance on Britain's Got Talent. Many observers noted that a lot of the hype that arose around her and the plaudits that surrounded her undeniably skilled singing voice seemed to suggest that people were genuinely shocked that someone who did not look like a supermodel could actually possess genuine talent after all, as if talent was something that was reserved for the conventionally beautiful.
The parallels between the vampire rights movement in True Blood and the real life gay rights movement are unnerving. Sure, vampires, like homosexuals, have no control over what they are, but the two shouldn't even be compared. Not to mention the fact that the humans are justified in their prejudice, because vampires are killers. Even Bill.

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Music videos which are happy to feature lots of blatant sexual imagery and push at the boundaries of censorship, but which don't want to be too controversial by, say, showing a potentially interracial relationship. A good example that UK viewers may know is the Sugababes video for their single "Push The Button" in which the girls each partner up with a man on a different floor of an office building. When you see the black guy (who is also conspicuously cool...) you can guess which Sugababe will be dancing with him... Sadly, the director wasn't Genre Savvy enough to partner the Asian girl up with an Asian guy to really hammer the point home.
A very disturbing example is "(How Could You) Bring Him Home " by Eamon, where the issue seems to be that he discovered his girlfriend with another man, and it's implied that he did somehing horrible to him. Not only does he try to justify it by saying that "any man would have done just the same", but the girl is demonised, because she heartlessly cheated on the otherwise so sweet Eamon and drove him over the edge.
The band Boys Like Girls has an unfortunately homophobic-sounding name.
- So long as we're interpreting, the name could be androgynous instead.
- While rejecting others' implications isn't really part of the motif, I'd like to point out that a mere of heterosexuality shouldn't really qualify, and perhaps the band name "Boys like girls, unless those boys like boys and those girls like girls (although those boys who like girls probably still like those girls who like girls)," would have been unacceptably long.
Not unfortunate as far as political correctness, more that I don't think they thought about this possible meaning: The song New York New York has the line "If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere". To this editor, that says, "It's really hard to make ends meet here! Stay the fuck away!"
Black female singer Ciara's video Love Sex Magic displays her as a total sex object to Justin Timberlake, a white man.

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In a very loose animorphistic adaptation of Balzac's (non-animorphistic) short story "A Passion In The Desert", the unnamed protagonist repeatedly claims that women are like beasts, both in the narration and in the dialogue. Furthermore, when he and Mignonne (the currently human animorph he is speaking to when he says that women are like beasts) are camping in a desert and a panther approaches, the panther will allow the protagonist to pet her. The man insists that Mignonne pet her, and when she refuses saying that she's frightened, it only makes him yell at her to do it anyway. She reaches out a hand, and the panther bites her. She pulls back but the man tells her to do it again. Unfortunate Implication? Double Entendre? Both?

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The earliest editions of Dungeons & Dragons Drow: an Always Chaotic Evil matriarchy that looked vaguely African in culture (and skin color). Luckily, the publishers very quickly edited that last part and instead made them look black, not brown, and more alien to human eyes. Though it's still an eeeevil matriarchy that must be destroyed (not to mention that all of the more unconventional, popular Drow are male.)
- Also, War of the Spider Queen shows how well most Drow fare when a tight grip of sadistic matriarchs and Religion Of Evil constantly keeping them in check is released. Though then it merely replaces the old Unfortunate Implications. Now it's "I know you and so do it to you For Your Own Good!".
- In addition to the Drow, other dark-skinned D&D races of typically evil alignment include the Gray Dwarves (aka Duergar) and the various Goblinoids. Never mind the fact that living underground would turn a population's skin incredibly pale after several generations, not dark. Further implications of the Drow are that any society that is sexually open is necessarily evil, and that association with spiders (those helpful arachnids that eat many a pest) makes you evil as well.
The Orks in Shadowrun could often be described as the "The New Blacks" as many things about them seem to be specifically designed to echo blacks (and occasionally, Hispanics). They have their own culture, which is quite popular on the street and amongst the less fortunate. They probably suffer the most from the Fantastic Racism, being seen as an actual threat by the normal humans due to how fast they multiply. There's even non-orks embracing Ork culture and become "Ork-Posers". Orks are more often presented as gangers or criminals then Dwarves or Elves. Similarly, theres fewer Orks amongst the rich and successful then there's of any other race, save the Trolls (who are big and scary and rarer then all the other metatypes to begin with, meanwhile, Orks are the second most common Metatype after humans).
- Not to mention Shadowrun's other little gaffes, like most of North America being taken over by Magical Native Americans, most of everything else being taken over by Evil Japanese Mega Corporations, most of the non-shadowrunning population being trideo-numbed idiots who don't have a clue that UCAS elections had been rigged for forty years, etc.
Most of Warhammer40000's female combatants are heavily sexualized with fetishes out the wazoo, generally with S&M overtones.
Whether or not changing gameplay based on gender by having differences in stats is justified is an on-going debate, but no one can justify FATAL's version of this, where female characters have a penalty to their intelligence score.
- Oh, why stop there? Men with a low Rhetorical Charisma score (that is, how well you can speak) gain the "gay" modifier. Rape receives a lighter punishment than keeping an unclean house. And then there are the cursed armors of bad racial stereotypes.
- After homosexuality was put in, the characters most likely to be gay were the weak men and strong women. Byron "Abominatus" Hall even chose to "defend" this idea by saying that "stereotypes are usually true, that's why they become stereotypes". The man is clearly either a very cunning Troll, or seriously brain damaged.
- The idea "your [female sexual organ] is hacked, [unpleasant effects], worst of all you won't want sex." Hell, FATAL is this trope embodied and mixed with (s)crappy mechanics.
The Old World of Darkness had its share of, um... interesting ethnic interpretations:
- Vampire The Masquerade had the Ravnos clan, a clan of Roma origin whose clan weakness was a roll to resist engaging in illegal activities. Rumor has it that the ham-fisted portrayal of Romani culture was why the writers chose to kill the clan's antediluvian (who took a good chunk of the clan with him) during the Time of Thin Blood.
- Werewolf The Apocalypse was a bit worse. Oirish bards with a penalty to self-control, Nordic warriors with very uncomfortable ties to the Nazis, two Magical Native American tribes... over time, some of the stupider elements (such as the tribal penalties) were removed from the system, and the tribes became a bit more developed, but in the beginning, things were awkward.
- Probably the worst example was the now-infamous Gypsies book, which turned an entire real-world ethnic group into a minor supernatural template. Complete with a stat called "Blood Purity."
- Assamites: Because the world really needed some Vampire Arabs to go with its Space Jews.
- Don't forget the Science Is Bad vibe in Mage, Werewolf and Changeling.

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Similarly, the moral of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Phantom of the Opera appears to this editor as "It doesn't matter how talented you are, or how much you desire love and acceptance, if you are physically imperfect you will die cold and alone. Because it also automatically means that you're criminally insane".
- Consider the creepy paedophilic themes. Erik poses as her father's ghost, starting when she arrives at the opera house at a very young age — continues posing as father's ghost after attempting romantic relationship with her — surely I'm not the only one who saw this?
- As Phantom of the Opera in 15 Minutes says, "Daddy issues ahoy!"
- The paedophilic aspect really shows up only in the film version; the stage version never specifically says when Christine came to the Opera and the Phantom started hanging around her (and it is generally assumed that, as in the original novel, she was a young woman by that point). The massive Electra complex overtones remain, though...
Seussical: the Musical, in its effort to give each character an individual musical style, trips over this trope but hard. The protagonists, needing to be straightforward and often innocent, get generic folky pop (Horton, Gertrude, Jo-Jo) or old-time vaudeville stuff (Cat in the Hat). The antagonists are a little more cartoony and therefore get more distinctive music... Latin for Mayzie the lazy bird who abandons her egg to go party, 70's funk for the threatening Wickersham Brothers (and they're literally monkeys. Whoo boy), and the sour kangaroo is specifically modeled after Aretha Franklin. Yikes.
The Las Vegas Sun's review of Criss Angel — Believe (the Cirque Du Soleil/magic show hybrid) points out that, in the story, "[T]here?s a continual struggle over [Criss's] usually shirtless bod between his stage assistants, Kayala, an angelic ever-receding woman in white and Crimson, a devouring, demonic black woman. (Not even going there.)"
The Paper Mill Playhouse production of Stephen Schwartz's musical Children of Eden cast Adam as white and Eve as black, apparently also allowing them to have children of different skintones. On the one hand, the colour-blind casting played nicely to the show's theme of unconditional love and community; on the other hand, there were possible Unfortunate Implications in that both Eve and Cain (one traditionally held responsible for mankind's expulsion from paradise, the other the first ever murderer) were portrayed by black performers. Of course, both Eve and Cain are portrayed as sympathetic protagonists compared to Father's (God) possessive behaviour and Adam and Abel's strict, unthinking adherence to the rules. Still, when a black Eve sings of her black son Cain "Was it just a defect in me, / A flaw in my nature, / And now look what I've done, / I've passed it to my son, / This wild inclination ...", and given how much the story goes on about "the blood of Cain" tainting the human race, it's hard not to feel a little uncomfortable.
Probably invoked another Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Jesus Christ Superstar. Judas' Motive Rant/Villain Song contains the following lines:
Listen, Jesus, don't you care for your race?
Can't you see that we must keep in our place?
We are occupied; have you forgotten how put down we are?
- Nominally, he's talking about the Jews, but consider that Judas is traditionally played by a black actor. (This was not Rice and Lloyd-Webber's intent, however. Murray Head, a white actor, created the role for both the original British concept album and the subsequent stage production; it was a politically-conscious American director who deliberately cast a black actor for the imported Broadway production and began the tradition.)
The song "Little Red Hat" from 110 In The Shade sounds more like it concernes a rape than an engagement.

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Resident Evil 5 features a white American who saves Africa from Scary Black Zombies.
- Where the black (and white, and arabic) zombies have been caused by what's basically a White Supremacist (Darwinist fits closer) and a Russian woman, and an annoying New Jersey man.
- It Got Worse. Later in the game, a large number of enemies you fight are, inexplicably, spear-wielding African zombies who look like they were ripped straight off the the set of Zulu! Apparently, this version of the parasite made them "dress like their ancestors" for some reason...
  - ...Which, as the boy who recorded this weird behavior notes, made them dress up in gear meant only for tribal warfare as they turned violent.
- And then there's Sheva's secret costume...
- There's also one whopper of an unfortunate implication late in the game... you arrive at the evil chemical plant, and find a conveyor belt full of limp, not-quite-dead humans, who've been used as test subjects, and are about to be sent into a furnace...and in order to proceed you have to activate the conveyer belt yourself...and you can also take their jewelry. Not reminiscent of anything, no sirree... They do try to kill you however.
  - Considering the evil chemical plant is an Umbrella plant, they might actually be already-dead zombies rather than not-quite-dead humans. Especially since some of them will jump up and try to bite you if you get close.
Repeat the same thing for Resident Evil 4 except this time with spanish zombies led by a spanish priest who hates America and your mission is to rescue a white woman. Your native assistant ends up dieing halfway through in the worst possible way imaginable and is left out of mercenaries mode despite being a capable gun slinger. Infact there are probably more Unfortunate Implications in the fourth game.
- Which still doesn't explain how he basically saves your ass, even in death (he leaves instructions on how to operate the Plagas removal and caused problems before Leon or Ada arrived). Ironically, I have heard that RE 4 was not offensive compared to RE 5, because, quote, "there are no stereotypes for the Spanish". Then again, you're basically fighting what are cultist rednecks in not-Spain.
  - The fact that nobody sees any issues with killing Catholic monks in Spain who weild crossbows offensive but immediately find killing native Africans who weild spears offensive, is an Unfortunate Implications in it's own right.
Warcraft III — The Horde's dialects are based on stereotypes of different races. The playable Trolls are Jamaican (with other tribes sounding Cuban), an Orc hero type uses pretty bad Engrish, and Tauren, while mostly unaccented, have several cultural commonalities with Native American. The Forsaken, however, have the sort of vaguely british accent one associates with minor bad guys in action flicks, and the Alliance-affiliated Dwarves sound Scottish. Thankfully, they had dropped most of the Always Chaotic Evil stuff before this.
"What do you mean what kinda' accent is dis? It's a troll accent. I swear, Jamaican meh crazy."
- In World Of Warcraft, this continues to the Alliance expansion race, the Draenei (Teutonic, Slavic, Russian, or Mediterranean, depending on what the accent sounds like to whoever it is you're asking), while the expansion's Horde race, the Blood Elves, meet a different stereotype (metrosexual) — more consistent with the Alliance original races' behaviors. This aspect of this may be a Justified Trope in that the Draenei and Blood Elves are supposed to be bastions of the opposing faction within their own ("human" Alliance versus "alien" Horde), in turn consistent with each of these races being the only race in their faction to have a class previously exclusive to the other. Both were pretty controversial.
- Many players have seen Unfortunate Implications in the Worgen of Silverpine Forest. "Worgen" backwards is "negrow." They all wear shackles and are enslaved to a white man who lives in a castle. When killed, they sometimes drop watermelon and pieces of meat with icons that resemble chicken legs. They are also Always Chaotic Evil due to their simple, animalistic minds.
  - Subverted in the forthcoming expansion when they will be a playable race.
In The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind the Dark Elves (Dunmer) used to be the Chimer, but their leaders offended the Daedra Azura and they were "punished" with ash-blue-gray skin and fire-red eyes. The Redguards, however, look like average blacks and are treated in a mostly neutral light.
- The reason for the Dunmer's appearance is actually vague in the game's lore because several deliberately conflicting accounts are given of their history that provide explanations for their divergence from typical elven appearance. Either way, by the time of Oblivion, they're treated the same as any of the other races seem to be.
- If memory serves, the Redguard are only in Tamriel because they "broke" their homeworld. Also there's the Adrenaline rush racial power, which makes a Redguard character run faster and jump higher. No comment.
  - To be fair. the ability also increases your strength, health, endurance and agility, which doesn't effect their ability to run and jump...
  - Depending on what source you listen to, the Redguard's home continent experienced earth tremors or was sunken by the Ansei bandits, or is perfectly fine and the Redguard are just the descendants of Ansei revolutionaries that left after beating a corrupt Emperor's army, so the implications can be unfortunate or not depending on who's telling the story.
  - Knowing Bethesda, possibly intentional. After all, there's that one infamous M'aiq the Liar quote that no one seems to sure of the implications therein. Just basic word/character play.
In the original Star Control, most of the Alliance (or "good") species didn't look very alien to humans (beautiful humanoid women, furry vulpine-lupine-rodent creatures, pretty silicon-based life forms, pterodactyl-like organisms, etc.). The Hierarchy (or "evil") species were invariably ugly, except for the humanoid Androsynth, who had Turned Against Their Masters, so the use of What Measure Is A Non Cute was glaringly obvious. The sequel reversed this to some degree, since the player character had to ally with both cute and non-cute aliens, but none of the old Hierarchy species allied with him permanently, if at all. And even if you do agree that space aliens should only be allowed to have sex with humans if said aliens are attractive by traditional human standards, the accidental invocation of Bring Out Your Gay Dead was unfortunate.
StarCraft: Most of the Terrans speak with U.S. Southern accents, are all white, and the Confederates fly the actual Confederate flag. SCV pilots (workers of the faction) appear black/multiracial, and will even mention "watermelon seed fights". There is one female non-unique unit. (Repeatedly clicking on an allied Civilian and then an allied SCV reveals that they either the same people or Blizzard got lazy and didn't give them a new soundset. Given that the Civilian is clearly white, one assumes that the interior of an SCV is just poorly lit.) Not mention the Terrans are all descendants of criminals that were put into rockets and shot into space. Whether this is clever satire or something else is up to the player, I suppose. The exceptions to the rules are as follows:
- In the plus column: Major character Kerrigan is a red-headed Hispanic.
- There is also, apparently, one Mexican (judging by his accent) in the original cinematic opening.
- The Battlecruiser captain is Russian. The Science Vessel commander is very slightly British. The Goliath is almost accentless. If the Firebat has any Southern accent at all, it's well-hidden.
  - The Goliath has a Canadian accent. Not the sort of stereotypical accent that many Americans believe Canadians speak with; rather, the accent that we, Canadians, speak with during our everyday lives.
- The expansion tries to rectify things a bit:
  - For one, Samir Duran is East Indian, doesn't get killed off, and isn't stereotyped in the least.
  - Samir Duran also happens to be a 1,000-year-old alien disguised as a human, who is working on a genetic engineering project to cross Protoss with Zerg. Not stereotyped, eh?
  - Both new Terran units are female. The Medic (non-combat unit) is a white woman with a flirtarious, vaguely Valley Girl accent, and the Valkyrie pilot (support combat unit) is given a very German accent with dominatrix undertones, which become overtones if you repeatedly click on her.
- In the upcoming sequel, the only unit with a black character model is the Marauder, whose face is concealed the majority of the time. The SCVs are now clearly white, now that the Terran Dominion has seen fit to give them adequate lighting inside their suits.
Wham Bam Rock◊, from Kirby Super Star. In the DS remake he was redesigned to look more like a Shakokidogu (an ancient clay figure from Japan with an extremely stylized female form) and less like a blatant Ethnic Scrappy. Good move, I say.
- Wham Bam Rock's appearance, meanwhile, was switched over to Wham Bam Jewel, his on-steroids counterpart from "Helper to Hero". The lips are less massive, and he has three eyes, but he still resembles a blackface a bit too closely for comfort.
Valkyria Chronicles: The Darcsens, for all intents and purposes, are Jews (this game is a very thinly veiled pastiche of WWII), but they look Japanese. AKA the people who were helping the Nazis. There's also a conspicuous lack of a Japanese Expy group, leading to the impression that the story literally replaces the Jews with the Japanese, and writes them as invaluable help for the heroes.
- The Valkyrur themselves. The legendarily angelic Valkyrur are responsible for the Darcsen Calamity and installed a traitor family of Darcsen as rulers, thus letting the shame of their betrayal become the incentive to keep their non-Valkyrur heritage (and thus the true identity of the Valkyrur as vicious conquerors) a secret. They're powerful, but they're also emotionally manipulative liars who used the pain they caused to elevate their own reputation. Guess which gender their One Gender Race is.
The early Ghostbusters video games had a maximum of three Ghostbusters, all white-skinned, as the playable characters, which means they forgot the black Winston. However, the Angry Video Game Nerd pointed out that for the NES game, this might have been a Fortunate Implication for Ernie Hudson, his actor.
Sony's Fat Princess looks like it's got a couple of issues...
In Ys Online, one of the three playable races are the "Afrocans". Here is their description: "Afrocans tower head and shoulders over their cousins, the Eresians. Unlike Eresians; who prefer a more subtle approach, Afrocans like to conduct business with the sharp end of a battle axe. Of course, it helps that they are naturally muscular and seemingly carved from granite. It is not surprising that their enormous physical strength and power are ideally suited to combat and they often take part in fierce battles." Emphasis ours.
A large portion of Final Fantasy Tactics is a rant against Christianity using a thinly veiled version of Jesus, implying that Jesus was executed not to die for mankind's sins but because he was evil.
In the Atelier series: . There are a variety of "fairies" that you can hire in the early games to assist with labwork and whatnot and to help gather materials. Unfortunately, the least competent one... is the one dressed in black. And he's often depicted in supplementary material as having dark skin. Oh man...
In the Russian campaign of Call of Duty: World at War, the Russians are portrayed as being just as bad, if not worse than the Nazis (they even commit more on-screen atrocities), and almost all of the Russian soldiers are portrayed as bloodthirsty psychos. Contrast this to the American campaign, in which the war crimes committed by both sides are largely ignored with the exception of the prison camp sequence at the beginning of the game.
- It's not exactly untrue to history to have WW 2 Soviet soldiers committing atrocities with equal or greater fervor than the Germans.
  - In addition, to be a bit of a chauvinist, the fact remains that the American land campaigns were largely devoid of atrocities save those that were directed against Japanese soldiers (and to a far lesser extent civilians, though given the fanaticism of the Japanese, that sadly wasn't unexpected). Think about it: the American campaign took place on several all-but-unpopulated islands with nil civilian presence, and the one exception was Okinawa, where the Japanese were likely more brutal to the civilians (their own, I might add) than the US was. This isn't to say atrocities didn't happen, they did, but nowhere near like what happened in Eastern Europe.
- In the multiplayer, all the announcers are zealous Large Hams. With the exception of the American one~~, Jack Bauer~~.
In Metal Gear Solid 3, the Boss comes across Snake disguised as Major Raikov (who is implied to be the lover of Colonol Volgin) and disdainfully asks why he is wearing a "fairy disguise" and mockingly warns him that it might "rub off on [him]". Kojima was clear in the director's commentary that she was actually talking about herself, but the translators decided to have some fun with the line.
- Every confirmed gay or bisexual character in the whole series is a villainous sadist. Volgin is a rapist, Ocelot gets off on torture, and Vamp is plain inhuman and wears a knife in front of his crotch (curiously enough, he was originally intended to be a female character, but was turned male fairly late in development). However, the gallons of Ho Yay between the heroic characters, the gay loves generally being portrayed as sympathetic relationships, and Snake calling out Raiden on being more disturbed by squicky gay relationships than squicky straight relationships do a bit to alleviate this. On the other hand in Metal Gear Solid 4, though, which depending on your view, presented a male/male "couple" as being incapable of raising children until a woman showed up and started cooking for them, which could be interpreted as a swipe against non-traditional families(Then again, Snake isn't exactly a real father figure to Sunny as she even refers to him by his codename instead of an uncle), and removed all of Vamp's sympathetic traits (like his noble goals and loyalty to Dolph's family) in favour of playing him for plain old gay panic with his Does This Remind You Of Anything fighting with Raiden.
- Race — The black member of the B&B Corp is the one who walks around on four legs like an animal. Also, the South American and Indonesian members are incredibly light-skinned.
  - But their appearances were actually based on models of those nationalities.
Actually, the black member, Crying Wolf, was controlling a machine based on an animal walking on all four legs. She, however, inside it was at most slanded there and NOT walking on all four legs.
- Racial stereotypes: The DARPA chief and weapons expert Sigint, two women who carry a BFG and the arms dealer are all black. The DARPA chief and the arms dealer Drebin actually are on the respective protagonists' side. But still
This troper is a formerly homeless sex worker, and was not particularly amused when playing Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines. It's discussed that Ph.Ds and so on taste better than bums, and members of one "elite" clan will even projectile vomit if they drink from a homeless person or a sex worker. Nice to know that either a) his socio-economic position was inevitable because of some kind of inferiority in the very blood in his veins or b) his socio-economic position has somehow made him lesser on a cellular level. (Or on some kind of mystical, spiritual level, but honestly, that just makes it worse.) Then there came the subplot about having to find and kill a plaguebearer spreading some kind of blood-related, sexually transmitted virus using homeless people and sex workers. It ended up being a fictional virus that had something to do with an evil cult, but the game allows you to think for a little while that you need to put down an HIV positive vampire. ("Ever seen Old Yeller?") There was still enough Have You Tried Not Being A Monster to make it really, really uncomfortable.
- (b): Those who eat better, going to taste better?..
  - Ventrue all have funny little restrictions on whom they can feed on — some can only feed off the upper class. As for the "tasting better," people higher up on the social ladder are obviously going to be cleaner and healthier than street prostitutes or the homeless.
- Given that the vampires of the Masquerade universe are generally portrayed as supernatural racists, Xenophobic to the point of hating the humans they were once a part of, and on an irreversible slide into becoming a slave to the beastial urges within them... and really all in all a negatively stereotypical portrayal of the Upper Class.. making them picky eaters seems more along the line of consistent writing than unfortunate implications.
- That, and all we know is that the vampires perceive them as tasting badly. To an extent that might be true (say what you will, but I don't think even a cannibal would like an unwashed bum), but it also raises the question of whether it is true, or whether the vampires, who are portrayed to have largely created a fictional universe, are driven by their prejudices and their elitism to THINK they taste worse. It's the Nocebo effect.
In City of Heroes, all uses of the word "God" are censored by default. So Yeah.
In Clive Barkers Jericho, the Firstborn does not appear in its true form, but instead takes the form of a small black child. This has lead to a small number of people believing the game to have racist undertones.
- Which is, as an argument by itself, misguided. It could be easily countered by saying that no one would complain if the Firstborn had appeared as a white child.
The designers of Final Fight were told that it was a cultural taboo to depict a male hero punching women in America, so instead of actual female enemies the designers added two shemale enemies named Poison and Roxy (the instruction manuals for the home ports in Japan mentions their true gender), the rationale being that it was okay to beat up a woman as long as we know she's a guy in a drag, since transvestites are Acceptable Targets.
- Needless to say, this excuse didn't worked quite as well as the designers had hoped when a Nintendo playtester reviewed the content of the game (according to an anecdote in the non-fiction book Game Over), so Poison and Roxy got replaced with male punks named Billy and Sid for the English localization of the SNES versions.
Super Robot Wars OGS is about German-named mecha destroying Jewish-named mecha. This fact is entirely incidental, considering the mechas in question first originated in games where the other doesn't exist.
Legend Of Kay has rats as villians, and at several points speaks of them with hostility and refers to them as dirty. This wouldn't be too bad on ITS own, seeing as this is how rats are often looked upon... But unfortunately, they were given horrifficly stereotypical chinese accents.
Sim City may have never been all that able to invoke an unfortunate implication, but when the creators decided to make the buildings more realistic in Sim City 4, as in desaturating colors and "grungifying" the looks of the buildings, it resulted in many of the low income houses, apartments, and business looking incredibly dumpy and ugly compared to the middle class and upper class buildings. Indeed, buildings do suffer from aging and weathering, but an apartment that's housing for the poor doesn't always get that incredibly ugly, especially if it's in a decent neighborhood, especially next door to a nice middle class condo.
- The buildings-degrade-with-lower-incomes only applies when a formerly rich-folks-inhabited building starts housing a lot of middle-income or poor people, or if an originally middle-class building is occupied by lower-income folks. Buildings intended for low-wealth residents (to use the game's terminology) look clean, and some aren't bad looking (a few of them do look rather Stalinist, however).
Golden Sun: The Lost Age has two examples. The only recognizably black character in the game(Akafubu) is a witch-doctor and the leader of a violent tribe that carries out cross-continental raids on peaceful villages.
- And then there's Lemuria, where the Senate is depicted as a bunch of short-sighted conservative fools who refuse to believe that the world is withering away due to the seal on the power of Alchemy. Of course, the King is correct. Take That, democracy!
Alien Invasion groups visiting earth seems to be attacking us with nothing more than mining tools to attack us. Reminds this troper of the Gold Rush

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Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire has an entire arc of worldbuilding and random fantasy races. The audience is introduced to Bort, one of the "Mongrelfolk", a race of hybrids that look like patchwork people (for lack of a better explaination) due to the high levels of magic in the food they eat. A race of people is referred to as the area's "greatest mystery" and "extremely rare" as if they're some form of exotic bird, and Dominic squees about the fact that he actually gets to help the mysterious foreign creature garden. He spends the whole time geeking out and gleefully questioning Bort, who chooses to communicate via misspelled pidgin written on wooden signs rather than speaking out loud, and doesn't seem perturbed at all. When Dominic's tour guide (who granted is a jerkass in most other things) tells him to shut up and "stop treating him like the catch of the century," Bort pounds him into the the dirt and calls him a "jurk". Native/foreign peoples are clearly just waiting to be admired and questioned about their daily lives when travelers enter their countries, and anyone who interferes with the white privilege involved in this is an ass.
- The relevant strips start here. When you respectfully question someone on their way of life, you're a journalist or scholar. When you're loudly blissing out in front of someone because the activity you are engaging in is not special or rare, but the person is, you're not acting like a scholar. You're acting like a bug collector, and you're not treating them like a person.
  - Yes but Bort didn't pound Stunt into the dirt for that, its because he called his garden stupid.
- The second line might charitably be called a prescient Lampshade Hanging: "Someone else we've managed to offend? Probably."
Shortpacked! lampshades this trope in this strip
The otherwise hilarious Buttlord GT falls headlong with this trope due to its gaybashing, though averts it noticably near the end of the comic; the only sympathetic relationship in the comic is the explicitly gay one, complete with Squee moment at the end.
Depending on how sensitive you are, the ethnic and gender jokes at PolkOut. It's not quite that bad because it's not played seriously and Polk is a social misfit.
Of Snakes and Apples is based on the Biblical creation myth. Lillith, her mate Samyaza, the two angels that show up, Adam and GOD are white. Only the ignorant and naive Eve, who has been created for the benefit of Adam, is black (But Not Too Black, what with the white hair).

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Capitol Critters — All the characters were different Talking Animals. The major characters we were asked to identify with, including the hero who'd just left the family farm and moved to the big city, were rats and mice. All the rodents lived on certain floors of the White House and were portrayed as mischievous at worst. Other floors were the exclusive domain of the cockroaches. The cute, furry rodents didn't get along with them, especially if they happened to enter rodent territory. Weirdly, several episodes seemed to suggest that the roaches should stay in their designated territory. Additionally, the mice were complained about vocally by the humans, but the roaches were met with immediate attempts to kill them. Standard What Measure Is A Non Cute situation, right? Well, yes, but consider the one thing that makes the show so irredeemably warped: The cockroaches all had blatant stereotypical minority personalities. They spoke with black slang and wore ethnocentric clothing. And their territory looked like a ghetto. Wow.
- Black stereotypes are not the only ones thrown around; the demimonde cockroach couple trying to move in at the beginning, who get targeted by a regular little "Save the Neighborhood" posse, seemed decidedly Jewish.
"Dr. Rabbit's Bright Smiles World Tour" (an animated short about oral hygiene sponsored by Colgate). One might suspect the real reason Colgate tried to get You Tube Poops featuring the cartoon off You Tube is not because of copyright infringement, but because of all the ridiculous foreign stereotypes in the cartoon.
Codename Kids Next Door's Multinational Team: Word Of God says Numbuh 5 is French. The good news is she doesn't follow any French stereotype. The bad news is since she's also black, she follows an entirely different stereotype. Uptight British Number 1 and fat American Number 2 come off the as the least stereotyped compared to the others: the dumb-and-tough Aussie (Number 4), the excited and ditzy Japanese (Number 3), and the already mentioned number 5.
- Somewhat compensated for in 5's case, as she's usually the straight man to everyone else. And 4 and 3's parents seem to be normal compared to their children (though 3's parents are overly stiff)
Of course, who can forget Wheeler in Captain Planet? Brash, loud-mouthed, wielded the mostly destructive power of fire, and was specifically designed to complain and raise objections only to be shot down by anyone else on the team, even when he had a perfectly legitimate argument. Was there ever any doubt in your mind that Wheeler would be the American in the group?
- Also, apparently Wheeler was made to ask all of the questions so that Americans in the audience (who were assumed to be the majority) could have stuff cleared up for them.
While nobody could fault the Tom and Jerry license holders for trying to get rid of Mammy Two-Shoes, a racial archetype that just comes across as offensive by today's standards, why did they swap her out for an Irish woman? Turner has subsequently swapped her out again, this time for a modern black woman, giving her lines in a straight modern reading (with attendant modern recording quality, resulting in an odd sort of audio-temporal version of Conspicuously Light Patch). This is of course completely period-inappropriate, and, further, a real-life Revealing Coverup.
In the first aired episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, Angelica refers to a white girl in a Sheena costume as a "jungle bunny"... apparently the writers figured: "bimbo girl on the beach = beach bunny", "bimbo girl on the slopes = ski bunny", "bimbo girl in the jungle = jungle bunny", without realizing that was an old, racist term for those of black descent. The Edited For Syndication version of this episode corrects it to "jungle rabbit".
Live Action Adaptation of Avatar The Last Airbender, has almost no non-Caucasian actors which stirred considerable controversy in the fanbase. One side saw racist implications behind casting all whites for a story that is obviously set in a world that was inspired by ancient Asian and Inuit culture. The other side says that it doesn't really matter, and that it's just one of the many changes that inevitably happen when The Movie is made.
- It got worse when: Jackson Rathbone (Sokka) reassured worried fans that he'll get a tan. Two casting calls were uncovered — the first asking for "white or other" actors to come out to audition for main roles, the second looking for multicultural extras to come in native dress and demonstrate native crafts ("if you're Korean, wear a kimono!") They swapped Zuko's actor out for the one famous young Asian because the original one had a schedule conflict they could make bank on in the wake of Slumdog Millionaire, never mind that he is Indian and looks (at least skintone-wise) far more like Sokka than the Japan-and-China-based Fire Nation's Zuko. And now the only Asians in the whole thing are the villains, as predicted above.
- If that weren't bad enough, consider the fact that the Avatar cartoon was based primarily on the East Asian cultures of China, Japan, Mongolia, Korea, etc. Though M. Night Shyamalan did eventually cast minorities in his movie, there's still the fact that very few of them are East Asian, despite the Avatar mythos being built almost entirely around East Asian civilization.
- Even ~~some~~ A lot of arguments against complaining about the cast are full of Unfortunate Implications, such as that whites are generally better actors than minorities anyway, that certain innocuous details that sorta resemble stereotypical white traits mean that the characters are white, and general willful ignorance about institutional and cultural racism. And the fact Zuko and Aang have Asian styled clothing, write with Eastern calligraphy, and live in an ancient Asian-styled world with nary a trace of Western culture? "The clothes don't make the man." (Actually, that last one was just an assault on all common sense.) Man, something about this fandom just brings out the worst in people....
- Now that images of the actors in costume are out, there are more complaints about the outfits are more subdued in color than in the cartoon. A nitpicky complaint, but the counter-argument falls straight into Unfortunate Implications: "The cartoon colors would be too bright to be believable in real life". Which ignores the Asian cultures the nations are based on that do have such brightly colored cultural outfits◊.
- And now attempts are apparently being made to "ethnicize" the supporting cast. Take a look at Suki and Yue, two female love interests. Hmm. I wonder what's going on there...
- (a) Me Love You Long Time. (b) the main charaters can't be Asian, but we can make up for it by casting a character who only gets one episode's worth of time in Book 1, and a character who gets killed off in the finale of Book 1 as somewhat foreign. (c) Aww man, those lousy moral guardians are forcing us to get some actual ethnic actors. Hey, this character wears face paint and this one has white hair. Under those special effects, the viewers won't know the difference
- Make of this quote from Dee Dee Ricketts, casting director, what you will.
  "[We want the prospective extras who show up at the casting call to] [d]ress in traditional cultural ethnic attire... If you're Korean, wear a kimono. If you're from Belgium, wear lederhosen... We're trying to create these four different nations so we're looking for different skin tones, and features, and bone structures... It doesn't mean you're at a disadvantage if you didn't come in a big African thing. But guys, even if you came with a scarf today, put it over your head so you'll look like a Ukrainian villager or whatever."
- The movie changed the almost entirely east Asian world into a more diverse one, with each of the three surviving nations becoming a different race. The problem is that they chose the Earth Kingdom for Asian (as doing otherwise would force them to change Toph Bei Fong's last name an a handful of minor plot points). The Earth Kingdom isn't visited until Book two,the second movie in the trilogy. Which means that there are only two asians in the first movie, both extras who don't show up in trailers.
  - This Troper's greatest fear in all this is that the executives will forget to hire actors who can act.
There was an episode of I Am Weasel which had the titular I. M. Weasel and I. R. Baboon both create microscopic versions of themselves from their DNA. Predictably Weasel's mini-people develop civilization at an accelerated rate while I. R.'s never moves beyond Stone Age level. The Unfortunate Implications come when both micro-civilizations make contact, interbreed, and promptly collapse; leading to Weasel and Baboon agreeing to never marry. This was so close to the old racist belief of "keeping the White race pure" lest Western Civilization collapse from the introduction of "impurities" that, even as a child, this editor could not find the joke funny. The creators probably thought they were on the safe side since Weasel is voiced by black Michael "Worf" Dorn. Given the nasty eugenics echoes, it seems they were wrong.
In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Sun Bleached", Spongebob and Patrick were not invited to a party because they are "not tan enough". Also, to enter said party, guests were required to have a skin tone that matched the darkest shade on a specific "tanning chart". Does this sound like an inversion of something?
- Ahem. You seem to be forgetting that at the end of that episode, bleached white is declared to be the best skin tone.
The purpose of Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin was to attract such criticism. He, er, succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Subtlety (in this case masked beneath obvious trolling) is just something the general public has never, and will never, EVER get, it seems.
Transformers Generation One had the nation of the Socialist Democratic Federated Republic of Carbombya. Yes, Carbombya; the apparent capital Carbombya City has a population of 4,000, and 10,000 camels (they even list this on the sign). The entire population is an Arabic stereotype always swearing on their mother's camels. The actor Casey Kasem was so disgusted that he left the show.
Animated B-grade Space Opera Starchaser: The Legend of Orin has, as a subplot, a a secretarial android in a very female chassis being captured by the local Han Solo Expy. Initially, she is quite combative, until he locates her personality circuits inside her posterior and reprograms her to be arm-drapingly infatuated with him (that's gotta be a trope, in itself). He then sells her to a slave auctioneer at the next civilized port, and only grudgingly buys her back when the Raised By Wolves hero manages to get himself put up on the block, too. Also, after the hero's initial girlfriend is rather shockingly killed, the hero finds a new chick to fall in pretty-much-instant love with, and the new girl uses the same voice actress. Women are completely interchangeable!
An episode of Animaniacs — specifically, one of the Pinky and the Brain shorts, features Brain having a crush on a female lab mouse, Billie, despite the fact that she's as dumb as a box of rocks, alarmingly similar to Pinky. Apart from what that implies about what Brain finds attractive, the unfortunate implications come at the end of the episode. Billie suffers an accident that drastically improves her intelligence; when Brain realizes this, he asks her to solve a complex formula that he's been struggling with, and she solves it instantly. After that, Brain takes Pinky back to the cage, and insists they need to get back to taking over the world. Pinky asks why. Brain's answer? "Because if we don't, she might beat us to it!" Family Unfriendly Aesop: Remember girls, guys will only like you if you are too stupid to compete!
- Of course, Brain doesn't like anyone who's smarter than he is, female or no.
Every animal in Little Bear is anthropomorphic to some extent, except Tutu, Emily's pet dog. She is treated like a pet, even by the other animals. She is said to only speak French by Emily's grandmother. Could the reason she is treated like a pet is because she can't speak English?
- It could be that, or it could be, y'know, that she's not anthropomorphic. This is pretty similar to Goofy and Pluto in Disney comics: Goofy is Mickey's friend because he's an anthropodog, Pluto is Mickey's pet because he's a plain old dog. Admittedly, having the dog able to speak does muddy the water a little.
In the Lion King everything is said to be a part of the Great Circle of Life — except hyenas that are filthy beasts that ought to be exterminated. And most of them are voice-acted by minorities...
- Trivia: Their names. "Banzai" looks Japanese but is also a word in Swahili meaning "skulk" or "lurk" (the fact that the two words sound the same is complete coincidence). Fitting for a hyena... Anyway, the other two hyena's names are "Shenzi" (meaning "savage", "pagan", "uncouth", or "barbarous" in Swahili) and "Ed" (which is neither Swahili nor Japanese).
- Let's not forget the fact that the hyenas are forced to remain in their own territory, which is harsh, dry land with little food, and are prevented by the wise, good king Mufasa from entering his fertile paradise on the pain of death, but when the evil king Scar lets them in, the formerly hospitable Pridelands becomes a veritable Mordor due to their influence. This troper can only wonder what the scriptwriters think about immigration and developing countries.
Kim Possible had its final episode focusing almost entirely not in the title heroine, but in her male sidekick to the point of making nearly the whole episode about just him. And by the end of it, with hardly any Character Development, but more because of the fans wanting it, he suddenly steps up with Monkey Power and saves the day, while the strong female characters are left as nothing but damsels in distress! Almost as if suggesting women can't be good enough to be the heroes of their own show...
- Fan reactions to Ron losing his You Suck portrayal has Unfortunate Implications going both ways. Demanding that Ron be kept at his You Suck level can imply that the only way you can have a strong heroine is for the guys to be dumbed down (to "accommodate" her, so to speak). In the other direction, decrying any instance of Ron showing initiative as "chickifying" Kim (which did happen in the fandom even as early as season 2) also carries the implication that Character Development is not for guys in the presence of heroic female leads — which, to bring things around full circle — is related to the former implication.
- Well, if you wanted an equal treatment, it would have been easy! They should have simply kept up the teamwork that Kim, Ron, Drakken and Shego, having everyone do their part, nobody looks useless, and it gives An Aesop about Friendship and Team Power. In other words, like they were doing so far!! But no! They had to go and waste the perfect performance so far and turn it into a total Wall Banger!
Mr. Garrison's Transsexual sex change from South Park was full of this for both episodes.

Close Western Animation

This news broadcast. Not the news itself but the way it is presented. Not to mention all the unfortunate implications in a number of the You Tube comments alone.
- "Implications" my ass! It's like a goddamn KKK meeting in that thread!
In a bit of meta-Scunthorpe Problem, words that are both used innocuously and in an offensive way like "gay" and "Jew" have been subjected to online filters. This has the ironic effect of censoring(and outraging) the very people the filters were intended to protect.
In Genki: An Introduction to Japanese one practice sentence says "My friend went to China and didn't come back". Which This Troper laughs about whenever he remembers it.
- That textbook is just generally weird. One of this troper's favorite practice sentences was "I like special bird meat".
- Similarly, This Troper's Russian coursebook loves using sentences about Siberia. "Where is she?" "She is in Siberia." Or, This Troper's favorite: "We are going to Siberia in a week's time."
On one website this troper lurks, one of the tags (for an article indexing articles on financial bailouts in the US, strangely enough), one of the user contributed tags is "This is what happens when you give money to 'the sons of Ham'". It's arguably made worse (or funnier) by the fact the site's owner was the author of several controversial newsletters in the 1980's regarding black crime.
MSNBC has a a sister site http://www.thegrio.com/ which is news specifically for blacks. Seriously.
Blackface anyone?
- Uh, no. As mentioned above in Anime/Manga, that's a popular fashion trend called Ganguro, a subsection of Garu ('Gal', or the sort of trendy girl style). Basically take the current trend of girls tanning and bleaching their hair and turn that up to the extreme.
In the Epcot World Showcase in Disney World, all of the eleven countries are in the northern hemisphere. Every single one. The closest they get to the equator is Mexico.
- Disney did produce Around The World With Timon and Pumbaa; where the title characters visit Bora Bora, Yukon, Saskatchewan, and Brazil. Apparently, you can go "Around the world" without leaving the Americas ('cept one island). I first noticed the DVD in Australia.
Wikipedia used to have an article at "List of All Blacks", since moved, but retained as a redirect.^*
^{By way of explanation, the New Zealand rugby team dresses completely in black, and is thus known as the "All Blacks"}
- Also from the same source: "List of All Black tests".
- Nitpicking here: The uniforms have white on them. Despite their name, they have more than just Maori/PI players. Oh, and all of the NZ sports teams have uniforms that are black and white.
In the old Gundam.com message board you can always tell which side the Broken Base the person was on because the people who liked UC Gundam and hated AU Gundam would always end their post by saying "SIEG ZEON!"
- If the people saying this were praising Zeon (I don't know, because I have no knowledge of or interest in Gundam whatsoever), it's not an unfortunate implication, it's an indication of stupidity, since they replaced the wrong word. "ZEON HEIL!" ("Hail Zeon!") would be more fitting; as it is, they're essentially yelling "Victor Zeon!"
In New Zealand at least, Jehova's Witness propaganda always has a lot of happy people of various colours on it. Plenty of them are married and have families, because that's a good Joho thing to do. However, there is never an interracial couple shown.
John McCain's (in)famously blunderous quote:
McCain: Obama's not an Arab. He is a good man.
Typographical example: Anytime the Neuland or Lithos typefaces are used in reference to African or other foreign cultures. The use of those two is done to evoke a "primitive" or "uncultured" feel.
- They were designed to evoke that, and they do it very well (well, Lithos is more of a sort of "classical antiquity" look as opposed to "uncultured"). Where is the "unfortunateness" of this? I mean, if someone uses Neuland to make a flyer inviting people to a chicken fry and watermelon eating contest, then it's their fault, not the fault of the font.
- The "unfortunateness" does derive from the usage, rather than the design (Neuland was designed to resemble blackletter, and Lithos is based on Greek letterforms). Read this for more info on the subject.

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