Sandbox / Political Correctness Gone Mad Playing With

Basic Trope: An individual or group is very zealous about not offending people.

• Straight:
  • In Tropestan, certain words and actions are forbidden either by custom, by law, or both. (They may be replaced with new terms that are supposedly less offensive.)
  • Alice innocently brings up guns. Bob yells at her, bringing up the latest school shooting and accusing her of being tone deaf and insensitive.
• Exaggerated:
  • The people of Tropestan wear formless gray robes and smooth, featureless masks to enforce equality, and though they speak of a right to individuality or feelings, rarely express any individuality. Newspeak is commonplace, and people resolve conflicts by talking about their feelings. It may also be a world of "Stop Having Fun" Guys, for fear of offending someone. Everything Is Racist, or Sexist, or otherwise a political issue. Sibling of Unspecified Relative Age, Gender Identity, or Pronouns is watching the citizens of Tropestan constantly, and All Crimes Are Equal. It's a very Crapsaccharine World.
  • Every single form of media in Tropestan must have at least one member of every single minority (or a Twofer Token Minority) and a Gender-Equal Ensemble.
  • Alice is telling a story in which two children are killed. Bob calls the police because Alice is being offensive.
    Bob: How dare you tell a story about people dying when people are actually dying in real life?! You're a disgrace!
  • Alice actually kills Bob because she thought he was wearing blackface. Turns out he actually was black.
• Downplayed:
  • Certain words and actions are discouraged in polite settings, but not forbidden.
  • The Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment.
• Justified: Select words and actions can be very offensive, especially when committed by certain groups.
• Inverted:
  • Tropestanis cause each other affront with near-impunity thanks to Refuge in Audacity.
  • Deliberate Values Dissonance
  • The "politically correct" meaning of something in Tropestan is solely based on whoever has the power, taking the definition to its most literal meaning. Tropestanis dread the day a Misanthrope Supreme is in charge, because it means that the "politically correct" term for everything is whatever is the most anti-society at the time.
  • The "proper" word for something is deliberately whatever word that the listener hates the most, because Tropestan loves making its people feel as low as possible. It's the user-friendly words that need to be replaced, and anyone who uses them will be "properly" corrected to use uncomfortable terminology.
    Alan: I was thinking about maybe going out with some friends—
    Bob: Shh! The term is useless deadweight now.
    Alan: ...Right. Going out with some "useless deadweight" for drinks tonight.
  • Political correctness never went mad; it is the madness in Tropestan. Anything can and must be said anywhere, regardless of personal comfort, and even the slightest disagreement with that conduct makes you the unreasonable thin-skin.
• Subverted:
  • Certain words, topics, and actions have a time and place.
  • Certain actions that are taboo in Tropestan are in a piece of media and portrayed as completely normal and acceptable.
  • People live a certain way, which is stated to maintain a functional society, but the society is bigoted against women, foreigners, practitioners of minority religions, etc., not the modern definition of politically correct.
  • A privileged class (like oligarchs, patricians, aristocrats, etc.) are held to different standards than everyone else. They are allowed to be as offensive as they like while other people are punished for it. Whether these people are the Moral Guardians or not, at the very least they have nothing to fear from them.
• Double Subverted:
  • But unspoken rules about N-Word Privileges or a Ban on Politics or waiting for the Watershed are expected to be followed.
  • The work is a period piece, and Fair for Its Day. (Doesn't stop a Misaimed Fandom from decrying its less-than-savory aspects, though.)
  • What is acceptable in one time and place is not so in another, and may come across to those not in that time and place as Unfortunate Implications.
  • It's not long before the Moral Guardians start to enforce the extant taboos against the formerly privileged class too. And that's assuming that is the furthest they go — they might even impose stronger penalties against the people who used to be exempted, create new limits specifically on their freedom of expression, or both.
• Parodied:
  • People who break the rules of political correctness must pay into The Swear Jar, have their mouths washed out with soap (lye soap if they caused particular outrage), or write the rule they broke on the board 1000 times.
  • Tropestan disallows minorities from going to work and make a living "for those who can't handle the pressure of society", instead making them live in homeless sh—Minority-Exclusive Housing. Anyone who realizes this automatically puts white, straight, neurotypical cisgendered males at the top of the hierarchy is conveniently and quietly Released to Elsewhere.
  • Tropestan supports the rights of minorities ... and enforces religious tolerance. When a Tropestanian official is asked how they respect the parts of the Crystal Dragon Bible that compare numerous minorities to abominations or otherwise lesser beings, they repeat some self-contradictory statements about how "all of it must be respected, yes, but not ALL of it", until it becomes a Madness Mantra and they're reduced to a gibbering wreck. Then their head explodes via Logic Bomb.
  • Tropestan is so progressive that it actively hunts down anybody who doesn't register as a potentially oppressed minority. The idea that hunting down and unfairly oppressing straight white men for the color of their skin or their sex is lost of Tropestan.
• Zig-Zagged:
  • Some words, actions, and topics are acceptable in polite society, others are acceptable in certain contexts, and others are not acceptable at all.
  • In Tropestan, they love people of all races and sexes, but they do discriminate against white males, but only because white males are believed, correctly or not, to be more racist and sexist than others, and Tropestan doesn’t tolerate racism and sexism.
• Averted: There are no rules or laws governing self-expression of any kind.
• Enforced:
  • The work may be Satire or social commentary.
  • The creators are subject to certain rules and expectations if the work is to get out of Development Hell.
  • The writer wants to create An Aesop, how just because you are politically correct doesn’t mean you’re a good person. Nor believe in the non-offensive words you are using.
  • The writer is trying to create An Aesop about how just because you are politically correct doesn't mean you are a good person or genuinely respectful of everyone.
• Lampshaded: "Shhh! You can't say that word anymore! You Wanna Get Sued?? Or beaten up?!"
• Invoked: Some person or group finds a certain word or action offensive.
• Exploited:
  • A petition is circulated by Moral Guardians and other concerned citizens to get certain words censored or stricken from Tropestan's vocabulary.
  • A feminist conference spells "women" as "womyn" to appease its more radical attendants.
  • A Politically Correct Villain is forming a Crapsaccharine World.
• Defied:
  • Whether a complete Refuge in Audacity is taken or not, people don't stop doing or saying a certain thing just because some people find it offensive. (They may, rightly or wrongly, dismiss the offended ones as "just butt-hurt" or "overreacting.")
  • Someone is corrected, he (or she, as the case may be) responds with a long, swear word-laden tirade that turns the air blue, strips the paint from the walls, and reduces the moral guardian to Inelegant Blubbering.
• Discussed:
  • "Why get offended? It's just a word! Get over yourself!"
  • "You aren't concerned with making anyone feel included; you just want to control how people talk."
• Conversed: "I'm not sure whether to laugh at the sheer audacity of it all or whether to be offended by how much they're making light of liberal groups."
• Implied: Alice says something highly out of the ordinary for Tropestan in public. Her friends glower at her, and Alice is next seen being interrogated by the police.
• Deconstructed:
  • Authorities are so obsessed with not offending anyone that society ends up becoming a People's Republic of Tyranny (or something similar) run entirely by authoritarian zealots.
  • People's ideas end up getting rejected because one person finds it "offensive", reducing the chances of society ever developing.
  • Political correctness has become hypocritical or biased in that people respect the ideas and feelings of the offended, but not those of the unoffended.
  • Tropestan's morals and rules eventually decay into Blue-and-Orange Morality.
  • Political correctness has been played in so many circumstances that most people decide any instance of it is Crying Wolf. Because it's used so flippantly as both a concern and an accusation, nobody can identify reasonable instances of the practice and they will be dismissed with the rest of the rabble.
  • Political correctness may not have gone mad, but the Tropestani public constructed a "straw political correctness" which has gone mad to bash real political correctness, or at least the reasonable ideals of inclusivity and equality, causing it to lose popularity and causing suffering to discriminated or disadvantaged groups.
• Reconstructed:
  • Because the authoritarian zealots run society well, people don't complain that they are politically correct.
  • Development just requires people to express themselves more creatively, paradoxically enough.
  • The people who are not offended by something or another think about it and decide the people who are have a point, whether they're using their affront cynically or not.
  • Tropestan's Blue-and-Orange Morality is cyclical and supplants the older moral paradigm, and something else will supplant it in due course.
  • Because so many people abuse the accusation of political correctness so much, people teach themselves and each other how to evaluate claims of offences taken, ad hoc.
  • The uncharitable characterization made up without much justification turns out to be pretty much entirely accurate as a descriptor of a handful of nutcases, but they're just a very Vocal Minority who are overwhelmed when the reasonable majority of "politically correct" people start to speak up and reclaim the term for their better ends.
• Played for Laughs: Fee Fi Faux Pas
• Played for Drama: All Crimes Are Equal, Jaywalking Will Ruin Your Life, Stepford Suburbia
• Played for Horror: All approved words are Brown Notes to which people react badly.

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Back to Political Correctness Gone Mad. Um, I mean, "inoffensive speech patterns have become neuro-atypical."

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