Discussion Main / TropeBreaker

"The poor reception of Caillou in the United States killed off the Importation Expansion trope for foreign, non-Power Rangers children's shows in the United States. The standard practice now is to adapt these shows into either a multiple shorts per episode format or to air them in their own timeslot as a Quarter Hour Short, now that the latter format is popular there."

You know what the ironic thing about this trope breaker's inclusion is? To my knowledge, people actually liked the puppet segments, even those who hate Caillou with a burning passion.

"The physical Porn Stash trope is still in use in anime and manga, mostly due to harsher Japanese online laws (and in a way to prevent portraying piracy since obviously, Digital Piracy Is Evil and all that)."

This doesn't make much sense (except for the parenthetical about piracy, but that would hardly be unique to Japan). Japan does not have "harsher online laws"(*) than the US, EU countries, the UK, etc. There is no government-mandated filtering of the Internet; was whoever it was who added this thinking of the Great Firewall of China? The country where that's an issue is kind of in the name.

If anything, the way Japanese obscenity law and the Internet work together makes a physical porn stash *less* plausible in anime and manga set in the present day. The Japanese Criminal Code does indeed ban the public exhibition, distribution, and sale of "obscene" materials, but, crucially, personal possession and viewing of such materials is perfectly legal (unless it's literal child porn, and even in that case, mere possession was actually only criminalized about a decade or so ago, and anything still goes if it's all illustrations and never involves any actual child victims). While adult material that is pixelated (and is thus legally deemed to be non-obscene, somewhat absurdly since you can basically show anything as long as you slightly blur the actual naughty bits) is certainly available for sale, anyone in Japan with an Internet-connected device that doesn't have some sort of parental control feature enabled can completely legally access and view exactly the same online porn as anyone in, say, the US can. Hence, because the Internet is unrestricted but print/physical video media are (nominally) subject to censorship, the incentive to just go online rather than keep a physical stash is even stronger in Japan than in most other countries.

I even kind of doubt the basic assertion that this trope really is still used in Japanese anime and manga any more often than in media from elsewhere. The only recent examples of such a stash being depicted that I can recall (not that I've been conducting a rigorous statistical survey, or anything) are in one work where the relevant scene is set in the late 1980s and another where a closeted high school boy has a single magazine with photos of shirtless-yet-still-bepantsed male models (and is also shown to have a much more extensive Internet search history he forgets to clear).

At any rate, if the mentioned trope is indeed unbroken in anime and manga, it most definitely isn't for the reason given. Perhaps Two Decades Behind is in play? Maybe Values Dissonance leading to pornography consumption just being depicted more often in general (whether because the mere concept is considered less taboo and hence shows up in more than just raunchy sex comedies, conversely because it might be used to show that a character is a sleazy lech, or because of some combination of the two, depending on the author)?

(*) Well, strictly speaking, hosting "obscene" files on a publicly accessible server that is physically located in Japan would be illegal, as that would count as exhibition or distribution under the Criminal Code and would provide Japanese courts with jurisdiction. However, given that the Internet is, y'know, one giant global network that lacks any inherent borders, this fact affects anyone accessing online content anywhere, be they in Tokyo or in Peoria.

Although the Clean Air Act has improved air quality in the United States, and its British counterpart has dead-horsed A Foggy Day in London Town, horrifically bad air quality now plagues Hong Kong, and many other industrial cities in China. I would argue that the trope isn't broken, just relocated.

Removed:

As discussed on the Fantasy Gun Control analysis, it's not the crossbow that was the Trope Breaker for the Knights; in fact, it solidified the "Armored Mounted Warrior" trope at first. What broke it was the rise of the professional (common) solider, i.e. commoners whose trade was fighting, as opposed to commoners who only fight for "one weekend a month and two weeks a year."