Basic Trope: Special characters, symbols and/or numbers are used in place of letters to symbolise that a character is swearing, or else speaking something particularly explicit or verbose, implying censorship. May be just casually but often out of anger, rage, shock, surprise or other forms of strong emotion that could warrant swearing or explicit language.
- Straight: 'The Adventures of Bob and Alice' is a comic book where normally, character's speech and thoughts are portrayed through speech bubbles with normal language. In one scene, Bob stubs his toe and gets extremely mad, and his speech bubble visibly says "$^1#!" as he screams in rage.
- Exaggerated:
- There is a scene where multiple characters are talking angrily, each with at least one string of symbols in each of their speech bubbles.
- Symbol swear word substitutes don't even remotely resemble real swear words.
- Symbol swear words are longer than normal words.
- Downplayed: Symbol swear words like "$h1T" have a mixture of normal letters and special characters that are relatively common, so you can pretty much tell what they mean anyway.
- Symbol speech strings use emojis only, so swearing isn't implied.
- Justified:
- The creators wanted to be able to convey verbose language in their stories without their younger audiences hearing the actual words or phrases.
- The characters are speaking language codes (e.g. hex) which translate to swear words when converted.
- Inverted:
- All of the characters communicate in a special symbol language which is incomprehensible to the readers/viewers. However, swear words are written and pronounced normally.
- Good words tend to get censored into symbols; bad words do not.
- Subverted: Curse Cut Short, but with symbol swear words.
- Bob screams "$%!7", but then screams the real thing right afterwards.
- Parodied:
- Bob finds the worst possible word that won't get censored into symbols and starts calling other characters it, and using it whenever he is enraged or surprised. Because he'd rather speak strength in human language.
- This "censorship" only applies to people who know what the swear words mean. People who don't can say any swear word they like and it shows up explicitly.
- Bob purposely uses symbols in place of swearing as he feels they are more harmful or strong.
- Bob stubs his toe and says "Dollar sign, up arrow, one, number sign, exclamation mark".
- Averted: No symbols are used as substitutes for swear words or verbose language.
- Defied: ???
- Enforced: The creators wanted to portray Bob in a situation of rage that older audiences could relate to, in which many normal adults would be tempted to say something mildly sharp at the least.
- Lampshaded: "Hey, Bob? How do you get so many symbols in your speech when you're mad?" "Oh, I dunno. Just say something harsh or explicit and then the magic happens. Like this: $%1#!"
- Discussed: "How am I able to get away with saying so much verbose talk? Would have thought it would have gotten censored by now."
- Conversed: "Do you ever wonder what a character is saying when their rage speech is all scrambled? It's an interesting thought."
Back to Symbol Swearing
