Needs a dramatic overhaul: GettingCrapPastTheRadar

As a followup to this conversation, Radar remains a hopeless wasteland of Square Peg Round Trope based WMG if what previous discussions regarding it have told me. The issue is best described on the Square Peg Round Trope page, some examples only seem right in name but not in intent of the trope either because the writers aren't actually trying to slip anything under in the given example, is something innocuous made into it because of an "underlying metaphor",reading between the lines to see something which wasn't there anyway or just sounds like something which is innuendo-laden. The worst offender is Western Animation where several series have their own Radar page but most don't really seem to require it. Basically, it comes down to the trope being something which touches upon being a YMMV trope seeing as outside of Word of God, there's not much way of saying if an example is actually a legit Radar example or just a Troper hearing or seeing something which they construed to be illicit in some way even if it requires squinting, tilting your head sideways and imagining that that was over there instead to figure out what they mean.

What I'm proposing isn't exactly Fetish Fuel levels of spinoff (though it'd be a good way to cut things down easily, it's not really an option I feel great about) but cutting down the examples and probably redefining what it means into a YMMV trope to avoid bad examples and reduce some of the bloat for the section. Only reason why it's here and not in Trope Repair is because it's a namespace and huge.

edited 7th May '11 6:12:48 AM by treelo

A list of suggestions, paraphrased from a previous thread on the topic:

1) Plot elements, by definition, cannot go under the radar. 2) If the [vaguely shocking thing] is the point of a scene or the joke, it is not flying under the radar. 3) Not everything that could possibly be interpreted as something sexual means it went under the radar; sometimes, the fact that things can be interpreted that way IS the joke, which again goes to the previous rule. 4) The more examples a work appears to have, the less likely it is that the examples actually fly under the radar. Works with more than, say, seven examples are considered ineligible for Under The Radar status.

Bump. Just as a addenum, shouldn't this trope be YMMV material given it is an Audience Reaction trope?

Eh. It's more like a Genius Bonus than an Audience Reaction. However it requires guesses.

No interest for this at all? Too bad it doesn't threaten to pull the site behind the Google curtain.

edited 15th May '11 5:53:49 AM by treelo

I tried doing this before. The problem is that it's far too big of a trope and misused far too often to do properly.

Doesn't make sense, usually if a trope decays by enough all hands get to work and fix the thing. Sometimes, it just gets cut and asked to setup over on Wikia instead but this, this one is crumbling. I figure that whilst it is broken, it isn't sufficiently enough to require any consideration.

I'll quit my whining if someone can come up with something better than "we know it's broken but people like it and has gained too much inertia to shift so just leave it alone".

This trope drives me bonkers.

I put it through TRS once before, and I think at least two or three others have tried as well. In addition to all of the previous ways in which this trope gets misused, there's also the fact that people just don't seem to understand where the radar is (Rule Of Rose is cited... and it got an "M for Mature" rating, the video game equivalent of the MPAA's "R").

It's a legit trope, but so misused that I'm almost tempted to request a lock. I can help with a clean-up if we set some guidelines as to what should be in there (I think some sort of list for each respective radar would be helpful), although the level of misuse involved tells me that this is going to be a team effort.

The problem is not really with the trope, but with the Tropers. We are a bizarre mix of astonishingly perverted and more puritanical than Jack Chick and Andy Schlafly combined, and we imagine that writers are even more perverted while network censors take puritanicity to even greater heights. As a result, we scrutinise everything we watch for anything that, if you squint, and ignore the context, plus add some fanon, and are stoned, might possibly be interpretable as vaguely alluding to sex, and then trumpet the fact that the censors managed to sneak in a blatant and filthy discussion of anal fisting into My Little Pony, yet also insisting that any genuine discussion of such matters must have been subversively inserted by the degenerates who actually write it, while refusing to believe that the censors might possibly have seen the episode, noticed the reference, and figured that it was inoffensive and there was no need to delete it. And you can quote me on that.

Radical suggestion: Restrict examples to cases where the writer actually states that they snuck something in. (Note: "I'm surprised they let us away with that" does not count, as that's a case of the censor being unexpectedly lenient, not of failing to notice something altogether.)

Suggestion 2: Make it a list of methods that a writer might use to sneak in racy material, such as Foreign Curse Word and Censor Decoy.

Also, regardless of what happens, let's make a rule that anything with an age rating of 15 or higher (or equivalent) is automatically disqualified, as any work with such a rating can more or less talk about anything frankly and openly.

Also also, I don't think that cases where an actor simply has a very sensual method of delivery should count, as seeing sexuality in their performance is the inevitable result of hiring the actor rather than anything the writer might have tried to sneak in.

edited 19th May '11 11:45:59 AM by VampireBuddha

I wouldn't quite go so far as only placing in items from Word of God - particularly as maybe the creators themselves don't know where the radar is (for an example, I always thought the bong reference in Futurama mentioned on the page is because they don't show it in use with marijuana - after all, water pipes are perfectly legal in and of themselves).

It might help if we split the respective subpages in terms of which radars are involved. The one I always go back to is in the video game section, with Bionic Commando showing Adolf Hitler exploding into a gory mess. Nintendo had very clear rules against both Hitler and blood back when the game was released, so getting exploding Hitler in the game (even though he wasn't named) is widely agreed to be one of the biggest examples of the trope in that medium (as for how they pulled it off - it was very late in a Nintendo Hard game, so the general assumption is that the censors just weren't good enough to get to that point).

Now, if we subdivide each subpage into sections based on their respective radars (such as pre-ESRB, "E for Everyone", et cetera) and list, before all examples, just what the radar actually was, it may help keep things under control. It'll still need regular curating, but we should have fewer issues in that case.

I prefer suggestion two, examples for this trope seem to cause a snowball effect until it becomes a broken trope as anything and everything can count. Just laying out how a writer might get around a radar seems a better way to describe than endless pages of examples which conflict, might not exist for everyone or may not even need to be there.

Yeah, the #2 suggestion is good. It is a lot more tropish to examine how things are gotten past the radar, than it is to list everything that did.

I like option 2 as well.

Hmm... if Option 2 happens, if nothing else, I get to come up with a new trope for the first time in ages (because I don't think there's one currently applicable for "stick it in a place where they won't think/aren't able to look"). Not my favorite option, but given the problems that this trope keeps having, probably the most workable.

Thought we had a bunch of tropes covering private or generally inaccessible places for things to go/come from (Victoria's Secret Compartment, Ass Shove, Trouser Space, there's probably others).

As for Radar, who wants to deal with option 2?

edited 21st May '11 4:19:51 AM by treelo

Oops, allow me to clarify - I don't think we have a trope for slipping things past the radar by placing them where censors wouldn't think to look/aren't capable of looking. For example, slipping an exploding Adolf Hitler late into a very hard game, so that censors would only find it if they perservered through a very difficult game. It would be the censorship equivalent of all those tropes, but would unlikely overlap (unless someone had someone literally pulling something out of someone's ass in a background, where censors didn't think to look).

So in other words, hiding controversial material as an Easter Egg? That sounds tropeable; if you can make a YKTTW out of it, that would help a lot with reworking GCPTR.

Exactly. I'll figure out a good way to word it and put it up there.

Oh, another method, related to the above, would be the ever-popular Freeze-Frame Bonus. That trope can be used for other things, of course, but animation is rife with using a frame or two to slip naughty stuff in.

Bump.

I think that maybe it should be limited for actual blatant things and not just "Alice said this which could be interpreted as that". Especially after reading the pages for Kid Coms.

We still haven't come up with a solid idea as to what, precisely, to do with the page as it stands. A crowner might be in order.

I'd like a crowner for this but I don't even know if Special Efforts can have crowners. The usual method to create one hasn't worked for me.

edited 2nd Jun '11 5:33:10 AM by treelo

This would be a Page Action crowner, not a Special Efforts crowner. If someone will go back through the thread and gather all the suggestions into one post, I'll make and hook the crowner.

edited 2nd Jun '11 8:13:33 AM by Madrugada

Righto, here's what's gone through so far:

1. Change trope type to YMMV
2. Cut it off and sail it down the river, Fetish Fuel style
3. Restrict examples to those stated through Word of God
4. Redefine trope to methodologies used by writers instead of examples
5. Subsections for each radar, sorted by age group/type
6. Tighten definition to very blatant attempts

This is just a cursory list, if someone feels it needs clarifying or expanding feel free to do so.

edited 3rd Jun '11 3:31:42 AM by treelo

Bump.