Needs a dramatic overhaul: GettingCrapPastTheRadar

It does make sense to limit it in that sense as there's no radar to try and get under for certain things aimed at adults, just seems like mentioning things which they might have merely wanted to not pull attention to.

Many things which are for adults do have a radar. Even Family Guy, despite being mentioned as an example of something which doesnt' really have a radar, has to stick to certain practices on certain channels, hence why some episodes are censored.

Basing it on what a ratings board says wouldn't work.

edited 29th Jun '11 12:33:44 AM by halfmillennium

Oh Family Guy has censors like 3 different sets of them (Fox, TBS, Adult Swim.). Getting something past one or all of the does make it any less of an example.

Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!

I've tried to clean up some of these pages before, and in so far as I've seen, the biggest problem that many tropers don't understand what sort on content 'the radar' does or does not care about in specific contexts (on specific networks, in specific time blocks, in specific decades, etc).

I'm not sure why the only ratings-based option is modded so far down, but I really don't know how we'd measure what was or wasn't snuck past the radar without taking into account what the radar is or is not looking for.

Perhaps we could have a Useful Notes page on standards and practices and ask people to check there before adding an example?

edited 29th Jun '11 1:54:32 AM by Bailey

That would certainly help.

Regulated fun - the best kind! I don't make the rules, just enforce them with an iron fist.

^^ Considering how little people look things up before posting them as-is, I'm skeptical about people double-checking such a page.

Like the woman answered when asked why she was feeding chicken soup to a dead man, though: "it couldn't hurt".

All your safe space are belong to Trump

'Oh Family Guy has censors like 3 different sets of them (Fox, TBS, Adult Swim.). Getting something past one or all of the does make it any less of an example.'

More than that, but how does that make it less of an example?

This is probably what makes this whole section such a pile of crap laced with razor blades to even deal with, everything is so contentious there rarely feels like there's any justification for having examples if it creates such issues and constantly requires policing due to the opaqueness of the trope and people just throwing things in. Still unsure why this isn't considered as big an issue as Fetish Fuel ever was, both involve the same level of weird opinion-based nonsense nobody can agree on.

^ Fetish Fuel was entirely subjective. Getting Crap Past the Radar is essentially 'content that is against the rules set down by standards and practices, but which appeared in the show anyway'. All of the wonky "could be interpreted as a vague metaphor for whatever" examples are not subjective examples, they're wrong. The Radar does not care about "could be interpreted as a metaphor for"; it cares about things on a checklist being present or not present, and more often than people think sides with the creators when there's enough uncertainty that the objectionable content can be plausibly denied to sponsors.

So, on the list of bad examples posted here, we can say that #1 is a bad example (the network allowed fairly graphic character death on that series, which is unmissable on a storyboard anyway), #2 is likely a bad example (rules regarding use of profanity are contextual, although I'm not sure what Disney's specific take was on it in that year and time slot); #3 is a bad example, because no censor in the US has ever had a rule in place about how much animated jiggle is too much animated jiggle, and #4 is actually correct, since there's a subheading for "lewd gestures" on every censor's list (pantomiming sexual acts is in general a big no-no for tv-14 and below).

edited 30th Jun '11 10:09:09 PM by Bailey

If by #4, you mean the Buffy, "Hush" example, it would depend entirely on the context in the scene whether it would count as a sexual gesture. As you pointed out, the censor "more often than people think sides with the creators when there's enough uncertainty that the objectionable content can be plausibly denied to sponsors." In this case, since the gesture she makes is the same as the motion she uses to stake monsters, and the discussion is about monsters, it would probably be acceptable.

But yes, the problem is that this page has turned into editors doing their very best impression of Beavis and Butthead, looking for something dirty in everything and chortling "Hur,hur,hur, you said <whatever>!".

This image◊ is Getting Crap Past the Radar (no, I'm not going to post it open. You'll see why.) Look at the brownish rock in the center top of the screen. Then tell me that that that wasn't deliberate on the part of the designers, and that it didn't get past the Radar — it's a game that's available to anyone on Gamehouse, among other places.

edited 30th Jun '11 11:03:35 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

OK, so how do you fix it so people aren't just adding examples because of real world Heh Heh, You Said "X" or forgetting Accidental Innuendo exists? This trope is a real ass to deal with because nobody knows what radar applies in certain contexts and even then you get examples which apply to other tropes like Accidental Innuendo. The reason I say it's subjective because examples usually are subjective given the troper who wrote it doesn't know what the censors are thinking nor do they know in most cases what the writers were thinking either, it's all their perception. I know the trope itself isn't but the examples are, they're the issue I have because the trope is too unclear on this and probably can never be clear enough for as long as Freud Was Right.

As for the definition of "blatant", that's one you'll never see the bottom of because blatant is a pretty subjective criteria to begin with, blatant how it got past or blatant in how rude the reference is? Because of the uncertainty inherent in this trope, that's why examples suck badly for a trope like this, sure it's not outright bad in terms of the trope but the examples will be where YMMV will creep in.

edited 1st Jul '11 4:44:00 AM by treelo

I agree that "blatant examples" isn't concrete enough, but I'd support revising the description to make it clear that this trope only exists in relation to what the censors actually care about, and axing examples from media that don't have a radar in order to make the point clear. Since determining creator intent is often impossible, we can acknowledge that this is often difficult to tell from Accidental Innuendo accept where Word of God has confirmed one or the other, but the major thing is that if the innuendo refers to something you'd totally be allowed to say or do openly in the timeslot anyway, then it's not an example. Most examples of Heh Heh, You Said "X" don't pass that litmus test.

edited 2nd Jul '11 11:02:33 PM by Bailey

Regarding the Buffy example, the scene went like this:

Everyone has lost their voices.

Giles

Uses acetates to show that Buffy has to kill the demons responsible.

Buffy

Waves loose fist up and down.

Xander

Looks at Buffy quizzically.

Buffy

Picks up a stake and makes the same motion, with a slightly sheepish look on her face.''

So yes, the scene did show Xander mistaking a killing gesture for a wanking gesture. However, considering that there were at least two episodes in the same season where we saw Buffy having sex with Riley*

, it's pretty clear that such things were not banned by the censor.

As for making blatancy a criterion, that won't work. Something similar happened with both Nightmare Fuel and I Am Not Making This Up. In the case of the former, what for one person was absolutely shocking was only slightly surprising to another. Person #2 thus takes 'slightly surprising' to be the threshold for IANMTU, and posts some examples that are slightly surprising. A third person comes along, for whom those slightly surprising things are merely a little unusual, assumes that being a little unusual is the threshold, and posts examples of things being a little unusual. Meanwhile, person #1 comes back, as well as people #4 - #10,000, who all see quite mundane and ordinary examples proliferating, take that as the threshold, and simply add a bunch of examples phrased in deliberately outlandish ways to get their favourite series onto the listing. This is what has happened to GCPTR.

A similar thing happened with Nightmare Fuel. It started off as unintentionally terrifying, but due to different people's ideas about what's scary and what isn't, it ended up a dumb pile of stuff that someone somewhere thought might possibly be scary to a highly sheltered child somewhere who has never read anything more advanced than Mr. Men. That page was actually made into an index of objective tropes that can be scary, which worked well, until The Great Crash buggered it up. That's why I think it would be better to turn GCPTR into a listing of methods by which the crap is snuck in; while it's very hard to tell what is or isn't an example without Word of God, things like Foreign Curse Word are perfectly objective and uncontroversial.

Ukrainian Red Cross

If we can't make the current top voted crowner choice workable, we should use the next positively voted option down. That'd be the one where we nix all examples and convert the trope page into an index of tropes used by this supertrope instead.

edited 3rd Jul '11 7:08:09 AM by treelo

Just thinking about Troper Tales for this, can you really have one if all it consists of are several people basically saying "I said/wrote/did X in school, it was funny and we loled"?

Bump.

bump again.

I don't think this needs a daily bump. It's just the Elephant in the Living Room. We all know it's an issue, but we're at a loss as to what to actually do. It doesn't help that there are bigger issues (like the whole Troper Tales issue) going on at the same time.

Perhaps we should take it in steps... for whatever option we do, there's some agreement that certain steps should be done no matter what - i.e. the worst examples need to be culled now, right?

Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.

How about we all list some of the "Radar" pages which we feel need the most work, with some examples, and reasons why they don't work? It would help us define the scope of the issue and determine if there are any patterns at work.

Pages that need work (here's hoping the formatting works):

• Sym-Bionic Titan

• Reasons: Idea of radar based on TV Y7 (FV) standards, when the show is rated TV PG (which, it's worth remembering, is the rating stuff like Gilmore Girls, Smallville, and Naruto get. Assuming that the radar scans for everything and anything that could be given a salacious interpretation, particularly when there are also more obvious, more innocuous ways they could be interpreted.

Generator Rex

• Reasons: See Sym Bionic Titan. Looking at the page, however, I notice that most of the "OMG! People got KILLED" stuff isn't in these any more, so somebody's keeping watch on the page.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

• Reasons: Plot-critical stuff used as examples. Salacious readings of innocuous lines.

Gargoyles:

• Reasons: Greg Weisman has repeatedly stated how it worked with S&P to get those things on the air.

edited 8th Jul '11 3:39:30 PM by DoKnowButchie

Avatar art by Lorna-Ka.

Culling bad examples for now would be good, I'll try and make a list of the worst offenders.

I hate going over this trope... anyway, some constants are that people assume the radars to be significantly more censor-happy than they actually are, figure anything that's bad is an attempt to get something past though there mightn't be a radar and happen to be downright perverse sometimes in how they get some of the examples to make sense. So in all, nothing we didn't already know. Onto the worst offenders anyway:

• As a starter thing, these forms of media don't require a page in any sense given there's no radar to subvert so they can be cut straight away.
  • Music
  • Literature
  • Mythology
  • Theater
  • Real Life

• Card Games: Not an actual example among them besides the minor faff with the Yu Gi Oh harpy cards and that's more about self-censorship, not being censored by an outside group. The rest are clearly aimed at an adult audience anyway.
• Comic Books: Lots of Heh Heh, You Said "X", innuendo, examples for comics aimed at adults and some really bad ones which pretty much happen to be down to the troper's perverse mind. Lots of natter too, nice way of flagging a bad example when scanning. Same goes for the awkward Newspaper Comics subsection which is a little confusing to some given it has a page linking to three rather stubby example pages and nothing else, a few examples scattered in Comic Books and a folder on the trope page itself.
• Film: A lot of R-rated films, mainly because people seem to figure being subtle or indirect about something obviously must be to appease a censor. Others are tame double entendres in PG films.
• Live Action TV: It's probably most telling that Babylon5, a show with pretty deep adult themes, has a page of its own. Otherwise, it's the usual set of PG-13+ shows with less of a radar than they think and Unfortunate Implications which only exist within the mind of the sicko who added it and clearly not the guy following up going "huh?".
• Video Games: A bizarre array of perverts and closeted childhoods, quite a few "do you see that, it looks like a/an/some X doesn't it?" examples which are the worst ones to use.
• Western Animation: Ugh, one thing that can be said, this and every subsection under it is 70% bad example, 15% adult aimed and the remainder the perversions of the writers. Cull it all, makes Fetish Fuel seem sane.

Worst by far are Western Animation and Video Games, Anime and Manga I sidestepped due to Values Dissonance but those two need the harshest clipping.

edited 9th Jul '11 5:14:55 AM by treelo

Yeah, I think that Western Animation radar pages should just start over. The pages that I think are the absolute worst are the pages for most Kid Coms, e.g. most of what's on Nickelodeon and Disney Channel. Disney Channel I can understand, because they are pretty strict, but Nickelodeon seems to just let anything by as long as it's not too blatant. Regardless, these pages are full of Accidental Innuendo and Fetish Fuel type examples.

You know, I've changed my mind here. Before, I thought that this would be too much trouble to clean up but still could theoretically stay. Now, I'm convinced It Is Beyond Saving. The sheer amount of perverse attempts to try and find something, anything "inappropriate" in a show - regardless of any context involved - is in equal parts disgusting and depressing. Is it too late to go for the "cut 'em all" solution?

I think so, the current crowner is unworkable and not really an option we can use so we should use the next positively voted option down which is the "cut 'em all" option. Thing is, I don't know if that can be done. All I do know is that it's the most sensible idea given the amount of work people would have to do otherwise.

Thing is, I can see the bad examples relocating to other related tropes and the issues involved in this one starting over. Guess that's the major issue regarding tropes involving sexual kinks and the like, most can't have examples because people have a hard time not putting down bad examples.

If you tighten it to just the most blatant examples, your removing all the deeper subtextual and insinuated moments that do count as getting crap past the radar but aren't stated as plain text.

At the point you might as well not have a Radar at all, because those examples were obviously let through.

edited 17th Jul '11 1:54:08 PM by Vyctorian

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