Getting Crap Past the Radar cleanup

Fighteer made a suggestion on Ask The Tropers that Getting Crap Past the Radar is suffering from massive misuse and needs a cleanup thread. Per his request, I am making this thread.

Fighteer said:

Let the data shredding begin! ...or something.

Working on Code Lyoko, I took out some examples that looked to me like they were more Parental Bonus or just something that a reasonable American radar would ignore. (For the former, I operated on the principle of leaving entries where I'd say "if you get it, you're old enough to get it.")

However, I'd also like to ask if we should cut the page entirely, on the grounds of the show effectively having no radar to get past; Moon Scoop wrote it in French, translated it almost completely uncut into English (except making a few attempts to hide the fact that the show was set in France), and Cartoon Network waved it across without so much as blinking.

If we don't cut the page, then if there's any French tropers viewing this thread, could I ask them to glance over the page with the mindset of what French Media Watchdogs might consider acceptable or unacceptable for kids?

edited 18th Oct '13 7:17:38 PM by Ramidel

I've said this in the past, but I think a lot of the problems with this trope may stem from a popular "executives bad, creators good" mindset among tropers, where people would prefer to believe that writers snuck "adult" references past those meddling censors than people saw it and didn't really care. So I'm not sure if merely cleaning up bad examples is going to be enough.

I hold the opinion that the pages should be cut altogether for creepiness.

We're trying to clean out creepiness and just leave what is genuinely the writers/directors/creators being deliberately sneaky -or when they're throwing stuff at the radar so hard something has to get through, because the radar will shut down in self-defense. (Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Birds of Prey song.)

I use Animaniacs as a rough starting point. If Yakko would say, "smooch Goodnight everybody!'' I file it in the radar pile. If Dot would say, "Old joke. Ask your parents," it goes in parental bonus.

Context is important too. In "Fury", Hawkgirl on DCAU saying, "Don't knock it until you've tried it," doesn't seem to be Radar material. But because it's a reply to Diana's line referencing 'what good men are anyway', it becomes Radar.

I'd say first clean out everything where the claim for 'radar' is clearly out of context with what the original line or scene was in the show. "Ooo, she said this," type of stuff, when the context clearly shows no way is it radar-level 'this'. (If that makes any sense.)

edited 18th Oct '13 10:45:51 PM by Candi

The problem is that this trope is laughingstock to detractors and one of the last "creepy" parts of the website. There are already plenty of innuendo tropes, so why not just use those?

There's no objective way to say what the censors approve or not, Values Dissonance and all that.

I can't say I agree with the "creepy" argument. That said, your argument about "we can't get inside the censors' heads" has merit.

But I think Fighteer issued a mod edict on the trope's definition and application up there. Your arguments seem to be more of a TRS question.

edited 18th Oct '13 11:15:50 PM by Ramidel

I thought Septimus Heap said that putting this up in TRS again would be preferable.

Ask the Tropers thread, mod verdict, Fighteer: Getting Crap Past the Radar has a perfectly good definition, but it tends to be disregarded, resulting in a mess, and yes, creepiness.

Septimus Heap is a very involved and highly respected member of the troper community, but he's not a mod. So what Fighteer says is what goes at this point.

Mod verdict is to clean up the examples. To get a different verdict, you'd have to talk to Fast Eddie. If he says it stays, it stays.

It's in this forum because there will also be someone who will misuse the trope re: the latest new work. So it'll be a continuing, on-going project.

And I tend to take 'detractors use it to make the site a laughing stock' with a big grain of salt without sources, especially since there were books on trivia in media long before the net became a major thing, and GCPtR items were always included in the books that weren't specifically for kids.

I also take it with a big grain of salt when the mocked trope's examples are not in the condition it should be. If someone were to mock, say, Ear Worm, I would completely understand. I've been over there a couple times working on stuff, to the severe detriment of my patience, and it still needs a lot of love.

And detractors are always a thing. An annoying one. There's always someone who will yell 'fake', or point and laugh, or bully, or troll. They're not what this site is about.

Now, Cleaning Up Examples: What's the consensus on finding shoe-horned examples, and examples deliberately taken out of context to look like radar material, and getting rid of those first?

Like I said before: can't speak for a "consensus", but from where I'm standing, removing bad examples alone isn't going to do any good. The misuse is the product of a widespread attitude (two, actually) among editors, and from what I've seen with Complete Monster, merely cleaning up bad examples won't help in a situation like that. mikurufan also has a point in that it's going to be very hard to tell what's a bad example in the first place - though there's admittedly some very obvious misuse, there's a lot more cases where it's hard to tell even with context.

(For the record, I think the whole "cut it because it's creepy" argument is ridiculous. While the things driving the misuse are arguably kind of creepy, the trope itself is no worse than many others and far less so than some).

For the record, the question of TRS was because there wasn't agreement in the last discussions on whether a mere cleanup would suffice at getting the problem fixed.

Technically, misuse of Getting Crap Past the Radar would be deleted like any other misuse, unless you are willing to move it to a more appropriate page.

I'm suggesting deleting obvious misuse as a starting point. It's a lot easier to deal with the stuff that might be salvageable if the obvious garbage is tossed first.

It'll also avoid someone working hard to make an entry look nice, just to find out that it doesn't fit.

The suggestion is, dispose of obvious misuse, then start on repairs of stuff where the problem lies other then in the specific example itself, such as spelling, grammar, formatting, example indentation, namespaces, and all the other things that make it easy to read and link to other pages.

For those examples that might have a home on another trope, they can be placed on the discussion page to see if they do fit somewhere else.

edited 19th Oct '13 5:46:01 AM by Candi

That's the problem with a fiat decision; there usually isn't a consensus behind it.

I don't think Fighteer actually ordered us to not make a TRS thread, but he did suggest that we make a cleanup thread under the current definition. So that's the purpose of this thread. This isn't the thread to argue the definition of the trope.

Correct. I'm not coming down with the Mod Hammer and dictating What Shall Be; I'm offering up the suggestion that, since we already had a TRS that resulted in the current definition, we should first attempt to make the examples fit that definition.

If, in the process of doing so, we discover that Radar is unsalvageable, then further voting and/or action can be taken.

To clarify, the definition of Radar currently is: Stuff that the censors should have caught, but didn't, that would probably have raised the rating of the work.

Innuendo is not Radar. You can have innuendo in a kids' work and not bother anyone. If you would feel comfortable with your kids watching, it is not a Radar item. Hence my Spongebob example above.

Also, a work that does not have censorship by the nature of its medium or publication method, or a work that is advertised as mature to begin with, does not have a Radar to get Crap past. Nudity in an R-rated film is not "crap past the radar". (One could make the case that a male full-frontal shot in an R film would be, since that typically gets it kicked out of theaters in the U.S., but that's not really the point of the trope.)

edited 19th Oct '13 7:12:39 AM by Fighteer

One thing I have to ask is how Literature/ is dealt with. Most places I know don't have ratings.

Also, I guess that most of the web based stuff ought to be taken out.

Please take note of where this thread is located in the forum tree: It's in Long-term Projects, not TRS. Deciding what to do with the page is not the subject of the thread; that's TRS business.

The purpose of this thread is co-ordinating the clean-up efforts. If you don't want to be a part of that effort, but would prefer instead to argue that something other than a clean-up should be done, don't read or participate in this thread.

For literature, we pretty much have to look at how the work was marketed. Was it marketed as a kid's book? There was Radar to get past. YA? Still some Radar, but not as sensitive. To adults? that will depend on when it was written — modern stuff has next to no Radar, but in the past the Radar could be very sensitive, indeed.

Sorry, I was the one who brought it up. I do not follow Ask The Tropers and did not know this thread was created by a suggestion there. I only thought this was yet another attempt to clean the trope up when I last heard it needed a Trope Repair Shop thread.

That said, the web media needs to have it restricted to In-Universe examples. I remember Web Comics has a folder like that.

edited 19th Oct '13 3:52:57 PM by mikurufan

I agree that web media definitely falls under the obviously-wrong banner.

I also agree. Any examples that are not In-Universe or Lampshaded should be removed.

Web Comics seems to be done already.

What about Web Original? I think it would be the same.

The only "radar" that exists on the Internet is the one that is upheld by hosting or advertising companies (the latter, for sites that depend upon advertising to survive).

In that case, I wonder if I should call a cut on the Code Lyoko page, because of the above carte blanche given to the company.

edited 20th Oct '13 2:47:23 AM by Ramidel

While I don't know the situation with Code Lyoko specifically, if the producing company really has a carte blanche to do what they want, then there's no Radar as far as they're concerned.

Code Lyoko's Radar would probably be French if any at all, since it was translated by the same company that made it, and the bits of stuff they changed had mostly to do with 'this really isn't France'.

edited 20th Oct '13 5:36:09 AM by Candi