Misused (New Crowner 6 Nov 2020): Getting Crap Past The Radar

As suggested by the Getting Crap Past The Radar clean up thread, I am taking GCPTR to the TRS to incite further discussion on what should be done with it.

The trope has been plagued with misuse for years and this issue is too far gone to simply clean up misuse when it is found. Radar really isn't common as most tropers think it is and it is pretty hard to prove if something was snuck past the radar unless Word of God explicitly states that that was the case.

According to a group wick the clean up thread did at Sandbox.Getting Crap Past The Wick Check, most of the wicks appear to be either innuendo, belonged on other tropes or was just plain misuse. Very few seemed correct based the context available

Huh, how is this already open?

Anyway, I'll throw my two cents in: One significant problem with this trope is that it's simply too difficult to determine if something was getting past the radar. Restrictions on what can be shown or not have varied over time, and still vary from place to place. The basic definition of the trope is just inherently too unclear.

Aw, and we were still polishing the wick check sandbox

But yeah, this needs some serious work.

What!? Already? I wanted to clean up the sandbox. But hey, better sooner than later.

We can keep cleaning it up, why not?

Reproposing from the cleanup thread:

Is it an option to lock the main trope page, copy over all the few examples that are valid from the subpages, then cut/redirect them one by one?

Also, I am not sure I like the list-of-instructions format of the description.

A plain cut or rename is pretty much ruled out by the 115834 inbounds.

So, like, an on-page-examples only thing? I could be down for that.

I think that can work as most examples are misuse anyway.

Another option is to make the trope definition only but that maybe too drastic. But considering the high level of misuse that will continue even after we finish what we need to do on this thread..

Now that the sandbox has been re-organized, we can better analyze the results.

If we're being generous and assuming we were correct about where we sorted every example, only 10 of the 105 wicks we checked are valid, leaving 67 misused wicks and 27 murky examples or ZCEs.

That's...not good.

I agree that this trope is a misuse magnet because it's too hard to know both the creators' intentions and how sensitive the radar was (if there even was a radar) when it was created.

So maybe it's best to cut all the examples, or require that all examples be verified by Word of God or other reliable sources.

Getting Crap Past the Radar suffers from a similar problem to Nightmare Fuel: tropers shoehorning in as many examples as possible to make a work look more clever or mature, like how Nightmare Fuel is used to make a work look darker than it is. Many examples of Getting Crap Past the Radar are unintended innuendos, things that aren't inappropriate for the age rating at all (such as Toilet Humor), or tropers reading too deeply into a line or scene. Another problem with this trope is what's considered appropriate for certain age groups changes over time; what was considered radar-dodging in The '90s may be considered fine to show today.

Many examples of Getting Crap Past the Radar can probably be moved to Accidental Innuendo or Parental Bonus (for jokes or references only adults will get but contain no explicit inappropriate content).

Edited by ADrago on Jun 4th 2020 at 4:22:38 AM

Has any thought been given to only including discussed or acknowledged examples?

Because yeah. This has been a serious problem for a while. People misuse the "crap," the "past," and the "radar" pretty frequently.

I think my favorite recent example was a video game where someone said "fuggetaboutit" and the entry talking about how "forget" could have been used... in place of "fuck." Entirely forgetting that it was, you know. Being used for forget.

I think most examples of this trope are misuse, and should be purged in some way. Wouldn't be opposed to a nuke to be honest.

Perhaps unrelated, but I heard there's a tool on the wiki that allows you to Exterminatus every wick on the entire site, but only admins can use it. When was it last used?

Getting Crap Past the Radar is a legit censorship trope even if it is widely misused, so I strongly oppose nuking.

Yeah, that's the thing. There are legit examples. There's not a lot of legit examples, but they do exist.

I agree with ADrago's comparison with Nightmare Fuel misuse (i.e., thinking it makes the work sound more edgy/mature than it actually is); I previously made a similar comparison in the Nightmare Fuel cleanup thread.

Anyway, I agree that this is a legitimate trope and thus shouldn't be cut. The issue here isn't whether it exists; it's that it's frequently misused, especially in the case of supposed examples that are actually Accidental Innuendo and thus not intended to sound dirty.

As for whether the admin tool to delete all of a page's wicks has been used in the past, that's how I Am Not Making This Up was cut.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jun 4th 2020 at 7:44:48 AM

Yeah I don't think it should be cut. Just that the majority of the examples should be axed or it should become definition only

I have two suggestions:

• Turn Getting Crap Past the Radar into a high-level supertrope for most censorship tropes, including a new subtrope for literal censorship (Sneaking Past The Radar or something).
• Turn Getting Crap Past the Radar into a disambig for the various tropes it's misused as, and dewick it after launching Sneaking Past The Radar.

I think the first one would require less work, and is close to how the troper hive mind uses it.

I like the second idea better, under the following conditions:

• It is listed as Trivia.
• There must be either Word of God or significant proof towards an example counting. This very much suggests that if there is significant and reasonable doubt over whether an example counts, it should be removed, as examples are not arguable.

Edited by Brainulator9 on Jun 4th 2020 at 9:59:06 AM

I like that.

Same; it keeps the same basic idea of the trope, but without all the confusion.

Edited by jandn2014 on Jun 4th 2020 at 11:14:10 AM

It’s also important not to forget the Animation Age Ghetto, which has been a significant factor in Getting Crap Past the Radar’s Trope Decay as people assume all adult jokes in cartoons are examples regardless of their actual target demographic (as the late Radar.Family Guy proves, since they had no radar they needed to get past and could go hog-wild with adult humor).

Perhaps the Word of God thing could be more of a recommendation and not a hard rule.

Edited by GeneralGigan817 on Jun 4th 2020 at 11:30:51 AM

The Word of God requirement sounds like a good idea, but how many examples would that leave the page with?

Well there would be far less than what it used to have but still enough to show a clear latter. I mean Radar really isnt that common of a trope especially nowadays were the standards have been relaxed some.

Most of the examples on the page barring the Web Animation (which I am not sure has a radar to begin with but I guess it depends on her is hosting the content) folder includes word of god or in universe examples.

Edited by MacronNotes on Jun 4th 2020 at 11:55:18 AM

I support renaming it to Sneaking Crap Past the Radar, but oppose a Word of God requirement. If it's apparent that it wouldn't be allowed in if the censors caught it, then it counts. For example, someone says in the background "that race was a pisser" in Cars (confirmed by the script); "piss" definitely isn't allowed in a G-rated movie.

Tropers have argued on the cleanup thread that examples need to explain the "radar" as well as the "crap". But assuming any works have enough legit examples for their own subpage, I think explaining the work's censorship standards in the page description is enough, as opposed to tacking "in a TV-Y7 show" onto every bullet.

Edited by rjd1922 on Jan 3rd 2021 at 6:22:01 AM