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

That would probably be more workable and less objectionable.

Like I said, we already have tropes that cover inappropriate subject matter in children's entertainment and creators trying to sneak material past the censors. It would be easy to index them on the Getting Crap Past the Radar page and direct people to visit those pages before adding new examples to Getting Crap Past the Radar.

Still personally think it's best to just slash, burn and lock because I'm afraid any other solution wouldn't lead to easy enough curation / wouldn't change wiki-culture quickly enough. The more wicks we have the harder it'll be to clean everything up. We'd be playing perpetual catch up. At least, that's how I see it.

...Also I'm pretty convinced that there's not enough legit examples anyway to justify having subpages and the like; we'll have to cut so much to begin with, that I feel we'd be left with about a tropes-page worth of them anyway.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 22nd 2020 at 6:56:16 AM

True, but part of the advantage of making a supertrope in this situation is that all those incorrect examples would now be correct. Imprecise, and they really should go on the more specific subtropes, but not aggressively wrong in the same way as they are currently.

Turning it into an index, on the other hand, would mean that those incorrect examples are still incorrect. So it kinda feels like the worst of both worlds to me.

Eh, I kinda see the point, I just don't particularly agree that the misuse should be kept unless it fits a pre-existing trope. I just see little point to keeping most of it around since it's just people overreacting. But we'll see what a new crowner decides I guess since we will need a new one.

The problem with turning this into a supertrope is that it isn't a supertrope and that we already have Accidental Innuendo for general innuendo.

But we don't have a trope for general intentional innuendo.

We can't have one because it'd be immediately misused for everyone's Accidental Innuendo/Fanon. You might get away with a Confirmed Innuendo trope that requires Word of God as a stand in but a general innuendo trope would be impossible to maintain.

Following the above about innuendo tropes, innuendo is also a common type of Parental Bonus.

There's a saying in design: "If there isn't a path people will make their own". In other words, without a general innuendo trope people simply took the nearest substitute, which in this case is Radar.

This is why I advocate for broadening the definition; not only is it easier to go with the flow, if/once we do cleanup there is decent chance people will just find a new trope to pile on.

But the title wouldn't really be accurate anymore. Getting Crap Past the Radar is referring to a very specific thing, something innuendo doesn't actually qualify as; a broader innuendo trope would either need a different name, or we'd have to really warp what we mean by "getting crap past the radar" to justify it.

Even then, we'd still need to make a new trope for the original meaning of GCPTR and find all the valid examples of it anyway.

I don't think broadening Getting Crap Past the Radar is a good idea. It's basically giving the misuse a free pass.

I don't think broadening is a good idea, but I don't think making it more strict will help either. The problem is that people don't care about the trope's definition. Changes to the definition alone won't do any good; if it was possible to stop misuse that way, there wouldn't be that much misuse in the first place.

I'm a supporter of renaming it to Sneaking Crap Past The Radar (since "sneak" makes it clear that it's for things that shouldn't have been allowed at all), and I can kinda see the point in favor of not allowing examples on other pages, so it's easier to curate them.

I don't think changing the name to Sneaking Crap Past The Radar is really going to make a difference. Most people aren't going to see Sneaking as that much different from Getting.

Agreed. I don't think a rename is the solution here.

EDIT: Just because I didn't make it clear, I *am* in favor of broadening it.

Edited by FernandoLemon on Jun 24th 2020 at 2:08:08 PM

I'm not against changing the name. I just think Sneaking Crap Past The Radar isn't going to do much, because I feel most people will view sneaking and interchangeable with Getting. If we're going to change the name, I'd suggest Sneaking Past The Censors, because that makes it clear that the subject matter has to be something the censors wouldn't allow.

Agreed, that won't really change much.

Just to claify, I'm responding to @Septimus that the logic of "we can't have a trope about innuendo because it'd get misused!" isn't very valid - I mean, here we are, cleaning up misuse because of a (lack of a) trope about innuendo.

If we are to rename according to its intended definition though I agree we should go with something more blatant, like Censor Dodging.

As somebody who misused this trope for every slightly dirty joke when I was a dumb tween...I am ALL for this retool. There are a lot of people who use it to feel more mature or edgy.

But I don't think the WOG requirement is necessary in all cases. If a website lays out in its rules that you can't show nudity, but a creator puts out a video with nudity in it, you don't need the creator to tell you that it's GCPTR, anybody who's familiar with the standards knows.

I'm very new to TRS, but I think tightening up the definition is a good idea, maybe locking or even redlinking the page until all the misuses are cleaned out and the new definition is clear. I also like making it a super trope while not allowing examples of its own.

Maybe a lot of the current Radar work subpages could be retooled into Parental Bonus subpages and then cut anything that doesn't count for that trope? Most of what people think is GCPTR seems to just be PB anyway.

I feel like this has basically the same problem as Nightmare Fuel- it's an ok concept and a thing that exists, but people take it as a badge of honor and overuse it. Nightmare Fuel just has a clean up thread which seems to be working out very well, so why can't we take the same approach here?

There is a GCPTR cleanup thread.

Adding onto the above, I feel as if this trope is far more misused than Nightmare Fuel.

Edited by jandn2014 on Jun 24th 2020 at 7:52:51 AM

Indeed. While Nightmare Fuel does have lots of misuse, it also has plenty of good examples. Meanwhile, it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that the vast majority of GCPtR examples was misuse. Which is why I think something as drastic as cutting all subpages, and having only one central page where all examples are, might be justified.

See, the thing about Nightmare Fuel is that it's still subjective. A cleanup thread is all we need here because we're not trying to do any major purges, we're just trying to remove badly written, exaggerated, or badge-of-honor examples. Still, because it's subjective, there's a lot of wiggle room and as long as someone has objectively thought a scene was scary it can be kept as an example if written decently.

GCPTR on the other hand is objective. It has very strict criteria and thus the cleanup thread model can only do so much since there's no ambiguity. Either something fits or it doesn't and the misuse is so rampant that we're constantly playing catch up. Because it's objective, the misuse is easier to spot but it's so misunderstood it's harder to combat.

It's gotten buried a bit, but early on there was also support for turning Getting Crap Past the Radar into a disambig, rather than a supertrope. At the time it felt kinda extreme to me, but if people are that opposed to a supertrope, it's a decent compromise to preserve inbounds while also pointing people towards the various innuendo tropes such as Parental Bonus that GCPTR gets misused as.

And of course we'd launch a new trope (name to be determined) to cover the actual very specific trope of "this show has a radar and this moment successfully slipped past it."