Banned in China/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Straight: A country bans a work to be distributed.

  • Exaggerated:
    • Merely talking about the work is grounds for the death sentence.
    • Every single place with any degree of government, no matter the size or form, has banned the mere existence of this work.
  • Justified:
    • A country bans a video game since it contains a virus that destroys personal computers.
    • The country has strict decency laws and the work either ignores them or deliberately breaks them. The People's Board of Artistic Monitoring is not amused.
  • Inverted:
    • A country allows a work to be distributed, despite the fact that it's banned in pretty much everywhere else in the world.
    • Alternatively, country enforces everyone to own the said work.
    • Germans Love David Hasselhoff
  • Subverted: A lawyer manages to convince the government to unban the said work.
  • Double Subverted: ...but a new government steps up and bans it anyway.
  • Parodied:
    • A country bans a work to be distributed, but that doesn't stop anyone, and the government is hopelessly inept at enforcing the rule.
    • The work is so vile that it makes the most bizzarre Hentai ever released look like Life Cycle of an Octopus. Anyone who views /plays /reads it gouges their eyes out, and even the most disgusting pervert has to go in for therapy. It's pretty much the pornographic equivalent of The Necronomicon.
    • The country declares war on the film-maker /game company /publishing house that made it.
  • Deconstructed: A country is worried about the public's reaction to a certain controversial work, and bans it.
  • Reconstructed: The populace is universal in the condemnation of a work and support banning it, so the government acquiesces.
  • Zig Zagged: Governments change quickly in that country and they're very varying in terms of freedom of distributing the said work.
  • Averted: Government doesn't even try to ban the said work.
  • Enforced: This trope is almost always enforced.
  • Invoked: The author purposefully releases the work in a country that will surely ban it, in order to gain some international notoreity.
  • Defied: The author removes a scene that will surely ban the work so that it won't be banned.
  • Lampshaded: "I think this thing will surely get this work banned in that country"
  • Discussed: "Isn't that forbidden in Tropeania?"
  • Conversed: "China banned this in 2003, you know…"

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