Enforced Trope
Tropes that are there because the writer had to include them - especially when a sharp-eyed viewer can tell the creator would have preferred to leave them out.
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It happens for a number of reasons:
- Systematic Executive Meddling
- Moral Guardians
- A Censorship Bureau
- Necessary Weasel (Requirements of the genre. For instance, if you want to do a Police Procedural, you had better include the procedure.)
- Constraints of the medium
- Government regulations
May lead to Writer Revolt in extreme cases. Clever writers may attempt Getting Crap Past the Radar.
Contrast Subverted Trope, Averted Trope, Defied Trope.
General examples
- Censorship Tropes. You can't ignore the censors without consequences.
- Being forced to Bowdlerise a work. The enforcers could be Moral Guardians, government requirements, or Executive Meddling.
- When fiction deals with the history of some region, it may sometimes need Rose-Tinted Narrative to get mainstream success in that region. In worse cases, Rose-Tinted Narrative will be required for publication.
- The Deep South in the first several decades of film got a lot of rose-tinting.
- Also happens with other works that require the authorization of their subjects - authorized biographies, for instance.
- Avoid the Dreaded G Rating. It's presumed that any work that can be seen without moral qualms by anyone, regardless of age, is not worth seeing by adults ("children will watch anything"). Since this would cut into profits by scaring off parts of the potential audience, it needs to be avoided.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle is all but unavoidable in TV series if they run long enough.
- Left Hanging can easily be forced on a TV series if it gets Screwed by the Network.
- Rated "M" for Money is often caused by Executive Meddling.
- The Coconut Effect, because Reality Is Unrealistic.
- Coconut Superpowers, because of budgetary problems during production.
- A Spiritual Successor may be created because a legal dispute renders a true sequel impossible.
- Any medium that relies on a small amount of people on a hectic time table will occasionally not be able to do the research correctly, and make some mistakes. Especially if they're on a contract.
- Any work that exists to promote or sell a product (such as a line of toys) will be constrained by product availability, turnover, popularity and gimmicks. Transformers is probably the most successful example.
- The Audible Sharpness in The Lord of the Rings was going to be averted, until test audiences had trouble accepting the absence of the trope.
- Dawson Casting can sometimes be necessary for legal reasons. One example is the film adaptation of The Reader. Michael Kross legally couldn't shoot his sex scenes with Kate Winslet until he had turned 18.
- Pac-Man Fever. Using a modern game would involve licensing or Product Placement agreements. Generic 80s arcade sounds do not.
- Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: Legal disclaimers are necessary to stave off attacks from overzealous lawyers.
- 555: Fictional phone numbers and addresses may need to avoid corresponding to ones in Real Life.
- No Budget: When the creators are limited by budget constraints.
- White Male Lead is usually employed because the entertainment industry feels (rightly or wrongly) that in order to appeal to whites, they need a white lead because white people won't relate to a minority.