Unfortunate Implications/Other Media

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Important Note 1: Copying from the main trope page: No real life examples, please; Real Life as a whole does not imply anything. Individual people imply things in their works.

Important Note 2: Just because a work has Unfortunate Implications does not mean the author was thinking of it that way. In fact, that's the point of it being unfortunate. So, please, no Justifying Edits about "what the authors really meant." The way an author handles a trope is an important factor here; handling a trope in a clumsy manner can certainly create unintentional impressions for readers. Likewise, if a work intends the offensive message (for example, a piece of Nazi propaganda about Jews), it wouldn't count. Also, for something that may not be offensive to you personally but may offend others in a different culture or time period, see Values Dissonance.

Fan Works

  • Slash Fics are contested for objectifying male homosexuality.
    • And here's another one. Who told you that all characters in Slash fics are homosexuals?
    • Ho Yay often assumes that nearly any affection two men have for each other is homoerotic. Les Yay often assumes that two women who are close to each other have some kind of romantic interest. (Since Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls, the former is a lot more prevalent.)
    • Foe Yay assumes that if two characters dislike each other, they must be attracted to each other.
    • Slash and Femslash fic is also often plagued by heteronormative gender roles, even when written by LGBT individuals. Regardless of actual characterisation or personality, you'll often see characters falling into really exaggerated Seme/Uke or Butch Lesbian/Girly Girl dynamics and archetypes, which brings out a range of unfortunate implications, especially since a character's "butchness" or "femininity" is often linked to entirely aesthetic things like race, hair colour, height, sexual dominance, or how sympathetic/attractive the author wants to portray them. Yeah, there's an awful lot of offensiveness and bad messages associated with gender and gender roles in far too many F/F and M/M fics.
  • The rather controversial My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic The Conversion Bureau has the rather unfortunate message of "if a new race arrives on the scene; it is acceptable, no good, to force the natives to convert to the newcomer's race and adapt to their customs and rules. In the process, the natives' history, culture and identity is completely erased. And the natives must convert or be killed." Basically, the story seems to advocate genocide/forced assimilation.
  • The Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfic How I Became Yours has quite a bit of misogynist subtext. To make matters worse a woman wrote it.
  • In the Lyrical Nanoha fanfic Behind The Smile, it's suggested that Hayate's Skinship Grope tendencies were a way of warding off male attention in middle school, because she been sexually abused in the past. Disregarding the fact that she had been feeling up her knights since she was nine, before she would have to keep up appearances, this bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the idea that homosexuals are only attracted to the same gender because they were sexually abused.

Memes

Newspaper Comics

  • In the comic strip 'Baldo', which takes place probably in southern California, the only Caucasian character is a racist counselor that believes that everybody who isn't Caucasian is a gang member.

Theme Parks

  • In the Epcot World Showcase in Disney World, all of the eleven countries are in the northern hemisphere.[2] The closest they get to the equator is Mexico or Morocco. Sub-Saharan Africa isn't represented at all because the only nation that would sponsor it was South Africa, at the time deep in apartheid and an obvious potential PR disaster. On the other hand... The Animal Kingdom Park is pretty much EPCOT - Africa.
    • On the subject of Disney, what about the Small World ride? It shows a lot of stereotypes, even if it was considered Fair for Its Day when it was built.

Toys

  • LEGO's Bionicle has a few issues with gender. Initially, the entire cast was going to be male, which would have put it at a definite Level 1 on the Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality, and it was only decided at the last minute that the Water tribe would be all-female, while the other five tribes would be all-male. Besides the obvious gender imbalance, (arguably justified due to the line being aimed at young boys) this presented the problem of all the tribes having associated Personality Powers based on their elements- meaning that virtually all the females were calm, gentle people who acted as the voice of reason, while the male characters were able to be far more diverse and interesting. As the series progressed, steps were taken correct this: the stereotypes were subverted/defied, and more female characters and elements were introduced into side-stories. However, the subtext was still there. When Greg Farshtey was asked about the in-universe reason for the imbalance, his answer was usually along the lines of " They don't have biological reproductive systems, so there is no need for there to be an even gender ratio" (paraphrased). However, when you consider that new Matoran of each tribe are created on the basis of which ones are needed for specific jobs to sustain the robotic Matoran Universe, this implies that men are considerably more useful to the universe than women.
    • There is a reason for this, though. The Matoran's creators, the Great Beings, are constantly written to seem bad, and sexism is just one of their faults.
      • What about the people whom the Great Beings didn't create, the Agori/Glatorian? Only TWO females are ever seen, apparently because sexism is just as rampant on Bara/Spherus/whatever Magna and women are still seen as much less useful. Yeah, this one can't have the buck passed up to the Great Beings. Additionally, if there is no functional difference between male and female Matoran/other Mata Nui species, why are women less useful? Do female Matoran etc exist just so the Great Beings can be misogynistic dicks to them?
    • Arguably a much more prevalent concern with BIONICLE, and indeed with many of LEGO's themes, is the tendency to border on xenophobia - all the good guys are handsome, clean humans (or, in the case of BIONICLE/Hero Factory, noble and heroic-looking humanoids), whereas every enemy is of varying degrees of being, well, not handsome, clean, heroic or normal-looking. In particular, every space theme since Rock Raiders has featured every hero as human and every "bad guy" as aliens of varying levels of twisted otherness:
      • Rock Raiders: The creatures living on Planet U, like Rock Monsters and Slimy Slugs. Granted, it was their planet, and the Rock Raiders were taking their food source, and they only hurt them when necessary (except when it wasn't).
      • LEGO Mars Mission: Humans fight over aliens for who gets to mine the Energy Crystals. The entire justification for invading the homes of aliens, capturing them and ransacking the planet seems to be that the humans want their shit. Of course, the aliens in this theme are also invading Mars, but that doesn't justify anything. Family-Unfriendly Aesops ahoy.
      • LEGO Power Miners: Slightly justified, as the rock monsters (which also aren't native) shake violently when they eat the crystals and could very well shake apart the planet unless stopped. There is even a line in one of the comics saying with the crystals gathered, the rock monsters will have to return to their natural food sources, so it's all good. At least it is an improvement over Mars Mission.
      • LEGO Space Police 3: Arguably the worst, with the heroes all being clean-looking people and the villains all creepy aliens.
      • Hero Factory: All the heroes are humanoid, while a lot of the villain are more animalistic, hunched over, or walk on all fours. Some are in fact animals, but not all of these are true villains -- in the Jungle Planet arc, they were merely enslaved by the Big Bad.

Web Original

  • On one news website[context?] one of the tags (for an article indexing articles on financial bailouts in the US, strangely enough), one of the user contributed tags is "This is what happens when you give money to 'the sons of Ham'". It's arguably made worse (or funnier) by the fact the site's owner was the author of several controversial newsletters in the 1980's regarding black crime.
  • In the old Gundam.com message board you can always tell which side the Broken Base the person was on because the people who liked UC Gundam and hated AU Gundam would always end their post by saying "SIEG ZEON!" which brings to mind the Nazis. This is because the Zeon Leaders use "SIEG ZEON!" in the English dub of the original series, but the dubbers apparently saw the implication and changed it, so by 08th MS Team and 0080:War in the Pocket, Zeon Leaders started shouting "ZEKE, ZEON!" instead. Eventually, such as in recent video game adaptations, Zeon Leaders simply shout "HAIL ZEON!", presumably to stop all this confusion.
  • The blog Sociological Images points out unfortunate implications in other media.

Real Life (which the trope page specifically says don't add - This Troper requests a confirmation that they are RL before deleting them)

Gordon Brown will solve everything with OH GOD IT BURNS
  • This news broadcast. Not the news itself but the way it is presented, and how every person they interviewed happened to be black, tying into a racist stereotype. Not to mention all the unfortunate implications in a number of the YouTube comments alone. Also, the "Related Videos".
  • The continuing difficulty some USA news outlets have in accepting that California-born figure-skater Michelle Kwan is an American:
  • While promoting her TV show "All American Girl", Margaret Cho appeared on a morning talk show for a local station. At the end of the interview segment, the host, in a Critical Research Failure, asked Cho to tell the people at home "in [her] native language" that they were changing over to an ABC affiliate. As Cho was born and raised in California, she simply looked at the camera and curtly said in plain English, "They're changing over to an ABC affiliate."
  • A sports team (of younger men) called the Cougars is occasionally liked by women over 30.
  • This overlaps considerably with Values Dissonance, but New Zealand has All Blacks, its national rugby team, and All Whites, its national association football team.[3] Wikipedia used to have an article at "List of All Blacks", since moved, that was the target of controversy more than once.
    • Other teams have since continued the theme, leading to occasional hilarity. The basketballers are the Tall Blacks, the wheelchair rugby are the Wheel Blacks, and so on. This was fine until the badminton team got involved and named themselves after the little thing that gets hit over the net: The Black Cocks.
  • John McCain's (in)famously blunderous quote:

McCain: Obama's not an Arab. He is a good man.

  • The New York Times‍'‍ gift guide for "People of Color". Which is bad enough in itself, but most of those gifts would be perfectly acceptable and like by anyone. However they seem to have been chosen because they were created by "famous people of color."
  • Water cannons and fire hoses are tried-and-true methods of breaking up a riot or civil disturbance. It's safe, effective, and the ammo's cheap. The police forces of most countries rely on water power to this day. But not the USA. Water power was extensively used to quell African-American demonstrations during the Civil Rights era of the '60s, and has been connected with racist police forces oppressing peaceful demonstrations ever since. American law enforcement avoids these now.
    • On a similar note, the recent[when?] protests in the UK over the increase of school tuition fees provoked a lot of discussion about how Police should handle such demonstrations in the (then) future. Though the protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, it was suggested that the police might/should (depending on the source) bring in water cannons to "quell further unrest". It was pointed out that the only times water cannons have been used within the UK was in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. The UI being that either students demonstrating (for the most part) peacefully in London were as bad as decades of violent civil unrest, or that Northern Ireland was of such little consequence to the government that it took decades of violent civil unrest before even water cannons were thought necessary.
    • A good deal of modern protesters have a habit of recording an entire incident, but only posting the police's reaction to their and making it out as oppressive. Which means that they don't think what they actually did is relevant to how the cops respond. Which means they think they don't have any responsibility for their actions. Which can be rather darkly ironic when the protesters in question are demanding others take responsibility for problems, but won't take any responsibility for their own.
  • Racial profiling. Yes, statistically, people of Arab and Black descent are more likely to be Muslims.[please verify] However, the innocent Muslims (y'know, the majority), as well as non-Muslim Blacks and Jews, are quite rightly irritated at being associated with one of the most negative events in modern history just because of their skin color. On the ordinary street crime level, a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by Blacks and Latinos, because said groups are more likely to be economically disenfranchised, which leads to higher crime rates, which leads to a negative image of said groups in the eyes of law enforcement, which means they don't trust the cops, which leads to a negative image in the eyes of law enforcement...
    • Going off of the Muslim bit, many American people imagine Muslims as being a group limited solely to the Middle East. Thus, they freak out at the thought of any living in the United States, despite the fact that Christianity and Judaism also originated in the Middle East and have spread pretty darned global. (This is, of course, an old trend in Western culture; as Larry Gonick once joked--as regards the Spanish Inquisition--"No weird Middle Eastern religions here--only Christianity!")
    • Speaking of Islam, doesn't it also seemed to be a bit of an Unfortunate Implications that whenever people made a bigoted statement against Islam, they are called 'racists' or 'racism?' As if implying that Islam is a race, something you are born into, when Muslim people comes from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and cultures.
  • There's a comforter set called the Othello. Did the designers of that not know what happens in that play?! For those that don't know the climax involves Othello smothering his wife to death in their bed. What Did You Expect When You Named It?
    • There's also a set of bedroom furniture aimed a little girls. The name of the set? Lolita.
  • The 2010 New Labour manifesto (see page picture) looked awfully like Brown's plan was to take somewhat extreme steps.
  • When The News Of The World was axed, one editor said he had "worked there for 18 months, it was a wonderful paper and they had gotten rid of all the Black people". This was because the media baron Conrad Black (who is in fact Caucasian) once owned it, but clearly That Came Out Wrong.
  • A TA sought advice from Reddit after they and their professor found definitive proof six students were plagiarizing. All six students were Black. In fact, they were the only Black kids in the class. Due to Canadian politics, they were worried they'd be accused of discrimination. Responders suggested the papers be evaluated by a third party, with names removed. Ironically, several people suggested the post was from a race-baiting troll, under the assumption that no one in such a situation could ever be worried about looking racist when they're not.
  • Many times, when an autistic person writes an autobiography, the back cover blurb will say something about it being a special insight into "the world of autism for the rest of us", assuming that every prospective buyer of the book and potential reader of the blurb, and by extension every person who reads books in general, is non-autistic.
    • Alternately, autistic people are assumed not to read those books because they already know what having autism is like. Which carries other Unfortunate Implications, namely that if someone has autism that must be the only interesting thing about them and that autism manifests in exactly the same way in anyone that has it, or at least close enough that people with autism wouldn't learn anything by reading about each other.
  • Elementary schools in Gwinnett County, Georgia apparently asked kids some rather offensive math word problems. The questions include such gems as "Each tree has 56 oranges. If 8 slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?", "If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?" and yet another asks how much cotton Fredrick picks in a day. The school district claims it's to teach kids history, but if so, it's very poorly handled.

Other Other Media and Unsorted Examples

  • In magazines where they make a list of attractive men (like People and their Sexiest Men Alive issue.) They use the fact that he's happily married and a doting father as a selling point. Since most of the Sexiest Men Alive are happily married, it makes it appear that women only want a man if he's in love with someone else. So women only want married men, then?
  • In a bit of meta-Scunthorpe Problem, words that are both used innocuously and in an offensive way like "gay" and "Jew" have been subjected to online filters. This has the ironic effect of censoring (and outraging) the very people the filters were intended to protect.
  • In Genki: An Introduction to Japanese one practice sentence says "My friend went to China and didn't come back".
    • Similarly, there is a Russian coursebook that loves using sentences about Siberia. "Where is she?" "She is in Siberia." "We are going to Siberia in a week's time." It's hard not to interpret that as a bit of morbid Textbook Humor on the writer's part, since to anyone who's familiar with Russian history, Siberia is instantly associated with one thing.
  • Typographical example: Anytime the Neuland or Lithos typefaces are used in reference to African or other foreign cultures, which are virtually their only appearances since the turn of the century. The use of those two is done to evoke a "primitive" or "uncultured" feel, regardless of the true situation. More info on the topic.
  • In Network TV land, CBS sent a memo to fire A.J. Cook from the hit crime show Criminal Minds for supposed "creative" (aka "financial") reasons. To add further insult, Paget Brewster (aka Emily Prentiss) will have her role reduced and a new actress will be cast to replace JJ. These decisions have been seen as having sexist undertones by an enraged fanbase and through angry blogs, calls and complaints to CBS, an online petition, and even a mailing campaign. This was accompanied by an increase in Charlie Sheen's wages for his then-on-hiatus show Two and A Half Men (which he was fired from) to 2K per episode per week. And just to add insult to injury, Sheen is a known spousal abuser who was fired for drug abuse and making derogatory comments about the production staff, making the apparent gender Double Standard even more obvious.
  • The Mighty Whitey trope is itself Unfortunate because it implies that white people are automatically better at things non-white cultures can do, even if the non-white people have been training their whole life. Problem is, reaction to this trope often this carries the Implication that white people cannot/should not beat non-whites at anything from the non-white culture, ever. There are things white people should be good at, things non-whites should be good at, and there's no overlap.
  • Some gay porn provides some strangely fascinating examples of this. It's terribly easy to find some where women are all Jerkasses, Yaoi Fangirls, both, or not actually a woman. Some choose to top it off by cheerfully basking in certain tropes. If examples are wanted, try pretty much anything by an individual, presumably a homosexual male, who posts under the alias of 'Beautiful Creamer.' (Warning: NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Also, contains certain tropes...)
    • Here's some Unfortunate Implications for you: who are you calling "not actually a woman"?
      • They might have been referring to the fact that the Internet is relatively anonymous and that sometimes people lie... but the context implies otherwise, lumping together three groups that have nothing in common with each other or with homosexuality: men with effeminate appearances, cross-dressers, and transgender people.
  • An English language race convention creates unfortunate implications. This troper was tutoring an ESL student from Korea, and she (the students) was talking about an American who moved to Seoul to open a language school. This troper asked if he was Korean, as in asking if he had immigrated and became a citizen. She responded that no, he was white (turns out is now a Korean). The implication here is that white people can never be accepted as Korean, but will always be just a white person living in Korea.
    • The same thing occurs in Japan as well. There are plenty of naturalized Japanese who still get clumped together as "gaijin". The idea remains that race equals nationality.
  • This was taken from the IMDB trivia entry for the movie Conviction: Screenwriter Pamela Gray says she doesn't believe the awards or critics, she knows if her projects are well received by listening in the theater ladies' room after a showing, as if only the opinions of the ladies matter.
  • The BCE/CE dating system is an example of both Unfortunate Implications and Political Correctness Gone Mad as it is meant to be a calendar system that is more sensitive to non-Christians. BCE is Before Common Era and CE is Common Era, but the dates themselves are identical to the BC/AD system based on when Christ was born. So if it's not based on Christianity, then what happened at 1CE that made it the "Common Era"? Common to whom? Is there any event whose significance would be universally recognized enough to actually be called the Common Era? By changing the names but not the dates, they moved from a calendar that makes no secret about being based upon an event that Westerners find important to implying that the birth of Christ was objective turning point for all humanity. This is an example of trying to avert one set of Unfortunate Implications while falling straight into another.
  • The Five-Token Band trope. Usually, the white guy is The Hero, and the Asian is either The Smart Guy or, if The Big Guy, a Genius Bruiser who gets the "bruiser" part from knowing kung fu. The black guy might be The Lancer (though if it's in a non-Western setting, The Lancer will provide that hint of indigeneity) or may play the role on the The Big Guy/The Smart Guy dichotomy not occupied by the Asian. If there is an American Indian, he'll be (for Trope Namer reasons) the Sixth Ranger, or sometimes Sixth Ranger Traitor.
  • Caribou Coffee, which went through a stylistic revamping semi-recently,[when?] had a form on their websites inviting people to submit answers to the question "What do you stay awake for?" Some of the "best" answers were printed on the new cups. One of the ones that made it? "Making sure the monsters stay in the closet."
  • A lot of character types have unfortunate implications if you think about them too hard. The most glaring one this troper can think of at the moment is the Tsundere character, particularly the tsun-tsun type. Fandoms generally tend to love tsun-tsun Tsunderes, especially if they're female, but the more extreme examples tend to show behavior that's disturbingly similar to the aggressor in abusive relationships. Of course, this is usually when they stop being Tsunderes and start becoming Jerk Sues.
  • Because of the impossibility of accurately representing the surface of a sphere on a rectangular map, the Mercator projection unavoidably distorts the relative sizes of continental landmasses. Unfortunately, this happens to result in a situation where most maps of the world depict North America, Russia and Europe (the parts of the world populated predominantly by white people) as being vastly larger than they really are, with Africa, South America, India and South Asia looking smallish and insignificant in comparison, just because they happen to be situated closer to the equator. Ironically, the original intent of the map was to depict the more equatorial-situated locations more accurately because they were more valuable.
  • For a while on Accentuate the Negative page, someone pointed out that you're more likely to see negative reviews than positive reviews, and negative reviews gain more views. Someone then pointed out that people were more interested in reading criticisms rather than "unjust praises". There's a good reason that when this is mentioned on the Accentuate the Negative page, it links to Unfortunate Implications.
  • The Fan Dumb for Survivor has a tendency to trash the winner of the most recent season as the "Worst winner ever". While this may appear to be simple Hate The New like is common for any Fan Dumb, but several seasons later, people still often state that a certain winner was a "Poor winner" or "robbed" a much more deserving winner. This happens with a much greater frequency to women who win (Unless they're either Parvati, Tina, Kim, and sometimes Sandra) than it does to men.
    • This attitude also spreads to Survivor themed works. A survivor webcomic has Fan Dumb who constantly berate female players for doing things that they praise male fans for doing. Hypocritical Fandom, anyone?
    • Survivor Sucks had a topic posted that was a petition to ban Leif (who is a dwarf) from competing on basis of being a "midget", and that other contestants with disabilities (Deafness, missing limbs, etc) shouldn't have been allowed either. Is there anything saying they can't compete?
    • It's no secret that Cook Islands had some Unfortunate Implications with dividing the tribes by race, and complaints that the casts were "too white". Yet Fiji featured a final five of only one white person, one Asian man, and three blacks. (One of them being Ambiguously Brown) And there were complains that they weren't white enough.
  • The Bratz doll lines Biography page has exactly one character who has any ambition aside from looking glamorous RIGHT THIS MINUTE, said character is also the only boy on the page.
  • It's fairly common to see members of a fandom referring to a Wholesome Crossdresser or transgender character as a "trap." The unfortunate implications are twofold--one, that trans-women aren't "REAL WOMEN", and two, that their sole purpose in life is to trick innocent young (cisgender) men. And of course, the reaction to discovering their trans*ness is always disgust and horror, and in extreme cases murder. People can still get a lesser sentence or get away with murdering a trans person if they claim "trans panic" as a defense.
  • Next time you check out at the grocery store, take a look at the covers of sex advice magazines marketed to women like Cosmopolitan. Nearly all the blurbs talk about the magazines' contents in the context of "pleasing" or "serving" the men, rather than the women who would be reading the publications.
  • Another example of Fan Dumb... in Big Brother US', after Shelly Moore decided to vote out Jeff Shroeder, people started to make Hate-sites about her, calling her employers asking for her termination, and wished bad things on her daughter such as being taken away, kidnap, rape, or murder. This daughter in question was eight years old.
  • Rule 34 is often seen as this.
  1. ↑ Looking back at this meme after a decade.
  2. ↑ About 90% of countries and the human population are north of the equator, however.
  3. ↑ They have a range of other colors, as well.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Unfortunate_Implications/Other_Media?oldid=2011104"