Archived Discussion

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

Ununnilium:
(which ironically still considers hentai games to be perfectly safe for sale)

This... isn't actually ironic. Sex != violence.

This troper is an employee of Gamestop/EB Games, where despite it not actually being a law, we are not allowed to sell M rated games to people without [i]legal, state issued identification[/i]. This troper finds peoples reactions to being carded for videogames from laughter to anger and everything in between.

I don't really see how this fits under here. `.`

Ironically, some fans of violent media say that it's the responsibility of parents to control what their kids watch, read or play, rather than passing laws to ban and censor such games, movies, comics or music. What's ironic about this is that the fans are actually encouraging parents to be Moral Guardians, at least in the sense that they can and should dictate what their own children can watch, rather than trying to impose blanket censorship.

Amplt0: Wow, telling parents to raise their children. Th irony is simply too much to bear...

Caswin: In the entry's defense, unless I'm missing something crucial in the definition of "moral guardian", that's... completely accurate.

Filby: I don't like PETA any more than most sane people, but how are they Moral Guardians? I thought this trope was for people/groups who protest media and try to get it changed. Has PETA done that, and if so can we get an example?

Ununnilium: Agreed; they don't fit in this trope at all — not to mention that it's degenerated into an orgy of natter. Yanking the whole thing:

PETA has devolved into one of these, and seems to be practically begging for everyone to turn vegetarian.
- This trooper would argue that PETA was always an extremist group that bordered on blatant terrorism. Their support of other extremists who burn down buildings or bludgeon doctors and/or researchers to death for harming animals is reprehensible. Despite what they like to think Pamela Anderson does not give them the moral high ground
- They're not helping their case with their constant dives into sheer absurdity. There are legitimate points in favor of vegetarianism (they're debatable, but hey, debates are fun and you don't debate something that's patently false); when the same group telling you about them then goes on to equate owning a pet with owning a slave, those points suddenly start looking a lot less legit.
  - Especially when you consider the alternative, throwing them outside to starve, though PETA may just expect you to give them your house.
  - Or give them to PETA, who will then promptly euthanize them and use their bodies as protest signs.
  - Let's not for get that a slave is someone you force to do work without caring much for them, while a pet is an animal you have to work to take care of. The two terms are practically antonyms.
  - Furthermore, almost anyone who has ever had and cared for a pet will tell you how quickly they become a loved and cherished member of the family, which is fundamentally at odds with the idea of a 'slave' being a disregarded item of property.
  - Comparing owning a pet to slave-owning is an astonishing bit of racism that could only be made by people ignorant of world history.
- Not to mention PETA expects animals to become vegetarians. Any carnivores they 'liberate' are expected to eat a completely meat-free diet. Virtually all of them die.
  - Parodied in an episode of Futurama. An animal rights group named MEAT is giving Planet Express a hard time about shipping Popplers. When Professor Farnsworth tells them they can't expect everyone to conform to their standards, Free Waterfall III replies that in fact they can-they taught a lion to eat tofu. Pan right to Waterfall's skinny, malnourished lion. Truthin Television indeed.
- Peta's latest delusion is a push for human milk to be used in ice cream instead of cow dairy. Whether they realize that Family Guy already made the joke or not remains to be seen.
- This troper was particularly annoyed by the assertion of one high-level PETA member who insisted that, if you ate meat, you couldn't be an environmentalist. Specifically, chicken-eating Al Gore is a horrible polluter apparently.
  - Given that his house uses energy disproportionately higher than it's size compared to an average house, and the polution producing methods he uses to get too "global warming" events. He is.
  - While PETA's antics annoy both carnists and vegans, people who call themselves environmentalists but refuse to question their eating habits have a massive blind spot that could do with examining.
- The huge irony in PETA's vegan standards is that they would cause the deaths of millions more animals than actually eating said animals directly because if humans were hogging all the plants herbivores would starve followed by the carnivores that feed on those herbivores.

Also, this last part is so very wrong. "Hogging all the plants"? Seriously?

Also also:

Coincidentally, this happened on this troper's 19th birthday. It makes me feel kind of bad. . .I did not get him anything for his!

Fair enough his intentions are noble (stop kids from being stalked by pedophiles or get exposed to porn and violence) but the approach is just plain stupid, in that it won't actually stop internet predators, would fail to achieve anything, apart from effectively killing the internet in Australia.
- Plus it also takes the decision making out of the parents (and adults) hands and puts in the governments, the first signs of a nanny state or a totalitarian dictatorship forming.

The fact that he also makes an incongruous concession to liberalism by marking films down for racism (for which the biblical justification is questionable, to say the least) suggests that he would rather have the aforementioned blank grey screen.

I actually use the CAPALERT website regularly. The lower they score a film, the more likely I am to see it. Also, they provide frequent examples on Did Not Do The Research.
- So this film contains "massive explosions", "gunfire to kill", "excessive cleavage", "lesbianism", and "demonic beasts"? Cool! Still at least even CAP realised that the main problem with Battlefield Earth was basically that it sucked and that Eragon just ripped off Starwars.
Infamously on that site, the first Harry Potter film gets a lower score than The Rocky Horror Picture Show!
Are they any relation to the Ministries of Truth, Peace and Plenty, by any chance?

Conversation In The Main Page.

I'm surprised they didn't have a riot over Sly Cooper, an E-rated game about thieves. Maybe it's wholesomeness and the fact that the main character is a a heroic thief.

...okay, but... ``

Filby: I think we've got a glut of quotes here. I'm cutting it down to one.

Emperordaein: I read two of the Childcare Action Project's reviews (On The Simpsons Movie and The Dark Knight). My brain and sanity are now dribbling out of my skull.

Seven Of Diamonds: The full CAP entry before I hacked it down, if you feel I cut something imperative, maybe you can add it back just don't make it three pages long again.

What the PTC is to television, the Childcare Action Project (usually called by its acronym CAP) is to movies (with the exception of "effective". ZING!). Its founder, Tom Carder, seems to favor a return to the Hays Code, and has given a perfect score to only two movies: Mary Poppins and Who Gets the House?.
- Star Wars is marked down because Darth Vader and the Empire have a "bad attitude" — clearly, a terrifying cyborg with a hobby of strangling people and the murderous dictatorship he serves were intended as role models. He also took a point off The Passion of the Christ because Jesus dies.
- To see how warped Carder's priorities are, look at the rating for the first Harry Potter film. 55. Now look at the one for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 67. Yes, apparently Harry Potter is more corrupting than The Rocky Horror Picture Show! Even better, Cloverfield earned a 23, while A Clockwork Orange scored a 36, Eyes Wide Shut earned a 43, and Battlefield Earth earned a 62. Apparently heavily angled cameras are only offensive to God when they're a result of hand held camera work. It goes further; Carder counts any remotely fantastic or imaginary element as blasphemy, which suggests that he doesn't comprehend the concept of fiction. Even more entertaining is that Mary Poppins didn't lose any points for supernatural elements because the abilities Mary Poppins had were never identified as magic/sorcery/wizardry and because there was sufficient subtext that she was an angel.
  - The real problem is that Carder targets only easy films. Like Hellboy II, which he decided contained a "Mockery of the Gay Lifestyle." Yeah. Two guys getting drunk and singing a cheesy love song. Oh, and the fact that one guy walks around in his undies all the time is worth a couple of points off. He also likes to add Bullshit "offenses" to a film's list of vices. Scenes of Spider bites are "violent", "Bodies erect underwater" is Impudent and using the word "fool" is an offense to God.
- Note than whenever a score by his system goes completely against common sense, he, without exception, calls it "proof of the objectivity" of his system, not proof that his system (based on the average of six scores which drop absurdly quickly, so one can be at 0 while the others pull it up by languishing above ninety) is absolutely fucked.
- Another ironic thing is that he even pickets movies by Christian writers, such as the Chronicles of Narnia movie.
- What took CAP from merely "unpleasant" to "fraudulent and stupid" has to be the CAP take on X-Men, which was given a MSTing (although this troper can't find a link, he has it copied to a Word document somewhere). It broke its own rules on how violence was classified, and the overly harsh style was characterised thusly:
Tom: So he considers violence to be "clutter" in an action movie, and he clearly slept through the "talking" parts. So what's left?
Crow: Sex.
Tom: I think this guy has serious issues.
- In the same film, he took an image of a helix of DNA as "proof" of an evolutionist agenda despite it being stated multiple times in the film that the mutants are the "next step in human evolution". He also took points off it because two of the actors are gay, even though they played straight roles.
- He also gave middle ground scores to The Chronicles Of Narnia movies, claiming that because CS Lewis wasn't involved they weren't "Christian movies" and that they would have been completely different movies had he been involved. Ironically, the fantasy elements he decried in the movie are actually portrayed quite accurately.
  - Well, of course Lewis wasn't involved in the filmmaking! He's DEAD!
- Plus, he appears to have chosen a pretentious acronym first and then built a rating system around that: "WISDOM," which divides the sins of movies into the categories "Wanton violence/crime," "Impudence/hate," "Sexual immorality," "Drugs/alcohol," "Offense to God," and "Murder/suicide." He then goes on to be incredibly verbose in justifying his system, with charts, no less, and spends a lot of time elsewhere being incredibly self-righteous: to claims that he makes Christians "look bad" he responds that the only thing that makes Christians look bad is changing the interpretation of God's word to be more tolerant (ironic as ever coming from someone who claims to follow a man who preached nothing BUT tolerance), claims that he's intolerant are met with, "Yes, I'm intolerant-of sin," the same page then concludes by basically saying "I refuse to accept that sometimes the things the Bible says literally can't be taken literally anymore because it's not reasonable or practical in this day and age, and that makes me better than you." Another page addresses the countless people who sarcastically point out Matthew 7:1 ("Judge not lest ye be judged"), and responds with the next four verses, which clarify that you'll be judged the way you judge, so judge well; he even includes parentheticals putting some bits in layman's terms, but never seems to catch on to the irony of citing Jesus' anecdote about not taking the speck from your brother's eye until you've gotten the plank out of your own (not pointing out the sins of others until you can say with confidence that you've dealt with your own). The whole thing has an overtone of "I'm just a better Christian than all of you and that means it's okay for me to be so judgemental". Oh, the assurance of moral superiority.
  - It gets downright hilarious when you consider that despite explicitly stating that violence ending in death goes into murder/suicide, he sometimes counts them as Wanton violence/crime anyway.
  - To be fair, he only counts violent resulting in death as Wanton Violence/Crime if Police or Military personnell do it. If anything he at least deserves points for consistency.
- He's also given TMNT a bad rap because apparently the skin from the Turtle's crotches could be considered sexually indecent... and skateboarding was considered violent. This Troper has seen TMNT (after reading the "review") and not once did she think about looking at the Turtle's groins.
- The review of The Dark Knight seemed to come with its very own Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, in the form of a ranting Take That! aimed at Freud and Benjamin Spock. This was apparently included because the first of the Joker's mutually exclusive stories about how he got his scars was intended to say "nothing the Joker does is his own fault because Daddy didn't love him," meaning we must chalk this up as yet another case in which he's just yanking it out of his arse to find new things to complain about.
  - The man also seems to be under the strange impression that the Joker was the good guy, talking about how his remorseless violence will instantly warp kids. His entire rant is about the Joker, he completely ignores the violence carried out by Two-Face, the mobsters, Scarecrow and Batman himself! I got a pretty bad feeling Tom Carder was just finding a reason to gripe about the Joker because he was portrayed by Heath Ledger, whom he probably only knows as "that gay cowboy that killed himself."
- If you have ever seen the movie Cabin Fever, a movie about some college kids who get a horrible skin-eating virus and ultimately try to survive the horribly contagious and painful thing, then you can tell that he didn't even watch the movie and instead just wrote one of the most weak-minded and short rants about over-sexed youth I have every had the displeasure of reading. And doesn't mention the skin thing, 'not even once', although it's the complete focus of the entire film. Also, in the same film, he lists belly skin and adults kissing underwater as Sexual Immorality. In the violence section, you still see no mention of the skin virus. The only thing that made me absolutely sure it was the same movie I had seen was mention of a dog eating a corpse.
  - [Symptoms of excessive stupidity may include hallucinations of dogs eating corpses, failure to understand the difference between fiction and reality, a violent allergy to fact checking, inability to see anything positive in anything even slightly different from your religion, inappropriate use of chainsaws, jaywalking, and, above all, starting a service like the Childcare Action Project. Use stupidity at your own risk.]
- You know what, let's just stop providing CAP examples and just say that Carder is a stupid, stupid man who should perhaps start actually watching movies before complaining about them.
  - Forgive me, and feel free to delete this if it's gratuitous and unnecessary, but I personally have to share that I found it hilarious in the review for the 2005 War of the Worlds film that he seemed to pay more attention then the childrens "arrogant" attitude toward their father then the fact that, oh, ALIENS ARE DESTROYING THE GODDAMN WORLD.
- This Christian troper will personally find it very entertaining watching Tom Carder on judgment day try to explain to God why he spent his entire life watching movies rather than helping people (you know, what christians are actually SUPPOSED to be doing).
- I'm sorry, but this man seems to me that he is a textbook case of Too Dumb to Live. Also, reading these examples has made my head hurt for some reason...

Seven Of Diamonds: Don't add that entire thing back in without even an explanation on the discussion page. Most of it's natter or explaining the joke. His actions speak for themselves, we don't need such witty comments like "This guy is stupid, heheh." It weakens the humor and deters people from reading it. Nobody's defending Carder, this is for the benifit of the wiki readers. If you do feel something imperitive was cut out, for example the entry about the Wolverine review, then add that piece back in but not the entire three pages of ranting and "This Troper read the Simpsons review and it was bad" tales.

Twin Bird: Removed Screw the Rules, I Make Them! from the CAP entry because there's only one example given over there, and as I'm going to put in that discussion, it seems to be a misinterpretation. As absolutely fucked up as his rules are, he does follow them.

Caswin: I don't want to natter this page any more than it already is, but to answer the question posed under Manhunt: "How can a game "revel" in anything?" The same way any other medium can — glorifying it (whatever "it" is, in this case the violence and murder) and showing it off at every opportunity. Even if the protagonist and his employer are the villains in the eyes of the plot, if the violence itself is up-front-and-center, it sounds likely to lead to a similar mentality to... well... Grand Theft Auto. To make a ham-fisted comparison (not least because I'll admit up front I haven't played or seen these myself), like Funny Games is to gorn, except a dozen times easier to miss the point by virtue of having all the hallmarks and beats of the "real thing".

Caswin: The laconic entry says, "Squeamish, always offended, overtly-proselytizing viewers." Something isn't adding up. Is the definition of Moral Guardian narrower than it sounds, or does the laconic version have exaggerated stereotypes in mind?

Laconic wiki is simplified not exaggerated so ya I think it needs to be fixed but I'd say that for the regular article too. It seems biased because if tropesarenotbad why does the real article reads with such disgust, pretentiousness and disdain? You might as well save the Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness and just write "UGH these are offended people are ruining my fun."

Caswin: ...and is the Simpsons quote actually supposed to be emblematic of the subject matter? Do we want to start a war on straw here?

Caswin: I'm cutting it. Frankly, the description is slanted enough as it is.

Call me a killjoy, but I think that because this is not to my taste no one else should be able to enjoy it.

—Marge Simpson

movie007: I just wanted to comment that I love how this article starts off getting straight to the point by mentioning both "conservative bible-thumpers" and "politically correct liberals", and how they're Not So Different. I agree with that wholeheartedly!!

blackmongoose: Cut:

Actually, copyright law did exist in Shakespeare's day (the quatros of his plays are effectively bootlegs, and several plays were nearly omitted from the first folio over rights issues). As for Bradbury's lawsuit, no, you cannot copyright a title. But, as Harlan Ellison or Universal Studios (see Universal v. Nintendo) would be happy to point out, if a work infringes on the market value or could be confused with a previous works title, then there is grounds for a lawsuit. Bradbury was not trying to censor Moore, he was trying to stop him from pushing politics he did not agree with using the publicity of his intellectual property.

for Natter and because most of it is incorrect about intellectual property (parody and Trademark vs. Copyright are the key issues). I did find it amusing that it cited a case famous for the smackdown Universal got trying to claim protection for King Kong. I think this whole article could use some natter trimming, but I don't have the time to go through it all right now.

Caswin: Alright, if this has bugged me this long I probably should have said it earlier, but anyway: Why do we have the Erich Fromm quote as the definitive quote for Moral Guardians? It's not like "hate or envy" is uniformly the cause behind moral indignation — most people have good intentions when they try to keep kids out of Pulp Fiction. For that matter — never mind my gradual poking around at the description over the past several months; it used to have a lot more generalization and general viciousness — most "Moral Guardians" types I've seen don't even claim "memberships", let alone vast ones, and Completely Missing The Point with a completely out-of-context-quote is rarer still. It sounds like someone had a few specific bones to pick and used them to define the entire category.

Archived Discussion Main / MoralGuardians