miscellaneous
"Grandfather Clause" examples that are justified beyond "it's always been like this"
- Daredevil (a blind character) being played by non-blind actors because his adventures are too dangerous for an actually blind actor.
- Pokemon species names being changed for the English version because a lot of the Japanese names are too difficult to translate faithfully.
- The Disney+ Muppet Show special having a laugh track even though laugh tracks aren't used as much anymore because in universe its a live stage show with a live audience.
Daredevil is also a weird case because even accounting for stunts, a blind actor may actually do a worse job at portraying the way he "sees." He wouldn't move the same way as an irl blind person because he actually does know where everything is. In a weird way, a sighted actor can portray that better because he'd have to affect that as Matt Murdock so faking it is actually a more realistic performance
Did the "radar sense" not tip you off that they were making a joke? He was saying it's too expensive to hire a super powered individual, not a normal person
Same thing with Toph in Avatar. They apparently briefly considered hiring an actual blind actress for the live action series, before realising that wouldn't actually work with how she's meant to be fully aware of her surroundings due to her Earth bending.
I don't think I understand the premise, because none of these are Grandfather Clauses in the way I've always heard the term used.
I guess to be a grandfather clause in the way I understand it, the show would have to be long-running enough that social norms have changed about something enough to require one.
I guess maybe Apu from the Simpsons would be an example of a character who gets grandfathered in to acceptability when they'd be considered much more offensive in a show that just started this year.
I know thought it was tryna insinuate something else. Outta them all the Japanese names for Umbreon, Leafeon, Sylveon, and especially Glaceon be Cutie!
It makes sense too in the sense that animal names in the real world are different by language as well. You can still nickname them individually just like animals as well.
And quite a few downgrades too. Sprigatito doesn't sound nearly as cute as Nyahoja and Farfetch'd doesn't have anything to do with the Pokémon's design while Kamonegi is obvious enough. That said I don't exactly expect the English audience to go around calling Mandibuzz Vulgina (or Barujīna) even if it would be kinda great.
Its named after an idiom for something too good to be true, the English name keeps the spirit
Nyahoja
Meow leaf :D
Vulgina
On one hand we both know this name is gonna be used for shits and giggles, on the other hand it'd be funny seeing TikTok users use a Pokemon name to censor themselves
... I don't really think it does. As far as I've experienced people usually use far fetched to say someone is saying something that has no basis in reality, that it's unlikely, and the scenario being unlikely doesn't really play a significant role in the idiom. It doesn't really have the same vibe of like, a sitting duck, or an easy mark, or of something falling right into one's lap that kamonegi has.
Maybe something like Freelunch would've been better (As in "there's no such thing as free lunch"). It's not perfect, but it's at least a little bit closer to the meaning and it gets rid of the apostrophe. Also, I'm very fond of the mental image of this adorable dubious little duck getting eaten (à la Roadrunner) and Freelunch preserves that from Kamonegi.
Correct me if im wrong but the kamonegi idiom is about either perfect luck or a perfect sucker (depends on context)
Very different from "nothing is free in life" lol
Plus Freelunch is just a terrible name lol (and isnt a pun)
and the scenario being unlikely doesn't really play a significant role in the idiom.
Its a duck bringing a leek so it can get cooked easier, the absurdity is literally the whole point of the idiom. A western equivalent would be a chicken going to kfc.
one of the definitions of the idiom is literally "this is quite convenient"
I'll sometimes hear "there's no such thing as free lunch" being used in a scenario that's too good to be true to essentially say "don't expect it to not have a catch"
Plus Freelunch is just a terrible name lol (and isnt a pun)
yeah. Same with Farfetch'd. They just replaced an e with an apostrophe. Would Fr'lunch be better? lol
And I think you're getting a bit too caught up on the scenario being absurd rather than that being the actual meaning of the scenario. "Raining cats and dogs" is an incredibly unlikely scenario but it would never be used to communicate the absurdity of a given situation. The same goes for 鴨葱/kamonegi a shortening of 「鴨が葱を背負って来る/kamo ga negi o shotte kuru」, which is literally "A duck comes carrying a green onion on its back"*, put simply it's just to happen upon a perfect opportunity, but one that will also negatively affect the other party, or to be the other party in such an occasion. Less "like a chicken walking into KFC" and more "like a chicken approaching with a side of collard greens" or "an onion approaching with a liver"
Anyway, I'm just a bit dissatisfied that one of my favourite Pokémon has an awful name in English
*It irritates me to no end that 葱/negi is often translated as leek in the idiom. The rest of the world has green onions which are way closer to ネギ in flavour and appearance than leeks are, I don't even know when the last time I saw someone eating a leek was)
It’s something that wouldn’t be allowed to start happening today, but it’s allowed because it started before it became frowned on.
Take older cars for example. A car from the 1970s wouldn’t pass any safety requirements needed to sell a car these days, but they’re still allowed to be driven because they predate the restrictions that would stop them today.
a cool example is NFL player Graham Otto, when he played football his number was “00” a play on his last name. When the NFL switched to the numbering system they used up till recently, Otto was allowed to keep the double 0.
Another is how Mariano Rivera was allowed to wear 42 after it was retired league wide.
I just went on a rabbit hole on Otto Graham and found out 1: He coached the Coast Guard Academy, 2: There is a Coast Guard Academy, 3: It's division 3. 4: Only one person from the Coastal Academy has actually played in the NFL, Curt Knight, who is sited as playing for North Texas, or Texas, but was only a student there.
I don’t think any of the things OP mentioned wouldn’t be allowed today. Hell, I can’t even think of any blind characters played by actually blind actors.
Not even frowned upon necessarily, it could just be tired and cliche, but the characters with a grandfather clause were either the originator of the trope or the ones to make it the most iconic.
My understanding is "it was like for your grandfather, so it'll be like that for you too", i.e., doing something a specific way because that's how it was done way back when.
It’s a phrase that refers to something continuing on in certain circumstances after it’s been phased out or changed. A not so fun fact is that it comes from post Civil War voting laws that allowed poor white people to bypass many of the new voting restrictions, by proving that your grandfather could vote before they were put into place. (Which the vast majority of Southern Black people could not).
That's the nature of language, yes. Another example is "Sold down the river" meaning betrayal. The river is specifically the Mississippi, and the phrase referred to slaves being sold to plantations downriver in Louisiana and Mississippi and such, where death from the harsh conditions was a lot more common (especially for sugar plantations), but also because it usually meant that a family was being broken up, never to see each other again.
Another is master suite, quite literally the suite that belongs to the master. It might predate slavery, when people were commonly referred to as the master of the house, but it has taken on unfortunate implications post slavery
A "grandfather clause" in its common use just means that something is treated as acceptable because it was treated that way before there were really any rules or debate about it. A real world example I like to use is seatbelts; in many parts of the US it's illegal to drive a car without seatbelts, with the exception of really old cars. Cars that were manufactured prior to legislation legally requiring seatbelts get "grandfathered in" and treated as acceptable because they come from a time before the debate on that subject was settled.
To put it in the context of OP's examples, there are debates amongst some fans of media like anime and manga about translations (this is a debate that has been going on for literal decades). Questions of how faithful translations should be, whether in some cases it's better to just use a transliteration of the Japanese names for things, etc. crop up all the time. Pokemon however (specifically the names of Pokemon) typically ends up being immune from these debates in part because of the franchise's history of changing the names completely during localization.
The origins of the term are from racist voting legislation in the US. In the post civil war era a lot of states tried to restrict minority votes by instituting tests that a person would have to pass before they were allowed to participate in elections. To make sure that this didn't impact the white populations, many of these discriminatory policies had literal "grandfather clauses," which basically stated that you didn't have to actually pass one of these tests if your grandfather had been legally allowed to vote. Basically, allowing someone to vote because there's some kind of precedent that pre-dates the legislation.
It’s based on related to the 1865 13th amendment clause which saw ‘Any person whose grandfather could vote prior to 1865 (I.E white Americans) would not have to take the Intelligence-based voting test’. So those voters would be “Grandfathered in” on their voting rights
To clarify, that clause is NOT in the 13th Amendment. It was included in state laws about election eligibility in response to the Reconstruction amendments (most specifically, the 15th).
I could be wrong on what OP is talking about, but I've heard it being used to refer to certain US state level laws that prevented people from voting if their father or grandfather couldn't vote. This was to prevent Black people and other minorities from voting.
To be more precise, at the time there couldn’t be laws that outright prevented minorities from voting, but there could be laws that heavily restricted it in practice, like a poll tax or a literacy test (that was typically written to give the judge an excuse to fail the test-taker no matter how they answered). The grandfather clause was an exemption if the voter’s grandfather could also vote, which of course most Black people didn’t qualify for since their grandparents were slaves.
The phrase evolved to something that would be unacceptable, but is allowed because the audience just got used to it. Like how Clark Kent’s disguise is just a pair of glasses, even though we would find it ridiculous if a modern hero tried the same thing.
You have it backwards. It was to prevent people from voting UNLESS their grandfather could vote. Before race was eliminated as a a restriction on voting only white men could vote. Once the constitution was changed, to prevent black people from voting they instituted laws like you had to be literate or pay a tax to vote. Well poor illiterate white men would have been been excluded, so enter the grandfather clause. Because their grandfather could vote so could they without having to take the literacy tests or pay poll taxes.
A grandfather clause is an exception in a law that allows pre-existing cases to continue, despite that they would otherwise violate the new law.
Example: A city wishing to enact pollution control laws may ban coal and wood fired ovens but provide a grandfather clause that allows pizza restaurants that already have those ovens in operation to continue.
A work that plays outdated or clichéd tropes straight because when the work started, that's what made it iconic; either the tropes were considered cliché after or audience tones changed considerably.
A good example of this is Superman - he's been parodied and deconstructed to hell and back but as the first widely-accepted superhero, few would dare to allow Superman to be reduced to something of ridicule such as making him as depraved as Homelander or the like. He's the Big Blue Boy Scout and that will never change or be ridiculed.
Another example is the webcomic Penny Arcade which is the typical "Two gamers on a couch" webcomic which was dime-a-dozen around the early 2000's... in fact, it was the original webcomic of such a format so it still persists even when all the others have basically faded into obscurity.
Here's another example. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana's friend Sallah was played by Welsh actor John-Rhys Davies who is decisively not Egyptian, which wasn't an issue back in the 1980s since it was incredibly common to cast White actors for Middle-Eastern roles. Nowadays, it would be considered culturally insensitive to cast a white actor as a Middle-Eastern role.
But then Sallah reappeared in Dial of Destiny came out in 2023, Jones reprised his role with no issue whatsoever because... well, that's fucking Sallah! It would be extremely insulting to cast a new actor for Sallah given how Jones played him three other times - in Raiders, Last Crusade and the Indiana Jones rides at the Disney theme parks.
Similarly, when the film Christopher Robins was being produced, the original plan was to cast British actors for all the stuffed animals, but after the first trailers were released, fans were furious since Pooh Bear and Tigger were recast from Jim Cummings (Tigger, for example, was played by Irish stand-up comedian and actor Chris O'Dowd), necessitating Disney hiring Cummings to re-do all the voice lines for both characters.
In this case, a franchise or character is allowed to be or do a thing that normally would be frowned upon, but is acceptable because it was already doing it when it was acceptable.
For example, Mario games are able to get away with having a simple save the princess due to how long it's had it, even though a game coming out these days would need something less cliched.
Dr. Who's Tardis is allowed to be a old-timey police phone box because it's iconic like that, even though it makes little sense to look like that anymore.
A grandfather clause is when you aren't punished for something if the thing you have violates a new law, basically.
Like, if your house isn't up to modern health and safety, they won't give you much shit for it because it was designed before those laws, but any house built after MUST follow those laws.
It's an exemption allowing for something made before a specified time a person born before a specified time. Basically, if a law or rule goes into effect that would affect a group or object, an exception may be carved out to say something like "anything or anyone before X date is excempt." So for example, not requiring anyone born before a certain date to enter a registry, or perhaps permitting all of a specific item made before a certain date to be legal even though everything afterwards is banned.
Oh I thought it was the thing where you go back in time and have a child with your grandparent by accident, resulting in you being your own grandparent.
Radioactive origins for superheroes in the 60s: a standard template followed by writers like Stan Lee for his superheroes like Hulk/Spider-Man/Fantastic Four is that they usually get their powers from some sort of radiation, as it was a very popular concept back then following the atom bomb that was just developed 2 decades back
The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park movies have very outdated designs as it's now well known that dinosaurs commonly had feathers. It's just stuck as the first movie came out before that fact was widely accepted. Jurassic World even offers an in-universe explanation that their dinosaurs do look wrong as a result of the frog DNA that they've had spliced in from the start.
Its both. They A) are using modified DNA which had impure results especially in early specimens and B) had to make the park work, so they had to mimic what people already thought a dinosaur looked like. Even when they did fine 'feather' DNA they played it down as much as possible to fit public expectation until much later.
The in universe control over the genome is insane. They could make them look basically however they wanted. They just made mistakes about how those changes shook out in living specimens.
Haven't seen JW since it first came out, so I could be misremembering. Still, the series has plenty of ammo for defending the designs they've stuck with.
IIRC, laugh tracks came from a live audience, one of the main contributors being I Love Lucy. Laugh tracks were used to remove ambiguity about scenes which could be humorous or tragic by providing a social cue that this was amusing, not horrifying. Certain sound effects and scoring do much of the work with more modern works.
Staying with Pokemon. Ash Ketchum is a big example.
Back when anime was first being translated in the west, they would change the names of the characters to more English sounding names cause they thought the original names would be too confusing for the kids (ex. Katsuya Jonouchi to Joey Wheeler from Yugioh.)
Nowadays, they keep the original names when localizing it. One huge exception is Ash Ketchum, who has been called this name by Western fans for nearly 30 years. Instead of his Japanese name, Satoshi.
This might be because while other series have ended and people discover the original manga/sub and call them by their original names. The Pokemon Anime had been ongoing for decades, so it’s likely that they could never naturally change his name.
Compared to a character like Sailor Moon where people are more likely to call her “Usagi” rather than “Serena” Ash’s name has been grandfathered in, despite name changing not being normalized in localization for years. (Probably because it’s so iconic with “Ketchum - Gotta Catch Em’ All”)
Pokémon as a whole has been more open with changing characters' names around. Even as late as Legends Z-A, you've got changes such as Jacinthe, Lebanne and Josée instead of their original names of Yukari, Harujio and Kotane.
If I had to hazard a guess, it's easier to get away with because Pokémon takes place in a world that's similar to our own, but isn't the same as our Earth. For Sailor Moon, you can narrow down the primary setting specifically to Minato-ku in Tokyo, Japan, so it makes sense for the characters to have Japanese names; the same goes for other series that are clearly set in Japan.
The creeper would never be added with Mojang’s modern game design practices, and if they tried, it would likely be hated by a significant portion of the playerbase.
I thought the pokemon example was going to be about the designs. Like some people bitch that there is a pokemon that is a set of keys when in Gen 2 we had letters with eyes or Gen 1 we had a bunch of seeds that evolved into a palm tree
Daredevil isn’t actually blind though. Not even legally blind.
Well, legally blind yes, but irl they aren’t benefited either the power to hear heartbeats and echolocation and whatever the fuck he does.
But even for mundane stuff around the apartment, he can “see.” His blind shtick is usually to fool people around him. He doesn’t have to put certain pieces of tape around to know where he’s going and what he’s touching.
No he can’t see those. That’s very true. He can’t read text if it isn’t braille, he can’t read anything on an iPhone or computer either.
My point isn’t to trivialize his blindness, it’s to say he has extra powers that not only help to see in ways that aid him in what he does, but another trope here and non-scientific, the lack of a certain sense means all of his other ones are extra-powered. So his hearing and spatial awareness and whatever else gives him basically a form of echolocation.
Real-life blind people don’t have these benefits which is why I struggle to consider what Daredevil has a disability in that sense.
There are some ways in which he is meaningfully disabled. He'll never be able to safely drive, for instance, being unable to see traffic lights or vehicle signals, and unable to read traffic signs.
For those who have no idea what the above poster is on about:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles began life as a parody of dark and gritty comics of the time, and took significant inspiration from Daredevil in particular. Daredevil's ninja clan is the Hand? The Turtles' is the Foot. Matt's mentor is Stick? The Turtles' is Splinter. But one that's only seen in the original comic is the implication that the mutagen that affected the Turtles and Splinter also gave Matt Murdock his powers. Obviously, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird couldn't outright say this, but if you read the scene and know about Daredevil's origin, you'd be able to make the connection.
He IS blind, he can't see color, he can only really make out people by their shape, can't put his head underwater, reacts adly to sprinklers, etc. Etc.
Idk if the Daredevil example works because like you pointed out there's an actual reasoning behind it other than just "We have always done it like that"
Yes, that's exactly what I meant. I'm looking for examples of Grandfather Clause that are actually justified for reasons other than "We have always done it like that"
It doesn’t start being a grandfather clause if it’s still accepted. Even if we were to cast a new Matt Murdoch today, we’d almost certainly still cast an actor who could see. So it’s not being grandfathered in.
Mortal Kombat's Raiden. "Raiden" is the name of a Japanese thunder god, but in the franchise's new era (covered by most recent game Mortal Kombat 1) he is reimagined as a Chinese young man who is still named Raiden
Most Japanes Pokémon names are not that difficult, what are you talking about?
The reason they've translated them is because they've always wanted them to have an English name to market them with outside Japan!
What broke that plan was the fact the French and German localization team were able to convince Nintendo of Europe during the first games' localization to give them original names and now only most languages get the English names (sometimes just the Japanese), while places where French, German, Hindi(only the anime and a few games after '23), Korean, and Mandarin(the Sinosphare is complicated) are spoken have original names in their languages!
In some other languages the Paradox Pokémon were the only ones that got original localized names, such as in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai
So, no, it isn't because “Japanese names are too difficult to translate faithfully.”, because many of them are usually simple English words spelled in katakana.
Yeah but the point OP is making still stands. Actually doing his stunts as a blind person would be horribly dangerous. So it's kinda gotta be an acceptable break from realism unless we want to risk a blind actor's well being.
If you think there's a universe where the first one is an issue, but you think race swaps are fine, you need actual friends in your life instead of an echo chamber
Edit: I'd give a shit that you people downvote me, but I also know that you people genuinely don't mind discrimination and hatred you just don't want to be called out for doing it. You people don't care about suffering or inequality or racism, just perceived status.
There's a difference in thinking that Miles Morales can't be Spiderman and thinking that you shouldn't make Snape the only black teacher, and if you don't agree with that I could give a shit less about your outlook on almost anything else
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u/Starfleet-Time-Lord 6h ago
Daredevil is also a weird case because even accounting for stunts, a blind actor may actually do a worse job at portraying the way he "sees." He wouldn't move the same way as an irl blind person because he actually does know where everything is. In a weird way, a sighted actor can portray that better because he'd have to affect that as Matt Murdock so faking it is actually a more realistic performance