Enforced Element - TV Tropes

TROPE*

Story elements that are there because the writer had to include them, due to outside factors (even if the writer would have preferred to leave them out).

It happens for a number of reasons:

• Executive Meddling (The execs outright order the creator to include a particular element.)
• Executive Veto (The execs forbid something from being there.)
• Moral Guardians (The element is added to appease complaints from prominent figures that the media is objectionable.)
• A Censorship Bureau or Media Watchdog
• Constraints of the medium (which can lead to a Pragmatic Adaptation).
• Budget and time limitations

May lead to Writer Revolt in extreme cases, or an attempt at Getting Crap Past the Radar.

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Tropes that are often enforced (at least in the circumstances noted):

• 555: Fictional phone numbers and addresses need to avoid corresponding to ones in Real Life.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Some degree of artistic license must be accepted in fiction, because trying to make everything realistic risks either reducing the audience's entertainment or exceeding the creator's capabilities.
• Actor Leaves, Character Dies: When an actor is removed from the series (either voluntarily or because a scandal forced the production company to sever ties with them) and recasting the character isn't an option, a common decision is to kill the character off as a convenient excuse for the character to not be used anymore.
• Adaptational Modesty: Even if an actor is comfortable with appearing naked onscreen or the film is animated and therefore any featured nudity doesn't require the characters' actors to bare all, extended scenes of full-frontal nudity pretty much guarantee a film an "R" rating, which makes it much harder to market—often leading filmmakers to omit scenes of full-frontal nudity to make it easier for an adaptation to reach a general audience. This is especially mandatory if a character is underaged and the adaptation is a live-action production; while putting naked underaged characters in a novel, comic book or an animated work might fly (depending on how explicit the nudity is), it most definitely doesn't in a live-action movie or television series, where (with a few exceptions) they have to be played by real underaged actors and any nude scenes shot with them would therefore arguably count as child pornography.
• American Kirby Is Hardcore: Tweaking a work's marketing (or, in more extreme circumstances, presentation) to make it more suited for a region's preferences.
• And Knowing Is Half the Battle: Became a de facto requirement in many kids' shows from The '80s and The '90s, when networks were required to make a certain percentage of children's programming "educational." Tacking on a moral at the end counted.
• 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.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: The work is intended for general audiences or is distributed on network television, so it's mandatory for nude scenes (if they can't be avoided entirely) to not feature visible nipples and/or genitalia, and it would be more practical for animated works to just not include such body parts on the characters when it can't be avoided showing them in frame instead of animating the private parts and editing them out in post-production.
• Bland-Name Product: Featuring trademarked brands and products in a movie or TV show can lead to legal trouble if it's done without the manufacturer's permission, especially if they don't approve of the manner in which their products are portrayed—meaning that it's often safer to feature fictional products instead. Notable examples include the films of Quentin Tarantino (where characters always smoke "Red Apple" cigarettes and eat fast food from "Big Kahuna Burger"), and Kevin Smith (where characters always chew "Chewley's Gum" and eat fast food from "Mooby's").
• Bowdlerise: The enforcers could be Moral Guardians, government requirements, Values Dissonance for different countries, etc.
• Cast as a Mask: Hiring a different actor to play a character's disguised self can be done to ensure the audience doesn't figure out the true identity of the disguise before the show reveals it.
• Character Aged with the Actor: As actors are human beings and can't stay the same age forever, productions will sometimes choose to make it so that the actor's character ages with them rather than recast the character when the current actor becomes older than their character's presently established age.
• The Character Died with Him: When a character's actor ends up dying while the series is still continuing production and recasting the character is considered to be either impossible or in poor taste, this often results in the actor's character getting killed off as a show of respect.
• The Coconut Effect, because Reality Is Unrealistic.
  • The Audible Sharpness in The Lord of the Rings was going to be averted, until test audiences had trouble accepting the absence of that sound.
• Coconut Superpowers: A character's powers are given limited demonstrations with cheap special effects because budgetary restrictions prevent the production company from being able to afford showing the character's powers to their fullest extent.
• Curse Cut Short: Depending on the work's content rating, a character being interrupted when they're about to swear is often the closest the character will ever get to using actual profanity.
• Dawson Casting can sometimes be necessary for legal reasons. A very common example is to avoid Union regulations and/or actual laws in regards to youth actors.
  • Take the film adaptation of The Reader. David Kross legally couldn't shoot his sex scenes with Kate Winslet until he had turned 18, as not waiting would've risked the production getting slapped with child pornography charges even if the film was not glamorizing their characters' Age-Gap Romance and acknowledging it as wrong.
  • Game of Thrones takes this even further. In the books, Daenerys Targaryen is 13 when she is married off to Khal Drogo, and eventually becomes pregnant with his child—just as she turns 14. She was aged up significantly to avoid the Moral Guardians, but as the time of her birth is tied to Robert's Rebellion, the rest of the cast had to be aged up as well.
• Death Is Cheap: While death in real life is permanent, fictional characters have the benefit that they can come back to life at a later point after being killed off, and the chances of characters coming back to life after they die are especially likely if the production company caves in to fans who are vocally upset about their favorite characters dying, a writer contributing to the series seizes the opportunity to resurrect a particular character due to believing it was a bad idea to kill them off in the first place or the character in question is simply far too important to the story to stay deceased.
• Dude Looks Like a Lady / Lady Looks Like a Dude: In live-action media, this is often due to Cross-Cast Role.
• Enforced Plug: The enforced variation of Product Placement.
• Epileptic-Friendly Filter: Naturally higher ups don't want to inadvertently trigger photosensitive epilepsy.
• The Faceless: When a work goes out of its way to obscure a particular character's face or otherwise prevent their face from being visible to the audience, it's often to add an element of mystery to the character or to momentarily shield the character's identity before the narrative is ready to reveal it.
• Fake Shemp: When an actor becomes unavailable at a crucial moment in production but the production company is unable to recast the character, a common short-term solution prior to recasting the character at the next opportunity, having the actor come back as soon as they're available again or finding an effective way to remove the character from the story is to use archived footage, archived audio and/or obscured body doubles to create the illusion of the absent actor still being involved.
• Filler: Anime works adapted from manga (like Dragon Ball and One Piece) often include "filler arcs" when they reach the most recent chapters of a still-ongoing manga before the creators can release new material—forcing the showrunners to stall for time by writing original material that can serve as fodder for new episodes without affecting the ongoing story.
• Flynning:
  • It's a necessity for theatrical productions, as realistic swordplay would not only be too dangerous, but also remove the audience's Willing Suspension of Disbelief in having them worry about the actors.
  • For family and children's media, Flynning is necessary for depicting exciting swordplay in a way that's appropriate for its target audience. Realistic swordplay is not only violent, but also detached from the audience's expectations of Rule of Cool; therefore, it's only used in works where the context would be appropriate, such as Robin and Marian and The Duellists.
• Godiva Hair: The production's content rating won't allow bare breasts to be visible, so if the work absolutely must feature a topless or naked woman and doesn't want to rely on obscuring the breasts with foreground objects or only showing the woman from the back, having her chest and/or crotch obscured by long hair is a convenient censorship method that can believably occur in-universe and wouldn't be as distracting as using a black bar or mosaic censoring.
• Great Offscreen War: Depicting a full-scale war is incredibly expensive in visual media, so budgetary concerns often necessitate keeping things offscreen (save for one or two important battles), or just setting the story in the aftermath. Notable examples include the Great Time War in Doctor Who, the War of the Five Kings in Game of Thrones, the Roman Civil War in Rome, The War of Wrath in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and the Earth-Romulan War in Star Trek: The Original Series.
• Implied Rape: As rape is a very serious crime and one that can't be explicitly mentioned in all media, it's common to imply a character suffered sexual abuse without directly saying they were raped so the work can be viewed by general audiences or because the writer is simply not comfortable with actually using the R-word to describe the character's fate.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: The owners of copyrighted characters will take issue with unauthorized use of their intellectual properties, so productions that want to feature appearances by certain fictional characters they don't own the rights to for the sake of a gag will usually redesign or partially obscure the character and give them a different name (if they're named at all) to avoid getting slapped with lawsuits or demands for royalties from whoever owns the character's rights.
• Merchandise-Driven: 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.
• Nephewism: To avoid the implications that certain characters (especially family-friendly ones, i.e. from the Classic Disney Shorts) had sex for those children to come to existence.
• Never Say "Die": It's common for works aimed at children to avoid directly mentioning death or death-related words, primarily out of concerns that acknowledging death could be too disturbing for the target demographic.
• Non-Singing Voice: It will be a necessity to hire a separate actor to do a character's singing voice if the standard actor isn't able to sing very well or if the plot requires the character's singing voice to be noticeably different from their speaking voice.
• The Nth Doctor: When a character is recast, it won't always be possible to find a replacement actor who's an exact likeness or able to imitate the voice of their predecessor, so working the new actor's different appearance and/or voice into the plot by providing an in-universe explanation for the character looking and/or sounding different is a handy way to convince audiences to get used to the casting change.
• The Other Darrin: Actors after all are human, so when a specific character is important enough to the story that they can't just be removed from the show when their usual actor is unavailable, dies, becomes too old to continue playing their character, becomes too expensive to continue hiring, declines to continue participating in the production or is fired over a scandal, it becomes a necessity to hire a new actor to play the given character afterwards.
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: Legal disclaimers are necessary to stave off litigation.
• Pandering to the Base: every work needs to cater at least a little to the audience it's being created for, whether that means over-the-top action for a summer blockbuster or spending a month perfecting a single unedited Long Take as an appeal to cinephiles.
• Post-Script Season: If a show is renewed for more episodes after concluding its intended run, it'll get written for, but the writers then have to work their way out of the constraints of what occurred in what was originally intended to be the series' finale.
• Precision F-Strike: In many movies whose producers had to fight for "PG-13" ratings, since the MPAA's rules on profanity mean that a movie arbitrarily receives an "R" rating if it uses the word "fuck" more than once.
• Product Placement is often the result of Executive Meddling, while some are done with the agreement of the filmmakers. Whatever reason, this trope brings more money to the production, which often covers the costs of filming.
• Re-Cut: Standard reasons for a later release of a work to be edited or extended include adding additional scenes to spice things up, restoring scenes that were initially deleted in response to popular demand or the work having aspects that haven't aged well (such as a scene coming off as offensive to modern audiences or a disgraced celebrity being involved).
• "Rise and Fall" Gangster Arc: Hollywood films produced between 1934-54 were expressly forbidden by The Hays Code from depicting criminals getting away with their crimes, so any gangster film made in the period was legally obliged to show the Villain Protagonist getting his comeuppance by the end of the film.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: When someone involved in a work's production has committed a crime or done something morally reprehensible, it will be necessary for the production company to fire this individual both to avoid bad publicity from associating with a felon and to prevent the offender from continuing to use their position to cause further harm.
• Rose-Tinted Narrative: When fiction deals with the history of some region, it may sometimes need this 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.
  • Under The Hays Code, priests, ministers, and other religious authorities had to be portrayed respectfully without exception. Fittingly, one of the co-authors of the Code's actual text was a Jesuit Catholic priest—and while he acknowledged that not all "ministers of religion" were worthy of respect, mockery of any one of them would (supposedly) encourage sacrilegious attitudes.
• Same Language Dub: Often in effect if the character's physical actor isn't able to make their voice sound how the production company intends the character to sound, or if the actor becomes unavailable at some point and they need to hire a separate actor to dub over them in post-production.
• Scenery Censor: When nudity in a work can't be explicit due to being aimed at a target demographic (i.e. children) or distributed in a medium (i.e. network television) where it wouldn't be allowed, one alternative to not depicting genitals is to simply have the naughty bits obscured by conveniently located foreground objects.
• Shoulders-Up Nudity: If the work features a nude scene but needs to be appropriate for general audiences, another effective censorship method besides invisible genitalia or obscuring the naughty bits with conveniently located objects is to keep everything below the neck out of frame.
• Sound-Effect Bleep: For when the work isn't allowed to use profanity and a plain old censor bleep just isn't cutting it.
• Spiritual Adaptation: When a legal dispute renders a true adaptation impossible. Many of the films of George Lucas are famous for this; supposedly, he made the original Star Wars because he couldn't get the rights to Flash Gordon, Raiders of the Lost Ark because he had always wanted to produce a James Bond movie, and Willow because he couldn't get the rights to The Hobbit.
• Spiritual Successor: When a legal dispute renders a true sequel impossible.
• Toplessness from the Back: The age rating won't allow for a woman's breasts to be shown, so it's mandatory to only show her from the back if the story requires a scene where she's in a state of undress where she'd at least be topless.
• Two-Part Trilogy: When a work turns out to be particularly successful, executives often demand two or more followups to cash in on the success of the original, which necessitates writing one story that can be stretched over multiple installments.
  • Other times when a writer gets an idea for a multi-part story, they usually can't get the later installments greenlit unless the first one turns out to be successful, which necessitates writing a first installment that can stand on its own.
• What Could Have Been: The final product won't always be exactly as how the production company intended it to be, so whether the reason stuff is changed is due to certain actors becoming unavailable, unforeseen circumstances that the production company has no control over or even a spontaneous decision made at the last minute, changing the work from its original pitch will often be mandatory.
• What Were They Selling Again?: Products which sell themselves based on unproven medical claims aren't allowed to use those unproven claims in their advertising, forcing them to settle for such tactics as telling you to "apply directly to the forehead" and hoping you'll figure out on your own that this is intended to cure headaches.
• White Male Lead: Because the entertainment industry feels (rightly or wrongly) that white people won't relate to someone from an ethnic minority group.
• The Wildcats: Most distinctive-sounding names for athletic teams are trademarked by actual professional athletic teams, forcing fiction writers to use generic names that are in the public domain.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: If a work is designed not be to be planned out in advance, but have the story changes be decided by things like random chance, or letting the audience vote on outcomes.
  • Vinesauce Tomodachi Life leaves many events and outcomes to the Random Number God, any number of plot twists and character traits are established with no real foreshadowing (for the most part). Since Vinny is livestreaming the game and can't save scum his way out of certain events, he ends up being just as surprised as the viewers are by them. Essentially, the series writes itself on the fly.
  • Others using random numbers include Il castello dei destini incrociati and Inglip.