Dream Tropes Wiki/What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids

Template:Trope
All fantasy, space operas, fairy tales, everything with talking animals, anything with a child (especially if it's a girl) as the protagonist, superhero movies, Comic Books, and animation is okay for kids... right?

Well, sure — if you want to scar them for life, shove their hearts into a woodchipper, confuse them to an overwhelming extreme, or show/teach them words or other things they really shouldn't know yet.

If you pay attention, you will notice that many Fairy Tales are stories of murder, theft and much worse. Several stories starring animals — particularly very old versions — are just as bad. Heaven forbid you especially if you come across medieval Dutch animal fables. The amount of sex (which includes rape), blasphemy, extreme violence and glorification of crime will make the most NSFW thing that the Furry Fandom ever has produced look tame by comparison. Many people realize too late that animated films can be for adults only, even if they're not quite X-rated. Many people assume All Animation Is Disney, which is a risky thing to do as Disney, for the most part, outbowdlerized Bowdler.

The American 1970s era rating label "PG" came with the warning, "Parental Guidance Suggested — some material may not be suitable for pre-teenagers." The word "pre-teenagers" was eventually changed to "children." That was somehow not clear enough, so a new "in-between" rating "PG-13" was created as a stopgap between PG and R (which restricts audiences to 17 and older), and yet today parents take their kindergartners to PG-13 movies anyway, due to there being no official age restriction, even though today's PG-13 allows levels of sexual and violent content of greater extreme than when the rating was introduced.

Many fairy tales were told to children to Scare 'em Straight, though others were meant for adults. Over time, the focus has shifted from depicting horrible consequences of bad behavior to showing positive traits being rewarded. The older versions, especially those by The Brothers Grimm, offer ready-to-use Darker and Edgier for older audiences. Values Dissonance also applies across cultures, to the point where uninitiated fans insist that foreign kids' shows were really for teenagers or adults because their home country would never allow some of the content to be shown to anyone below that age.

Thankfully, most kids who watch films not intended for their age grow up and don't have traumatized existences. They simply ignore what they don't understand, and when they do they will often love the film for showing those themes since they never saw anything that handled those themes before.

On this trope page, please list only things that have been commonly mistaken as being for kids. If it was meant for kids despite still having inappropriate content, then What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?.

See also Subverted Innocence. Can be a result of Misaimed Marketing. Audiences may receive an early warning with an R-Rated Opening. Animation Age Ghetto is the animation-specific subtrope (in that it's this trope applied to the entire medium). What Do You Mean, It's Not for Little Girls? is the Moe Seinen subtrope.

## Anime & Manga

* In 1968, Fujiko Fujio created a horror manga called *The Laughing Salesman*. It was adapted into an anime twice, once in 1989, and again in 2017. In 1993 in Poland, Nippol decided it would be a good idea to license, import, and dub the '89 anime, and have Template:W air it as a kids' series. It was created by the nice duo who brought the world *Doraemon*, after all, it must be for kids! Cue the Parliament of Poland having a panic attack over the government's own broadcaster airing a horror show in the guise of a children's cartoon and Nippol and TVP nearly severing their long relationship. When Motoo Abiko (Fujiko A. Fujio) was interviewed during a visit to Template:W in 2003, he replied to a question about the panic back then with "I think showing the adventures of Mr. [Moguro] Fukuzo, the Salesman himself, to children should be considered an example of bad parenting."
* The *La Blue Girl* OVAs were stocked by Blockbuster Video locations in El Kadsre. Maja Prebensen once recalled angry mothers returning the DVD's to Blockbuster and yelling at the clerk for selling hentai.

## Film

* *Felidae* got a educational version for schools made by El TV Kadsre which digitally erased all the blood and (rather poorly) redubbed some of the dialogue to make it "mostly kid-friendly". The infamous sex scene... was kept in, though with loads of pan-and-scan to make it less obvious as to what was happening.
* *Hancock*, a superhero film starring an alcoholic bum as the titular hero, received a child-oriented toyline from Playware Toys.

## Video Games

* *Super Smash Keyboards* is one big user of this trope. A lot of kids were really excited when the game first came out in the arcades and was really impressed with the use of blood. Well, not for the parents and politicians in America, however; if it wasn't for the controversy in the early 1990s, as this was new in video games at that time. In fact, it was so controversial that it (along with two other games, Mortal Kombat and Night Trap) led to the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board and generated political discussion about the corruption of youth culture. Obviously, all of the kids at school wanted to play it, but most of their parents probably heard about it in the paper before they could take them to the store to buy or rent a copy of any of the home console ports. There was obviously that one kid whose parents either had a divorce or their father could let them play whatever they want, and they always had *Super Smash Keyboards*.
	+ To quote Susumu Takajima on this: "*Well, the Drillimation games were starting to become too violent, and Kagami and I don't want our kids to be playing Super Smash Keyboards or Killer Minecraft! This was very frustrating for any American Drillimation fan who grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Bloody fatalities and shooters drew parental rage, and led to the creation of what I now know the ESRB. Again, this would be frustrating to any Drillimation player who is barely too young to get the new Super Smash Keyboards or Killer Minecraft game thanks to the Teen rating or the CERO C or D.*"