Compare Audience-Alienating Premise in other media. This can come up when importing anime and manga, due to Values Dissonance between Japan and the West.
- Ashigei Shoujo Komura-san would otherwise be an unremarkable harem manga except for the fact that its Fanservice chooses to focus on the female characters' feet, especially the main protagonist, who uses her feet for almost every single task. The blatant Author Appeal naturally excludes all those who don't share the same tastes as the author, and it's not hard to see why the series never built up large enough of a fanbase to avoid getting cancelled fairly early on.
- The Beautiful Skies of Houou High: The main character's mother sends her to an all-boys school, in order to prevent her from becoming a lesbian so that the mother can have grandchildren. The story is on the mother's side. And nearly everyone in the school abuses her and treats her like shit. Cure Your Gays (but just lesbians, Ho Yay is portrayed in-story as perfectly fine) played straight; written by a woman. The American publisher put one volume out before pulling it in the face of massive protests.
- Cited as the reason Case Closed failed in North America, especially among mainstream audiences. Its premise about a teenager trapped in a little boy's body solving murder mysteries was considered too dark for children and too childish and ridiculous for older audiences. Made even worse by having hundreds of episodes, which will alienate anyone from the West from committing to such a long series, considering the fact that many episodes already aired in Japan years before they were officially translated overseas.
- Cheat Slayer: Fans of isekai works were turned off by the inaccurate and mean-spirited parodies that painted the characters they were familiar with as a group of utterly horrific monsters, whereas general audiences were turned off by the excessively grim tone and graphic content (for example, the plot begins with the protagonist's childhood friend being raped and murdered). Even people who liked the idea of an anti-isekai plot were generally turned off by the story playing too many tropes that make the genre contentious straight. Needless to say, Cheat Slayer only lasted a single chapter before it was cancelled in the face of massive backlash.
- This is likely why it took nine years to find a company willing to license Den-noh Coil for a North American release. It's a thought-provoking, intelligent examination of a society that's just beginning to go Cyberpunk, with virtual reality glasses that was eerily prescient of apps like Pokémon GO, and contains moments of horror and philosophy about social interaction. It also has a cast mainly consisting of children who get up to many misadventures with lighthearted comedy and Slice of Life antics. The series takes its time to thoroughly explore its setting. Its characters look quite cutesy, but the backgrounds are dim and washed out, leaving fans of Moe possibly turned off from the moments of Nightmare Fuel and occasionally complicated Techno Babble. If Science Fiction fans can look past the child characters, the series does start touching on the sort of transhumanist, internet-related philosophical questions that would be right at home in series like Ghost in the Shell, but the character-focused writing makes it impossible to simply skip to the major themes. Now, you could maybe tap into a certain market of childhood nostalgia clashing with such difficult topics, but you'd need an audience who doesn't mind childish comedy, the kids' various friendships and rivalries that are given a fair share of importance, and serious social commentary that's seamlessly woven together.
- Dragon Pink, an old-school classic JRPG turned into an (also classic) hentai manga series, never really found an audience, even in Japan (where it's rather obscure even amongst ero manga buffs). The intricate heroic fantasy plot scares away people who want to jerk off, and people who enjoy great stories and characters will dismiss the series out of hand just for having hardcore sex scenes. The fact the manga has been abandoned by its creator with no new chapters since 1994 is quite telling. (The creator, ITOYOKO, has said that he wants to finish the series, however, so there may be hope for Pink & her party yet).
- Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is an adaptation of a highly popular RPG video game series, that doesn't actually adapt any of the games' themes or elements (except perhaps a Dr. Cid). That alone alienates the game fans, but non-fans will be treated to a rather sappy and sometimes silly work (e.g. the Phantoms killing anyone they poke, as if it is a video game) and would avoid it as well. Also as a fully computer-generated film in 2001, that premise was a flaw as human characters would hit the Unintentional Uncanny Valley more often than not. The result was a massive Box Office Bomb that put a swift end to the fledgling Square Pictures.
- Final Fantasy: Unlimited. While the series does thematically adapt some of the main elements, such as summons, the crystal, chaos, and Cid, fans are baffled when the story focused on non-action kids protagonists, despite typically in Final Fantasy, even kids are capable to fight. The angsty caretaker Lisa is even more so, only have defensive kind of magic early on that is unique to the series. For kids, the supposed audience, they're put off by the inappropriate design of some characters, like Lisa, and also the weird imagery of the series thanks to it taking place on a "Wonderland". Action scenes are few and far between, and while there's summons, it's generally underused thanks to the uneven pacing, and the anime generally received poorly with the planned sequel (which was adapted into a series of novels and audio plays) being not animated.
- First Love Monster seems like your typical shoujo romance with a Cast Full of Pretty Boys... except for the fact that despite appearances, several of the male characters are actually in elementary school and the high school-aged female lead falls in love with one of them even after learning his real age. Unsurprisingly, the anime adaptation flopped in sales because of this.
- Gate: While the premise of a modern army clashing with an Iron Age fantasy world is in itself not alienating, the story contains strong nationalistic and right wing overtones, generally depicting all countries other than Japan as only interested in exploiting the resources of the other world, versus the almost flawless Japanese characters. On top of that, the series openly admits that Japan intends on doing the same, though it's treated as a good thing. While a moderate success in Japan (helped slightly by it getting a minor promotion from the JSDF), of the current 15 volumes, only the first received a broad foreign release. The anime had a bit more success, but mostly came and went, and failed to make much of a lasting impression on Western audiences (at least compared to others in the genre).
- A cursory glance at Goodnight Punpun make it seem like a cute slice-of-life story about some cartoon bird doodle and a cute little girl. However it is actually an extremely dark Coming of Age Story and character drama, which isn’t afraid to show the characters’ depravity and pettiness. It’s won itself critical acclaim and a devoted following for those reasons, but even fans admit the story is so bleak that it can be hard to stomach for many people. An interview with Inio Asano, the author, stated that volume sales had a noticeable decline every time something really upsetting and dark happened.
- Haou Airen is a bloody, lurid series about a girl kidnapped by a Hong Kong gang leader to be his Sex Slave and who becomes horribly broken. It's also a smutty shoujo romance. Viz Media reportedly dropped its license of it for this very reason. Most of Mayu Shinjo's works are this. It's the main reason only a small chunk of her works have ever been translated and/or licensed.
- Heat Guy J never achieved much widespread popularity due to this. It looks like a straightforward sci-fi buddy cop-style action series, as opposed to the serious drama it actually is. As a result, many people wrote it off as just another buddy-cop action show, and those who watched it because they liked straightforward action shows came away underwhelmed. This even translates to its poor performance in the US, where Chad Kime from Geneon points out that for every copy of the show sold, Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) sold 4 times as much, even when Geneon marketed it as from the people who made The Vision of Escaflowne (one of Bandai Entertainment's best-performing titles), and Funimation has said that it's one of the worst-performing shows on their streams.
- Himegoto is a wacky ecchi comedy about a feminine boy... who is bullied, sexually harassed, and forced to crossdress by three assertive student council members. Now you know the first reason why the anime bombed (the second being the truly shoddy quality, making some people suspect it was actively sabotaged).
- i tell c's main character being a detective who's also a yandere stalker rubbed some readers the wrong way right off the bat. Even then, the premise clearly only works as one joke that would get old fast without a proper Myth Arc to keep readers engaged, resulting in the manga having to shift gears a little to be more about a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits that make up a newly formed division of the police force. Despite the attempt to change things up, the manga was ultimately cancelled after only five months due to low volume sales.
- Joshiraku is a hard sell for both sides of the world. The protagonists are Rakugo performers, a very old style of Japanese comedy that you'd be hard pressed to find anyone under 50 watching in its home country. If one can get past that, there's the very Surreal Humor aspect. And for American viewers, it comes with a boatload of Japanese wordplay and puns that will most likely fly over their heads. Not surprisingly, the series didn't fare well in Japan and completely bombed with American viewers.
- Kaguya-sama: Love Is War Official Doujin touts itself as a Hotter and Sexier Spin-Off of a work that deliberately avoids gratuitous fanservice and was drawn by someone who had produced hentai doujinshi of the series. Needless to say, fans of the main series only really started to like it when it dropped that premise in favor of just throwing the characters in various Alternate Universes instead, and even then it was cancelled after only 33 chapters.note
- Kaihin Shūgakuin no Shiroiharu, another manga by Nico Tanigawa of No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular! fame. It was about a pair of teenagers in a private school for boys trying to help the hormonal male student body cope with the complete lack of girls on campus through masturbation. First by studying masturbation scientifically and then forming a club devoted entirely to masturbating. It sounds like the premise for a hentai, but it was a shonen that couldn't actually show any real depictions of sex. Furthermore, it featured both discussions and images of guys yanking themselves off while completely lacking female characters to provide genuine Fanservice to balance that out, making it unappealing for the male audience it was supposed to be geared for, all the while trying to be a raunchy comedy that was by and large never going to attract a female Periphery Demographic. The manga lasted for six chapters before it was abruptly canceled and Nico Tanigawa apologized for ever making it.
- Maria†Holic is about a sadistic double-faced crossdresser who torments and abuses a perverted misandrist teenager at an all-girls school. It hasn't fared well with many people, especially in the U.S. and other countries due to the homophobic sounding premise, resulting in the translated version being dropped after only a few volumes.
- This is probably why Mitsudomoe's anime adaptation flopped so miserably, at least in Japan (in the US it's a borderline Cult Classic). The crude, childish nature of the show put off otaku, while the otaku-targeted advertising and merchandise scared off most other potential audiences (and made some believe it was a lolicon show). The second season bombed so badly in terms of ratings and DVD sales that it was cut down to eight episodes before it even finished airing. The manga didn't have this problem, since it managed to be serialized for eleven years.
- Negiho: Mahora Little Girls from the Negima! franchise, in which Negi is a young man and the girls are five years old. Although the Fanservice (or maybe Fan Disservice in this case) was definitely toned down, according to The Other Wiki, reviewers still considered the series to be creepy and questioned whether a preschool comedy adventure could appeal to fans of the original series. This manga was cancelled after one volume.
- Nidome no Jinsei wo Isekai de/[New Life+] Young Again in Another World has as its main protagonist Renya Kunugi, an unapologetic sociopathic Imperial Japanese Army veteran who fought in World War II. Renya killed over 5,000 Chinese with his sword, 2,000 of them after the war ended. Worst of all, he escaped punishment for his crimes, living long after the war and dying in his nineties, and then God reincarnates him as a young man. Due to the trauma the neighbors of Japan have from that period, combined with the author MINE's intense racism towards the Chinese and the Koreans lead to the cancellation of an animated adaptation and the ceasing of the novel's publication. However, it still has an ongoing manga adaptation.
- No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular! is a Mood Whiplash-filled comedy about a severely anti-social and messed-up girl who tries to become popular but usually fails horribly at everything she does. While slightly more popular in the US, the anime flopped in Japan. The manga did eventually start progressing a bit beyond this, making it a little more palatable to people who don't want to watch an egotistical loser embarrass and humiliate herself over and over again by gradually giving the main character some real actual friends to interact with and downplaying her more childish and perverted elements, while exaggerating the same elements in other characters.
- Nozoemon. Parodies of Doraemon are commonplace in Japan, but a borderline softcore porn parody, especially serialized instead of being some one-off doujin, drew curious eyes away. When it was figured out that the gadgets all had a sexual bent to them and the Doraemon stand-in was modeled to resemble a little girl, the manga was cancelled after a single volume.
- This is a major reason why Takeshi Ohmi's manga never make it past one or two volumes:
- Kiss my Ass is a comedy manga about a high school boy suffering from... hemorrhoids, and it's intended for a young adult audience. It's hard to see just who it appeals to—the accurate descriptions of the condition turn off young readers and others who are looking for a comedy, and others find the misfortune of someone suffering from a chronic illness to be more mean-spirited than funny.
- The Fushidara (Misfortune) series is even worse in this regard. The story (in two parts) revolves around protagonists who are granted the power to make their wishes come true by a mysterious benefactor, but which comes with a downside of destroying their sanity the more they use it. The story contains in-depth explorations of the psychology of greed and just how far humans will go to get what they want, but it also contains loads of graphic sexual content. The amount of sex, rape, and gore has a negative effect on those who wanted to read a psychological thriler, while the morals and explorations of the human condition turn away those who just wanted to read something to arouse them.
- This is the reason why Pokémon RéBURST never really became the big hit that many were expecting. It's a Pokémon manga outright targeted towards the series' Periphery Demographic of older audiences that's rife with violence and Fanservice... and has the Trainers become their Pokémon in battle rather than partner with them, with traditional Pokémon battles being incredibly scarce. Pokémon fans weren't happy with the liberties taken with the source material, and older audiences that would have liked the other elements were turned off by the source material being associated with a normally "kiddy" franchise. The manga was eventually cancelled after only a year and a half of serialization (with Shonen Sunday later deleting its page on their official site), and it was never officially released outside of Japan.
- PPPPPP: Manga about music generally tend to be a hard sell because of their focus on music in a soundless medium, but this manga was starkly different from the usual output of Shonen Jump and what the magazine's primary audience is used to reading. In a magazine that is known for gag comedies and hot blooded action, PPPPPP is a slow paced family drama with heavy focus on character exploration. The art, while beautiful in its capacity to create surreal scenes and landscapes, is also quite unusual for shonen manga, with character designs that break from the norm a lot, making it even harder to get interest from the main readership of the magazine. The manga's strong visuals and character writing did earn appreciation among its own small fanbase, but it never managed to attract enough people to leave the very bottom of Jump's charts. Despite strong critical reception, the manga was ultimately cancelled after its 70th chapter.
- PuraOre! ~Pride of Orange~ is an ice hockey, Slice of Life, and Idol Genre mashup. Putting aside that hockey is extremely niche in Japan, the show has much less in the way of actual hockey action than the premise would suggest (which turned away any pre-existing hockey fans), there are about five minutes of idol performances total across all twelve episodes, and the slice-of-life aspect suffers from the show dedicating time to the other elements. The Blurays flopped by most reports, and the PuraOre! mobile game that the anime was made to kickstart lasted a mere eight months (covering less than half of its intended story) before shutting down.
- While Reborn! (2004) had a fairly decent following in Japan, it failed to gain similar popularity in the US. Most American fans were turned off by the first 60 chapters (reduced to 20 anime episodes) being an average Slice of Life gag series full of Slapstick and Cringe Comedy, with the main protagonist in particular being a Lovable Coward constantly subjected to unwarranted cruel punishments and humiliation in every chapter. Many viewers were largely unimpressed with these first initial episodes and therefore had no interest in continuing the series even after the Genre Shift in the second arc. The anime was never dubbed or aired on TV in America (with its only acknowledgement being a English sub made by Viz) and its manga release in the states only covered 16 of the 42 volumes before canceled due to low sales.
- Rika is a manga about a middle school boy, Kazuya, who shares a bedroom in his family's small Tokyo apartment, with his younger sister, the titular Rika. Normal so far. Then we find out that Kazuya masturbates while his sister is changing, without her knowledge. Then we learn that Rika has romantic feelings for her brother, which they eventually confess to one another. It makes the Kissing Cousins plot that comes up later seem tame by comparison. Unsurprisingly, it's been on hiatus for years.
- Robot × Laserbeam attempts to apply the high-stakes and emotion-driven narrative endemic to sports manga... to golf, which is famously one of the slowest paced and least confrontational sports there are. Likewise, the attempt to include special moves in the vein of the author's previous work came off as harder to stomach due to the change and format, not helped by the use of such elements rapidly becoming a Discredited Trope in the 2010's. After it failed to garner an audience outside of the creator's existing fanbase, volume sales dropped to the point that the manga was cancelled a little over a year after it started.
- Sugar Sugar Rune is a little girls Magical Girl show that also has a surprisingly dark plot and tries to raise questions about semi-serious topics such as love and femininity (with mixed results). It also suffers badly from Most Writers Are Adults, which can be off-putting for a lot of people. Possibly because of this it never really became popular outside Japan and faded into obscurity there after it ended.
- Time Paradox Ghostwriter is about a failing manga artist who suddenly receives issues of Shonen Jump from ten years in the future, and he decides to pass off the most popular series in those issues, White Knight, as his own. While he's later confronted by the real creator of White Knight over it, the main character essentially plagiarizing someone else's work as a plot point rubbed a lot of readers the wrong way, since the fact that he keeps passing off White Knight as his own work despite frequently saying he feels guilty about it makes him come across as Unintentionally Unsympathetic. This led to the manga being cancelled after only three months of serialization.
- Transformers Kiss Players appears on the surface to be a Transformers series where the Transformers are powered by kisses of little girls, but further inspection reveals imagery that borders on Hentai and teenage girls that look a fraction of their age. While this is not the first time many Western fans have been confused by the fiction the Japanese side produces, this is the first time where they have been so disgusted by them that they outright refused to take a look. Japanese fans, meanwhile, were deeply embarrassed by it and feared it would irreversibly color Western perceptions of Japanese Transformers media. Even the entry on
TFWiki.net seems disgusted by the premise. - Wedding Peach: This Magical Girl series has the main characters transform with a wedding theme, and the series often has the girls dreaming of their weddings and chasing after boys. This is a much stranger premise in the west than in Japan, where more traditional gender roles are the norm. The anime also shared a head writer and character designer with Sailor Moon, which caused it to be dismissed as a Sailor Moon clone despite the two shows not having a great deal of similarity beyond aesthetics and the core pieces of the magical girl genre. The show never even aired in North America despite getting a dub in English. However, the show did find a niche in South Korea, where it was so popular it was run constantly and received four different Korean dubs over 20 years (which, it should be emphasized, is very rare for a Japanese show), and in Italy, where it became a Cult Classic.
- Yo-kai Watch, at least in the West. A lot of people were calling it "the next Pokémon" before it released. That's not the only reason, though; Yōkai are a pretty Japanese concept, and not a lot of Westerners would "get it", so to speak, at first. Then, even if you know about yokai and are a Japanese cultural enthusiast — therefore looking forward to seeing something like this — they localize the show and games in many of the typical fashions (like Dub Name Change). It's still got a pretty good Western fanbase going for it, though it's admittedly nowhere near as big as in Japan. The anime not doing so well led to the English dub changing casts on season 3 to accommodate budget issues (though the games are keeping the original cast); and eventually to the show outright being pulled altogether in early 2019 in favor of Inazuma Eleven: Ares.
