Everything you need to know to be a
NASCAR driver.
All of us here know that there's a diverse array of titles within any one medium. Like, not all video games are
Wii Sports or
Grand Theft Auto or
Super Mario Bros. or
Tetris or
Halo. There are games like the
Silent Hill series, which tries to immerse you in an environment through the use of incredible attention to detail and lots of optional internal monologue, before gradually creeping the living daylights out of you over time. Or
The Elder Scrolls series, which presents to you a wide-open world and a ton of choices you can make in it, giving you unprecedented freedom to experiment and explore.
The general public doesn't (always) know that, though — people who don't play video games think that all games are like the ones they hear about on TV, which would tend to be either
Wii Sports (due to the Wii showing up in retirement communities all over the place), or the latest "controversial"
violent game that the media
love to shove in people's faces. If these people are older,
expect their perceptions of video games to be even worse.
Likewise, comic books are not all about poorly-written superheroes in garish spandex costumes fighting one-note supervillains with outlandish plots. In fact, they haven't even been
primarily about that since before most of today's comics fans were
born. There are a great many comics telling other kinds of stories, such as the supernatural mystery
Leave It To Chance, the numerous indie
Slice of Life comics or even various
Japanese comics manga, such as the cute family comedy
Yotsuba&!. And certainly the Super Hero genre itself is much better written than what is stereotypically attributed:
Watchmen and
The Dark Knight Returns should be proof enough of that. Good luck explaining that to the average person on the street. If you say you like comic books, they'll respond with something like, "So you like Superman and Spider-Man?"
* If you're in North America, that is; in Europe the response will be more along the lines of, "So you like Donald Duck and Asterix?"
. Some comics (usually ones dubbed "graphic novels" to eliminate this very problem), like the autobiographical
Fun Home or the aforementioned
Watchmen, have won awards for their artistry and originality. But the general public doesn't know about that.
And of course, cartoons. We know all about the
Animation Age Ghetto. Cartoons can only be funny, right? The sheer number of non-comedic cartoons says otherwise. On the other hand, many companies seem convinced that kids will watch cartoons only if they are funny, and add extraneous humor that sometimes
clashes with the mood just to fulfill their comedy quota. There have been non-comedy cartoons for adults, but they haven't done terribly well. Unfortunately, the Animation Age Ghetto lives. Often, animators have to start with an
R-Rated Opening in order to
warn young audiences and their parents that
what they're watching isn't a Disney animated flick just because it had cartoon people on the cover.
This is especially true for anime. On the public eye, anime is either associated with
Sailor Moon,
Dragon Ball and Dragonball Z,
Pokémon,
Naruto and
Yu-Gi-Oh! (often with the
Animation Age Ghetto), or with sordid, lecherous
hentai. And the dialogue is either poor dubbing along the lines of
Speed Racer, or blatant
"Blind Idiot" Translation.
Heaven save
paper Roleplaying Games, which a significant chunk of the general public has simply
never heard of, or, at best, has some nebulous awareness of D&D, in the same way they have a nebulous awareness of Andorra.
* For the record,
Andorra is a small country in Europe, bordered by Spain and France.
The public at large has these prejudices and preconceptions. These are their
Small Reference Pools, and the prejudices that result. These works are often prime targets of
Snark Bait,
Hate Dumb and
Complaining about Shows You Don't Watch.
Common Knowledge is usually ignored in these situations. Works that fall into this have a high tendency to suffer from an
Audience Alienating Premise. Exposure to a
Gateway Series can certainly be
very helpful to break these prejudices. If a significant title stands out from the perceived "ghettoed" group, the
No True Scotsman is often applied to try and distance a well-liked entry from it. Related to
Pop Cultural Osmosis Failure.
Tropes associated with this:
All examples of this are right in those sub pages, or in the page's Discussion thread.
).
