Complaining: Audience Alienating Premise

The problem with defining this in terms of "intended audience" is that it's a tricky concept to pin down, and liable to be twisted in self-serving ways, as in the Penny Arcade panel currently serving as page image for Not Screened for Critics.

Why not? Most media have some kind of intended audience. It's something many creators keep in mind when creating a work.

At least, it'd be more logical and honest than measuring a product against the tastes of some imaginary Joe Public.

The question is: How many actual examples of this are there? A lot of what I see on the page is less "the premise alienated the intended audience", and more "there was no audience for the product". There's also blatant misuse as They Changed It, Now It Sucks! or "people outside its intended audience didn't like it". I think it just needs a thorough clean-up, and then we'll see if there's anything left.

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UPD: So, here are my thoughts about some examples on the trope's page:

Correct: "The premise alienated the intended audience"

• Power Pack and Runaways.
• Avengers Arena and Avengers Undercover. Not They Changed It, Now It Sucks! because it was intended for these characters' fans, to cash in on their cult popularity.
• Chick Tracts.
• Angel Love: Though it was less premise, and more artwork dissonance.
• Legacy characters in comics. Though the example needs a rewrite to reduce They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.
• Irredeemable Ant Man
• The Unholy War
• Spec Ops The Line: Even discussed.
• Wall Street Kid
• Lester The Unlikely
• Viva Pinata

Wrong: "There was no audience for the premise"

• Amethyst Princess Of Gemworld. The relaunch example seems right, though.
• Yeah!
• The Movement
• Games by Double Fine
• Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City

Wrong: "The premise is horrible"

While it's true that most normal people will be driven away by these premises, the sad fact is that there are extremely niche (and extremely weird) groups those were intended for.

• FATAL
• JFK Reloaded
• Criminal Girls
• Super Columbine Massacre RPG
• The Clown Prince Rises
• Rapelay
• Custer's Revenge

Wrong: "There's fanservice, hyperviolence or crude adult humor"

Moralizing. A lot of people like those things, so it's not a problem as long as the products were intended for them.

• Cho Aniki
• Stretch Panic: Wasn't even adult humor, just innocent Gag Boobs.
• A Corny Voyage
• Boogerman
• Hatred
• and any examples of "this product contains Fanservice"

Wrong: "They Changed It, Now It Sucks!"

• Secret Avengers.
• One More Day. Horrible plot idea, but not this trope.
• New Avengers. People whose "beloved hero" is Reed Richards wouldn't really be shocked to see him acting in a morally dubious way, anyway. The sub-bullet is just bad writing.
• Teen Titans

Wrong: "This troper / critics / the general public / people outside the intended audience didn't like it"

• Page quote.
• Archie Meets The Punisher: Gimmicky crossovers were all the rage in the 90s. Is there any evidence of it alienating readers?
• Archie Comics Sonic The Hedgehog: Looks more like "audience-alienating bad writing".
• The First X-Men. It was created for Wolverine fans; the example says that people who hated Wolverine hated it.
• Wraith The Oblivion
• Exalted
• Promethean The Created
• Star Fleet Battles
• Ironclaw
• GURPS
• Black Crusade
• Lose Lose: People who want to risk their files play it, it's that simple.
• Papers Please: It was intended for people who like those kinds of pointless simulators. The interesting story is just a bonus.
• Divekick: It's a parody, intended for people who could understand the parody. The extremely simple mechanics are exactly what is parodied (how easy it is to use the divekick strategy in some fighting games).

edited 20th Aug '15 4:38:25 AM by Rjinswand

"Most media have some kind of intended audience. It's something many creators keep in mind when creating a work."

That doesn't mean creators can't change their minds when the originally targeted audience doesn't go for their work and retroactively claim that it was really intended for a different class of people who might be more interested in it. Parody Retcon is one option for this.

Well of course that can happen, but there are also obvious examples when a work was clearly intended for a certain category of interests and tastes.

I wonder if dividing up the different aspects of use and misuses into their own tropes would be the way to go.

That's a good idea! What other tropes do you think there could be?

I personally only see one more (apart from already existing tropes):

• "The premise alienated the intended audience"
  • That's the current trope, Audience-Alienating Premise.
• "There was no audience for the premise"
  • That might be a sister trope, though I think it could prove more difficult to exactly define.
• "The premise is horrible"
  • I'd personally rather prefer for these works not to have a specific page dedicated to them.
• "There's fanservice, hyperviolence or crude adult humor"
  • Not a trope.
• "They Changed It, Now It Sucks!"
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.
• "This troper / critics / the general public / people outside the intended audience didn't like it"
  • Not a trope. The critics part is Critical Dissonance.

A lot of those "There was no audience for the premise" ones actually did fairly well. It just seems to be individual tropers projecting their own dislike onto others.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Could be. I just sorted them based on what was said in the example text.

I like to look at it as more 'A work failed to find an audience', usually those who are marketed to everyone and fail to find anyone.

Something marketed to a specific group and failed to grab them is something different, Pixels is a recent example, it can grab a whole other group instead to keep it going.

There are also those who do not find their audience till decades after the whatever aired or published.

edited 21st Aug '15 7:31:48 AM by Memers

Well, that would be what I labeled as "There was no audience for the premise". It could encompass 2 possible situations:

1. A work doesn't target a specific audience, and fails to interest anyone.
2. A work targets a supposed audience that just isn't there in reality.

As for Pixels, well, the premise itself was pretty okay.

Attracting an unintended audience is Periphery Demographic. Exploiting it is Multiple Demographic Appeal.

As for those that find their audience much later, I'm not sure if we have this trope, but I think it can be a trope. But regardless, these works still failed in the first place, so they can also be examples of Audience-Alienating Premise or "There was no audience for the premise".

edited 21st Aug '15 8:04:22 AM by Rjinswand

We do have the trope for picking up an audience later. That's Sleeper Hit.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

"The premise alienated the intended audience" seems like an oxymoron. Wouldn't the intended audience of any work be basically boiled down to "people who like this sort of thing?"

Thanks, didn't know that.

That's the point. Sometimes a work is intended for an audience, but the premise alienates that same audience. Note the word "intended", they intend to attract that audience, but do something wrong, and alienate it instead. It might attract a different, unintended audience, but that's unrelated to the trope.

E.g. the creator makes a work intended to attract people who like cute fluffy kittens. But the premise is that cute fluffy kittens recreate Orwell's Animal Farm. This alienates the intended audience.

edited 22nd Aug '15 5:00:52 AM by Rjinswand

Kind of late here but I always interpreted this trope as being "something that's too niche to become popular but is expected to anyway". For example, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World technically bombed because it was based on a comic with a cult fanbase that was based on 90s video games. So a very small group of people. Anybody else would walk in and wonder wha the hell they just watcheed. That eliminates all the stuff that people just didn't like or that wasn't meant for people to like anyway.

But in your example, it didn't bomb because the premise alienated the audience, it bombed because it attracted an audience that likes that kind of stuff but it was too small to cover the budget. Everyone else wasn't "alienated", they just weren't interested in this kind of movie in the first place. It was a niche product.

It actually did exactly what a niche product can be expected to do: got a meager revenue in theaters, but became a top seller on home formats. Its only fault was an overblown budget for a niche product.

What you're suggesting, is a trope for niche products that unsuccessfully try to attract outside audiences (like SPVTW supposedly did). That might be a trope (or a trivia page), but I think that's too radical a change for Audience-Alienating Premise.

edited 9th Sep '15 11:30:40 AM by Rjinswand

Aren't you kind of ignoring that the current trope description itself lists niche genres as one of the main reasons this trope happens? It's literally in the first sentence of the second paragraph.

Nishe Genres trying to be marketed as Mainstream via movie theaters and such should be a thing on its own, some of those actually succeed.

Well, the trope is in TRS, isn't it?

The thing is, a niche product is a product with a small audience. It doesn't "alienate" everyone else, it just doesn't interest them. E.g. rugby doesn't "alienate" people who are not into rugby, they're just not interested in ever watching rugby. Every product has someone who isn't interested in it, it's not the end of the world.

The key is to carefully calculate how large your audience is, and not to overload your budget or get your hopes too high up. Which was what SPVTW did. They made a niche product (which sold quite well for a niche product), but had a budget unsuitable for a niche product.

Audience-Alienating Premise would be if they made a movie called "Scott Pilgrim", marketed it to Scott Pilgrim fans, but revealed it will be directed by Michael Bay and Scott Pilgrim will be a marine fighting terrorists with explosions. Scott Pilgrim fans wouldn't watch that perversion of their favorite comic, and action flick fans wouldn't watch a movie called "Scott Pilgrim".

edited 10th Sep '15 11:08:45 AM by Rjinswand

It's in TRS because the OP thought there should be stricter guidelines to adding examples, NOT because the trope itself needs to be completely rewritten.

The trope itself is fine, from what I can see.

Yeah, and stricter guidelines is exactly what I'm discussing here.

The trope is not fine, judging by the misuse.

edited 10th Sep '15 11:41:06 AM by Rjinswand

Oh right, so a work was successful, it clearly didn't have an audience alienating premise then. So Win The Crowd is what then?

Success doesn't matter, that people were got turned off when they heard the pitch matters. You know, Transformers in live action, this is gonna suck. Michael Bay, this is gonna be a disaster. Optimus Prime has no trailer and flames on his chest, this is heresy! Cue Cullen...this might actually be watchable.

Granted, we do also have Tainted by the Preview but that doesn't cover this:

A wrestling promotion named after tits n ass that expects you to pay ten dollars a week, with Vince Russo as booker, where the first thirty minutes of the first show featured nothing but talking. If I wanted to torture myself I'd go watch Raw for free...AJ Styles, Christopher Daniels, Low Ki! This X Division is a new landmark of pro wrestling!

Nor this:

A parody of superheroes focused around an idiot who flies by farting? Pass. An epic about an alien nation whose culture is almost entirely defined by pro wrestling? I'll take two.

A long, linear combat heavy dungeon crawler? If I wanted another one of those I'd get another Paper Mario, I'm going for another round of Rogue. "No, no, just play a little bit longer, It Gets Better."

Success does matter, at least short term success. If it opens up to have the highest grossing opening weekend then it really can't be this.

This discussion is going absolutely nowhere though.

Well, we need to get it back on track, then.

We need to ask ourselves 2 questions:

1. Who's "the audience"?
2. How do we determine that the premise "alienated" the audience?

edited 20th Oct '15 5:08:36 AM by Rjinswand

It occurs to me that some examples like Changeling: The Dreaming are in a separate category, of works where the tone is badly inconsistent. A common complaint is that parts of it are like an old children's cartoon, and others try to stay with the dark tone of the rest of the franchise, a dissonance that extends to the artwork. The trouble is that we have no article for it (Mood Dissonance is for deliberate, within-work cases).

Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.

After thinking about this for a bit, I'm not entirely sure if we need to do anything.

The way I see it, Audience-Alienating Premise is where you tell somebody a brief explanation about a work and frequently get a "that's dumb/crazy/etc." reaction. For example, Kingdom Hearts is a popular and successful gaming franchise, but I know from experience that telling people about how it's a Disney/Square crosseover gets me a decent amount of "what the hell" reactions. This tends to lead people to make quality judgments without experiencing the work firsthand.

edited 22nd Oct '15 3:55:58 PM by Karxrida

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?