Complaining: Audience Alienating Premise

I'm with Karx. This isn't necessarily about whether or not a work is successful; it's just about whether the premise is initially alienating. It's already marked YMMV, so it's not like a mostly-subjective trope is clogging up the main pages.

Thirding that notion. As long as there's no natter on the page, the page is pretty much fine as is.

Fourthed.

Something that may be worth doing is soft-splitting the example list into works that are popular and works that have small fanbases and/or failed to profit.

That works too.

As it is, The Avengers (2012) could be added to the trope because "based on a comic books is an audience-alienating premise".

Yeah that doesn't work. Anything can be shoehorned into that like every comic book movie ever.

It really can be successful but not at the start, it's gotta be a premise that keeps audiences away but word of mouth or an academy award starts bring them in.

That's why I think we should take into account the specific audience that a work was created for, not our projection of some kind of average "general audience" (aka "Joe Sixpack").

Got examples? Aside from a Genre Change in the style of Animatrix or an already present fandom like Sonic And The Black Knight I can't think of any.

However quite a few works have laconics or pitch ideas that just sound horrid but eventually get made or get popular via word of mouth.

I discuss it more in detail in @27. Basically, a lot of examples are either works which would be appreciated by their target audience but might alienate other audiences (or the critics, or the troper, or the troper's projection of a "general audience"); or morally horrible works that would clearly alienate most people but yet didn't alienate their specific (horrible) audiences.

If effort is shown to let the audience know what they dislike about a premise is not as prevalent as initially believed or the work is out and out changed as a result of earlier audience reactions, that still doesn't change the fact an audience alienating premise was pitched.

You can't say go and say successful works can't be examples if they were successful after clarifying things or outright changing.

I haven't been following this strongly, but after having just skimmed the page, it looks to me like this just needs a little help. When I read the definition, I knew exactly what this was talking about. I don't know how to best describe that, but I definitely feel this is a thing.

I don't think eventual popularity is even that important. Guardians of the Galaxy is one I think could be on here. Not despite, but because of how big the Marvel Cinematic Universe had gotten by that point, it was still a huge risk. It was probably one of the biggest genre breaks so far, took place in a setting that you couldn't directly relate to, it involved some of the most obscure characters they had touched, and one of those characters was a talking raccoon, when one of the appeals of the cinematic universe was how real they made Marvel feel without crossing the line into edgy.

I can give an example of the other end of the spectrum that's not on the page either, but they feel like the same concept to me. The New Adventures of He-Man was a short-lived revival of the wildly popular He-Man. It decided to abandon the primarily fantasy setting of the original for a sci-fi one, it left behind both Etheria and Eternia (including franchise-centric locations like Castle Grayskull), it left behind all of the characters aside from He-Man and Skeletor (and Skeletor had a very different characterization), it had a new art style with very different character designs (even the Power Sword looked completely different), and even catch phrases were altered. In pretty much every way, you'd think it was a Dolled-Up Installment, but we have evidence and statements from creators that claim it was always intended to be this way. It's not really surprising it didn't catch on, but quality and popularity aren't really important to how baffling those changes were.

Some things I noticed when going down it, however:

One More Day doesn't really sound like it belongs, from what I know. That sounds more like the entire story is audience-alienating, not simply the premise.

Awoken might deserve a mention since the creators apparently intended it to be, but I don't think it actually applies. Mixing zombies with classic literature has been a running joke, and a common criticism of Twilight is reinventing a horror staple to make it romantic. Between those two things, something like Awoken sounds like a pretty expected parody, and something that people are going to want to see for the joke alone.

edited 30th Oct '15 4:10:14 AM by Jokubas

I've been cleaning up the examples a little, but a lot of it still seems like Complaining About People Not Liking the Show. It really doesn't help that there are more than a few examples describing works whose pages have been not coincidentally removed from this wiki for violating the Content Policy.

I'm a tad bit confused about this trope. At first, it seems like any work of fiction that scares people off from enjoying it, even if it's actually good. But some examples seem to be of works of fiction that do have an audience, just a small one - i.e., they don't alienate their intended audience. Boku No Pico, for example, is aimed at shotacons and/or possibly Real Life paedos - a very squicky and gross audience, yes, but none-the-less an audience.

I don't think this Audience Reaction means "no audience at all" (that is So Bad, It's Horrible's province), so Boku no Pico would still qualify here.

So do we need to do anything or what? Let's figure this out before the purge.

IMHO, we need a more clearly-defined, not confusing description. The current definition of the trope is way too hard to parse.

I'm still not sure doing anything is even necessary, but a description tweak could be done.

I tried shortening and rewriting the description a bit, input wanted: "It might be one of the best works of a generation. It might have very high production values, fantastic writing and a stellar cast. The artist might consider it their most wonderful painting, the director says it's the best movie they ever made. Yet nobody wants to see it because one thing is flawed: its premise.

It might be a Deconstruction gone wrong, taking a beloved genre and twisting it so far it becomes nigh-unrecognisable and unbearable to watch. It might be a depressing World War II movie people do not want to see if there are cool action movies as alternatives available. Or it might be reputation by association to either a studio that is known to be bad or by belonging to a genre that is considered dead for good reason or simply not liked by enough people.

In the end, works that fall under this trope are near-universally doomed because of what they are about, and what they are about is something the great majority of people do not want to associate with."

The trope itself is fine, but the description definitely needs some work. I also propose that we try to categorise it into straight examples and subversions. Stuff that won prices and/or is really popular no matter how it might actually sound then would go to the latter.

Okay, let me rephrase that. TNA wasn't initially successful. Quite the opposite in fact. They would have been out of business in six month had Panda Energy not stepped in to fund them. It was only after they got rid of some of the more Russo esque tropes (the cage dancers, the trash can sex, the threats of murder by firearm) that people started paying attention to this X division thing. Especially after AJ Styles, Christopher Daniels and Samoa Joe's performance at ''Unbreakable". That was still only critical success. Financial success didn't really come until Samoa Joe's feud with Kurt Angle...and that was still critically derided. Critical and financial success, I think their first angle to get both was the feud between Gail Kim and Awesome Kong.

So yes, they were successful, but that was in spite of an audience alienating premise, not incidental to it. They had to cut back on the things people didn't like while putting a larger spot light on the independent circuit legends and three acquisitions from two major promotions. If TNA had simply kept running Sports Entertainment Xtreme vs Jeff "Drop The Belt" Jarrett. They'd never be that promotion that screwed up its chance to compete on the national level, they'd be the sorry indie fed floating on panda(which is only what they're endanger of becoming now, nearly thirteen years after their turn around)

edited 6th Mar '16 1:24:05 PM by IndirectActiveTransport

Looks alright to me, but I'd reorder it to get rid of the Example as a Thesis. The trope description should start with a definition first, and then give examples to illustrate if necessary. Basically, put your third paragraph first and it's pretty good.

Reasserting my stance on this.

Karxrida, I think I'm inclined to agree.

As tropers seem to have lost interest in fixing this trope, and general consensus seems to have not embraced any option beyond various minor description and example cleanups, I think this thread should be laid to rest.