Audience-Alienating Premise

My concern is, without the "failed to get an audience" factor, the trope is just "weird idea for a work". However, pinning down evidence of a work failing to get an audience has proven very difficult.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

It's almost as if this "trope" is so subjective that it's not worth trying to pin down, and is thus not really a trope...

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

even if a work does fail to get an audience, and you somehow manage to prove that conclusively, how can you prove it's because of its premise and not any of a million other factors? correlation≠causation. i don't think this is a trope.

Edited by razorrozar7 on Aug 23rd 2019 at 1:36:01 AM

Migrated to Chloe Jessica!

^ Adding on to that, a lot of things that could qualify suffered from poor to nonexistent marketing, which would spell doom regardless of the premise. (ie, Beyond Good & Evil)

I was going to remove the Literature section since none of them give any objective proof they alienated and we couldn't think of any that theoretically could count. I thought Creator Killer might but the one example I found was caused by other issue, proving the above that failure doesn't necessary mean alienation.

What's wrong with "weird idea for a work"? It's YMMV of course, but that's fine, the trope is already labeled as YMMV. And again, that's what the TRS thread decided to go with.

Ultimately, the problem I'm seeing in this thread is just that a lot of people didn't get the memo about the definition tweak. Specifically, the very first post:

That just sounds like some people have the wrong idea about the definition, even though the description and the use match up. In which case, again, we don't have a problem here. Just an overzealous cleanup effort, which is a thing that happens.

"weird premise" is People Sit on Chairs. it's not a trope in itself and it's far, far too broad to be made into one. also, if the premise didn't alienate the audience, then it's demonstrably not an audience-alienating premise. it's literally in the name.

Edited by razorrozar7 on Aug 23rd 2019 at 4:26:01 AM

Migrated to Chloe Jessica!

But a work can be alienating without being a flop. I think that's the disconnect here; some people think there needs to be some solid proof in the form of lost profits (which, as Warjay has noted, are very hard to prove), while the TRS thread decided that's not necessary.

See, I don't think a work has to flop to count- but I don't know how else we'd prove a work didn't garner an audience.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

How can we verify enough that it would make people not want to see the movie due to the premise?

That's part of the issue. With it being a flop, we see enough results to get a decent enough idea. This prevents it from being just a complaining threads, as it has stricter standards.

...It's weird having so many websites and no way to properly display now, lol.

Idea, rename this "Audience Alienation-Induced Flop". This would remove the ambiguity and let us remove anything laking a metric for it's failure.

As for the issue of can we prove the flop was caused by the premise, I don't know of any example of misuse do to flopping not due to premise, but other circumstance. It's the far lesser misuse than lacking proof of flopping.

Removing all bias, ie actually referencing news articles and gathering data on critical/audience response, would turn it into a trivia trope. I think it's just like a lot of ymmv tropes where any given example is subject to the external thoughts, opinions and personal observations of the editor. Same with Draco in Leather Pants or The Scrappy it typically ends up a broad claim with anecdotal evidence.

That'd work if this were solely about opinion or fan culture, but it's more similar to Eight Point Eight, where it's about how the work was recieved. If the premise did not alienate audiences, it isn't Audience-Alienating Premise.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Even YMMV tropes are based some objectivity (The Scrappy has a bunch of requirements that make blog posts insufficient proof). AAI is YMMV because it's an audience reaction to something objective, the work flopping.

As for the question of can we prove the failure was caused by the premise, fans are good enough about gushing about what they like that I have never seen an AAP misused that way.

I dunno, people are also pretty "good" at assuming their own personal dislikes are universal. I've definitely seen proposed examples of Audience-Alienating Premise where there was no reason to think the premise was actually responsible. (Specific case: someone was making this argument for the 2019 Hellboy film with the supposed AAP being rebooting the popular Ron Perlman films, whereas most actual word of mouth I heard was that people weren't seeing the film because it just wasn't very good, actors irrelevant).

AudienceAlienatingPremise.Video Games

Genres

• TIS-100, ShenzhenIO, the Kerbal Space Program Game Mod kOS, and similar programming-a-virtual-machine games have extremely limited appeal. People who can't program can't play them, people who can program find them dumbed-down, and people who are trying to learn programming get to spend hours fiddling around with a fictional language that's too simple to do anything with, instead of learning anything useful.
• H-Games (as in actual games such as platformers and RPGs, rather than visual novels) often get flak even from people who enjoy NSFW content. The vast majority of them typically aren't good enough to be entertaining as games in and of themselves, and as delivery systems for porn they add unneccesary steps ("If I wanted to look at porn I'd just go on the internet" is a common complaint.) There are also many H-games where most, if not all, H-scenes are the result of failure, creating a counter-intuitive system where being good at the game punishes the player by denying them the content they're playing the game for in the first place.

If they were successful enough to produce entire genes worth of the premise, how can they be alienating? And can whole genres fit the commercial failure requirement?

those are both general examples anyway and can be summarily cut.

Migrated to Chloe Jessica!

Examples are not general.

Cut it.

"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."

YMMV.Terminator Dark Fate

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Dark Fate suffered from this the moment that word-of-mouth got around that John Connor is killed off in the opening scene. As Richard Roeper put it, the film sends mixed signals about whom its intended audience is. Marketing the return of Schwarzenegger, Hamilton and Cameron to the franchise for the first time in 28 years gives the impression that it's being marketed towards die-hard fans who grew up with the franchise. But then, killing off John Connor, and then falling back on the same Recycled Premise as the first two films except with a new Big Bad and Living MacGuffin gives the impression that this was meant to be a clean slate. The end result is that the film failed to interest either side and became a financial flop.

I intend to cut as if what alienated them is a spoiler, it's not part of the premise. Any objections?

Can something speculated about the premise from the promotions (as this was) count?

Edited by Ferot_Dreadnaught on Nov 13th 2019 at 12:20:49 PM

Not familiar with the movie, but if something happens in the opening scene, doesn't that make it not a spoiler?

It's spoilered because it's a First-Episode Twist that provides yet another Happy Ending Override to Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Not that I agree with spoiler-tagging it in the first place.

Edited by Albert3105 on Nov 14th 2019 at 9:01:37 AM

Then maybe there should be a Late-Arrival Spoiler warning on top of the page, instead of treating something that happens at the start of the movie, and probably impacts the whole story, as if it was a spoiler.

Indeed, especially since it seems that the entire character arc of a major character revolves around John's death.

Edited by Albert3105 on Nov 14th 2019 at 10:37:47 AM

This reads more like an Uncertain Audience entry. Maybe it could go under there instead?

Edited by PlasmaPower on Nov 16th 2019 at 9:11:37 AM

Thomas fans needed! Come join me in the the show's cleanup thread!

I'm sorry, I just want to bring this example from Hercules.

I bring it since I don't see that combination necesarily alienating, and it seems to be the exact same critiques the Nostalgia Critic made in his Disneycember review, so seems like just "added because a critic said so".

But after reading this thread I must say I'm kind of confused on what counts as "alienating", since it seems to only count flops.

It makes me think of movies like Schindler's List, which is "a realistic take on the Holocaust based on a real (and depressing) story." That seems like the kind of premise that would drive people away. And SnowWhite, which apparently was this when it was first released, with people close to Disney saying no one would like to see a movie about freaks, refering to the dwarfs.

Just some thoughts I had.

Edited by ElBuenCuate on Jul 15th 2020 at 3:26:48 AM