Audience-Alienating Premise cleanup

Bringing up the following example from Sonic X:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The concept of the show where Sonic, despite being the titular character, would not receive much screen time in favor of a human kid character who comes off as annoying and uninteresting to the majority of the audience definitely was not gonna win over a lot of fans of the franchise.

This was on the YMMV page for Lolita:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Downplayed. It's a novel written from the perspective of an offending pedophile, though despite the stigma it's still considered a classic of modern literature. Some still view it poorly, see Misblamed for more information.

First off, tropes can't be played with. Second, wasn't Lolita successful?

I'd say Lolita counts. It's by all accounts a great book and not at all pro-pedophilia, but the very premise makes less informed people think it's some sort of pedophile fantasy and that has cast a shadow over it. Even this wiki at one point considered cutting the trope page until it was realized that it does not glorify pedophilia at all and the main character is meant to be disgusting.

Remove the "downplayed" part, though. Can't play with a YMMV trope.

It's pretty successful... but also banned in a lot of places because its subject matter is so off-putting. It definitely fits something. Probably Overshadowed by Controversy if nothing else.

to moving the Lolita example to OBC (with a rewrite, of course.)

Bringing up the following example from Greenland:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: A Disaster Movie staring Gerard Butler that isn't an action movie and that averts Saving the World and deconstructs a Restricted Rescue Operation didn't play well with some audiences in light of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The movie doesn't even have anything to do with the pandemic, and on top of that, other entries on the same page say it got great reviews for a disaster movie, and the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is 64%... I don't think it counts.

YMMV.Metroid Prime Federation Force

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Most fans of Metroid generally point to the exploration and sense of isolation as the series' hallmarks, so an installment that ditches all of that for a more action-oriented, Co-Op Multiplayer installment that doesn't even star the main character became a hard sell for them. It being five years since the last installment in the franchise, which itself was widely regarded as the worst entry in the entire series, only aggravated the issue. Even among those who didn't mind the idea of a spin-off game and weren't part of the intense backlash weren't impressed by the announcement.

Does this check out? The only audience is ever mentions is the fans.

Bringing up this example from AudienceAlienatingPremise.Film:

• Monster Hunter (2020): The earliest previews of the film killed almost all interest in it right from the start from the primary game fanbase because it featured the bizarre introduction of the human military in a Trapped in Another World plot (which tend to highly contentious already) that was never in any of the games, and that it was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who has gained infamy for his very loose and largely reviled Resident Evil movies, and was now given the reins of another treasured Capcom franchise and shoehorning his wife as the grizzled Action Girl hero again. Fans of the game were turned off by the unnecessary cross-dimensional military story elements that overshadow the rest of the movie, while general audiences and fans alike would be turned off by the director's entire prior filmography being schlock, and Monster Hunter obviously being more of the same. These factors, plus a one-off line that was interpreted as a Sinophobic insult and led to the movie being pulled from Chinese theatres and review-bombed by Chinese viewers, and releasing in theatres in the midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic led to the film financially bombing.
  "Series fans will feel cheated by such a chintzy and incurious take on something they love, while the rest of us will be left wondering how the source material earned itself any fans in the first place."

Sounds like it counts due to being a financial failure.

It might need to ease up on the bashing, though.

Yea it counts but it can definitely be rewritten with a more neutral tone.

Would this count as examples: Live Action TV

• Alcatraz, a 2012 drama seemed good on the surface, but the premise of returning prisoners to jail was itself one that seemed questionable (if people wanted to see this, wouldn't they see a documentary? was one critic's logic). Set in a Crapsack World with characters who are difficult to like including the protagonists, it was fairly formulaic, and got average reviews at best.
• Falling Water, a 2016 Fox drama was a hard sell due to its concept of three people sharing the same dream, a High Concept in itself. It didn't get good reviews from the critics despite an All-Star Cast, and ended after two seasons.
• Reckless 2014, about a police sex scandal was a difficult enough sell due to its premise, but also a character whose questionable morality in her profession as a lawyer and the entire plotline surrounding the sex scandal meant it only lasted one season. Despite the fanservice of Anna Wood, it was a difficult show to market, and faded into obscurity after a single season.
• Spitting Image, at least in its 2020 Continuity Reboot was a hard sell due to making jokes about the ongoing pandemic and jokes that only really made sense if you were a politics geek. It was a hard sell for many people, and received negative reviews. Also, it was uncertain if it was intended for new audiences or a continuation adding to the problems.
• Sun Records was a historical drama Mini Series launched in 2017. However, the premise was difficult to accept due to the characters being devoid of personality and historical blunders, meaning it neither appealed to historical or music enthusiasts, and the show generally didn't know who it was aiming to.

• Buck and Buddy was a 2019 series for pre-schoolers set in a garbage dump, and the timing of its launch in the United Kingdom during the COVID-19 pandemic would put some parents off, especially as the moral of washing hands was in the news frequently. Mainly, however, the titular duo rarely receive comeuppance for their actions and the Surreal Humor may be difficult for some kids to comprehend. Plus, Letch the leech, a Trumplica, the de facto boss of the duo, is a frightening character at times. It's supposedly a kids show but seems more aimed at adults.
• Problem Child was an animated 1993 Spin-Off of the 1990 movie but its protagonist always getting away with it in the end and Jerkass behavior made it very hard to root for the protagonist, plus the plotlines were very generic at best.
• The Brothers Flub was a show about aliens travelling the galaxy, delivering packages, essentially a comedy about mailmen was a hard sell, even to kids in 1996. It lasted only a single season before Nickelodeon deep-sixed it.

Edited by Merseyuser1 on Jun 20th 2021 at 7:06:47 PM

None of those describe the shows getting bad ratings or lack of viewers as a result, the closest is the first one which only describes bad reviews- and people have to watch a thing to review it.

Sun Records did get poor reviews, though, would that qualify? I've had a look through several reviews from critics, even though IMDB viewers seemed to like it; Critical Dissonance maybe?

Edited by Merseyuser1 on Jun 20th 2021 at 7:09:14 PM

No, "poor reviews" might have nothing to do with the premise. This trope has nothing to do with after-viewing opinions.

Do any of the reviews specifically cite the premise as a reason they didn't like it?

Fair enough.

Does poor research on a period of history or it being a very sanitized version count for this trope, or even the period of time itself?

Edited by Merseyuser1 on Jun 20th 2021 at 7:10:17 PM

It can, but it doesn't automatically do so.

It can if such a premise alienates audiences. That's what the trope is about. That's all the trope is about.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 20th 2021 at 2:11:42 PM

The Brothers Flub did famously flop, but I have no idea why the premise would be alienating on itself.

This is the only entry on YMMV.Archie Meets The Punisher.

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Readers of The Punisher and readers of Archie tend to have little overlap, so the initial response from both fandoms was confusion. Despite (or because?) of this, the comic is viewed favorably by both fandoms for the most part.

Misuse; cutlisted since it was the only example on the page.

Does this example from AudienceAlienatingPremise.Film fit, or need cutlisting, or a rewrite:

• Tulip Fever was a 2017 Period Piece romantic drama starring Alicia Vikander and was something of a Box Office Bomb, grossing $2.4million against a production budget of $25million. The plotline of Your Cheating Heart felt more like a movie version of a Lifetime Movie of the Week, plus the title was an Intentionally Awkward Title; anyone expecting it to be about the history of the Netherlands' most iconic plant would be left disappointed, for the tulip mania was more a historical backdrop than the focus of the movie the title suggested. Also, it was fairly slow-paced and despite an All-Star Cast, it didn't appeal to those who wanted a Period Piece on tulip mania and there was accusations of severe Artistic License – History while romance fans didn't enjoy the Darker and Edgier tone of the romance (the plotline was about an artist commissioned to do a painting of a woman but ends up having an affair with her) and the Your Cheating Heart plotline. In short, it was a hard sell for historical genre fans and romance fans, being a movie that fell in between two stools, and it was basically a Lifetime Movie of the Week on a Hollywood budget without the Special Effects Failure and aesop they usually have. The movie got a lot of negative reviews and was one that was difficult to market to due to not knowing who to aim for as the target audience.

Edited by Merseyuser1 on Jun 26th 2021 at 7:50:13 PM

I still think you’re focusing way too much on the quality of the work itself, and not why it alienated audiences. Also, Your Cheating Heart is no longer a trope.