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Audience-Alienating Premise

444 statements
81 feature instances
43 referencing feature instances

Audience-Alienating Premise	type	FeatureClass
Audience-Alienating Premise	label	Audience-Alienating Premise
Audience-Alienating Premise	page	AudienceAlienatingPremise
Audience-Alienating Premise	comment	Some shows never stood a chance. Not necessarily because they're bad, but because the very concept scared people away. They say that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but sometimes, that's easier said than done. This is the Audience-Alienating Premise: an idea that could be cool and could even make a fantastic show, book, movie, video game or comic, and may very well have, but which instead dooms the work from the very start due to the mere concept being a difficult sell. Sadly, due to how it "sounds", many people won't try it out. This can play out in the inherent struggles with trying to get people excited with niche genres (horror films with Squick, Nausea Fuel and Black Comedy), foreign material that doesn't translate well (comedies with puns based on the native language), genres that were killed off some time ago (blaxploitation can only exist today in parody), adaptations of an existing property with a built-in stigma, trying to appeal to too many demographics at the same time (making only that part of the film intelligible to its target audience), characters who are difficult to root for (an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist who mooches off the generosity of friends), a brutal deconstruction (fans would be insulted by the criticism, while non-fans would still see it as the same style of work) or the execution itself takes things in an unexpected direction. Or a creator might deliberately offend the sensibilties of the mainstream, out of a sincere attempt at creating True Art or a more crass belief that there's No Such Thing as Bad Publicity. Note that this is not a judgement call on the work itself. Marketing itself can be entirely at fault, trying to sell it as something more generic when it has plenty of other qualities to offer. Sometimes attempts to mimic styles popular from other cultures comes off as too different for audiences to understand and appreciate, even though it is a fine example of that genre in its own right. And the concept can be taken too far by the audience. A Hard-to-Adapt Work doesn't mean an adaptation shouldn't be attempted, and a prequel with a Foregone Conclusion doesn't mean there isn't an interesting story to tell. Of course, a work with such an obstacle can rise above it and achieve recognition; in many cases an oddball work is shunned on release only to become a Cult Classic, often being either Vindicated by Video, Vindicated by History, or Vindicated by Cable. Simply having an off-sounding premise doesn't immediately qualify for this trope, as sometimes a movie inspired by 1930s pulp space adventures or psychedelic rock with horror themes ends up being wildly successful anyway. Compare that to And You Thought It Would Fail. Compare Germans Love David Hasselhoff when a work winds up much more popular in another country due to differences in tastes and Values Resonance. When the alienated audience is in another country, it's Americans Hate Tingle, similarly attributable to Values Dissonance. Public Medium Ignorance is for works which suffer from a strong tendency to be audience-alienating. Premises that are not merely unusual, but downright offensive might result in the work also being Overshadowed by Controversy. Could also overlap with Angst Aversion and Uncertain Audience. Contrast Dancing Bear, where the oddness of the premise attracts interest rather than discouraging it. Also, in many ways the opposite of Multiple Demographic Appeal; in fact, an Audience-Alienating Premise is sometimes the result of trying to cater to different kinds of audience and failing to attract any - even fans of multiple things don't always like those things in the same work at the same time. Compare Intentionally Awkward Title, Demographic-Dissonant Crossover, Audience-Alienating Era. Note: Since "some people won't like this work's premise" on its own is too subjective even for YMMV, there should be objective proof that people in general didn't like the premise. This means the work being a Box Office Bomb, Acclaimed Flop, Creator Killer, Short-Runner, Stillborn Franchise, or receiving No Export for You, which can only happen after the work has been released to the public, so do not add examples of unreleased works. Just because one person finds a work's premise unappealing doesn't necessarily mean that everyone shares that viewpoint, and just because a work's initial trailers are unappealing, it doesn't mean the work is doomed to failure. Some individuals may just be put off even by something that's very popular because everyone carries their own personal baggage. In short, this reaction should not be used for Complaining About Shows You Don't Like.
Audience-Alienating Premise	fetched	2024-03-16T19:32:00Z
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_11282746	type	Audience-Alienating Premise
Audience-Alienating Premise / int_11282746	comment	Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War by military theorist William S. Lind is a book where a bunch of manly Right Wing Militia Fanatics completely crush the forces of liberalism, leftism, multiculturalism, feminism, political correctness and progress to establish a new, pure America where everyone is a good, proud, red-blooded Christian, or else. It's... not for everyone, and outside people who subscribe to certain flavors of right-wing politics, it tends to be enjoyed more for being So Bad, It's Good.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_12482def	comment	You've Got Mail: When someone suggests Frank write a book, he proposes writing on "something relevant for today, like the Luddite movement in 19th century England."
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_180c62ce	comment	While The Mister, E. L. James' follow-up to her smash hit Fifty Shades of Grey series, sold well enough, it dropped off The New York Times Bestseller List much faster than the Fifty Shades series and got even worse critical reviews. Part of this may be to do with the fact the heroine is an undocumented immigrant from Albania who is revealed to be a victim of attempted forced marriage and sex trafficking, which are very serious topics, only in this case they're used more as an excuse to put her in the hero's path; not helping is that the hero himself is her vastly more rich and powerful employer. The trivial way such subjects were dealt with and the extreme power imbalance between the Official Couple understandably made many readers uncomfortable.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_1a97dc8b	comment	The Little Muppet Monsters. As Scott Shaw! (who storyboarded the series) put it "The concept of this second half-hour was neither simple nor particularly well-developed." Three new kid Muppet monsters live in the basement of the Muppets' home and create their own TV station which broadcasts Muppet-based cartoons but only to the familiar Muppet characters living above them. Yeah. When a failure to produce the animated segments in time resulted in the show being replaced after three episodes by a second episode of Muppet Babies (the show was scheduled to follow Muppet Babies to create an hour-long slot called "Muppets, Babies and Monsters"), ratings shot up, and everyone involved said "Well, let's do that, then." LMM's blending of animation and Muppets would be handled much better in Dog City (adapted from a special aired on The Jim Henson Hour), which lasted a good 31 episodes on Fox Kids.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_21e1640f	comment	JonTron feels this way about a lot of the various Barbie games he reviews. He finds them to be far too focused on fashion, which simply is nearly unworkable as the main premise of a video game and would even drive away Barbie's target audience since they could just as easily do that with the dolls. Notably, the only one he actually finds decent is Barbie: Magic Genie Adventure, because said game averts this and is a normal fantasy action-adventure game with Barbie characters:
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_24705e44	comment	NXT Season 3 on paper seemed like it could be a good idea - a season of female rookies from WWE's developmental system competing for a chance at the main roster. However, the concept was flawed from the beginning when WWE's choice of contestants included only one trained wrestler from the indies in A.J. Lee and, while some of the homegrown developmental talent were already quite good for their amount of time training - Naomi was already on the same skill level as AJ, and Aksana and Maxine could have a good match with the right opponent - rookies included Jamie Keyes, who was literally a ring announcer forced into the wrestling role and didn't have any experience beyond basic holds and pins. The planned Wrestling Monster Aloisa (Isis the Amazon from the indies) was dropped from the contest before the first episode and replaced with Kaitlyn, who had only a few weeks of training and had her first ever match there on television (although she too would prove quite good for her inexperience if she had the right opponent). The choice of mentors for the rookies contrasted heavily with the prominent superstars who had done so on the main roster and didn't even have top players in the women's division - instead the likes of Primo and Goldust, who'd had minimal presence on TV, and lesser Divas like Kelly Kelly and the Bella Twins, with only Alicia Fox (a former Divas' Champion) and Vickie Guerrero (an over heel manager) being notable. The greenness of most of the rookies resulted in several matches that were full of botches, including a match between Kaitlyn and Maxine so terrible that Michael Cole got up from the commentary booth to take a phone call in the middle of it. WWE also treated the show like a joke, with silly segments like dance-offs, Halloween costume contests and mechanical bull riding that placed the season heavily into the Girl-Show Ghetto. Ratings plummeted every week until it was moved to WWE.com after a few episodes, and the finale was a debacle where the extremely green Kaitlyn was chosen as the winner over Naomi.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_25fff573	comment	The Turner Diaries is about a group of white supremacist terrorists... who are the heroes of the story. Needless to say, this book has absolutely no fans outside of its very narrow target audience.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_261c8d3f	comment	The Simpsons: "Worst Episode Ever" has Bart and Milhouse put in charge of the Android's Dungeon comic book store. Milhouse stocks 2000 copies of Biclops, a comic about a nerdy, glasses-wearing superhero who resembles him and beats up football players who made him cry, which nobody wants to purchase. "Beware My Cheating Bart" has a movie literally titled Horrible Premise being shown at the Springfield Mall. We never find out what this "Horrible Premise" is exactly, but it's apparently about an American Football player (portrayed by Rainier Wolfcastle) wearing nothing but a helmet and a diaper. "Homer to the Max" has Admiral Baby, a sitcom about a baby commanding the United States Sixth Fleet. The premise is considered so stupid that even Homer comments on it.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_296a232e	comment	Passion: In the 19th century, a young soldier has a Stalker with a Crush — a mentally unbalanced, homely, terminally ill woman who adores him. Notable for having the shortest-ever run of a Broadway show that won the Best Musical Tony Award, with 280 performances — less than a year's worth.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_29cdc9a2	comment	The Northwest Front series is white nationalist literature where we're supposed to root for racist militants.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_2e4de70c	comment	Warriors Adventure Game, the licensed RPG adaptation of Warrior Cats, was an attempt by the publisher to get tabletop RPG fans interested in the book series. The book series is targeted at children ages 9-12, while tabletop RPG players are generally much older, so there already wasn't much demographic overlap. The game is too complicated for a kid who's never played a tabletop RPG before but too simplistic for an audience that's experienced with RPGs. The pre-written adventures were included in books 19-24 of the series, which make no sense unless you've read books 1-18, so if you've just picked them up for the adventures you're not going to get into the book series from them. Essentially, nobody who reads the series is going to be interested in the game, and nobody who plays RPGs is going to pick up the game, to begin with, never mind start reading the series because of it. Predictably enough, the game lasted under three years before getting canned - although you can still find the rules on the website, and current printings of books 19-24 continue to have the adventures in the back, nothing new will be published.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_2eeec9bd	comment	Merrily We Roll Along has a workable central premise in the tragic story of three friends who all lose their youthful optimism over the course of two decades and end up with every artistic spark crushed out, but was doomed with its setup of telling the story in reverse order by a group of teenagers in a gymnasium. The first audiences were horribly confused and walked out in droves, and there were quite a few attempts to try to make it more understandable, including the costuming being reduced to sweatshirts with the characters' names on them. Further rewrites have removed the Show Within a Show aspect, making it slightly more comprehensible.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_2f3aa7ef	comment	My Little Pony: This is why G2 sold so poorly. It retooled the characters into looking more like full-size horses than cute little ponies, and as a result, didn't last for more than a year or so in the US (though it went over somewhat better in various European nations, where it went on for a few more years). The next retool returned the ponies to something close to their original look, and was much more popular as a result. G3.5 fell into this, because although it retained an assortment of popular characters from G3, it switched over to a heavily stylized look which didn't even particularly resemble any kind of equine, with short muzzles and hooves nearly the size of their heads - the Unintentionally Uncanny Valley "Newborn Cuties" spin-off took this even further, resembling colorful human babies with some horse traits. Not helping matters is that the tail end of G3 proper suddenly switched from the franchise's typical large cast to a Minimalist Cast, which G3.5 largely retained, disappointing those who wanted other ponies. The retool was unpopular everywhere, and it contributed to Filly's displacement of the franchise in Germany.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_2fe3dbaa	comment	Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed is a double LP set with nothing but continuous droning of guitar feedback and screeching noises. The album was Reed's first solo effort to not chart at all in any country (even his debut album just barely scraped the Billboard 200 at No. 168) and was deleted by RCA Records in just three weeks.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_3066c465	comment	The Wanted bombed in the United States because they were being pushed as a boy band. Unfortunately, their members were all in their early 20s at the time they started to release music there, so they proved to be unable to build up the teenage girl fanbase that helps boy bands succeed. The boy band image also alienated adult listeners, who were also growing tired of the electropop sound dominating the airwaves at the time.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_3ac36a5c	comment	As the Transformers: Generation 1 franchise began to wane in popularity, Hasbro attempted several gimmicks to keep the line fresh, many of which failed to connect with the audience: Transformers Pretenders tried to take the "Robots in Disguise" aspect even further with the inclusion of Pretender Shells that could disguise the figures as organic beings. In theory, this line could be two toys in one, but the two sides failed to synergize properly; the shells, with their garish appearance and limited articulation, seemed more at home in Masters of the Universe as opposed to the older-skewed Transformers, and the robot often had to sacrifice in design to accommodate the shells. Some later Pretender designs got even more bafflingly surreal, with the top of the heap likely being the Pretender Vehicles, which replaced the Pretender shell with a vehicle of some kind. As in, Transformers, whose whole gimmick is being able to turn into vehicles, disguising themselves further as... vehicles. By hiding inside them. It didn't help that even the fiction surrounding the Pretenders really struggled to explain how and why they were supposed to work. Transformers Action Masters were, simply and infamously put, Transformers toys that didn't transformnote The tie-in media tried to explain this as a case of Discard and Draw; they discovered a new fuel that turned their transformation systems into enhanced power systems. Instead, they came with gadgets, nonhuman partners, and larger vehicles which turned into weapons, while also featuring somewhat better articulation than preceding toys, making for a more conventional toy-line along the lines of G.I. Joe or M.A.S.K.. Not only did this screw over what made Transformers unique and memorable, but the end result was too surreal to be taken seriously on its own; not only was Bumblebee (who becomes a small car) the same size as Devastator (who is combined from six robots who become construction vehicles), but the likes of Optimus Prime and Wheeljack ended up driving a Big Badass Rig and a Cool Car, when they're famous for turning into those vehicles (which begs the question of whether the Transformers shrunk down or their vehicles were absurdly huge). Though Beast Wars was generally successful, it also had a notorious stinker in the form of Transquito, possibly the worst-selling figure in the line's history. Making an action figure that turns into a mosquito, one of the least popular animals out there, was already a rough sell, but Transquito also boasted an unappealing color scheme of brown, purple, and translucent yellow, a missile-shooting gimmick that gave him the look of constantly vomiting, and a fifteen-dollar price tag putting him in the second-costliest range at the time. Most reviewers who actually bought the toy noted that there was nothing particularly wrong with it in terms of engineering or play value for the time, but the concept of a giant brown puking mosquito would have struggled at any price. Transquito sold so poorly that there are accounts of seeing him on clearance as late as Transformers: Energon, seven years after his release. Machine Wars was a line exclusive to Kay-Bee Toys, meant to throw a bone to older fans who had been put off by the at-the-time running Beast Wars. But while the new molds had some appeal, all the line's larger toys were Palette Swapped designs from the Generation 2 era, complete with now severely-dated articulation, with several of them also getting their signature gimmicks neutered. Its status as a G1 revival was dampened by most of the characters looking almost completely different: Skywarp, for instance, went from black and purple to white and yellow, and Starscream got the largest toy in the line, which was an all-black behemoth with no mouth. Add in the fact that there was essentially no fiction to advertise the line or explain these radical changes, and it only lasted one wave and became little more than a curiosity. Transformers: Timelines ran into this when it attempted to do an adaptation of Machine Wars for BotCon 2013, despite having had success with revisiting Generation 2 and many characters from the Pretender and Action Master ranges. Obviously, adapting an already obscure series posed a challenge, but the designs from the line didn't make for good exclusive figures, with their drab colors and generic looks making the high pricetag questionable. What made this even worse, though, was that rather than leaning into the weirdness and Same Character, But Different nature of the Machine Wars designs, they tried to downplay them as much as possible; Starscream went from a giant to regular-size, for instance, and Megaplex was no longer Megatron's body-double. And then the fiction printed at the convention doubled down on this by declaring that the Machine Wars characters were actually malformed clones of the G1 characters, making them even less desirable. At this point, even people who would be into a Machine Wars revival weren't interested, since the mystique of the series had been why the classic cast had changed so much. Add in a number of other issues with the finished productnote Hoist and Electro were misassembled, Hoist moreso. Skywarp and Thundercracker used designs from Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, and Megaplex used one from Transformers: Prime, which caused them to not match aesthetically with the rest of the set. And in a case of very poor timing, Sandstorm and Hoist had new retail toys announced at the time. and the only other real draw being characters from the incredibly controversial Beast Machines, and you had one slow mover, to the point that despite being produced in limited numbers, the sets still needed to be put on clearance in the online store.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_3c3d7561	comment	Chris Cornell's Scream: An artist best known for fronting the alt-rock bands Soundgarden and Audioslave collaborates with Timbaland, a hip-hop/R&B producer, for a dance-pop album. The record didn't fly well with Cornell's usual audience or attract him any new listeners, and the commercial failure of this was a major factor in Suretone Records' demise.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_3defe34c	comment	Discussed on Projector. Mathew notes in his review of How I Live Now that it's about a not-very-likable character trying to get back to someone who is their cousin/lover. He also notes that it flopped in his native UK, probably because of this.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_3f3abe9	comment	Rick and Morty's first interdimensional cable episode had a trailer for a film that was essentially Weekend at Bernie's but with cats and their old lady owner. The trailer shows the old lady's corpse in a state of decay, yet some guy manages to fall in love with her, even having sex with her. Especially bizarre is the film's actual title looks like the studios were trying to package it as a horror movie instead of a really gross romantic comedy. Then you find out an alternate version of Jerry Smith came up with the idea.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_4280731c	comment	Johnny the Walrus, by conservative commentator and Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh, tells the story of a little boy named Johnny who loves to role-play as different animals and objects. One day, he decides that he wants to be a walrus. This (somehow) causes everyone to treat him as if he actually wants to become a walrus, culminating in a doctor suggesting that Johnny eat worms and have his limbs cut off in an allegory for hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery—a metaphor that would only be understood by the transphobic adults in Walsh's audience who would purchase it, despite the book being illustrated and ostensibly presented as a children's book. Walsh boasted that it was the best-selling book in Amazon's LGBTQ+ category,note for reference, the author of a book sold on Amazon chooses its initial category, meaning that Walsh himself would have categorized it as such, only for Amazon to recategorize it to Political and Social Commentary and for Target to completely remove it from its online storefront.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_4346b828	comment	Alfie's Home is a children's storybook about a kid who, due to his parents constantly arguing, latches onto the sexual abuse from his uncle as his only source of affection. That alone is a hard sell, but it could have found a niche helping kids who deal with sexual abuse in Real Life... that is until it brings up the possibility of Alfie becoming gay from all this (something based on a long-discredited psychological theory), and treats it as a problem that must be taken care of by a few words with a counselor. You can probably imagine why the book was lambasted by everyone who has read it.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_47e80a7e	comment	Wrestlicious was a short-lived women's wrestling promotion from 2010, intended as a throwback to the Camp popularised by GLOW in the 80s. As nostalgia for that show and 80s media in general wouldn't kick in for another few years, the previews emphasising the comedy characters and rapping full of Painful Rhymes alienated wrestling fans who thought the show seemed too silly. The marketing also played up the Fanservice angle, turning off women's wrestling fans who thought the show would be Jiggle TV, and/or featuring untrained models trying to wrestle. In actuality, while there were a few women trained specifically for the show, it featured far more legitimate female wrestlers from the indies, but the marketing and overall presentation meant that the matches were overlooked. Not helping matters was the only publicity surrounding the show being that it was funded by a man who won the lottery, making it come across as thirteen episodes indulging his sexual fantasies. There were also problems with the tapings being done in 2008 and the show not airing until 2010, after which several wrestlers had been signed to WWE or TNA, meaning there was little point getting invested in it. While websites like Diva Dirt did cover the show and get it some attention, enough for there to be tapings for a second season that never aired, it sank without a trace.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_4b97cdc0	comment	In Magic: The Gathering, the plane of Lorwyn was immensely unpopular upon its release, for reasons related to this. In addition to having problems with overcomplicated mechanics, Lorwyn was set in a bright, soft, idyllic world full of Ghibli Hills and forests, with an explicit "fairytale" aesthetic, and absolutely no human characters at all. The closest thing it had to humans was the "hobbit"-like kithkin, who had Hive Mind powers. MTG's audience at the time was still largely teenage boys and young men, who didn't want a "cutesy" world in their "cool" high fantasy game. Yet, the plane was also very dark in some aspects: for example, the elves would outright murder "Eyeblights" — those that not fit their impossibly high standards of beauty, so those looking for such an idyllic world would be alienated as well. Thus, the world become consistently low-ranked in official popularity polls. However, the plane did have admirers and become a Cult Classic... And the audience for MTG grew, expanded, and evolved over the years. So much so that MTG tried a second "fairytale" plane, Eldraine, in 2019, directly citing the failure of Lorwyn and MTG's growth in their desire to "try again." Not only was Eldraine even Lighter and Softer than Lorwyn, being based on actual fairytales and nursery rhymes instead of just inspired by them, it was Denser and Wackier as well, featuring cards such as a gingerbread man and Goldilocks as a fur trapper. Unlike with Lorwyn, this "cutesiness" was accepted warmly, and the plane's themes were one of its most popular aspects.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_52a7b781	comment	Kamen Rider Geats: The DGP originally starts off as a game where random civilians save the world for the entertainment of the people from the future. However, as the series progresses, it devolves into a blatant Sadist Show with a massive focus on Rider vs. Rider fights and seemingly never-ending torture. This is what ultimately does in Suel, the Executive Producer, and the DGP itself, as the blatant pandering to him and the other VIPs (read: other sadists part of a Vocal Minority) only results in the VIPs fleeing back home to their time when it's pointed out they're not safe even from the supposed comfort of their viewing room, while alienating the Silent Majority who end up rooting for the DGP to finally come to an end and for the perpetrators to finally get what's coming to them.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_5666e22b	comment	The Deptford Mice trilogy features anthropomorphic mice in a struggle against a God of Evil and his bloodthirsty rat minions. Violent deaths abound, including decapitation and flaying alive. The cute animal characters would put off older kids, but the stories are Nightmare Fuel for the younger ones. This is likely why these books have yet to see a film adaptation.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_576c09b8	comment	The WWE Brawl for All's entire concept was that it would be a "fighting for REAL" tournament, standing in defiance of typical Kayfabe. Not only did this seemingly cast the rest of the WWE's output as fake, but it resulted in matches that looked less like your typical pro wrestling bouts and more like a weird mix of boxing and MMA... and really clumsy, inexpert boxing and MMA at that, because it turns out most of the wrestlers were not able to adapt to unscripted fights. Several people suffered injuries, the unscripted nature of the fights meant that things went off the rails when relative nobody Bart Gunn managed a Darkhorse Victory,note The intended endgame of this whole thing was supposed to be "Dr. Death" Steve Williams winning and going on to challenge Steve Austin (real name Steve Williams, oddly enough) with lots of money to be made by all. This plan went completely to hell when Williams tore his hamstring in a BfA match with Gunn and got knocked the fuck out, WWF management were so sure that Williams was going to win thanks to his tough guy rep (the guy is nicknamed "Doctor Death" after all) that they paid him the winner's purse before the tournament even started. Oops. This again begs the question of why anyone thought that it was a good idea to have 7 members of the roster lose an actual real fight on TV and the crowd spent most of the matches booing. The cherry on top came when Gunn got his "reward" for beating the clearly-intended winner... a fight with professional heavyweight boxer Butterbean, who flattened him in under twenty seconds. It's telling that Ken Shamrock, former UFC champion and active WWF wrestler at the time, flatly refused to have anything to do with this because he felt it would destroy his credibility.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_5ae07dd1	comment	While Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling started with the fairly tame premise of pro wrestlers competing against various martial artists and athletes from other sports, the "anything goes" nature of the bouts quickly saw an escalation to bloodletting, burning, electrocution and worse. Those who watched FMW in its glory years will tell you it offered so many different match types that it was possible to still enjoy it while ignoring the more Garbage heavy matches and indeed, some did. On the flip side, when Kodo Fuyuki tried to introduce a safer style to FMW he called "sports entertainment", that was an audience-alienating premise to the FMW faithful who had learned to like the occasional blood bath and those who stuck around ended up leaving too when they learned "sports entertainment" translated to less variety even among the normal matches. The concepts associated with "sports entertainment" would later be more successfully implemented by All Japan Pro Wrestling during its "Puroresu Love" rebuilding period and Fighting Opera HUSTLE. HUSTLE was a bit of a cash sink that could only survive under Nobuhiko Takada, but it at least had a fairly massive inter-promotional starpower and tons of Narm Charm going for it.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_5f710a0	comment	ProZD has some trouble getting other people interested in Chihayafuru, which is about a game called Karuta, where one person reads a verse from a poem and the other players have to find the card that corresponds to that poem. He ends up putting the other guy to sleep because of how unexciting it sounds.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_6209e22d	comment	There's a joke as to why people were alienated by the film Malcolm X. It's because they never got a chance to watch Malcolm I to Malcolm IX and thus were unable to follow the story!
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_667fc0d8	comment	Golden Logres tried to combine realistic pinball action with the mission-oriented structure of a Role-Playing Game. While die-hard players loved the challenge, it alienated everyone else who just wanted straightforward arcade action.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_67ef746b	comment	Imagine This was a 2008 West End musical set in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 depicting a Jewish theater troupe that learns, during their Show Within a Show about the siege of Masada, that the ghetto's residents are being tricked into going to certain doom in the concentration camps. In the end, most of the troupe is murdered for trying to warn the audience. Not hard to see why this would-be inspiring musical didn't last two months (counting the preview period); both the main story and the Show Within a Show have downer endings, and the basic conceit of a Holocaust-set musical is a questionable one.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_69ef92d4	comment	Save the Pearls: Revealing Eden is a novel about a dystopian future where whites are enslaved and oppressed by evil black people. The premise relies on outdated tropes played straight (including Food Pills), and worse, Blackface plays a huge role in the story. The work was ignored or shunned by general audiences.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_6ba3c140	comment	Dear Evan Hansen: The story focuses on an awkward teenager who is mistaken as the best friend of a boy who commited suicide and through that is able to get close to the boy's family, date the boy's sister and greatly improve his social life by essentially leeching the affection of a grieving family. Needless to say, that's very hard to sell even with all the context, good acting and music numbers it has to offer. This show, despite getting fair criticisms around its protagonist and perceived glorification of suicide, still got acclaim and multiple awards. However, the film adaptation exchanged the artificial dream-like theatre staging in favor of a naturalistic work, making the severe alienating flaws from the stage show far more obvious. That, along with Dawson Casting a 27-year-old Ben Platt to reprise the title role, succeeded in creeping audiences out, the film getting memed to death and ultimately being a Box Office Bomb.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_70da6e51	comment	Goosebumps was adapted as a screenplay titled Screams in the Night; mere months after its premiere it was put on indefinite hiatus and never re-aired. In addition to rather poor writing, the fact that Goosebumps appealed to young fans of horror and not adults who appreciate theatre didn't help it gain an audience.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_7219e05	comment	The Clique is an Indecisive Parody told from the point-of-view of a middle school-aged Alpha Bitch and her Girl Posse (two character types that are nearly universally despised) but does very little to make them likable or sympathetic. And even readers who would want to read something like that are very likely going to be put off by all the Squick (namely the very sexualized depictions of preteen girlsnote The author is female). The author tried to add some Deconstruction elements later on in the series but for many it was too little too late. This trope is possibly why The Film of the Book was Direct to Video — the creators were probably aware that a film with this kind of plot would bomb if released in theaters.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_755c9804	comment	It is generally believed that this was a major reason behind the failure of LEGO's RoboRiders theme. Their previous attempt at buildable, collectible action figures, Slizer, was a big hit for its creative setting (robots in different elemental settings) and for the uniqueness of the models. However, whereas the Slizers were identifiable characters with posable limbs, RoboRiders were essentially goofy-looking cyborg motorbikes with weird weaponry attached. They came with no rider figures, nor did they have seats — instead, the bikes themselves were the riders. Their front wheels featured printed decals on the sides representing the otherwise unbuildable talisman characters, and they launched these wheels like projectiles, meaning that every shot reduced the bikes to a nonfunctional mess with one wheel at the end. The concept was too esoteric for kids who wanted more Slizers sets, and the line failed.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_7793825d	comment	The Golden Ticket is a musically-sophisticated opera full of Genius Bonus musical in-jokes for buffs... but it's also an adaptation of a popular children's novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Critic James L. Paulk's review of the Atlanta Opera's staging for ArtsAtl.com was fairly positive, but pointed out that adults who love opera would likely find the source material too kiddy for their tastes, while kids wouldn't appreciate the jokes referencing adult operas and styles in the score and find proceedings too slow-going. (That much of the book's snarkier humor is absent doesn't help.) The result, according to Paulk, was a show that didn't sell a lot of tickets and had many families leaving at intermission — which is to say, kids didn't want to stick around for the actual tour of the factory! He also thought the show was too long for said kids at 2 and 1/2 hours with intermission. Compare this to the success of the 2013 stage musical adaptation of the novel, which lasted 3 1/2 years on the West End with a similar runtime.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_79c00bf7	comment	Heathers sticks to its original premise of two teenagers who start killing students and framing them as suicides in an upper class white high school, starting with the local Alpha Bitch. It's full of Black Comedy, Mood Whiplash, and frequently Crosses the Line Twice, both playing the deaths of rich kids for laughs yet taking the act of suicide very seriously. Being based on an even darker source film that gathered a modest cult following, it didn't even make it to Broadway before major productions lost steam. It still attracted a very loyal following of adult fans of the original and teenagers that liked the snarky humor. It has since enjoyed a healthy West End run which was filmed for streaming.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_805207b6	comment	Twisted (2010) is a book about sentient rollercoasters... that kill and eat people. The idea of the main characters being amusement park rides seems too childish for adults, but the gore and edginess of the content makes it inappropriate for children.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_84d0a277	comment	Redakai was a trading card game doomed by its own gimmick. The cards are translucent with paint on certain parts so that players had to stack cards and combine their attributes, and attacks take the form of battle damage that reduces the victim's health bar. Not a bad idea on paper, but this also means that you needed a special board to prevent your opponent from seeing what you have. Combine this with the "basic" game giving you no control over what happens, and you have a game that hit the bargain bin after just a couple of months. The Animated Adaptation being a critical and commercial flop as well also hurt it in this regard.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_85cc0eab	comment	Pacific Overtures: How Japan opened itself up to the encroaching Western world in the 19th century, with staging inspired by Kabuki theater (an all-male cast, etc.). That's both a presentation style and a section of history that the average Western musical audience has no interest in. The original Broadway run lasted only six months, and it remains one of Sondheim's least-performed musicals, primarily due to the casting difficulties. A 2017 revival drastically cut down both the cast and the length of the show itself.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_8b71d932	comment	Â¡Three Amigos! starts with the title heroes' latest film, "Those Darn Amigos", bombing because it was different from their standard western fare ("nobody cares about three wealthy Spanish landowners on a weekend in Manhattan"). Since they practically live on the studio's dime, they ask the studio executive, Harry Flugelman, for compensation, but Flugelman fires them, instead. Because of this, they gladly take a telegram promising 100 thousand pesos if they travel to Mexico to face El Guapo (thinking he's a Mexican performer).
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_90e2f673	comment	The BattleTech novel Far Country. Standard BattleTech stories revolve around Realpolitik stories of different human star empires fighting each other, with no focus on Space Opera themes like exploration or first contact with alien species. Far Country had several different groups get stranded on an alien planet with no way home having to deal with the bird-like alien natives. People who liked BattleTech were turned off by the utter lack of a BattleTech-related plot, while fans of space opera style science fiction were turned off by the tie-in to the franchise.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_923dd091	comment	The CollegeHumor sketch "Nicolas Cage's Agent", mocking the actor's tendency to choose very strange films, is solidly made out of these. The premises run the gamut from racist ("To Kill a Mockingbird retold so that the black guy really did rape that woman") to disgusting ("...and everyone on this bus is vomiting, except your character, who has diarrhea") to just plain baffling ("jack-o'-lantern comes to life, makes itself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and becomes inanimate again"), but despite the protestations of the agent, Cage is enthusiastic about every single one. It concludes when the agent makes up the worst premise he can think of: a silent movie about a man who can talk to dolphins and uses this power to hunt them, who has real onscreen sex with a puppy, shot on Fruit-by-the-Foot instead of filmstock. Cage still happily agrees to do it, and when told the film doesn't exist, he suggests contacting Jerry Bruckheimer to see if they can make it happen. And if one looks closely, the shelves in the agent's office slowly fills up with multiple Oscars and Golden Globes over the course of the video.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_946f58c1	comment	All Grown Up! has an episode where the kids sell Dil's inventions to earn money for concert tickets, and Angelica copies the ideas and sells them with different names to compete. The third item is 'Shillows' - shoes with pillows. Angelica's attempt at a portmanteau to copy them is the poorly thought out 'Poos', and Harold's slogan "nothing feels softer on your feet than a nice soft poo".
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_947ed2f1	comment	Awoken (written by Lindsay Ellis, Antonella Inserra and Elisa Hansen) is a parody of the Paranormal Romance genre, specifically "Twilight meets the Cthulhu Mythos". When asked if it was an audience-alienating premise, they responded with "That's the joke."
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_99beaff4	comment	Demo Reel was Doug Walker trying to replace the comedic Video Review Show that made him famous with a comedy/drama that made genuine efforts to be serious. This naturally alienated most of his existing fans, who rejected the heavy, overly serious and pretentious storylines that also included his previous humor except without the Nostalgia Critic for people to latch onto. Doug eventually appeased old viewers by canning Demo Reel and reviving his past show instead, incorporating the show's existence as part of the Critic's lore.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_9ad7a27b	comment	The The's Hank Williams tribute album Hanky Panky (1995) was met with mixed reactions, to say the least. Dusk era The The melded with Williams' country tunes from the 1940s and 50s was a hard sell to the thin overlap in the Venn diagram of the artists' fanbases, while many others had no idea what to make of it. The punny title and silly cover art didn't help, and the album found its way onto "worst albums of the 90s" lists. However, it was well-received by some, particularly those already familiar with Williams but not The The (including Williams' daughter) and opinions of it have skewed a bit more positive over the years.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_9bc9894a	comment	Hunter is a book where the hero is a Serial Killer who targets Jews and racial minorities.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_9d7f8403	comment	This, combined with a severe lack of attractions, is widely agreed to be one of the major reasons for the initial failure of Disney's California Adventure: even if the execution had been better, the very idea for the park was flawed from its inception, because no one wanted to visit a California-themed theme park located in the already California-themed California. Only after getting more Disney/uniquely themed attractions was it able to become successful.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_9f0dae2a	comment	The Cold Moons is a Xenofiction fantasy about talking badgers. While there may be a decent audience for this sort of thing if done right, as shown by the success of Warrior Cats, Watership Down, and Guardians of Ga'Hoole, badgers are not an appealing species choice to center a book on, especially when and where it was published in 1980s United Kingdomnote In The '70s and '80s, badgers in the United Kingdom were blamed for the tuberculosis outbreak affecting cows in the country, despite little-to-no evidence that they were actually the culprit. A mass genocide campaign against badgers nearly led to their extinction in the country. It's only an uphill battle from there to get people interested.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_a0ae46f	comment	Toy Story 2: Stinky Pete, a character from Woody's Roundup, is The Scrappy of the toy line, as he is not very appealing to most children because he's a gassy, elderly man Prospector. He spent years on a shelf watching other toys be sold and never got played with, which made him bitter, and led him to become the villain. In the end, however he gets taken by a little girl that paints on her toys in what appears to be a Fate Worse than Death, but according to Word of God, he eventually bonds with the little girl offscreen, so it's actually a happy ending for him.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_a0b522dd	comment	Lesser known Inkling member and poet Owen Barfield's Orpheus: A Poetic Drama is a loose adaptation of Virgil's telling of the Orpheus myth with heavily Christian takes on the themes of identity, free will, emotion and reason, death and resurrection, and eternal salvation. The play took 50 years to be published and has only been performed twice, once in 1948 and once again in 2015. Part of the issue is not only the esoteric and confusing dialogue and happenings in the play, but the play's subject matter; Christians are unlikely to think of a retelling of a Greek myth when looking for Christian plays, while fans of Greek mythology are likely to be turned off by the inaccuracy of the play compared to the source material.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_a485ad0f	comment	During The Angry Video Game Nerd's 12 Days of Shitsmas he feels this way about Mary-Kate & Ashley Get a Clue! for the Game Boy Color. Though he admits the game actually isn't that bad, he feels fans of the puzzle-game genre would be alienated by it starring Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, while fans of the twins would be alienated by the game's in-depth puzzle mechanics. Notably the game was originally to be a South Park video game, before being retooled into a Maya the Bee game, which was then reskinned with Mary-Kate and Ashley, without ever once changing the actual gameplay mechanics, it's evident the developers had absolutely no clue who the game was supposed to appeal to either.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_a88418fd	comment	Stephen Sondheim shows are notorious for these. This is why, for all their acclaim, only a few of his musicals (Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd, etc.) are well-known to the general public. A few audience-alienating examples include: Pacific Overtures: How Japan opened itself up to the encroaching Western world in the 19th century, with staging inspired by Kabuki theater (an all-male cast, etc.). That's both a presentation style and a section of history that the average Western musical audience has no interest in. The original Broadway run lasted only six months, and it remains one of Sondheim's least-performed musicals, primarily due to the casting difficulties. A 2017 revival drastically cut down both the cast and the length of the show itself. Passion: In the 19th century, a young soldier has a Stalker with a Crush — a mentally unbalanced, homely, terminally ill woman who adores him. Notable for having the shortest-ever run of a Broadway show that won the Best Musical Tony Award, with 280 performances — less than a year's worth. Merrily We Roll Along has a workable central premise in the tragic story of three friends who all lose their youthful optimism over the course of two decades and end up with every artistic spark crushed out, but was doomed with its setup of telling the story in reverse order by a group of teenagers in a gymnasium. The first audiences were horribly confused and walked out in droves, and there were quite a few attempts to try to make it more understandable, including the costuming being reduced to sweatshirts with the characters' names on them. Further rewrites have removed the Show Within a Show aspect, making it slightly more comprehensible.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_a8ae62a	comment	The Producers has an in-universe example that somehow crossed into real life: a shady theater producer picks the most Audience-Alienating Premise possible to ensure a play fails, allowing him to keep the overcharged budget: a musical about Hitler, written by a fugitive Nazi. It does work for a while, with the opening musical number appalling the theater audience... until the second act introduces a hilarious beatnik FÃ¼hrer which captivates the patrons and makes them yearn for more. After Mel Brooks finished the movie, the studio got cold feet on releasing it (it helps not only it deals with Nazis and shady businessmen, but the latter are Jews), and box office and critical reception was unimpressive. Still it earned Brooks' script an Academy Award, and the movie was Vindicated by History to the point it resulted in a successful Broadway adaptation which was itself adapted into a film. (Notably, Mel Brooks originally wanted the film to be named "Springtime for Hitler", but no studio would take a film under that name.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_ac7fd385	comment	Hatoful Boyfriend, a romance game where all of the love interests are sapient pigeons. In spite of this, the game has been critically acclaimed due to its surprisingly good story, but many just can't get past the bizarre concept.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_af3dd955	comment	Transformers: Timelines ran into this when it attempted to do an adaptation of Machine Wars for BotCon 2013, despite having had success with revisiting Generation 2 and many characters from the Pretender and Action Master ranges. Obviously, adapting an already obscure series posed a challenge, but the designs from the line didn't make for good exclusive figures, with their drab colors and generic looks making the high pricetag questionable. What made this even worse, though, was that rather than leaning into the weirdness and Same Character, But Different nature of the Machine Wars designs, they tried to downplay them as much as possible; Starscream went from a giant to regular-size, for instance, and Megaplex was no longer Megatron's body-double. And then the fiction printed at the convention doubled down on this by declaring that the Machine Wars characters were actually malformed clones of the G1 characters, making them even less desirable. At this point, even people who would be into a Machine Wars revival weren't interested, since the mystique of the series had been why the classic cast had changed so much. Add in a number of other issues with the finished productnote Hoist and Electro were misassembled, Hoist moreso. Skywarp and Thundercracker used designs from Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, and Megaplex used one from Transformers: Prime, which caused them to not match aesthetically with the rest of the set. And in a case of very poor timing, Sandstorm and Hoist had new retail toys announced at the time. and the only other real draw being characters from the incredibly controversial Beast Machines, and you had one slow mover, to the point that despite being produced in limited numbers, the sets still needed to be put on clearance in the online store.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_b0fba5f1	comment	In Kitchen Nightmares episode "Piccolo Teatro", Gordon Ramsay opens the episode by stating that "The French are a nation of meat lovers, each eating an average of 90 kilos of this stuff every year." The titular Piccolo Teatro was a vegetarian restaurant situated in Paris. Gordon was exasperated when he realized what he was up against, yet nonetheless proved to the owner that the restaurant was indeed capable of faring well in spite of the circumstances, or even because of its niche as one of the only vegetarian options in Paris. The real problem with the restaurant - and the reason why it went out of business - was its Lazy Bum owner that wasn't willing to be more hands-on in the restaurant business.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_b2b8158	comment	JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable: When Joseph ask Rohan if his manga Pink Dark Boy is available in English, the mangaka replies that it's published in Japanese, Taiwanese and French only. There's no English localization because "Americans must have bad taste or maybe can't comprehend the subtleties of the work".note This bit is absent in the anime, for obvious reasons This is a bit of Leaning on the Fourth Wall for how JoJo itself had suffered a lot of issues in being marketed to English-speakers—notably, by the time of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: The JOJOLands, it's suggested that Pink Dark Boy has picked up a significant American fanbase.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_b3685f53	comment	Argo:
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_b56da2f8	comment	Snow White's Enchanted Wish, Peter Pan's Flight, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, and Alice in Wonderland originally didn't have the title characters in them - the idea was that you were the heroes and that everything in the dark ride you saw was through their point of view. However this was changed because a lot of people were asking "Why doesn't the Snow White/Peter Pan/etc. ride have Snow White/Peter Pan/etc. in it?" It was one of the reasons why Disneyland's Fantasyland was overhauled in 1983; not only were the title protagonists added to their respective rides, but the overhaul added another ride called Pinocchio's Daring Journey, which had Pinocchio in it from the start. Since 1983, along the same lines, new dark rides have been created themed to such films as Winnie the Pooh or The Little Mermaid, and they, too, have always had their main protagonists (i.e., Pooh or Ariel) visibly present from the start. Snow White and Peter Pan rides in the other parks have also featured their title characters since their respective openings, with the one exception being the Disney World version of Snow White's Scary Adventures until its 1994 renovation.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_b61bbe0a	comment	The Modern Family episode "Good Cop, Bad Dog" features "the Good-Doggy/Bad-Doggy Training System", a dog-training method invented by a grocery store worker looking to break into something more. It consists, simply, of feeding the dog either bland treats or tasty treats, depending on their behavior. On top of the incredibly basic methodology and the obvious issues with trying to sell it to people, the treats themselves turn out to be a bust, as the dog actually prefers the "bland" treats. Jay, an experienced businessman, does his best to let the guy down gently, but also has to flat-out tell him that while his salesmanship and presentation are fine, the idea itself is just not going to work.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_b7336a25	comment	Melanie's Marvelous Measles is a children's book by Stephanie Messanger, an anti-vaccine activist. The book itself not only condemns vaccines, but has An Aesop about how measles are a Beneficial Disease that make you stronger, comparing the fear of measles to fear of the dark. Compounding things further is the fact that measles are depicted inaccuratelynote The only symptom Melanie gets is a rash that doesn't even itch, but in Real Life a rash from measles almost always itches, and in worst-case scenarios the disease can induce blindness, a weak immune system, or even death. Not helping matters is the title's similarity to George's Marvellous Medicine, whose author (Roald Dahl) became a pro-vaccine activist after his daughter Olivia died of measles in 1962note It is worth mentioning that GMM also has a case of Artistic License â€“ Medicine—the eponymous "medicine" would have realistically killed the protagonist's Gruesome Grandparent—but it was written as a comedy rather than a serious political message, and later editions include a Do Not Try This at Home warning.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_b8aa06e5	comment	A critic of O Pioneers!, one of the seminal canon works of Willa Cather, one of the most prominent female authors of the first half of the 20th century (one of her others, My Ã�ntonia, was published in 1901) said that "I simply don't care a damn what happens in Nebraska, no matter who writes about it." Indeed, she frequently wrote about Nebraska - one of the least densely-populated and featured in the United States. Cather's work The Professors House was partially written in response to this trope (and consequently is more like a Dark Fic or Deconstruction compared to her earlier works - and most notably, takes place along the shores of the Great Lakes with flashbacks to Arizona).
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_c3210502	comment	Problem #2: Most of the people you'd want to book for such a show were already under contract. Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, and Randy Savage were all in WCW. Dusty Rhodes was doing commentary for them, The Road Warriors were in the WWF, and most of the retired guys (who were retired for a reason, mind you) were working backstage for either Vince or Turner. The card was thus mostly filled by people who were only there because they were unemployable anywhere else, because they couldn't pass a physical or had major substance abuse issues (mostly the latter.)
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_c66f52d9	comment	In Todd in the Shadows's Trainwreckords episode on Katy Perry's Witness, he says that not only did "Chained to the Rhythm" do mediocre numbers by her standards, but it could never have been a hit because it's a feel-bad pop song that condemns pop songs, which is bound to put off people (including fans of Perry's earlier lighthearted material).
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_c8478efd	comment	Side Show is a musical drama based on the lives of Violet and Daisy Hilton, Conjoined Twins who became 1930s vaudeville stars and are best remembered today (if at all) for their appearance in the film Freaks. The original 1997 Broadway staging was a flop, but the show has an intense enough fanbase that it received a revival in 2014... which had an even shorter run. Ads for both versions tried to get around the premise by not directly stating it, but that didn't help. To quote a New York Times article on the revival's closure:
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_cf69b21e	comment	Machine Wars was a line exclusive to Kay-Bee Toys, meant to throw a bone to older fans who had been put off by the at-the-time running Beast Wars. But while the new molds had some appeal, all the line's larger toys were Palette Swapped designs from the Generation 2 era, complete with now severely-dated articulation, with several of them also getting their signature gimmicks neutered. Its status as a G1 revival was dampened by most of the characters looking almost completely different: Skywarp, for instance, went from black and purple to white and yellow, and Starscream got the largest toy in the line, which was an all-black behemoth with no mouth. Add in the fact that there was essentially no fiction to advertise the line or explain these radical changes, and it only lasted one wave and became little more than a curiosity.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_d154285c	comment	A wrestling promotion with Vince Russo as booker that expects you to pay ten dollars a week, where the first thirty minutes of the first show featured nothing but talkingnote Because a fat jobber broke the ring during a pre-show dark match and the ring crew was still fixing it when the PPV went on the air. An omen if there ever was one.... Wrestling fans wanting to torture themselves could see the same thing for free. But then more people started to notice AJ Styles, Christopher Daniels, and Low Ki, and declared the X Division to be a new landmark of pro wrestling! All the same, financial success wouldn't come to TNA until a while after Samoa Joe and Kurt Angle were signed.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_d888c467	comment	This is most likely the reason why the Tailchaser's Song adaptation is stuck in Development Hell. It's an adventure novel full of rich lore and violence. It's also about talking cats. Unlike its Spiritual Successor Warrior Cats, which is allegedly aimed at 10-year-olds, Tailchaser's Song is aimed at older fantasy fans. It's more in the vein of Watership Down with its heavy emphasis on mythology, culture, and Conlang. Kids are unlikely to be interested in a novel that has its own glossary and has 4-page long character section, cat fans are turned off by the mature tone, and fantasy fans don't want to read about cats. This leaves it for that small niche of Xenofiction fans.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_d9c602eb	comment	South Park: In "The Biggest Douche In The Universe," Rob Schneider is shown to be starring in films where he's a stapler, a carrot, and Kenny. There's also one film where it's impossible to figure out what it's about because it appears to have the mother of all Random Events Plots, the trailer narration largely consists of variations on "derp", and the title is Da Derp Dee Derp Da Teetley Derpee Derpee Dumb note Rated PG-13; this isn't the first time the creators have created such a film either, as their previous catalogue includes Der and Tum Ta Tittaly Tum Ta Too. The main boys are unimpressed. This is meant to be a Take That! towards Schneider for his bizarre roles such as an animal and a woman.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_e186e2cf	comment	How NOT to Write a Novel calls this trope "The Voice in the Wilderness" and illustrates it with an intentionally offensive sample novel passage which portrays Auschwitz commanders, guards and doctors as selfless souls trying to save the inmates from dying of typhus, only for the Allies to "demonize" their efforts. The authors then explain that writing a novel with a "universally detested" viewpoint is a bad idea regardless of whether you genuinely believe it or simply figure that shock for shock's sake will sell.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_e5964cdb	comment	Treasure Chess is chess.com's attempt to make a chess-based NFT project by letting players mint NFTs of their games. It was rejected by the chess community, which (like many parts of the Internet) strongly dislikes NFTs. NFT fans weren't interested either, as they didn't want to buy worthless NFTs of random people's chess games. According to this post, only six people bought any "Treasures" during the first five months of Treasure Chess.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_e613a516	comment	Industrial Society and Its Future: It's a book/manifesto decrying the Industrial Revolution and not only modern civilization, but many social aspects of it. Those who are environmentalists or concerned about human impact on nature in general will be put off by Kaczynski's critiques of leftism, feminism, LGBT movements and his Social Darwinist leanings. Readers coming from a conservative or "traditionalist" background will also be put off by Kaczynski's decrying of civilization in general and conservative "hypocrisy" towards the environment. And that's of course without getting into the eco-terrorism he has done and his unapologetic positions towards it and the deaths he has caused, even if they're only briefly mentioned in the manifesto itself.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_e6bd705d	comment	One of the reasons why the otherwise decent Luck & Logic didn't really get off the ground is because matches can take forever. Average time for a round is 45 minutes. Combine that with tourney-style play, and you'll have most of the players already exhausted after the second match. For the record, most of the popular CCGs like Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and PokÃ©mon can finish a match in 10 to 25 minutes. That's approximately half the duration. Pop open any Starter/Trial Deck and open the rules side of the pack-in playmat. At first glance, the sheer rules density is intimidating enough to scare off card gamers looking for a simple, go-to game. However, the rules are actually quite intuitive once you learn them.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_ed02b09	comment	Galidor's tie-in LEGO line: a bunch of overpriced gimmicky action figures with swappable body parts and virtually no compatibility with other LEGO sets. May have been more successful as a regular toy line made by another company, but LEGO lovers hated the enormous, useless pieces and other buyers didn't know where to put these weird, expensive toys (the LEGO logos, which may have given them confidence about the product's quality, were hidden on the boxes).
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_f00d733b	comment	Chronicles of Darkness has Promethean: The Created. Devoted to playing as golems Ã la Frankenstein's Monster with the goal to Become a Real Boy, Promethean suffers from a combination of fluff that is brilliantly written but very heavy on the Wangst, due to its emphasis on the Created's nature as In-Universe Hate Sinks and Walking Wastelands, an end-goal that many players find counter-intuitivenote "So, I start out as a super-powerful monster, and... I'm going to try to give all that up to become an ordinary human? In the Crapsack World that is the New World of Darkness? Are you serious?", punishing mechanics that can easily make the game unfun, a susceptibility to Railroading, and just a general playstyle that demands a high level of maturity and good communication on the parts of both player and storyteller, due to the very intimate focus of the game. Promethean has earned a reputation amongst NWoD fans as "the greatest game that nobody plays". This has led directly to the authors trying to tone the game down in its second edition to hopefully make it more accessible.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_f7c59eee	comment	Bill & Ted Face the Music have the titular duo, in their many attempts to "create the song that would unite the world", write incomprehensible music that would end up pleasing no one. For example, at Missy and Deacon's wedding, Bill and Ted try to perform the first three movements of "That Which Binds Us Through Time: The Chemical, Physical, and Biological Nature of Love and the Exploration of the Meaning of Meaning â€” Part 1". If the title wasn't bad enough, the music was so alienating that everyone cringed until Ted's dad literally pulled the plug.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_f9527b75	comment	In the annual Lyttle Lytton Contest, a contest which challenges contestants to write the worst opening line of a novel they can think of, the Berman prize used to be awarded to the entry that suggested a novel with truly terrible subject matter.
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Audience-Alienating Premise / int_fb9c177d	comment	Transformers Action Masters were, simply and infamously put, Transformers toys that didn't transformnote The tie-in media tried to explain this as a case of Discard and Draw; they discovered a new fuel that turned their transformation systems into enhanced power systems. Instead, they came with gadgets, nonhuman partners, and larger vehicles which turned into weapons, while also featuring somewhat better articulation than preceding toys, making for a more conventional toy-line along the lines of G.I. Joe or M.A.S.K.. Not only did this screw over what made Transformers unique and memorable, but the end result was too surreal to be taken seriously on its own; not only was Bumblebee (who becomes a small car) the same size as Devastator (who is combined from six robots who become construction vehicles), but the likes of Optimus Prime and Wheeljack ended up driving a Big Badass Rig and a Cool Car, when they're famous for turning into those vehicles (which begs the question of whether the Transformers shrunk down or their vehicles were absurdly huge).
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

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