Audience-Alienating Premise: Difference between revisions

== Anime and Manga ==

* ''[[Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan]]''. Bear with us here: an angel comes back in time to repeatedly and brutally murder (and promptly reanimate) a junior high student, in order to stop him from creating a 'pedophile's world' where all females don't age past 12 years old. And it's a ''comedy!''

** Although tempting, using this series to demonstrate that anime is [[Animation Age Ghetto|not always for children]] is just as likely to backfire as anything else, since people will simply jump to [[All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles|the other extreme]].

* ''[[Koi Kaze]]'' is about a man in his late 20s and a teenage girl 12 years younger who fall in love. What's the alienating part? ''[[Brother-Sister Incest|They're brother and sister and haven't seen each other in a long time]]''. Also depending on the person, the idea of an adult and a high schooler falling in love can be [[Squick]] material. Actually, it's a quite thoughtful and realistic examination of such a situation, but the mere premise sounds like coming from an incest-themed hentai, and the series lack of any type of fanservice doesn't even get the people looking for prurient material a reason for reading.

* ''[[Madoka Magica]]'' exploited this trope by starting off disguised as a mostly normal-looking cutesy [[Magical Girl]] show, causing many people to [[Tastes Like Diabetes|stop watching it in disgust]] before the real, [[Cosmic Horror Story|much darker premise]] took shape. But, of course, [[Late Arrival Spoiler|once everyone learned what the show was actually about]], the trope got played straight, since some of the people who actually ''like'' cutesy magical-girl shows didn't have any interest in watching a brutally deconstructed version.

* ''[[Suicide Island]]'': The title itself will probably scare away a number of people. The premise goes like this: the Japanese government has lost big chunks of money due to hospitals being crowded with people attempting to commit suicide. In response to this, the government gives these people the choice of trying to live on or die. If these people choose to die, they will then sign papers, they will be rendered unconscious (nicely), and they will wake up to find themselves on the titular Suicide Island. They are declared [[Unperson|UnPersons]] and they can do ''whatever'' they want on the island, as long as they don't try to leave...but there are really no means (and likely not even desire) to leave anyway. The premise itself will probably scare a number of people off, because they might think it's just a story where they get to watch people commit suicide. While some of the characters do, it ends up scaring the other characters into trying to live on and make the best of their situation. The story could be compared to ''[[Lord of the Flies]]'' on some levels. Also, the story examines the minds of these characters, to help the reader understand why they would want to die in the first place. The examination reveals some dark stuff about Japanese culture, like the [[Hikikomori]], pressures of society, [[There Are No Therapists]] (actually, there are in this story, but it doesn't seem to be working), the stigma of shame, and so on. Indeed, the story seems to be a critique of how Japanese society has something fundamentally wrong with it, and is causing people to not really ''live''. It's likely that this story did not sell well in Japan, and it's hard to say how well it would have sold in other countries, since there is no way to sugar-coat this story!

* The manga ''[[Lotte no Omocha]]'' is a story about a strapping young man who is tricked by elves into moving to another world, specifically so a 10-year-old succubus can have sex with him for the rest of his life. Trying to talk about it generally goes like this: "It's a story about a man becoming a surrogate father—" "Wait. Isn't that the one with the ten-year-old succubus?" "Yeah, but–" "Ten-year-old. ''Succubus''."

* ''[[Kodomo no Jikan]]'' is about a pre-pubescent girl who falls in love with her teacher, and [[Troubling Unchildlike Behavior|acts overtly sexual]] to get his attention, which you wouldn't expect to do well in the US. It didn't get a chance to — it was canceled when the licensing company learned how bookstores and distributors would react: by canceling orders. Outside of Japan, owning something like this could theoretically get you ''thrown in jail''. The US release was also slated to have the audience-alienating ''title'' of "[[Lolita|Nymphet]]", which was requested by the author since [[Seven Seas]] couldn't use the original [translated] title of "A Child's Time". It launched a [[Kickstarter]] campaign that successfully got the amount needed to release a printing run of the manga, and then some.