Out of the Ghetto

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The critics will not have a pidgeon-hole neatly labeled for it. —Father Robert Murray, one of JRR Tolkien's mentors, on the latter's magnum opus

Ah, the ghettos of fiction. We're all familiar with them: Cartoons are for kids, (and Comic Books are for slightly older kids,) SpecFic is for nerds, Romance novels (and Soaps) are for single women and Desperate Housewives, Rap is for Gangstas, Classical Music is for Snobs, New Media, especially Video Games, are for unproductive deviants, Printed works are for people with one foot in the grave, etc.

In short, the medium, and to a lesser extent the genre, define the target audience. Entire clases of works are "pigeonholed" into "target" demographics, and woe unto any fan who happens to fall one day, dollar, chromosome, or lateral inch outside of these appointed bounds. Some works surrender and even embrace these holes, falling into unoriginality and Flanderization, so long as the money keeps rolling in.

Then, you get something which blows away the conventional notions. A work that dares to challenge a genre's or medium's natural order, or even, dare we say it, threatens to expand its demographic! (Even if it's to retain viewers it already had.) If it changes perceptions of the genre as a whole, then it could even be a Genre Turning Point.

Often a work that breaks out of the ghetto (and its fans) will attract its own hatedom due to outsiders rigidly holding the ghetto lines while upholding their personal "defintions" of "True Art"; along with the genre's/medium's "normal" target audience saying that the work makes their (ghetto-compliant/sustaining) favorites "look bad" and/or employing No True Scotsman. In the case of a deviation to a long-running franchise, They Changed It, Now It Sucks often comes into play.

Contrast It's Popular, Now It Sucks, wherein a work/creator who previously challenged established conventions accepts them to grow its fanbase or pocketbook.

Examples of Out of the Ghetto include:

Anime & Manga

• Animation is just for kids, right? Let me introduce you to Neon Genesis Evangelion. Shocked as you might be, we haven't even reached Seinen territory yet.
• Animation can't be art huh? Watch a couple of Mamoru Oshii and Satoshi Kon films and try saying that with a straight face.

Card Games

• Yu-Gi-Oh! Before that, trading card game players were either D&D geeks or 10-year-olds. Yu-Gi-Oh fans attracted their own hatedom for being stereotyped as 10-year-olds, but it's still quite disturbing to see a trading card game where your soul is at stake.

Comic Books

• Comic book fans get a lot of hate. Especially X-Men fans. But 300 was one exception, though 300 fans are generally accused of being gay. Watchmen is possibly a better example.
• Spider-Man in general. The movies made Spidey into a romantic.

Film

• Star Wars is rather cyclical. In the late 1970s and 1980s, it was cool, then nobody remembered it. In the mid-1990s, Shadows of the Empire and the Dark Forces Saga introduced the world to the Expanded Universe. Then came cries of They Changed It, Now It Sucks for the Special Edition and the prequels. On the other hand, the romantic subplot attracted a significant female fandom. And the Mandalorians have attracted a significant following in the military. Of course, Star Wars fans make fun of their own Fan Dumb.
• Star Trek has Narm, Green Skinned Space Babes, an Anvilicious group of morally superior beings, and a Mary Suetopia. The fanfic coined the term Mary Sue. The spinoffs use physics terms but have no idea what they mean, if they mean anything. Of course, it's going to attract a lot of hate. Then came the 2009 Star Trek movie.
• If you like gay romance, then you're either gay or a hormonal Yaoi Fangirl. And then came Brokeback Mountain.

Literature

• If you like romance, you're a desperate housewife. Then came Twilight. Of course, Twilight has its own Squick, especially Breaking Dawn. Yeah, it went right back to the ghetto.
• Who would want to be seen reading a fantasy novel in public? Grow up, you hopeless Nerd. Though Harry Potter and Discworld don't seem to count, even before they were republished with sombre covers to hide your shame.

Live Action TV

• Star Trek: Voyager tried to do this. It ended up with Magical Native Americans, a serious case of Ship Tease that ended with Chakotay choosing another girl out of the blue, and using physics terms that the writers didn't know what they meant or that they made up as they went along.
• True Blood has successfully become the most popular thing on HBO, and has almost unanimous critical praise.

Music

• White rappers attract only suburban wannabe gangsters...except Eminem.

New Media

• The Internet itself. 1990s version: It's for porn, Star Trek, debates about the Empire taking on the Federation, anime and combinations of the foregoing. There Are No Girls on the Internet. 2000s version: MySpace! Napster! iTunes! BitTorrent! Facebook! There's still porn, but now teenage girls are sending it to their boyfriends.

Radio

• Unsuccessful attempt: Radio is a Daily Kos Conservative medium, right? Certainly Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck would have you think so. Meet...pretty much all of Air America. Which failed to compete with Rush and co. and shut down.
  • Incidentally, Limbaugh himself is an (successful) example, taking political-commentary-based radio out of the droning doldrums and into the controversial and popular format it is today. Granted, the revocation of The Fairness Doctrine made it possible, but there still had to be a leader for everyone to follow.

Video Games

• Video games are an interesting case, since there are so many ghettoes. First, the "games are for kids" ghetto. Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat broke out of that.
• RPGs were for D&D fans and anime nerds, until Final Fantasy VII came out, as Animesque as it was.
• Video games were for men and boys, until virtual pets and, a year later, Pokémon. Naturally, Pokémon attracted its own Hatedom.
• The development of "casual games" and the Rhythm genre, along with the ability to purchase games on cell phones and iPods, made gaming a co-ed activity.
• Goldeneye007 and Halo broke the FPS out of the domain of the PC enthusiast.
• World of Warcraft brought the MMORPG into the cultural mainstream.
• The Wii series of games as well as Nintendo's other Touch Generations games saw the demographic for gaming broaden outside the 18-34 demographic (though it had long existed in younger demographics as well).
• You absolutely could not sell a normal 2D Platformer as a full retail title on the 7th generation consoles, until New Super Mario Bros. Wii.

Web Original

• Web original are nerds for. Then in AD 2001, war was beginning. All your base everywhere was. Videogame fans rejoicing for great justice.

Western Animation

• As the Animation Age Ghetto page explains, Western Animation was once an all-ages affair as complementary works to major movies, and this held true in the first decades of TV; this is why The Flintstones and The Jetsons aired in Prime Time in their heyday. Then Demographics emerged, animation studios largely became separate from movie studios, and the dark days of the Ghetto began. This lasted for two long decades until The Simpsons aired on FOX. Subsequent shows upped the ante, until you were sure you didn't want your kids to watch Western Animation, at least after sunset.
• Cartoons aimed at female audiences have nothing to offer male viewers... unless Lauren Faust was involved in their production.