It's Not a Bad Story, You're Just Not Emo Enough!

I've recently been playing through Final Fantasy VIII, which I thoroughly enjoyed when I was in high school. Now...not so much.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, it's a long, long story, but for the purpose of this post, I'll just say that it's about angsty teens dealing with seemingly giant problems. My point is that back when I was 18, the game had a lot more pull for me. This has a lot to do with the fact that I myself was an angsty teen at the time.

This is about the general concept of target audiences. A target audience is any demographic that a form of entertainment is designed to appeal to. At first, one might think that an artist should try to make their work appeal to everyone, or at least as many people as possible. But this is impossible. I don't care how great your story is, but a 3 year old boy, a middle-aged housewife, a tween girl, and me, a twenty-something guy, cannot be interested in the same material. Peoples' brains are just too different.

But once those differences are distinguished, people become so similar within their sub-categories that it's downright creepy. Guys between the ages of 18-35 will watch anything with cleavage, explosions, and/or stupid humor. Tween girls will latch onto metro-style boy toys that can dance. Toddlers won't watch something unless it is simplified down to its most basic form, and appeals to their incredibly basic understanding of color, number, shape, morality, etc. The list goes on, and most entertainment companies have the human race figured out on a psychological and sociological level. Even if you think you have different tastes than these general categories, you simply fall into a sub-category with many other people. All humans seek entertainment, and that is something that somebody can make a profit off of.

How, then, can an artist use this to their advantage? First, the artist must ask themselves 'what is my target audience?' Probably the easiest one to aim at is the one you yourself fall into. If you like it, odds are, people similar to you will like it. But you have to determine what it is about your work that people would like. Look at other stories that have the same audience: what are their focuses? What do they downplay, or completely skip on? Different audiences have different attention spans: how do you need to adjust your work to compensate for this? If you're aiming at a target audience that you are not really a part of, that's fine, but do your homework. At the risk of betraying my own demographic, I have to admit that I really don't like zombie movies. But if I was commissioned to make a zombie comic, book, or film, my first step would be to find out which zombie movies/comics/books are the favorites and get a hold of those ASAP.

I'm almost done with Final Fantasy VIII. I can see some qualities in the story that still appeal to me, but I've outgrown it. But that's okay, because the world is never in short supply of angsty teens...no matter how much I may wish it.