The problem with genre

I have once again lost my mind in a futile pursuit of something everybody else would deem as “not important”. See, I have this love/hate relationship with the concept of genre or should I say hate/hate, for the concept of genre is totally removed from common logic.

A genre is defined as 

“a style or category of art, music, or literature”

Wow, what a narrow definition! 

There are many problems with the concept of genre, more so than I think people realize. Basically, the definition is easy enough to understand. Genre is all about categorization, this means we as a society have grouped things together so that we can better navigate art. By doing so we create rules for what a piece of art should contain. The problem arises when we start to dig into different categories for when we do we find that (almost) nothing is clear-cut. 

It is simply impossible to find a definition that encompasses everything within a genre

while at the same time not excluding elements of the same genre for being different. 

Genre is hard if not impossible to navigate, which is exactly why I have decided to try to get to the bottom of the concept. I will be looking at different genres with different mediums of art like Literature, Cinema, anime, and video games. 

Will it be worth it?

Probably not 

Is it important? 

Nope 

Then let’s go! 

The ground rules 

First of all, let’s get some ground rules down. 

Genre is about the subject matter. An example could be romance. A romance book contains romance (I know it’s shocking). A horror film contains scary scenes in some capacity. 

Anime is not a genre, it’s a medium. Anime can contain genres like romance and horror. 

German expressionism is more of a movement than a genre. Same goes for other movement in cinema. 

Playing the definition game

Defining a genre is difficult, at least most of the time. As an example let’s take the genre of Science Fiction. It’s easy to identify Sci-fi at first glance, if you have a show about space exploration, well then you clearly have a Sci-fi story. 

At its core Sci-fi is about fictional stories where science plays a part. The Science involved can be fantastical like interstellar space travel, highly advanced androids, and so on. However, it can also be a movie like gravity where there are no fantastical scientific elements. Gravity is a fictional story where science plays a role, thus it can be called Science Fiction.  

Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige is also a Sci-fi movie. It contains a fantastical machine that clones people. Just because the movie takes place in the past doesn’t mean it’s not sci-fi. 

It can sometimes be hard to pinpoint a particular piece of work. Arthouse films are at this point their own genre, yet it’s so hard to define them in any meaningful way. Arthouse is more about tone and atmosphere rather than traditional storytelling. While you could have a romantic or a funny arthouse film the experience would be so alien compared to traditional movies with those genres. 

You can also combine genres, in fact, most things don’t fall under one genre. Sci-fi is a genre that can easily be combined with different genres. Alien is a horror Sci-fi film, starship troopers are Sci-fi action, and so on. Sci-fi is more of an aesthetic genre, meaning it’s more about the world. You could easily have a romance story with a cyberpunk setting. In fact, it’s hard to come up with an example of a Sci-fi story without other genres. The best example is probably the foundation series by Isaac Asimov. 

The funny thing about Sci-fi is that it can be dated. Unlike all the other genres Sci-fi is predicated on fantastical science. If you had a story about a flying car salesman and that was the only element of the story that was sci-fi then what happens if we invent flying cars in the real world, would it then cease to be Sci-fi? 

The answer is: If I wrote a story about a flying car salesman and everybody got a flying car the day after it was published, then it would still count as Sci-fi since flying cars was not a thing when it was written, thus the time of writing and publication is important. 

Couldn’t you just use the gravity logic and say that if everybody gets a flying car the story is still Sci-fi because it is still a fictional story where science plays a part? 

Well, it does not play a very big part, in fact, the flying car is a very small part of it and the story doesn’t revolve around how it works, thus the science part of the story is not the focus.

Genres are bits and pieces like the example above. When you start overthinking and defining things you inevitably run into problems. 

Can you have a piece of art that incompetence all genres? 

It’s a funny thought experiment to ponder, what would such a work even look like? 

On a strictly theoretical level, I think you could incompetence a lot of genres. I do not know if I would go as far as saying you could incorporate all of them. 

Another problem with genre is the amount needed for it to count as a given genre, example: Could you have a romance story where the romance is only present in the first five minutes of the story, where afterward the story changes to a horror? It is not enough to have a love interest and a romantic subplot to be considered a romance. For something to “count” as a romance story romance has to play a big part. 

One of the underlying things here is “tone” every genre follows a tone in some sense. A romance has a tone or “feel” about it. That’s why playing with tones can be interesting. The movie “Come and see” is a war movie with the tone of a horror film. These two go hand in hand and the movie does a brilliant job of depicting the horrors of war. 

On the other hand, you cannot have a romance story (plot) with a tone of horror. Because you would find it weird and out of place. You would think when is he going to kill her? Imagen the notebook with creep music and jumpscares, it simply doesn’t fit. A genre that does fit is a comedy, hence the famous Rom-com. 

What is comedy? 

A movie that seeks to make you laugh.

What if you do not laugh does it then cease to be a comedy?

A comedy is about tone, it seeks to make you laugh and it adopts a silly tone

Some comedies are deadpan in their delivery for comedic effect without being silly. 

It’s easy to identify what a comedy movie looks like, one can easily point at a movie like a catty shack and say that’s a comedy, but what components are needed for it to be a comedy? 

What is the difference between a comedy and a movie with comedic moments?

See, the thing is, I have no answers to all these questions. Genre is a hard thing to define and explore. Genre is like an onion, you can keep peeling layers off. 

Literary fiction vs Genre Fiction 

Genre fiction is your horror, fantasy, sci-fi, you name it, whereas Literary fiction doesn’t fit into those categories. Literary fiction can be your classics like your Dickens, but it can also be more contemporary works.   

Literary fiction is often held in higher esteem than genre fiction. It is also more connected to high culture and high art, basically your classic pretentious discourse. 

The problem is that both these genres are not mutually excluded, for example, literary fiction is said to be about social commentary, political criticism, or reflection on the human condition. These aspects can be explored by genre fiction as well. I would argue that no genre is better at exploring the human condition than Sci-fi. 

Genre fiction is accused of being shallow, but one has only to look at fantasy writers like Robin Hobb, Tolkien, or Steven Eriksson to see that this is not the case. The genre is only as good as its authors, the aforementioned authors all write fantasy, but if they wrote anything else then that genre would be filled with good books. It is more about talent than it is about arbitrary genre definitions

Literary fiction is also said to be more character-driven, which is false. Genre fiction can be character driven. 

When talking about Literary fiction vs genre fiction it sure feels like one of them is trying to be better than the other. I personally kind of hate the way the differences are outlined between the two parts. 

I also think that most people know the value of genre fiction, it is only oldheads who insist that what they read is better than anything else. However, those old heads still hold a lot of power when it comes to the prescription of genre fiction, especially in academia. Nothing shows that more than the distinction between Fantasy and magical realism 

Fantasy vs Magical realism 

This section is why I started to write this overly long post on genres to begin with. Because Magical realism is made so that literary snobs can enjoy fantasy. At least that is my opinion. When I first read “one hundred years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez I thought it was a good fantasy book. Little did I know that magic/supernatural/magical elements are not necessary for something to be a fantasy. But what’s the difference? 

Well, both of these genres use magic, so that doesn’t help us at all. The most common definition of magical realism is the idea that the magical elements are common within the story, and characters act to the fantastical as if it were an everyday occurrence. However, I would argue that in most Fantasy stories at least those with swords and sorcery the characters know of magic. When Gandalf goes to the shire everyone’s all like “yeah that’s the wizard guy he does magic and stuff” no one is reacting to magic as if it was foreign. 

Another definition is that magical realism takes place in our world. The setting is real, the characters feel real, yet sometimes magical stuff will just occur. Fantasy on the other hand takes place in a magical world unlike our own like middle earth. This is called high fantasy. The opposite of this is a low fantasy where you have our world where the magical elements slip into a real life story and the setting. An example of low fantasy could be The Percy Jackson series. 

The comic series fable takes place in New York where fairy tale creatures live their lives after their story is over. 

The fantasy series The Dresden Files takes place in Chicago. 

American Gods is set in present-day America with mythical elements and characters and that is considered a fantasy book. 

Stephen King’s The Green Mile is considered as “Dark Fantasy, Southern Gothic, Magic Realism ” Wait can it be both Fantasy and magical realism???? 

Magical realism is when a story takes place in our world with magical elements.

The characters react to the magical as if it were a mundane thing.  

However, as I have demonstrated these things are also part of some fantasy books. The more you think about the genre the less it makes sense, but let’s continue on!

The divide between Magical realism and fantasy are made so that literary Snopes can enjoy magic. Gabriel Garcia Marquez had an informed quote on the subject: 

“Fantasy has nothing to do with the reality of the world we live in; it is purely fantastic invention, an inspiration, and certainly a diversion ill-advised in the arts.”

I am not here to lay down the literary merit of fantasy, but this quote strikes me as incredible assenain. 

If you look at the literary canon you will find some magical realism, but no fantasy. Fantasy is often looked down upon and I don’t really know why.

What the fuck is drama? 

Here is an interesting question What the fuck is drama? I mean Drama as a genre here. The term Drama can be traced back to accenting Greece. There were three types of dramas back then. 

Comedy: Normally satirical mockery of people in power

Tragedy: A sad-ass story about love and lost

Satyr Plays: Short acts performed between acts in a Tragedy

We still see the first two types of genres today, but the meaning has changed a bit. Comedy is now a lot broader, containing sub-genres like deadpan, slapstick, and satire. Comedy thus contains more elements and possibilities. 

A tragedy is what has the most in common with today’s definition of Drama. A lot of Oscar Baity movies are Dramas. We all know these movies where a lot of people are very sad and yell at each other a lot. This is what most people would consider a drama. It can be hard to define the Drama genre, but if we look at cinema, the most popular definition is something akin to a story with many characters and a lot of conflicts. 

Man, we are already lost in the woods. 

First of all, I am sure you can identify a drama film with few characters. In fact how many characters are needed for there to be “a lot” and thus for it to be a drama? No one knows it’s just arbitrary definitions. 

Second of all “There needs to be a lot of conflicts”, Well sure. Again, how many conflicts are sufficient for it to qualify as a drama? 

It is also normal for films to have one or more conflicts. You can have a hysterical comedy, but there will always be some kind of conflict within the film. Some movies are half comedy half drama making them a “dramedy”. 

You can have the funniest movie ever, but the movie can contain a really heavy and sad scene and if that happens you can say “that was a dramatic moment or scene”. But that doesn’t change the genre from a comedy to a drama, but what if there were more of these scenes? Is it the amount of “serious” scenes that make something a drama? 

Again I do not have the answers here. 

Age is not a genre 

The evolution of genre has come to the present day where a new bread of genre has risen. I call it the “Age genre”. It’s where you categorize something into a genre based on how old the reader is. This is a problem since it removes focus from the actual work and shifts it to the consumers. 

A perfect example of the “Age Genre” is “Young adult fiction” aka YA books. These books are sold to people within the age range of 12-18. Originally it was made to soften the transition from children’s books to adult fiction. However, Approximately half of all YA is read by adults. 

YA books are easier to read than “adult books” with a protagonist in the age range of 12-18. 

You see it right? The problem? Okay let me explain 

You can have a story where the protagonist is in that age range and it being not a YA book. The age of the protagonist is a stupid way to define the genre. What if a book starts with the main character being a child, but by the end an adult? You wouldn’t say the book starts as YA and then becomes “adult”. 

The “age genre” is super prevalent in anime/manga where you have 

Shōnen aimed at young boys between 9 to 18 

Seinen aimed at young adult men between the ages of 18 and 40

Shoujo aimed at young girls between 9 to 18 

Josei aimed at young adult girls between the ages of 18 and 40

Again, the problem arises due to a lack of consistency. 

A lot of different series belong under the Shōnen umbrella. One Piece and Death note are both considered Shōnen. However, Death Note is a highly psychological thriller where the themes are ill-suited to a young audience. 

These genres are actually not genres at all, but more of a demographic range. However, people still use these terms like they were genres. Today most people consider Shōnen battle series like Dragon ball, Boku No hero academia, and FullMetal Alchemist to be within their own genre. So technically not a genre, but people use it that way so it’s fair game. 

The one-time genre works 

Genre works best when it comes to Video games. You know when you buy an FPS (First Person shooter) what kind of game it’s going to be. You know when you buy a fighting game what kind of game it’s going to be. There might be differences in graphics, gameplay, story, and so on, but you know what you get. 

I would say that genre is important to know when it comes to games. Now, most people will already know the genre of a game they are interested in. I have personally never bought a game without knowing what genre it was. 

Why do we still use genre? 

After all this, why is genre still a thing? I think there are two reasons for it 

The first is because of marketing, it’s all about the dollar BABY!

Think about it, why are fantasy and sci-fi grouped together? So they both are easy to identify in the store. Because both genres share an audience. It’s not about the work, genre, or merits, it’s about the people buying. This further weakens the overall idea of a genre and why they are important or useful. No one cares about the actual differences or similarities between Sci-fi and fantasy. All they care about are consumers. 

The same goes for the “Age Genre”. 

The second (less cynical) reason we have genres is that people love to categorize things. It makes us feel safe. Humans fear the unknown and will always meet what they know with what they don’t know. So if you present something new to them you can say it’s just like the other stories they like. 

A personal problem I have with genre is that it leads to expectations. If you go into something expecting it to be one way and it turns out different, well then chances are you are not going to enjoy it. 

Genre can lead to a subversion of expectations. This might be a good thing or it can be a bad thing, but creativity is in danger if art has to fit within parameters others set. 

creativity is in danger if art has to fit within parameters others set. – quote Me 

There is also the problem of shame. Say you like to read romance novels or watch “bad” television shows, if the genre is looked down upon then you would be looked down upon for liking it and I think that is wrong. People should be able to like something without the scorn of society. 

Conclusion

Genre is a strange concept back in the day; it might have made more sense since there were fewer art forms. Nowadays genre just feels like something marketing people control in order to make the most money. 

Things are not divided into genres because of artistic merits but because cataloging is what humans do. 

The idea of genre also limits the artist since they constrain their vision so they can be marketed in a category others have decided. 

The more you talk about genre the more insane you become. It feels impossible to reach a definition of a genre without having exceptions within that genre that did something different.