r/CharacterRant • u/JayJay_Tracer • Aug 16 '20
Question The Five Genre Theory
A couple months ago I noticed how every story, regardless of medium, could be fit into one of five genre: Action, Drama, Slice of Life, Thriller and For-Kids. The latter two being semi-catch-alls. The examples will be given in oder of medium: Anime, Movie, Book.
Action: A story where threats are of a phisically violent nature or are solved that way. Examples: JoJo's; MCU; Percy Jackson
Drama: A story where threats are of an interpersonal nature. Pretty much every romance fits here. Examples: Toradora; Aftermath; The Host
Slice of Life: A story that may not even have any threats, that is just a section of someones life, usually focusing on being down to earth and set in our reality. Most comedies fit here. Examples: Love Chunibyo & Other Delusions; Babel; Ein König für Deutschland (I really can't come up with any english ones)
Thriller: A story that doesn't quite fit any of the top 3 that is of a darker nature. Examples: Paprika; Saw; Sherlock Holmes
For-Kids: A story with fewer elements as to be easier digestible for children. Much violence won't be found here. Examples: PreCure; Spongebob; Harry Potter
But there's a problem. I've come across stories that don't fit any of these. Mainly "The Ancient Magus Bride" as it doesn't have much action or much of a threat all the time, only in sections. It has magic so t doesn't fit into SoL. It's partially darker, but also partially very upbeat and bright. And it's definitely not for children, including slavery, suicide, gore and more. And all of Dowman Saymans stories (with the exception of weight lovers as it's a drama) as they're all just very weird.
So it's definitely flawed, but I feel like it's almst right. Any ideas for improvements?
Edit: I get it I'm wrong. My concept of genre isn't actually what genre is. My genre were designed to give a vague idea of the feeling of the story, whilst actual genre are a bunch of tags that together try to vaguely summarize the content of the story. The use of genre bothers me as it too often defines the story. Instead of a story being written and then assigned a genre, most stories are written to fit into a genre or a combination of genre and are judged off of that. The stories I couldn't fit into my theory are stories written disconnected from the concept of genre. Also, I don't think fantasy is a genre as it can't stand on its own, unlike any other genre.
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u/potentialPizza Aug 16 '20 edited Aug 16 '20
Yeah, uh, no.
No offense but this is a bit of a ridiculous thing to try to be doing. You aren't going to be able to categorize all stories with five genres. You simply won't be. There's a few issues with this.
1. The broadness of genres:
You might be able to think of five genres that cover 90% of stories. Arguably, your system does. But to do so, you need each of the five genres to cover so many stories that they essentially become meaningless. You claim that Thriller and For-Kids are the catch-alls, but aren't all of them? It's absurd to say that Percy Jackson and JoJo fit into the same genre just because they both happen to feature action, but does anybody honestly believe those stories are very similar? Well, they aren't as different as Spongebob and Harry Potter, yet your system puts them in the same genre.
Having action simply is not enough to say two things are in the same genre. I can think of plenty of major, distinct genres, that could all fall under "action" but are nearly nothing like each other. Superhero movies, battle shonen, '80s action movies, kung fu movies, wuxia, et cetera et cetera.
That doesn't even come close to how meaninglessly general genres like drama or for-kids. There are so many different types of drama that have entirely separate appeals. And kids aren't a genre, they're a demographic. Spongebob and Sesame Street are both for kids, but are entirely different experiences with different appeals. One's a kid-oriented comedy, the other is educational.
You could say that subgenres can still exist, but the point of your system is to have all-encompassing genres. But that's exactly the problem. These are all-encompassing enough to be meaningless.
2. The broadness of stories:
You could think of a genre system that, regardless of how well those genres actually work, does cover 90% of stories with only five genres. But I'd say it's quite literally impossible to cover 100%. There are simply far, far too many stories out there, from authors who are all experimenting with their own unique ideas, to all fit into so few categories.
The problem you have run into, of finding stories that don't fit them, is inevitable. You would still run into this problem if you had a system of 100 genres.
It should be clear that you'd run into the problem from the fact that your definitions aren't even very strict. Thrillers are a distinct genre with its own definition, and saying it's just those that "don't fit into the others and are darker" is kind of a meaningless category to put things into. Simply by defining it as a genre at all, with the concept of being "dark" (and trust me, thrillers don't even have to be dark), you already exclude stories that will end up not fitting.
3. The purpose of genres.
It can be neat and satisfying to think of a perfect categorization system, in many different contexts. When it comes to stories, for the reasons I listed above, I doubt it's possible, but there's nothing wrong with trying.
But other than for the fun of it as a thought experiment, I'd call this rather pointless and missing the reason genres exist at all.
Genres exist to help people find similar stories to those they like. If you enjoyed Sherlock Holmes, you can look for more stories labeled "Mystery" and find Agatha Christie's work.
When a genre becomes as broad as a simple label of "action" then it becomes meaningless. A gritty, realistic story about real-life martial artists, and a fantastical adventure of wizards, will both be action, but attract entirely different audiences. Plenty of people will enjoy both, but recommending one based off the other solely because they're both action will leave people confused at why you think they're similar experiences.
But at the same time, genres become useless (other than to niche groups) when they become too specific. They can be helpful to a few people if they want to find something very similar to something they already like, but the stricter the criteria, the less you can actually recommend, and the less significant the existence of the genre becomes.
So most genres hover around a middle ground, and how specific they are ends up being naturally determined by how people use them. While overall labels like "action" do exist, even a term like "action movies" tends to refer to a specific western style of them, rather than all action. Some labels like mystery are broad yet work pretty well, but mystery stories tend to be consistent.
Trying to categorize all stories into just five genres leans heavily into the broadness issue. They simply lose all meaning. Limiting yourself to five, and thus making your genres so broad that they end up including multiple more commonly-used genres, is bringing them out of the range where people have naturally decided they matter.
Let's say you could figure out the perfect five genres that cover every story. What would they actually do? There would be so little in common between various stories within the genre that you couldn't make recommendations based off them, and the genre labels wouldn't even be saying anything specific or meaningful about the stories within them.
Again, I don't begrudge you the fun of this thought experiment, OP. Nothing wrong with doing it. But your current genre definitions just aren't quite specific enough to say much of substance about the stories they contain. Five just isn't enough. It's a bit like saying you can categories all colors into just four colors. You could define the boundaries of each color in a way that technically covers them all, but there'd be little point to calling red and yellow by the same name.