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3 Genres

I came up with the theory that there are only three media genres.

Those genres are:

Comedy
Horror
Pornography

I no longer believe this theory. But here is my reasoning: these three genres are the only genres that ellicit a measurable reaction. Comedy produces laughter, Horror produces fear, and Pornography, well... You get the picture.

The other genres are all combinations of these genres. "Adventure" is mild horror. "Romance" is a bit of pornography and a bit of comedy. You see?

Here is how these fusions tend to work:

Further Analysis/Disproving the Theory

I mentioned I no longer believe this theory- and that's because I beleive it is a shallow analysis of media. Anything that reduces storytelling to "building blocks" or "tropes" will always miss out major parts of the bigger picture and make it shallow, as if stories only serve a functional purpose.

Luckily for me I'm not the first person to propose a theory like this, so I can pin it on someone else. To my surprise someone sent my way that scholar Linda Williams had proposed a similar theory- hers was more about critiquing the depictions of women in fiction: 3 "body genres". Here's a snippet from the wikipedia page for "Body Horror" that tells you the kind of thing:

According to the film scholar Linda Williams, body horror falls into one of three "gross" genres or "genres of excess" which also includes pornography and melodrama.[3] Williams writes that the success of these body genres "is often measured by the degree to which the audience sensation mimics what is seen on the screen".[3] For example, an audience may experience feelings of terror through horror, sympathy through melodrama, or sexual arousal through pornography.[citation needed] Body horror specifically focuses on the limits and transformative capabilities of the human body.[4]


so as you can see she proposes something slightly different. That pornography, horror, and "melodrama" are the three genres that illicit "gross" responses. The inclusion of the third one is interesting, as I have not included melodrama. I believe it (and drama itself) would most likely fall under the "horror" category, which is where I include disgust and sadness.

One can argue this kind of boiled-down thinking dates all the way back to the way in SHAKESPEARE'S DAY (you have to capitalise that because you've got to say it in a posh voice) you had two genres (TWO!) comedy and tragedy. These genres were less defined by the content and more by the ending. A comedy had a happy ending and a tragedy had a sad ending. Never mind the intermediary content- if a really depressing sad story eventually has a happy ending- it's comedy!

CONCLUSION: Don't do media analysis so simplistically or you falsely convince yourself you've read everything there is to read. The true power of a story lies in the mood, the characters, the place. And many other things. A story OR piece of media is worth more than the sum of its parts.

-K.B