The 4 Genres I love

 When it comes to the things I love in fiction, the reasons I prefer some series to others, outside of relatively universal reasons, I found there were five more specific things that appeal to me specifically and that four of them were exemplified to me by the four genres I love. So I wanted to make a quick blog about them. Obviously, this is generalities, many works in these genres contain multiple of these elements and sometimes don't even contain the appeal I associate with the genre, but I associate each genre with one of the appeals because the appeal is so generally abundant in the genre and I like the genre the most when it plays to that appeal. 

Magical Girls - Themes important to me

The Magical Girl genre is the collection of series where the protagonist is a girl, uses magic or magiclike powers, and that those points are somehow associated. It is a celebration of femininity by associating it with power.

Everyone I think prefers themes important to their life to ones unconnected to them to some extent, but for me the amount I like the themes of the word are truly one of the most important points. I don't really have an escapist tendency with fiction. When I watch fiction it never really leaves my mind that what I'm watching is fiction. Fiction is a form of communication to me, a way to express ideals, thoughts, or emotions in a more intuitive and full way that just saying it wouldn't get across. When I watch fiction every moment I am semi-consciously asking myself "What is the writer trying to communicate here." The works I have loved have expressed beautiful feelings or thoughts to me, things I can intuitively understand.

The Magical Girl Genre by it's very nature explores one of my favorite themes when well explored; the theme of gender. There are other themes I find especially compelling that also often show up in Magical Girl series, especially the subgenre that is my preference, the Magical Girl Warrior subgenre. Even more than what themes are communicated, I love the mode of transmission Magical Girls use to express themes. It is a common trait of MG to use the magical elements of the storytelling to link the literal events of the story with the emotional or symbolic undercurrent. I see this in other works, but is appears more routinely in the MG genre from what I have seen. This to me is part of the Platonic Ideal of storytelling, where there is no divide between the story and what it means. 

Superhero Fiction - Characters as Symbols

Superhero Fiction is fiction where the protagonist has unusual capabilities, often supernatural powers, and uses their powers to try to improve the world, often as a costumed alter ego/ They are differentiated from other stories where the protagonist has powers by the protagonist's general desire to aid and improve the world usually in the form of crime-fighting as opposed to a conventional hero's drive to stop a particular evil or complete a particular objective, befitting Superhero Fiction's origin in American Comic Books with no defined endpoint. 

As I mentioned I never really "disappear" into fiction the way others report. I see some people talk about fictional characters as though they were the speaker's friends. That is to say, the character seems to have a sense of reality to the speaker. This is not my experience, my experience of characters is that as communication tools they are most potent as symbols for something, icons or archetypes of a particular kind of personal or a particular idea personified. A character's level of "realism" is kind of irrelevant to me. If someone tries to assess Superman for his "realism", to me that seems to somewhat miss the point. Similarly outside the genre if someone tried to assess Cthulhu on the basis of his realism, once again I think they somewhat miss the point. Characters are most potent for me when they are personifications of some idea or an expression of a particular kind of person so that something can be expressed in their interactions with the plot. 

Superhero Fiction is full of this kind of symbolic personification. Superheroes are larger-than-life caricatures, embodiments of society's ideals which gives them a real kind of power. I am fascinated by the potency a character has to affect the real world just due to their nature as a symbol. One of the reasons I consider Superman one of the greatest characters ever made is that he gave hope to the Jewish community in the second World War, discredited the KKK, and prevented suicides in real life. He had a real, tangible, positive influence on the world despite not being real himself just by personifying real things. This is what I love most about the Superhero Fiction, that as their characters as expressions of the ideals that exist in reality, they have a very real power as symbols and also that as symbols the meaning of their actions are far more impactful in my mind than a character who doesn't represent anything quite so much. 

Mythological Fantasy - Sense of Immensity and Reverence

Mythological Fantasy is my name for the collection of works that exist in a world where one or more religions or supernatural worldviews are true and prominent even though the author doesn't necessarily believe in them. In other words, it's the writer trying to write a fantasy story set in a worldview they are trying to recreate. This might be a controversial viewpoint but I view an Atheist writing a story set in a Christian World, or a Western Christian writing a story set in a Buddhist world to be examples as the writer is trying to recreate a worldview they don't share, even if it is a prominent worldview in their time. The academic term for this is "Mythopoeia", the genre of consciously creating mythology and recreating the mythic worldview but I think Mythological Fantasy as a genre can be a bit more broad and include works that aren't trying to accurately reflect a mythology but more so just tell a story with influences of that Mythology (Such as the Disney Hercules film which doesn't try at all to accurately reflect Greek Mythology and is moreso trying to tell a story with some character concepts adopted from Greek Myth.) 

For the longest time, it felt like, most of my life, two disagreeable elements has been growing in popular culture that it seems like people are finally starting to get sick of, irreverence and irony. Series going for the "chaotic good quirky protagonists on an irreverent cheeky adventure" were everywhere for me growing up and for much of the 2010s. I longed for and clung to works that did the inverse, were sincere in their convictions, took themselves seriously, and presented their subject matter as dramatic and worthy of gravitas. If you can imagine two opposite problems; caring too little and caring too much, I am definitely more on the latter side temperamentally; I get easily frazzled and upset, I fixate on potential problems, I'm the kind of person that definitely probably cares too much rather than not caring enough. As such works that spoke to more were works that took themselves seriously, ones where the characters took things seriously and dramatically. I loved works that had ambition, that strove to go beyond all of them. I love works that depict the immense and worthy of reverence. This can include immense in space, the works that focus on the cosmic and universal. It can be immense in time, including a deep legacy and historical roots or looking for the eternal. It can be immense in-depth, works that focus on the deepest parts of the psyche. The things that are worthy of reverence, and giving them the reverence they deserve, that fulfills a longing in me. 

Mythological Fantasy by its nature tends to include these elements. In evoking religious ideals, there is an inherent sense of grandeur and immensity being evoked, notions of rituals and ideals that extended across cultures often extending across a nation or further for thousands of years, and dealing with matters that go so far as to concern themselves with their gods, their literal ideals worthy not just of reverence, of worship. Particularly the best Mythological Fantasy that evokes the spirit that animated these cultures, that expresses their ideals as they understood them, the result is something soul-expanding, which exposes oneself to the wide swaths of the collective human psyche and history, somehow at once both alien and familiar.

Occult Fiction - Invocation of the Metaphysical

Occult Fiction is something of a genre invention of mine to describe the intersection between Urban Fantasy stories with a more somber, melancholic tone and Gothic Horror. Broadly Occult Fiction is fiction with a particular fixation on Death, the Afterlife, or the Residents of the Afterlife (Angels, Demons, or Ghosts.) The genre is known for a melancholic tone as born of a genre focused on Death and its results, though being ultimately hopeful is also not uncommon. There are even comedic works I'd consider Occult Fiction. But what binds them as a genre in my eyes is the fixation on the ultimate fate of humans and the underlying atmosphere of the past and future creeping up on the present in the form of lingering spirits and Death's looming presence.

As mentioned, to me the truest purpose and strength of art is as a communication tool, a device that can express things in a way more intuitive and emotionally powerful than just expressing it verbally. There are many things I feel that I just can't express directly because they are too abstract, and I suspect the same is true of most people. But I can express it in the form of a hypothetical, given enough time. There are parts of the world we grasp without knowing why, spirits and concepts. To what extent these are metaphorical, just subjective perceptions that we are tricked into thinking have a life of their own I don't know, but if they are subjective perceptions then at least communicating them can create a greater bond and understanding between people, and it's possible we're expressing something deeper about reality as well. Fiction's power is in expressing their inexpressible things, the patterns of being we see without realizing.

Occult Fiction has this as its primary goal and with the most universal and ultimate realities. I think Occult Fiction excels at capturing the incomprehensible in terms such that we can glimpse it. I think it excels in creating an atmosphere that itself is a spirit, reflecting the psychic environment the heart wanders through. I love the way it captures the interplay of the vulnerability and beauty of the human condition in the face of the infinite and eternal. 

These are my favorite genres and how they relate to the things I love most in fiction. This was four out of the five, with the last being by far the most mundane, that being a fast pace. Few things put me off a series faster than someone saying "it gets good after the first 50 episodes." If an artist lets it get to that place, I feel like there's going to be an immense artistic difference between us that will always be there; the notion that the writer doesn't respect efficiency of communication, the honoring of each other's time. Time is the ultimate un-renewable resource and wasting someone's time is a big disservice to them. If a piece of art is a slow burn leading to one of the four above points, that's one thing but if it is a slow burn leading to none of the above, I will seriously question justifying the time spent. 

That leads me to another thing I wanted to mention. The above points may make me sound incredibly picky and judgmental, that if a work isn't doing a lot of very hard things I dismiss it entirely. However, these five points are much more "or" statements than "and" statements. I'd be thrilled if a work incorporated multiple but these are five distinct ways a work can be great and I'd be happy if a work had even one of them. Even if a work of fiction has no real themes important to me, if it's fast paced and doesn't waste my time, that's good. Even if a work of fiction's characters aren't really symbolic of anything and don't invoke any sense of archetypal power, if the work has an evocative atmosphere that speaks to something metaphysical, that's good. If a work has truly none of these then yeah I probably will feel neutral about it at best, but that doesn't happen that often. If a work has none of these then it's slow, tonally bland, small-minded, insincere, and lacks characters and themes I find interesting at which point I don't really feel bad saying I don't like it. As it is, these are the five specific things that most appeal to me in fiction and how four of them are exemplifed in the genres I like.