Genre Language

What follows below is some text I submitted to one of my classes which I’m kinda thinking about a lot. So hey, if you find it here, Automated Grading software system, let me know.

Japanese media that we mostly experience is very genre, which I refer to in class as being unscrutinised. Broadly speaking genre media isn’t being made for mass-market appeal, but more niche, which means that their creation is more a matter of, for lack of a better phrase, filling in the blanks. In the west, some of our great genre media industries is the realm of the Erotic Novel For Women – the Mills & Boon archetype, where the quality of any individual piece isn’t really regarded at all, as long as the work hits a certain number of targeted goals. Is the central woman bosomy and relateable? Is the hunky man she’s going to smooch adequately mysterious and brooding? Are there three or four sex scenes in an exotic location? Okay, we’re done.

This style of genre structure follows in a lot of anime and manga and videogame media, where it doesn’t matter so much about what characters do or say as long as they hit some well-established beats of story. This means that genre, in Japanese culture, has a wealthy sort of ‘concept language.’ Characters translate reasonably well into totally different forms because the archetypes themselves are structurally components of the character. A tsundere character is not seen as boring or cliché, because the point of the character is to fulfil some element of that archetype, or to defy it.

This is, to me, super interesting because it implies a sort of inherent media discourse. The idea of character archetypes has a language in this genre media – and it informs the way that media is then made.