Forum:Genre Refactor
So, I'm a person who likes to have a good top-level view of things. In some sense, tropes look at works from the bottom instead -- sets of little components which are assembled and arranged by master craftsmen to make a story.
I'm going to extend my crappy analogy further, because I'm an admin and no one will tell me to to shut up. Analog clocks are made of gears and springs. Electric engines are made from gears and wires. Mattresses are made from springs and wires. They all use similar components, but turn out to be radically different things. The components tell us something about the kind of object that can be made, but not much about the final object. Nor does it tell us the quality of the object, but that's another discussion.
What the components do tell us, is the type of object that can be made. And there's something about semiotics that suggests all mattresses, engines, and clocks are of their respective types -- they can even be "broken" and still be of the same type.
Well, the definition of "genre" is basically the same as "type" or "sort". Our page on Genre is still considered of the type "wiki page", though it's also "broken". It tells you more or less what you already knew, and then proceeds onto a list.
So I'm going to suggest a new definition: A genre is described by the set of tropes common in the works of that type. Horror Tropes describes the set of things common to horror stories. Though the common set of literary conventions (read:tropes) may change over time, which spawns new genres and subgenres.
But if genres are conglomerations of tropes, are they tropes themselves? I'm not sure, really. A set isn't really the same thing as an element. You can play with, or subvert the conventions (i.e. tropes) of a genre, but that essentially requires you to play with or subvert the individual tropes therein. Or perhaps to add tropes from outside the genre's set, but that's more like Genre Busting. I get the feeling that we should be treating genres differently than ordinary tropes, anyway.
Anyway, I'm fishing for ideas on what we should do with genres --the page and the categories -- and how we should do it. Vorticity (talk) 00:10, 30 March 2014 (UTC)