Genre Shift: Difference between revisions

'''Narrator:''' I am your permit, your license, your permission to drive. I am a privilege, and an obligation... Your obligation to drive skillfully, carefully, and legally.

''(Someone suddenly gets into a car crash, with quick cuts to up-close shots of innocent bystanders reacting, before settling on a long shot of a traffic light in a fog of smoke.)''

 

The weird cousin of [[Executive Meddling]], except it can be planned in advance by the writers.

Controversial or extremely different ideas are very hard to get past sponsors and audiences suspicious of anything new and unfamiliar. An easy if sneaky way around this is merely to present the beginning of the story as something familiar. However, once the main plot kicks in, your audience is hopefully loyal enough not to notice the quick shift in tone and pacing. If you did it well, in hindsight they might notice little hints you dropped about what was to come. As a side effect, the story will probably also undergo [[Mood Whiplash]].

 

 

 

 

Even worse is if a genre shift is used as [[Deus Ex Machina|the solution to a plot point]], which just feels tacky.

If this happens one time only in a series before reverting back to the main genre, it's an [[Out-of-Genre Experience]]. If it happens before the work is released to the public, it's a case of [[Mid-Development Genre Shift]].

 

 

{{examples}}

** And then the 2 penultimate episodes were straightforward drama/suspense/action eps. So the shift... metalooped? Is that a word?

* ''[[Soukou no Strain]]'' had a first episode much like a [[Shojo]] series, and though its marketing in the [[Bishoujo Series]]-focused ''Megami Magazine'' could predict that that would change, no one predicted its quick shift to angst and its new motto in [[Anyone Can Die]].

* ''[[Ouran High School Host Club]]'' went through most of the [[Anime]] as an over-the-top [[The Parody|parody]] of [[Shojo]] drama, but in the last few episodes became more of a shojo drama with jokes added.

* One may be excused for thinking that ''[[Guyver]]'' is a typical school-based shonen anime after the first few issues/episodes. But this changes pretty rapidly when {{spoiler|the school is blown up by either Zoanoids or Guyver 2, depending on what medium you prefer}} and Sho is almost never seen in school again.

* The OVA ''[[Moldiver]]'' spends three episodes as a gender-bending superhero send-up before abruptly switching into a serious drama in the final two episodes.

* ''[[Berserk]]'', though it does show a number of demons at the beginning of the anime and a fight with demonic [[Blood Knight]] Nosferatu Zodd early on in the anime, goes from grim and gritty medieval fantasy into straight up horror in the final episodes when {{spoiler|Griffith makes his [[Deal with the Devil]] and becomes [[Dark Messiah]] Femto, and the demons start coming ''en masse'' to rip apart the members of the Band of the Hawks who Griffith has marked out for sacrifice}}. Since both Guts and Casca are marked with the Godhand's [[Magnetic Plot Device|Brand of Sacrifice]] as a result of Griffith's betrayal, both of them have to deal with the monsters from that point forward, and they soon become Guts' primary enemies.

* The ''[[Suzumiya Haruhi]]'' series (both the original light novels and the anime) begins as a comedy series that, while featuring a very eccentric protagonist in [[Genki Girl]] Haruhi, was still a fairly realistic [[Slice of Life]] comedy. Then the aliens, time travelers, and psychics start turning up, and we get the big reveal that {{spoiler|Haruhi is God (or at least the next best thing), and her subconscious desires can warp reality, or even destroy the universe if she becomes bored enough.}} It actually remains a [[Slice of Life]] comedy for the most part, but it's slices of much weirder lives than we originally thought.

* ''[[Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle]]''. It starts out as standard fairly light shonen fare, then takes an extremely abrupt left turn in Tokyo onto [[Mind Screw]] Way towards Drama Town.

* Oh God, ''[[Narutaru]]''. It initially shows signs of being a lighthearted, female version of [[A Boy and His X]]... only to suddenly change into a dark, depressing series with lots of horrible things.

* ''[[D.Gray-man]]'' has evolved somewhat from being a [[Horror]] Gothic [[Shonen]] series to more of a... normal [[Shonen]] series. Oddly enough, if the [[D.Gray-man/Nightmare Fuel|Nightmare Fuel page]] is to be believed, the switch from horror-style [[Monster of the Week]] plots to a more complicated storyline has actually made it a lot ''more'' scary.

 

 

* ''[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/404359/1/Gaijin Gaijin]'' started as a darkly comic [[Self-Insert Fic]] in which the SI character was essentially Murphy's Law incarnate (''despite'' being more powerful than he had any right to be). Then he started disguising himself as [[Spider-Man (Comic Book)|Spider-Man]]. Then more analogues of Marvel characters started appearing, the most recent as of this writing being the Fantastic Four and "Tako-sama" (Doctor Octopus)...

* ''[[My Immortal]]'' starts off as a fairly generic, albeit a little over-the-top, ''[[Harry Potter]]'' badfic with a typical [[Mary Sue]] protagonist and the [[Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls|usual focus on relationships, clothing and teen popular culture]]. Then it gradually turns into a surrealistic mish-mash of fanfic clichés and confused plot points involving such things as [[Time Travel]]—sort of like a badfic version of ''[[Lost]]''.

* ''[[Undocumented Features]]'' started off as a joke, a corny self-insert fic in which college students launch part of their dormitory into space to fight anime villains. It quickly went [[Grimdark]] with the "Exile" plot, stabilized into an odd mash-up of science-fiction adventure, has intermittently gone [[Song Fic]], and has dipped into romantic fantasy with the "Symphony of the Sword" plot.

 

 

* The ''[[Discworld]]'' series started off as fairly straightforward parodies of [[Heroic Fantasy]]. Later novels have been much more heavily focused on social satire, with heavy emphasis on philosophy and topics such as morality, class warfare, religion, theoretical physics, and modern city life. It works because they're still bloody hilarious.

* The ''[[Harry Potter]]'' books started off as a slightly tongue-in-cheek [[Urban Fantasy]] and gradually became an epic [[High Fantasy]] in which [[Anyone Can Die]]. [[J. K. Rowling]] planned from the start that the series would become [[Darker and Edgier]] as Harry (and his readers) grew up.

* P.C. Hodgell's ''[[Chronicles of the Kencyrath]]'' series starts out in [[Low Fantasy]] territory in the first book, ''God Stalk''; while there's foreshadowing there, the wider [[High Fantasy]] plot doesn't really emerge until the second book, ''Dark of the Moon''. The shift alienated some readers, who wanted more of the same style of book as the first.

* [[Orson Scott Card]]'s ''Treasure Box'' turns out to be {{spoiler|one of his "tales of dread,"}} but you don't realize it's in that genre until well into the story, about the same time the main character does.

* [[Vladimir Vasilyev]]'s novel ''The Black Relay Race'', while not a direct sequel to his ''Death or Glory'' novel, takes place in the same 'verse. However, unlike ''DoG'', which involves a human colony discovering that there's more to humans than meets the eye, while alien races are hunting them, ''The Black Relay Race'' is a horror novel, taking place on a space yacht transporting strange cargo with the crew disappearing one-by-one. Then follow the novels ''The Legacy of Giants'' and ''No One but Us'', with an additional genre shift, although much more like the first novel than the second. These are pure war novels, inspired by [[David Brin]]'s ''[[Uplift|Startide Rising]]''.

* [[Dale Brown]] books: ''The Tin Man'' was the first one to be almost entirely focused on the dirtside perspective, unlike previous titles that were almost solely the flyboys' game. More infantry-centric content started creeping in after that.

 

== Live Action TV ==

** And then season six ditches the science fiction in favor of becoming a fantasy show.

** The shift from science fiction to fantasy is definitely the most clear cut example of genre shift in the show. The dramatic shift from (occasionally bonkers) sci-fi to straight up [[A Wizard Did It]] fantasy left a sour taste in the mouth of many longtime fans, to the point that season 6 more than any other season has been fanonically disregarded by many. Lost never really shifted into sci-fi to the same jarring degree, it was really grounded in it from the beginning, albeit far more subtly and with a greater emphasis on mystery than anything else.

* ''[[Passions]]'' started out as a typical soap opera and quickly mutated into a supernatural weird-fest. Ditto for ''[[Dark Shadows (TV series)|Dark Shadows]]'' and ''[[General Hospital]]'''s [[Spin-Off]] ''Port Charles''.

* The early episodes of ''[[Lonelygirl15]]'' were in the style of a realistic video blog. Over time, it turned into a sort of soap opera/drama/thriller hybrid with evil cults, conspiracies, guns and laser beams. For an example of just how different the show has become, compare classic episode "Proving Science Wrong!"[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQEBobE9XZs\] to one of the early season 2 episodes, "Home Invasion."[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnVvMzQpGUo\]

* ''[[House (TV series)|House]]'' was pitched to Fox as a show somewhat along the lines of ''[[Diagnosis: Murder]]'', where the doctors use their medical skills to solve crimes. It quickly moved away from this and became a drama centered on the fact that "everybody lies," from the patients to [[Jerkass|House]] himself.

* ''[[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine]]'' is a slightly odd example since, in hindsight, the static setting seems an obvious way to do more [[Story Arc|arc-based]] storylines and use lots of recurring characters but, in the beginning, it was just normal [[Star Trek]] with a gimmick -- the only important difference was that the [[Once an Episode|alien of the week]] from the [[Planet of Hats]] came to ''them'' instead of the other way 'round thanks to the wormhole discovered in the first episode. The first season is almost indistinguishable from other Treks, and only when the characters are established do the writers start doing different things.

* For much of its long life, ''[[The Bill]]'' was a [[Police Procedural]], but when a new executive producer took over in 2002 it rapidly shifted into a [[Crime-Time Soap]], alienating many long-term fans.

* ''[[Baywatch Nights]].'' Goes from action to sci-fi in season two.

** All the way back in the 1960s, when the show first aired, it was meant to be an Edutainment show with a heavy focus on history and science. Now its a sci-fi fantasy horror dramedy where Agatha Christie fought off murderous alien wasps and Winston Churchill sent spitfires into space to fight alien crafts. So, yeah, the genre changed somewhere there.

** Series 6 turned into a [[Sci Fi]] [[Soap Opera]] at times.

* ''[[Jonas]]'''s first season was your average sitcom, featuring the Jonas Brothers in the title role of course. Its second season, ''Jonas L.A.'', has a stronger plot and is a borderline soap-opera, complete with [["Previously On..."]] and [["On the Next..."]] segments.

* The first season of ''[[Prison Break]]'' revolves around [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|an honest-to-god prison break]] with a cast composed almost entirely of stock characters ripped from classic prison movies, and the second season continues it with the escaped inmates on the run from the FBI. By the end of the second season, the escapees have all successfully evaded the law {{spoiler|(the few that survived, at least...)}} but the writers manage to justify the title by having the main characters all [[Ass Pull|rounded up for random reasons]] and [[It Got Worse|sent to a new, even worse prison in Panama]]. Then the final season rolls around, and the whole series morphs into some weird cross between ''[[MacGyver]]'' and ''[[The Bourne Series]]'' about the main cast trying to take down some [[The Syndicate|evil shadow corporation]] using zany schemes whipped together with loot from the Dollar Store.

* ''[[Community]]'' most episode are comedic joke a minute following the study group and their antics on the Greendale campus. However there are some switchups. "[[Community/Recap/S2/E10 Mixology Certification|Mixology Certification]]" keeps this up for the first five minutes, but as soon as things switch to the bar, things become more somber. The end of the episode isn't comedic, but poignant. Consuming alcohol doesn't make the characters do anything funny, but makes things ''sad'' (it's the [[Lifetime Movie of the Week|"Lifetime original movie of beverages"]] as Troy puts it).

** ''Community'' is renowned for managing all sorts of single-episode genre shifts perfectly. It's been an action movie ("Modern Warfare"), a Rankin-Bass style Christmas Special ("Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas"), a spaghetti Western ("For a Few Paintballs More"), a single-camera documentary show ("Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking"), and even a zombie movie ("Epidemiology"). The reason it can pull all of this off is because while each episode is great example of the genre it's shifted to, it's also a great episode of ''Community'' at the same time.

 

== Music ==

* The Cult started out as a heavily-produced, effect-laden musical experience that inspired modern Goth rock for their first two albums. On their third album, Electric, however, they had finished recording the entire thing when they realized that they didn't really like the way it sounded, so they found a new producer with whom they re-recorded the entire album as a straight-up hard rocker that sounded quite a bit like AC/DC and other heavy rock bands of the time. The resulting schism in their fanbase makes them seem like they became an entirely new band.

* [[Miyavi]] has gone through several genre shifts, starting with a kind of [[Marilyn Manson]]-esque kind of rock, moving to acoustic pop and rock, then into a fusion of hip-hop and punk, and now has his own blend of rock the showcases his percussive guitar technique.

* Happens occasionally in [[Hip Hop]]. If a rapper is also a decent singer, there's a very high chance (that increases as they get older) that they'll abandon rapping completely in favor of singing. This isn't necessarily a ''bad'' move; the quality is still high and they're likely to appeal to a wider audience (especially if their career was beginning to stale), but fans of their older material might feel left out in the cold. See: [[Queen Latifah]], [[Kid Rock]], [[Lauryn Hill]], Cee-Lo, Andre3000, etc.

** The Black Eyed Peas. 'Nuff said. Those of you who only knew of them post-''Elephunk'', listen to [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqoKEyvdjv8 "BEP Empire"] and be utterly amazed.

* Chester Gould's strange twist of ''[[Dick Tracy]]'' from crime drama (albeit with futuristic technology) to SCI-FI, one of the most obvious genre shifts of all time. This is so (in)famous, it could almost be the trope namer.

* During the Great Depression, a good number of comic strips shifted from domestic comedy to comedic adventure.

 

 

*** Seems to be toyed with in ''Uncharted 2'' when {{spoiler|you bump into what seems like a yeti-type monster while in the mountains. However, later on it turns out to be a bunch of apparently bullet resistant natives in suits. Which you then discover are actually mythical ape-like Guardians of Shangri-la, so everything is okay again.}}

* ''[[Half Life]]'' started as a deconstruction of [[I Just Want to Be Badass]], and is currently one of its most shining examples.

* In ''[[Medal of Honor]]: Airborne'', after 5 missions of largely realistic gameplay based on actual historic [[World War II]] campaigns, the final mission throws bulletproof, heavy-machinegun-wielding Nazi [[Super Soldier]]s at you, and takes place in, as [[Zero Punctuation|Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw]] put it, "a giant concrete tower that can only be described as a '''Doom Fortress'''."

** Those "doom fortresses" are actually real. 8 were built, they were ridiculously sized, and they had more refuge in intimidation than use. I mean, come on, they're towers built to repel air attacks that are also made of concrete. Still true to this trope, however, the Allies never actually attempted an attack on one of them.

* ''[[Oddworld]]: Stranger's Wrath'' starts out as the Oddworld equivalent of a western. Mysterious [[Bounty Hunter]]? Check. Gun toting outlaws? Check. Hick Towns populated by chicken men? ...Um, Check. But then in the final third of the game, {{spoiler|after stumbling into an ambush set up by the [[Big Bad]], and getting hit with a [[Tomato Surprise]],}} the game shifts to a more traditional Oddworld setting as you help the native Grubbs overcome the [[Big Bad]]. This change completely overhauls the game. Stranger's costume changes, the concept of Moolah (and therefore the concept of enemy bounties) is removed (enemies are turned into ammo instead. Don't ask), the soundtrack changes from spaghetti western music to epic orchestrated pieces, the enemies change from gruff outlaws to military Mooks, new gameplay mechanics are added, and the scenery colors shift from browns and reds to blues and greys.

* The ''[[Chzo Mythos]]'' goes from fairly conventional (but good) horror, to [[Recycled in Space|SPACE horror]], to [[Cosmic Horror]].

* In terms of in-game Genre Shift, ''[[Spore]]'' goes from the hunt/gather adventure-game-esque "Cell" and "Creature" stages, to real-time strategy for "Tribal" and "Civilization," to a [[Wide Open Sandbox]] for "Space."

* ''[[Okami]]'' gets a bit of a shift towards the end, from a feudal Japan mythical fantasy to a feudal Japan {{spoiler|Sci-Fi}} fantasy.

** This has happened a lot with the [[Shin Megami Tensei]] series. The main series tends towards dark, post-apocalyptic stories, the first two games and [[Strange Journey]] having heavy sci-fi elements (you use some kind of technological device to summon your demons,) while [[Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne|Nocturne]] does away with all the sci-fi elements. Meanwhile, the ''[[Persona (video game)|Persona]]'' series ditches the post-apocalyptic elements and introduces high-school life and Jungian psychology into the mix, with the demons becoming aspects of a person's psyche, and the enemy demons doing the same, turning into Shadows starting with [[Persona 2]]. By [[Persona 3]], [[Slice of Life]] and [[Dating Sim]] elements are introduced, while [[Persona 4]] turns into a more [[Lighter and Softer|light-hearted]] [[Scooby Doo]]-style murder mystery with MegaTen trappings. Meanwhile ''again'', the [[Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army|Raidou]] [[Raidou Kuzunoha VS King Abaddon|Kuzunoha]] games are [[Alternate History]] with more action elements and also more light-hearted, while [[Devil Survivor]] acts very much like a [[Deconstruction]] of the [[Mons]] genre in general. And that's only counting a ''few'' of the games in the franchise.

* ''[[Super Mario Galaxy]]'' starts off like most typical ''Mario'' games, where the title plumber had to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser (in this game, Bowser kidnaps Peach and carries her off into space), but about halfway through the game, the plot unexpectly shift to a sad story about the loss of a different princess' family, but then cuts back to Mario still trying to save Peach from Bowser.

 

== Web Comics ==

* ''[[Questionable Content]]'' started out about a post-college Indie rocker, his friends, and his weird little [[Robot Buddy]]. Then Faye got her tragic backstory, Pintsize got increasingly destructive and psychotic, Raven got kinda skanky, etc, until you can barely recognize the characters from the early strips.

* ''[[YU+ME: dream]]'' starts out as a romantic story between two girls at a Catholic school, dealing with the various issues that comes with, with some family drama—an average young adult romance story. Then after a hefty [[Wham! Episode]] it turns into a slightly-psychological adventure-based story on an epic scale.

* [[Bob and George]] was originally intended to be a superhero comedy webcomic about the titular brothers. It changed into a sprite comic after the author realized he couldn't draw.

* [[Kid Radd]] started out as a general parody of video games. Then Cerberus syndrome sets in.

* ''[[Homestuck]]'' started out as a simple [[Spiritual Successor]] to ''[[Problem Sleuth]]'', but in time became a riff on epic stories and creation mythos, which made the series much more popular. Later, When [[Ensemble Darkhorse|the trolls]] [[And Now for Someone Completely Different|were introduced]], the entire comic shifted to have [[Romantic Comedy]] elements and took a turn for the darker.

* Since-ended [[Keenspot]] comic ''Cool Cat Studio'' started out as a mundane office comedy without any hint of unusual goings-on. And then one of the characters got [[Abducted By Aliens]]. The sudden genre and tonal shift caused many readers to cry foul.

 

== Web Original ==

** As of it's later seasons, it is firmly entrenched in serious business, albeit with some gags.

* While many of the chapter reviews on the [https://web.archive.org/web/20150428022333/http://markreadstwilight.buzznet.com/ Mark Reads Twilight weblog] follow the traditional "quote the source text, [[Snark Bait|mock it ruthlessly]], add some funny [[Angrish]]" formula that's far too common in most [[MST]] blogs, reviewer [[Mark Reads Harry Potter|Mark Oshiro]] often goes out of his way to mix up the structure of his posts.

* The entire first season of [[Venture Brothers]] is pretty much just slapstick comedy in a parody setting; season 2 downplays the raw slapstick and up-plays the parody/[[Satire/Deconstruction|Deconstruction]] elements of the show, culminating in a funny but fairly serious season finale. Seasons 3 & 4 still feature a lot of humor, and it's definitely still a comedy show, but there's been a significant shift from it being a parody of sci-fi/action/everything to now being a genuine example of those genres.

* ''[[The Lion King]]'' has a particularly famous example of this trope. The first third or so focuses mainly on Simba's lighthearted escapades around his father's domain, with a tone and style typical of pretty much any Disney-made comedy. [[Mood Whiplash|Then Scar kills Mufasa and makes Simba think it was his own fault]]. The rest of the film becomes a practical drama that deals with Simba's guilt and his need to fulfill his destiny by kicking Scar off the throne of Pride Rock. [[Hakuna Matata|Lighthearted elements are still present, of course]].

* ''[[We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story]]'' starts out as a cheery musical film about cute talking dinosaurs, but about halfway through the film, it turns into an animated horror film about an evil scientist and his [[Circus of Fear]].

* ''[[Dreamworks Animation]]'': Originally, Dreamworks focused on sweeping epics, and more serious stories such as ''[[The Prince of Egypt]]''. These unfortunately fell under the umbrella of ''[[All Animation Is Disney]]''. Now, barring some of their [[Kung Fu Panda|recent]] [[How to Train Your Dragon|efforts]], it can be hard to remember when their films didn't include pop-culture references and celebrities.