Posts tagged genre
Unpacking the Trash Can of Genre: Practical Literary Theory

When you select a genre and decide your going to produce a book, comic, film, or similar within it, you’re essentially taking a whole set of unexamined assumptions and saying that you’re going to abide by them to the exclusion of everything else. This is a mistake.

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Crossing Wires and Killing Punk

In fiction, and broadly in aesthetics, punk is largely anti-authoritarian but non-revolutionary. In the political compass sense, it tends towards the bottom or “libertarian” end (caveat: people who claim to be libertarian in the US political sense are not and never will be punk. Don’t @ me.) In narrative media, this tends towards a somewhat mythic structure (similar to the thing I called “the millennial monomyth” a while back), a paradigm that all -punk stories usually follow, similar to 19th century realism or naturalism in many ways. Consider a capable but fairly normal person who wishes to be largely left alone; consider some powerful agency or circumstance that will not do that. The story is the Rube Goldberg interaction that arises here.

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