Friday, July 17, 2020

The Potential Of Various Genres

Different individuals might find that they easily gravitate towards different genres within entertainment, and their favored genres will naturally have the potential to explore different aspects of human existence more thoroughly than others.  Some themes and storytelling approaches are especially suited to genres like horror, even if any work of entertainment could include sections that identify most with a genre other than the one(s) that summarizes the work's primary features.  Each genre can be intellectually appreciated for its own unique focus on specific components of reality.

For example, drama has a particular tendency to hold light to the potentially complicated layers of the human mind, whereas horror can draw attention to matters of epistemology and the metaphysics of supernaturalism more directly than many other genres.  It is not that drama and horror have elements that no other genre can possess, but that they can unify or emphasize certain elements of philosophy and storytelling in ways that are more focused than other genres would handle the same subject matter.

Fantasy is often used to present moralistic archetypes--though it can also be used to thoroughly deconstruct them, as Game of Thrones accomplishes.  Again, archetypes and deconstructions of those archetypes are not confined to fantasy, but not all genres are able to as naturally acknowledge or dismiss archetypal figures.  Furthermore, science fiction, romantic films, and other genres and subgenres have their respective thematic strengths that make them more suited to certain kinds of stories and subject matter than other genres.

Even comedy addresses the capacity for humor and laughter, things that are sometimes philosophically underappreciated and thus ignored or trivialized.  There is no part of reality or human nature (which is itself just one part of reality) that needs to be kept out of entertainment, no matter how lighthearted, dark, or subjectively offensive it might be.  All of human life can be displayed or dissected in various works aimed at prompting anything from catharsis to introspection to emotional excitement.

None of these genres are necessarily superior to the others in terms of their philosophical or storytelling potential, even if some examples from each stand above some examples from the others.  Different genres simply permit more specific explorations of the parts of reality that are more relevant to their own types of stories.  The fact that genres can overlap in a given work only highlights the fact that they are not thematic or artistic opponents that can never coexist in the same space.  Instead, they are a diverse set of tools for communicating a diverse set of concepts.

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