Just as Christina mentioned in her post, I previously associated the term ‘genre’ solely with categories for books and movies. This past week’s readings have redefined genre for me as a set of guidelines/expectations associated with and formed by the creation of repeated styles of content. In connection with the saying, “imitation is the best form of flattery,” we as humans have a subconscious tendency to draw ideas from each other. This includes the templates we follow with nearly everything we create. True originality is almost impossible, and that’s okay. Genres serve as a base for new interpretation. Having a starting point gives creators of content a varying degree of confidence that what they are working on will be generally accepted or understood, if not by all viewers, then at least by other creators of the genre they are creating within.
Another point of discussion that has come to my mind in relation to our readings is the looseness of genre interpretation. Movies are the best example I can think of for this. While I would consider Jordan Peele’s movie Get Out as a suspenseful thriller, the Golden Globes consortium nominated this movie under the “musical or comedy” category instead of the “drama” category. This sheds light to the issue surrounding the lines of genres. Is genre merely subjective, or are there certain objective criteria for categorizing content into genres?
In many instances, a case can be made for either side of the argument. Take Youtuber JennaMarbles into consideration. Many people watch her weekly videos for the sake of comedic entertainment. However, many of her videos involve Jenna trying out DIY projects. Despite her comedic approach/commentary, the structure of her videos follow similar guidelines to beauty, craft, and cooking Youtube videos. Because of this, one could argue that her channel is not strictly a comedy channel. So then, what is it?
Christina mentions a multi-genre project she once completed in the sense that there were multiple genres compiled into one project. Could multi-genre also be used to describe a video/blog/etc. that can be classified into multiple, separate genres?
Final Word Count: 348