Is being Genre Blind a bad thing?

Just as the title says, is it wrong to not be aware of the tropes at play? Or being aware of the trope and ignroe it?

edited 10th Mar '12 11:55:36 AM by GAP

It depends on the execution.

Depends on setting. In a modern or future setting, I do generally find Genre Blind characters annoying. Society today is sufficiently media-saturated that people displaying total ignorance of tropes is something I find fairly hard to stomach.

This doesn't mean that characters have to be Genre Savvy either. On the contrary, I think it's perfectly sensible for people to, say, deny they're in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse because "zombies aren't real". What doesn't really make sense is for them to have no idea what zombies are in the first place.

It seems to me the most Gene Savvy thing to do most of all is not fight but that is not possible in fiction.

edited 10th Mar '12 12:01:28 PM by GAP

I'd say it's not bad at all. Real life isn't a fictional work. In real life, a badly injured enemy is most likely to die even if you don't stick around to actually watch them die. If something like a Zombie Apocalypse occurred in real life, there's not any guarantee that the zombies would act the way they do in horror films. And so on, and so forth.

I actually find Genre Savvy quite tiring. It's OK in comedy with a brittle fourth wall, but there are few things that annoy me more in a serious work than characters acting as if they know they're in a story. Real people don't do that.

I'd say that's not the same thing as being Genre Blind.

I like my characters to have at least a little Genre Savviness; you know, it's kind of related to how we have stuff like Reality Is Unrealistic. I don't like it when it crosses over into Ass Pull territory, when characters guess major plot twists correctly in improbable circumstances and turn out to be right or wrong when it's convenient for them.

edited 10th Mar '12 3:12:46 PM by CrystalGlacia

Really depends on what you are writing. If you are writing a serious detective work, making sure you get it as real as possible, while still being entertaining, then the detectives are going to be genre blind, otherwise the cops will arrest someone who says something inconsequential at the start of the investigation.

In a 5 vs 1 situation, the 1 tends to get his head kicked in.

For the first example, they won't arrest someone just for an inconsequential remark, but they might take note of that remark as potentially important. There's a degree of overlap between being Genre Savvy according to the rules of fiction, and being clever and observant according to real-life standards.

For the second example, I think it's a little silly for the hero to think he can win a fair fight against five people just because he's the hero, but it's even more silly for the hero to actually win. Much more interesting, at least to me, is either a character who fights out of desperation and gets his ass kicked, or a character who knows full well he can't win fairly (either seeking to win unfairly, or just running for dear life.)

It's also worth noting that there's different kinds of genre blindess/savvy. Being familiar with and acting on tropes about zombies or some other fictional entity is different from being familiar with and acting on narrative tropes like the ones that have just been mentioned.

Inherently, no. However, unintentional Genre Blindness in not-very-deep-Worldbuilding is so frequently cliche, boring and poorly executed. It can be done well especially if you aren't running on being a Dancing Bear like what Avatar did showing off 3D technology. In shorter terms, if the writing is good enough nobody's going to care that the characters and/or setting is Genre Blind or that the work when analyzed from a distance is a total Cliché Storm.

To be brutally honest, I'd rather watch a Genre Blind work done well than a half dozen so called post-modern works that throw the Fourth Wall to the winds.