Misused: Genre Busting

I feel uneasy opening a new TRS thread, but this trope seems to have quite a bit of misuse and shoehorning. I removed a couple of bad examples (Sailor Moon & Back To The Future, two series that are firmly in a specific genre), but there still seems to be a lot of unfitting examples, probably due to the "positive" feel of the trope, so people like to add their favourite series, despite it not actually being an example. Listed on the trope page:

• Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, starts off as a routine Gaming and Sports Anime and Manga that gradually morphs into a full-blown Mind Screw, with a chaser of psychological exploration and numerous Take Thats at shonen anime tropes and concepts from its franchise's original series. - I seriously doubt this is a valid example, more like fans trying to make the show sound deep.
• Have fun listing Slayers as a single genre of anime. Set in a fantasy world, it includes comedy, action, and large amounts of drama...often into a single episode! - As a fan of Slayers, I can tell you pointblank it's a fantasy series, nothing else.
• The Pixar example - most of those can be fit into a single genre, even if they have elements from other genres. For example, The Incredibles is very much a superhero movie.
• Footloose: comedy? drama? romance? musical? You tell me. - Actually, I can tell you - it's a musical movie.
• Teen Titans is a superhero action cartoon whose animation is often more inspired by Tex Avery or the weirder side of Anime than anything in U.S. Comic Books, yet often has very dark, dramatic storylines and, on a few occasions, will have an episode focus almost entirely on character interactions, with the obligatory supervillain battle relegated to a minor B-plot. - Animation styles equal genre busting now? Ov vey.

The wicks are unfitting, too, with works like Romeo & Juliet, Samurai Pizza Cats (Really????) and Recess, of all the cartoons out there, listed.

IMHO, for this trope to avoid misuse it needs a clear definition on exactly what elements make up a genre-busting fictional work.

Ok, yeah, this is a mess. I think the first thing we need here is a definition tweak. People seem to be shoehorning anything with any emotion into this. Ugh. What we have here is a gush magnet.

Part of the problem is that most of the examples should be on Neoclassical Punk Zydeco Rockabilly which is our Genre Mashup trope.

edited 5th Jan '16 3:40:52 PM by shimaspawn

The big problem I think is that is a horribly obtuse music specific name. A more general Genre Mashup trope would probably be the best.

Genre-Busting as a 'does not belong to any genre' almost does not exist because almost everything has been done before and every example is this + this + this.

edited 5th Jan '16 4:26:51 PM by Memers

So I came up with some criteria to determine if a work of fiction is Genre-Busting, using Haruhi Suzumiya as a jumping-off point. Tell me if it's good:

• Must include elements from multiple genres, not just drama & comedy combined, or something borad like that. Haruhi is a Japanese School Club series, Sci-Fi series, Romantic Comedy, and (occasionally) a Mystery (like in Remote Island Syndrome) all in one. Genre Busting
• Back To The Future is a Sci-Fi flick with some Period Piece like elements, and a lot of comedy & drama mixed in. Not Genre Busting, because drama & comedy is too broad; almost all fictional stories have both drama and comedy at some point. And the Period Piece elements are a rather minor part of the overall story.

edited 5th Jan '16 7:32:15 PM by YasminPerry

That would be completely wrong. Haurhi is not Genre-Busting. It mashes up multiple genres which makes it Neoclassical Punk Zydeco Rockabilly which needs it's own clean up effort.

Any definition of this that has Haurhi qualify is a bad one. That's not what this trope is for.

Genre-Busting is for works like Katamari Damacy or Frankenstein when it was first written. Works that when they're created defy all genres because the genres they belong in don't exist yet.

edited 5th Jan '16 7:52:54 PM by shimaspawn

One is a The Same But More of Genre Mashup.

Two is just a set piece for a time travel story, its not even a Genre Mashup.

Genre-Busting is X literally did not exist till Y was made and it does not fit any kind of Genre period. It may make a new genre or it might not.

God Neoclassical Punk Zydeco Rockabilly needs a freaken rename so badly its not even freaken funny. Its so underused outside the music section its stupid.

edited 5th Jan '16 8:05:08 PM by Memers

If is true, then there shouldn't even be too many examples. You can only invent so many genres.

The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Metroid Prime defining "First Person Adventure" or something, and even then it's basically First-Person Shooter combined with Metroidvania.

edited 5th Jan '16 9:10:59 PM by Karxrida

There honestly shouldn't be that many and most of the modern ones are games since it's an emerging media.

Yeah there should be VERY few examples for this, Katamari Damacy might be the only recent example of this I can think of simply because it is so non-standard and truly does not fit in any kind of genre.

Himitsu Sentai Goranger would be another being so different than pretty much anything else at the time.

Cutey Honey as well being so different from anything else it was described as a 'super hero' show even though it really wasn't. Now we would call it a Magical Girl Warrior show aimed at boys, a genre that was created 15 years after Cutey Honey aired.

edited 5th Jan '16 10:46:15 PM by Memers

The actual examples of this are far more interesting than a simple genre mashup though.

There are quite a few older historical examples, like I said with Frankenstein.

• Finnegans Wake also because it's a singular pin point of incomprehensibility.
• Dungeons & Dragons which single handedly invented the RPG.

The more modern examples will probably be weird things.

• There's Flower where you are the wind and you bloom flowers. Even now the closest thing to a genre the wiki has for it is Art Game.
• Depression Quest where the genre is experiencing mental illness interactively.
• Minecraft may seem run of the mill these days, but it was the first of it's genre.
• Thief (the original) was the first stealth game of it's type.

I think what I'm saying is there are lots of examples, they just take a little more looking for.

edited 5th Jan '16 11:03:38 PM by shimaspawn

The origins of video game genres like Pong being the first sports video game ever too would be something. DOTA was so unique no one knew what to call it as well as Rogue

Anyway I propose

edited 5th Jan '16 11:16:25 PM by Memers

I'm for that suggestion, but have a few reservations about the name Genre Mashup. Part of me worries that if we give it too generic of a name it and Genre Buster will sound like they're the same trope to a casual troper. I would rather keep the current name, or something in it's vein. It's a Snow Clone of Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot, though maybe without being so music specific.

edited 5th Jan '16 11:20:23 PM by shimaspawn

Genre Mashup is probably the clearest thing I can think of, the trope is literally taking different genres and bringing them together into a single work. IE Persona 4 is a Dungeon Crawler RPG x Dating Sim

It fits well with Outside Of Genre Foe, I think that is what it was called, and Temporary Genre Change tropes like RPG Episode.

But Haruhi is listed as Genre-Busting on its page, though, which is why I assumed it was correct.

Lots of these bad examples are probably listed as genre busting on their pages.

Haruhi combines a whole bunch of Sci-Fi / Fantasygenre elements like Alien On Earth, Time Traveler, Super Hero, Magical Girlfriend, Battle Harem and places them in a Slice Of School Life setting. There is nothing unique about it, aside for being pretty well written for an LN, hell it can't be unique or else Haruhi would never have thought of it.

It is just a Genre Mashup, a large one but still just a Genre Mashup. It's been done before too Project A Ko had everything but the time traveler in its school life mashup.

edited 6th Jan '16 9:40:34 AM by Memers

So, Memers, can you explain to me the difference between Genre-Busting & Genre Mashup? Because I'm a little confused when it comes to the difference between them.

Zapped, didn't read shima's post all the way through.

edited 6th Jan '16 9:50:51 AM by Willbyr

Genre-Busting is literally something so completely different from anything that came before it that it does not fit in any genre period. Something like Pong when it first came out, nothing like it existed before it.

Genre Mashup is take various elements from different genres and toss them in one work.

No music, people already think it's only about music as it is.

edited 6th Jan '16 9:54:21 AM by Memers

Ok, imagine a genre as a standard box of tropes. You don't have to use all of them, and sometimes you toss in a few extra, but this is the core set for making the work.

• Genre Mashup: Is when you use two or more of these trope boxes.
• Genre-Busting: Is when you go, screw those boxes. I don't need no boxes, I'm going to make my own.

Now, sometimes after a work has done some Genre-Busting people will look at it and package the tropes it used into a box so it retroactively belongs in a genre, but at the time it was created, there was no premade tool set.

So, shimaspawn, abiding by your definition, would FLCL be Genre-Busting?. It doesn't seem to fit into any established genre to me. (I hope I'm right this time.)

Genre Mashup sounds good for that one. I think it's Genre-Busting that has a problematic name. It sounds like it's gushing itself, when the definition as explained in this thread is more simply "the origin of a genre." Yeah, maybe it originated a genre because it busted out of the confines of previous ones, but I think that's emphasizing the wrong part.

edited 6th Jan '16 10:46:31 AM by Jokubas

Its not always the origin of a genre.

Katamari Damacy may have inspired some other games but did not start a genre at all. It is so non-standard that the other wiki can only describe it as a "third-person puzzle-action video game" which is so general that it is not even funny.

Others like Cutey Honey are an Ur-Example of a genre created later.

Things like Rogue with Rogue Like and Dota for MOBAs though yes.

edited 6th Jan '16 10:59:06 AM by Memers

FLCL is a much better example. It uses a few Space Opera, and Slice of Life Tropes but mostly it's just uniquely weird. A lot of the ones that don't spawn genres don't do so because they're just too weird.

edited 6th Jan '16 11:00:30 AM by shimaspawn

Also, this might help explain why Back To The Future was on the page: http://sfdebris.com/videos/films/backtothefuture.php (Mostly starting at 2:57 in the first video)

You can argue it's "busting" (in a denotative sense, not necessarily a trope sense, hence misuse) in that it combines several factors that typically do not share an audience. The romantic comedy people think it's not raunchy enough, and the more family-friendly people think it's too raunchy. It essentially ends up as its own genre because its genre overlap is not an audience overlap.

edited 6th Jan '16 11:11:43 AM by Jokubas