Specific hard to define genres

I’m opening this thread for the purpose of defining hard to define genres. Specific breeds of movies/shows/games/whatever with common traits that we want to place in a specific category but don’t know what that category is, and even if it should be a category. Depending on how successful we are, I may try to put some of these categories in the trope proposal thread.

I’ll start with a specific breed of film that was very common in the 2000s. A sort of cool dark urban fantasy thing. Stuff like Underworld would be the Ur-example, moving into other things like Hellboy, the Blade films, I Frankenstein, and the Last Witch Hunter. Very modern but very gothic too. Usually with fantasy monsters and creatures. There may also be a demimond or Wainscot Society. There is also a moodiness to the music and visuals.

Edited by BigBadShadow25 on Feb 26th 2024 at 2:11:53 PM

That sounds like Urban Fantasy with a 2000s aesthetic.

I've been keeping a list of some of my own on my troper page!

• Invisible Diaries or Unnatural Histories: Anthological series of loosely-related philosophical vignettes about strange-but-beautiful places or objects. Any connection between episodes is pretty minimal and often only thematic. There's a certain resemblance to the forgotten genre of Travellers' Tales, which evolved into modern high fantasy; this also creates overlap with episodic SF series that have a Navel-Contemplation-Inspiring-Scenario Of The Week and not much of a Myth Arc (e.g. early Star Trek, The Twilight Zone).
  • Invisible Cities
  • Invisible Games
  • SCP Foundation
  • Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies
• Mindscape Fantasy: The majority of the story happens in a symbolic representation of a character’s headspace, trying to pick through the dream logic and free-association to explore and possibly heal their subconscious. Dramatising introspection generally entails a person-vs-self conflict, but sometimes fantasy elements get others involved as well.
  • American McGee's Alice and Alice: Madness Returns
  • Inception
  • LSD: Dream Emulator
  • Paprika
  • Psychonauts
  • Yume Nikki
• Psychogeography Horror: This region of space is infected, and it acts as a Fisher Kingdom where everything inside slowly changes in accordance with its alien normality. Also, it's probably spreading. In any case, something about it is distressingly attractive, and on a psychological level the distinction between "adapt" and "perish" is inconsequential. Often makes me feel extremely gender, personally, but there isn't any one kind of applicability common between them. There are connections to Cosmic Horror, especially in how the latter will infiltrate stories and slowly transform their genre into itself.
  • Annihilation (2018)
  • Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun
  • The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals
  • New Phyrexia, and to a lesser extent Lorwyn/Shadowmoor
  • "The Red Tower" maybe?
  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
  • Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
  • "A Touch of Grapefruit" (aka "The Creeping Terror")
  • Uzumaki
• Whatever we call these: I've thought of it as "crimepunk" occasionally, but I don't think the criminal underworld setting they have in common is actually as important as their defiance of conventional narrative structure, downplaying or distributing out the role of protagonist between an ensemble cast of largely equal weight, and relying on flashbacks and anachronic order to slowly entangle each character's plot threads into a climactic knot. Stories whose general tone is a mixture of action and sonder.
  • Baccano! and Durarara!!
  • Hugo is unusual in that its "underworld" is unrelated to organised crime, though interestingly the director is otherwise known for them (but I haven't watched them so I don't know if they fit).
  • Lackadaisy
  • Repo! The Genetic Opera
  • Snatch.

I'm not really convinced these are useful categories for anyone else, though — it can be good just to remember that genres are often pretty arbitrary ways to group stories together and that they can change depending on the angle at which you consider them.

I've kinda noticed a trend in niche video games that use purposefully unfair mechanics to instill a sense of dread or smallness in the player. Off the top of my head:

Fear & Hunger (MASSIVE cw on this one.)

Pathologic

Rain World

Darkest Dungeon

It might be a sort of extension of Survival Horror, but it is a really fascinating space.

Edit: I just remembered the LISA series

I've always called them Misery Simulators, but if someone has a better name, I'm open to it. As for your genre, maybe Gothic Noir?

Edited by BILLYMAYS!!!! on Feb 27th 2024 at 4:42:13 AM

We gotta put names to these. What would you call your thing? And what would we call mine back at the top?