Jay Anderson Comparative Genre Anslysis Draft 2
Intermediate comp
Section 006
(Warning this article may contain spoilers for the people who haven’t watched some of the content mentioned read at your own risk!)
Have you ever watched an anime before, maybe you have that one friend that is a huge anime fan and talks about it alot. There are many different genres that go into an anime such as action, adventure, romance, horror and drama just to name a few. Like movies anime can have many sub-genres as well that can make them unique to other and can give the person watching a better understanding of who the target audience is using different demography to tell who it’s for. Genre can also be used to describe the different themes that can go into the story and tell what kind of content is going to be in the story and what its made up of. To tell you the truth there is probably an anime out there for just about everyone out in the world that they might enjoy.
Sub-Genres
Sub-genres are like secondary sources that go along with the genre to help the audience get a better understanding of what else is going to be in the story. These genres can sometimes be mixed together that way they make the story more interesting with different genres added in.
Anime has tunes of different sub-genres such as mecha which is an anime which feachers robots of some kind, school life which are anime that depicts the life of students in school, harem which is a anime where the main character is loved by multiple women thought this applies to female main characters as well which is a reverse harem which is where the female protagonist has more than one male love interest. There are many more type of sub-genres in anime that might have something for everyone in fact some of the sub-genres get their meaning from the japanese language. For example mahou shoujo can translate to magical girl with mahou meaning magic and shoujo meaning girl. Sub-genres are important to the story because they give the story more feel that way the audience can have some kind of emotion as they watch it, some animes might have more than one sub-genre. Take the anime ‘’My hero academia’’ (just to name a more well known one) it at first may seem like a superhero because of how everyone in the anime has a superpower. However it has a mixture of school life when the characters have to go to school to learn to be a hero , action because of its fight scenes and comedy for how goofy some of the characters are and one genre that is known in japan as shounen meaning it’s more geared towards boys. The reason a sub-genre can change what you think of an anime is that some might have more meaning than what you think like it might have what I call a hidden genre.
Hidden genre
You probably hear about them before if you been on netflix when your are searching for something to watch. Animes sometimes does this to try and surprise the audience of what they are watching like the anime your ‘’lie in april’’. Though it is classified as a romance musical anime there are some tragic and sad moments in there so if you don’t like to cry or have a emotional side to you well good luck watching this one. But I digress the reason for these hidden genres is to keep the audience coming back for more in a way by having a genre that is not stated at first that way the creators can surprise the audience with something they didn’t expect.
Because of this reason a hidden genre is as important to an anime or any media for that matter whether it be movies or a book as is a sub-genre.
By have hidden genres in a media it can have the audience coming back for more that's why having a few genres that no one knows about can really shock the audience with something unexpected then what they originally thought.
Conclusion
I hope this has been of some help to the people who don’t really understand the genres that go into an anime and hope that it helped those that needed help with understanding genres and how they can be used to change the outcome of the story that you are trying to tell in your media. What I have learned is that you should try to keep your audience entertained by making them laugh, keep them in suspense, and lastly make it so that your audience doesn’t know what is going to happen next. The reason I say this is because I’m pretty sure that if the person watching, reading, or listening to your media they will quickly lose interest and go find something else. Though you may or may not have thought about it anime has its own discourse community within the fans that watch it. For why I say this is that there are many types of fans and some might have a type of anime they really like but someone else might not like, which makes them their own discourse community.