What Genre is Not

There are ways some categorize media apart from genre. It may fit the needs of publishers, distributors, vendors, and even consumers to have alternate ways to classify work according to actual or perceived customer preferences. The usefulness of classifying a work by its intended audience, sales records, seasonal relevance, or types of characters does not make these types of categories genres, it just makes them useful.

A work's age-based marketing demographic is not its genre.

Some Age-based Categories:

Children's, Middle Grade, Young Adult (YA), New Adult, Adult

But, couldn't these be genres? Doesn't the age of the protagonist or the anticipated age of the audience indicate something about form or content?

Not directly. The age of the protagonist gives us one trait of one character. (We'll get more into the reasons why characters are not genres further down the page.) It does not tell us about the work as a whole. As well, a character could be eleven-years-old or one-hundred-eleven-years-old and appeal to readers of any and/or every age, so it doesn't even necessarily tell us who will read the story.

The anticipated or tracked age of the audience tells us nothing about the content of the work itself. It tells us  who may read or who has purchased or reviewed the work. It does not tell us about the content, or style, or form. It's not a genre.

A work's popularity is not its genre.

Some Popularity-based Categories:

Bestseller, Top #, Hot

A work's sucess does not tell us about the form, content, or style at all. Not a genre.

A work's location in a store display or temporary online promotion is not its genre.

Some Promotion-based Categories:

New, Seasonal, Bargain (Sale), Topical,

But, wait! Doesn't a work being seasonal or topical tell us something about content?

Something. Its placement might tell us a book has something about Halloween included, but this (as with the character question we will get to) does not tell us about the content in general. Useful, but not a genre.

A work's being new or on sale tells us even less about what it's really about. Not genre.

The type of character in a work is not its genre!

Some Character-based Categories:

Vampire, Magical Girl, LGBT+ (Gay & Lesbian), Werewolf, Giant Robot, Urban, Multicultural

First, let's separate those based on realistic characters from those based on fantastical characters.

Real people, and thus realistic characters, come in every color, class, faith, nationality, ability, gender, and sexuality there is. Realistic characters have a place in any and all genres (even speculative genres with made-up fantastical races and worlds).

Long, long ago when humans were writing their national epics and traditional lore, it was normal to write only about one's own sort of people, depict their own sort of people as protagonists, and mention other types of people as enemies, if at all. It didn't cause offense, because whether a work's genre was Romance, or Comedy, or Tragedy, each inclusive group was reading about their own sort of people. Art imitated life.

Advances in transportation and communication brought about cultural exchange and increasingly global culture. The rate at which art imitated life did not keep pace with social change. (And social change itself did not come without great difficulty.) People started to take offense that there was an imbalance in how some peoples and their cultures were depicted.

There was no formal People of Privilege category of fiction, yet there was a great predominance of some types of characters to the near exclusion of others. People were offended by the unequal representation. Art wasn't imitating life.  

In response, there was a desire to draw attention to those works that did represent the under-represented. From the consumer or reader perspective, this often took the form of store displays. (As explained above, store displays, though useful for marketing, are not genres.)

But, as useful and necessary as it has been to further the cause of representation for all types of people, classifying works by character type does not define a genre. Knowing the protagonist is of a particular appearance or ability or orientation does not tell us in a general sense what the story is about.

Some may argue that a given under-represented group may share a common pattern of experience which constitutes content or subject matter which can be criteria for defining genre.

Yet, it is the story or experience being told that may determine genre not who has that experience.

It's this last point which applies also when made-up or fantastical types of characters are in question. The argument is that a character's being a girl with magical abilities, or a vampire, or some other fictional type of character means that they must come with stock tropes and plots which thus constitute content and which can then be said to define a genre. 

Even if some types of characters more often appear in certain genres or more often associated with certain tropes it does not mean they must.

If I say I wrote a Raptor story, that doesn't mean Raptor is a genre, and it doesn't tell anyone about the form, content, or style of the work. Suggesting all stories about raptors must be in a proposed Raptor genre implies raptors can't be in other genres.

Type of character is not a genre.

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The broad 'What is genre' matter handled, I'll move on to definitions of specific genres and sub-genres.

What genres are easiest or most difficult to define?

What sub-genres interest you?

What genre do you most want to see illustrated by photos of plastic toys?