Your own genres

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I know that there are people out there who hate genres, and people who loathe extremely specific sub-genres. This thread is not for you.

I like genres lots - especially extremely specific subgenres. It's nice to be able to catagorise things and it helps in finding new things like it. The problem comes when the genres that are widely acknowledged don't quite fit what I liked about a work that falls under them. So I just come up with a new one and drop them under that as well. I'd like to hear about the genres that other people come up with to describe what they like beyond the standard too-broad-to-be-descriptive ones that I already know about.

This is also a thread to flagrantly recommend things that you like, because I enjoy doing that too. If you know of anything that fits under someone's subgenre, it would be nice to recommend it to them.

Here are my extremely specific genres, along with the quintessential examples of them:

Kittens/Razorblades
Can't come up with a good self-explanatory name for this one. The basic concept is really nice 'pretty' things blended with really horrific things. The name refers to a description a music critic gave of the song Crystal Eyes by The Nightblooms - 'sounds like a kitten trapped in a bucket full of razorblades'.

Examples from...
Movies:
Pan's Labyrinth pretty much takes the show here. Lovely fairy tale mixed with extreme wartime brutality. Walked out of the cinema feeling like my brain had just been beaten in with a hammer, which is a feeling this genre likes to do a lot.

Music:
Crystal Eyes (obviously), Never Dream At All, and One Weak Moment by The Nightblooms.
Loveless by My Bloody Valentine.
Baby Talk and Leaves Me Cold by Lush.
Fuse, Self-Non-Self, and Wings of Joy, and to a lesser extent Forever and Loved by Cranes.
Any Bird that Dares to Fly by Halou.
Enter by Within Temptation.
Prison of Desire by After Forever.

Comics:
(Japan has a real thing for this genre...)
Narutaru. This is the most extreme example I know. The first volume makes it seem like a children's story (which fooled the American publisher, who marketed it as such), and by the end of the seventh volume you need brain bleach. Highly recommended.

Elfen Lied. The mood whiplash will break your neck.

Saikano. The unhappiest thing ever? Sets up nice things and then mercilessly grinds them down. Its tagline is 'the last love song on this little planet'...

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. Beware the nice ones.

And for a rare break to American comics: The Storm and Illyana miniseries. I can't really justify dumping all of The New Mutants under here because of Illyana, but she does this well. Dark magical girls in general have a tendency to pull things this way.

The Story of the Vivian Girls by Henry Darger. Might not exactly fit as a comic book, but it's a book (many of them, in fact) with a lot of art attached. Not actually published, but very interesting all the same.

Alien culture exploration
Fairly self-explanatory. Anything that makes showing off a strange culture or world a priority.

Movies:
Avatar. When it's not busy being a bland action movie, it does this.

The Dark Crystal. Focuses more on alien world than culture ... but I don't think there's a more alien world than this.

Books:
Omega and Chindi by Jack McDevitt. Especially Omega.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison, which has some really alien aliens. How do you communicate with sentient starfish?

Total Eclipse by John Brunner. Focuses around an archeological dig of an alien race that died a long time ago, trying to piece together their culture.

The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien. The entire history/mythology of a culture spanning thousands of years...

I have more, but that'll do for the notable ones.

Magical Fantasy
The vast majority of fantasy disinterests me - this strangely small subgenre is one of the few things that keeps me interested. There's some overlap with Kittens/Razorblades - I won't list the ones that fit under both. Basically, the magic is magical, and as a whole it feels magical.

Movies:
Labyrinth.
Beauty and the Beast.
The Swan Princess.
(Noticing a trend yet? Children's stories do it well)

Music:
Mother Earth by Within Temptation.
Oceanborn and Century Child by Nightwish.

Games:
Cloud.

Books:
The Summer Birds, Emma in Winter, Charlotte Sometimes, The Magic Stone, and A Castle of Bone by Penelope Farmer. Especially The Summer Birds - although Charlotte Sometimes is an overall better (... best?) book, The Summer Birds is this genre perfectly.

The Land Behind the World by Anne Spencer Parry.

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin.

Phantastes by George MacDonald.

Stardust by Neil Gaiman.

... and a bunch of others. I have quite a collection these days.


And that concludes the 'Aik blathers about his favourite things' section of this thread.

So, tell me about the genres you had to make up yourself to describe what you like. Or, if no one actually does that but me, you're more than welcome to point out things that I would like that I've missed

(possibly not the right forum for this given it's cross-media, but meh@Whatnots and The Sensorium seems more general than The Playground or Booktalk)

 

Psychotic-Ghost Stories
It's not about ghost with mental issues, it's basically films that are popularly classified as Horror films but turns out to be more of a psycho-thriller with supernatural elements. The scare factor is there but the plot is much harder to comprehend. It deals more with the psychological/emotional side of the characters rather than scaring the audience out of their wits. But were market as a scary movie because it was the IN thing.

Movies:
A Tale of Two Sisters (Korean with Hollywood remake The Uninvited)
The Uninvited (Korean aka Table for Four)


Great Films I'll Never Watch Again
These are movies with great stories, plot, acting, directing, and etc. Most of them are even nominated for awards and even won. They are actually some of the best films I've ever seen but will never want to watch again simply because they are just to darn depressing. These films felt like half or the entirety of it was made for the sole purpose of making you sad.

Movies:
Million-Dollar Baby
The Color Purple
Mystic River
Grave of the Fireflies (Japanese - both anime and live actors)
21 Grams
The Wrestler
Farewell My Concubine (Chinese)

 

Try Threads. It's upsetting, and there isn't much fiction that I'd call that. It isn't just sad in certain scenes - it's ... pervaded by hopelessness and horror. I find it kind of hard to find the words to describe it - 'traumatising' might work...
So yes, nuclear war - let's not have one.

 

My favorite genre is Great Boob Flashes.

Romeo and Juliet
Saturn 3
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Swordfish
Airplane
Total Recall

 

I agree, great movie, but it left me totally depressed.

The boobs were too prevalent to be considered a "flash".

 

The Dark Brotherhoods of Fantasy:

Books:
The Black Company Series by Glen Cook.
Any Forgotten Realms novel containing Erevis Cale.

Movies:
Underworld & Rise of the Lycans
The Matrix trilogy
Predator vs. Aliens