Genre failure crystal

Proposition: Approaching a work with the expectation that it is a perfect representation of its genre tends to make your experience worse.

Genres are ongoing conversations across space and time, it's extremely difficult for a single work to distill all its inspirations in a way that preserves their original significance, and if it does succeed at that, it still has to be good on top of that. It's an expectation that sets you up for disappointment, and can obscure the significance of a work's variation from the genre standard.

So: How do we end up with this expectation in the first place? a few ways I've found:

1) Bottleneck events. A reader encounters a work somehow in isolation from the rest of the genre. This might mean that it's their first time reading in the genre and they're ready to judge the whole genre on the single work. But it might also mean that a work becomes a breakout hit, vastly more popular than others in the genre, or it's an adaptation to a medium that doesn't have as many entries in the genre. It's a function of visibility; the more you stick out, the more you invite various lenses of interpretation, whether or not they're very productive.

2) Discourse Poisoning. This often accompanies bottleneck events; sometimes a community spends significant time discussing the genre and constructing a definition or set of priorities that meets their particular needs. Once the community has reached consensus on what the genre should be, they'll start to compare works to their criteria and reject them from the genre if they don't meet the standard. Once the community starts producing their own works, these standards become reified as they create works that consciously adopt the established standards, forming a "crystallized" version of the original genre.

3) The work itself calls attention to the genre it's working in. References or comparisons to other works, appealing to genre logic as an explanation or justification, etc. This can happen in the text itself or paratext like marketing, author interviews, etc. Here's the key thing: Once you say something happens "because of genre," you're claiming that you've identified an essential element of the genre. That means the stakes are higher, the question isn't just whether the elements are good for your story, the question is whether your genre analysis is correct.

4) uhhh probably more than that idk