Episode: 2718
Title: HPR2718: Genre In Storytelling
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2718/hpr2718.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 15:28:18

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This is HPR episode 2007 118 entitled,
John Ruin Store Retelling.
It is hosted by Lost in Bronx and in about 13 minutes long
and Karimma Clean Flag.
The summary is, Lost in Bronx takes a look at the importance
of John Ruin Store Retelling.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting
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Hello, this is Lost in Bronx and you'll have to forgive the song quality.
I'm in the car right now.
Today I would like to talk to you about John Ruin in Storytelling.
There's a repeated sort of trueism about John Ruin in that
John Ruin is a little more than set decoration and that you can tell
more or less the same story in any kind of John Ruin just by
changing around the background or changing the clothes or the weapons
or how the villain looks, whether they have a big black mask
or if they're wearing a black hat and they're riding the range.
To an extent that's true, but only in stories that emphasize the importance of character.
If you're telling a story that absolutely has to take place in a particular setting,
it really doesn't matter how central your characters are.
If that setting is vital to your story, your genre is not interchangeable.
Now there are many reasons to pick a particular type of genre and most of them are aesthetic,
but not always.
Science fiction is a great one because first off it's a much more recent sort of genre compared to many of the others that we enjoy,
including romance, adventure, even fantasy, even high fantasy for that matter.
Science fiction is one of the more recent styles and as a result,
it doesn't necessarily follow the assumptions of that trueism.
You can take a story, a science fiction story that has a very specific setting.
Now I've mentioned in other episodes about storytelling Larry Niven's Ring World.
Now that's a story that couldn't be told in any other type of genre.
It is only a science fiction tale.
It could be done otherwise.
I suppose you could try to tell that tale as some sort of high fantasy with some sort of magical construction,
but it would lose most of its punch by doing it that way,
which is not to say that magic or fantasy stories lack punch,
it's just that adapting it would water it down.
You would want to have a story that was focused entirely on that genre in order to take advantage of its strengths.
So I don't necessarily subscribe to that trueism,
except to say that, well, a lot of times it's true,
but again, it's true that you can swap the genre out by just focusing more on character.
If you do that, you really can swap things around.
You know, a lot of people especially consider science fiction to just be a western in space.
Well, of course, people that say that don't really understand the nuances of that particular genre.
And I would argue that anyone who dismisses any genre in such a simple fashion doesn't understand the subtleties of that genre.
That being said, it is often possible to do exactly that,
to take a science fiction tale and set it in, say, the Old West or vice versa.
The film that came out, I think it was in the late 80s, mid to late 80s, called Outland.
It starts Sean Connery as a sheriff or lawman in a space station set on an asteroid where they were doing asteroid mining.
And he goes up against a corrupt local boss and corrupt organization and government in general.
And ends up having to square off against a bunch of assassins that come to kill him.
And he's more or less alone through the entire thing.
Well, this is just high noon and everyone knew it and they even admitted it.
Yes, this is high noon in space. We deliberately took high noon and put it in space.
Well, you could almost argue that wasn't science fiction at all.
Because while the dressing, the set dressing of the whole thing, being in space,
changed some of the aspects of this tale.
The basic meat and bones of the tale were exactly the same as high noon.
So what's the difference there?
Right? Why would you choose one over the other?
Right? Why would you choose to have set that story in outer space as opposed to just doing a remake of high noon?
Well, for one thing, variety.
For another, if you are, especially if you're creating stories that we sold,
stories to make money to generate revenue, you're looking for the most popular thing.
And at that time, science fiction was far more popular than Westerns.
Still is right now. That may change. That may change.
These things do go in cycles, though. This has been a long one.
So that's another reason to do it.
And you're allowed to swap out some things when you change the set decorations.
So that some plot elements won't exactly follow the original.
And that can be surprising. People like that sort of thing.
So from a storytelling standpoint, is there any validity to it or are these just minor, minor details?
Well, I suppose it depends if you did that.
And you had a character that really could only appear in a science fiction.
And what they're doing in the story, this version of the story, could only happen in a science fiction.
Then there's a strong justification there.
But otherwise, no, it was absolutely arbitrary.
And there was no reason why it had to be science fiction for that matter.
It could have been a remake of an old West thing. It could have been film noir.
It could have been high fantasy. It could have been virtually anything.
It could have been a pirate tale. It could have been almost anything.
That simplicity of tale with a focus of character over plot.
But when you have plot or setting the Trump's character or at least shines as brightly as character,
they are not interchangeable.
And you cannot just say that this thing is the same as that thing.
Just with some minor variation. It doesn't work like that.
A popular film and television genre that has arisen, at least in the United States, in the last, say, 10 years or so,
are war pictures that emphasize bravery and patriotism of war veterans and how they are adjusting to society afterwards.
One could argue that, well, a war picture is a war picture.
And there in these stories, they might be in Afghanistan, but you could have told this same tale set in World War II or set in a fantasy world or something like that.
And that misses some of the important elements of the genre.
I said patriotic. And that means specifically patriotism for America.
Now, I'm not going to get into the politics of that. That's a different conversation and absolutely a field to storytelling in this case.
But my point here is that the patriotism aspect, the modern American focus on patriotism, especially when wrapped up among soldiers in combat,
that is a very important element of that genre.
And if you tried to tell that story differently in a different setting, a different genre, a different story type, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, whatever,
it would absolutely lose much of its punch, much of what they were after when they came up with the concept.
It's not only supposed to entertain you, at least for many of these stories.
They're not only supposed to provide you with an hour and a half, two hours, whatever it is of entertainment value, they're supposed to inspire you.
They're supposed to make you feel proud of where you live and of the people that defend your country.
That is part of this. You could say it's propaganda. You could say it is fantasy. You could say it's whatever.
You know, you can have your own view about the subject matter. The point here is that it will not function in any other genre.
Yet on the surface of it, this is nothing but an action film. This is nothing but a war picture.
You could tell that same tale for another country, and they could inspire the same sort of patriotism, et cetera, et cetera in the viewers of that country.
That's entirely possible. But that's about as much swapping around you can do without absolutely changing the point of that story.
Now, genre types, obviously they range, and in this day and age, they're often mixed in match. So that fantasy and science fiction will mix.
You'll have aesthetics that almost absolutely dominate the genre itself, such as steam punk, which without the Victorian trappings doesn't really amount to much of anything.
We're in an era where these sorts of things have become very, very common and very popular.
People are more or less tailoring these stories to their personal taste. Some of these absolutely have to be set where they are.
Many of them don't have to be. Now, steam punk, I brought that up for a reason. That's actually an example of a genre where setting Trump's character implied.
If you didn't have that steam punk aesthetic, you have a completely different story. Yes, the plots could be swapped around.
You could have all sorts of things like that, but the story wouldn't have the same sort of feeling to it.
You would have to change almost everything about it, in fact, including the main characters in order to take that plot and set it somewhere else.
As opposed to characters like in Outland, where you have a more or less stoic main character as the sheriff, and a more or less evil corrupt robber baron type, who is going to oppose him.
In something like steam punk, you need characters with a very particular type of background, a very particular way of carrying themselves, very particular level of education.
And of course, everything else about it, the aesthetic, the technology, all of these things are so endemic to that genre that it would be difficult to adjust that and bring it somewhere else without having to change absolutely everything.
And point of fact, the only thing you really could bring in is the plot. And plots, they can be interchangeable, they can be, but not always.
As I was saying, those American sniper movies, those American patriotic military movies of the last decade, those are not very interchangeable. Yes, the plot, the basic action of the tale might very well be brought into almost any other kind of story.
But that doesn't even come close to telling the same tale. See, in that particular case, the action does not trump the subject matter, and in steam punk, action would not trump the setting and the aesthetic.
In my opinion, it's probably better to tailor not just the action and plot, but to tailor the characters and tailor the setting and the aesthetic, and very often the theme of your story to your setting, so that all of these things work together, where you'll have something like a science fiction, but it can't really just be dragged over to something else.
Because in the end, only very, very simple stories can do that. Stories that focus on one thing so much further than the rest of the stuff.
The science fiction TV show that everyone misses, Firefly has often been called a Western in space. And in many ways it really is.
That's a very simplistic sort of story. However, the characters were complicated. You had very, very strong characters that stood and outshown the setting.
For many people, they say that I love that show. I love science fiction and spaceships and stuff, but what they really mean is I love those characters.
Those characters were what I really enjoyed the most. And if they weren't disposed to dismiss something right away, if they weren't prejudice against a particular genre, right away, that show could have been a Western, and they would have loved it just as much.
We are getting into a stage now where people aren't quite so married to particular genres. There are TV shows that are very, very popular that range all over in the type of setting that they have.
There are all sorts of books being produced now in all sorts of settings, very often blended settings, where it's a Western and a horror, it's a Western and a science fiction, it's a Western and a fantasy, it's a Western science fiction horror fantasy.
All of these things, it's becoming less important what genre they're in, and it's a very often, it's character that's driving that sort of ability to blend these different things.
You know, that stuff, it is just the paint on the walls, so to speak. I don't believe that we're likely to see a return to super strong genre where genre trumps more than anything.
Like a time when Westerns dominated everything, everything, everything, where that was it, you know, Westerns were the big, big thing.
Some people will say, well, superhero movies are doing that right now, but if you add up the amount of superhero movies that they actually have produced versus the amount of Westerns that they used to crank out, it's no comparison.
The amount of money it costs to make a popular superhero movie versus what it might cost to make a Western, even in this day and age, it doesn't even compare.
We're never going to see a return to that sort of dominance of one particular genre in my opinion, at least in popular culture.
I believe we're at a point where genre is almost immaterial for many types of storytelling.
But as I said, I don't believe that's necessarily the best way to tell your tale.
It does depend on your story, but if your story is entirely dependent upon your setting, you could almost say it's not a genre story.
Because in a way, if genre is interchangeable, then this thing can't be genre because it is not interchangeable.
You could say that Ring World is not an interchangeable story. It's not a genre tale. It's a science fiction tale, but it is not just sort of hackneyed and with a standard setting that can be just swapped out here and there.
That's probably a matter of semantics and largely unimportant when you come right down to it.
The point here is just that that is a story that is forever locked to its setting.
When you think of Ring World, you think not only all of those characters, but of the Ring World itself.
Yes, it's right there in the title that helps, no argument.
But even if it was called something else, we would always think of the Ring World in that tale because nothing else could happen without that.
You couldn't set it anywhere else.
So I guess my point, ultimately here, is just that it's probably more important to focus on your character, your plot, yes, your action, and your setting.
Try to make them all mesh, try to make them interdependent so that this entire story is built upon all of these elements and isn't so easily swapped out.
When everything is easily swapped out, when your characters can be just thrown into any other sort of story, they're not as compelling, they're not as complicated, they're certainly not as memorable necessarily.
Yes, yes, we love those characters from Firefly, we do, but we've seen them before and we'll see them again.
Whereas many of the characters in Ring World, I haven't seen them before. They're unique.
They have certain characteristics that do the same as other characters from other stories, other genres, but they are characters that I associate with that tale, and I don't associate them with others.
At any rate, these were just some very quick and muddled thoughts about genre in storytelling, modern storytelling, and what you might want to be looking for when you're thinking about where to set something.
I mean, obviously you're going to set it where you want it to be, where you enjoy telling stories, and where you're hoping your consumer of that story, whether they're readers or listeners or viewers or players, whatever it happens to be, that they're going to enjoy it too.
If you have any thoughts about this episode or any other, please leave them in the comments section on Hacker Public Radio, or better yet, create your own episode, because you have interests and you have opinions and we want to hear about them.
This has been Lost in Bronx. Thank you for listening. Take care.
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