I’ve been thinking lately about the relationship between characters in near-modern-day story settings and genre expectations. Even Murderbot, in it’s far-flung future, often evaluates situations in terms of soap operas, pulp mysteries and adventure shows. Characters set in anything like the present day seem strangely out of touch if they aren’t at least passingly aware of basic genre conventions for a variety of genres.

This poses an interesting challenge for authors. They have to decide—what kind of genre awareness do I need them to have, and how do they use it?

A character making every mistake common to a type of story they know well is just frustrating. Meanwhile, a character who sails right through every genre convention too easily could feel flat. It’s easy for them to feel too ironic, too cool for their story, or so busy winking at the audience that they don’t let the reader get immersed in the story itself.

So, you have to let the character know the conventions of a genre they naturally seem they should know, and then you have to get creative with it.

The strangest application of this that I’ve seen lately comes from my falling down a rabbit hole of an extremely niche- or at least extremely specific, micro-genre.

Anyone familiar with current Japanese pop culture will already know the word isekai. It’s everywhere. For those who aren’t familiar, isekai is the name for a subgenre of high fantasy story in which someone (generally from the modern, mundane world) is reincarnated or transported into a high fantasy world, with their memory of their regular life either intact, or recovered. It’s got a whole host of it’s own tropes, microtropes, and conventions.

I could say a lot about isekai stories. I don’t actually like a lot of them, but I am fascinated by the way the genre is in constant open conversation with itself, with authors and creators competing for finding the weirdest, niche-ist way to have a fresh take on the narrowly defined tropes and concepts. It’s like one big iterative writing exercise.

In fact, isekai stories are so ubiquitous in Japan that by now, the characters getting transported or reincarnated or whatever seem very strange if they don’t know the trope. Honestly, so many of them quickly orient to what’s going on that you’d think this was a common occurrence in Japan.

And then, it goes beyond genre savviness. Many of the main characters in isekai these days are transported into a familiar story. For example, a common trope is waking up in a videogame they already know, into the body of a character they already know, or at the very least surrounded by characters they remember. That means that they know how the whole story is supposed to play out.

This is a fascinating way for an author to further complicate the difficulty of genre savvy characters. How do you make a story compelling with the main character already knows what’s going to happen? Especially when the isekai’d character is often ludicrously powerful compared to everyone else around them?

That is a whole order of magnitude more complicated than, say, characters in Shawn of the Dead already knowing zombie movies are a thing.

The micro-niche I’ve been drawn into is isekai, but it’s even more specific. There turns out to be a whole range of isekai shows/comics/light novels from Japan in which a character specifically wakes up as the villainess of a high fantasy videogame/story with a ton of romanceable love interests. Always, the character is at least passingly familiar with the story, and is trying to use that information to their advantage. Seriously, I’ve watched like 8 different series like this. A new one just came out. I’m not sick of them yet.

I love iterative takes on a narrow prompt.

These stories do tend to be on the lower stake, cozier side of things. But that just makes managing the tension and keeping the reader engaged an even narrower tightrope walk.

A non-exhaustive list of ways I’ve seen creators actually pull off highly genre savvy characters, both in Japanese and English language media:

- The character knows what someone in their position in the story should do, but lacks some characteristic that would let them act that way. One of my most favorite villainess isekai stories centers a middle aged bureaucrat geek who loves videogames and knows the tropes, watched his daughter play a popular romance videogame, and then was reincarnated as the villainess of that game. He starts off dedicated to keeping the story on track, so the other game characters can get their happily ever afters, but he can never bring himself to be mean enough to the teens that remind him of his daughter, so fails miserably at being a villain. (From Bureaucrat to Villainess: Dad's Been Reincarnated!)

- The character is so distracted by worry/excitement about one part of the narrative they’re expecting that they totally overlook other key factors of what’s going on. For example, the main character knows the villainess was executed or exiled in the videogame, depending on the player’s actions. She’s so worried about avoiding doom that she totally fails to notice how far from the game’s plot they’ve strayed. (My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!)

-The character still treats this like a video game and throws the plot off completely because she’s just really excited about leveling up and killing monsters and has no interest in the rest of the game’s plot. (Villainess Level 99: I May Be the Hidden Boss but I'm Not the Demon Lord)

- The character only half remembers the story. Long Live Evil is a fantastic novel by Irish author that features a main character who is transported into a grimdark novel series that her sister was obsessed with, that she half listened to while being treated for cancer. She has forgotten and misremembered a lot of key elements. I’ve also watched a show in which an adult character is transported into the high fantasy blatant wish-fulfillment story she wrote in middle school, which she barely remembers and often cringes at. She’s been reincarnated into her own story, but not as the universally beloved and powerful pink haired protagonist. She is the evil sister she killed off early in the story. (Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess)

- The character is confronted with the reality of the genre tropes, and is horrified and uncooperative. In Other Lands (by the same author as Long Live Evil) is my favorite version of this—a child is told they’re special and transported to a magical land to help defend it, only to loudly decry the entire idea of child soldiers and miss central heating and the Internet. This doesn’t make him immune to the lure of the magical land, but I think Aslan would have had his hands full with this kind.

- And my personal favorite: the character has misunderstood the genre of story they’re in.

That last one was a huge part of how I developed characters in Secondhand Origin Stories. Jamie feels like she’s in a classic coming-of-age YA book, with no thought of it being a scifi story or a superhero story. She’s just a girl, growing up in her family’s shadow. Opal loves a gothic romance, so when she finds herself the poorer outsider who finds herself in a big fancy house inhabited by a wealthy, powerful and deeply dysfunctional family, that’s how she understands what’s going on around her. Yael, due to not wanting to think about the high mortality rate of xyr family’s main profession, sticks tightly to the lighter cape stories and shonen anime for as long as xe can. None of them are exactly wrong—that would be really annoying! But they’re reacting to different facets of their situations specifically because of genre awareness.

Issac is the only one who knows he’s in a scifi story. He knows he’s on the bleeding edge of tech development and was raised on classic scifi. But, because of how he views himself relative to his family, he mis-casts himself and ends up in a different role than the one he wanted for himself.

What’s fun about this is that with a story with multiple points of view you can have a bunch of conflicting genre conventions going simultaneously. It’s a great way of telling readers efficiently what assumptions the characters are carrying into a situation.

I think I love all of this because it puts on display the way stories shape us. Even if I’m never reincarnated into a dating sim, the stories I know and interact with shape how I see and respond to the world around me. I think we’re all pretty used to being told that representation matters (which is true) but I think stories shape us in a much wider array of really fundamental ways.

Before I close out, I have my usual free monthly action item. I had a different one planned, but given today’s supreme court ruling, I am going to ask you to consider reaching out to whatever voter’s rights org is near you, and finding out what help they’re requesting. Maybe even consider being an election judge. Voting rights in the US are under attack from many angles, so it’s going to take many lines of defense to hold back the bullshit. You can find whatever option works best for you, where you are.

Non-US folks, sorry I rarely have action items for you. I hope you have free and fair elections, and that you do whatever you need to to protect or produce them.

As always, thank you for allowing me into your inbox, and please feel very free to share the online link around. Reminder that I do also have open comments, and would love to hear from you.

Best wishes,

Lee Brontide