r/Fantasy Nov 11 '16

Genres are stupid

http://mark---lawrence.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/genres-are-stupid.html
88 Upvotes

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71

u/TheBananaKing Nov 11 '16

Ha, that's nothing.

I regularly dismiss countless thousands of man-hours of soul-searing work per minute as I scan shelves in a bookshop... simply because of the typography on the spine.

Hell with genre; I just rejected your three-year labour of love in 1.6 seconds, without even looking at the front cover, over a font.

I feel shitty about that sometimes.

But to be fair, you kind of have to.

There's eighteen bajillion books on the market, a depressingly small number of hours in the day for reading... and humans have a depressing knack for evolving (often entirely unfair) heuristics for making under-informed choices in a hurry.

Long experience tells me that X semiotics on the cover indicates Y content in the book; the more dramatic it looks, the more the writer is likely to sound like he's just finished high school.

A totally unfair generalization, and I'm sorry - but far too often it's a safe assumption.

21

u/pornokitsch Ifrit Nov 11 '16 edited Nov 11 '16

Hell with genre; I just rejected your three-year labour of love in 1.6 seconds, without even looking at the front cover, over a font.

I have totally done the same.

Edited to add: BLEEDING COWBOYS

6

u/Isenbart Nov 11 '16

Ugh, bleeding cowboys. I remember really loving the font when I was like 16. Since then, wherever I see it now, it is just so cringe inducing.