Quote:
Originally Posted by hildea
The way I see it, genre conventions are not a matter of limiting outcomes, it's a matter of labelling/truth in advertising. Say you sit down to read a historical novel but find that it takes place in 2022. Or midway through a historical novel the protagonist is bitten by a vampire and then abducted by aliens. Or a book marketed as a cozy mystery had several extremely explicit sex scenes with detailed descriptions of body parts in motion and exchange of bodily fluids. Or you are enjoying a crime novel with a tricky locked room mystery and are looking forward to finding out how the author is going to explain it, and then learn in the last chapter that a ghost did it. Or a book marketed as a fantasy novel is a realistic contemporary story with nothing supernatural or magical at all. All of these books may be perfectly fine in themselves, but if they don't meet a minimum of their readers' expectations many readers will be disappointed and annoyed.
Authors are, of course, free to write as many love stories with unhappy endings as they like. But they shouldn't slap a label saying "this is a hopeful, uplifting love story" on their tragedies. Just like authors are free to write stories which take place completely in the present day, but then they shouldn't call those books historical novels. And so on.
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My preferred genre is mysteries. Once I read a random library book where the blurb sounded like it would be a police procedural. I don't remember what was on the cover but obviously it wasn't anything that was a red flag for me. The book started off as a typical police mystery but then it turned out the villain was some ancient supernatural entity. Definitely not what I was expecting or looking for.
Another time I was feeling really stressed out and decided I needed something light with a happy ending, so I downloaded some random romance book from the library. It had a fully-clothed couple on the cover (not a shirtless Fabio-type) and I think the blurb was something about characters coming home for the Christmas holiday. I figured it would be light and cute but boy, once that couple got together they were doing it like rabbits complete with detailed descriptions. I ended up skipping over a lot of that book. Not that I have any objection to such books existing, it just wasn't what I was looking for at the time.