Quote:
Originally Posted by hildea
Why? Why do you care?
I think that's the part I find so baffling about this discussion, and is probably the reason I return to it  Why does it bother anyone "useless" genres exist?
Lots of things are useless to me, but useful to others. If they don't harm me, I simply ignore them. |
Same here. I'm blissfully unaware of many of these sub genres that have been named. Their existences don't harm me in the least. I've found/read/liked/disliked several of the books mentioned that have some of those labels (after reading about them in this thread). I obviously don't need many of those labels myself, but that doesn't mean they're universally useless. I'm certainly not going to be presumptuous enough to suggest that labels I might not need myself, should go away.
I don't particularly need the word cyan to describe a shade of blue, either. But I'd never suggest that it needs to be gone from the entire world's crayon boxes.
Red velvet cake with cream cheese icing tastes no different than the same recipe sans food coloring. Do I care if someone claims it as their favorite cake? Well OK, maybe a little bit, but not enough to suggest that particular cake description should be nuked.
I'm not the decider of what's "useful" for anyone other than myself. Especially when it comes to petty harmless minutiae like this.