What if there was a genre named, 'Character.'

[l8rose]

It kind of exists already in Fanfiction under the tag "Alternate Universe".

Where the existing characters are dropped somewhere different from the world they were created for. Sometimes, it's just a few choices that are different, other times it's putting My Little Pony in a Saw Dungeon.

 

[AnonUnlimited]

I feel like this is too complicated.
As a reader I've seen people try to put similar charactesr (same design) in different situations, but what ends up happening is the background of those characters become blurry and as a reader I want them to go back to the old character.

It's kind of strange that way.

 

[JKhub]

I feel like this is too complicated.
As a reader I've seen people try to put similar charactesr (same design) in different situations, but what ends up happening is the background of those characters become blurry and as a reader I want them to go back to the old character.

It's kind of strange that way.

That's right they should be the old character, not character 2.0.

So King Arthur as a saber, next an archer, next a mage, next an assassin...

Not exactly. The character playing King Arther, plays an archer in another story, or an assassin in another story.

 

[Clo]

I feel like the TV series of "The Expanse" feels like that, almost.

Sure, it's all tied to a single narrative, but season1 feels like a Film Noir detective show, season2 like a space opera, season 3 (or was it 4?) feels like Star Gate.

It impressed me how that show's seasons kept the same characters, but has drastically different feel to them.

 

[aToTeT]

In horror genre for instance, the books are about horror, but in Character genre, the books would be about a set of charcters. Once you met and got to know them, they would appear in completely different stories, differing genres, same characters, different story.
Anybody like the idea?

www.scribblehub.com/series/1373610/virtual-virus/

I am all for more variety in tags/genre that aid in writers finding their audience and readers finding the stories that appeal most to them.

The problem comes in that the stories we tell are many, and the genres people keep in their head are few.

I think you’d need a better name for such a thing than ‘character’ — without whom there are few stories indeed (and those without usually end up infusing ‘character’ into their world.

Consider fantasy:

Grimdark
Noblebright
Cozy
Romantasy
Epic/High
Portal
and many more:

While every one of these stories will likely look largely different from one another, and might well better serve an audience than ‘Fantasy’ by itself — the effects of navigating a site with infinite genres/tags to search through, all with incredibly idiosyncratic names come upon by literally thy o sands of authors…

Can be a bit of a pain.

Ultimately, it’s all a wash: genre isn’t real, all stories despite their derivations are different unless copied to the last point of punctuation, and it probably doesn’t matter.

I’d call your multiverse character story Isekai within genre conventions (Summoned for the seventeenth time? That’s rough buddy.)

other times it's putting My Little Pony in a Saw Dungeon.

Which is horrible — but understandable that there would be an audience for it.

 

[HarperMcFarlane]

I honestly like this idea because I’m someone who likes character-focused narratives. Hell I’m writing one myself that’s quite literally about ‘a group of characters’ and I often think about AU scenarios for them as I’m writing.

Of course the plot and setting are important. But as someone who likes to get into the heads of the characters a bit more than worldbuilding I think having it as a genre would help me find more stories of a similar vein to my interests.

 

[Clo]

I guess it’s not a one to one relationship, but slice-of-life, coming-of-age, slow-burn or Bildungsroman all seem to hint at character-focused narratives. Or at least, they do to me.

 

[Zagaroth]

Sounds more like "Anthology" or "Ensemble Cast" than "Character" to me.

Yes, exactly.

You want creative control to belong to one person (called an editor in a multi-author anthology) but to have multiple people writing about the same world and/or characters. This ensures that everyone is on the same page about the personality of a particular character.

If you want to see the result of losing this oversight, I would point you at most long-running comics. The X-Men have a relatively stable cast of characters, but are written by different people and with different editors, so they have variance in their personality.

Now, OP's suggestion includes a twist on that, but that twist is also covered in some of the "What If?" type comics.

So, "What if the X-Men were in the Wild West?"
"What if Superman grew up in a fantasy world?" Variant: "and the tech in his pod still worked and let him build a Kryptonian-tech city?"

That is OP's style of what-if.