PB1B

Disclaimer: I won’t be using the first website because it always generated the same thing with the same information, it just changed the names in put into the generator.

The task at hand is to go online see a couple of websites, see conventions within different genres, and then to explain how such websites can give people a better understanding of what exactly a “genre” is.

Pandyland is comic strip website; the creator of makes a comic out of three boxes and then uploads them to this website; this website then randomly selects three of the many boxes and makes a single comic strip out of them. The best part about this website is that most of the time the strip that is generated makes no sense, but even though they make no sense I still find them funny. Most of these generated strips tend to have at least one box that contains a violent action, either the characters assaulting each other, or of them doing self-inflicted damage. Another convention in these strips would definitely have to be the vulgar language; the two characters consistently curse at each other and sometimes reference their genitals. I’m not too certain about this being a convention, but I noticed that in some of the strips, the comic starts off with what people would call a conversation starting, and by the end, most of the time, the comic has nothing to do with what was presented at the beginning. The final convention I could find is that you could make a comedic strip by only using two of the chosen boxes and completely ignoring the other one that could possibly be making the strip incoherent.

Prior to this assignment, I had never really looked at memes. I now know that certain memes contain text that go with them; it could be said that meme has their own conventions. A really popular meme is the one with the dinosaur; his memes are always captioned with, what I think are meant to be, thought provoking questions. Why this is so, is unclear to me. The memes containing “the most interesting man in the world,” mostly have to do with how the man does things; they all start with the, “I don’t always…” phrase. Something all the memes have in common are their witty captioning; they are all meant to be funny and easy to understand. This captioning is also always in big white bold letters so that they capture the attention of the reader. Obviously since they are memes, they must include a picture or drawing of some sort. These pictures are usually something that went viral on the internet and stood out enough to able to be associated with something that somebody thought others would find funny.

While searching online for some genre generator, I thought about book titles and found a decent website, Fantasy Name Generators, whose purpose is to create titles for different genres ranging from sci-fi, children, humor, horror, and many more. I’ll only be considering the conventions for the aforementioned genres. From what I gather, sci-fi genre titles, according to this website, tend to have words in the title that deal with robot/androids and of course outer space, encompasses aliens. The children genre was dominated by titles that included names of animals or other simple nouns, such as flowers, buildings, or imaginary things. This website has a weird humor generator because the tiles it was suggesting were all terrible. These titles consisted mainly of two completely unrelated words being connected by conjunction.

There are a wide variety of different genres so understating genre can be difficult, but by using websites, such as these that create random genres, one can learn to identify what makes up a genre, its conventions. All of these websites had obvious repeating patterns when they each gave out their random genre. For example, as stated earlier, the comic website usually had violence and profanity, the memes website had those bold words and iconic viral pictures, the title generator had couple of patterns for each genre they had. The point is that genre is just a big broad picture of everything because within the subject of genre there are many sub-genres, that can have even more sub-genres. A Genre is like a group that consist of many pieces of writing or any medium that incorporate certain conventions, but even these conventions can have conventions, thus making those conventions possible genres, very specific genres.