Genre and Conventions

What is Genre and conventions?

Genre is the classification of any media texts into types or categories. Whereas Conventions Is what you would expect to see in a certain genre, for example: in a fantasy genre film you would expect to see maybe unicorns, demons, hero's, strange settings, basically things that are fictional and unreal in our world.

When we look into teen drama’s you would expect to see teenagers stereotyped into different categories. For example jock, nerd, drama queen and etc. This can be easier to distinguish in the movie based on teen drama.

History of Teen Drama’s

Teen films was created at the beginning of 1950's where the post war ended as this re-develops making the economy better. The whole concept of teenagers was socially constructed by wider society shaping 'teenagers' through marketing. Such as music, fashion and 'lifestyle'.

Mainly teenagers watch teen films as they can relate to their lifestyle from their perspective. for example in the 1970's their school lifestyle was rebellious which is shown in 'Grease' - in a sense of what they were wearing (leather jackets and their hairstyle). Whereas now in the modern era, teenagers are portrayed as wild and irresponsible shown in 'mean girls'. Many teenagers are negatively stereotyped through many films although not all teenagers are like this in reality.

Genres and Sub-genres

Although teen drama is seen as a genre, we could point out that there’s sub genre’s in teen drama’s. This is because they aim for a particular audience varying on the company whether mainstream or niche. Examples of sub-genre’s: Horror, comedy, romance, fantasy and many more