Genre Histories

This is the directory page for my genre history projects. At the moment, my focus is the magical girl and mecha genres.

A note on "genre"

In these pages, I'm treating "genre" as describing a set of shared creative influences between works, and a set of shared expectations created in an audience. I'm not going to worry about hard boundaries or strict definitions; as much as I'm trying to track down specific origins of various tropes the overall categories are pretty vibes-based. I can't definitively establish what is or is not part of a specific genre, but I can explore how much overlap there is between different works.

This site is the work of an enthusiastic amateur. To the best of my knowledge what I'm putting here is accurate, but if I get a detail wrong or repeat misinformation, you can let me know at my Guestbook for me to review.