Genre

Thank you.

Welcome to Shelf by Genre, a show about types of literature in the worlds they imagine.

We are continuing our unit on J.R.R. Tolkien with 1977's The Silmarillion.

And today we are reading the first two pieces of The Silmarillion, The Ainu Lindale and The Valaquinta.

Everything has to be content.

Her son is called Genre.

Genre, yes.

And Brett, who's clearly in love with an AI chatbot or something of that ilk.

A lot of shows put these things in and they just feel like they're shoehorned to be current.

It was originally published back in 1990.

Genre-wise, we're talking supernatural horror, but that's almost underselling what Lumley is doing here.

You've also got elements of dark fantasy, espionage thriller, science fiction, psychic phenomena, and cosmic horror all thrown into the blender.

And somehow it works.

It's the third and final volume of The Deed of Poxenarian, following Sheep Farmer's Daughter and Divided Allegiance.

Genre-wise, we're firmly in Epic classic fantasy here, with military fantasy elements, traditional fantasy races, gods, magic, quests, ancient powers, and especially important here, the paladin tradition.

And I don't mean paladin in the modern sense of, I picked the class because Divine Smite does a ridiculous amount of damage.

No, no, no, no, no.

They have a bunch of first party sales that have interesting themes that they curate.

And I think Daily Deal is always going to be, you're always going to see stuff from different genres in Daily Deal, because at least unless they change that, because Daily Deal is literally his six games that are, you know, just like on sale right now.

So I think they're going to have some of that.

But I think it's a good thing to, it's a good thing to note, like if we get too far down that, then the first person shooter people will be seeing all first person shooters for the rest of time, right? So yeah, it's fair.

And we looked at 2021 versus 2025.

And yeah, what we discovered is there is some stuff that's still hanging out pretty high, like Action RPG, which I know covers a multitude of sins.

But there's still a bunch of hit Action RPGs in a bunch of big and small genres.

Now it's like a good hybrid.

Not that we didn't the whole time, but like in my eyes, I was like frustrated with that.

I didn't really like personally, I didn't really like understand, not understand, but I didn't personally like like metalcore or like some of that like Genre like the genre that the label became kind of known for breaking.

I was like, I don't understand why this is.

I don't understand it.

Mm.

Genre-wise, we're still firmly in dark fantasy, but Godsgrave changes the flavor of the story considerably 'cause Nevernight gave us an assassin school narrative as Mia Corvere trained with the Red Church.

Godsgrave takes Mia into a different kind of arena and I mean that somewhat literally.

You do.

And the CGI is so good there, it makes a character with physically impossible fluid anatomy feel genuinely believable.

The fights feel raw and completely distinct from anything else in the superhero genre.

genre.So we have this wildly unconventional, chaotic hero, but every superhero movie needs a foil, right? A villain to push against.

Yes, the villain.

And this is where the movie makes some very interesting and controversial choices.