Am I totally insane? I looked through the thread asking about favorite horror mangas and I was kinda dumbfounded, so I looked up the horror genre, and was surprised to find that quite a few popular series listed as 'Horror' are about as scary as a difficult bowel movement. Deadman Wonderland is a horror manga? Are you high? It's a freaking fighting manga. It's no more horror than Bleach (oooh, they're shinigami~ oooh, they kill things, oooh~ I'm scared ). Claymore? Horror? Jesus, I'd change it, but someone would just change it back.

I think that we have a serious identity crisis here. Horror is not violence. No Country for Old Men was not a horror movie. Violent? Hell yeah. A little scary? Maybe. Horror? Not the last time I looked up what horror was in the dictionary, no.

Tragedy is a similarly misrepresented genre. If someone dies and it makes you sad, that makes it a tragedy, right? No. Sorry. Genres are themes. If the manga is sad throughout, then it's a tragedy. Otherwise it just has sad parts. Kinda like Star Wars (OMG Harrison Ford died! And he loved the Princess! How sad *takes out tragedy stamp*).

Now. Am I totally off the mark here? I know that genres are open to certain amounts of interpretation, but there are limits, right?

Yeah, but for inexperienced manga readers, Deadman Wonderland and Claymore are horror-ish. Or for people who only read Shoujo and the like, and aren't familiar with the violent genres.

Though I do agree with tragedy.

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On this site they don't just put the main genre. For example claymore says: Action, Horror, Shounen, Tragedy

Which is actually pretty accurate, and more specific than just 'horror' or 'action' by itself.

Say you were looking for a action manga that also features horror or tragedy, without the multiple entries that would be harder to find.

But maybe it would be better if they renamed 'genre' to ' themes', yes.

I see where you're coming from, but I think violence can easily be represented with 'mature+action'. Generally, I don't assume that a mature action manga means they have sex and fight at the same time (unless it mentions adult as well). A genre shouldn't be relative... it should be a genre. If your 7 year old has been watching Shrek, lots of things will scare them, but that doesn't make Law and Order a horror show.

The point is that little kids (and girls who only watch chick flicks) know what to expect when they walk into the horror section of Blockbuster, so why is it any different here?


And @ nevels: A manga can have multiple themes, and thus, multiple genres, yes. And it's accurate to say something is 'horror, action, tragedy' if, say, the plot is centered around the main character having to fight her family to the death as they slowly become inhuman monsters'. But if that same manga only has a little of that killing of family, then it's just a horror action with elements of tragedy. As the tragedy is a very small part of the whole (and is therefore not a theme/genre).

And if it's not scary (or intended to be scary), then horror isn't even a sub-genre. It's a misrepresentation.

I'm with you SnoopyCool, Bleach should be considered a horror manga because hollows are very scary

Seriously, horror, as a genre, should only be applied to the manga whose plot and overall atmosphere is intended to scare the reader.

If a manga is gory and bloody and has lots of action, that doesn't make it a horror manga, unless the mangaka wants to scare the reader with all that gore.



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Yeah. I myself was surprised those two were horror, but I listed them anyway according to the genre list.

Actually, in my personal opinion, very few 'horror' manga can actually be classified as 'horror'. I have found that most manga with the genre horror simply mean, 'Slightly scary to those who are wimps.' It also is sometimes classified as 'Violent to some degree that girls who only watch chick-flicks will throw up.'

The genres are also classified for all ages and groups of people. So what might not even be relatively horror to a die-hard fan might be extremely scary to say a... 10 year old.

Yeahhh. Thats my experience at least. I agree with you.

Actually, I found Parasyte even lacking in the Horror section. Thats just me.

Horror can also be classified as something INTENDED to scare people... But ends up not being scary at all.

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In the cases of Claymore, horror and tragedy fits the series, though I would've just left it as shonen/fantasy/action or something close to it.
Claymore does have its share of blood, gore, dismembering, guts, killing, eating of guts, and guts left lying on the ground. Can't say it's not related to the series when the monsters eat steaming human guts as their only meal.

Tragedy, I was a bit surprised to see that there when I did, but I left it since the series is far from the typical happy go lucky theme of other shonen series. It is one train wreck after another, things never got great for the characters and it has been a ride on the darker side of human emotions.

At least the labeling isn't like a "mature, adult, hentai, ecchi, smut" for some series, I seriously have to think hard about what to do when more than 2 of those show up for the same series...

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Good to hear from people who agree... and it's not really that I don't want things that are weird and gross and stuff in the horror section, I just want things to be evaluated in a way that better represents the central themes of the stories. Gore doesn't automatically classify something as horror. It's more a psychologically disturbing or physical fear-inducing genre (but of course, violence can increase that element). And really, it should be pretty damn small... honestly, I think that most mangas have about 5 too many 'genres' listed. Very few stories are actually horror, action, ecchi, tragedy, romance, comedy shounens... because damn, that would be one hella weird manga.

Like Dark Water, if you're familiar with the series. I think that the "Horror" genre fits with this one, and is a perfect example of what Horror manga should be like.

There's barely any gore in it, but it still has this scary/depressing mood going throughout the manga, which made me shiver sometimes. >.<

In my opinion, this is a good description of what "Horror" should be...

It's not something visual, but more psychological.

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Damn right, now take guro mangas for example (Uzuga Waita maybe) ,that is gory and sick and twisted but not scary at all, it makes you want to puke but not hide under your bed and then compare it to Mail (which I have read alone in my dark room) which is scary as shit, small even non-existent violence and filled with scary, psychological stuff and a scary story

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Post them all here:
http://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=4462

Btw, Deadman Wonderland and Claymore are taken off horror and are genre locked

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