rhysiana

(Moving this piece of meta over because I'm about to write another thing that links to it and I don't want the original to disappear into Tumblr's collapsing void.)

I spent entirely too many hours this week forcing myself through the rest of S5 of Teen Wolf (mostly in the vain hope that it would give more context for the whole science teacher storyline in S6; spoiler: it doesn’t), which I had given up on 3-4 episodes in back when I originally binged the rest of the show, and in an attempt to salvage at least something from this experience, I started trying to analyze just why that particular season just DID NOT work for me.

What it comes down to, I think, is that this was the season where the show crossed the line from urban fantasy to horror. I was reading urban fantasy back when it was still shelved under horror (Tanya Huff’s Blood series in particular), so I know the line can be thin, but there are some key distinctions.

I tried to find another essay that would handily put into words what the main differences between these genres are, but shockingly there don’t appear to be any. The best succinct thing I found was a discussion thread on LibraryThing that boiled it down to this:

I’ll just share that for the past few months my guideline has been, “Is the paranormal force/creature/person the good guy?” - then it’s paranormal. If it’s the bad guy - generally horror.

You’d be surprised how well this division tracks with how publishers market them.

Teen Wolf, I feel, is a show that was never quite sure which side of the line it fell on. The audience, on the other hand, was pretty sure it was watching urban fantasy, which fits with the definition above. Scott McCall, the titular teen wolf, is obviously the good guy. So good, in fact, he is able to gain the powers of an alpha through sheer virtue. And the real villains of S1 are clearly the human hunters, so the audience’s expectations are clearly set.

What’s more, the audience had actual contemporary shows to help set those expectations, in that Lost Girl had premiered the previous September. Things viewers of the the two shows could expect: The main character finds themselves suddenly thrust into the world of the supernatural and must learn to find their way. The supernatural is not always nice or safe, and not all of the people there automatically like them, but, with the help of their best friend, they form a group of trusted allies and friends that eventually form a found family and band together to solve crime, protect the ones they love, and generally kick ass. Hooray! There may be horror elements, but they’re only there to add weight to the plot problems that need to be overcome.

(Arguably Lost Girl did all of these things better, but hey, Canadian genre TV has been doing a lot of things better than the US lately. Clearly Teen Wolf did it well enough to amass an extremely dedicated fandom, and created characters intriguing enough to spark the imaginations of an amazing number of fan writers. That’s not nothing!)

But then we get to S5.

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