[blechinger]

As with most systems these categories don't work universally because they're firm definitions for complex works which exist on sliding scales. We may identify tropes from a variety of trends and subgenres within a single work of art. Our categories guide us to the greater conversations and traditions some work may be participating in and are no more prescriptive than classifications of evolutionary speciation or morphology. That does not diminish their usefulness: it allows us the freedom to use them as scaffolding to build our own models for the thing itself being studied and compare those models to other's for consistency and depth of consideration.