Emotional Cores in Genre

Basically, genre is just shorthand for “what emotional feeling are you looking for from this book.”

In thriller, that would be thrills. The sense of the clock ticking down, of every second potentially being your last.

In sci-fi/fantasy it’s wonder. It’s the sense of scope and scale as you explore a world totally foreign to your own

In progression fantasy, it’s self-actualization. We insert onto the MC who becomes more powerful and fulfills their potential.

In regression, I’d argue it’s the feeling of redemption, of getting a second chance to fix the mistakes of the past.

You get the idea. The point is that if you can identify the emotional core, then you’ve basically cracked the code for how to make a story consistently fun for a reader, because you know exactly what it is they’re looking for from a story.