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Beyond Genre Categories: How Narrative Pattern Coherence and Spanning Distance Shape Film Success

Paper · 2026 · Zhichao Wang and Zeyu Lyu

Summary

Research on cultural markets usually separates products by genre labels. This misses large differences in content between films that share a label. The authors instead treat TVTropes tropes as the basic units of narrative. They collected about 30,924 tropes linked to 18,164 films and matched these films to IMDb ratings (evaluation) and vote counts (attention).

They built a weighted trope co-occurrence network and partitioned it with the Leiden algorithm into 29 narrative patterns. Each film then received two scores:

  • coherence: an HHI of how its tropes are distributed across patterns;
  • spanning distance: a weighted Jaccard distance between the patterns it mixes.

OLS models controlled for trope count, release year and main genre. Coherence was linked to both higher ratings and more votes. Spanning distance was associated with higher ratings but fewer votes.

The work shifts the study of category spanning away from genre labels and toward what stories are actually made of. It suggests that novelty pleases viewers who watch a film but makes it harder to attract an audience in the first place.

Key points

  • Data: about 1.2 million trope–film links from TVTropes.org, matched to IMDb, covering films from the 1920s to the 2020s.
  • Narrative patterns: Leiden community detection produced 29 patterns. One general-purpose community (Community 0, 10,573 tropes, e.g. Foreshadowing, Chekhov's Gun) appears in almost every film. The other 28 are thematic, such as horror/supernatural and sci-fi.
  • Sample: 17,108 films. The 1,056 films whose tropes all fall into one community were dropped, because spanning distance cannot be computed for them.
  • Results:
    • HHI (coherence): β = 1.089 for rating and β = 1.207 for log votes.
    • Spanning distance: β = 0.477 for rating and β = −0.557 for log votes.
    • All p < 0.01; R² = 0.258 (rating) and 0.409 (votes).
  • Limitations: popular films are annotated more thoroughly on the wiki. The patterns also depend on the Leiden resolution parameter, and the general community may compress distance estimates.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Tohoku UniversitySendai · Japan20 works · 514 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksEconomics, Econometrics and Finance · 17 worksEconomics and Econometrics · 12 worksVisual Arts and Performing Arts · 5 worksMuseology · 2 works

Cite

Cite as Zhichao Wang and Zeyu Lyu. 2026. Beyond Genre Categories: How Narrative Pattern Coherence and Spanning Distance Shape Film Success. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.nlp4dh-1.13

@inproceedings{wang2026beyond,
  title = {{Beyond Genre Categories: How Narrative Pattern Coherence and Spanning Distance Shape Film Success}},
  author = {Zhichao Wang and Zeyu Lyu},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for the Digital Humanities},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.nlp4dh-1.13},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.nlp4dh-1.13}
}

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  29. Center trope Representative tropes 0 1 10,573 3,658 18,164 10,475 0.170 0.084 Shout-Out Eldritch Abomination 2,565 9,428 0.083 Doomed Upgrade 1,703 7,878 0.090 Converted Into a Weapon 1,453 7,288 0.129 Face Framed In Shadow Shout-Out, Oh Crap!, Foreshadowing, Big Bad, Chekhov’s Gun Eldritch Abominat… find

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