rachelmanija already mentioned both of my favorite examples, but the ones that instantly came to mind when you mentioned the question were Trigun and Hexwood. Trigun was very meaningful to me in my early twenties because of the way it went from comedy to - not quite tragedy, but serious drama that at least flirts with tragedy. When I had to teach tragedy as a genre in the past few years Vash the Stampede came to mind as one of the tragic heroes I actually identify with - although he really isn't a tragic hero, he has the qualities of a tragic hero much more than those of a comic hero, despite the fact that the entire first season posits him as a comic figure. In one of the final episodes of Trigun before the climax, there's a moment that goes back to the comic characterization of the first few episodes, and you see how superficial that is as a look into Vash's character, and that's really stayed with me ever since. It was very effective.
I feel like the genre shift of Hexwood was what Deborah's whole presentation at the first DWJ conference was about, and it was also a really memorable presentation for me - have been reading Hexwood through that lens ever since.
I would also second the We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves recommendation - that is a wonderful book I have been trying to get my father to read for years now. I don't know why he won't.
I feel like sometimes last minute genre shifts really work well too, though? I remember how moving and powerful I found the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth as a teenager. And the best Shakespeare production I have ever seen was the Globe's travelling all-female cast Taming of the Shrew, which played the whole thing as broad comedy until the final scene, which grew more and more horrific, and even Petruchio was horrified, and I found that quite effective.
As I have some claim to being a scholar of the structure of Henry James novels, which are often clearly divided into two parts, I feel like there should be something to say there, but I can't think of it now. Hmmm. . . going back to graduate school in general, Endymion? We think it's a simple heroic quest but it actually gets much more complicated than that? Would Beowulf count, or is tragic fatalism intrinsic to the genre? I suppose there's no real twist there, either. I read Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping this way - I was expecting it to be a coming-of-age novel about how weird people eventually have to conform to society, and then it wasn't, and that struck me as a really awesome twist which made the genre a lot weirder than I was expecting, but I don't know if anyone else would read it that way.
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I feel like the genre shift of Hexwood was what Deborah's whole presentation at the first DWJ conference was about, and it was also a really memorable presentation for me - have been reading Hexwood through that lens ever since.
I would also second the We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves recommendation - that is a wonderful book I have been trying to get my father to read for years now. I don't know why he won't.
I feel like sometimes last minute genre shifts really work well too, though? I remember how moving and powerful I found the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth as a teenager. And the best Shakespeare production I have ever seen was the Globe's travelling all-female cast Taming of the Shrew, which played the whole thing as broad comedy until the final scene, which grew more and more horrific, and even Petruchio was horrified, and I found that quite effective.
As I have some claim to being a scholar of the structure of Henry James novels, which are often clearly divided into two parts, I feel like there should be something to say there, but I can't think of it now. Hmmm. . . going back to graduate school in general, Endymion? We think it's a simple heroic quest but it actually gets much more complicated than that? Would Beowulf count, or is tragic fatalism intrinsic to the genre? I suppose there's no real twist there, either. I read Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping this way - I was expecting it to be a coming-of-age novel about how weird people eventually have to conform to society, and then it wasn't, and that struck me as a really awesome twist which made the genre a lot weirder than I was expecting, but I don't know if anyone else would read it that way.