Quote:
Originally Posted by Reckoner
While discussion of the semantics behind genre label classifications might be a nice thought activity for some people, I am not quite sure what the overall point to the discussion here is.
Even beyond the fact that different people might see each series as different things, so many anime today are multi-genre that it's hard to pigeonhole any of them into anything. Furthermore, all genre labels were meant for were to give a quick and easy method to classify anime. If someone says something is an "action" show, then it's easy to get an idea of what to expect in it. When we start trying to dissect terms like "slice of life" that originally referred to something very specific before getting mangled up, we start to stray from the very idea of classifying things as "slice of life" was never intended to be a genre category like drama.
Kokoro Connect, Tari Tari, and Hyouka are all dramas. They're different dramas of course, but using the term "slice of life" here makes little sense and almost purposeless. Simply describing them with real terms that we have a grasp of would work better. For example, Tari Tari is very obviously built as a coming of age story. Hyouka is obviously also a mystery story. KC is trickier to describe, but at its heart its a bit of a melodrama.
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^ All of the above.
I've always hated the label "slice-of-life". It's so broad and poorly defined as to be completely useless as both a name of a genre ("drama" would usually suffice) and a description of a narrative style (all dramas necessarily try to tell us about the lives of their fictional characters).
Much more importantly, I find "slice-of-life" to be a label that makes sense only to anime fans and, even then, only to that small section of anime fans who actually bother discussing such labels. If I were to tell someone who has never watched anime, someone who knows nothing about Japanese popular culture, that
Tari Tari is a "slice-of-life" story, he wouldn't have a clue what I'm talking about.
What's wrong with the broad classifications used by everyone else in the world outside of anime fandom? Drama, tragedy, comedy, thriller, horror or documentary. What makes anime drama so "special" and different from all other kinds of drama that it needs a unique descriptor that no other critic but an anime fan would understand?
Moreover, I've always thought of "slice-of-life" as a redundant term for an equivalent idea that has already been around for some time: "fly-on-the-wall" drama.
Words should exist to aid communication, not to obfuscate meaning or to create walls of exclusivity ("If you don't know what slice-of-life is, you're not l33t enough to enjoy anime").