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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.
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Genre labels are meant to be helpful in finding anime to recommend and watch. So if you take a genre category like "drama", and overuse it to the point that it essentially becomes a catch-all category for anything that doesn't neatly fall into much more specific genres like "comedy", "romance", or "sci-fi", then that genre label ceases to be useful for its most practical purposes.
Do we call a show with a little bit of "comedy" a "comedy"? I would argue that Tari Tari has just as much "comedy" in it as it does "drama" so why not call Tari Tari a "comedy"?
The reason why is that people
specifically searching for comedy are likely going to want a show that's more comedic in nature than what Tari Tari is. Likewise, a person
specifically searching for "drama" is likely going to want a show that's more dramatic in nature than what Tari Tari is.
But when people look for "Slice of Life", they're primarily looking for a show with a certain
feel to it, and Tari Tari does in fact have that feel, consistently throughout the show.
So I think that some people are allowing an overabundance of pedantic thinking to get in the way of what would be most helpful in a practical way when it comes to genre classification.
It would probably be best if "Slice of Life" purists were to let it go, and allow the term to take a natural evolution that might actually make it useful once again. Right now, the Slice of Life purists are leaving a popular anime fan-term in a place where it's completely useless because it applies to almost no recent anime. I think it would be far better to let go of a strict standard of "Slice of Life is a show that
must be Setting-Driven rather than Character-Driven or Plot-Driven".
And a good side-effect of this is that by letting "Slice of Life" evolve in this fashion, the genre label "Drama" is much less likely to be overused to the point of uselessness.