Blessed be the LORD my strength which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight:
My goodness, and my fortress; my high tower, and my deliverer; my shield, and he in whom I trust; who subdueth my people under me.
TheSubtleDoctor wrote:This is the conundrum. Now, you may say that certain shows, such as Haibane Renmei, just need to be re-classified as dramas or whatever. However, I want to avoid making this move so as not to enforce my arbitrary definition upon others and to try to find a definition that accommodates the thinking of the well-meaning and thoughtful fan community.
Falx wrote:In non slice-of-life shows, the plot shapes the characters and their development. While in slice-of-life shows, the characters shape each other.
FllMtl Novelist wrote:I don't really think that's possible. If something's typically considered slice-of-life because a whole bunch of people happen to give it that categorization, there isn't necessarily any one underlying idea because every one of those individuals has their own perception of the genre. Even if there is a such an idea, there's infinitely many perceptions and infinitely many ways to word (or badly word) those perceptions, which means you could be looking for a universally-accepted definition for a really long time.
FllMtl Novelist wrote:I As kind of a sidenote, I've also noticed slice-of-life can get used as a catch-all for stuff that doesn't obviously fit in anywhere else, which also makes nailing down a real, universally-applicable definition difficult.
Actually, yes, this is pretty much it. I'd say it's close to iyashikei but the two aren't one and the same.TheSubtleDoctor wrote:Two points:
(1) This is a well-thought, nuanced definition. So, if I read you correctly, slice of life is a completely viewer-focused genre? It's all about stirring up a particular feeling of nostalgia or belonging or being-present, within the viewer, rather than about narrative structure or character development. According to your definition, it also seems to overlap heavily with the "healing genre" of anime (don't know the Japanese name for it).
I haven't seen Haibane Renmei, so I can't talk about the specifics of whether or not it counts or what kind of weird in-between state it has (though based on what you're saying I'd probably say it's a drama in the same vein as tsuritama) but I think the notion that "this has been called this genre by a lot of people so making a definition that excludes it isn't a correct one" is a bad line of thought. I think slice-of-life -is- a vague term that a lot of people throw around in different ways, but that doesn't make it useless as a term if a useful definition is created. It also doesn't mean the term is useless, for instance, the debate about whether or not Star Wars is SF or not doesn't make SF a useless term if people can argue about what the precise definition is.(2) While this definition is indeed well-constructed, it runs into the same problem i point out in my OP. It excludes works that are classified as slice of life, Haibane Renmei being a prominent one that comes to mind. HR's characters -are- real characters, whose growth is a central focus of the story. There is a pretty major conflict that takes up the last third to half of the series. Yet, everything you said about the setting being paramount and the creation of feelings within the viewer applies to HR as well.This is the conundrum.
Now, you may say that certain shows, such as Haibane Renmei, just need to be re-classified as dramas or whatever. However, I want to avoid making this move so as not to enforce my arbitrary definition upon others and to try to find a definition that accommodates the thinking of the well-meaning and thoughtful fan community.
The problem with this line of thinking, I think, is that by lumping very different shows like Nichibros (whose title even contains Daily Lives) and Aria into the same category is ultimately a useless gesture. Even if you do find some loose definition that can fit all the shows that are classified as slice of life, the term becomes meaningless because the shows have literally nothing in common with each other except that neither feature physically dangerous conflicts. When I tell you something is SF or a historical epic, you can have some expectations of the show. I'd wager that the misunderstanding and confusion over the term mostly stems from the fact that we don't really have similar stories to the definition I put forth in America (as far as I know anyways) so it's an attempt to nail down a genre the Japanese get but we don't because we're used to people fighting or yelling at each other or making out or doing funny things and we don't really get something that isn't trying to do any of those, but so we end up applying the term to things we think might count.TheSubtleDoctor wrote:I am actually afraid of this being the ultimate outcome of the current exercise. If you're correct here --and-- it also happens that there are no clear and distinct criteria for what makes a series slice of life, then we really shouldn't be using the term as a genre-designator because it's completely ambiguous. It'd be like creating a genre of anime called "heart-pounding." I think that it is possible, in principle, to discover at least a broad line of demarcation b/w slice of life and non slice of life (even if there is a sort of "border zone" that contains weird, outlier cases that prove to be exceptions).
Mr. Hat'n'Clogs wrote:I think the notion that "this has been called this genre by a lot of people so making a definition that excludes it isn't a correct one" is a bad line of thought.
MangaRocks! wrote:I think that, personally, I've always taken the term slice-of-life to mean that what you're seeing is a slice of the characters' daily lives-- not necessarily your own. So, for example, Natsume, Aria, and Time Of Eve can all be slice-of-life, not because their settings or the stuff happening in them are normal life for us, but because it's normal life for those characters.
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