Aren't all stories Slice of Life?

[Deleted member 68927]

Just hear me out. If you explore the characters, and what is a story without the characters, then you show a glimpse of their lives. A Slice of Life, so to speak. Even short stories could be considered such. So, what is the point of the genre, if all stories could fall in that category?

 

[Temple]

I think I read an explanation about this before. Slice of Life focuses on the moment, hence a slice. Let's take a scene of a person trying to bake a cake. That can be a serious scene or a comedy scene or whatever. But it should stay in the moment. If this person is baking a cake for her love interest, and then she gives the cake later on, it wasn't constrained to a slice anymore but it's building the plot and becomes maybe a romance story. Slice of Life stories barely has any plot, because once they zero in on a plot, their genre turns into that plot. So it's more like an examination of the slice and not the whole cake.

 

[DarkeReises]

I think I read an explanation about this before. Slice of Life focuses on the moment, hence a slice. Let's take a scene of a person trying to bake a cake. That can be a serious scene or a comedy scene or whatever. But it should stay in the moment. If this person is baking a cake for her love interest, and then she gives the cake later on, it wasn't constrained to a slice anymore but it's building the plot and becomes maybe a romance story. Slice of Life stories barely has any plot, because once they zero in on a plot, their genre turns into that plot. So it's more like an examination of the slice and not the whole cake.

I'm going to disagree with you, but not debate with you.

 

[NotaNuffian]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slice_of_life

 

[Arkus86]

I would say it's about the focus. You get the glimpse of the character's daily lives in an action or horror story for example, but it's just that, a glimpse. An interlude between the main events, not the main focus.

 

[ShrimpShady]

So that we can easily tell apart Lucky Star from Death Note

 

[halfBlooming]

You're just arguing semantics.

This is almost like we're talking about the romance genre, when it's obvious we're talking about romantic love context but someone says everything is romance because, duh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_(prose_fiction)

Slice of life genre doesn't mean everything that's 'part of life'. Yes we use 'slice of life', but that doesn't make every genre go under slice of life just because the words literally say so.

 

[Sebas_Guzman]

HalfBlooming has the right take. You're being too literal. The term "Slice of life" does not mean what the individual words strung together imply. There is new meaning in the specific combination of words. Can you appreciate this fact?
In a way, "Slice of Life" is jargon to people that know about literature/read books. Said in another way "Slice of Life" is an idiom. Point is, it has a different meaning than what you assume.

The point of the term is to convey to readers that they're going to read a more chill story with a high rate of chapters or segments that don't really contribute to an overall plot but are pleasant/relaxing/nice/or slow.