Slice of life

Slice of Life to me is the presentation that Anime utilizes to its most powerful. The experiences and journies I've gone on with characters through this medium feel incredibly personal in a way that I don't think any other medium has accomplished for me.
And within these shows there always exists an element in them that I either have to casually ignore or create an external reason for them to exist diagetically for the show. And that is what I've come to think of as the Voyeurism of Anime.

Every experience I have with media is very much a conversation for me. A chat that you have with the black box that is Creator and Myself about our life experience, expectations and regrets. You can just look at my twitter timeline to get the barest hint of that.
For that reason I have always connected incredibly deeply with the presentation form of Slice of Life. From Chef and Inside Llewyn Davis to Hidamari Sketch and Ichigo Mashimaro, Slice of Life has been a large way that I've been able to reach an understanding of living
outside of my life experiences and personal expectations.

Part of what's so powerful about Slice of Life is that it is by definition a very vulnerable way to tell a story. The editorialization it excludes enables presenting you with incredible intimate moments from a persons life through a structure designed to create
an empathetic response. For me, characters in a Slice of Life feel far more truthful to me than through any medium, specifically because I feel I have a greator understanding of their desires and insecurities because I've experienced those alongside them.

Because of that I feel that there is a very deep trust that has to exist between Creator and Character that the story being told has to be meaningful enough to expose them in such a vulnerable way. That the power of Slice of Life is best utilized when telling a truth
that could only be truly understood through the incredibly personal experience that Slice of Life engenders.

When meaning plays second fiddle to exposition the conversation instead turns towards an exploitative contract between the Creator and You to instead peer into the perosnal lives of the Characters for personal gratification. And the only truth that ends up being shared
can only be your desires and expectations of what the Characters lives can grant to You. That their lives value to you only comes through the exposure of their intimate moments.



It is important when talking about Characters to acknowledge that they are architected with particular intentions. Their behaviors and objectives exist to serve particular functions within a story. Discussing a character without discussing the narrative is
fundamentally ignoring who the character is. Their context has to be recognized.

Character exploitation is when a character is designed without any agency in a narrative. To serve merely as a totem, these characters do not exist to be expressions of personality, but lodestones of appeal.