Clephas' VN home

True words. Although I wouldn't call myself a particular fan of slice if life VN's, I do consider slice of life 'scenes' as very important for almost every VN. They are the calm breaks inbetween the action or more serious story parts of a VN, and essential to develop characters and relationships. Ideally, they happen in 'sine waves', iterating between story and slice of life parts. Though there's certainly still a lot to say about how to write actual good slice of life scenes... 

1 hour ago, ChaosRaven said:

True words. Although I wouldn't call myself a particular fan of slice if life VN's, I do consider slice of life 'scenes' as very important for almost every VN. They are the calm breaks inbetween the action or more serious story parts of a VN, and essential to develop characters and relationships. Ideally, they happen in 'sine waves', iterating between story and slice of life parts. Though there's certainly still a lot to say about how to write actual good slice of life scenes... 

A lot of the problem is that a lot of slice-of-life writers don't seem to understand that experiencing the daily life of a boring incompetent is... boring.

SoL segments are perfectly fine in a charage or moege imo.

I also agree on SoL being an important element in writing. The problem shows up, when writers can't really balance the contents of their story well enough. As @@RedK said, it's fine for SoL to make majority of the game's content, at least in terms of modern standards (although, I'd still digress - even moege or charage can be written differently - they don't particulary require SoL as sole supporting element), but things get different with story-centric prose. Whereas an average charage or moege can survive solely on influx of SoL elements, more active genres require action and catalysts for these to actually happen. Good prose tends to minimize SoL elements to brief periods between chapters or events, where the action unfolds and remain used solely as subtle character-building devices. It's said, that "real characters" gain soul only through "real ordeals" - obviously, SoL itself isn't enough to actually construct an interesting character with deep personality, unless you're planning to create the next generation of Mary Sue's.