The Drama Tag

As some of you might have noticed, I posted a new story today. What you might not have noticed is that it has a nifty new tag - the Drama tag.

Why Don't You Tell Them?

Drama
2,174 words

In the days after her ascension, every newspaper in Equestria is talking about how Princess Celestia transformed Twilight Sparkle into an alicorn princess.

There's just one problem – Twilight knows that's not what happened.

Why does Celestia let them believe something that isn't true? After all, it isn't like knowing could hurt anypony, right?

Yes, that's right, FIMFiction has finally implemented the Drama tag, so that many, many stories previously labelled "Slice of Life" can now be properly labelled "drama".

So what's the difference?

In general literary parlance, something which is "slice of life" is about mundane realism in our everyday existence. Drama, on the other hand, tends to be focused more on pivotal moments in people's lives - something which shapes them as people.

Note that a slice of life story is not literally an everyday occurrence, but simply something which is relatively "normal" - someone going on vacation to Disneyworld might be a slice of life piece, even though they only went once. If, on the other hand, they went to Disneyworld and someone was seriously injured when they tried to climb out of the Space Mountain roller coaster and hit their head, that might be a drama piece, as the characters react to the sudden medical emergency and how it shapes them.

All this means that I had a lot of retagging to do, as I had been using "Slice of Life" to designate a lot of drama pieces. In the end, I retagged a number of my stories, in addition to my most recent one:

Thanks, Mother

As He Lay Dying

Rose Petals - Debatably redundant with the Romance tag there (Most romance is functionally a subgenre of drama, specifically focusing on, well, romantic feelings between characters)

Dawn

Dusk

Famous Last Words (well, it fits two of the stories, anyway)

The Butterfly's Burden

The Stars Ascendant

I really have no clue what tag to stick on To the Sun, admittedly.

Anyway, I hope you guys all have fun with the new drama tag.

And of course, with my new story - it is a philosophical piece about the burden of knowledge and the possibility of grasping for immortality and failing, a subject matter I have approached once before, but from a different angle.

Comments

[Eonflare]

Interesting tag.

[Quillamore]

I do feel, however, that there are some stories that can effectively switch from SOL to drama from time to time, so I don't quite see them as necessarily canceling each other out.

[PatchworkPoltergeist]

3524919
Yeah, I see Slice as covering both comedy and/or drama in equal measure, especially in my current project which spans a lot of emotional ground. It's firmly in SoL territory, but I've been waffling on if I ought to add the drama (since the drama will ramp up in the second half) and comedy (because it's not all srs bsns).