Tag change: High School/University to School Life?

Honestly, I'm not a fan of the 'school life' tag, but it seems to be standard on other sites and I know people have requested it here. So I'm giving into the idea - please respond to the poll and let me know if you'd prefer the school-type tags are changed to 'School Life'. You can respond too if you want, but definitely vote in the poll :)

uni != school

hm, it could be a regional thing but here in the states all forms of education are considered 'school' - elementary, high school, trade school, college, etc.

Formal education=school, plain & simple.
Also, it can be very difficult to tell in an anime/manga whether it's about "school" or "university", especially if the "school" is a boarding school.
To complicate matters further, japanese have what they -call- "high school", but which they treat as college/university. From what I can tell, the education & age levels of it are approximately equiv to american high schools, but they have to -try- to get into it (by getting high grades, paying tuition, etc) as if it were college.

yeah, the levels are pretty confusing and also, university is tagged almost never. i think tagging josei/seinen is more important than the actual school setting given age demographic is usually what's important

Uni is more than just lessons given to undergrads. It's a scientific community where you're supposed to research and share new information with others. At least that's what they say here. For me a "school" means "elemantary school", classes 1-9. But I guess that's just a difference between English and Finnish. You don't go to school, you go to study...

In any case there's so many anime that has a school/uni as a setting it's not even worth tagging it, unless it's a really major part of the anime, like in GTO or Azumanga Daioh. And if I were searching for related anime I'd prefer to know if it's uni or a high school.

well yeah, like all tags it wouldnt be used unless it's a really major part of the series.

i agree that the distinction between high school and university is sometimes important (as personally, id rather watch a more mature title - ie university, usually), but i think that can be covered with seinen/josei (if applicable, of course), given those terms are aimed at older audiences.

can anyone think of instances where a series was NOT josei/seinen and involved a university-level of matureness?

eriol- Here regular school is k-12 (ages 5-18), with grades 1-18 being mandatory, then college/uni is for 18+ who want advanced education & is voluntary. Uni is also for research type stuff, but that function is secondary to the educational function. Also, I have never encoiuntered so much as a single anime/manga title which involved uni in the form of researching. research labs appear in anime/manga, but they are always portrayed as being purely labs, not uni.


As far as making a distinction between the 2 tags, I can't think of a single series where it was clearly uni. The vast majority of school oriented anime/manga are either clearly "normal" school, or unclear whether it's uni, high school, or a boarding school.


edit: I just looked at the tags on the site, and there's only 1 series that currently uses the uni tag (plus the manga version of that same series, so I count it as just 1). I've never seen/read the series in question, but from the description & screens, the only thing that makes in "uni" is the fact that it uses the word "university" in the description. If the synopsis hadn't included the word "university", it no doubt would have just recieved the school life tag.

sothis said:

can anyone think of instances where a series was NOT josei/seinen and involved a university-level of matureness?

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I'm not sure if I remember correctly but I believe that Honey and Clover takes place at a university, involves university life, but they never actually really go to classes or anything, its more like the on-campus life. At least I think...its been a while since I've seen it.

In any case, I do think Honey and Clover is a good example of why you should keep uni and high school tags...the fact that they are in a university influences the show a LOT, and if you just randomly switched them into high school, the show would be way different.

*Edit* For that matter, Nodame Cantabile is fairly distinctly college level, but I feel like Honey and Clover would be the best example.

*Edit* I watched these shows when I was younger, but it appears that you have them listed as josei/seinen currently so I guess I'm wrong...but I still think they are distinctly different than a high school setting.

I vote for no because in my mind High school and Univeristy animes tend to be different things so it would probably be better to keep them seperate.

Honey & clover/H&C2 don't have any school/uni tags at all here on a-p, so that's a bad example.


edit: FYI I can't find ANY other anime/manga site which has a university tag/genre. ANN doesn't, MU doesn't, animenfo doesn't. (Anidb is down atm, so I can't see if it does or not.)

I read 'school life' and I automatically think 'high school'. I do think that the seinen/josei tags would cover most of the maturity issues, but not necessarily so.

Sad that conformity works better in some instances.

In this case I know exactly what you mean with School Life as a tag. I mean, I think I am smart enough to know University life, but if it is hardly used then we all know many don't equate that tag.

Anyhow that is my 2 cents... if it does not help I want a cent back... preferably one flattened out in one of those machines at the Space Needle. ;)

Drahken said:

Honey & clover/H&C2 don't have any school/uni tags at all here on a-p, so that's a bad example.

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Maybe that's a case of mis-tagging? I certainly think uni-life played a large roll in that show...I mean that's what the show is focused around, even if it's not about attending classes, it's about somebody's experience living at a college. If that doesn't warrant a university tag then I think the issue is whether we want to call high school anime "school life" or "high school". I dunno, if were not gonna bother tagging the uni shows as "uni", we might as well just use school life to umbrella things.

I don't know warlucith. Like I said, I haven't seen the series myself.

I really think that giving a univerisy tag to any series will be extremely difficult, unless the series specifically says college/uni somewhere. As I said before, most school/uni anime & manga is nearly impossible to tell whether it's "high school", boarding school, or uni.
That being said however, perhaps "univeristy" could be used as one of those sub-tags that soth said v3 will have. Something like:
SCHOOL LIFE:
-UNIVERSITY

Another idea: Replace "university" with "boarding school", or something similar. (It's almost always very clear when a series involves some form of boarding/away school (including uni), but is almost never clear whether it's some sort of regular level boarding school, or a uni level school.)
Alternatively, have both as sub-tags:
SCHOOL LIFE:
-ELEMENTARY
-BOARDING SCHOOL
-UNIVERSITY

It was definately clear that they were at a uni in H+C, but the idea where you have School Life tag with high school, uni, or boarding subtags seems like it would be easier, and more organized to me. That way you can still get across the differences between levels of education/maturity without making any "useless" tags that only apply to a few shows. I think that would probably be the most efficient way of doing it.

Drahken said:

I really think that giving a univerisy tag to any series will be extremely difficult, unless the series specifically says college/uni somewhere. As I said before, most school/uni anime & manga is nearly impossible to tell whether it's "high school", boarding school, or uni.
That being said however, perhaps "univeristy" could be used as one of those sub-tags that soth said v3 will have. Something like:
SCHOOL LIFE:
-UNIVERSITY

Another idea: Replace "university" with "boarding school", or something similar. (It's almost always very clear when a series involves some form of boarding/away school (including uni), but is almost never clear whether it's some sort of regular level boarding school, or a uni level school.)
Alternatively, have both as sub-tags:
SCHOOL LIFE:
-ELEMENTARY
-BOARDING SCHOOL
-UNIVERSITY

Click to expand...

Sounds me a good idea, but I do think that military academy should also be available as sub-tag.

I've gone for no because I agree with shadowolf. Anime series set in high school and those set in university or college do generally tend to have a different tone about them. Just adding seinen and josei to a university based one may not get that across well enough.

Plus if I heard the tag 'School Life' I would automatically thinkof shows with elementary, middle or high schoolers. Stuff like Ouran or Minami-ke, of Kyo no go no ni. I wouldn't thinking of stuff like Genshiken which is set after the compulsory school years.

It would be nice if there was a single tag that covered Elementary, Middle and High school, because at the moment high school is the only one that gets a tag. Possibly Having a school life tag that would cover those three would be a good idea, but maybe keep the university tag as well.

the key here is i dont really use the university tag anyways. i probably should have not mentioned it in the first post for this reason, as changing to school life wont really affect much.

and i'm definitely not going to create sub tags for things like boarding schools - are you seriously telling me you think people will want to browse by tag for 'boarding school'? or will see a series and think 'oh cool, it has a boarding school, now i want to watch it!'

this school tag would only be used if the focus of the anime is the school situations. if the focus is romance and drama but the chars happen to be in university, it wouldnt have been tagged university.

I'm for the School Life tag.
School is school, as Zakiel said. For example, I never really knew if Genshiken was in a high school or university (and it really doesn't matter).
Since the university tag isn't used, anime involving universities should still be tagged as being in a 'school' setting.