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High-Concept versus Low-Concept
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It makes sense that it would exist given the existence of "high-concept", though.
Did you read my mini-essay up top?
What I don't get is how one can necessarily say that a work is one or the other, from the observer's perspective, without getting into many arguments of opinion or semantics.
^ Again, precisely. The harder a story is to explain meaningfully, the less high-concept or the more low-concept it is.
But I'm just not getting how one can define the difference between, say, (to borrow from Sredni's blogpost) "dinosaurs fight aliens" and, say, "a gentle comedy about high school", other than simply saying that the first premise has more "punch". I mean, it just seems really subjective and based on cultural norms -- for example, the premise "a story about a nun who moonlights as a prostitute" feels "punchy" only because we have a cultural expectation about nuns being sexually conservative.
Maybe it really just is about that, and has to do with how much something differs from "normalcy" in one's culture? But in that case it could also be said to be a measure of "speculativeness" (in the sense of speculative fiction), and basically everything sci-fi and fantasy could be said to be high-concept. (Is it?)
Actually the way you put it there makes it seem like the difference is whether the work is more focused on the immediate premise or more so just uses the premise as a launching point for exploring other themes. That seems to be it.
Let's compare two high school comedy anime, just to show you what I mean. Great Teacher Onizuka is about a Japanese delinquent who winds up teaching high school. One can tell what kind of story this is going to be and what the tone probably is just by the description. That's high-concept. On the other hand, Hidamari Sketch is about female art students in an apartment complex. That description tells you nothing about the appeal of that show, however: How the tone is gentle yet exuberant, or how the direction uses symbolism and wild angles to convey these emotions. Such a story is low-concept.
i feel like this is likely true of *most* concepts in criticism and fiction
the lack of black-and-white concrete lines does not invalidate the concept, and demanding them means shackling oneself to a very shallow and limiting form of criticism imo
And in particular, Haruhi was mentioned and I'm not actually sure whether that counts as high-concept or low-concept. I think it was cited as an example of high-concept? Y'know, you may be onto something -- maybe I'm confusing the work itself with the pitch.
Unfortunately, of the examples named so far I'm not personally familiar with any of the low-concept ones.
I think I'm starting to see how high-concept stuff could be mistaken for being shallow since the premise is more attention-grabbing? Though of course it's possible for something with a speculative-fiction setting to also explore deeper themes.
But I'm also kinda failing to see how it doesn't basically include all of speculative fiction. Unless you also say that something can become low-concept when the premise is done a ton of times, like the first time you have a knight-saving-the-princess story it's high-concept, but then after that's been done fifty million times, it becomes low-concept on its own, or something like that? Which would also mean that it depends on the audience, like it might be high-concept to children but low-concept to adults. Or am I barking up the wrong tree?
I thought you were more of a weeb than I was.
And yeah, I've never seen either of those. Closest thing is a Wiz Khalifa x Hidamari Sketch video, and putting Sketchbook on my to-watch list.
. . . can't it? Is subjectivity ipso facto horrible?
i find this concept extremely straightforward and intuitive, and genuinely am not sure whether you've spotted some problem i haven't, or whether you're overthinking this.
Haruhi is a funny example, really; it's easy enough to describe it in ways that make it sound like a high-concept series but in practice that premise is rarely the focus (often it's more like an elephant in the room). i wouldn't be confident describing it as either high- or low-concept, i think it's somewhere more middling/ambiguous.