"Award-winning"

[Momiji]

I'm not really sure, so sorry if this is in the wrong category, but I've been wondering... How is "award-winning" a format? I personally find that quite odd... Maybe it would fit better under content or something else ?

 

[DANDAN_THE_DANDAN]

It's funny how you often see "award winning" having 6s and under

 

[crazybars]

Well, go look at the audience score versus the Critic score on say. . . . . Doctor Who Season 11. Doesn't look like the people who actually watched it liked it right?

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/doctor_who/s11/

-----------------------------------
This turd of a Doctor Who season won . . . . . . a Golden Tomatoe. For best sci fi . . . . . . over Westworld and Longmire. . . . .

https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/rt-hub/golden-tomato-awards-best-movies-tv-of-2018/

 

[Kendama]

Popularity, technical quality and taste are very different things.

I'd imagine award givers are mangaka, pretty used to everything and therefore with a different taste from ours.

I remember once reading a quip about a Velvet Underground album. "Only 30,000 copies were sold… but every single one of the kids who bought it formed their own band". How many people like something sometimes is not as important as who likes it. Major directors from the 80s and 90s, like Spielberg, Coppola and Lucas, plus many others, declared their master was Akira Kurosawa, whom most average filmgoers probably never heard of. Being admired by other mangaka may be much more important than by us peasants.

Specialists may like things because they see aspects we don't. They also belong to a different culture, and that also plays a rule. And of course, award-giving can be biased by manga industry dynamics and turf wars. Kodansha awards aren't given to Shueisha series, for example.

For me, neither scores nor awards matter in terms of what I like and don't. There are favourite series of mine scoring in the upper 6s and 7s. One series that is at the top ten in both popularity and rating here, Solo Levelling, is a complete mystery to me, 'cause it has nothing I can see going for it other than being pretty. But that's just my opinion. The other ones in the top ten don't even interest me enough to read them.

Basically, the tragedy of awards is that they reflect the informed tastes of specialists, who don't share our experiences or views. The tragedy of popular scores is that they reflect the mainstream taste, which only matters to any one person to the extent that their own taste matches the mainstream. If the match is good, then they are useful. Otherwise they are equally useless.

The people who get it right are the ones who instead of relying on either, post a sample of things they like in the Recommendations thread and ask for reading suggestions. These are infinitely superior to any rankings.

 

[Momiji]

Your answers are interesting but it's not what I was talking about, sorry if it wasn't clear. What I'm saying is just, if we go to the main page of any manga here, in the description uder the "format" label we see tags such as "Long Strip", "Web Comic", "Full Color", "Official Colored", "Oneshot", "4-Koma" etc, just to name some. Among those, there's the "Award Winning" tag, which I don't see belonging there at all... ?

 

[421cookies]

I wish someone would make a petition to have award as its own segment. would be nice to know what those manga have achieved.

 

[heru]

"Award Winning is in Format because we didn't want to make a new category for literally a single tag"

That's the response I got from one of the devs a couple weeks ago.

 

[Teasday]

Award Winning is in Format because 1) Content is more for "warning"-type tags (using that term pretty loosely here), 2) it's certainly neither a Genre nor a Theme and 3) we're not going to make a separate subgroup just for a single tag.

If it bothers you, just squint and it goes away

 

[Momiji]

I see. Great to know, I guess. Following logic though, it's certainly not a format either (and I can hardly see how it can be considered a format more than it could be a theme). I personally don't think it'd be such a problem for it to be under content either (I highly doubt any manga would have both this and a warning tag anyway).
But don't worry, it doesn't bother me that much. It's just a word being misused after all (with such good reasons too!), so, yeah... sure?

 

[ununseti]

An interesting comparison to make is with Danbooru tags. They have five different tag categories for all the image posts in their database:
- artist tags: identify the creator of the post
- character tags: identify the characters in the post
- copyright tags: identify the anime, manga, game, novel, etc. associated with the post
- meta tags: describe things beyond the content of the image itself: e.g. "translated", "copyright request", "duplicate", "image sample", "bad id"
- general tags: describe the visual and factual elements in the image

So meanwhile, with the Mangadex manga tag categories, they're sort of like this:
- theme tags: describe the content of the manga: specific tropes or concepts
- genre tags: like theme tags, except more general and holistic (the distinction can be unclear, though)
- format tags: a mix between general tags describing the layout/presentation/structure of the manga (i.e. "anthology", "4-koma", "full color", "long strip", "oneshot") and metatags describing information that requires external knowledge and cannot be discerned just by looking at the content of the manga itself (e.g. "adaptation", "award winning", "doujinshi", "fan colored", "official colored", "user created", "web comic")
- content tags: a selection of theme/genre tags that would affect the age appropriateness of the manga (i.e. sex, violence)
- demographic: a specific selection of metatags relating to publication origin

(As for what the difference between a theme and genre is... I'm still not entirely clear on this. For instance, I think "supernatural" and "school life" are very clearly genres, not themes. But what exactly is a genre? What exactly is a theme? The distinction is so fuzzy! For example, take a look at the most commonly used tags on AO3. If someone were to go through that list and classify each tag as either a genre or a theme, what would their decision algorithm be?)

 

[Teasday]

_{@Momiji posted:}

I see. Great to know, I guess. Following logic though, it's certainly not a format either (and I can hardly see how it can be considered a format more than it could be a theme)

It's not really a "format" per se, yeah, but the format entries are a bit more miscellaneous in nature than the theme/genre ones, not to mention fewer in number. Also, as @ununseti mentioned, that category is indeed meant to include meta-type tags, we just decided format would be a better name for it. Don't get too hung up on what the category name is. It's not that important.

_{@ununseti posted:}

As for what the difference between a theme and genre is... I'm still not entirely clear on this.

It's essentially arbitrary and based on the staff's intuitive opinions. The best I can simplify it from my own perspective is something like genre describes the primary subject or structure of the work while themes are like additional flavors or elements. Whether some people understand the exact distinction (if it even exists) or not doesn't really affect the tags themselves, though, so I don't see why it would matter.