AFAIK, in japan, 'shojo ai' isn't really a thing, it all falls under the label of yuri. Western fans tend to distinguish the two for the sake of separating more 18+ rated materials from everyone else, but. We've got a smut tag. So what's the point? This just makes things difficult for people when searching out GxG works. I've got to search the SA tag for things not listed as Yuri despite them being the same thing.
I'd suggest we do the same thing to Yaoi and Shounen Ai.
Some things are very lightly Yuri. Especially those that have GL subtext. Would those light Yuri themed manga (that are sometimes labeled Shoujo Ai) still be considered Yuri? Would it be better to just call it Girl Love (which is a term I've seen used in Japanese)? Unrelated in a way, but what also about manga that have some Yuri in it, but it doesn't play a big part in the series, yet are still labeled as Yuri?
I feel like it may be better to just have a basic genre of overarching themes (genre), and then a separate section for what it contains (e.g. it contains Yuri, but it's not what the manga is about).
But I do more or less agree that the two set of tags should be merged.
Agree. Idk how english community adapt the shoujo ai term but within all my journey in GL world, never once I have stumbled on the term shoujo ai in japanese. That term is like, japanese adopt Girls Love from english and then gaijin translate it back into japanese for whatever reason.
And if a series have small amount of yuri, I don't think the tag should be there. I mean, if it's not the main genre of the manga why should it be there?
[ol]• It has been well hashed out in the past (Like, on Batoto years ago—I can find the old threads if you want) that "Yuri" and "Shoujo-ai" as used in Batoto's (and by inheritence, Mangadex's) system are loanwords, not equivalent to the Japanese terms. (In fact shoujo-ai is said to be an obscure term with some unfortunate pedorastic connotations in some circles). They've been around for a while, though, and some people are used to them.
• (Yaoi and shounen-ai are also loan-words and not nicely equivalent, FYI; here there's less confusion simply because neither happen to be in vogue in Japanese like "yuri" is)
• Mangadex's populace comes from a mix of people used to Batoto/MangaUpdates tagging conventions, and people who are not. A lot of them don't even know that there is a disagreement over what the terms mean.
• Mangadex's tags aren't as nicely maintained/policed as Batoto's were anyway, because they're not open to public editing (yes, there's also less greifing, but unfortunately less accuracy is the cost), which may or may not exacerbate the problem further.
• End result: The shoujo-ai/yuri distinction on mangadex is absurdly arbitrary on a case-by-case-basis. The only thing that can be said is that something with just a "shoujo-ai" tag almost definitely doesn't contain sex—but "yuri" can appear on literally anything.
[/ol]
What I'd personally like to see done about it:
[ul]
• Merge shoujo-ai and yuri, call it "GL" (just so we don't have to argue about what's yuri or not; "GL" is pretty neutral and I think well-understood by the fanbase as a term? Not sure).
• Add something like a "sexually explicit" (or "graphic nudity"?) content tag so that anyone who was using shoujo-ai/yuri the same way as shounen-ai/yaoi can stick that tag on.
(Er... I'm assuming here that anyone was using it exactly like that. I try to avoid lewds so I may be out of my depth here ever so slightly. Does lewd yuri stuff end up in R-18 section on mangadex? Is it only male-male sex that arbitrarily stays out of the R-18 section on account of gayness?)
• Assuming such a content tag does exist, possibly do the same thing for BL (yaoi == sexually explicit, which is why those tags are well-defined and don't actually need fixing, though gods it's a weird convention).
[/ul]
@JKTV@DANDAN_THE_DANDAN
How do you explain Yuri Hime for not named Shoujo Ai Hime when barely any manga that serialized there have sexual content in them??
How do you explain YuruYuri for not having any sexual content even though it have yuri in their name???
To save time (hopefully for everyone), I'm going to re-post something I once wrote somewhere in the comments about the history of the terms and why we have this mess in the first place. It's kind-of sort-of a rant, so I may have glossed over some subtleties, but the gist should be correct:
Pokari said:
This argument isn't at all new. Old threads that hash this every which way (from Batoto):
The four-element genre-set of shounen-ai, shoujo-ai, yaoi, and yuri do not match the Japanese usage of these terms at all.
"shoujo-ai" and "shounen-ai" are said to in japan to traditionally mean "lolicon yuri" and "shouta yaoi", respectively. "Yaoi" is a comparatively obscure term for "plotless porno BL". And "Yuri" refers to all of GL in general.
In essence, in English, they're messed-up loan-words. Japanese fandom does this with english words too, so that's okay.
In usage in (parts of) the English fandom, the evolution is beleived to be something like, "Yaoi" got used for gay stuff, "shounen-ai" got used to distinguish more tame (not-sexy-time) gay stuff, "shoujo-ai" got adopted as an analogue [to shounen-ai], turning "yuri" into meaning more-explicit stuff.
The fandom is split on this issue—yuri in particular means something close enough in Japanese and English such that there's an ongoing fight over it's meaning. Some fans prefer the shoujo-ai/shounen-ai, yaoi/yuri symmetry (which many consider standard); others would prefer to abandon (or perhaps more weirdly and arbitrarily, relegate to only to "super pure no kissing even stuff") the "shoujo-ai" term.
On mangaupdates and batoto, from which the tags Mangadex uses were taken, this debate was generally settled in favor of "shoujo-ai" and "yuri" being analogous to "shounen-ai" and "yaoi". That is to say—more or less decided on the question of whether there were on-screen sex-y bits.
...to be clear, while I will fiercely defend the legitimacy of "yuri" as a loanword that is contextually understood to be separate from the Japanese word, I still am in favor of merging the tags as I described in the post above above, for pragmatic reasons. Though, it's complicated.
Imo, it's fine the way they are right now. It makes it easier for new entrant to the genre to find similar stuff with the way they are being used right now (Like softcore and hardcore thing).
If anything, I think there should also be a supercluster for GL and BL in general.
@Pokari Can't believe some people still visit vatoto lol.
Yeah, I can't agree anything more than merging them into GL. Having both of them only makes unnecessary confusion. Even now you can find lot of manga indexed as yuri even though there's no sexual relationship in them.
The thing is, GL author may it be sexual or not, almost always put their works in 百合(yuri) tag. From there, scanlations tend to go with the flow and put them in yuri section the way the author describes it. And so the tags get confused here and there.
It's very arbitrary when someone tries to distinguish the "pure/subtext" shoujo ai vs. yuri the traditional Western manga fandom way. As in, a manga literally titled Yuru Yuri, the flagship title of a magazine publication called Yuri Hime, the premier yuri publication in Japan, would NOT be yuri under this definition. That is rather silly.
We should also remember what tags are for: search, categorization, and major themes/elements. When two different tags are basically the same thing, it makes searching harder. When the barriers are arbitrary, it makes searching even harder. When the barriers are based on, well, "cooties," it really shouldn't be a barrier period.
Just put everything into yuri and let the yuri + smut/NSFW tags speak for the more aggressive ones. GL is just another awkward compromise. Unlike its BL counterpart, where terms get rather more complex and fluid, the Japanese mostly adopted yuri as the main term of the genre with little controversy. Works that are so light on subtext or wherein yuri isn't a main element (for example, having one lesbian character in a shounen romance) shouldn't have a tag anyway.
Unless you go Dynasty Scans-style "ALL the tags" approach, which isn't how mangadex tagging currently works.
I agree, there is no line between Shoujo Ai and Yuri, hundreds of manga on MD has been labelled one or the other incorrectly. That's preciously because the term has no meaning. The existence of smut and hentai erases any distinction Shoujo Ai and Yuri has.
With that being said, they're still well known genre/demographic tags outside MD so I don't know if this will be accepted. TBH it was silly to have them in the first place.
@josephgomes619 I'd say the distinction was born partly out of the more difficult times in the West when being overtly gay was much more taboo than it is now, so there was a "need" to "purify" and "legitimize" the lighter subtext works as an independent genre. It may have also been influenced by the early history of the yuri genre being drawn from idealized, subtext-only "S-class" literary material from Japan (the archetype being a story about two girls with an extremely close, pseudo-romantic relationship during school, but then moving on to marrying men after graduation).
Neither of which would be to the credit of their continued usage. It is safe now to be gay in West, at least in civilized circles -- much battle remains, I know. And new generations of Japanese yuri authors have long since moved away from the safe grounds of S-class subtext and conformity towards legitimizing same sex relationships*, rendering any such distinctions obsolete. No one, incidentally, ever identify themselves as "shoujo-ai" authors.
*It's often been said that yuri is for men, as BL is for women. If that was ever true, it no longer is. Audiences for the likes of Comic Yuri Hime are largely 50/50 (and any non-binary of course).
