Merge "Shoujo Ai" tag with "Yuri" :planned:

[Teasday]

_{@GoggledAnon posted:}

Why divide that based on content when you have seperate tags for content?

Because

_{@Teasday posted:}

It's true that we could start treating Yuri by itself as the equivalent of Shoujo Ai, and Yuri + Smut/H as the equivalent of the current Yuri, but outside of advanced search there would be no mechanism to filter out only "smutty" Yuri while leaving "tame" Yuri alone. The same applies to Shounen Ai and Yaoi.

We could argue about the definitions of these terms, but the tags do currently serve a mechanical purpose on this site.

 

[GoggledAnon]

Then why not just add toggles for Smut and Ecchi like you have for Hentai?

 

[ABCsOfLife]

Hee.. the forum feed filled with this thread.
Also, from how I see it...
Shoujo Ai = Girls Love
Yuri = Plain Sexual Act Between Girls (be it a lesser one such as kissing or straight up.. fucking(?))

I'm trying to say, Shoujo Ai are not.. necessarily always involving Yuri and so are Yuri are not necessarily involving Shoujo Ai.

But hey that's just how I see it.

 

[yassaimossai]

@Teasday

It's true that we could start treating Yuri by itself as the equivalent of Shoujo Ai, and Yuri + Smut/H as the equivalent of the current Yuri, but outside of advanced search there would be no mechanism to filter out only "smutty" Yuri while leaving "tame" Yuri alone. The same applies to Shounen Ai and Yaoi.

By that logic, shouldn't there be two separate tags for "guy and girl fucking" and "guy and girl staring tenderly into each other's eyes and not even coming close to fucking"? Currently, if I want to avoid running into hentai or smut while searching for regular romance, I have to specifically exclude these tags from my search, and even go out of my way to disable displaying hentai works in the settings since this tag can't be filtered out in the advanced search itself.

If it's actually a massive problem that inconveniences all readers who don't want to read smut, then there should be separate tags for everything. And on top of that, there needs to be some form of moderation in place to ensure that sexual content is tagged correctly. However, I don't see how using the advanced search to tailor the results to your preferences is a major inconvenience when it's a pretty simple and easy to use feature.

 

[GoggledAnon]

@ABCsOfLife Girls Love is Yuri though. Japan uses "gaaruzu rabu" as an alternate name for yuri, not a distinction of content. The only main way they distinct things content-wise is by using "rezu" for straight-up lesbian porn. So to be more accurate:
Subtext = Stuff that's pretty gay, but not outright stated or confirmed.
Girl's Love / Yuri = All forms of love between girls, be it romantic or sexual.
Lesbian / Rezu = Hardcore lesbian porn, not neccessarily relevant to sexuality.
Shoujo-ai = America trying to be clever but only creating unneccessary confusion.

If reworking the tag system is too much of a ballache to impliment, maybe just rename "Shoujo Ai" with something like "Light Yuri"? Something that at least gives a better indication of what it's supposed to mean in terms of context.

 

[Teasday]

_{@yassaimossai posted:}

By that logic, shouldn't there be two separate tags for "guy and girl fucking" and "guy and girl staring tenderly into each other's eyes and not even coming close to fucking"?

It sounds to me like the first is the H toggle and/or Smut, and the latter is Romance, so to answer your question, yes. As far as I understand, the main reason only homosexual relations get a separate tag is because it's enough outside of the hypothetical "norm" that it makes sense to mark it, which is the same reason practically all tags exists.

_{@GoggledAnon posted:}

Shoujo-ai = America trying to be clever but only creating unneccessary confusion.

If reworking the tag system is too much of a ballache to impliment, maybe just rename "Shoujo Ai" with something like "Light Yuri"? Something that at least gives a better indication of what it's supposed to mean in terms of context.

Oh, if this is seriously just about a personal distaste for the phrasing then that seems kinda... I dunno, linguistically prescriptivist I guess. I don't see why "light yuri" gives a better indication of the expected content. If I saw it somewhere and were to guess, it sounds like softcore porn to me, whereas "shoujo ai" is relatively commonly used across the English-speaking fandom to refer to more simply romantically focused stories. Is it misusing the term as it relates to the original Japanese meaning? Sure, in some sense, but "hentai" is in practically the same bucket. I dislike using it, but it's got enough steam behind it that I don't see weebs getting confused about why porn is actually called "pervert" or "transformation".

 

[Ooshi_Somen]

I like the current tagging system
the way i see it, the way most people see it, and the way most uploaders sees it, is that
shoujo/shounen ai = lighty gayness without super in your face action
yuri/yaoi = straight up gay with obvious gay acts and payoff but not super sexualized
yuri/yaoi smut = actual gay sex

i like to know if what im reading is a either closet gay romcom (ai), a story about being gay (yuri/yaoi), or gay sex (smut).

with the suggestion to say that all gay smut can be removed it the "smut" is a problem.
Compare
I dont want gay smut (new): ill just exclude smut, but ill keep the gay. ALL smut is gone, even if i wanted the smut
I dont want gay smut (current): Ill just exclude gay, but ill keep the ai, ALL gay is gone, but i keep the ai and the other smut

idk why we need to change what works for most people on this site just to be etymology/politically correct

 

[yassaimossai]

As far as I understand, the main reason only homosexual relations get a separate tag is because it's enough outside of the hypothetical "norm" that it makes sense to mark it, which is the same reason practically all tags exists.

But these tags aren't utilized properly anyway. As I mentioned before, some uploaders use "shoujo ai"/"shounen ai" for both explicit sexual content and romance, some use only "yuri" or "yaoi" for regular romance and some use both tags at the same time. Hentai/smut works are still tagged accordingly regardless of whether they have gay or straight sex, so I don't see why the distinction for "gay romance" and "gay sex" needs to exist when there's already an all-encompassing tag for just "sex".

 

[GoggledAnon]

@Teasday It's not in the same bucket at all. Anyone with any kind of exposure to the world of Japanese media recognizes "hentai" as the English equivalent to "eromanga/eroanime/eroge" as much as Rock Man is recognized in the West as Mega Man. If everyone in the world just used "shoujo ai" as an alternate word to "yuri", there wouldn't be much of a problem, but the idea that it's apparently it's own seperate category with an extremely blurred line between what's appearently degenerate smutty "yuri" is kinda dumb and also a bit insulting. Heck, it's called yuri cos it's pure like a lily.

Over on Dynasty, it's simple. If it's blatantly gay, then it's Yuri. If it's kinda gay, but not obviously stated, then it's Subtext. Any naughty stuff going on, there's additional tags such as "NSFW", "Ecchi", "Lots of sex", etc. You don't like the look of one of those tags, you just don't read it. It's a simple system that works.

 

[Freezee]

Right, so out of sheer curiosity and looking around, the term is used in a lot of places. And it does help an english reader to denote what is actually in the story.

An example of where both shoujo ai and yuri are used is in Citrus. So my own previous idea got shot down with demographic labeling.

Hentai is definitely used inappropriately as far as original JP meaning as well.

"Light yuri" could definitely work in the case of a manga like Citrus. However, not all stories end up like that, and there's a whole lot of "non yuri" drama/melodrama inbetween.

As far as tags go on this site, and other sites like mangaupdates, shoujo ai does help differentiate from a story going straight toward romance vs a story with complications inbetween. Same with shounen ai I suppose.

It's really weird.

In any case and at this point, I'd say it's an idea that can't really be turned back that easily. Because the effect ripples far beyond this site. Considering several other sites do use the tag "shoujo-ai", and retroactively changing it across the web isn't necessarily going to happen, I'd say it would have to stay.

Since OP also has trouble just classifying the demographic (...and I would too really), it would ultimately do more harm than good.

If something will change first, it's "hentai" as far as how it's perceived in English. And by extension "ecchi", which itself is based on "H...entai" in JP (iirc). Both seem pretty much set in stone. I'd imagine it's very similar to shoujo/shounen ai now. They will continually mean something very different from what the terms would mean in actual JP.

 

[Ooshi_Somen]

@GoggleAnon
Over on Dynasty, it's simple. If it's blatantly gay, then it's Yuri. If it's kinda gay, but not obviously stated, then it's Subtext.

So what youre saying is that you want to replace the "ai" with "subtext" because that is not going to help, and if anything makes it harder for people to find the "subtext," because "subtext" could literally mean anything, where as the ais and the yuri/yaoi have been established whether you like it or not

 

[GoggledAnon]

@Ooshi_Somen Since Dynasty is a mainly yuri reader, Subtext is the equivalent to "Yuri Subtext", obvs. Naturally trying to impliment subtext over here would be another cuttle of fish (the majority of Shounen Jump titles would automatically end up with "Yaoi Subtext") so we'll put that aside for now. The main thing is if the only thing distinguishing "shoujo-ai" from "yuri" is the level of explicit content, then just call everything "yuri" and let the content tags be an indicator of the context itself.

ps. Can we please stop bringing up the whole "Hentai" usage as a counterargument? We don't have an "Eromanga" tag to confuse it with so it's not relevant.

 

[Ooshi_Somen]

@GoggleAnon
With the current search system in place, and the tags that you want then please suggest how it would find:
Yuri subtext= kinda gay, but not obviously stated
Yuri = actually gay, and obviously stated

and how would you exclude
yuri subtext = if you only want actual gay stuff
yuri = if you only want subtext

and remember most other readers site as well as everyone else who reads online still use ai

 

[Teasday]

_{@yassaimossai posted:}

But these tags aren't utilized properly anyway. As I mentioned before, some uploaders use "shoujo ai"/"shounen ai" for both explicit sexual content and romance, some use only "yuri" or "yaoi" for regular romance and some use both tags at the same time.

Then please use the report function for those titles and issue your corrections. The staff can't pre-emptively check these things, so we have to rely on the community to ensure the information is correct.

_{@GoggledAnon posted:}

what's appearently degenerate smutty "yuri" is kinda dumb and also a bit insulting.

I don't know what to tell you, to me you seem to be reading into it excessively strongly.

We're not Dynasty and our strategies are not similar, neither in the extent of the content we host nor tagging methods. We don't want people submitting their own tags like "Non-moe art", "Weird Nipple Shit" and "Conspicuous white fluid on page 26".

 

[MavB_Ver]

I have nothing in particular against nor support the idea of merging, but there is a scenerio I think of if this idea is put in to implementation. Say, there are people want to blacklist yuri on their feeds using the Exclude tags in the Settings while keeping the "non-smut yuri". Exclude both yuri and smut won't work because it will exclude all the titles with smut too.

Unless I understand things wrong, this is not gonna happening until there's an implementation of this https://mangadex.org/thread/190530 which seems to have been rejected.

Of course, a simple fix on the confusing of yuri/sa tags is to change the sa into something else, but merging would be a problem.

 

[GoggledAnon]

@Ooshi_Somen Those are literally things you can do in the current system's Search page. You have a thing for "include tags" and a thing for "exclude tags".

The main thing is that shoujo-ai is not a seperate genre from yuri. For example, Mario and Limbo are completely different in terms of graphic content, but they're both Platformers as far as genre is concerned. If you have the means of filtering series based on sexual/violent content, then having two seperates categories that are only distinguishable because of seperate content just makes things confusing. It's just simpler to have a single category for gay stuff in general, and give users the option to customise the range of gay stuff they want to see. I hardly think there's people who aren't willing to read explicit yuri but are perfectly fine with reading explicity het hentai.

 

[Ooshi_Somen]

@GoggledAnon
you didnt answer my question, I know the current system can do it, im asking how merging ai with yuri would change that and how your tagging would work
also i feel like dynasty had a similar tread like this

 

[GoggledAnon]

@Ooshi_Somen You search for one combined category, you get all of the gay. You don't like what the content tags are saying for a particular series, you nope on out of there and blacklist the tags in your settings. If the distinguishing factor of something being "not shoujo-ai" is there's smut involved, there'll likely be a smut tag that you can blacklist. Basically, it's a lot easier to ignore something you don't want to read on one big list than trying to find something you do want to read on two.

 

[Teasday]

_{@GoggledAnon posted:}

It's just simpler to have a single category for gay stuff in general, and give users the option to customise the range of gay stuff they want to see.

But the point I've been trying to make that, as things stand currently and for the foreseeable future, it isn't simpler to get rid of the Shoujo Ai tag. We simply don't have a tag exclusion setting mechanism for "exclude Yuri but only when accompanied by H or Smut". You would be removing the customization option because we don't have an alternative in place - outside of advanced search, of course, but that's a separate matter from the tag exclusion setting.

Believe me, if we did have that mechanism, I'd be much less against the proposition and possibly even for it. The less tags we need the better.

 

[DANDAN_THE_DANDAN]

My gosh when did the suggestions forum become so active I can barely keep up I don't have enough time to read and understand this much text sorry for those who are expecting a reply from me