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

[Teasday]

_{@P0ck posted:}

It's irrelevant because the argument "they do it, too," is childish, at best.

You misunderstood my point then. It would be whataboutism if I were trying to point out to it as "they're just as bad as us". My point is that loan words not having the same meaning as in the original language is completely normal in every language on earth, and you bringing it up as a point against Western usage of a Japanese term does not fly. It's just prescriptivism.

 

[DoubleK]

@Teasday

Wasei-eigo is using English words and phrases for things that do not have a proper, or widely known Japanese equivalent. If you held a camera up to someone in Japan and asked them to tell you what it was called without using loanwords, they'd struggle to tell you, and those that did would likely give wildly different answers

"Shoujo-ai" as this site uses it has an English equivalent. "Lesbian Romance"

It's not even a loan word, because for it to be that, it needs to have a commonly agreed upon meaning, and most communities dropped using that term seriously about 5~10 years ago

 

[GoggledAnon]

@Teasday What P0ck means is that it's a petty excuse that's diverting from the legit issue. Even the most diehard of weebs recognize "hentai" as a genre or demographic to mean pornographic media. You type "hentai" in google, you're right away getting images your parents wouldn't approve of. Type "shoujo ai" into Google and literally the first thing you see is a excerpt from the Wikipedia article for Yuri (genre) telling you it means pedophilia.

As previously mentioned multiple times, having Shoujo-Ai on this site in particular is pointless, because pretty much any description people have given to try and distinguish it from "yuri" is covered by the multitude of other tags for content, themes, and genre. It's just like how we don't have tags for "Non-Gory Action" or "Yaoi without the Crossdressing", because there are seperate tags you can exclude or include in your search results to suit your needs. We don't alienate the readers who just want to see all the action manga available just because there are few who may be sensitive to dog-in-a-furnace. It is their duty to specify what their pet peeves are so they can be served an appropriate menu. Anything beyond that is pretty much just down to the limitations of the search engine.

 

[P0ck]

The problem with defense of shoujo-ai as a loan word is simple. It is not a loan word. It's not borrowed because it's made up in western fandom to begin with.

Anyhow, the point was made. The target audience for yuri/shoujo-ai tag is annoyed (the use of word "shoujo-ai" aside) by having to constantly use two tags that largely overlap instead of having a single tag for f/f relationships. The audience that's not aware of the lack of distinction is confused by the inconsistency in tagging.

If you insist on using shoujo-ai as a tag for non-sexual, platonic content, then the current tagging is inconsistent and requires hundreds of reports to go through, and the reporting using tag search is obfuscated by having to go through largely duplicate lists of manga. Getting rid of shoujo-ai and using romance tag where it belongs looks to be a simpler solution to me, but the resistance to it is weirdly strong.

Meet us somewhere. It shouldn't be such a weirdly difficult issue to solve.

 

[Probably_wont_log_in_again]

>The target audience for yuri/shoujo-ai tag is annoyed

No hun, you are annoyed, and you are not your group, nor can you speak for everyone in your group. Curiously though, why dont you guys try bringing this mess to ds cesspool? Perhaps its because even the madmen there recognize an inherent value which collectively agreed upon distinction between those two tags brings to the table? Or maybe youd already tried and they told you to have sex with yourself?

>If you insist on using shoujo-ai as a tag for non-sexual, platonic content, then the current tagging is inconsistent

Its been addressed already. Those are the charms of outsourcing responsibilities to the crowds, which sometimes dont even give enough of a turd to write a three word description for a title theyre uploading. Channel that zest youre carrying constructively and within the system by using a report button.

Looking at it from another angle, that lack of consistency is the fault of your awesome co-fandom members. If you indeed are one with your group and feel comfortable enough speaking for it, then maybe try putting some pressure on its members to do a better job in the future, because given the already displayed lack of competence and dedication in expanding this sites database section of their beloved genre, I wouldnt have trusted any suggestions issued by such fandom or its members, period.


>Meet us somewhere. It shouldn't be such a weirdly difficult issue to solve.

Its been rejected at least four times already. Give up. No one wants it. I dont want it.


Thats all I suppose. Go claim rights for your persons encyclopedia drammatica entry elsewhere. Youre continuously trying to invent a problem which doesnt need solving. Or you can keep making threads with this specific suggestion - it isnt the first one, and I doubt it will be the last.

 

[P0ck]

You've been warned several times in this very thread to keep things civil. Work on your behaviour, will you.

If you have nothing to offer aside from passive aggressive tirade, keep out of this.

 

[Probably_wont_log_in_again]

>If you have nothing to offer aside from passive aggressive tirade

Theres ton of insight there, but it seems that without flavoring nothings get passed through to you. Youve already been told multiple times "no dice, no chance", this thread had been red taped, yet you keep yapping and addressing devs like theres something to win here, or rather, like youre entitled to 'win' something. Even worse, by constantly repeating points - or straight up lies - which had been processed already.

>Work on your behaviour, will you.

Take your own advice first will you, and stop collectivizing, which itself is rude and uncivil(ized) beyond comprehension. Youre not authorized to speak for what fandom wants. - if it did want it, itd had been implemented already somewhere else. Like I dont know, the biggest internet repository for said fandoms kink of choice oriented eastern graphical narratives. Or batoto. Or mal. Or mu. Or...

 

[P0ck]

Addressing the devs is the only valid stance.

Other than that, I'm not interested in your cheap retorts, and since you're neither a dev nor a mod, keep your petty provocation to yourself.

 

[Probably_wont_log_in_again]

>Addressing the devs is the only valid stance.

At this point its 'harassing' hun.

>Other than that, I'm not interested in your cheap retorts, and since you're neither a dev nor a mod, keep your petty provocation to yourself.

Reductio ad bigotry is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay cheaper tho, tried and true as it may had proven to be. But yeah, I probably will, because talking to zealots with a cause is pointless. Id have told you to do something more constructive with your life, like getting a cat, but youd had probably tried converting it to veganism, and thats animal abuse, so I wont.

 

[kenx]

I think everyone is assuming that uploaders are good taggers. Which they generally aren't (no offense intended, since they can just be the ones who upload from somewhere else). Or that the community will correct and add the "good" tags. Which will start a war if that becomes the focus of the discussion instead of the manga. Also, yadda yadda definitions. IIRC, japanese classification is different from western (heck, they give R-18G to stuff that would be 14+ at most here), and this is a western site, so it should follow western understandings of the terms. Besides, at the end of the day, Teasday and co. will have the last word, and I don't think tags are that serious of an issue now.

On a wildly unrelated note, anyone is going to comment on the fact that opening the "Post reply" window makes the page viewer disappear? Or is that an actual forum feature that I didn't know about?

@Probably_wont_log_in_again
...why is veganism animal abuse?

 

[GoggledAnon]

@kenx A good amount of us are Western (for clarification's sake, I'm British) and the actual "understanding" of the term is very different from how it was 10-15 years ago. Between those who now know "yuri" to be the main term for girl-on-girl stuff (which extends to official English news sites and publishers) and newcomers who will probably google the term and think we're all sickos, there's too much variation in people's perception of what it means (/u/ thinks it means subtext, Wikipedia thinks it means pedophie, Alexa thinks I want to e-mail my friend Joe a picture of an eyeball, etc.). Not to mention all the stated points above that we have content tags on this site to specify what kinds of girls love each series has, eliminating the need for two seperate tags that exist because of said content. If Shoujo-Ai was the only tag here, we'd be annoyed, but we could live with it as all the FF content would still be in one place. But having two just splits things and confusing uploaders who just want to upload some yuri, leaving some users annoyed that they have to search multiple tags to get everything and others annoyed that searching for one tag gets stuff that they assume should belong to the other.

Honestly if the main sticking point is people getting confused on what "yuri" and "shoujo-ai" mean, just have one tag called "Girls' Love", both a term used in Japan and one that's understandable by Western fans.

Spoiler

As for the veganism thing, cats and dogs are carnivores by nature, so by forcing a vegan diet on them, you're denying them the nutrients they need to, well, live.

 

[BestBoy]

@kenx Giving your cat vegan cat food could be considered animal cruelty in the UK. That's about the only place I've seen it. Cats are obligate carnivores so their bodies require meat. Most places do not suggest vegan diets (even with supplements) for cats.

 

[kenx]

@GoggledAnon
I think both should exist. Not sure if it has already been said in the thread, but for me, (Yuri, Yaoi, Smut) = Sexual innuendos with explicit sexual results and more (basically erotica), while (Shoujo-ai, Shounen-ai, Romance) = The lesser stuff. Also, wikipedia thinks that anything above a kiss is heresy. I do agree that there should be a legend (that stuff when you hover the cursor and a kinda floating help text box appears) in the tags, but as I said before, I don't think tags are that serious of an issue in the site for now.

@BestBoy
Oh, I somehow didn't notice that it mentioned making a cat vegan, not being a vegan yourself.

 

[GoggledAnon]

@kenx I don't know what Wikipedia article you're reading but here's a segment from the article on Yuri.

Japanese vis-à-vis Western usage

As of 2009, the term yuri is used in Japan to mean the depiction of attraction between women (whether sexual or romantic; explicit or implied) in manga, anime, and related entertainment media, as well as the genre of stories primarily dealing with this content. The wasei-eigo construction "Girls Love" (ガールズラブ gāruzu rabu), occasionally spelled "Girl's Love" or "Girls' Love", or abbreviated as "GL", is also used with this meaning. Yuri is generally a form of fanspeak amongst fans, but its usage by authors and publishers has increased since 2005.[3][5] The term "Girls Love", on the other hand, is primarily used by the publishers.

In North America, yuri had initially been used to denote only the most explicit end of the spectrum, deemed primarily as a variety of hentai. Following the pattern of shōnen-ai, a term already in use in North America to describe content involving relationships between men which does not feature sexually explicit scenes, Western fans coined the term shōjo-ai to describe yuri without explicit sex. In Japan, the term shōjo-ai (少女愛, lit. girl love) is not used with this meaning, and instead tends to denote pedophilia (actual or perceived), with a similar meaning to the term lolicon (Lolita complex). The Western use of yuri has broadened in the 2000s, picking up connotations from the Japanese use. American publishing companies such as ALC Publishing and Seven Seas Entertainment have also adopted the Japanese usage of the term to classify their yuri manga publications.

I do recommend giving the thread a read to see the points that have been made in favor of a singular GL tag, mostly that this site has content tags for when you want to specifically look for/avoid sexual stuff.

 

[kenx]

@GoggledAnon
That's why I think there should be some kind of legend in each tag, to show the definition that this site gives those tags and what their usage should be. Because, regardless of anything, it's up to the MD team to decide on this. I haven't read the thread yet but will do so later and see if I ammend anything, but for now, I stand by the opinion I expressed in my previous posts.

 

[shouldsleep]

@GoggledAnon

However, the problem with that is that you might want to search for smut but want 0% lesbian stuff in it (assuming non-romantic lesbian stuff exists, which I assume they do).
That is literally already a thing you can do in the current search engine.

You completely missed my point.

If you're looking for smut but don't want yuri (assuming we merge what MD classifies as yuri into smut) then it will pull up results that are in that classification.

If there are yuri titles not under shoujo ai (assuming they are, as they would be a similar case to smut titles not under romance) then there would be problems here.

Western fans coined the term shōjo-ai

And there you go. The key term here is coined. It's a word with western usage and should be judged by western standards. Language is used to fit the user, otherwise nimrod wouldn't have been an insult in the past, the n word would be insulting if used by a black person and a crapton of other stuff.

Anyway, the point is, using "it is used improperly" is a pointless argument here.

Wasei-eigo is using English words and phrases for things that do not have a proper, or widely known Japanese equivalent

If you actually took the time to read what @Teasday posted, one of the first things it will show you is "bakku-mira" which is a Japanese term for rearview mirror. Its words have no compound meaning in kanji (afaik) but they left it with the English term. There are also things like" sei-fuku" which is a weird mishmash of kanji and kana.

Just because a word has an equivalent meaning doesn't have to necessitate its usage.

 

[GoggledAnon]

@shouldsleep

(assuming we merge what MD classifies as yuri into smut)

Who even suggested that? All girls love media would be under the one Yuri/GL/whatever tag. If it happens to have smut, then it will have the Smut as a seperate tag. Thus, if you want to search for smut without the yuri, you search for Smut excluding Yuri. Not exactly hard. It's just like searching for any other genre with/without certain criteria linked to that genre (eg. Action without Gore, Fantasy without Isekai, Comedy that isn't 4koma, etc.)

 

[kamishiniyari]

Tag description when one clicks on it, like vndb (a header box with short description of the tag will appear above the click result) ... that will help the readers...
and tag description on hover over the tag box when one's uploading stuff, tag description glossary/tag search?

I believe this is more a problem of standardization.. as long as there is point of distinction between similar tags, i don't think there is any reason to remove one or another. Though yeah, the Yuri and Yaoi is quite a problem, because it has multiple interpretation form the perspective of the west.

My suggestion is just to translate the tag name entirely as Girls romance and delete both Yuri and shoujou ai.

I often browsed for VN on vndb, shoujo ai is just an alias for Yuri, whereas the explicit ones are tagged with Lesbian Sex tag.

 

[GoggledAnon]

For those confused, here's a nice lovely graph.

And yeah, given the conflicting definitions of both "shoujo-ai" and "yuri", "Girls' Love" (and by definition "Boys' Love") would probably be the best choice for a singular tag.

 

[Teasday]

_{@P0ck posted:}

Meet us somewhere. It shouldn't be such a weirdly difficult issue to solve.

The bottom line is we're not about to remove or change the usage of either one, and just changing the phrasing on one or both of them seems like it would at best (temporarily?) confuse everyone outside of this thread for no great reason.

This thread was resolved three pages ago.