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

[Exhausted]

Just going to chime in to agree with a few things.

Yes, shoujo-ai is a useless and redundant tag that should be removed. Frankly, it never should have been here in the first place, considering how new MangaDex is. But it's never too late to fix your mistakes.

If someone admits to posting in bad faith (@pikokola) you should stop responding to them. They literally told you they're just here to stir shit. Stop helping them.

Yes, MangaDex should clearly define its tags. This is basic common sense and their refusal to do so is pure, indefensible idiocy. Normally I'm of the opinion that the thing to do when you encounter idiocy is ignore it and move on, but when that idiocy is tarnishing an otherwise excellent and appreciated site, that's not really possible. Please define your tags.

 

[Nevri]

@pikokola

Always = once term become popular. So pedantic. And it really is irrelevant, because yuri replaced those terms, not become new genre altogether.

In fact, with "always only used Yuri" I meant more they always only used 1 term for everything. But since they do also use Girls' Love I had to add it as well, but then message of my sentence got muddied. I should have rephrased it, but whatever.

 

[pikokola]

*sigh*
why don't you try to re-read why they choose to keep the split anyway.
and aren't you part of people who are inconvenienced by the fkin split because they are used liberally which makes the split moot?
enforcing the tag with MD's definition means the tag would be used for it's intended purpose with a definition, which albeit outdated, generally understood by user because MD put a fkin definition on it. in the end it'll dismiss the inconvenience for people like you until they have better solution about it (even merging them).
If it can't be done, at least make what we currently have work.
can't you comprehend that even a little? or you're simply so headstrong on semantics that it's "yuri for everything lesbian or fuck off", that you prefer being in state of inconvenience limbo, inconveniencing everybody by bringing this up every fkin month than accepting old definition of yuri and shoujo ai in the mean time?

ps: did what definition I bring is MD's vision when they split the tag? fk if I know. so yes, it's irrelevant to what definition I cite. I just wants to say there is a basis if they wants to enforce it.

@Exhausted
oh I'm waiting to be reprimanded by mod actually. and I actually having fun here.

@Nevri
I just wants to point out that even in japan, there are times where lesbian-non sexual literature have terminology like western's shoujo-ai, and yuri was also have porn connotation at some point. it changes sure, but dismissing them doesn't make the history gone.

 

[421cookies]

such a long thread for suggestion that already rejected for million times.

Also, please add "gay" and "no-homo" tag

 

[Nevri]

@pikokola

yuri was also have porn connotation at some point

It never had though. There was never distinction between things having explicitly sexual content and not. And Erica Friedman is very biased so I don't really consider her as a trustful source of information.

Honestly solving this really doesn't need any complicated system. Just tag everything involving romance with 2 girls yuri and if there's explicit sexual content, add smut tag. Problem solved. If people complain that smut implies no story or something, just change name to sexual content/nudity or something. If smut is so specific of a term then add it as a genre and keep sexual content/nudity as a content tag. If someone want to exclude sexual stuff from their search, then I don't see why they can't simply exclude smut. Boom. Now all yuri they'll see is safe for work. If they don't want to see smut in yuri, then they wouldn't want to see it anywhere as well, right? So there shouldn't be issue with them excluding smut from search.

 

[Sabruness]

I'm surprised people are still arguing that shoujo-ai is innocent and just means non-sexual romance between girls. The term was hacked together by weebs long ago who wanted to make a distinction and had no clue of the actual connotations in japanese. fast forward to now and only the most rusted-on weebs still legit use it despite it having gone out of fashion a decade ago (or so) when people had greater understanding and clarity on the real meaning of the term. Srsly, if you went to japan and asked someone to recommend shoujo-ai, they'd see you as a pedophile.

Using the argument 'but it's what western weebs (or non-weebs whichever the argument is) think it means so it's fine to keep using it' is a horrible argument. Most western weebs would likely have an idea, by now, about the problems with the term. Thus continuing to use it risks an unfortunate stigma if normal people google the term and see what it really means

So, as i said in my post 4 or 5 pages ago and what several people have been saying in this thread is: nuke the tag and have everything under yuri. There's enough sexual content tags on MD that any properly set search should be precise enough to include and/or avoid whatever is set.

THIS SHOULD BE DONE ON THE PROVISO THAT THE PREVIOUSLY MENTIONED WHOLE SITE REWRITE MENTIONED SEVERAL PAGES AGO IS COMPLETE BEFOREHAND. As staff have said before, altering the tags right now is highly impractical but it should be something on the dev's "eventually get to after site rewrite" list.

Now that i think of it, a clear "stuff to do after site rewrite" list posted publicly could keep people informed of what the devs are aware of and plan to handle at some future point.

 

[BestBoy]

A decent compromise would be to replace the west's "shoujo-ai" with Japan's "Girl's Love" as tags. At least this way, people aren't squicked out about Japan's usage of "shoujo-ai."

 

[RonBWL]

Kinda forgot to post this last night so I'm not sure if anyone's pointed out yet. But here's my opinion

The suggestion of merging Shoujo Ai with Yuri goes under the assumption that people either want Smut or not, that's a Y-N question - it works in that case because with Yuri being the only tag used, you can simply include/exclude Smut to avoid H content. However this will NOT work if readers are okay with straight smut but not okay with Yuri-smut level.

Let's make a quick example: Say a manga that features smut between main couple (straight) while at the same time depict the female MC's "girl love" with another friend, thus warrant the Smut and Yuri/Shoujo Ai tag.

-With the current system, said readers (who just look for pure GL + straight smut is ok) CAN find this series, because it has a specified tag assigned to it, and they know while the "Smut" tag is there, it won't involve Yuri.
-With the proposed system, the series would be tagged Yuri + Smut. Said readers will NOT be able to find it because they'd have to exclude Smut, so said series is excluded, even if it technically contains the theme they're looking for.

Now, there has been suggestion to include a "gender preference" so readers will be able to toggle F/F-M/M-F/M, but at the end of the day we'll simply have to implement even more tag, just to "correct" an obsoleted tag that's still being used by lots of readers (whether it's correct or not).

So, I think there's pretty much no benefit in merging Yuri to Shoujo Ai because to fix one problem you create another problem in the process. Yes the current tag is not perfect but it's not broken. The proposed idea sounds cool and all, but it's not foolproof yet.

 

[Nevri]

@RonBWL

However this will NOT work if readers are okay with straight smut but not okay with Yuri-smut level

Are there actually people like that? I'm yet to find someone who actually likes het smut, but wants to read only "pure" yuri stories. And being fine with het smut and not with yuri smut sounds kinda insulting to me tbh. Either way, yes it won't be possible, but unless I'm proven wrong and many people here will comment they can't stand yuri smut, but are ok with het smut, I don't believe it's a issue that even exist.

 

[GoggledAnon]

@RonBWL That's just the inevitable downside of excluding literally any tag. When you choose to block a certain tag, it comes with the caveat that something that may take your interest may not show up in the results you do get (eg. A comedy you would probably find hilarious that is excluded from your searches because you're not an isekai fan). Not to mention that if you're already aware that a specific manga exists, then you can just look up that specific manga (as a test, I briefly stuck "incest" on the tag blacklist and could still access Tae-chan and Jimiko-san by pasting its direct URL). People aren't gonna be particularly fussed about a manga they don't even know exist.

Also I have literally never heard of a smutty het series featuring a non-smutty yuri side couple. Either the yuri gets equal level of smut, or we just get one of those disgusting "conversion" plotlines.

 

[RonBWL]

@Nevri We're talking about tolerance here, and there are people like that, yes. I can name a few series that's smut + GL, maybe not main theme but the level of presentation is there.

@GoggledAnon The difference in your example is that I can simply choose to not give comedy "isekai" a chance because I know I don't want it. For the proposed idea, I would have no way to know if a series is smut-friendly to me or not because Yuri is both smut and non-smut. At the end of the day the Shoujo Ai tag DEFINES the non-smut Yuri and it works even if the series itself has Smut content in it.

 

[igenetycs]

@RonBWL

However this will NOT work if readers are okay with straight smut but not okay with Yuri-smut level

What about those who are okay with yuri smut but not straight smut? I propose we add two seperate hetero tags so I can find exactly what I'm looking for, despite it being an absolute edge case compared to the interests of the userbase at large (not to mention, I'm inconveniencing them at the same time).

Your argument doesn't hold water when you strip it down to its base level.

 

[GoggledAnon]

@RonBWL That sounds very much like a "you" problem. (As in it's a very specific case that the staff aren't really gonna feel a need to specifically cater to)

 

[MadeOfMagicAndWires]

@RonBWL

We're talking about tolerance here, and there are people like that, yes

""Tolerance"" of and catering to are two very different things.

For the proposed idea, I would have no way to know if a series is smut-friendly to me

There would be a way to know: if it lacks the smut tag it doesn't have smut in it. Simple as that.

If people want to find series without certain content they have two choices: blacklist the tag or keeping it open and manually checking if it has the tag or not before reading.

 

[DYWYPI]

@RonBWL

Let's make a quick example: Say a manga that features smut between main couple (straight) while at the same time depict the female MC's "girl love" with another friend, thus warrant the Smut and Yuri/Shoujo Ai tag.

This absolutely should not warrant the yuri or shoujo-ai tag. A straight romance series that happens to contain a female friendship or gay character isn't a yuri series, any more than a slice-of-life series that happens to have an athletic festival chapter is a sports series. Anything else gives the exact same problem you're describing, except to people who want to make a very simple "show me yuri series" search rather than a very complex "show me romance, and it's okay it it has smut, and it's okay if it has lesbians, but only if the smut isn't about the lesbians" search.

You seem to be approaching the tags from the perspective of providing the greatest utility to people who want to avoid very specific niches of content in very specific ways, and if that has negative side-effects on people who just want to use those tags to *find* that of type content, oh well, that's fine. As has already been enumerated in this thread, the current system forces what should be a very basic search - "just show me all the yuri" - to go through the advanced search interface, and prohibits actual advanced searches, like "I want to read a yuri fantasy series", entirely, at least without sifting through two separate advanced searches with significant overlap between them. When you have a search system that has a simple "tag exclusion mode" rather than full Boolean searches, some sacrifices are inevitable - given that, it seems rather backwards to me that the functionality of a tag within that system is geared entirely towards a theoretical "I'm okay with gay stuff, but not if it's TOO gay" audience, rather than simply towards helping people use that tag to FIND the type of content it's tagging. And that's before we get into the fact that, because the distinction is vague and porous and nobody can agree on where it lies, as evidenced by the enormous catalogue of series tagged with both, or as yuri but not smut, or as shoujo-ai despite having clear romance or even clear sexual aspects, you *already* cannot make the search you're describing - this hypothetical "I'm okay with girls kissing but actual lesbians are just icky" person will inevitably either miss something they might be interested in, or see something that they are not.

 

[BzzBzz]

C'mon people, stop this fantastic 〈I want ... but not ... however I somewhat ok with ... or ...〉 shit. Be honest, average John Doe will never use this. If you really need this then there's sites like MU where 200+ tags for specific series is usual things. MD isn't (at the moment at least) data base with tags for every sneeze.

 

[Teasday]

_{@DYWYPI posted:}

As has already been enumerated in this thread, the current system forces what should be a very basic search - "just show me all the yuri" - to go through the advanced search interface, and prohibits actual advanced searches, like "I want to read a yuri fantasy series", entirely, at least without sifting through two separate advanced searches with significant overlap between them.

Sorry, what? We have two searches: quick search that doesn't let you search by anything except the title, and the advanced search where you can search for both all yuri and yuri fantasy with practically equal effort. The second one requires a click or two more depending on which tag input method you use. You don't need to make two separate searches.

 

[GoggledAnon]

@Teasday To be fair, it's a little tricky to figure out at first glance when you have the dropdown box as the default, since that tends to give you the idea that you can only pick one option each for include and exclude (it took a bit of brainwracking to figure you could select multiple tags for each section, and even longer to notice the option to display them as checkboxes). I dunno if that's on your to-do list for the rewrite, but that might be something worth tweaking as part of a to-do-afterwards list if it isn't.

Either way, the point DYWYPI made still stands that you have to access the Advanced Search and make several unneeded clicks for the "all the yuri" scenario (this includes figuring out the lists, selecting two seperate tags AND remembering to select "or" instead of "and" so you get everything and not just the ones that have been tagged with both), as opposed to a single one that people can also access by clicking a tag on a manga entry.

 

[Teasday]

@GoggledAnon I've already done some work improving the tag selection UI, at least as far as making the tabs more obvious goes. I didn't think the dropdown would be hard to figure out, but I'm not sure what I could do about it to make it clearer you can pick additional tags. Maybe default the dropdown immediately to "Select another tag" after picking one? I'll think about it.

Anyway, duly noted about the yuri search.

 

[GoggledAnon]

@Teasday Personally, I'd say making the checkboxes the default would be the clearer option, since people associate those with multiple selections more easily, although I understand if you're concerned about cluttering up the UI. But as a stopgap measure, having the dropdown reset to blank or something like "Select tag(s)" after a selection would be a smart option.