@definitionofinsanity said:
I find that
very difficult to believe, because that then means a lot of manga here is improperly tagged.
First off, let it be said, before we go further—a lot of the manga on mangadex
are improperly tagged. The older entries are mostly okay, but ever since MD decided to severely restrict who could edit the tags (a pool of people which to my knowlege has effectively been shrinking over time even as the site grows), with surprising frequency the tags are blatantly and obviously wrong now and no one gets around to fixing them.
This has extra-noticable repercussions for stuff where there's some disagreement among the fanbase as to what the tag means (exacerbated by mangadex not bothering to make it easy to find official statements on all the tag-meanings themselves). Back on Batoto, the "shoujo-ai" and "yuri" tags were broadly crowdsourced into the "correct" (for these sites) meanings since everyone could edit...
Not so on MangaDex. If someone changes the tags in either direction on MD, they tend to stay that way for a while.
(Heck, I could probably "prove" this right now by removing the tag now and demonstrating that it will stay gone some time and indeed possibly not come back at all. It wouldn't be the most scientific of tests, of course, but that would be my expectation based on previous/recent experience. But that would not be very proper of me, I feel.)
Having said that, I'm moderately dubious about your specific example:
YuruYuri being a notable example, which if it was a car engine, would be running on 100% pure, unleaded, lesbian subtext despite having a cast literally full of gay(ish) girls. Unless delusions count as the real thing.
I've never read YuruYuri so I can't say for sure, but FWIW the fans on MangaUpdates gives that one the "Subtle Romance" category-tag, contrasted with this one's "GL Subtext" tag. I can't speak more than that, but the broad perception of the fanbase appears to be that YuruYuri actually does
have romance. Without getting in to whether or not that's correct, which I have no opinion on, I presume the tag is based upon that premise.
In fact, removing that tag before it's concrete is rather premature.
As was adding it in the first place! A bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here. This is, however, the reason why I have not yet taken it upon myself to remove the tag, personally.
(As an aside: I have contrib status and the ability to edit tags, simply because I asked for it early on when they were handing it out. I am not an official authority on anything! Just so we're clear.)
because the difference between subtext and unrequited love is potentially only perspective
Begging your pardon, but this seems like pure sophistry to me—stories
are written from a given perspective, and we're allowed to use a character's internal monologue and the like in determining genre. The fact that a character "could potentially be" thinking something on the other hand, means nothing to genre. There is a middle ground, wherein we sometimes have to fight tag battles, when
we think that some character's motivations (or whatever) relevant to the genre are
supposed to be clear as day, but they aren't explicitly and unambiguously stated—but, that is
not what this manga is.
(Well—If you do think that's what this manga is, that's fine, I can see where you might be coming from, even if I disagree, but the general consensus would seem to be that nothing here goes beyond subtext.)
Anyway, I meant it when I said "at the bare minimum" a potentially unrequited love is required: At that point it pretty much has to be one of the primary focuses of the work; just like a regular "romance" tag gets applied to shoujo stories of failed romance,
and also to action manga that have romance on the side,
but not to an action manga where one character happens to like another but nothing comes of it.
In other words, by "bare minimum", I meant that would already be borderline territory where people will argue over it. (Pushing the definition even further by saying, "well, X is sort of like Y" is therefore problematic.)
@yurirei said:
It didn't begin as shoujo-ai and would never end as shoujo-ai tag so why we add it in the beginning anyway?
Could have been a genuine misunderstanding on someone's part. The close friendship build-up here is indistinguishable from the beginning of a slow-burn shoujo-ai; I honestly personally didn't suspect anything was amiss with the tags until we got the author's notes saying this was based (with permission) on an actual school's club. (And, well, chances of a club wanting to be known as "that club with the lesbian manga based on it," are low. Not zero, of course, but still.)