Group Leader
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2025
- Messages
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So, the historical tag. It has problems in how it’s applied. Specifically, it is often applied to comics that are not actually historical (particularly “vaguely-fake-European settings”), thus clogging up the tag for people searching for actual historical manga, and making it incredibly inconvenient to use - especially for me, whose future projects of interest tend to be manga set in historical Europe. I’m not the first person to complain about this, as can be seen in the following links.
https://forums.mangadex.org/threads...hemed-fictional-setting-not-on-earth.1937856/
https://forums.mangadex.org/threads/kawai-full-throttle-ch-1-1.1937526/#post-23316201
Recently I’ve been going around and fixing tags on numerous comics when I see mistakes - adding the anthology tag to short story collections missing them, upping the rating on comics that ought to be tagged higher than “safe” or “suggestive”, adding the original “fandom” to alternate titles of non-doujinshi comic spin-offs of said fandom (Vocaloid, Sherlock Holmes, etc.). So I figured I might have a go at removing the “historical” tags from works that shouldn’t have them - but I wanted to run it by people here in the forums first, and see if there was any sort of actual rule about how this tag ought to be applied.
In my opinion, the “historical” tag would denote “Comics that deliberately and demonstrably involve or pertain to real-life historical settings, persons, and/or events.”
Deliberately: It’s gotta be set in the past according to when the person created it. Comics not set in the exact year the person is tagging it shouldn’t get tagged “historical” just because they were written in the past and set in what was then modern times.* Riyoko Ikeda’s French Revolution-set The Rose of Versailles would count as historical; Ikeda’s manga oneshot about Princess Diana, who was alive and contemporary with the oneshot’s creation, would not. I don’t think it necessarily needs to be extremely far in the past to count as historical, either - for instance, The Scene of my Rumspringa would qualify since it’s written in the 2010s but set in the 1980s.
*An exception to this rule would be for comics that directly or partially adapt stories that were contemporary when the original author wrote them, but not when the comic creator adapted them. So long as they retain their original time period, they should count. Moriarty the Patriot (adapted from the Sherlock Holmes stories), Please, Jeeves (adapted from the Jeeves and Wooster stories), Hiroshi Asuna’s Arashi ga Oka (adapted from Wuthering Heights), all the manga versions of The Tale of Genji, etc. would be fine for the tag. Modern or futuristic adaptations, like the manga adaptation of Sherlock (BBC), or I AM SHERLOCK, wouldn’t count.
Demonstrably: It must be a defined time, place, person, and/or event. For example:
Potential hangups:
https://forums.mangadex.org/threads...hemed-fictional-setting-not-on-earth.1937856/
https://forums.mangadex.org/threads/kawai-full-throttle-ch-1-1.1937526/#post-23316201
Recently I’ve been going around and fixing tags on numerous comics when I see mistakes - adding the anthology tag to short story collections missing them, upping the rating on comics that ought to be tagged higher than “safe” or “suggestive”, adding the original “fandom” to alternate titles of non-doujinshi comic spin-offs of said fandom (Vocaloid, Sherlock Holmes, etc.). So I figured I might have a go at removing the “historical” tags from works that shouldn’t have them - but I wanted to run it by people here in the forums first, and see if there was any sort of actual rule about how this tag ought to be applied.
In my opinion, the “historical” tag would denote “Comics that deliberately and demonstrably involve or pertain to real-life historical settings, persons, and/or events.”
Deliberately: It’s gotta be set in the past according to when the person created it. Comics not set in the exact year the person is tagging it shouldn’t get tagged “historical” just because they were written in the past and set in what was then modern times.* Riyoko Ikeda’s French Revolution-set The Rose of Versailles would count as historical; Ikeda’s manga oneshot about Princess Diana, who was alive and contemporary with the oneshot’s creation, would not. I don’t think it necessarily needs to be extremely far in the past to count as historical, either - for instance, The Scene of my Rumspringa would qualify since it’s written in the 2010s but set in the 1980s.
*An exception to this rule would be for comics that directly or partially adapt stories that were contemporary when the original author wrote them, but not when the comic creator adapted them. So long as they retain their original time period, they should count. Moriarty the Patriot (adapted from the Sherlock Holmes stories), Please, Jeeves (adapted from the Jeeves and Wooster stories), Hiroshi Asuna’s Arashi ga Oka (adapted from Wuthering Heights), all the manga versions of The Tale of Genji, etc. would be fine for the tag. Modern or futuristic adaptations, like the manga adaptation of Sherlock (BBC), or I AM SHERLOCK, wouldn’t count.
Demonstrably: It must be a defined time, place, person, and/or event. For example:
- Anything based on a real historical figure’s life or containing real historical figures, like all the manga concerning Napoleon, the T. E. Lawrence manga, etc. would count. Even if it involves time travel or alternate history, I’d think having the real historical figure would count.
- Anything clearly set in a real time period - anywhere from Victorian England to ancient Egypt to the many historical eras of Japan, China, and Korea. Historical accuracy should not be a necessity for the tag (or nearly everything would be out lmao - true of the majority of historical fiction worldwide), and neither should absolute realism - historical fantasy and alternate history should be fine. Earl Cain, Dororo, Muscle Joseon, etc. are all correct for this tag.
Potential hangups:
- Should the xianxia genre count? Like, sure, xianxia works aren’t typically set in a real, exact time period, but at least they’re demonstrably set in “China a long time ago”, so I’m not quite as upset about those receiving the historical tag. I haven’t read much xianxia though (read: I literally only read some of Mo Dao Zu Shi in college years ago and chatted with a Chinese friend about the genre), so I’d like to hear thoughts from people more familiar with it.
- Should fake-European settings that are deliberate analogues of real events count? I can’t think of many of these, but The Saga of Tanya the Evil, concerning an analogue of WWI, and Gunka no Baltzar, concerning an analogue of the Franco-Prussian War, are works I personally would not have a problem with being called historical, especially since I believe Tanya the Evil’s events being effectively a magical alternate history of WWI are strongly alluded to in-universe (though I haven’t actually read the manga or the novel, I’ve just seen the anime). Are there any other examples of this?
- While less common, there are also pseudo-American settings that receive the same treatment - namely, in regard to Westerns. So far, there are three I’m aware of - Stranger, Dead or Alive, and Macaroni. None of these list any specific sort of location or time period in America, so I’m wondering whether they should be tagged as historical or not. Stranger does call the protagonist’s savior an “Indian/Native American” - at least, in the translation, since I haven’t looked at the raws - so that might be enough to count as a confirmed real-life historical setting. Dead or Alive, however, is almost certainly not set in the real American West - the backstory (the area being turned to desert due to over-harvesting and lack of crop rotation a la the Dust Bowl of the 1930s) doesn’t match with the natural desert of the actual United States, and that description is given at the beginning as if it’s world-building for the setting rather than actual history. Macaroni is a tougher case, since its title comes from being inspired by spaghetti Westerns, but no actual real locations are used. What should be done with the three of these?
