The Mute Girl and Her New Friend (Webcomic) - Ch. 3 - Cafeteria

[primrosea]

@TheElusiveTaco
AFAIK it's the other way around
some japanese publisher use GL to distance themself from porn works, which then "translated" to shoujo-ai by western audiences for whatever reason
nowadays publisher doesn't really use GL anymore and just go for yuri
if we talk about relation, maybe because shoujo is... well, young girls

 

[GoggledAnon]

@primrosea GL/Girls' Love is pretty much an interchangeable word with Yuri, even when it comes to R-18 stuff. Far as I can tell, Tokyopop does use Girls' Love for their releases, but the main thing is people these days, even in the West, stick with one category for all the gay rather than try to divide it for extremely vague reasons.

 

[TheElusiveTaco]

@Lilliwyt
Well, I stand corrected. This is genuinely the first time I'm hearing of this, though I suppose I have always focused on works labelled as "yuri". Honestly kind of shocking... Learn something new every day, I suppose...

@Epsilon04

Don't go saying people are misinformed when you are clearly the lne who didn't even bothered reading and understanding what Lilliwyt said.

Don't conflate ignorance with malice. I'm speaking for myself here, but I think it's safe to assume that the other commenter was unaware of the Japanese connotations as well.

 

[ma_zedong]

@Epsilon04

It's a useful distinction and on basically most English manga websites I've been on is used in the same way. Many words end up changing meaning when they're brought into new contexts and languages, and come to serve different purposes. It doesn't really matter at this point how it's used in Japan. You can argue about where the line is drawn between shoujo ai and yuri in a Western context and how useful as a term "shoujo ai" actually is, but honestly it's about as subjective a distinction as any other genre/subgenre (why argue about how much punching is needed to call something "action"?) and as long as enough people seem to be getting use out of it I think the "shoujo ai" tag has earned its keep.

 

[afkeroge]

"Shoujo-ai" is not a real term. It's a term coined by some westerner fucktard who thinks they know Japanese when they actually don't. Yuri is the term for the genre of entertainment in Japan that deals with the interactions (romantic/very close friendship) between girls. That's how publishers use the word nowadays. In the days when publishers avoided tagging works as "yuri," they used other terms like "GL" or "onna doushi," reserving the term "yuri" for more explicit (but not necessarily adult-oriented) works. The pornographic manga that depicts lesbians used to be tagged as "rezu," as you can see in Japanese AV tags to this day. Nowadays, yuri is one, all-encompassing term for all things girls' love related, even going as far as people being able to call a lesbian person in Japan a "Yuri," though it's not something I'd recommend.

 

[GoggledAnon]

@ma_zedong As successfully argued here, shoujo-ai doesn't need to co-exist with yuri on this site in particular because there are a seperate set of tags for level of content. All it was doing was making things hard for uploaders to categorize and readers to find what they wanted. I reccomend reading through the linked thread for the specifics of the argument, as we're derailing from the important topic at hand. Namely how wholesome this chapter was.

 

[TheElusiveTaco]

@GoggledAnon
Thanks for providing info in a kind manner

It gets even cuter next chapter!😊

 

[Xari]

To be honest, arguing over whether the tag is useful or not is pretty useless, some people get bothered by it and some not, I personally don't really care. I do incline more over the dynasty tags where it's yuri or subtext tho cause as I said, it's pretty much the same.

Anyway, it just bothered me how the other commenter accused of misinformation in a "mocky" way out of ignorance, which as the tl said before, might not be malice but accusing others of ignorance while you are the one who doesn't actually know is a pretty shitty thing to do.

In any case, I might have come as a bit agressive before and I apologize for that.

And btw thanks for working on this, I forgot to say that before <3

 

[Aluna]

So wholesome I'm dying help me

 

[TheElusiveTaco]

@Epsilon04
All good! This discussion has been an enlightening one to be sure...
I never looked at the roots of the term before (or considered the combination of kanji properly), and I'm glad to have learned about this before I used the term with a native speaker...

Thanks for reading!

 

[Lilliwyt]

@Epsilon04 Don't worry buddy, it's all good.

@TheElusiveTaco It's nothing, you can't know everything. I'm happy to make people learn something.

 

[Ekfreet]

@Aluna

Dimelo a mi, no se si ponerme a reir o a llorar. Innocence done right, burns so fucking much.

 

[frzned]

"少女愛" = 少 = little/young 女= girl 愛=love
shoujoai = loving younger/little girls.

This is how it's actually in Japanese. And thus it's a synonym with lolicon. The Westerners (wouldnt be surprised if it's Viz) decided to put a hyphen in and thinks it now means something else completely.

Not so fun fact, a serial lolicon rapist and murderer by the name of Tsutomu Miyazaki was coined "少女愛" (shoujo-ai). It's not a negative word in Japan. It's a REALLY FUCKING NEGATIVE word in japan.

Much like the modernization of Otaku, which used to be use only for the absolute scum and degenerate in Japan, but got globalized into "casual anime viewer"

 

[SoloSera]

Learning new things every day! 😮

 

[MoonlightwolfchanX]

It gets even cuter next chapter!

We are reaching cuteness levels that shouldn't even be possible!

 

[TheElusiveTaco]

@frzned

Much like the modernization of Otaku, which used to be use only for the absolute scum and degenerate in Japan, but got globalized into "casual anime viewer"

That's a rather interesting one, isn't it? Seeing how it was taken out into the world, the meaning morphed into something (usually) not so negative, and then it came back to Japan, where it's now used in the same context (and with the same connotation) as "nerd".
Of course, this tends to be among younger generations, with things like Train Otaku, and then Anime and Manga Otaku being separate ideas. It goes without saying that there is still a number of people who use it in a negative context/connotation, but this seems to be on the decline, at least in my experience.

 

[frzned]

@TheElusiveTaco I'd not contribute this to "came back to japan" but the booming of internet, social medias and personal computer, portable computers (phones) that fueled the rise of nerds globally. Otaku themselves is still mocked by the media and viewed negatively by older generations, just that there are so many of them out there now. More people has access to media and more "normal" otaku appears, which in turns normalize the use of the word.

It less of a "the world view this as good so now we think it's good too" and more of an "internal shift"

But there's no effort to normalize shoujo-ai, not at this moment. Since like any type of lolicon is wrong and should not be promoted. Whereas otaku can be downplayed into "enthusiast".

 

[TheElusiveTaco]

@frzned

Otaku themselves is still mocked by the media and viewed negatively by normal people though.

You know, this is a good point. Most of circles I'm part of, in Japan and otherwise, consist of otaku so I certainly end up seeing it as more normalized, or at the least less stigmatized.
The Japanese media love to jump on things like that, and I wouldn't be surprised if they still drew parallels between "The Otaku Murderer", and modern otaku if the term comes up in the latest sensational story.
To be clear, this isn't limited to Japanese media, but it seems far more common in my experience.

 

[primrosea]

you know, instead of talking about yuri vs shoujo-ai tag, we should demand for 'fluff'/'fluffy' tag, we need it for something like this manga XD

@GoggledAnon
yeah, that's what I mean, @afkeroge explain it better than me

 

[animekek69]

@primrosea honestly this tag is what this site really needs, there is so much stuff i could find with it