Merge Shoujo Ai/Yuri and Shounen Ai/Yaoi genres :rejected:

[CG]

Just wondering why there's genres for both Shoujo Ai and Yuri, when they both typically refer to the same thing.

I would suggest that Shoujo Ai be merged in to Yuri genre, because the former is a silly label only used by some parts of western community.

Same goes for Shounen Ai and Yaoi.

 

[jokerxhisoka]

@CG Because ppl are using the genres wrongly. They were inherited from batoto, and, on batoto, Shoujo/Shounen Ai referenced to homossexual romantic relationships, while yaoi and yuri where just homossexual mature content without implying romance. Here they add the genre "romance" together with shounen/shoujo ai which kills the original purpose they had, that was to differentiate the works that had these contents with those that had heterossexual. Plus you would add both genres(romance + shoujo/shounen ai) only when the work had both kinds of relationships.

 

[totallynotmike]

Sure. And while we're at it, let's merge "shounen" with "seinen", "shoujo" with "josei", and then "josei" with "romance". It could also be a good idea to fuse "ecchi" with "smut", "mecha" with "sci-fi", "game" with "sports", "supernatural" with "horror", and "isekai" with "fantasy". It's not like every single tag comes with its own set of narrative tropes, right? All that matters is that sometimes, some parts of those sets overlap.

Even if you like to think about those things (by which i mean romance) in terms of quantifiable, easy to distinguish concepts, you can't deny there's a continuous spectrum - like quality to them, and i think it's a good idea to have an appropriate labels to point out where, more or less, presented relationship lies on that spectrum. "Romantic two girl friendship" is in no way equal to full blown "Girls love" - "Purple Qualia" is not "yuri", no matter how much you want to protest. Nor is "Mars no kiss".

Similar case, i think, can be made for BL, although i haven't read it as much. Philia, eros, and everything in between.

Obviously the decision belongs to the overlords, but i don't get why people are always into erasing stuff. It works, everybody's using it, so why force the change?

 

[tathra]

the difference between them is basically the same as the difference between ecchi and hentai.

nuance is a good thing.

the genre tags for the demographics do need to be removed now that theres a proper place to put the demographic tho, but that's a separate issue.

 

[Noms]

Generally, the tags here are based off of MU / MAL + reader discretion as is the case here. As tathra, mentioned the shoujo ai/yuri and shounen ai/yaoi tags are used here to differentiate whether relationships are sexual (yuri, yaoi being the more explicit end).

MU Genre Definitions, MAL doesn't have one that I know of.

Some people, as I believe is CG's dissatisfaction, disagree with the use vs. terminology (shoujo ai/yuri = girls' love, shounen ai/yaoi = boys' love, Western misunderstanding etc.).
The differentiation is useful, though, so I doubt they will be combined. Of course, I don't speak for the readers of these genres or the website admins.

 

[CG]

So, from MU we have the definitions:
- Shoujo Ai: Often synonymous with yuri, this can be thought of as somewhat less extreme. "Girl's Love", so to speak.
- Yuri: This work usually involves intimate relationships between women.

Think about what the actual translation of "Shoujo Ai" is, it's "Young girl love", an outsider who understood that translation would probably think that Shoujo Ai is a subcategory of Yuri, as in, Yuri which involves love between young girls specifically.

But instead what we're saying is that Yuri is just extreme/intimate relationships between women, and Shoujo Ai is Yuri-lite. It doesn't really make much sense. Either something is or isn't yuri, if it has explicit content, then it should also have a NSFW/hentai tag, rather than splitting it up in to this yuri and yuri-lite mixture.

I understand it's easier from a technical perspective, for interoperability reasons, to just retain the tag structure that so many other websites in the western community use. At the same time though, this is a nice opportunity for a relatively new website to fix up this mess and misuse of shoujo/shonen ai.

 

[Pika]

I've always thought yuri and yaoi were closer to hentai and shounen ai and shoujo ai were more like "There is a couple that's homosexual" or "There is some (implied) romance between 2 girls/boys".

BL is the most vague/broad term btw, because the Japanese consider the most slight romance between boys as BL, but yaoi (hentai) is also in BL...

 

[Noer]

As a reader of all of the above genres, I will say that there are noticeable differences in what is categorized as yaoi vs shounen ai, yuri vs shoujo ai. It's a bit difficult to explain without reducing the nuances to simply "porn/hentai" and "not porn/hentai," although broadly speaking, yes, yaoi/yuri are much more explicit. There have been works considered as shounen ai/shoujo ai that, albeit having sex and sexual content in them, aren't considered yaoi/yuri. An example would be the classic Kaze to Ki no Uta, a founder of the shounen ai gender and considered purely as such (on MU, Wikipedia, etc.) despite it containing depictions of "racism, homophobia, pedophilia, rape, and drug abuse." As the focus was not purely on sex/sexual acts or eroticism despite them being elements of the story, focusing instead on the tragic events that happen in relationships involving people of the same gender, it's classified in both Japan and in the Western community as shounen ai, not yaoi. On the other hand, there are yaoi/yuri works that don't necessarily have explicit sex in them either but aren't considered shounen ai/shoujo ai. Think of the currently wildly popular Citrus - I haven't read it in a while, but I don't believe the two main characters have had sex yet (although there's been covered up nudity and erotic kissing and all). Despite that, it's been considered from the start as firmly yuri and not shoujo ai. For many readers, it's because the focus is on the drama and the erotic acts between the two that it's labelled as such. And lastly, there are works depicting romances between people, main characters even, of the same gender despite not being considered yaoi/yuri/shounen ai/shoujo ai. Examples here are titles such as Revolutionary Girl Utena, Yuri on Ice!!! (yes, yes, an anime), Antique Bakery, or The Rose of Versailles.

Therefore, I think that, even though the technically correct translations so to speak would imply that there is much too similarity between shoujo ai/yuri and shounen ai/yaoi, to the scanlation communities upon which this website, MU, and tons of others have grown from, they are regarded as vastly different things and so should be treated as such. Do we (speaking as a primarily Western-based community) use the terms "incorrectly"? Probably, yes. But, in doing so, have we not grown to attach different meanings to the terms than were originally intended? Yes. The "misuse" of the term could be likened to the usage of "otaku" is the Western community vs. in Japan, or whatever other terms we've adapted over the years to serve our own purposes rather than what they meant in their original language. And now, they serve a practical function in being defined differently in this community, despite them being perhaps used interchangeably or having different nuances in the Japanese community. They're useful to us here in this community in this sense, and just because there's overlap between yuri/shoujo ai and yaoi/shounen ai, doesn't mean they should be combined.

 

[Burlap]

Out of curiosity, would it be possible to get actual metrics on how often these terms are searched separately?

I agree on principle that there is a quantifiable difference between the tags, but their understanding may just be too muddled for actual usefulness.
I did some quick searches and there are a lot of works with both tags. For yuri especially, over a third of works also have a shoujo ai tag, and they make up a fourth of all shoujo ai works as well. (It's not as severe with the men, proportionally)

Spoiler

The numbers are, as of my search:
Yuri/Yaoi: 689 / 2761
Shoujo/Shounen Ai: 962 / 1286
Both: 252 / 375

Now, this could be entirely legitimate if you argue that these tags aren't mutually exclusive, but this muddles the value of having both tags in a search engine even more.
Tags this similar to one another may be worth keeping on a dedicated yuri or yaoi site, but they are clearly much more specified than any other tag on this site, since they essentially define overlapping subcategories of a subcategory of a subcategory (yuri vs shoujo ai: Innocent vs sexual < lesbian relationship < same sex relationship < romance)and a lot of the discussions about new tags (like those around cross dressing vs gender bender) revolve around whether they would be too specific or have to much overlap. In almost all those cases the distinctions are more clear cut than this.

So if searches of these tags are usually done in conjunction, it may be worth merging them for efficiency's sake.
Or just set proper definitions.

 

[Pokari]

I really want to make a separate post about this, but...

Without going into the history of why (the reasons make sense once you know them), there's a good deal of confusion/debate over what the distinction between "yuri" and "shoujo-ai" is. On batoto there was enough agreement that the tags were used semi-usefully, but it was never perfect I think (e.g. I know Tamen de Gushi sometimes had a yuri tag, sometimes not, even there—and there's nothing about that manhua that particularly merited it being an iffy case, it's a pretty straightforward romance). Mangadex imported new users who have different ideas and the problem got worse again.

@Burlap:

Shounen-ai and yaoi distinctions are pretty rigid, based on what I've read over the years. If there's explicit on-screen sex, it's yaoi, if not, it's shounen-ai. There are a handful of exceptions (Tiny bits of nearly/semi-explicit sex in / at the end of long series, like in Guang Xiang or in Raising a Bat, caused some tag flip-flopping, I recall. And if something has non-gratuitous graphic gay sex—if you can find anything like that—then some "it's art so it's fine" weirdness might apply, as per usual in our culture). But for ~98% of content it'll work as a rule.

Put differently, more or less, anything that would be considered hentai if it were a guy and a girl, gets the yaoi tag. It's a really peculiar system. It also means that as someone who reads a lot of shounen-ai but doesn't like explicit sex in my manga, the shounen-ai / yaoi tag distinction is very important.

Though I think the way it's done is weird as hell—by any rational line of reasoning everything I've seen that's tagged yaoi should be in the R-18 section, but we don't lump yaoi and hentai together because... I don't know. Probably because the fujoshi and the hentai-readers don't want to be lumped in with each other's stuff, really.

* * *​

Shoujo-ai and yuri distinctions, on the other hand, are just a mess. I have no idea what a "yuri" tag means on a given manga right now on Mangadex. Could mean sex for days, could mean there's more than one kiss (le gasp), could mean the tagger, like the OP, believes shoujo-ai isn't a real genre.

 

[monkey123]

@CG
Absolutely not! Btw. your avatar is a fucking traaaaaaaaaaap!!

 

[ununseti]

fwiw there's a lot of semantic drift for these terms depending on country and language.

In Japan, yaoi ("yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi") refers to doujinshi/works with m/m sex scenes, and has negative connotations. Nowadays BL is the more commonly used term to very broadly refer to any works focused on m/m relationships that are targeted at women; including sex or not; professional or doujinshi; etc. Meanwhile, here in English people seem to draw the distinction where yaoi which refers to explicit M/M, and shounen ai which refers to non-explicit M/M.

All of which are distinct from bara ("rose"), which denotes M/M works created by gay men for a gay male audience. (These are often more realistic/autobiographical.)

In Japan, yuri ("lily") broadly denotes F/F works. Meanwhile, here in English, there seems to be a parallel distinction between yuri and shoujo ai wrt explicit/non-explicit; but that seems to have fallen out of use lately in the yuri community; In recent times, the meaning of yuri has basically drifted to more closely match Japanese usage. Dynasty Reader, a yuri-centric site, uses the yuri tag to denote all F/F works, and makes no use of a shoujo-ai tag.

Also, Seven Seas Entertainment has been licensing a lot of LGBT-related titles here in North America, and the relevant genres they have only consist of boys' love and yuri; no shounen ai, shoujo ai, or yaoi. Series like Bloom Into You or Nameless Asterism, which get classified as shoujo ai here, are actually marketed as yuri in the publishing world.

To me, yuri means any work with a focus on a F/F relationship, explicit or non-explicit.

***

If we really wanted to be totally unambiguous, we could be like AO3 and just use relationship tags of either F/F, F/M, M/M, or Gen tags + an age rating of either general, teen, mature, or explicit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (on a related note, there was a thread a while ago about having more rating level granularity for filters)

Or maybe we could just lay out more specific guidelines for genre tagging. I still think that the idea of a tag wiki is a sound one, even though it was shot down (https://mangadex.org/thread/11565/wiki-guidelines-for-genres-and-tags)

 

[Pokari]

If we really wanted to be totally unambiguous, we could be like AO3 and just use relationship tags of either F/F, F/M, M/M, or Gen tags + an age rating of either general, teen, mature, or explicit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (on a related note, there was a thread a while ago about having more rating level granularity for filters)

Having GL / BL tags, coupled with an appropriate content-rating system so that, say, BL can either be BL (shounen-ai), or BL + "Mature Content: Explicit Sex" warning (yaoi), is indeed the direction I'd like to move in, personally.

I mean, I'd never even heard of "BL" (or GL) back when Batotos' or MangaUpdates' tags decisions were being made, I feel like they only entered English parlance like four (?) years ago. But they're easier to explain, less contentious, and don't even have unfortunate connotations attached.

But because, for instance, the shounen-ai/yaoi distinction contains important data, I do feel like a rating system is necessary for such a change to work. Mangadex has even less of one than Batoto did (since mangadex dropped even the vague "mature" flag).

Specific guidelines for tagging would also work, depending, but would require settling on what that dividing line is between shoujo-ai/yuri once and for all, which necessarily will make a lot of people unhappy no matter what you choose. (Right now it sort of seems like people don't fight about the definition mostly only because they don't realize each other's definitions are so different).