The growing problem of inscrutable titles and text

We were debating on exactly what elements the Yuri Genre is.... we were getting some place too with Black Cat's questions.

IMO its specifically Girls Romance aimed at mostly straight Teenage Girls (Shoujo) and Young men (Seinen) crowd Publishers say that's the demographics for it. Using very specific tropes themes (Love Flowers Situational Sexuality "Romantic" Two-Girl Friendship ect) and settings (One-Gender School or at least no guys are ever more than a one liner role and a few more we were talking about in the thread.) As well as playing up the Moe card.

edited 30th Jun '11 1:18:35 PM by Raso

While there is a problem in which people take a general trope that applies across all media and attempt to make it anime specific, I think that this is an example of a case of the reverse of that problem.

It seems to me that the Yuri Genre was very likely created to cover the listing of works that are objectively part of the Yuri genre in Japan, which is a subtrope of Lesbian Romance in general. However, since no article existed for the supertrope of Lesbian Romance, people who wanted to list Lesbian Romance works shoe-horned them into Yuri Genre, incorrectly generalizing a specific sub-group of works instead of taking the effort to create an article to properly cover the parent genre.

We saw the same thing with Kitsune, which was created to document the Japanese cultural-specific historical representation of fox spirits. Editors then started shoehorning every representation of fox spirits from every culture, causing Trope Decay which led to an attempt to rename Kitsune to something more general. In the end it was pointed out that Kitsune are a form of fox spirit specific to Japanese culture, and that the proper course of action was to create Fantastic Foxes as a supertrope for general examples of fox spirits, with Kitsune remaining in place to capture the specific Japanese cultural representations.

The interesting thing about this was that the situation gave the perception that Anime fans were trying to apply a Japanese name to the non-Japanese concept, when it was actually the other way around.

In the future when we run into situations like this, we should probably ask ourselves what the article was originally intended to cover: the subtrope that it's named after, or the supertrope that people have been adding examples for. Then take the appropriate action to create whichever article we are lacking.

edited 30th Jun '11 1:25:44 PM by Meeble

My question would then be: why do we need these very specific cultural referent tropes? Do they add anything useful that the more general case doesn't cover, with a nod to the Fanspeak term added to the description?

Of course we do. Trying to say that culture specific elements don't heavily inform how media is produced in that culture is nuts.

Sure, lots of things are shared across cultures, either from being the most basic of storytelling devices, or due to cultural sharing, other things are just going to be very, very specific.

One problem is that "American" media tropes have influenced much of the rest of the world's, due to the pervasiveness of Hollywood in world entertainment, this makes it look like these tropes are far more universal than they may otherwise have been.

Another issue is that Japanese popular culture in general, and Anime and Videogames in particular are the most well known non-English cultural entertainment in the English Speaking world, so tropes from Japanese media may seem to be overrepresented, but if we were to really bore down into other culture specific entertainments, we'd almost certainly find similar instances. But Japan hit the jackpot in this department, and their output of animation and interactive material has become far more well known worldwide than any other.

The Kitsune article is a good example. I'm sure there are actual Kitsune in a few non-Japanese works, but the vast majority of the examples are from Japan, where that interpretation of a Fox Spirit originated. Other cultures have other interpretations of the concept, and I'll bet that if we really explored and investigated, we could come up with a number of other cutural specific subtropes for them.

Maybe because the cultural version of them has enough differences that it is different from its western counterpart and can be considered a subtrope.

And Girls' Love is a preexisting term used by readers and publishers to apply to Yuri. From what we know, it hasn't really been applied offically to a western work. Maybe readers might've done it, but not the publishers.

edited 30th Jun '11 1:38:57 PM by chihuahua0

Wouldn't you just make a subtrope for them under Fantastic Foxes?

@Fighteer: I think that there is no one answer to that question, as it's something that should really be taken on a case-by-case basis.

In the case of Fantastic Foxes / Kitsune, you can see just by looking at Fantastic Foxes that the description is already pretty unwieldy as it is. If you include the description of Kitsune in with what's already there, you would have a trope description that would be several pages long.

Furthermore, since Kitsune are heavily represented in Japanese media, the examples section of Fantastic Foxes would be overwhelmed by Japanese examples. So it makes perfect sense to lay it out in the way it currently is: We recognize that Kitsune are a sub-trope of the general fox spirit concept, and we have them separated so that those who want to learn more about that specific representation can, while still having another place to go to compare the more general examples.

Girls' Love / Yuri is the same thing: There objectively exists a genre called Yuri, and there is a list of works that are objectively considered to be parts of that genre. If you have Lesbian Romance as a parent trope and Yuri Genre as a subtrope, fans of Yuri Genre can zero in on the specific works they are looking for, while those who are not interested in Japanese works don't have the general listing cluttered up with tons of Japanese examples. And since the articles will be linked together, fans of both the parent and subgenre can easily go back and forth with a single mouse click. Win-win-win.

But this is really getting into a lumper vs. splitter philosophy debate, on which I generally lean towards the splitter side of things. I don't really see a good reason not to split out subtropes like in the examples above when splitting them gives us a more thorough examination of how those tropes are used in different cultures, and also helps us avoid the inevitable page length issues we'll eventually have to deal with.

edited 30th Jun '11 1:52:02 PM by Meeble

Right, I'm sure there are western works that would qualify as Girls' Love (I know there are at least a couple English language webcomics that do), and they should be listed on that page, but the vast majority of the examples will be from Japan, because thats where this subgenre originated, or at very least, identified and codified!

The problem is, I don't read much Western lesbian fiction, so I can't say what the tropes involved in those stories are, as compared to what is found in Girls' Love manga.

My problem is the opposite. I read a lot of both so I know that they aren't that different other than love bubbles. Even things like "Romantic" Two-Girl Friendship are just as common in Western works. But that's not the topic of discussion right now.

Part of the problem is when people make a trope that's a universal concept with Japanese cultural elements (or with superhero comics conventions, etc.) but don't make the Supertrope. It's like hanging up a big DECAY ME sign.

Yes, the people who decay it are doing wrong, but the decay wouldn't happen in the first place if the launcher(s) didn't have Fan Myopia about their preferred medium/genre and recognized that they had two tropes on their hands.

In theory, such things should be caught in YKTTW.

But instead of whining about anime fans, people should make the supertrope, and not act like an entire fandom has a massive entitlement complex (which is absurd! ALL fandoms have massive entitlement complexes. Thats almost the point).

Then we got Aggregate Tropes like Most Common Super Power. And the 10 page debate we had on that [1]... why its and entire medium instead of work or person specific.

edited 30th Jun '11 2:25:22 PM by Raso

I dislike all fandoms equally, but as I've said, I think on this particular site anime fans have caused the greater share of these Fan Myopia filled entries. This doesn't mean they are "better" or "worse" then any other fandom (I personally view it as a demographics thing), but the point is, again, that there is some basis in fact, or at least historical fact, for the anti-anime paranoia on this site.

And I have to say, even with the changes made to it, YKTTW still doesn't seem to have improved that much in regards to fan myopia - driven proposals.

There are two sides to every coin. For every troper with Japanese-colored horse-blinders on, there is someone else with a shoehorn in hand ready to perform trope decay.

For every one person that adds almost-exclusively anime examples on a trope article, there are ten other editors that could be adding literature examples but, for whatever reason, don't.

People tend to contribute in the areas they are most passionate about. Their passion is not a bad thing, as it is what drives a community-based wiki like this.

Instead of trying to place blame on specific groups of editors, I think that it's far more productive for those of us who both recognize that there is a problem and are in a position to contribute to fixing it to just take the lead and do so.

edited 30th Jun '11 2:36:45 PM by Meeble

I'd rather have a general trope with a non-english title myself. It was the quirky foreign language titles that grabbed my interest in this wiki and brought me here (I realise there are some that will consider that a reason for never having a non-english title again). I wasn't really an anime fan before I came here and read the japanese titled tropes, so the titles captured a reader, opened me to new genres, gave me a wider cultural knowledge base, and expanded my vocabulary.

Long live the non-english language trope names!

Lesbian Romance would be a much better trope than Yuri or Girls' Love.

It would be a super trope (super genre) to Yuri Genre or Girls' Love, Girls' Love might not get above subtext of really really close friends (IE Nanoha) or with Situational Sexuality or alot of other things.

Making a page for that one to discuss the broader themes while the subpage would stay like it is now (although I would add a part on the demographics.)

edited 30th Jun '11 4:26:24 PM by Raso

That's true for all lesbian works. Not just Girls' Love. It's frequently subtextual in Western works.

At minimum, Girls' Love is a subgenre of Lesbian Romance. You can't just ignore that its an "officially" recognized genre, used by fans and publishers.

You can't just ignore that.

It's recognized as Japanese Lesbian Romance, but it's not so clear that it's recognized as a genre beyond that. There are some interesting subgenres in it, but most of what it makes it unique is the same things that divide Western Animation from Anime. Unlike Boys' Love which has Seme/Uke dynamics and the like that seperate it from Western style works, Girls' Love doesn't share the same divide from it's Western counterpart.

I am saying this as a fan of the genre and of Lesbian Romance in general.

edited 30th Jun '11 4:56:17 PM by shimaspawn

No way they are handled a lot differently, marketed a lot differently the stuff is marketed to straight people. (Rarely if any does the issue of being a lesbian come up ever or an issue that it might be wrong or someone having an issue with it), different demographics, have their own unique tropes and dynamics and alot of other things.

All the Q Qing about the description in the other thread was trying to remove all the uniqueness... make the super trope about everything then the unique stuff just stay in Yuri Genre. (no one actually seems to care about writing about Lesbian works anyway outside of The L Word or whatever.)

The Other Wiki separates them like this as well. They use "Lesbian Fiction" and Yuri(genre) as titles for their pages.

Boys' Love is marketed to girls and Bara is marketed to gay men as well which is another distinction for that.

edited 30th Jun '11 5:20:54 PM by Raso

It would easiest to create a Lesbian Romance page now, and compare the two once the things being compared both exist.

I think the difference is that the Japanese recognize it as its own genre whereas here in the West, we usually give no such distinction for Western works.

Just my two cents, though.

^Probably best to go through YKTTW first.

edited 30th Jun '11 5:17:00 PM by RocketDude

That I'll accept as a dfference. The target markets are actually pretty much the same. Aside from a couple of indie projects, most Western works with Lesbians are targeted at straight men because Girl on Girl Is Hot.

^Yeah, whereas Yuri seems to appeal both to men and women.