Page Restoration Petitions

We consider intent. Someone writing a work where characters who look and act like children are sexualized doesn't get a pass on it by claiming that they have an "accelerated lifecycle" or are Really 700 Years Old. That sort of thing is a red flag for the P5.

edited 26th Feb '17 2:02:02 PM by Fighteer

Same reason we have anything on the Erotic Film, Erotic Literature, and H-Game indexes: because a work can have sex and eroticism as a significant part of the work without being pure porn.

Fifty Shades of Grey actually was cut by P5 for a while...then reinstated because, quality aside, it's not even remotely pure porn, just a story in which a(n unhealthy) BDSM relationship—including, yes, the sexual aspects of such a relationship—is a major part of the plot.

I was looking at the list of pages that had been cut, and Yoiko stood out as something that might have been deleted in error. A plot description might lead someone to think it was pandering to pedophiles, but I've watched it and it didn't actually seem like it was at all. Basically, the main character is in elementary school but looks like she is college-aged. While she is shown naked a lot (almost every episode starts with her showering), there is no actual sexual content involving her character, and no sexualization or fanservice of characters that look under-aged. Most of the show consists of raunchy humor that isn't any worse than what would be in a R-rated movie. The show seemed to me to be aimed at college-aged men who find college-aged girls attractive, and not at all at a lolicon audience.

Main character looks like she's in elementary school and is shown naked is pretty much an automatic red flag, I'm afraid.

Well, again, she looks like she is in college. As far as I can remember, there wasn't any nudity of anyone who looked under-aged.

Oh, it's the other way around. Well, then it's explicit sexual exploitation of a minor. "Looks like she's older" is a very common dodge that artists use to get around child pornography issues. Doesn't fly with us.

"She's ten but looks like she's eighteen, we swear." Yeah, no.

edited 26th Feb '17 7:26:16 PM by Fighteer

Well, from what the content policy says, I wouldn't think it would be disallowed (i.e., it isn't "Fanservice intended to cater to pedophiles" and it doesn't have actual or implied sex involving under-aged characters). It's a non-pornographic work with fanservice intended for people who find adults attractive, and I just didn't think the policy called for those to be deleted. All of the other non-pornographic works that got removed seemed like the worst-of-the-worst for being specifically aimed at pedophiles, and even works with a lot of lolicon fanservice like Strike Witches or the Nanoha franchise got kept around. If just showing under-aged characters bathing got a work removed, then I would think those and hundreds of other anime titles would be gone. It just seems out of place for something with basically no pedophile appeal at all to get deleted when those were deemed to be acceptable.

Anyway, my main concern was if the people who voted to have it removed had watched it. If they did watch it and found it unacceptable, then I don't think I'm going to change their mind. But if they voted on it just based on a plot description without watching it, then I just wanted to request the P5 members to try watching it and see if they still think that way, since in my opinion it doesn't meet the stated deletion criteria and isn't worse that a lot of works that were kept around.

edited 26th Feb '17 8:45:10 PM by Calathan

Fighteer, would you actually be able to tell this is allegedly not an adult◊?

Calathan, the thing is that for differences between alleged and visible age, as we cover Really 700 Years Old as "the worst case applies", the reverse could be a problem too.

However, I haven't seen how the previous judgement of this work went, so I'll have a look myself later.

edited 26th Feb '17 10:19:49 PM by Adannor

...that's supposed to be a ten-year-old? 0-0

Yes.

Previous discussion of Yoiko seems to be thinly spread across over a hundred pages, making it a little hard to catch up on.

Reminds me of this comic on Danbooru where an elementary-age boy kept repeating the same grade for at least a decade (all because of some silly school ritual about finishing some sort of food that repulses him), becoming a 20-something-year-old "veteran elementary schooler" by the time the story proper starts and one of his female classmates comes back to the school as a newly employed teacher.

Okay after a bit more digging, the main meat of Yoiko discussion seems to be around page 138 and main factor in the cut was that she behaves like a 10 year old. While getting fanservice'd up.

Right. A work that sets up a pedo-pandering scenario can't wiggle out of it by making a single counterclaim, such that the character "looks 18".

Part of the point is 'are they mentally/emotionally a child'? She is, so it doesn't matter what she looks like. It's the flip side of looks like a child but is really ancient.

Both are and have been used to try and dodge pedophilia accusations. That doesn't work here.

On the MLP fanfic problem, if the humans are nonsentient and being used for sex by sentient beings, -well, that's a whole 'nother can of worms besides the initial one. And one we don't cater to.

I understand the argument that she acts like a child (and is supposed to be about 11) as a reason someone would be opposed to the work, but I still don't think there is any way the work was intended to appeal to pedophiles. The series features a class of 5th graders, yet never sexualizes anyone who looks underaged despite having ample opportunity to do so. I just can't imagine the creators intended the series as appealing to pedophiles. It certainly is a squicky concept, at least to Western sensibilities. If the idea is to get rid of works with no intended pedophile appeal if the content is squicky enough, then I agree that it should stay gone, but if the idea is to get rid of stuff intentionally pandering to pedophiles, then I just don't agree with removing it. At the very least, if something like this is unacceptable, then I think the content guidelines should be updated to make that clear. Right now they say that the intent of the work being to appeal to pedophiles is what matters, and wouldn't seem to apply to something without that intent.

The guideline is that explicit sexual content featuring pre-teens is something we ban absent an overwhelming reason not to. We're all too familiar with the "it's not really pedo-pandering" dodge.

edited 27th Feb '17 2:03:27 PM by Fighteer

Fighteer, I understand that, but I don't see this as a "dodge" or an excuse on the part of the creators, but as a work with no intended pedophile appeal at all. As I said above, it certainly comes off as squicky, but the way the content guidelines are written, they ban works that are aimed at pedophiles or that contain actual or implied sex by minors. Sexualization or nudity aren't the same thing as actaul or implied sex, and if the intent of the policy is to ban works that sexualize minors, then I agree that Yoiko does that. But again, if that is the intent then I think the content policy should just be edited to make that more clear.

Just to make sure I'm being clear, I'm talking about the content guidelines over at [1]. I don't see any way Yoiko would fail the guidelines listed there, so if the intent is that works like Yoiko should be banned, I think those guidelines need to be updated.

edited 27th Feb '17 4:22:37 PM by Calathan

It's still a preteen girl being shown in the nude in a sexual context. It may be running afoul of our rules for story reasons rather than artistic reasons, but let's call it what it is.

And on that note: Maybe I'm weird for thinking this, but for as potentially uncomfortable and dubious as portraying a young-looking character with an adult mental capacity and emotional history in a sexual light can certainly be, I find the implications of sexualising an adult-looking character with all the faculties of a child far more disturbing. I mean, this shouldn't be news to anyone, but a child cannot give consent. Just, really, think about it.

I agree with that. The mental age of a character seems more important to me than the physical look. Then again, I might be biased at that, since I have trouble judging ages of people, let alone stylised drawn characters, so I tend to perceive them as looking the age they act. However, neither the mental age nor the physical look should be obviously pre-teen for sexual content for how I think we should judge the works.

Chronological age can get a little wiggle room, since medieval and similar works (AU, fantasy, otherworlds) can have people marrying at 15 or 16.

The point, though, is for their world and time, they're considered young adults, with the mental maturity that goes with it.

Children, and those who are mentally children or have suffered mental damage, don't have that mental maturity. They don't have what's needed to make big decisions, including those involving sex.

Physical appearance doesn't mean squat when the person is too mentally young to make the judgement calls needed. Pursuing them for sexual use is essentially exploiting their inability/inexperience to make those calls.

Which is why the physically-looks-like-an-adult while being mentally a child doesn't fly here.

They actually get much much younger in historical works, like age of 9 in some works including Romance Of The Three Kingdoms.

Most don't get into details though.

There's cases where chronological age doesn't matter - but the idea of this is a mental and chronological fifth-grader who happens to look 18, which I think is problematic from a pedopandering standpoint.

Well, I agree with basically everything that everyone said other than that the show should have been removed, since I don't think it met the listed criteria for removal. I didn't think the point was whether most people would find the content offensive, but only to remove a very narrow group of pages that were likely to get Google to cut off advertising. But if that is the point, then perhaps it is best to just leave it as gone, as it still seems like something someone could complain about even if it doesn't exactly meet the removal criteria. Also, looking at some episodes on Youtube, I'm thinking it was a little worse than I remembered it.

The Google thing is long gone. We're doing this for our own standards.

Really? I find that strange, being used to other sites like Wikipedia (which covers basically everything under the sun, offensive or not) and Anime News Network (which long ago decided to stop reviewing porn, but still enters it into their database). I admit that I've not participated in TV Tropes discussions before, so why was there a decision to go in the direction of self-censorship? I would think just covering topics in as tactful a manner as possible, and making sure the pages themselves don't become lewd, would suffice. Is it just that the site is supposed to be more fun than informative, so people are encouraged to go elsewhere (e.g., Wikipedia) if they want to learn about offensive topics?