Misused: Fan Yay

Since the trope Ho Yay has replaced Ho Yay Shipping and is inclusive of both gay and Yaoi Fangirl audiences, Fan Yay is now just having a strong gay fanbase, intentional or not, with or without shipping. Fan Yay really needs to be cleaned up, with examples more appropriate to Ho Yay moved there — especially considering a few of the examples on Fan Yay seem to apply more to Yaoi Fangirls than gay fanbase. There are also entries that were previously moved to Fan Yay from Bara Genre that also are now more appropriate in Ho Yay — these examples were not cleaned up for gushing either, and read as if they were still written for the Bara Genre article back when it was still collecting fan-shipping examples. Fan Yay still has many perfectly appropriate examples that involve gay characters being attractive, or relatable Audience Surrogate, or fitting in well to gay demographic interests, etc. And perhaps, if Fan Yay is cleaned up enough, it can be reassessed for the mature content curtain, though that need not be a priority right now.

But I don't just want to go ahead and haphazardly try to clean it up and migrate examples. I thought we could discuss this first and arrive at a reasoned and balanced consensus.

Sounds like a reasonable proposal. As an aside, I think we need Gay Comics or GBLTQ Comics to take up some of the stuff on Bara Genre; there's no reason why non-manga people like Ralf Konnig should be on there.

I think GLBT Comics would be good, since there are plenty of American comics dealing with those themes, and we could put Bara under that umbrella, like see subgenres here.

animeg 3282: Bara Genre could be expanded into an international genre with the understanding that it's not just targeted to an LGBT audience (making it Queer Media), but is also highly Manly Gay, and even straight male characters are Rated M for Manly. And Ralf König's work would then certainly apply.

To be honest, I'm surprised there simply isn't a Homoerotica trope. Or, heaven forbid, a Gay Porn trope. TV Tropes is currently using a mishmash of tropes for more definitive gay situations. Homoerotic Subtext implies subtext with or without an actual gay situation. Bara Genre implies a specific genre of Manga, but many examples are non-manga and even non-comics. And this isn't even just considering what would be considered Porn — sometimes works are fairly homoerotic without being considered outright porn. For example, works where everyone is Mr. Fanservice.

EDIT: Oh wow...there aren't even Porn or Pornography trope pages? Sure, pornography isn't everyone's cup of tea...it's usually not even mine. But it is a genre and topic, is it not? At the very least, UsefulNotes/Pornography sounds like a logical article.

edited 22nd Mar '12 6:53:23 AM by Gilgameshkun

There really should be. Want to make them? I think most people are just a little freaked at making the topics. There is a general page for Explicit Content though.

@Gilgameshkun: animeg 3282: "Bara Genre could be expanded into an international genre with the understanding that it's not just targeted to an LGBT audience (making it Queer Media), but is also highly Manly Gay, and even straight male characters are Rated M for Manly. And Ralf König's work would then certainly apply."

But that's not the definition of bara. Bara refers to Japanese (and Japanese-influenced) manga/anime/games/whatever aimed at a gay male audience, Manly Gay or not. Most of it tends to Manly Gay, but there is some that has Twinks or what have you and it's still Bara. Ralf König's work is not Japanese or Japanese-influenced, I don't see why he should be on the Bara page any more than Mary Renault's gay novels should be on the Boys' Love page.

Hm, that is true...I suppose it's not always Manly Gay. But my understanding is that it usually is. Bara is manly. At least all the bara I've ever seen.

Bara is manlier than yaoi, but it's not always uber manly. Sometimes it's just realistically male rather hypermale.

The western examples on bara look like shoehorns to me.

A lot of Anglophone bara fans are looking for stuff that is maximally different from yaoi. They tend to be less interested in the "ordinary guys" bara. The twinkish stuff, which is relatively rare in Japan to begin with, is almost invisible on the US bara-fan scene. But it exists.

edited 22nd Mar '12 9:42:53 AM by lebrel

Anyway, getting back to Fan Yay, I like your proposal. I don't think it's worth separating "Ho Yay as seen by (presumptively heterosexual) women" from "Ho Yay as seen by people who identify as GBLTQ"; it tends to be sparked by the same phenomena, in my experience.

Indeed. Ho Yay is made and consumed by straight and gay people alike. Fan Yay is having a lot of gay fans whether or not there is actual shipping.

And I suppose it's highly probable a lot of Bara Genre examples are shoehorned. But if they are, then there has to be a legitimate broad international Manly Gay genre that Westerners (like on the image boards) are calling "bara". But not sure what to call it. Among my friends, we usually just call it "bara". Some people easily call it "gay porn", except not all of it is porn. The best neutral term I can think of, is "homoerotica". Even before pornography was legalized in the 1960s, there was a strong homophile male audience for "beefcake" media, which was never explicit but highly fanservicy. And when pornography was legalized, those niche publications immediately vanished and were replaced by gay porn. But there is still a large audience for "soft" homoerotica, which even my baby boomer parents acknowledge is not pornography — stuff that emphasizes/accentuates the attractiveness of men, up to and including full nudity and interpersonal affection, but with too much artistic redeemability to always be considered porn. Basically, stuff for people who aren't desperate for "fap fuel" and aren't in dire need to get off. (One could be cute and say such people are termed "women", but there are a lot of men who appreciate such things too.) There are artists and photographers all over the place that specialize in this. I know that CaptainGerBear in particular (currently mentioned as an example on Bara Genre but not exclusively Japanese-influenced) does a lot of this. Sure, some of his art is strongly sexual, but I'd say most of it is more of a strong sensual feast to the eyes, including the examples in the article's top image.

I don't know how much of the previous paragraph made intuitive sense. I'm not even sure about linking relatively tame examples, since I figure a lot of you are straight and wouldn't appreciate the aesthetics anyway. And after that incident in the "Embarassing crap on the wiki" forum thread with that distraught 15-year-old girl who complained about Roommates 2009 (also listed as Bara Genre but probably also shoehorned), I'm now slightly more reluctant to casually link stuff even if I believe it's legitimate.

...come to think of it, "homoerotica" is still too broad to inherently imply Manly Gay. Been a hectic day full of interruptions and distractions, and I'm not thinking up to snuff.

edited 22nd Mar '12 10:44:03 AM by Gilgameshkun

Gay Beefcake. Or something. I definitely know what you mean, but it's not all bara. I know a lot of places use "bara" for "any homoerotic material featuring manly men", just as there are a lot of places that use "yaoi" for "any homoerotic material featuring feminine men" (even if it's Otokonoko Genre or for-men shotacon or gay men's comics or anything involving two guys of any kind anywhere), but it's misuse.

Gay Beefcake sounds better, but it still sounds vague as a genre, in that its name doesn't sound distinct enough from Manly Gay. And the men portrayed are not always gay, though they usually are, and the audience almost certainly is. Maybe...Homoerotic Beefcake. Manly Homoerotica, maybe? But I also fear using too many Big Words, since most guys never use such long and specific terms for such things. Just a sea of shoehorned terms and slang, more suited to Urban Dictionary than Oxford English Dictionary. "Bara", "porn", etc. — often misused from respective Japanese-oriented or prostitutive definitions. ("Porn" is one of the most blatantly redefined terms on the internet. Anywhere from actual pornography, to mere erotica, to...just anything people think looks great, like Food Porn, etc.)

But I digress. The theme I'm thinking of is often pornographic but doesn't require pornography. And a lot of men...just don't distinguish (which I usually find quite annoying, but is still meaningful in finding a name for this).

I'm actually tempted to start a thread on the social board of Baraspot (a shoehorned "bara" image board), and gather thoughtful opinions on this particular Bara Genre article topic, linking to this TV Tropes forum thread. But I'll hold off on doing that for the time being.

edited 22nd Mar '12 11:37:46 AM by Gilgameshkun

After a good sleep, I'm still not more certain than before how to address the Bara Genre issue.

Okay, I've done some more thought about fixing the Bara Genre article.

Bara Genre seems to be simply Queer Media Manga, if I'm understanding correctly. If it's really that simple, the article may have to be drastically simplified into a most orthodoxly defined genre page.

Gachimuchi (which currently redirects to Bara Genre), seems to simply be the Japanese term for Manly Gay, and that can probably be redirected there instead.

For homoerotica that does not require the subjects to have a gay-compatible sexuality, the proper trope may vary between Explicit Content, Mr. Fanservice, Rule of Sexy, or any combination thereof. And though online westerners gravitate to "bara" for homoerotic Rated M for Manly beefcake, there seems to be no clear-cut genre term for this, and yet we also know full well that what we're talking about is Older Than Dirt. It's probably just best to describe it as Homoeroticism, with manliness or lack thereof being a combination of this with Rated M for Manly and/or Manly Gay. But then, it's still arguable that many well-referenced existing tropes are this — if bara isn't required to be Manly Gay, then the difference between bara and yaoi is the gender of the creators/audience. Sometimes combining tropes creates a third trope with additional meaning, but this isn't always so easy to describe.

Anyway, I know this discussion is about cleaning up Fan Yay, and this thread has nearly derailed from its purpose in discussing Bara Genre instead. Perhaps a separate Trope Repair Discussion for Bara Genre would be a good idea as well?

edited 24th Mar '12 1:01:53 AM by Gilgameshkun

"then the difference between bara and yaoi is the gender of the creators/audience"

The difference is the sex of the intended audience, yes (Japan kinda has a tough time with the whole sex/gender/orientation thing, even in queer media, so I'd say sex rather than gender).

Gachimuchi is just a body type (muscles but also chubby), it can be used to describe a character of any orientation, although it's much more common in Bara than anywhere else. There's some gachimuchi yaoi, but not much. Sometimes the term is used to describe yaoi/bara crossover stuff like Gekidan.

Moving this all to a thread on Bara would be fine with me. :)

Yeah, I tried to start a discussion for Bara Genre. :3 What do you know...forum thread limit got hit again. I suppose we'll just have to combine the topics here. :3

As for Gachimuchi...I'm already confused again. XD This stuff practically needs a whole Useful Notes page to cover the various topics and their subtle distinctions. Maybe something like Queer Media In Japan.

edited 26th Mar '12 9:14:56 PM by Gilgameshkun

I could take a stab at a UsefulNoytes.Queer Media In Japan article if that would be useful, but we really don't cover any beyond Bara and that corner of Yuri aimed at actual lesbians, so I don't know how much use that would really be.

Anyway, let's fix Fan Yay and then we can worry about Bara.

Agreed.

I did some edits and prunings, starting with the Anime section, but to be honest I just don't know enough about many of these works to understand the nature of their gay fanbases. I don't want to remove examples where there's more than just Ho Yay for the gay fans to appreciate. (Ho Yay isn't the only thing in the world.)

edited 4th Apr '12 12:34:35 AM by Gilgameshkun

Clocking due to lack of activity.

Locking.