Page Restoration Petitions

Just wanted to put in a final good word for the (highly wayward) genius of Comics Nix and his works. As best I can tell, no one's revisited it since it was initially cut, and neither then nor since have we been clear on what separates him from parodists like Peter Chimaera. Since the original cut was unexplained, and since no one has responded to anything on the subject since that time, I was wondering if this might be a decision that had fallen through the cracks—God knows, the 5P has enough work on its hands.

Of course, there might be excellent reasons for not reconsidering Comics Nix; I just haven't seen them explained. And because the pages in question are down, it's tough to go back and look for differences between him & similar writers that would justify cutting him alone.

@ 1050 Arha: "The panel seems to be judging BL stuff fairly harshly."

Most of the BL stuff that's been flagged so far has been angst-ridden relationship melodrama, which is a sub-genre I think is going to be judged more harshly because it's (deliberately) unpleasant and frequently deals with abusive relationships. We don't seem to have many pages about the plotless smut type of BL, and the various other subtypes are less likely to be a problem.

There are at least a couple of other people contributing to the content violations threads who read BL, but they don't post as much as I do.

If it sounded like I was criticizing, that wasn't intended. They're being judged harshly because they have a lot of rape and it's played at least partially for titillation.

"They're being judged harshly because they have a lot of rape and it's played at least partially for titillation."

I'm not really on board with that being a criterion, since it would cut a lot of romance material going back to at least The Sheik (1911); Rape Is Love is a hugely popular trope in Western as well as Japanese romance. (shimaspawn had a nice summary of the point, that I can't find now...) If we're defining "porn" in terms of the sex-to-plot ratio, the type of sex shouldn't be an issue. If we're also cutting things for being kinky, that's an expansion of the mandate and I'd like to see a formal statement to that effect.

That was intended as a neutral statement. Sengoku Rance was judged similarly harshly. Big Bang Age, which is otherwise similar, was viewed pretty leniently until the pedobait issues came up.

Still, this thread is not about me.

Wait, you're not saying that rape is "kinky", are you?

edited 14th May '12 10:46:27 AM by Mazz

There's been a couple of passing statements by P5 members that give me the impression that non-vanilla sex (such as heterosexual anal) is being seen as more "porn-y" than vanilla sex.

But yes, Rape Is Love in romance is frequently played for dominance-submission kink (when it's not being played for angst-ridden melodrama). Next time you're in a big bookstore, wander through the Romance aisle and see how many of the Harlequin-style bodice rippers have titles like "The Arab Sheik's Kidnapped Bride" or "Prisoner of a Lustful Pirate" and so forth. It's a very popular fantasy.

I read BL but not as much as you Yes, the kinks are different in ladies' fiction and sometimes cause confusion.

edited 14th May '12 12:52:51 PM by animeg3282

I don't think BL titles are being judged more harshly than anything else. It's just the ones we have pages on were unbelievably not okay under new standards (Boku no Sexual Harrassment and Kuso Miso Technique are NOT indicative of most of BL).

Kuso Miso Technique is Bara, not BL. Just so you know.

Most of the Boys' Love Genre works we have pages on are just fine (look at all the pages that are still there). The stuff that has been flagged/reviewed is mostly the Dark Heavy Angst end of the spectrum.

Also, Kuso Miso Technique is not BL. It's Bara Genre. [edit] Or what Kuro Bara Hime said.

edited 14th May '12 1:01:19 PM by lebrel

Speaking of FATAL, I think it should be conserved in some way.

Honestly, that game is a minefield of "everything you should not do when creating a work of fiction". You could include a tip to readers about "attitudes you should not demonstrate and opinions you should not profess in public if you don't want to paint yourself and your interlocutors as Acceptable Targets by a sufficiently large fraction of said public", it'd be useful to those readers/editors with No Social Skills and a poor understanding of public image management, but that would be extraneous.

And Kuso Miso Technique is absurd to the point that it's impossible to see it as anything but comedy. Also, pics from it literally pepper the Internet everywhere, and are absolutely iconic. I think it merits at least a token mention as a Narm Charm and Cult Classic achievement.

edited 14th May '12 1:23:57 PM by TheHandle

I agree on the idea of keeping FATAL. The idea that anyone could endorse the idea of actually playing it is laughable.

Oh, sorry. Thought anything Japanese with two gay men was BL. My bad.

& Agreed.

RE: FATAL:

I made a thing.

edited 14th May '12 1:33:16 PM by Mazz

@Jhimmibhob: I have read some of his fics and skimmed through others, and most of what I've read is porn. Side-splittingly hilarious Troll Fic porn, but still porn. What little plot exists is only there as an excuse for the characters to have sex. I'm as disappointed as you are to see his unique brand of genius removed from TV Tropes, but it's obviously the sort of thing the P5 doesn't want. There's really no way to argue it.

Main.Erikas New Perfume

It's not really a porn. At worst it is a Squicky fetish work. It is not porn.

edited 17th May '12 7:01:12 PM by PancticeSquadCutterback

Thump!

edited 17th May '12 8:24:57 PM by animeg3282

I'm probably not the kind of person who ought to post about this, but:

Variable Geo was cut with little discussion, the line of reasoning, roughly stated, being "Fighting Game with dubious premise = porn with Excuse Plot."

After doing a few searches, it seems that the series started out with two hentai fighting games for the PC 98 which were even listed as Excuse Plot on our old YMMV page. All the subsequent PC releases were H-games of one sort or another, though some might be Porn with Plot. The Advanced VG games, however, were all Bleached Underpants (not sold as 18+ in Japan) console versions, which fleshed out the plot to compensate for the loss of H-scenes. (The H-scenes could apparently be enabled in the Sega Saturn version by an option; apparently VG Max had a similar option.) This could support the idea of at least making a page for Advanced Variable Geo.

The first Variable Geo OVA might be OK to mention; it was "loosely based on Advanced VG" according to our old page, and according to reviews such as this, despite heavy nudity and sexual themes it's not "full-on hentai," though the later VG Neo OVA was.

edited 18th May '12 9:11:41 AM by Prfnoff

In the total absence of 5P/mod response, I'll have to assume that's the case. And if that's their reasoning, it's pretty fair and I can't really fault it. I'll limit myself to pouring out a forty in honor of a very human monster, the pity and terror that his works have inspired, and the magic of a Psychopathic Man Child's laughter.

edited 18th May '12 9:54:17 AM by Jhimmibhob

"Fighting Game with dubious premise = porn with Excuse Plot."

This is the same problem I've mentioned before: "porn without plot" really ought to be about non-porn content, not literally about plot. Fighting games are played for the gameplay; they are not played for their plot, and almost every fighting game has an Excuse Plot even if there is nothing sexual in it at all. A fighting game shouldn't be considered porn because it has sexuality and little plot, since fighting games have little plot anyway. The overly literal interpretation of the "plot" rule leads to it being impossible for some genres of work to have anything sexual at all in them.

I suggest that before anything is condemned as "porn without plot", we ask the question "would something like this have a plot even if it wasn't porn?" If the answer is "no", analyzing the plot is probably a bad way to go about analyzing the content. Neither a gag series (containing non-porn gags) nor a video game (containing non-porn gameplay elements) is "porn without plot", even though neither gags nor gameplay elements are literally plot.

edited 18th May '12 11:04:14 AM by arromdee

Yes.

Someone else who brought up this issue was ccoa, in the thread on Sengoku Rance:

And, in response to your suggestion, I think that a more important question to ask of games like these might be: "To what extent is the objectionable content kept out of the actual gameplay?" Custer's Revenge (for instance) would obviously fail that test, and Miss World 96 Nude (whose page still exists at this moment) probably would too.

edited 18th May '12 12:24:04 PM by Prfnoff

Not really, cutscenes matter as much as the gameplay itself. If there's a game where the actual interactive part involves absolutely no porn but there are involved cutscenes with graphic sex at the end of every level, it might still be porn. If it's graphic kidsex, then it's definitely pedoshit.