The Place for Purging Porn and Pedo-Pandering (AKA P5 flag evaluations)

As I said earlier, my feeling is that I'll do my best with whatever guidelines are eventually laid out. I don't want to influence the policy decision one way or another, since my job is to enforce P5 policy rather than craft it.

Same here.

Whether or not the plot is purely porn and whether or not the gameplay makes up for it is exactly what the P5 have to determine, and I hardly envy them. What I think of the game is pretty irrelevant, and would be uninformed, besides.

One needs only look at the Double Standard Rape tropes, Black Comedy Rape, Victim Falls For Rapist, and, my personal all time "favorite", Rape as Redemption to see how terrible media is at handling rape and how often it is treated as a good thing. While I certainly wish they'd freaking stop, burying our heads in the sand and pretending it doesn't exist (such as when all the rape tropes were nearly cut) won't change anything. The only way to have even a snowflake's chance to influence people about it is to point out that it's not funny, redemptive, erotic, sweet, or any other positive adjective.

If we're going to have a policy on it, we have to be very careful about it how it's worded. Otherwise, we're just going to start the panic over again, and it's hardly died down from the first couple times.

My personal thoughts, which Shima has already articulated, is that it should be allowed to be a point against a work that is already up on the chopping block, but we should wait to go after rape until we've really thought about it and what beyond those we want gone, if anything. There's no reason to jump in half-cocked again and every reason to wait until the current crisis and workload has passed.

This is why the slippery slope argument is not actually a fallacy here. All the people who said "we start with 'creepiness', then we cut porn, then we cut other things" were right. I'm certainly now willing to give more credence than I was yesterday to the idea that the wiki is moving towards cutting anything sexual.

edited 11th May '12 7:14:30 AM by HersheleOstropoler

Don't really want to be arguing stuff here, but here goes...

I'm starting to agree with the above here. As I've said before (and was ignored completely), there's no such thing as 'pornographic elements' in a work. There are only 'works with explicit content' and 'pornography', plot or no plot. By definition, pornography lack artistic, social, historical, and literary merit (see various SCOTUS decisions, although I fully understand that the Supreme Court is not the arbiter of any rules here).

The problem I have is that it seems like there's been a movement by the panel from 'cut pornography (and pedo-pandering)' to 'cut anything with elements in it that I personally find squicky or otherwise don't like'. I feel that said movement should be reversed as soon as possible. It's the surest path to Moral Guardianship. Obviously, I don't get a say in the matter, but I still feel as though I'm entitled to voice my concerns.

If we end up cutting anything sexual, it'll be because the wiki's position has changed to that being the ideal situation.

Review each decision in its own light, and you'll be fine.

The problem with slippery slope arguments is that people are awfully keen to call them fallacies now. I edited out a post outlining a progression I could see occurring if we started attacking rape as well since I wanted to avoid derails over whether or not it was a fallacious argument.

In any case, I don't really see much support for expanding our current guidelines. Shall we stick with them until we've finished our current load of work and it appears that works focusing on things like rape or whatever seem to be becoming problematic?

Well, y'all, if it means anything, my criteria for what stays and what goes is entirely dependent on whether or not the work in question contains any explicit sexualized imagery of prepubescent children made primarily for the sake of titillation and/or the whole point of the work is to get off to it. Rape in itself does not factor into my personal criteria unless, again, the whole point of its inclusion and use is to get off to it.

edited 11th May '12 7:32:20 AM by Komodin

To nitpick - it's "obscenity" that's not supposed to have any artistic / literary value, not pornography. (This is why it's so hard to enforce the Miller Test - the "value" part is too subjective to be enforced in a majority of cases.) Now, if the current objective is to remove pornography (which would therefore be judging by stricter criteria than the obscenity test), then it's really a subjective decision to define pornography - by appointing the 5P, you're applying "I know it when I see it" to (hopefully) a representative sample of the population to determine what's within our acceptable limits for ratio of explicit to non-explicit content and what isn't.

Having said that, while the panel are certainly entitled to their own opinions on "swing factors" such as rape, incest and the like, which may or may not influence the direction of a borderline vote, I'd rather not put them into the rules for now - that's diluting the main mission.

edited 11th May '12 8:50:36 AM by Pyrite

Kichiku Megane... hm. Going by the work page for it, it doesn't really have much going for it beyond the whole "BDSM Yaoi" thing. Can someone who's more familiar with this work do me a solid and fill me in this, and whether or not its work page is accurate to what's in the work?

The tags at this page might be useful. From the tags I'd guess that there's a lot of explicit content, but I'm not sure there's enough to call it porn. I'll point out that group sex tags tend to appear on things that I'd personally label porn. Other than that, I don't know. This isn't a VN I'd be likely to read.

edited 11th May '12 7:54:16 AM by Arha

Re Kichiku Megane, I posted a defense to the Pages Pending For Perusal By P 5 page when it was first brought up, quoted below for convenience:

Here's a writeup in the new standardized VN-defense forma (note: only for main game, I don't know about the fandisk/sequel):

• When are the sex scenes located? - Throughout the routes, including an early one in most routes.
  • Are they spread out over the game? - Yes.
    • How much gameplay is there between sex scenes? - As a Visual Novel, there's not a lot of gameplay overall (there are about 20 decision points per route), but there is a lot of content between the sex scenes; there's about 2-3 sex scenes per route, and it takes about 3 hours to play through a route (depending on how fast you read), most of which is character interaction.
  • Are they only at the endings? - No.
    • How hard do you have to work to get an ending? - There are 4-5 endings per character/route, one good (you form a happy consensual relationship), one not-so-good (you form a unhappy or non-consensual relationship) and the remainder bad (usually involving insanity or murdering / being murdered by the other character).
    • Are they in every ending? Every good ending? - Every character (route) has sex scenes. The ending scenes themselves usually don't have sex in them.
• Are the sex scenes optional via a choice in the menu? - No. Any CG event (which includes the sex scenes) can be skipped when you encounter it, though.
• Would the story make sense without them with minimal or no rewriting? - They could be made off-screen with little impact, but as the plot is mainly relationship drama there would be motivation gaps if they were removed completely.
• Are the scenes made up of stills, or are they animated? - Stills with voice acting.
• How explicit are the sex scenes? - Full-body nudity with genitals hidden.

edited 11th May '12 8:14:36 AM by lebrel

So largely standard BL stuff except the sex is onscreen?

Yes, most of the routes are your basic Dark Heavy Angst relationship-melodrama BL story.

[edit] Looking around, it seems like the sequel (the R "Fandisk") has more explicit art. I don't know about the story / sex ratio there.

edited 11th May '12 8:22:19 AM by lebrel

I agree with ccoa. The best antidote we can provide to the mishandling of rape in media is not to stick our heads in the sand, but to address it. A good example of this (and one I thoroughly support) is on the So You Want To Write Yaoi page. The person who wrote it up is someone who understands both the societal reasons for people wanting to write Victim Falls For Rapist etcetera - and takes them apart and explains that it is a cliche and not to write it simply because everyone else is doing so, that in almost all if not all cases it's an insult to actual victims and a trigger, etcetera.

THAT is how we should best handle rape in fiction: not by censoring, say, everything that mentions it, but explaining that it's handled badly, warning those who might be triggered and encouraging the writers to try something else like consensual BDSM (if they want to be titillating) or Rape as Drama with the full respect the victims deserve (if they want to be dramatic).

(ninja'd) Also, in the effort of "lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness," we could make a special effort to create pages for works that don't portray rape positively and that do portray consensual relationships and consensual sex positively. And we already do this to some degree - for example, we have pages on Katawa Shoujo and Future Lovers - a hetero VN and a yaoi manga, respectively, that feature consensual, respectful relationships and don't involve rape. So that is another idea, and maybe one that deserves a Special Efforts for genres that tend to treat rape lightly or disrespectfully - find and create pages on works within those genres (Visual Novels, yaoi, romance novels, etcetera) that either don't have rape or that at least treat it with the gravity it deserves.

edited 11th May '12 8:50:04 AM by AGroupie

About the currently discussed issue, I think that whether there will be further changes to the guidelines, is up to Google.

I've noticed that the article on Sankaku Complex got 3 devils but was only locked. I expected it to be cut because the text itself says the "militant pro-hentai, pro-lolicon stance" is one of its defining characteristics. Further reading tells about articles on the site on "loli dolls", the focus on lolicon of many discussions there... So, isn't against the guidelines to have an article detailing a site that is stated to have a lot of content that can be classified as "pedo-pandering"? Or is, in the case of other sites, a more neutral stance taken?

Yeah, I'm wondering why Sankaku Complex wasn't cut or at least turned into a locked stub...

BTW, you think we could edit this one line into the lolicon and shotacon pages to save some trouble re: people listing such works in the future?

"TV Tropes does not allow pages on works that play this trope straight or use variants of playing with it as an excuse to show underage characters in sexual situations."

If you cut out all uses of lolicon as described on the page, you're going to end up cutting pages like Lucky Star.

I think I should note that Lolicon as described is about pedophile characters, not underaged girls.

It's not playing it straight that's the issue. It's playing it in a way that sexualizes children. There's at least one show I watched that had an episode where there were a bunch of girls who were telling scary stories only to see someone through the window and freak out. It turned out to be a lolicon character played straight, but at no point were the girls themselves shown in anything more revealing than long night gowns, and other loose fitting pyjamas. They beat him up when they caught him, but it was still played for laughs.

So the trope was played straight, but the girls weren't sexualized, and it was a one time throw away gag.

It's not the trope, it's the sexualizing of minors that's the issue.