U.S.-centric policy and international tropers

Yes, neither do I, and yes.

"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.

@largo I'm sorry for making those jokes about the panda. I'm not against masturbating pandas per se, but I think the phrase sounds funny.

but making those jokes made that person feel like we were against furries, and so I felt bad.

edited 4th May '12 3:43:12 PM by animeg3282

Oh, lol, I wasn't thinking about you with the panda. There was definitely a person - who might've been thumped for it - who was all, "cutting this is discriminatory to furries!" or something. It was strange.

EDIT: Aaaah. I didn't remember that, but y'know, no worries.

edited 4th May '12 4:19:53 PM by LargoQuagmire

I'm all for being open to other cultures, but if those cultures involve pedophilia or other similar filth, then we need to keep it off our site.

Do other cultures have different standards for defining pedophilia or porn? I doubt it.

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

I think the issue is that it's not so much what is pedophilia, but how much sexual humor is allowed or whether kids can be naked. In America, some eyebrows may be raised by the dad in my neighbor toroto bathing with his kids,since we don't do that here.

While for the purposes of official policy, to avoid running in circles, we've adopted western standards, I think we are considering some target audience issues and cultural differences are considered in that aspect.

Now using Trivialis handle.

My Neighbor Totoro is a G rated film in the US. It's so far below our cut off lines for content that suggesting it is just going to be laughed at. That said, context matters. There's nothing sexual about that scene at all.

edited 4th May '12 5:02:42 PM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

A lot of interesting feedback. I can't say I've digested it all at this point, but I'm at least glad that my concerns are being discussed.

The main reason I brought up all this is my own complex background. I am a U.S. citizen, born in Hawai'i, raised abroad in an American expatriate community in Oceania, and currently reside in North America. So it's probably not accurate to say I'm not American at all. But my friends — the people I know, my everyday circle — tend to span the ocean. Where they touch the U.S. at all, they tend to fit in best in places like San Francisco or Massachusetts. But even growing up, there were many American expatriates, but also many nationals from other countries. They were almost all highly educated, and what Americans may consider very "liberal". Though by my own perception, this was "moderate", and it was glimpses of American life that seemed startlingly "conservative". After coming to North America, I continued associating mainly with international people. People from places like Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Spain, and a handful of Americans who also had many of these same contacts. No one culture dominated, but we still had things in common if we recognized them, and that allowed us to respect one another and be friends.

It was common practice to apply the least restrictive judgment between two people, as long as they didn't violate a certain baseline. And even in saying "baseline", that's just a word I'm using for something we tended to assume without having to outline in advance, since people quickly learned not to harshly judge their international friends for minor resolvable conflicts of cultural standards.

For example, I knew a few people that we may think of as ephebophiles where that was entirely normal and average in their society — this could be respected, since anthropologically it is historically common for societies to start considering whether who have entered puberty can start living the lives of adults. But pedophiles — people interested in children who had not yet hit puberty — creeped me and everyone else the hell out. Personally, I'm neither — I tend to be attracted to people who appear more physically mature, like they could be at least in their 20s and 30s, and very often in their 40s or 50s. Which sometimes had its own cultural dissonance — some people thought it weird that I liked "old people".

Interestingly, this was one of the main appeals of Morenatsu which I have defended for this among other reasons. Though all the main characters are teenagers (most 16 or 17, and maybe one or two are 15), most of the characters appear blatantly far more mature, and Juuichi in particular looks at least 30 (being The Bear helps).

I know that Japanese culture tends to have a very large modern skew on this. Traditionally the culture has been predominantly ephebophile, with teenage boys or teenage girls being the ideal of beauty. This is the age they were usually married off by their parents, and even 16 or 17 was once considered a spinster age for people who had not become attached. Today in Japanese society, the average marriage age is closer to 30, if people marry at all. Most Japanese women have become far more independent than most any period in Japanese history, and want more from man than just a traditional unaffectionate husband who only two or three generations ago may have treated his wife like property. Most Japanese men, however, want sex, and they want it from the age they traditionally wanted it — as teenagers, and with teenagers, and not necessarily both simultaneously, as teen years are traditionally the height of Japanese ideals of beauty and sexuality. Japanese society has undergone many upheavals over the past century and a half, and is still trying to reconcile tradition with change and reality, and this is usually a bumpy ride full of double standards. Practically any modern society can relate in principle.

Truth be told, I would be uncomfortable if any of my international friends faced a brick wall of someone else's indigenous discriminations. I don't feel comfortable passing judgment on reasonable people from other places. When in doubt, make freer, not less free. If we suddenly all had neighbors who were all different from each other living in one place, we'd have to adapt peacefully or have constant ugly culture clashes. And since the Internet is already largely this kind of place, it only seems like common sense, at least as I understand it.

Comply with the rules of Google Ad Sense or other services if you must, but I feel it's far better to keep remaining standards to an international baseline standard, rather than making them so culturally strict. When they're strict, they constrict, which is most painful for reasonable people who respected the baseline but never shared (or even necessarily understood) similar cultural standards in the first place.

And, as this experience seems to demonstrate, it may be important for literary movements like TV Tropes to decentralize, and openly torrent its content data, so it can be mirrored and/or forked by anyone else under the appropriate free content license. We have come to love troping, but there can't be just one influential repository of trope information if it intentionally restricts to regional cultural standards. It would have been nice if TV Tropes still only limited itself to a fairly simple baseline. But once it adopted limits, decentralization and wiki cloning became inevitable.

If you think about it, TV Tropes seems to have had much humbler original goals. Tropes from television shows, for ordinary people who watch ordinary TV. It quickly became a repository for all tropes in all media, including from any other countries tropers had interest in. I can sympathize if Fast Eddie feels like it has grown past his original intent. On the other hand...it has grown past his original intent, into an entire movement that no one person has the power to control. Fast Eddie is free to run his privately-owned websites as he sees fit. But this movement is so much bigger than him or any of us now — it's a creature that demands independence and freedom of thought. And, as much as I have loved TV Tropes, I can see it losing relevance in the inevitable decentralization if it does not assert itself as a natural compassionate leader within the movement, retaining the respect and reverence of all. Not everyone can be Jimmy Wales, but they can still forge constructive trends in a larger movement.

Apologies — when I'm brimming with deep thought, I am utterly incapable of being brief. I do not have Thomas Jefferson's universal communicative skill. TL;DR is entirely expected if someone doesn't have to patience to bear with me. However, I did try to use more line breaks this time.

edited 4th May '12 5:20:48 PM by Gilgameshkun

"[H]ow much sexual humor is allowed" is not the question at all. Different cultures may have different standards about, say, how much pedophilia is acceptable. But that is irrelevant.

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

I can see why U.S. centric standards are used here. The site is hosted on U.S. servers and sponsored by U.S.-based advertisers. Although I'm pretty sure there are a lot more places than just the mid-east and Japan where U.S. standards aren't culturally accepted.

edited 4th May '12 5:13:48 PM by ThatHuman

something

In actuality, we aren't really using U.S. standards as such, since U.S. standards vary from medium to medium and from genre to genre, and even from state to state. (North America is a big place, yo.) In comparison, we're looser in some areas and stricter in others. That's fair and good, as we really don't want a Double Standard at work. Hence why I'm not overly worried on that count.

But when people mistake this change as a switch to U.S. specific standards, it does create problems for the wiki, and far too many arguments for my liking. I'd much rather us focus on solving those problems, and any other practical concerns that arise, than debate too much over culture, morality, and such.

And for those that dislike the changes: if this new content policy, given time, proves practically unfeasible in terms of maintaining it across the wiki, I will oppose it then. Until then, I'll keep pointing out any issues that I take note of, and wait to see how it turns out.

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

But mores have changed within the US as well. Remember the rash of parents being arrested for naked kid bath pictures in the late 90s?

I hope I can still trope my favorite edgy works in the future without fear of crackdown. We need pages for influential works like Morenatsu. It's been magical for the equal amounts of G-rated and adult-oriented fanart that has flooded the art communities. Rarely does a nominally adult work appeal so well to so many fans for remarkably worksafe Slice of Life/Romantic Comedy appeal. And it utterly galls me that it may end up being cut for content technicalities that aren't even as interesting as the story itself.

Look, this is a Fur Affinity account set up solely to index Morenatsu art and fanart. Even without being logged in or being able to see adult content, you can see that there's a large variety of it. Works like Morenatsu actually seem to be less like H-games, and more like ordinary works that include some adult content as a matter of uncensored matter-of-fact frankness. It has gained it a lot of fans, even those who don't at all care about the love scenes.

edited 4th May '12 7:30:34 PM by Gilgameshkun

"By porn, we do in fact mean porn - not 'explicit' or 'NSFW', but 'porn'"

What do you mean? It doesn't seem like that nearly violates any policies. Seems like an overreaction.

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

Lately, we've been calculating the porn to plot ratios. I'm not sure how much porn gets it cut, but I'm sure over 50% causes a lot of hmmm..

Note: by 'porn' I mean explicit sex scenes

I guess you have a point. I have no idea what we do with works targeted at sexual minority communities.

edited 4th May '12 8:09:22 PM by animeg3282

When I think about it, this is actually rather common in works that appeal to a gay audience. There's often less consideration of censorship or the question of whether something contains pornography, in part because for many members of the audience, being gay alone is taboo in their community, so being involved in their gay community often implies more exposure to adult media as a common baseline resembling facts on the ground. (In short, gay is culturally taboo, and pornography is culturally taboo, so people find acceptance where taboo is relatively more tolerated.) A lot of what they consume is pornography. And lot of it isn't. And some of it has a deeper literary value that puts into question its very primary consideration as pornography, when pornography itself is less taboo or distinguished in audience context. It's not Porn Without Plot, and seems to be barely even Plot With Porn. It's more like Plot With Plot, and some sex but it's not critical to the story.

With media that appeals to straight people, there tends to be a sharper line between pornography, and broader works that deal with relationships. In many gay communities where their own larger communities may stigmatize them, this distinction is less important in the media they consume, because there are fewer gay Moral Guardians to take issue with it in their own community. And with things being as they are, Gay Conservatives are still often frowned upon as "self-haters". Someday this may change and gay media will have a mainstream integration analogous to straight media, and gay communities will finally shed their Gay Village mindset of safety among one's own kind.

Until then, I think we need to consider the special concerns of gay media, where more of it is not going to distinguish between pornographic or non-pornographic categories, because the stigma is not nearly as strong. Whether a work has explicit content or not has less relevance than the value of the work itself. And I'm worried that TV Tropes may ultimately not be adequately sensitive to that. It would have Unfortunate Implications to stigmatize gay works, but it would also have Unfortunate Implications to apply nonintuitive strict content separation rules that are less culturally relevant in niche gay media than they are in mainstream straight media.

...this additional concern may be outside of the scope of this thread I started, but I can see how it's related. When people pool into communities — whether by country or by subcultural necessity — they can congeal their own separate standards, which may typically be the primary standards in the lives of its community members. They all deserve respect and sensitivity. Niche works for the gay community tend to have more elements of sexual liberation, fewer hangups and less censorship, because to be part of the openly gay community may necessarily take that step of liberal self-acceptance to identify as being gay to begin with. Being prone to homosexuality by nature isn't going to be different whether you're conservative or liberal. But being openly gay and proud tends to be socially liberal by default, simply because many similarly-inclined social conservatives will instead become insecure deeply-closeted Heteronormative Crusaders to satisfy cultural demands. And as this statistically limits the amount of open members of the gay community, it will also tend to make the gay community's mainstream tropes and works more liberal and more permissive.

This is not to say that it's necessarily right to have double standards that force people to choose between loyalties and cultural mindsets. It's just acknowledging that the separate independent standards already exist in some form or another, as long as reasonable subcultures feel forced to gather in this way for their own protection and social interaction. It's not a far-fetched notion that, as gay people are more accepted in the mainstream, having a gay community identity will be less relevant. Until then, there will still be a community, and valid works and tropes that cater to them, and the opinions in that community will tend to matter more than the opinions outside that community, and with all th content considerations that will imply. The analogous international baseline of cross-cultural tolerance can help be a bridge between mainstream straight works and LGBT culture works.

Anyway...someone else in this thread mentioned how the primary concern is whether something is pornography, rather than whether it's explicit. The inherent problem here is whether someone else's work is being judged as pornography, when the creators and audience may not have actually given much priority to that consideration to begin with. People may like many niche gay works, both explicit and non-explicit, and some of it may genuinely have been made with pornographic intent. But that consideration may be irrelevant to the audience, and for it to be imposed from outside feels like it insensitively misunderstands the niche interest. Basically, many of us don't question and don't care whether something may be thought of as porn, and we're not really used to trying to think that way, and may find ourselves clumsy or awkward when we do try. Possible pornographic content is not always the biggest reason reason a work interests us — indeed, it may not even be a significant reason at all.

edited 4th May '12 8:08:09 PM by Gilgameshkun

That's obviously not pornography. Gayness is completely irrelevant. Is over half of it sex? No? Then it's not even close.

edited 4th May '12 8:08:31 PM by rodneyAnonymous

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

Chub Pan wasn't more than half sex, and it still got cut... That still makes me sad. It was frank, and it was explicit, but you still spent most of your time walking around a town and interacting with fully-clothed characters, and getting to know them as characters, all to some really excellent music.

Actions can speak louder than reassurances. Most of my gay friends no longer trust TV Tropes over this.

edited 4th May '12 8:13:58 PM by Gilgameshkun

That is a self-described "erotic dating sim".

Also, the m.o. is "cut first, ask questions later". If you think something shouldn't have been cut, appeal it.

edited 4th May '12 8:15:47 PM by rodneyAnonymous

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

Yeah, it was erotic. And it had some pornographic scenes. The rest of the eroticism was Mr. Fanservice appeal. It's not always a foregone conclusion that eroticism, even neighboring pornography, is itself also pornography. And even then, as I said, much of the niche gay community's creators and audiences don't care, and just like what they like whether it's explicit or not, whether it's erotic or not. As one famous homoerotic photographer half-joked, "The only difference between pornography and art is bad lighting." I've been worried that these recent events might cut too deeply into homoerotic works as collateral damage, simply because of guilt by association. This causes great alarm and uneasiness in me and my fellow gay tropers, some of which have sworn not to return to TV Tropes.

edited 4th May '12 8:21:43 PM by Gilgameshkun

The problem with Chub Pan isn't that it's a gay work. The problem is that game play focuses on things like a masturbation minigame and that there are sex scenes constantly. We've kept works that are gay but erotic. that particular game is just the other side of porn.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

It is almost completely irrelevant that a work is "gay porn". The relevant part is just the noun "porn", not the adjective "gay". My claim is mitigated by "almost" because it's true that works aimed specifically at that audience do tend toward being pornographic*

, but that doesn't matter to The Panel. Most of the flipping out seems born of misunderstanding or exaggerating the actual concerns.

If cutting an article about something that is subtitled "A Point & Prick Adventure" makes you want to leave and swear never to return, bye.

edited 4th May '12 8:34:51 PM by rodneyAnonymous

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

Well...I respectfully disagree. I do admit that Chub Pan was relatively harder to defend than the others. But when it was cut, it still stung, because we still loved it for whatever reasons we loved it. And it's still going to sting.

And we're still worried how TV Tropes will approach works like Roommates 2009 and sidestories, whose creators are from Mexico with Mexican standards (where an occasional 14-year-old Mr. Fanservice is not shocking at all), and whose first chapter is blatant porn but its subsequent chapters have almost no porn at all. To know that we're having these issues and cases and exceptions picked apart in a committee with very real consequences, when instead we could be busy troping...it just gives us a whole lot of terrifying anxiety, you know?

It's so much harder to be detached at TV Tropes than it is at Wikipedia, because we were practically encouraged for the longest time to gush about what we liked, and use an informal comfortable tone when editing. And so when this kind of interference comes, it's painful, because TV Tropes is more than just a wiki. It's like one of our best friends. It hurts to get into such a fierce argument with your best friend.

Rodney Anonymous: Hah, I'd actually forgotten about "Point & Prick Adventure". A lot of us were so wowed by attention to non-sexual detail when we played it, that its original tagline proved forgettable. XD But as I said, yes, it was harder to defend... It was that the work had such a positive audience reaction for so many different reasons, that the work was beloved, and why its dismissal from TV Tropes was a hard one. Also, Rodney Anonymous, I'm glad that you understand the issue of niche gay works being more likely to have explicit content. It's a rather complicated concern that requires a mature mind. And I haven't decided if I'm leaving TV Tropes — I took a sabbatical to regain my sanity, but as you can see I still care very deeply about the site. But one of my friends went as far as deleting his bookmark and his login cookie.

edited 4th May '12 8:44:16 PM by Gilgameshkun

Who's this "we?" Speak for yourself, not some group of friends who you can give no proof of existing.

Also, what's this "international baseline" you keep bringing up? You realize American culture is actually near the liberal end of the scale, right?

edited 4th May '12 9:11:48 PM by Martello

"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.