Needs Help: Ho Yay

And I still think that'd be more trouble than it's worth, if only because Ho Yay gives a place for the shippers to put their interpretations.

And I still think that'd be more trouble than it's worth, if only because Ho Yay gives a place for the shippers to put their interpretations.

That being said, I'm stumped, too.

What's PITA?

"pain in the ass"

I had an idea back when this thread first opened that wasn't really discussed, so if y'all will allow me to bring it up again since we're so stuck:

I suggest we combine all the "Yay" tropes into a singular trope focusing on fan interpretations of moments that is obviously just fans over-thinking or misinterpreting things due to shipping googles.

Ship Tease would be similarly redefined to be about moments where the work is obviously hinting at characters being attracted to each other, and Homoerotic Subtext would have it's definition of platonic same-sex characters evoking romantic tropes to emphasize their non-romantic relationship be much more heavily enforced.

"Obvious" should be the key word here. If you can't tell if the tease was intended or accidental, it shouldn't be added, simple as that.

The issue we're running into is that it seems impossible to tell if something was accidental, so I'm wondering what an "obvious" unintended example would be and how we'd spot them.

FWIW, I'm pretty sure "intentional ship tease that is not intended to be followed up on" is also totally a thing - with characters of any sexuality - so there's that to put up with too.

So...now what?

This thread has accomplished nothing- we've only gone in circles. At this point, it may just be better to move the Ho Yay cleanup thread to LT/P, and close this, and get to work on cleanup.

Agreed. I'm opposed to merging all of the "Yay" tropes.

We've established some of the distinction between Ship Tease and Homoerotic Subtext versus Ho Yay a little better, I guess, but it remains to be seen exactly what we can do with this trope. I think it's OK to close this for now and maybe come back later after we've done more cleanup.

For those stumbling on this thread after it's closed but still want to help, here is the Ho Yay cleanup thread. I forget/don't know if any of the other tropes discussed here have dedicated threads.

I imagine Les Yay also gets addressed under that thread? Should the title be adjusted to acknowledge that?

I mean, we could just open a new thread in LT/P... but Les Yay is just the female Ho Yay, so I don't see why we'd need specifically express that it's also allowed on the thread.

Les Yay is just a redirect to Ho Yay, not a seperate trope. A lot of entries treat it like one, which is something the cleanup thread should deal with.

It's an gendered redirect that's acceptable to use on pages.

But if there are both male and female examples on the page, they all go under Ho Yay, right?

I'd rather do something more drastic, but if we're not in agreement about what that should be, then maybe it's best to maintain the status quo, even if that status quo is rampant misuse.

I've already edited the main page of Ho Yay to be more clear about these sort of distinctions for newer entries, and newer entries for Broken Base and Base-Breaking Character are a little less likely to fall afoul of the newer more stringent requirements than the past. Enough cleanup will hopefully establish a better culture for this in the future, and a lot of the really bad and vague entries tend to be established older ones that came about before this site shifted to become more analysis-heavy.

Why do we have a gendered redirect for a trope with a gender neutral name?

The problem is, as noted in an Ask the Tropers thread, that Ho Yay is more likely to apply the less evidence there is. Given how Ear Worm and Fetish Fuel were scaled back due to potentially applying to anything and everything otherwise, as well as how such barely discriminate collections of fancruft were/are collected by Counterpart Comparison, Nightmare Fuel, Hilarious in Hindsight, Harsher in Hindsight, and "Funny Aneurysm" Moment, Ho Yay and related items should be scaled back somehow. I don't know if this should mean requiring citations (à la Unfortunate Implications), requiring a lockdown and curation (à la Complete Monster), a mix of the two, or just limiting it to the definitions only.

Going back to the Les Yay thing for a moment, gendered redirects do exist and are perfectly valid to use. It's intended to be used when the characters we're discussing are female, while Ho Yay is for boys and mixed-gender groups. That's of course why I said we don't need to explicitly say Les Yay is allowed on the Ho Yay thread- they're literally the same trope, one is just for females.

I think one issue with Les Yay that can be addressed is when YMMV pages list Ho Yay and Les Yay separately, as if they represent different tropes because of the genders involved, when the proper handling is to group them all under one trope or the other (Ho Yay being the more natural candidate because the term "homoeroticism" is all-encompassing, even if the slang "homo-" is more associated with gay men specifically).

We definitely don't need separate threads for it, but my original suggestion was that the title of this or the Cleanup thread be modified to state "Ho Yay and Les Yay Cleanup" just to make it more obvious to people not already familiar.

Edited by AlleyOop on Feb 19th 2020 at 3:30:46 PM

@ Brainulator 9:

Some measure of jurisprudence is necessary, but my edits to the main page definition which I hashed out after some discussion a few pages back should hopefully provide some good guidelines as to what kinds of examples can't fly even when being generous.

If anyone has some suggestions on how to make it more clear in places go ahead.

Edit:Whoops, sorry for the double post.

Edited by AlleyOop on Feb 19th 2020 at 3:38:19 PM

Eh, or just "Shipping Tropes Cleanup" since the Yay tropes aren't the only ones we've established need help.

Ho Yay is the most popular of them by far, so "Ho Yay and Other Shipping Tropes Cleanup" might make it a bit more clear.

I just can't see any reason for Les Yay to exist at all. The distinction is not "one is male, one is female", it's "one is gender neutral, one is female". It seems like a redirect created in an earlier era of the site, when rules were more loosely enforced. If itdidn't already exist, there would be no reason to create it. The only purpose it seems to serve is to cause problems because of people thinking it's a seperate trope.

Edited by TheMountainKing on Feb 19th 2020 at 4:48:55 AM