Needs Help: Ho Yay

TBH, I feel like people are only really raising Les Yay as an issue because we're still stuck in regards to the bigger problems. It's not particularly doing any harm that I can see.

Probably. I mostly just made the crowner to speed up this thread, or we'd have stagnated with endless discussion over whether or not we should keep Les Yay around. The sooner this can close the better.

I made a case for it not being like those here.

I agree. The only reason I brought it up was that it had been annoying me for a while, and people in this thread expressed the misconception that Ho Yay and Les Yay are two separate tropes. I figured that it was a small enough problem that it had a chance of actually being solved. Ho Yay has much bigger problems, in fact it might be one of the most misused, ill-defined, and arguably unnecessary tropes on this site, but fixing those problems is so time consuming and labor intensive. I'm starting to come around to the idea that this one is too.

Also, can someone send a link to a page that lays out site policy on the proper use of redirects?

Edited by TheMountainKing on Feb 24th 2020 at 11:10:19 AM

Well, Ho Yay by definition is YMMV. It's ridiculously hard to build a straight and narrow criteria with a lot of tropes like this.There's no real way to monitor Ho Yay and its ilk even if one were to analyze every work's fandom in some way to see if if the trope is being used correctly, its mostly an exercise of futility. The best we can do is just clean up the examples and at least make they look like they fit based on a case to case basis.

So, probably better to open a cleanup thread on LTP to fix the wicks/badly written examples after the crowner has run its course.

The issue you bring up is largely a technicality. Although homoeroticism is a gender-neutral term, among laypeople its connotations still lean heavily towards male forms of homoeroticism, in the same way that the terms "gay" or "homo" usually conjure up the image of a gay man specifically rather than a gay woman/lesbian. Likewise "guy" technically encompasses women ("Wait a second, I'm one of you guys!") but is associated with maleness.

I don't think describing a situation btwn two women "homoerotic" or calling women "gay" would get you any weird looks, but that's somewhat immaterial. "Ho Yay" is internet slang that most people have no idea about, and the way we use it on this site isn't even the way it was originally used, so adding this other thing implying it's a gendered term when it isn't is adding another layer of potential misconceptions too its meaning. But that's only one small part of a pile of problems with the trope that I'm starting to think will never be fixed in any real way.

I am still wondering if there are official guidelines for the use of redirects. I searched but couldn't find anything.

Edited by TheMountainKing on Feb 24th 2020 at 11:42:47 AM

I haven't actually seen that kind of gendered misuse in more recent examples, at any rate.

The consensus is strongly in-favor of not doing anything to Les Yay, so I think we can close up.

Close up the crowner or close up the thread?

Both.

Not sure about the latter - as much difficulty as there's been trying to come up with a fix, no one seems to think the trope in its current state is okay.

Maybe make a Ho Yay a definition only page? And allow Homoerotic Subtext. Maybe thats going too far but there is no real way to clean up fan entries or figure out non examples. Cleaning themselves might be an exercise in futility though.

Edited by MacronNotes on Mar 3rd 2020 at 8:45:53 AM

Nope, as we pointed out before, the concept of Ho Yay is far too ubiquitous and established as a concept, and it keeps that kind of entry from being placed where it doesn't belong elsewhere.

I guess there's nothing we can do then? Well in any case we already have the clean up thread in the projects section and I don't see us coming up with anything.

Yeah, the issue is that as big a mess as this trope is, we've come up with zero solutions to fix the trope beyond just having a cleanup thread. Every other solution has been debated to death. There's no consensus on anything; we've been talking in circles for several pages now, and just to trick ourselves into thinking we're making progress, we keep changing the subject and talking about stuff like Ship Tease and Homoerotic Subtext.

This thread is just taking up space at this point. Not a single solution has been agreed upon as anything worth doing.

Is it possible to lock a thread then reopen it at a later time as things change?

Yes, if you give a good reason when you hollor the mods to unlock it. Although I would rather make a fresh thread than drag this one up again

Edited by MacronNotes on Mar 3rd 2020 at 3:24:36 PM

Right. If during our cleanup effort we figure out a solution, we can return to this discussion; but for now, this thread is pretty pointless.