Needs Help: Queer Media

Well, I was removing works I personally know.

Edited by Eiryu on Dec 17th 2021 at 4:30:23 AM

Should we make some sandboxes so we can work on deciding what to keep and remove and then just swap them in when we're done?

Sandboxes would be a good idea

Alright, created them: Sandbox.Queer Media and Sandbox.Queer Romance (already removed Steven Universe from the latter since the romance is not at all a major focus)

I cleared out all the non-fitting examples that I found on the anime/manga section of Sandbox.Queer Media.

These ones I'd like some input on:

Questionable on Queer Media:

• Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: The plot is mainly slice of life/goofy hijinks that comes from the interactions between the two female main characters, who have a lot of romantic subtext and eventually get together.
• MW: The plot is about a priest attempting to stop his sociopathic boyfriend from using a chemical weapon to kill millions of people, but the extremely toxic relationship between the two is a major focus.
• No 6: I'm not sure how major of an element the romance between the two leads is vs the story about them trying to bring down the dystopia they live in.

Questionable on Queer Romance:

• The Color Purple: Is it really a romance story? I always thought it was more of a biography with a romance subplot.

Re :

The two characters on Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid got together?

According to the trope page MW apparently devotes a chapter to an Aesop about homosexuality. I'm unsure about this one.

The trope page is barebones but No. 6 only makes a few mentions towards the leads getting together. I say cut.

The description of The Color Purple doesn't even mention it despite being rather detailed. I say cut it.

I looked it over, and getting together might be too strong of a claim. In chapter 97 of the manga, the protagonist confesses to Tohru that she's got romantic feelings of some kind for her but isn't sure herself what they mean, and wants time to figure them out.

And cool, I'll cut No. 6 and The Color Purple.

Edited by Orbiting on Dec 18th 2021 at 5:42:29 AM

Steven Universe needs to be on the Speculative Fiction LGBT sub index anyway. In fact, I removed it before we made sandboxes, so I don’t even know why it’s there.

Being a fan of No. 6, it is not a Romance genre story, and also needs to move to Speculative Fiction LGBT.

Edited by Eiryu on Dec 18th 2021 at 5:19:27 AM

I forgot we had that index.

Edited by Crossover-Enthusiast on Dec 18th 2021 at 6:20:37 AM

Went through the Queer Media sandbox and removed works I know are spec fic and need to move if they aren’t already there. Did not do the same to Queer Romance because romance genre and specific genre can crossover and they’re not subindexes of each other.

Edited by Eiryu on Dec 18th 2021 at 5:33:39 AM

Speculative Fiction LGBT isn't an index, it's a trope. It's crosswicked onto work pages and doesn't do indexing. At least it usually doesn't. I noticed some pages were indexed on it recently — I guess someone turned on indexing on it — but now it's back to not indexing.

There should probably be a thread for discussing page types and indexing... anyone could unilaterally change a page type (with no record of the change), which in turn determines whether the page is allowed to be listed as a trope example or not.

It’s listed as a subindex on the Queer Media page itself. And it indexes.

For what it's worth, I actually brought up the weird space the genre and subgenre pages occupy as halfway between a trope and an index, and the confusing nature of what they are weeks ago, and the mods shut it down pretty hard as an unnecessary discussion of a "solution looking for a problem" so I don't think we're going to fix it any time soon.

Edited by Eiryu on Dec 18th 2021 at 2:24:14 PM

Yet it wasn't actually an index. Editors can make mistakes.

Must be ghost wicking. If you look at the page type settings, indexing is turned off.

If we're not treating it as an index, then every single example from that page needs to get added to the Queer Media sandbox to be evaluated there, because there will be plenty of editors who saw it as a subindex and only added it there, or otherwise moved it.

Does everything on Speculative Fiction LGBT fit the new criteria for Queer Media? Some examples just seem to be "science fiction with a queer main character", which wouldn't count.

Sure, but a lot of the stuff in the sandbox also doesn't fit. I thought that was why we were doing sandboxes. So we could move everything there and then sort it out then.

As part of a different TRS thread, I dewicked Schoolgirl Lesbians from Sandbox.Queer Romance. Just letting you know and apologizing if I overstepped any bounds.

Went through the Sandbox and removed the Live Action TV entries I'm sure about.

Went through the comic book section of the sandbox and removed the ones that didn't fit.

Disagree with The Backstagers, Lumberjanes and especially The Witch Boy being off that list. I did state earlier in the thread that LGBT youth series were going to be tricky as they're hampered by standards and practices on what can be be presented for children, but the The Witch Boy has a clear queer theme, presented metaphorically as well as LGBT representation.

I disagree: I don't think that having a queer metaphor is enough, and I don't think it makes sense to have different standards for some media instead of others.

It's not just a queer metaphor, it's not something like Have You Tried Not Being a Monster? or Does This Remind You of Anything?. The boy central to the story is gender-non-conforming. There's a character with two fathers and another with two mothers. It is a clear metaphor for transgender people and trans acceptance, wrapped with gender dysphoria/euphoria with a clear Aesop.

Edited by MegaJ on Dec 20th 2021 at 12:29:45 PM

That is a metaphor: the boy isn't trans or has gender dysphoria, but his issues with his type of magic is a metaphor for that, which is not enpugh in my opinion. Having queer secondary characters is irrelevant: they are not the focus of the story.

Edited by Orbiting on Dec 20th 2021 at 12:54:24 PM

I thought we talked about this queer metaphor stuff earlier. Did we discourage that? I think a metaphor coupled with actual queer rep might push it into counting.

We had this discussion on page four I think, but I'm not sure we ever reached anything conclusive.