Manhwa and Manhua example sorting in trope lists. (What media category/folder/subpage should they go under?)

Manhwa and Manhua have inconsistent placement in trope lists due to it not really being formalized/stated on Media Categories.

It's been brought up here, and part of the General Media Category discussion thread here. Some have chosen to put examples from Manhwa and Manhua in the "Anime & Manga" folder, some have chosen to put them in the Comic Books folder, while others choose to give them their own folder. There is no consistency on this site at all.

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To give some examples:

• On Ignore the Fanservice, an example from the manhwa Hot Blooded Woman is placed in the "Anime & Manga" folder. The manhwa Pervert Club is also placed in that folder.
• On Berserk Button however, Hot Blooded Woman is placed in a seperate media category asscap titled "manhwa" and under it lists other manhwas.
• Then for Pimped-Out Dress, Hot Blooded Woman is placed in the Comic Books subpage. As well as other manhwas like Dear My Girls and Goong.
• On Cute Witch, commented out ZCE sees a media category/folder for "Eastern Comics" which lists manhwa Witch Hunter under it

On a related note, the way Complete Monster is sorted lumps both Manhua and Manhwa examples into the "Anime & Manga" subpage.

What should we do about this?

• Give them their own separate media categories/folders/subpages
• Lump them into "Anime & Manga" media category/folder/subpage
• Lump them into the Comic Books or Webcomics media category/folder/subpage in accordance to their medium
• Lump them into an "Eastern Comics" or "Eastern Comic Books" media category/folder/subpage

EDIT: Ok, so it seems we will also discuss the namespaces Manhua/ and Manhwa/ as well and whether on it not we need them or if we should just merge them into Comic Book/ and Webcomic/. But to keep this thread on focus, the namespace talk will be discussed here

EDIT 2: The thread decided that Manhwa/ and Manhua/ are worth keeping as namespaces after all.

Edited by AudioSpeaks2 on Jan 24th 2024 at 4:17:01 AM

Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project

I vote for either seperate folder (seperate namespace) or meeting with comics and webcomics (sometimes they're under that namespace anyhow)

Definitely not that one, they generally tend to have more than enough formatting differences to end up somewhere else from what I've read of 'em. Might just be because most of those are web-published, though.

Edited by RainehDaze on Jan 5th 2024 at 2:48:43 PM

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I'll ping ~ACW here because they're the unofficial Wiki Curator of Complete Monster and I kinda wanna get their opinion on that trope's lumping of Manhua and Manhwa into the A&M subpage.

I'll also ping unofficial Wiki Curator for Magnificent Bastard ~Siegfried1337 here because MB also lumps Manhua and Manhwa into the A&M subpage.

Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project

I've always just given them their own folders, since I don't like to mix namespaces unless it's Anime and Manga.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

The query link in the OP doesn't work, but I'm assuming it was meant to go here. As I said there, it also wasn't necessary to necro that query since it was from 2020.

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

I actually meant to also link here, but yeah.

Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project

Give them their own folders as well. That being said, for MB, since there is only one Manhua entry in the anime and manga section, it shouldn't be too hard to move it into the other media section.

MB Pending | MB Drafts | MB Dates

I'd rather keep them separate.

Does it include Korean Webtoons? They and Manhwa are often called interchangibly.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

Korean Webtoons should just go in the "Webcomics" folder and namespace if they are Web First.

Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project

I'm fine lumping manhua and manhwa with manga.

CM Dates; CM Pending; CM Drafts

Agreed. I really don't think they're distinct enough to count as an entirely different medium to begin with.

I disagree. Anime & Manga refer to animation and comics from Japan.

I don't think lumping Korean and Chinese comics into that same folder is a good idea.

Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project

They're functionally the same medium and are produced and marketed the exact same way. We don't put music from Japan in a different folder from American music. In my opinion the only thing that actually differentiates anime and manga from comics and cartoons from elsewhere is the fact that that manga is usually run in a magazine first (and even that is changing with the onset of online services like Shonen Jump Alpha), and that they're so routinely and faithfully adapted into one another that their production teams are pretty tightly intertwined.

Edited by StarSword on Jan 6th 2024 at 6:44:23 AM

But they literally aren't anime and manga by definition, which would make including them in said folder misleading at best, and outright confusing because putting them anywhere else—which makes more sense based on the category naming—is then incorrect. And as you've just noted, anime and manga (and Light Novels, though those are still in literature unless people are talking about the adaptations, last I checked) have a heavy tendency to be cross-adapted and continued in one medium or another, which I'm not aware of happening with these.

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I'm personally in favor of using "Eastern Comics". Manhwa and Manhua are niche enough (at least on this wiki) that I don't see a point in giving them separate folders. I definitely agree that they shouldn't go under Anime & Manga, however. Manga are Japanese comics, first and last; putting Chinese and Korean comics under such a folder is simply incorrect.

Edited by jandn2014 on Jan 6th 2024 at 7:14:04 AM

back lol

Eastern comics would include basically any comics made by any eastern country

Yeah, I support "Eastern Comics" option the least because we'd have to put comics like Trese in there because its made in the Philippines (an Eastern country) despite that work using the Comic Book/ namespace.

Edited by AudioSpeaks2 on Jan 6th 2024 at 8:30:50 PM

Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project

Hmm... if that's the case, then I say separate folders.

back lol

Btw, just wanted to state that I'll let this thread run for about a week to get a lot of people's opinions on the options presented, and why they agree with it, as well as other options.

After a week has passed, I'll request to hook a crowner with the options in the OP + any additional options the thread could provide.

Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project

There was also the option of "Asian Comics" which, again, presents the problem that we will have to lump Singaporean comics such as Roleplayers into that hypothetical folder.

Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project

And I'm waiting for somebody to come up with a coherent reason why that would actually be a problem. As an example, The Embodiment of Sins is made in Malaysia but published in both English (first) and Japanese. If it was a print comic and not a webcomic, where would you want to put it?

Frankly, I just think the people arguing to sort anime and manga separately from everything else are just engaging in special pleading at this point.

Edited by StarSword on Jan 6th 2024 at 11:52:39 AM

Well, there are two reasons to keep them separate as they are:

1. it is literally not worth the effort to change it until there's some easy way to alphabetise and merge a bunch of disparate lists automatically. This also partly comes into the next point—
2. the already mentioned headache tendency for adapting things each direction. If we start really, really caring what came first and what precisely happened in which version, then the task of separating them out gets way more annoying.

The second one is already doing a lot of the load-bearing for not having to go shift like a third of the tropes down into literature, which would be more correct for everything with an LN source but even more generally confusing for people looking to add examples.

The simple reason there is that you'd probably have to drop every other project for the next year to actually complete that one.

None of which really applies to "consistently decide to not put manhwa and manhua in that folder".

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I mean, I agree that re-sorting anime and manga into more generic comic and animation namespaces is probably more trouble than it's worth at this point, I just don't see much functional difference between a manga, a manhwa, and a manhua for example sorting purposes beyond country of origin. As a point of comparison, we still usually leave works from Web Video, Web Animation, Website, etc. namespaces lumped together under Web Original even though the actual Web Original namespace is now mostly defunct.

The part where they're not anime and manga and putting them under anime and manga isn't just outdated, it's factually incorrect?

Like, we're talking about a category whose defining feature is its country of origin and whose main utility is reducing the sorting headache from divergent media origins in something that can be near-identical across 2 or 3 different adaptations. Putting random other stuff in there because "they're also comics made in east asia" would be incorrect.

Edited by RainehDaze on Jan 6th 2024 at 5:37:06 PM

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