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malyminLike, ok, part of chilling out as a "book-smart" autistic person is learning to accept that the same word can have different meanings in different contexts, right? Instead of being insistent that "a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable," one internalizes that "fruit (culinary)" and "fruit (botanical)" are overlapping but separate categories. (The key, imo, is that "vegetable" is a word that has no meaning whatsoever in modern botanical science, but clearly has a meaning in culinary contexts.) Also, understanding the importance of folk taxonomies in categorizing things by similarity in taste, or habit, or convergent anatomy. If evolutionary clades are the only categorization that matters, then yes, "fish aren't real", because a lungfish and a carp and a shark are less related to each other than a lungfish is to an antelope. But "fish" is nonetheless useful in day-to-day life to describe the common shared features of finned water-dwelling vertebrates, and it's not helpful to throw the entire tetrapod clade into the category even if it makes the "fish" category genetically coherent.
And then sometimes I halfway want to revert to the "UM acktually tomatoes are fruit" person because I'm fed up with the pendulum swing in the other direction of "words don't have to mean anything consistent or coherent at all."
One often runs into people on Tumblr who show complete disinterest, even hostility, to understanding anime/manga trope and genre terminology that don't fit into blorbo-incorrect-quotes shitpost boxes wherein all het romance is shoujo, seinen is "shounen but grittier," yaoi is a funny meme name for "gay male subtext and romance" and yuri is a funny meme name for "lesbians subtext and romance." (and not, say, manga genres that contain doujin but were formed on a bedrock of published original fiction, and formed independently of Spirk-descended anglophone shipping culture). People get mad when you point out that Skip and Loafer is seinen and not shoujo because it's het romance and doesn't hate women. People on Tumblr have called both Fullmetal Alchemist and Dungeon Meshi shoujo because A Woman Wrote Them. God forbid you try to have a real conversation about mahou shoujo or mecha, that isn't based on telephone game distortions of one-to-three of the most popular (in anglo spaces) franchises. It's like... imagine you're trying to make an educational blog post about shark biology, and people won't stop "correcting you" about the fascinating anatomy of shark's rough skin, because "lol sharks are smooth, they're so smooth, don't you know?" They laugh at you being so pedantic as to try to actually communicate information about the world, and they won't take in anything you're actually saying or engage with it in good faith. Except it feels like about half of the people in Tumblr anime discussions do believe, figuratively, that Sharks Are Smooth In Real Life.
...honestly, the "I don't need to learn anything about the media history of other countries and cultures, I can just call things [japanese genre name] based on vibes" take feels kind of racist. Though I also see this attitude in areas where you can't really say it's racist or otherwise bigoted, just... kind of obnoxiously anti-intellectual? Anti-learning? A sense that vibes and shitposts are the only form of communication that matters, and caring about details and communicating those details makes you a wet blanket redditor who hates fun.
Like how stubbornly the fanfic writers on Tumblr refuse to take being corrected about the meaning of "favoring a leg" in veterinary contexts, and how frustrating it is for people for whom the clarity of its meaning is actually important in their real lives to be told that they're wrong because words mean whatever the majority wants them to.
Okay normally I'm on the side of "words mean whatever we need them to mean".
but guys, I don’t like the suggestion that it’s what is happening here. Being unfamiliar with the term, and guessing its meaning based on vibes, doesn’t mean you have equal authority on whether it’s “correct” with the community who actively use this word in a technical sense.
please do consider that if you haven't been exposed to the word in the context it's used in, "both are correct" and "you can interpret it differently" and “there is no right or wrong answer” and “it feels like it SHOULD be X” cannot be a fully realised take. Sure, linguistics recognises there are rules in which meaning changes - but “laypeople being unfamiliar with the word, and liking vibes better” isn’t one of them.
Quite frankly, "words mean whatever Vibes they convey to me personally" is probably also why fandom-culture SJ has gone so fucking disastrous in the long run: words and phrases that were initially given very specific definitions to talk about complex nuanced sociological contexts get simplified, or even warped into the exact opposite of what they originally meant, based entirely on the Vibes they convey in snappy, viral, bite-sized tweets and Tumblr posts and TikTok videos. You cannot have a coherent conversation about "intersectionality" or other theory-jargon in such an enviroment, but instead have to explain their original meanings over and over to an ever-growing unlistening cloud of rebloggers and repliers... the exact problem coining terminology was meant to alleviate in their original contexts.
Also it just makes your life hell if you love learning and don't like the idea that a True Enlightened Progressive rejects the yucky boy world of fact-checking and information curation/preservation for getting your understanding of reality from Unconscious Innate Feminine Wisdom. Vibes can help you with understanding some things (like folk taxonomy, mythological symbolism, etc), but to treat them as the only thing that matters is... not for me. And I'd rather talk fandom with people who know when to put the vibe-reading on the shelf and talk about something a little more... concrete, or at least historically established.
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Date: 2026-01-18 02:54 am (UTC)descriptivism but it's actually Majority Rule Prescriptivism. normal people use thet word differently so you're obviously wrong and bad
Honestly even descriptivists should realize that people have reasons to use the definitions they do, right. 90% of the time it's way more helpful to a conversation to zero in one why a definition is being used, even if you're not taking it as authoritative, because that way everyone can still understand what each other means
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Date: 2026-01-18 03:50 am (UTC)(Same with shounen-ai. Are you discussing homoerotic Year 24 Group stuff and their direct descendants? No? Then you are using the word wrong. At least now people’ve stopped using it as a synonym for fujobait/homoeroticism/SFW BL/like fourteen billion other uses)
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Date: 2026-01-19 05:14 am (UTC)Unfortunately the people who really think the entirety of BL is called "yaoi" don't listed when you correct them, so on Tumblr I have seen people who are fans of 70's manga things use the term "yaoi" to talk about, like Y24 Group shounen-ai because otherwise people reblogging them will refuse to understand what they're talking about.
Because how could something ever have a more specific definition than the one I learned from funny shitposts???
(I think the way that "yaoi" and "yuri" both starting with the same syllable has affected the way that "yaoi" retains such a death grip in English spaces. They're percieved as symetrical names for symetrical genres, when that just... isn't true.)
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Date: 2026-01-18 10:50 am (UTC)I hate to be a centrist, but I've always believed that there is room for both cultural understandings of a word and book-correct definitions of a word... within reason.
"I love toxic yaoi" jokes and discussions of the yaoi genre? Can co-exist at the same time, so long as both sides are clear about which "definition" they are using, and neither tries to aggressively "correct" the other side. Like you said, the same word has different meanings in different contexts, and the issue arises when different contexts cross over, and try to state that their understanding is the only correct one -- especially when one side has not fully been exposed to the other side's usage of it in its correct context. And, as you say, I don't think the descriptivist interpretation of a word should ever be seen as the only thing that matters.
"I am genderqueer"? All self-identification labels like this should be viewed as very loosey-goosey. "Genderqueer" has a general Vibe of what it is supposed to mean (a gender that is queer), but the exact definition will vary from person to person. I define genderqueer as, "Anybody with a queer gender or queer gender expression, including trans people, nonbinary people, and GNC cis people". Other people define it as a synonym for non-binary. Both are correct in equal measure. This is a case where I would say, "Language exists to serve us, not the other way around."
Usage of a word intended to describe serious things, such as abuse or politics? Such as, for example, "purity culture" being originally about the misogynistic abuse women are subjected to under Christian circles, being watered down to nothingness in fandom circles? Or, as you stated, the word "intersectionality" being used to mean the exact opposite of its original intent? And don't get me started on words like "gaslighting" and "triggered". These words should not be taken out of their original context, because watering them down or changing them has serious ramifications for discussions of serious topics.
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Date: 2026-01-18 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-20 04:27 pm (UTC)... I admit, Full-Metal Alchemist feels shounen to me, Dungeons Meshi seinen, but I don’t actually know.
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Date: 2026-01-20 05:12 pm (UTC)Oooh... what's the name of the book, author, publication date? Finding anything resembling well researched info on this kind of thing online is near impossible, especially with SEO slop everywhere. (AI generated articles make it even worse, but it was getting to be a problem even when it was just low-effort nothingburger articles by underpaid humans in 2017...)
They are in fact shounen (FMA) and seinen (Dungeon Meshi), respectively! It's harder to sus out when series are anime-only with no manga equivalent, but the main way of determining a manga's demographic category is what magazine it's published in: if it's considered a boys' magazine, girls' magazine, men's magazine, or women's magazine. While there's definitely conventions associated with each demographic category, I think people also forget that mangakas writing for different demographics can take notes from each other; for example Berserk is seinen, and fits the mental image people have of a "stereotypical" seinen, but the author openly admitted to being influenced by shoujo manga like Rose of Versailles in his art and writing.
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Date: 2026-01-20 05:29 pm (UTC)There were definitely cross-pollinations between gay manga and BL, with some artists playing both sides of the fence!