Sometimes prescriptivist are a little bit right, is the thing

[malymin]

Like, 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.

Comments

[lb_lee]

Rogan: I had a book about the evolution of gay manga and those history parts were my favorites, more so than the comics themselves! I love learning about comics industries and how they do it.

... I admit, Full-Metal Alchemist feels shounen to me, Dungeons Meshi seinen, but I don’t actually know.

[malymin]

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.

[lb_lee]

Note that this book was mostly an anthology of gay manga; the history was a lesser part of it. It was Massive: Gay Erotic Manga and the Men Who Make It: https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/massive

There were definitely cross-pollinations between gay manga and BL, with some artists playing both sides of the fence!