Create Anime and Manga et al Metadata

[branchandroot]

So, Fanlore (which is in no way synonymous with the Fandom History fiasco, despite the efforts of the FH creator/troll) is looking for knowledgeable people to talk about that eternal question:

What do we call this stuff?

I find myself torn, really. I mean, a big part of me says "this should be simple, Categories are like tags, so you create as many Categories as there are Kinds Of Stuff and slap all that are applicable on any given wiki page".

Another part of me says "but that will make the Category structure really unwieldy and hard to navigate!"

One thing I'm sure of is that I do not think Anime should be merged into Cartoons, nor Manga into Comics. The latter are names for specifically Western art forms, and using them for non-Western forms would, in my eyes, be a nasty sort of erasure, given the cultural history involved.

Kind of like using Manga as the Category for something that's really manhwa. Given the cultural history involved.

And so I come back to "a Category for everything". Actually, I'm not at all sure that's a problem. I don't think it would be that unwieldy, in the end. And trying to limit the Categories implicitly assumes that the world is only as big as X number of categories. Which is just plain wrong.

So, what do you think? What Categories do we need?

Comments

aww, thanks! :D

[krait]

The early academic treatments of slash -- good parallel! "Oh, they're all just a bunch of sexually frustrated women/girls afraid of their own sexuality", bah. It really highlights how it's often not just an Outsider Thing; it's also got undertones of superiority and dismissal: These things (enjoyed by Those People) don't require study; it's small and silly and one-dimensional enough that a glance is all that's required to analyse it correctly, and even if you're a off by a bit, it's not important enough that anyone will notice or care.

Part of why I love fandom (as a whole) so much that I will never leave, despite having changed fandoms several times, is because fandom seems to be this really awesome place where people go out of their way to be inclusive. Even if they're not into what you're into, they're willing to listen to what you have to say about it and cheer you on wherever there's some overlap, even if it's just that you both like doing fannish things, albeit about very different things". Maybe because it's something they don't get in mainstream culture, so we're aware of the lack and doing our best to remedy it where we can?

Geeks Unite for Nonunity! :D