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Sep. 29th, 2004 03:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tephraThis is a semi-random pseudo-otaku minirant, read at your own risk.
Let's talk terminology, specifically labels applied to fanfiction (and fanart, and apparently starting to show up on original works by anime/manga fans).
Yaoi is a romanji acronym, perhaps is should be written YaOI to make that point clear. It's short for "yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi" or no climax, no point, no meaning. That's right folks, we don't care if the men involved (and yes, it applies only to male/male sex) give a damn for each other they just have to fuck to get the label. Note, this is not even the full 'correct' meaning, it's just the most correct for the way westerners use it.
If you want warm and fuzzy feelings (WAFF) with or without hot gay sex you should be using another term, like shounen-ai (boy love). Which isn't entirely accurate for older male characters but let us not get too complicated here. Most characters in shounen-ai (and yaoi for that matter) are bishounen (beautiful boys) anyway.
Or, give up the otaku (rabid fangirl/boy) labels and just call it slash.
Or if you want to be sure no one expects a plot use PWP, which means Plot? What Plot? and not Porn Without Plot, though sometimes the difference is essentially absent.
So now you might be wonder what label to use for hot girl on girl action. If you're using the trendy Japanese terms (which, if what I've been seeing lately is true, are decades out of date) you would be looking for the term yuri. It is not an acronym, it's the word for lily. I guess two women is a beautiful thing and two men are just fucking. *shrug* Anyway, yuri is commonly used as the female version of yaoi though the usage seems to be more flexible and blurs into the next term, shoujo-ai (girl love) with is, of course, the parallel to shounen-ai.
Yuri/shoujo-ai is pretty much equal to femslash (also written as femmeslash).
Note that nothing about the term slash indicates gender, it's just been used primarily for male/male pairings for so long that femslash developed as a tag for female/female pairings so you could find them in the floods of slashfics.
So, to sum up the rant so far:
yaoi = explicit male/male sex
shounen-ai = male/male romance
slash = male/male relationship, romantic or purely sexual
yuri = female/female relationship, usually with explicit sex
shoujo-ai = female/female romance
femslash or femmeslash = female/female relationship, romantic or purely sexual
PWP = just get to the juicy stuff, already
Still with me? Good. Now a final point on the yaoi and slash thing, if you're going to specify the pairing and use the yaoi label then get the syntax right, it's TOPxBOTTOM (SEMExUKE if you want to stick to the Japanese). Note the 'x' in place of the '/' used with the slash label. With yaoi the order of names in the pairing is very significant, it's less so in slash (though the first name is generally the POV/more active character).
Now a rant within a rant, citrus ratings. I never really 'got' these and never remember the exact meanings for anything other than lemon. So a nice little summary follows:
lemon = sex in all its messy glory
lime = goes off scene before things get too messy but people get naked and... friendly
orange = passionate kissing (maybe some gropes/petting)
grapefruit = things get a bit bitter/sour, generally drifting into rape/NC (non-consensual)
All that said I would really like people to drop the citrus thing. Use a movie rating or just say what's in the story. Something like "R for sex" says more to me than "lime". Likewise, NC-17 or X for lemon, PG/PG-13 for oranges, and NC or 'rape' with a movie rating (as determined by now explicitly the scene is written) for grapefruit.
Let's see, what else bugs me about fanfic labels... oh yes, if it's two furries fucking it's not bestiality! I'll even go far as to say that if the 'beast' in question can talk, regardless of physical anthropomorphism, it's not bestiality. Beasts don't talk.
I've been seeing a lot of Wolf's Rain stuff labeled as bestiality, it really irks me. The sex is invariably written with the wolves in their human forms/appearances and usually with them having sex with each other and not with some human. I could see, grudgingly, using bestiality to label something like Kiba/Cheza if Kiba was in his wolf form at the time but I see no need to use it for something like Hige/Blue or Tsume/Toboe where both are wolves. A wolf screwing a wolf, regardless of form, isn't bestiality either.
I think I'm done, for now.
Let's talk terminology, specifically labels applied to fanfiction (and fanart, and apparently starting to show up on original works by anime/manga fans).
Yaoi is a romanji acronym, perhaps is should be written YaOI to make that point clear. It's short for "yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi" or no climax, no point, no meaning. That's right folks, we don't care if the men involved (and yes, it applies only to male/male sex) give a damn for each other they just have to fuck to get the label. Note, this is not even the full 'correct' meaning, it's just the most correct for the way westerners use it.
If you want warm and fuzzy feelings (WAFF) with or without hot gay sex you should be using another term, like shounen-ai (boy love). Which isn't entirely accurate for older male characters but let us not get too complicated here. Most characters in shounen-ai (and yaoi for that matter) are bishounen (beautiful boys) anyway.
Or, give up the otaku (rabid fangirl/boy) labels and just call it slash.
Or if you want to be sure no one expects a plot use PWP, which means Plot? What Plot? and not Porn Without Plot, though sometimes the difference is essentially absent.
So now you might be wonder what label to use for hot girl on girl action. If you're using the trendy Japanese terms (which, if what I've been seeing lately is true, are decades out of date) you would be looking for the term yuri. It is not an acronym, it's the word for lily. I guess two women is a beautiful thing and two men are just fucking. *shrug* Anyway, yuri is commonly used as the female version of yaoi though the usage seems to be more flexible and blurs into the next term, shoujo-ai (girl love) with is, of course, the parallel to shounen-ai.
Yuri/shoujo-ai is pretty much equal to femslash (also written as femmeslash).
Note that nothing about the term slash indicates gender, it's just been used primarily for male/male pairings for so long that femslash developed as a tag for female/female pairings so you could find them in the floods of slashfics.
So, to sum up the rant so far:
yaoi = explicit male/male sex
shounen-ai = male/male romance
slash = male/male relationship, romantic or purely sexual
yuri = female/female relationship, usually with explicit sex
shoujo-ai = female/female romance
femslash or femmeslash = female/female relationship, romantic or purely sexual
PWP = just get to the juicy stuff, already
Still with me? Good. Now a final point on the yaoi and slash thing, if you're going to specify the pairing and use the yaoi label then get the syntax right, it's TOPxBOTTOM (SEMExUKE if you want to stick to the Japanese). Note the 'x' in place of the '/' used with the slash label. With yaoi the order of names in the pairing is very significant, it's less so in slash (though the first name is generally the POV/more active character).
Now a rant within a rant, citrus ratings. I never really 'got' these and never remember the exact meanings for anything other than lemon. So a nice little summary follows:
lemon = sex in all its messy glory
lime = goes off scene before things get too messy but people get naked and... friendly
orange = passionate kissing (maybe some gropes/petting)
grapefruit = things get a bit bitter/sour, generally drifting into rape/NC (non-consensual)
All that said I would really like people to drop the citrus thing. Use a movie rating or just say what's in the story. Something like "R for sex" says more to me than "lime". Likewise, NC-17 or X for lemon, PG/PG-13 for oranges, and NC or 'rape' with a movie rating (as determined by now explicitly the scene is written) for grapefruit.
Let's see, what else bugs me about fanfic labels... oh yes, if it's two furries fucking it's not bestiality! I'll even go far as to say that if the 'beast' in question can talk, regardless of physical anthropomorphism, it's not bestiality. Beasts don't talk.
I've been seeing a lot of Wolf's Rain stuff labeled as bestiality, it really irks me. The sex is invariably written with the wolves in their human forms/appearances and usually with them having sex with each other and not with some human. I could see, grudgingly, using bestiality to label something like Kiba/Cheza if Kiba was in his wolf form at the time but I see no need to use it for something like Hige/Blue or Tsume/Toboe where both are wolves. A wolf screwing a wolf, regardless of form, isn't bestiality either.
I think I'm done, for now.
