Let me start with how I understand these genres, somewhat ignoring the site descriptions, based on my search results, and the problems I have with them.

mature: contains adult content like sex and violence.
- no problems with this one.

adult: contains lot of sex.
- is supposed to contain more sex and violence than the mature genre as I understand the site description, but searching for it rather shows many pornographic manga and in case of violence, enough adult manga simply add the mature genre as well, underlining mature as the genre for adult content besides sex.

smut: contains explicit and intense sex scenes.
- no problems with this one, though I don't feel like offensive or profane are fitting to describe smut.

hentai: is all about sex.
- my problem with this one is that far too many manga are missing this genre on their baka page, there are plenty adult, smut, yaoi, yuri, shotacon, lolicon series without it despite having a strong focus on sex while some hentai on baka may even have quite a bit story in comparison.
- in other words I will still get quite a few hentai if I search for adult with hentai blocked and I will miss some hentai if I search for hentai only.

ecchi: fanservice, more or less.
- series with only sexy clothes and some immature jokes but nearly no fanservice are sometimes considered ecchi, sometimes not.
- series with fanservice and sex are sometimes considered ecchi, other times only mature and/or adult.
- in other words I cannot use ecchi to block only series with a very heavy focus on fanservice nor to find all series with sexy women or however to call that.

yaoi/yuri: contains sex between men/women
- no clear destinction to mature, adult, ecchi and hentai. While plenty of yaoi/yuri have these genres of well, there are also plenty without them, making it quite difficult to search for yaoi that for example is neither adult nor hentai.

While it is impossible to choose the perfect genres for each series, in case of these mature genres I feel like it is mostly due to lack of clear descriptions that they get so muddled.

There are plenty series that fit both the shounen and seinen genre to a certain degree, but in general the difference between these genres is easy to understand and a series gets only one if these genres (same with shoujo and josei).

I read enough yaoi that fit multiple or even all of the above genre, mature because of some dark story elements, adult because it has a serious story with lots of sex, ecchi and smut because of fanservice scenes and very explicit sex scenes, hentai because there are far more sex scenes compared to story scenes. Because of that I think it would be worth to look at these genres and maybe overthink them.

There are two other "mature" genres left, shotacon and lolicon, that baka updates uses just like most sites but that needs a serious overwork in my opinion. Especially since that genre itself includes so many different things. To give you three examples for shotacon why this is troublesome:

1.) There are quite a few older shotas in bl manga like No Sex No Teens! or Super Lovers and while I do understand why they are shotacon, there are plenty bl mangas also featuring minors that are not considered shotacon, including Mukaishi or Bathroom Magic! - Mifune Rio, making the genre somewhat unreliable.

2.) A shotacon may include a harmless character in a feel-good manga that overly adores the shota, a comedic pervert character in a shounen, a younger teen that lusts for an older woman with her returning the feelings, two teens lusting for each other in a bl manga or a pedophile raping a (male) child. Excluding the last one, all these mangas might be something a young teen may like and look up. And all of the last three may also include the hentai, mature or adult genres simply for showing a minor having sex.

In other words, I see a risk of younger people using the shotacon genre because they can identify with these younger characters and then instead finding some hardcore pedophile content. I know that there is always a risk involved when kids look up things not meant for them, but pedophile content is in my opinion not only one of the worst things you can find, it also often misses important keywords like rape if the the child "gives consent" despite being at a age where a real child would be traumatized for life.

3.) One of the biggest prejudices homosexual people suffer is that they will go for everyone of the same gender, including children. If shotacon and lolicon manga include same-gender intercourse, they are also considered yaoi and yuri, even if the manga is very clearly depicting adults going for children so young that no gay or lesbian would every have interest in them. As a gay person myself, I hate this.



To add some solutions I could imagine for this:
- turn ecchi, shotacon and lolicon into categories, I don't think it is possible to clearly draw a line when a manga includes too much/less fanservice to be considered ecchi, when older teens are too old to be considered shota/loli or when young teens are too young* to be of interest to non-pedophiles, but this way they are at least not one of the main-genres anymore and lose importance as they are less reliable.
- define mature as a genre that includes blood, gore, rape, violence, everything that makes a manga a bad choice for younger or more sensible readers, while mentioning "for series including sexual content, see the adult genre instead".
- define adult as a genre that includes sexual content which may be too extreme for people under the age of 17 and smut is defined as series of the adult genre depicting sexually graphic acts with these NOT being the focus of the series and that a series can only be either smut or hentai.
- these definitions may be not perfect in regards to the terms "mature, adult and smut", but they are easy to understand and fit the current use of the genres well enough, especially with adult still being a genre for adults, so if some adult series are rather mature series with blood and gore it is not that much of a problem.
- combine yaoi/yuri with shounen ai/shoujo ai into bl/gl by simply adding adult to any yaoi and yuri manga, so you can simply search for shounen ai or yaoi by including or excluding the adult/hentai genre, also mentioning this in the discription for bl/gl, like "This series involves relationships between women. You can include or exclude the Adult genre to search only for Yuri or Shoujo Ai series.

I imagine that you could select (not sure if it is possible for you to select a genre and edit all series in it at once) and add adult to all yaoi, yuri, hentai and smut manga, add bl or gl to all shounen ai/shoujo ai/yaoi/yuri manga, then remove smut from all hentai manga and shounen ai/shoujo ai/yaoi/yuri manga from all bl/gl manga. At least then my solution or something similar should be easy enough.

*

Last edited by MachineBaka at 10:11 am, Feb 24 2024

After overworking the above post, I stumbled over another problem with these genres: Hentai, Psychological and likely Tragedy and Horror do not always have the Mature or Adult genres even if the manga includes themes like rape. While not a perfect solution, I think it wouldn't be bad to add to the description of these genres that they may contain subject matter which may be too extreme for people under the age of 17.

To add some more thoughts about how "useful" some genres may be:
- Gender Bender should be overworked to also mention trans and maybe intersex people. I feel like they deserve their own genre, even if combined with crossdressing and gender swap series.
- I think you could add extended options and types as genres (exclude or include) with extended options being Licensed, Completly Scanlated, Completed, At least one release, Rushed Ending/Axed and type adding Oneshot and Collection of stories.

These are all just suggestions for if you update the page in the future and not for now. In regards of types, I am not sure why there is a need for both the type and genre Doujinshi, but a Thai comic could be Doujinshi, Artbook or Novel, too, right? And when searching, I usually are annoyed by not being able to exclude Collection of stories or Novels, sometimes 20% or more of my results being Novels and Collections. Also, If I want to exclude Manhwa or Manhua, I usually select show only results for Manga, but that obviously also excludes French, Thai and so on, which I would be interested in as well.

To add another suggestion unrelated to this (but I am not sure if it is worth to start a new topic for it), how about grouping categories. For example:
- Male Lead: Young, Shy, Arrogant, Falls in Love First, Two Male Leads without BL-subtext and so on, same for Female Lead. With the categories being Male Lead: Young, Male Lead: Shy and so on.
- Intercourse: In School, Outdoor, Incest, Oral, Sex Toys, Masturbation and so on.
- Relationship: Human-Nonhuman, Senpai-Kouhai, Older Seme Younger Uke, Love Confession, Reunion, Friendship and so on.
- Fantasy: Vampire, Zombie, Monster, Witch, Magic and so on.

This way I assume it would be a lot easier to look through the categories and to reduce the chance of having doubles.

Generally sounds good to me. I'm all for this site being clearer with how it defines and uses genres because a good deal of what's there is a mess. Shoujo ai vs. yuri touches on the stuff I'm interested in but I wouldn't doubt things are about as bad with other genres.

The way things are now, it seems that anything romantic between females with more than just subtext but that's not hentai could and do manage either of shoujo ai or yuri, entirely depending on the personal opinion of whoever is editing it on where the distinction is. No individual call there can justifiably be labeled wrong, so we get "shoujo ai" where the women have sex and "yuri" where the girls never even really kiss. There are also over 150+ entries that actually have both genres despite this supposedly being impossible by definition, because one person's shoujo ai is often another's yuri. The root of the problem is ultimately that since "shoujo ai" is not (and never was) a well-defined general category - and you can't rely on experts, authors, publishers, and/or hardcore fans to provide a good definition for you because the consensus is that the term shouldn't be used in this sense at all - it can only really have a clear meaning if you choose to give it one - and this site hasn't. Even if mangaupdates doesn't do the right thing (stop using shoujo ai as a genre, it's all just yuri), setting up ANY real guidelines and then actually attempting to follow them would probably be an improvement to what's there now.

Will say I agree with the distinction between Mature, Adult, Smut (like soft-core Mature, less explicit) and Hentai does seem clear to me, but Ecchi seems more like "if you know, you know" without a clear definition (maybe the farthest the sexual content goes is panty shots or excessive cleavage?) Hentai and Adult can get muddled sometimes, but the point is a hentai is easy to identify as based on sex whereas an Adult manga might be pornographic, but there is supposed to be a plot around the porn. So, maybe Porn with Plot vs Porn Without Plot. This kind of explains why most Hentai are one shots.

However, regarding the second point, the categories are even more poorly tagged and muddled than the genres are - at the very least for the genres people tend to tag them semi-decently (although lots of confusion remains over shoujo/josei and josei/seinen - people should use the magazine to find the genre, but there have been previous threads around this if you search the forum; people also over-tag, i.e., tagging Yaoi and Shounen-Ai ). Because of this I disagree on the "shotacon" and "lolicon" being turned into categories because 1) they still have clearly understood definitions (prepubescent-appearing minor and an adult in a sexual or romantic relationship), 2) they either really squick people or it could be a thing some people want to filter in, and 3) you can't filter out categories yet so only people who want to filter these categories out lose, and 4) Lolicon and Shotacon are already categories, including some specific ones.

People shouldn't be using "shotacon" and "lolicon" for romance between two teens...but then again, tagging is only as good as people do it and this site relies on users to add tags and categories. Both the un-tagged series you linked are situations where someone should add the tags when they see them missing. I also don't think tagging should be based on identification with the MC or any character, but rather objectivity - is it a romantic or sexual relationship between an adult and a minor that *looks* <13 years old? Then it belongs in the shotacon or lolicon categories. The larger issue here is that there are shotacon and lolicon stuff where the lolicon or shotacon is supposed to be 18+ years old. For some people, it's all about how the character looks. And although I understand your point 100%, I also slightly disagree on not cross-tagging. There are people who are looking for yuri lolicon or yaoi shotacon - and likewise, there are people who want to see only yaoi and yuri with those tags filtered out.

KaiserMagus advocated for yuri and shoujo ai to be merged and I think they have a good case because everything is just "yuri" these days in Western fandom as it's become more popular. I don't think the definitions of lolicon and shotacon are really muddled to the extent there is confusion on what it is. Otherwise, if it was just an adult and a minor - A LOT of shoujo would be tagged as lolicon and a lot of shounen as shotacon. There are manga were these things happen in passing or are mentioned that they aren't tagged for. So I am not sure it's common to define lolicon or shotacon as a genre this way (you could describe the character as some, but a genre is the subject matter of the manga):



A "shotacon" or "lolicon" manga can be a "feel-good" manga and it can contain no sexual content at all to some people -- is the romantic or sexual relationship between a pre-pubsecent looking character and adult the focus of the piece? Then it should be a shotacon/lolicon - some people would argue against this, tbh, and define it exclusively as a sexual relationship and as a subgenre of hentai entirely, but I think this is where you have pointed out the ambiguity of "where is the line?" Is this a side-character or even main character doing it in passing (or as a running gag even, but it's not the focus on the manga)? Then the manga shouldn't be genre tagged and new categories should be created to address this, if needed. To me, "teen" doesn't = lolicon/shotacon because lolicon/shotacon is pre-teens, usually...

All that said...there could be an "Underage" genre, that include ALL minors and adult relationships, but many shoujo would end up here and filtered out for a lot of people since high school seems to be the point where people seem to stop caring in the manga age world. I think they should stay as genres so they can be filtered out.

EDIT: I also just tried to search for Lolicon, filtering out "Adult," "Mature," "Ecchi," and "Hentai" and there are only 2 pages of results compared to the 74 pages without those things filtered...

Last edited by flowinmyboat at 2:31 pm, Mar 7 2024

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not adding anything to this thread, just wanted to respond to this part



you are able to filter out categories, but i wish it was made more clear because i didnt know until someone told me. this is what i was told to do if you want to exclude tags, for example like Age Gap, put a - in front of the tag you don't want, so your search looks like this:

Robot/s
Dream/s
-Age Gap

it has worked for me. except the - won't work for series that aren't tagged fully of course so i'll still get "age gap" if someone doesn't tag the series as such even if it's true when you read it...

I will try playing with this! The last time I tried this, it didn't work (Also, I get it can't filter out what isn't there, but that's life, lol).

I tried quickly just now (picked a series on my list with specific tags, copied it's tags, and tried to filter one out but it still showed up) and I am not sure it's working on the website yet. I know the API has more functionality in search though, so it could be that difference, too. I'll check my formatting though -- don't wanna detract from this thread though!! Thanks again for the tip!!

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