The thing to remember is that genre tags are mostly applied by the users of the site. The admins only step in to settle long-term disputes over what genres should or shouldn't be applied to a particular series, and such disputes are pretty rare in the scheme of things.

So when various respondents above explain the difference between adult and mature genres, or I explain how smut is applied, we're referring to the effective consensus of the MU userbase, the wisdom of the crowds. Would it be nice if someone updated the genre page to reflect how genres are actually applied at this point? Sure. But it isn't a necessity.

Quote from vigorousjammer

This just further serves to prove my point that the genres are confusing and should be ratified in some manner, either the names, the descriptions, or some other solution.

There's already a solution: when users see that a series is tagged inappropriately given how the tag is commonly used, they fix it. There's never going to be a strict prescriptivist approach to genre-tagging on MU, both because the number of moderators is far too small to deal with the 100,000+ series in the database, and because many series aren't readily available for moderator review.

If you're not comfortable making a particular decision yourself, it's perfectly acceptable for you to leave it to other users to decide. That's certainly my preference for the borderline cases.

@svines85 - Thanks.

@ hahhah42

Did it? I have difficulty with quoting on the forums here.......I probably don't do it enough, and I probably get disgusted with it the times I seldom try and then just give up.

Hey, nobody's perfect, eh? 😀

There we go, I (think 😀 ) it's fixed 🙂

The more categories/genres the better. A person who reads smut probably wont read hentai. I would much rather search for mature manga than adult. Maybe this doesnt translate well to other countries or other people using this site but when I see the mature tag I get a completley different feeling than when I see the Adult tag. Like that other guy said, mature is like an R rated movie, you can have gore and naked people and small amount of sex, but its generally not the focus of that manga. While Adult means it has a focus of a more explicit theme. Lots of sex, extreme graphic gore or whatever it may be. Berserk is a great example of the border between adult and mature. Well early Berserk anyway. But thats a whole different argument. 😛

Quote from Cthylla

The more categories/genres the better. A person who reads smut probably wont read hentai. I would much rather search for mature manga than adult.

Like Cthylla said above, the more genres/categories the better. For example, when I am reading a manga I may want sex with a little plot (adult), or sex with no plot at all (hentai), or a story oriented manga that does contain sex but is not the main focus of it (mature). These are just examples and by no means absolute. Just trying to explain things easier. 😀

Therefore, if the adult - mature - hentai - smut and whatever genres/categories this discussion has mentioned get combined, many of us won't be able to search for the exact manga we want.

Quote from svines85

Yes, the differences in them are somewhat subjective and yes, OP, you do have to think about the tags and the content/title you're tagging and make a decision as to which applies......might be that not everybody agrees with what you decide, but that's just how the system works.

Quote from svines85

Downvote and/or report incorrect tagging, bad tagging is just a fact of life in our community and on these user-driven sites, there's no real way to "fix" the rest of the world.

Users can downvote or upvote the tags they disagree or agree with, however, once a manga that isn't adult is tagged as such - until it gets downvoted a lot - it remains adult and makes manga searching more difficult.

Fortunately or not, that's how the system works and we can't expect everyone to know the all terms when updating the series, hence that's why I suggest for those two terms (adult - mature) to be re-written, so that people will (hopefully?) understand better.

I think for regular readers of these genres, the distinctions are clear. As residentgrigo wrote, if we compare these to movie ratings, mature would be R-rated and adult would be NC-17. And as hahhah42 mentioned, smut is a manga with some sexual content that is generally targeted to a female demographic while ecchi refers to fanservice and is generally targeted to a male demographic. Neither smut nor ecchi has be explicit enough to be categorized as adult or mature. And as for hentai vs. adult, a hentai manga can be considered adult, but an adult manga doesn't have to be hentai. Hentai is specifically for explicit sexually content, but adult can be used for explicit violent content. Maybe the definitions listed for these categories could be updated, but I don't think we should get rid of any of them. They've been around for this long because they are helping people find exactly what they are looking for.

Quote from Aominecchi

Fortunately or not, that's how the system works and we can't expect everyone to know the all terms when updating the series

Oh yeah, that reminds me, the cardinal rule of tagging..... when in doubt, don't tag.

OP, if you were really serious in your original post about how those two definitions sound to you like they're "essentially describing the same exact thing!?", yeah, you shouldn't be tagging them then.