magcolo said:
are you suggesting that we expand loli’s definition?
I'm not sure if expand is the right term but possibly shift, and substitute a more appropriate term.
Given that Japanese have long used loli to refer to shoujo it seems inappropriate to ban shoujo, one will just naturally gravitate to calling shoujos lolis given the historical association.
If we need a tag for the younger-than shoujo "youjo" in English terms then Cybele produced the arikon alternative to rorikon which could be easily used. The youjo/arikon are basically "earliest hint of puberty" whereas shoujo/rorikon are mid-way.
And the same goes for shota, in practice it’s often used to describe younger shounen too. It’s really just talking about characters that aren’t too physical mature, there’s no strict age range.
Even though over time it seems (at least in the west) these have become parallel terms in representing alternate gender faces of a concept, I don't know that their origins are necessarily so matched. Shotaro Kaneda was 10 so he overlaps the 7-12 range of arikon and 10-15 range of rorikon that Cybele Henshuuben introduced.
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blindVigil said:
loli and shota as we use them are entirely and exclusively based on common western usage of the word in regard to a character's appearance.
Yes, Konata is a loli, because she looks like a prepubescent girl.
The point I'm making is in respect to the historical introduction of these tags in 2005 which is when they were defined in Danbooru's wiki. Lucky Star did not apply the tag to Konata until 2007.
Her age is irrelevant. You wouldn't call Inoue Orihime, 15 at the beginning of Bleach, a loli just because of her age.
Actually I would, because even though she's an older loli, she well resembles the buxom loli of Hell Teacher Nube in the 90s, her bust doesn't mean she's not loli, she's just an oppai loli. Loli traditionally encompassed a spectrum from pettanko to oppai and then at some point some began to try to exclude the latter.
I'm curious as to when this happened, where we can observe dated instances of that shift in perspective. Unless there are gaping holes in my anime timeline, it seems like it might be a behind-the-scenes thing, because I didn't observe the shift in anime until nearly a decade after I observed the shift in booru tagging.
2channel's been around since 1999 so maybe that has something to do with it? What's exhibited in mainstream anime is only a small snippet and I'm sure there's more obscure references to the vocabulary and it's meaning which might be found in a deeper dive into the dialogue of doujin in the early 2000s which presumably Albert was reacting to.
It really doesn't matter how Japan uses the words, because this is not a site for Japanese users. It is a site for English speakers, the majority of which are not living in nor native to Japan.
It certainly matters if we're culturally appropriating their slang for our own use, it's pretty rude to not try and be faithful to their usage. If we have needs for tags beyond their language we're capable of making our own slang to fill that need.
This is also the first time I've heard anyone claim that it's an age gap thing, and not an appearance thing, so I'm skeptical.
Do you want me to give you a link to watch the monk defining lolicon on-air in Urusei Yatsura in 1982? He very clearly states it's "middle-aged" men into bishoujo, and that theme is also apparent in the "Lolita Anime" of the late 1980s too. The MC of UY wasn't called a lolicon even though he also reacted to Lum.
There's plenty of evidence of Japanese people on sites like Pixiv using it at least similarly to how we do, though usually not limiting it to NSFW content as we do, so I honestly fail to see how it matters what it meant 30 years ago. What matters is what it means now, and there's plenty evidence to support our usage of the term, even if it's not 100% accurate. Technical accuracy is a fool's errand on a site like this.
The problem with Pixiv is that a lot of westerners use it (including me) and that anybody can come along and tag stuff as they like, so there isn't an organized study we can perform regarding tags.
Artist descriptions OTOH might be useful in such a study since those were made at specific dates (specifically the upload date) and by specific people.
Pixiv was launched in 2007 though, two years after 'preteen' definition by Albert in 2005 on this site's wiki, so it wouldn't help us in understanding any Japanese origins for Albert's choice, we would need to look into the history of pre-Pixiv image sites to find hints of that.
Possibly if anyone has any old archives of 4chan threads that might be of help since that was around in 2003. Maybe to see if there were arguments about the meaning or how people were deriving that meaning or tweaking it subtly over time.
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nonamethanks said:
Look, it doesn't matter what the definition of the term according to some old magazine is.
Dismissing the legendary Cybele Henshuubu as merely "some old magazine" is disrespectful to the culture.
Our definitions of loli and shota are what they are primarly for legal reasons, because hosting this kind of content in the open means putting a target on your forehead. At the end of the day they mean "explicit pictures of underage-looking characters that hosting providers and payment processors would strangle you over for having in the open". The tags need to be what they are for reasons more important than semantical accuracy.
I'm find with a broad definition like 'underage' it's just the 'preteen' thing which seems strange to push in back in 2005 as there seems to be no visible precedent at the time for a "13 is too old" kind of boundary being implied anywhere in the late 90s or early 2000s, unless someone can tell me some examples because I'm still trying to flesh out my citation timeline.
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Damian0358 said:
I can bring up my own points countering your usage of lolicon in the Japanese subcultural context through the research of Patrick W. Galbraith, who points out the usage of lolicon to effectively mean 'moe', cuteness (think why lolita fashion is called such)
Going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita_fashion#History it was called Otome-kei in the late 70s, kawaii-style in the early 80s, then in September 87 someone first called it Lolita in Ryukou Tsushin. That'd be interesting to dig into, I'd like to see a translation of that issue and who coined it. Pretty sure that etymology had more to do with WHO was wearing the clothing than WHAT the clothing was.
or to be more specific in an anime and manga context, attraction to fictional characters
Can you show me an example in a single anime where someone talks about loli to mean fictional-only and not real-also? I've asked around and I'm sure if that existed people would be throwing it at my face since it would support a strange subculture I've seen in western fans.
One of the core lolicon magazines of the early 1980s, Manga Burikko, initially had images of gravure photography of young girls, but by late 1983, finally succumbed to reader pressure and removed the photos, which remained the case up to the magazine's end. Does this mean we should shift the usage of "loli" to reflect this? No, because while the remnants of this usage of lolicon remain today, with the rise of moe in the 90s, everyone shifted to using that word instead, including Galbraith himself once his timeline reaches and passes the 90s.
Lolicon magazines shifting from drawn loli to photographed loli doesn't actually shift the definition of what loli means. We actually need evidence of that, and my window into Japanese culture via anime has characters calling girls who are real (to them, not to me) that term.
If you look up anime works involving underaged female characters in pornographic situations, you'll see the majority, whether they be 3 or 17, using loli, whether it be here on Danbooru, reuploaded doujinshi across various hentai websites, or on the Japanese internet.
Yes, it's an observed shift, but does that mean it is a correct one? The question here is whether Albert's 2005 assertion of all-preteens was a reaction to a pre-existing change in the definition, or whether it was part of a new movement to actually change the definition and force the meme.
Where in anime have we seen a 3-year-old ever called a loli like we have in a booru? Even with Jurai Andō in InoBato who is a high-schooler I believe was creating an altered version for his own use (I take the same view on KonoSuba) used a 7-12 range, so he didn't think girls 6 and under were "loli".
Searching for ヘイジコンプレックス, アリスコンプレックス, ヘイジ・コンプレックス, アリス・コンプレックス, ハイコン and アリコン on Pixiv basically gives me nothing, so if not even the Japanese are using them, then there's no reason to consider them ourselves.
My guess is they're probably using other terms like youjo, or other slang we're not aware of. The reason to consider the Cybele Henshuubu trilogy is basically historical precedent and clearly identified publication,.
I had never seen anything mentioned on age gaps ever playing a role, and to me sounds like you're doing what you're accusing Danbooru of doing, imposing your own belief on what loli is.
As I mentioned to blindVigil above, this is not merely -my own belief-, this is the belief of Rumiko Takahashi who wrote Urusei Yatsura
I'm not aware of anyone else besides her who had a character blatently define it aloud so clearly as her monk did in UY. Although Lupin didn't go and define it (he was too busy rescuing Clarisse) his usage aligns with Takahashi's because Count Cagliostro is a middle-aged man.
We wouldn't be able to apply the Japanese usage of adolescent anyway, because 青年期 goes up to the age of 24 at bare minimum, and can even be used to refer to folks up to 40 depending on context
Inconsistency on what adolescent means in varying cultures could be a good reason to avoid that as a tag, good point. There's a 1760 dictionary in English that says it is 15-25 for boys and 12-22 for girls which probably doesn't align so well with recent usage.
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magcolo said:
Just a side note, 青年 is more like "young adult" (or in practice ppl who are older than shounen but don’t felt old enough to be called middle-aged yet). The equivalent of adolescence should be shounen and shoujo, which in practice, as we all know, are often mixed with loli and shota.
Takahashi's usage only mentions shoujo and not whatever pre-shoujo would be (presumably youjo) although that doesn't necessarily mean there's any hard lower line, just that no hard upper line should be made to exclude shoujo or Clarisse+Lum who are cultural icons who stand out as the first film+TV usages of the term in anime (AFAIK anyway, keep digging before 79/82 if you can folks)
