Talk:Boys' love/GA1

GA Review

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

Reviewer: Lemurbaby (talk · contribs) 12:31, 9 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Is it reasonably well written?
A. Prose quality:

B. MoS compliance for lead, layout, words to watch, fiction, and lists:
Is it factually accurate and verifiable?
A. References to sources:

B. Citation of reliable sources where necessary:

C. No original research:
Is it broad in its coverage?
A. Major aspects:

B. Focused:
Is it neutral?
Fair representation without bias:
Is it stable?
No edit wars, etc:
Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?
A. Images are copyright tagged, and non-free images have fair use rationales:

B. Images are provided where possible and appropriate, with suitable captions:
Overall:
Pass or Fail:

Comments

General

There are instances of British and American spellings in the article. Pick one and use it consistently.

Done Or at least I think so. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 02:31, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes Japanese terms are italicized and sometimes they aren't, but not in a consistent way. Either they should all be italicized, or only italicized on the first use - some kind of a system.
There is confusion in the use of Yaoi and Boys' Love at places throughout the article. Sometimes Yaoi is used as a blanket term, and other times Yaoi and Boys' Love are both discussed with an implied differentiation that seems to be more relevant among Japanese than among Westerners. The article needs to be clear on how it's using the terms within the article itself. How are you intending they be used here - are you using the Japanese meaning of Yaoi or the Western one?
Choose one consistent way to write dates: day month year or month day year, and choose whether to spell out month names or use a number

Done All dmy to match the Oxford usage.

Citation formatting is inconsistent as well. Please use one consistent format for these - I'd recommend templates, but they're not required.

Lead

The lead doesn't summarize all the subsections of the article and needs to be reworked and expanded.

History

This section should lead off with the background to the creation of the genre as an outgrowth and parody of the earlier one. I copied the content from the lead as a place holder and moved another bit of referenced material here where it fits better than where it was. I'd recommend rewording and expanding the copied content and adding the necessary references to support it.
"The nascent genre targeted the shōjo and josei demographics" - which are what?
The history section is difficult for the average English-language reader because it uses foreign terms without defining them. It's also unclear what happened when, and why/how in the development of the genre - is yaoi a subgenre/outgrowth of shonen or of shojo, for example?
If "A Lovers' Forest" is the first work of yaoi, it shouldn't be in a note but in the main body of the article. It's unclear which was the first though - the article posits several contenders. If there is no consensus on which really was the first, would you cluster the contenders together and make it clear that cases have been made for each but there is no agreement on any one of them? It will be important to include the year each one was published to help make the chronology clearer in the reader's mind.
Explain why Kurimoto's works are the precursor to yaoi - did they focus more on female sensibilities or something?
How can the term yaoi be created in the 1970s and coined in the 1980s?
"The phrase also parodies a classical style of plot structure." How so?
Using the quotes "difficult to understand" and "yummy parts" is not encyclopedic and obscures the meaning here. I'd recommend explaining in plain English what's meant here, and if you feel the quote is really worth keeping, use it in a quote box off to the right side.
I'd recommend explaining how june is supposed to be pronounced if we don't want a whole world of readers to pronounce the name of the genre the same as the month! :) Also be consistent in using either juné or june as the spelling.
"male/male tanbi (耽美 "aesthetic") romances" - there is a problem here with the coding, indicated by a superscript question mark in the article after "aesthetic". I also noticed the same problem after " Yamete, oshiri ga itai" and it's probably elsewhere too. You'd want to review the whole article to check for and correct this error wherever it surfaces.
In the note, "The word was originally used to describe an author's distinctive style, for example, the styles of Yukio Mishima and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki." - the wording of this is unclear to me. Can you provide an example linking these writers and the word tanbi?

Shōnen-ai

Can you briefly describe how these were characterized by idealism?
Who is Suzuki? (help the reader know why his/her opinion or analysis matters)
Do you have a reference to support the claim made regarding Gravitation and the Remix version?

Top and bottom

"In recent years..." can you use a year or decade when this changed?

Bara

This section is relatively underdeveloped. I reorganized a bit. Add citations where indicated.

Female characters

"Early shōnen-ai and yaoi have been regarded as misogynistic" - by whom?
"but Lunsing notes a decrease in misogynistic comments from characters and regards the development of the yuri genre as reflecting a reduction of internal misogyny." Can you explain this more fully? I don't understand the connection between the development of yuri and reduction in misogyny.
"Alternatively, yaoi fandom is also viewed as a "refuge" from mainstream culture, which in this paradigm is viewed as inherently misogynistic." - I don't follow this either. how is yaoi fandom a refuge from misogynistic mainstream culture, especially if the female characters are so unimportant or negatively depicted?
"Yaoi author Fumi Yoshinaga usually includes at least one sympathetic female character in her works" - why cite this one particular author? Is this meant to be evidence for something bigger? How does this fit?
"There are many female characters in Yaoi who are Fujoshi themselves." - need to explain Fujoshi and how this connects to female empowerment. Add a citation.

Homophobia

"The theme of the protagonists' victory in yaoi has been compared favourably to Western fairy tales, as the latter intends to enforce the status quo, but yaoi is "about desire" and seeks "to explore, not circumscribe, possibilities."" - This is unclear - I don't understand the comparison, especially since the part beginning "but yaoi" seems to be intended to contradict the comparison rather than support it.

Rape

"rendering her stories a subversion of contemporary tropes that reinforce and reflect older tropes such as the prevalence of romantic tragedy themes." - I'm having a hard time following this. Can you reword it or clarify?
The focus on Fusanosuke Inariya here seems unbalanced. Are there other authors to talk about in relation to this subversion of the rape fantasy trope?
I disagree with the idea that rape is more prevalent in Yaoi manga than in other type of erotic or pornographic material. If you were to do a statistical analysis of all Yaoi mangas, I am pretty sure the rape fantasy would rank pretty low bellow other more common fantasies - like best friend romance, unrequited love, etc. I would question the impulse to single this topic out amongst other.

Tragedy

"June stories with suicide endings were popular" - when was this?
You jump from discussing june to talking about yaoi. Is there a distinction you need to draw here between june and yaoi? If not, use the term yaoi throughout. If so, we need more of a lead from the discussion of june to the discussion of yaoi because as it is now there is no discussion of what tragedy happens in yaoi stories.

Publishing

In general this section is underdeveloped and doesn't cover some key areas of content. It's unclear but seems the only publishers discussed are those printing for North American markets. Who prints in Japan? What data do we have about revenues, publishers and popularity of yaoi manga in other countries? What about revenues, sales and distributors in the self-publishing market?
Restate here when June was first published, and explain what happened in 2004 to mark the transition to the second period. I hid this using the !-- because right now it won't fit without significant expansion to make the information relevant.
I think the word "imprint" might be a mistranslation here. Is the article referring to publishing houses?
Address "citation needed" tags

Demographics

address the citation needed tags
This section should lead off with data about female fans in Japan, which is currently lacking.
There is also info about non-Japanese fans here that should be moved to the section "Popularity outside Japan".
"a search for non-Japanese sites" - what kind of sites?
There is redundancy in the "popularity outside Japan" section regarding Global Yaoi
Need to introduce the acronym GLOBL alongside Global BL
Several manga titles in this section are not italicized and need to be

Critical reception

Again use yaoi as the term, not Boys' Love or BL, if the Anglophone meaning of the term (i.e. the subject of this article) is being discussed
Use the past simple tense when a specific year or date is referenced: "In x year, so-and-so observed" not "so-and-so has observed". Lots of grammar fixes to be made in this section regarding verb tense
"BL has been compared to romance novels..." rephrase so it's no longer a passive sentence
"Sandra Buckley believes that bishounen narratives..." remind the reader what characterizes bishounen narratives relative to other types of narratives discussed in this article
yaoi ronsō - this should be defined
in the paragraph starting "As women have greater economic power, ..." references are needed for the quotes and paraphrasing

Criticism

yaoi ronsō or "yaoi debate" of 1992–1997 - this needs to be fully developed in a paragraph of its own, and should probably be mentioned in the history section
"There has been similar criticism to the Japanese yaoi debate in the English-speaking fandom" - awkward, rephrase
"In China, BL became very popular..." this sentence also needs to be rephrased
This section also needs to use the term yaoi instead of BL/Boys' Love for consistency
"comics were not copyrighted as the publishers feared arrest for posting the content" - I don't understand the connection here
"In 2001, a controversy erupted in Thailand ..." this paragraph is disorganized and difficult to follow. Reorganize

End GA review

With the passage of NGE, I'm moving to this one, which I somehow neglected to see. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 02:31, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]