Do we want a [hentai] tag?

Question

I've been thinking for quite a while now that maybe putting up a hentai tag for eligible questions may be appropriate. For several reasons:

• Users who don't want to see them can ignore them
• These questions tend to be a slippery slope, so users who wish to moderate (as well as the moderators) can follow them
• It can give us valuable metrics as to how many such questions are asked, by whom and about what.

A possible con is that in case the tag becomes too popular, questions tagged hentai will have that appended to their titles.

What are your thoughts? Is it a good idea? A bad one? Do you have a better suggestion?

Answer 1

We've debated genre tags like this before in one of the chat casts. In that case I think we were discussing lolicon, but the same logic applies here. The consensus at that time was that a genre-based tag could work, but it would need to be used on questions about the genre itself (e.g. production, tropes, etc.) and not questions about individual series. So in this case, What was the first Hentai ever made? could be tagged hentai, but What is the song played in Operation 11: Fallen Angel Rina? should not be. We didn't discuss identification questions (e.g. Anime identification request about guy with invisible pills (hentai)), but it seems best to also leave these untagged.

The reason for this is fairly simple. Use of the tag in the former way is perfectly fine, since it's about the content of the question. However, the latter style of tagging describes the genre of the series, which is almost always irrelevant to the actual content of the question. Tagging series questions with genre tags would make the series tags redundant and the genre tags bloated, facing essentially all the problems of meta tags. It's also not clear exactly where to stop. Should every question tagged fate-stay-night also be tagged hentai? Of course not, but the original visual novel certainly qualifies as an H-game.

So, if we do make a hentai tag, I'd say it should be for meta-questions about hentai as a genre, not for any-and-every question about hentai series. That may not be what's being proposed here, but it's the only way I can see this tag being a useful non-meta tag. Actually policing tag use to make sure it happens that way is a nontrivial amount of work. And at this point, I simply don't see a lot of questions like this (there are a few others, but less than a dozen), so I don't think the tag is worth it right now given the amount of extra work it will cause. It could become worthwhile in the future though.

Answer 2

TL; DR: No.

For multiple reasons:

First off: The Stackexchange Network is open for use by users from the age of 13 onwards. This introduces by legislation a responsibility to disallow inappropriate content for such participants, because pornography is considered harmful to minors.

Public display of pornography without a disclaimer notice is illegal in the US (which is the relevant legislation for SE)

Secondly: Does anime.stackexchange.com want to get known as hentai.stackexchange.com? If no, then we should consider clearly keeping that out. If only to shut up the critcism and condemnation by association that may happen from outside the network.

While anime certainly include ecchi and moe elements, hentai is flat out pornography. That's simply a different caliber. It's like comparing a cliché romance movie to ... (I think you got the idea)

Thirdly: Hell what benefit does it have? Do you really want to proudly announce: "I am the hentai-expert on anime.se!"?? I certainly wouldn't.

The point about statistics is IMO moot. If we don't have such questions yet (or rather not many), what is the point in collecting statistics?

Answer 3

I think it would be a good idea to have it purely for the reason that it allows for better categorization of questions.

Hentai is essentially its own sub-genre of anime and creating it will allow those interested to easily search for it OR avoid it as required and desired. Currently, you open a typical question titled "Who is this girl with the red hair?" and are then hit with a NSFW image you didn't know would be there - the tag would solve this problem and others similar.

To answer Hakase's comment, the scope of hentai is relatively straight forward. I'm sure most people have the level of common sense to know whether or not something is pornographic. Having said that, some To Love-ru Darkness OVA's are insanely close, but I wouldn't consider it Hentai.