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There are two recent questions (one and two) that ask for the existence of an anime (or manga) that satisfies certain conditions. They are not list questions; rather, they are clear, and probably also focused and answerable (I will get to this later), questions about anime/manga, so many, but not all, people agreed that they should be on-topic here.

If we happen to know of any anime/manga that satisfies the requirements set by the OP, then it is job done. But what about the case that no one is able to identify any such anime/manga? Can we say "no, there is no anime/manga satisfying those conditions?" It is clear that, in this case, the question is not reasonably scoped because no one can ever see all the anime and manga that are out there, and therefore no one is qualified to verify the truth of the claim. Then one question follows another: how do we determine whether questions of this kind are reasonably scoped or not?

I investigated the status of this kind of questions on Sci-Fi SE, and it seems that they are closed as not constructive there (e.g. questions one and two). Should we do that, too? And if we want to allow existential questions, what should we tag them with? The two questions on Anime & Manga that I mentioned before were tagged as , but are changed to to divert the flow to an already over-saturated tag. However, I feel that both these tags don't adequately describe the nature of those questions well, and we certainly don't want to pollute the tag. How should we tag them?

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  • Although I myself suggested to tag it as anime-history, on hind sight, it might not be a good idea to tag them so. It is not asking for the first or the origin, and the answer might be invalidated in the future if some new series fulfill the criteria. Looking through past question, the 2 recent questions seems to be the first cases of such questions (either that, or past cases have been deleted).
    – nhahtdh
    Commented Apr 12, 2015 at 19:51
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    afaik list questions are bad because they usually result in long-ass answers, but if they're not (honestly how many works with overweight main chars could there be?) I guess it should be fine. As for tagging… no idea
    – Hakase
    Commented Apr 12, 2015 at 20:11
  • With one more addition to existential questions, I'm starting to feel that they are getting more like recommendation questions.
    – Gao
    Commented Apr 13, 2015 at 7:53
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    "no one can ever see all the anime and manga that are out there" - challenge accepted.
    – Toshinou Kyouko
    Commented Apr 13, 2015 at 17:32

1 Answer 1

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I believe they are akin to out of universe list question.

IMO these questions are poorly scoped and should be closed as unclear/too broad or off-topic (as needed), because they border on being recommendations, are constantly changing, and don't have a definitively answer.

I don't like these type of questions because they usually a pretty broad and unlikely to help anyone. For an example, if I were to ask, is there an anime using depicting focusing on religious iconography? Sure there are, but what of it? We know for a fact that they exist in one form or another, either in the background or the foreground elements of the show. But the question to be answer is, does this help anyone (aside from making a simple point with a local discussion)?

Note that some of the close reasons are a bit deprecated, I'm currently going through and looking at all out site policies and doing a comprehensive revision to them.

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  • Fwiw we banned these as part of the list questions. meta.anime.stackexchange.com/questions/470/…. "This includes questions asking for examples of a particular genre/theme/trope."
    – Toshinou Kyouko
    Commented Apr 13, 2015 at 17:30
  • I remember this being a problem before - starting with allowing a question looking for an anime set in a particular war
    – Toshinou Kyouko
    Commented Apr 13, 2015 at 17:31
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    I wouldn't want this question anime.stackexchange.com/q/2351/24 closed. Though I would be OK to see the 2 samples raised in the meta question gone.
    – nhahtdh
    Commented Apr 14, 2015 at 12:02
  • That is an interesting question. I think it's probably possible to rephrase it so that it's still valid under a rule like this, as it's an anime - production question as well as a 'name an anime with x feature' question. I don't have any immediate recommendations however
    – Toshinou Kyouko
    Commented Apr 14, 2015 at 15:04
  • Perhaps something like 'are manga strictly a prevcious/simultaneous work to anime'. - removing the 'list' part of the question
    – Toshinou Kyouko
    Commented Apr 14, 2015 at 15:08

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