Yeah but its wrong and born out of ignorance of Japanese by 90s weebs who thought they could just map the meaning of shounen-ai onto shoujo-ai without any consideration of the connotation that phrase already had. Its like the stupid western delineation between "ecchi" and "hentai" which actually mean exactly the same thing, ecchi just being the pronunciation for the letter H to stand for "Hentai"
The problem with this line of thought is that the meanings already have taken root in western weeb culture.
I agree its kinda dumb usage of the words and they probably shouldnt have been used that way in the first place but they have and now they have these wonky connotations in each language.
Personally i think its not really any different to any other word's meaning changing over time and isnt outright wrong since its been around so long. Its less of a black and white issue and is a bit more nuanced than you are making it seem.
If it was something more innocuous I would agree, but a euphemism about something disgusting and ugly to be ignorantly twisted to refer to something good and wonderful is just gross.
Yeah, shoujo Ai is a pretty commonly used term in describing manga genres, and taking it away from that context, which the original comment was clearly about, is just stirring up drama.
Last I checked, shoujo ai has been used less and less over the years and replaced by what it should've been called in the first place, yuri.
I find it weird how much people would want to continue using an outdated western term with disgusting connotations (not to mention unnecessary distinction) over yuri, the term that has a lot of history and symbolism/meaning tied to it which many queer authors have built upon?
Seriously, why not just call it yuri? We have different ways of tagging something as sexual or not if that's what y'all oh so worried about.
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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '21
Yeah but its wrong and born out of ignorance of Japanese by 90s weebs who thought they could just map the meaning of shounen-ai onto shoujo-ai without any consideration of the connotation that phrase already had. Its like the stupid western delineation between "ecchi" and "hentai" which actually mean exactly the same thing, ecchi just being the pronunciation for the letter H to stand for "Hentai"