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So can we expect a general purge of 'Western' influence, such as Schoolgirl art, Witches and Halloween etc., and French Maids ? --- Certainly a benighted few assume 1930s gymslips and maidservant apron and cap to be traditional Japanese gear, but they may be safely ignored as nutcases.
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Farewell, a long farewell to Bonnie Kancolle; Alice and Marisa skip off into the sunset holding hands; and the maids pack up their brooms, dusters and machine-rifles and dutifully give final notice.
buehbueh said:
And who says the tools DONT matter? There's a reason I brought it up. The site features 90+ percent digital art, beside doujinshi which does tend to be inked. Wouldn't it suck if someone wanted to post hundreds of shitty inktober works drawn on cheap notebook paper right now? That's because this site is biased against traditional media for the same reason it has been biased against western art, photos, guro and furry: shitty artists abusing a free web board to post work that the fanbase in general didn't want, and people with poor taste posting the worst examples of these things. The blanket bans were devised to keep back stuff that didn't look right from getting on. But maybe those bans don't work when the standard is exclusively about content, and people get confused when a solid work is deleted for content and not quality. This is what compromise is about. We let great traditional media on just as we stop doodles from getting on, it didn't take a blanket ban to achieve.
If by "photoshop" you meant "anything that has been touched by a computer", then you're making quite a different statement. (There are plenty of different image manipulation programs, including ones specifically for manga/doujin drawings.) There is a difference between scanned sketches that are finished in image manipulation programs, tablet drawings, and drawings done entirely by mouse you're glossing completely over that make a larger difference between one another than whether any digital manipulation took place after the fact.
There has never been a ban or stated guideline against "traditional media", nor even explicit bias I have ever noticed against hand-drawn art outside of uncleaned pencil sketches and scanning quality being potential places where quality can take a strong hit.
I don't see how the tools matter when a "quality" judgement suffices; We all know we can easily find images made completely in Photoshop that are total garbage while this site has many decent inked pencil sketches or even MSPaint drawings whose artist actually took the time to add details and refinement not normally associated with the program. Shitty Inktober images should not be approved because they're shitty, (or non-anime) not because they're Inktober. (And Inktober, for that matter, is basically the same as the "one-hour draw" contests whose artwork we get on Danbooru, it's just a Western contest.)
buehbueh said:
As we go from accepting art for merit beyond content, many have learned to do so for non-japanese works. That's not people wanting to ruin the site, that's regular uploaders, including our staff, who think that it belongs. Whether they're going against the rules as they're written is beside the point here. This is a living system, made of people who each make active decisions on what they think belongs, on a whim or a long term plan.
And as we humans, as living beings in living systems, needed to cope with the pressures of different people wanting different things, rules, whether as laws or social norms, were invented and enforced because those prevent greater strife.
The reason there is a rather dramatic uptick in flagging is because the norms were simply whatever people could get away with in the past, and that caused dramatic enough conflict to cause Albert to have to change the moderation system. Some people still want those old anything-goes norms to apply, and hence, there is conflict.
Having at least honest, agreed-upon guidelines exists because they prevent conflict by providing legitimacy towards whatever decisions are made if they can be shown to be in compliance with agreed-uopn guidelines. The Doom image in question is being constantly re-flagged because there are obviously people who don't feel the previous approvals were legitimate, and that they never reached any consensus with whatever standard the people who approved the image feel should be in place.
buehbueh said:
In ending, I don't mind borderline works getting flagged, and I can't deny that aceofspudz has legitimate reason to want a change for clarity on borderline works. But think about it like this: The rules will always be in need of new wording as long as even one person thinks they need to change, even if everyone else wanted them a different way. Western art may not have a prominent place on site, but we're not here to have a battle just because a few users want an anime-only Danbooru. There's nothing wrong with wanting the rules to reflect the users, and while they may not be worded to the desires of the users now, trying to take them further back to what it was before is not worth it when most of the site has moved on.
Actually, as I've said before, I find it odd that the new set of rules is actually more tolerant of guro than "webcomic"-style Twitter and Pixiv doujins. The same written rules that apply the same extremely harsh standard to uploading Twitter strips as full published mangas have never changed, in spite of there probably being more people who look at the latest Kouji strip every day than look at any random non-comic anime art.
I seriously question your impression that only "a few" people come to Danbooru just to look at anime art, only. I suspect most users switch between Danbooru and other sites when looking for non-anime things, and only those few who live on Danbooru exclusively want all forms of things to be here. After all, flagging is relatively rare, and a tiny minority of users ever really use it, so for any one image to be flagged multiple times is an extreme rarity that probably represents a sentiment held by just one or two people who actually hit the flag button. (And for the record, no, I wasn't one of the flaggers.) If a majority of users, janitors included, wanted more non-anime works put on the site, then by your own admission, Danbooru would have already stopped being an anime-specific site at all. It's simply that the anime-viewing majority that probably is always putting up Touhou or Kantai Collection search filters don't notice when a handful of Western art slips through the cracks until such a point as, as Albert put it, "it isn't a problem until it is."
The problem I have isn't so much that there aren't perma-rules, as there are rules that have massive unstated exceptions or are so flagrantly ignored that nobody feels they are legitimate. The howto:upload guide should, at the very least, reflect what the consensus actually is or should be, rather than what it was supposed to be back when the site was started, but are routinely ignored, now.
And again, I'm not saying we need rules that state absolute bans, but simple statements that different works make things less likely to be approved. That not only allows for consensus moderation, it makes an actual consensus much more likely to be achieved because it actually helps inform where the consensus that brings up the least conflict should be and provides legitimacy for that consensus. (To bring up the previous example, again, if a flood of guro users show up, that changes the consensus, and ensures a conflict between those who wanted the old consensus and those who want the new one.)
wareya said:
I think some consideration for the artist is important because there are artists that occasionally make landscape works that can't be interpreted as having eastern or western style. But instead of the artist being western or eastern, it should be their typical focus, especially with the works they made around the same time as whatever work is being called into question.
However, it's critically important to be careful about borderline styles, because a very large number of artists that are rightfully part of whatever japanese pop art movement they fall into, do have such borderline styles. As such, the problem is not "what style of art does the artist usually make", but "does the artist's usual art fall under the site's agenda", which are very different approaches. When you think about it like that, it's obvious. The problem is what steps to take to identify whether the artist's usual art, and the particular piece of art in question, fall under the site's agenda. No, that's not a terminology problem, and yes, that's the moving target at the center of the contention in this thread. There isn't really a dichotomy between eastern and western in the first place. You can come up with extreme examples, but that's not how art styles work.
Of course, guidelines like this are hopelessly abstract and will never have a reasonable solid form, so do whatever almost makes sense.
Actual landscape images are a real rarity, however, and probably more rare than Western-style drawings of Western properties. Many landscape-like images here tend to have at least one anime figure standing in the middle of the field, just making it an unusually highly detailed background.
I don't think it's as hopelessly abstract as you make it out to be. Evolution is a complex thing, with the definition between species having some gray areas. (Hey look, a different use for a ring species link!) Likewise, art styles have influences and their own taxonomies. Different techniques are used both for achieving different results, but also to carry on different traditions.
I have been using this parody of Leifeld several times, but actually read it, and it does detail part of why "graphic novels" look the way they do. The glossy comic books that are the standard of this style, especially since the 90s, are a few images in high-priced books where excessive detail and dynamism in each square millimeter is demanded, so making a background out of exploding hot dogs makes sense, as action needs to be evoked in every frame. By contrast, the much more animation-driven anime style was developed around expressiveness through simplicity. And while a moving target, from its origins through its evolution, there is plenty of documentation for how it changes. Even just looking at Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun, which switches art styles between the shoujo manga world and "real world" says a lot about the formality of styles used for each.
As a result, when people try to ape anime style after coming from Western art influences, the mistake they make is often in trying to add too much detail. The KyoAni standard that reigns today is fields of solid color with one tone of shade and maybe one tinting to represent something shiny, like the top of the hair.
And sure, there are plenty of borderline cases, and maybe it can be difficult to express concisely (again, I can link plenty of YouTube rants about changes in anime art styles over the years, especially with 80s OVA nostalgia,) but it's not like people can't find objective and expressible differences in style, even if it becomes more a matter of intuition to people than objective measurement in people's own minds.
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I didn't say that only a few people come here for anime art, since almost everyone here does. I meant that a good number want art more generalized than just the current topic as we have it today. Also, I know there are many ways to make a picture. Most art that comes on this site is made in specific ways that facilitate the creation of the styles desired. That's all I meant by that whole paragraph. The difference I meant to point out is that many tags which tend to include poor art do tend to follow trends. Awful MSPaints aside, you don't see nearly as much traditional work to begin with, cause its harder to make nice clean stuff. Digital just tends to be super clean, and that's just what I notice most of the work here being. That's what I meant by bias, but perhaps preference would have been more fitting.
I also don't think the approvals were illegitimate, just as as the flags aren't, I simply don't agree with them,. The reasoning for the flags are fair based on what has been stated in the forums by higher users and the wikis, and I'll concede that we do need stronger guidelines. That said, I've made my case repeatedly defending borderline art so I'll say no more. And we do agree that the best resolution would have the wiki's changed to reflect an answer over this. Perhaps then we can go from a conflict that never moves anywhere to actionable resolution.
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tapnek said:
This revived thread is going nowhere. Unless someone comes up with some plan on how to change the wikis or ToS, this thread might have to be put to rest.
Well, isn't this @albert task then? Since it is his website so he should say and give the guidelines what is allowed, what has to be put too higher scrutiny for us approvers aned what is prohibited.
I don't see a problem with the current status. I look at one of the properties in question here like overwatch and the majority of it is not objectionable. That Doom image. Not objectionable. The real problem isn't Western art. It's low quality art in general. That's what we should be focusing on.
It's important not to get hung up on one or two exceptions that crop up from time to time. Perfect is the enemy of good enough.
With regards to flagging, if you think something doesn't belong on this site then flag it. You're limited to 10 a day so use it wisely.
