Hey everyone, Was browsing through some stories, and after reading some of them (not gonna specify) it got me thinking. Sometimes, there are some really WEIRD stories out there. For stuff like that, should we make a new tag, "bizarre" so that people can have heads up on that kind of stuff? Just a discussion thread on the viability of such an idea. Weigh in please!
How WEIRD it is? Tentacle rape weird, sexually confusing weird, reality warping weird, psychological trauma weird, culture shock weird, surprise habit weird, etc. ?
People have their own definition of "weird"/bizarre, and not really a common point for definition. So....this tag probably failed hard. Weird things to you might be common stuffs to other, like CN/JP novel with various culture points put in it.
Instead of a bizzare tag, what if we just have a “difficult to read” tag, which could cover all of the tentacle rape, difficult to understand translations (ie poor grammar/sentence structure), sexually confusing, psychological trauma, and other things that can be considered “bizzare” without defining bizzare, but rather calling it “difficult to read” since you can then infer what’s difficult to read about it by the other tags. Like, if a novel has a tag of tentacle rape and this tag, then we’d know that tentacle rape was a major part of this series instead of it being in one arc.
no you cant. They are two different things and neither is neccessarily a negative thing. seems like a good idea on paper but wierd is subjective. Try making a tag that doesnt depend on people and what they think.
Did you miss that my post was directed at the idea of an "idiot" tag? If not: The "Dense Protagonist" tag describes a person that has trouble with emotional intelligence. This is not the same as being an idiot but in a lot of cases the protagonist is arguably both, and if someone is an idiot then he has usually also trouble discerning the feelings of other people.
again read my post. They are two different things. just coz the sets of two concepts intersect doesnt mean they are the same set.
They intersect very often if not most of the time. And I did not say that they are the same, I said that, if he wanted to give a novel the 'idiot' tag, he can usually give it the 'Dense Protagonist' tag and it would still tell someone what to expect. And while being airheaded or naive may make a character likeable, calling the protagonist an idiot is just insulting and I doubt anybody would see something positive in such a tag. They are almost the same thing, usually are meant to express the same thing and one of them is almost certainly always meant to insult the novel or its protagonist.
meh stick with your contrived views then https://www.novelupdates.com/series-finder/?sf=1&tgi=14541,14644&mtgi=and&sort=abc&order=asc
Interesting. Please keep sharing your views everyone, but keep it civil! Don't want this thread to get shut down cuz things get heated!
We were already off-topic so I don't think we should continue this discussion (sorry for hijacking the thread btw), I wouldn't know how to continue it anyway. If the 'bizarreness' is caused by the way the narrator tells the story, then I think some of your ideas can be conveyed with the tag "Unreliable Narrator": As others already pointed out, the biggest problem is that it would be hard to decide where to draw the line between something simply unusual or new and something bizarre. On a side note, maybe you should ask a moderator to move this thread to the Novel Updates Site Discussion subforum, where discussion about tags usually takes place.
Weird is too subjective, it's not happening. Tags don't need to be 100% objective, but there is a limit to how subjective they can be, and bizarre is clearly above that limit. That's even worse, people will just use it to say the translator's English is bad. Even if used as intended, it would depend heavily on the other tags of the novel to make sense, that's not how the tagging system works, so it's not possible.
That’s a great point, but I still don’t really see the downside for using it as a bad translation, since that’s something that I personally use to decide wether or not I want to continue reading a certain novel. I’ve dropped a novel or two because of a bad translation or it just being a difficult novel to understand (one kept jumping to different characters talking without any indication of who was saying what). But for it depending on the other tags of the novel, that would definitely be a problem you’re right there. Maybe we could have specific names for those types of things, like “tentacle rape as a main plot” or “tentacle rape arc” instead as I’ve run into a problem more than once where the reviewers don’t give a good enough explanation of a problem within a novel, or the majority of the reviewers like said weird thing.
NU has no right to decide rather a translation has good quality or not. This isn't even allowed to enter the reviews, much less the tags. This would add an excessive amount of tags for each small thing that had any significance to the plot, which is the exact opposite of what the mods currently want with NU tags, it's why we went from 1500ish to 700-800 tags. So... Not happening.
Oh? I didn’t know that, I thought the tags were edited by the users so that would mean that people could go ahead and make a note of the translation/book quality (since some WN are pretty trashy, just sentence structure wise). Hmmm interesting, so NU at one point had 1500 tags? I can definitely see why they’d want to trim down that amount. Do you have an idea of a tag that would be descriptive and specific enough to denote when a novel series is difficult to make it through? Or when there are some “bizzare” or “unpleasant” topics as the main focus? Where bizzare and unpleasant are defined as constant tentacle rape of a tsundere on an unprecedented scale (just something that seems unpleasant to read, but not necessarily uninteresting)