I'll be blunt here - if Fanlore goes with Option 1 or 2, all they'll do is alienate the animanga community even more than it is now. And considering this post opened with the desire to reach out to the animanga community, I'm not sure that's the direction you want to go in.
Problem Number One: You can't try to be inclusive of other fans by forcing them redefine how they identify themselves - particularly in a project that's meant to record fannish history.
Problem Number Two: The boundaries between media in animanga fandom are really, really blurry. The proposed solutions to make things simpler are going to turn insanely complicated once you get down to details. There's a reason the animanga community and it's sister communities have a history of looking like overlapping blobs.
Problem Number Three: This proposal already failed once. The same exact debate already happened on the tag wrangler mailing list and it did not go well. At all. A lot of western media wranglers were surprised and confused when the animanga wranglers had serious problems with the umbrella categories of comics/cartoons/sequential art. And those were animanga fans who were already open to the idea of introducing the AO3/OTW to the animanga community. I know this is a different project, but the basic argument is still the same.
Problem Number Four: I'm an animanga fan, but I still don't see the comics fandoms or western animation fandoms taking too kindly to these new divisions either, and yet I notice they were never mentioned in this post. Possibly some thought should be put into their side of the issue as well?
Problem Number Five: The way Fanlore is approaching this problem is going to get you one of two reactions from the majority of animanga fandom - a) they'll get pissed or b) they'll stay completely indifferent to Fanlore, not even bothering to engage with it.
I don't know what to do about manhua or other nation-based fandoms. They're not my area. But animanga is my area and I can tell you that the only thing the proposed solutions will do is keep the animanga fandom presence on Fanlore at a bare minimum. Personally, I think there should be categories for how fans define their own fandoms, not how Fanlore or other fans believe they should be defined.
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Problem Number One: You can't try to be inclusive of other fans by forcing them redefine how they identify themselves - particularly in a project that's meant to record fannish history.
Problem Number Two: The boundaries between media in animanga fandom are really, really blurry. The proposed solutions to make things simpler are going to turn insanely complicated once you get down to details. There's a reason the animanga community and it's sister communities have a history of looking like overlapping blobs.
Problem Number Three: This proposal already failed once. The same exact debate already happened on the tag wrangler mailing list and it did not go well. At all. A lot of western media wranglers were surprised and confused when the animanga wranglers had serious problems with the umbrella categories of comics/cartoons/sequential art. And those were animanga fans who were already open to the idea of introducing the AO3/OTW to the animanga community. I know this is a different project, but the basic argument is still the same.
Problem Number Four: I'm an animanga fan, but I still don't see the comics fandoms or western animation fandoms taking too kindly to these new divisions either, and yet I notice they were never mentioned in this post. Possibly some thought should be put into their side of the issue as well?
Problem Number Five: The way Fanlore is approaching this problem is going to get you one of two reactions from the majority of animanga fandom - a) they'll get pissed or b) they'll stay completely indifferent to Fanlore, not even bothering to engage with it.
I don't know what to do about manhua or other nation-based fandoms. They're not my area. But animanga is my area and I can tell you that the only thing the proposed solutions will do is keep the animanga fandom presence on Fanlore at a bare minimum. Personally, I think there should be categories for how fans define their own fandoms, not how Fanlore or other fans believe they should be defined.