What is bara?

Is post #4698414 bara? It's currently undergoing an edit war since people can't seem to agree on whether or not it counts, so to try and get some clarity on the subject a forum thread is in order.

As for my personal opinion, this post is not bara. From what I can tell, bara is not just "very ripped male body", it's a homosexual-oriented artstyle that many artists take inspiration from and contribute to. A quick Google Image search for "bara" should be enough to grasp the concept, and this post in question looks nothing like the content in that Google search.

That looks like 1girl manly muscular female meme to me

I don't think it's bara either.

In my opinion, no. Bara is definitely a certain style, and this isn't it. Even if the post was parodying bara, the head/face would match the body and wouldn't look like it's just Barbara's normal head plopped onto a muscular body.

sorry for double post, but i think i need to explain why that particular post is not Bara.

Short ver:
IMO, People who search for Bara wouldn't think that should go to Bara (wouldn't see is too strong word because that's just haha funi)

Sorry if I'm wrong or if i did something bad. but yeah, that is just my take

On what is the concrete definition of Bara tho, i don't know. I'll leave it to people that actually browse Bara to explain

This looks more like a meme image than something made for homosexual masculine men. Even what is more fitting imo.

Yeah, no. This ain't it. Not even close.

Not bara, just a muscular girl.

It's quite common for people not familiar with the bara niche to misunderstand it as just a "muscular body".
This is not the first time we've had to deal with "muscle memes" being tagged bara thanks to that misunderstanding.

I have edited the bara wiki a couple of days ago in hopes of clearing that misunderstanding even a little. I've been meaning to do it for over 2 years now, but I always ended up scrapping it because I'm never satisfied or confident enough with what I end up with.

I think this particular parody is the usual "character turned muscular" meme but with the twist that the character's name actually has bara in it. I admit I didn't notice that because I'm not familiar with said character.
That said, while this particular case has a slight connection, it is still thematically irrelevant.
This is the same thing as masculine men parodying playboy bunny, another fetish tag, but people were complaining about it in forum #192721 saying that playboy bunny shouldn't contain those types of images.

Memes and parodies regarding muscular dudes and gals have been popular for a long time now, just look at the results for muscle memes on google. Those memes have nothing to do with the bara concept, people just think big dudes and grills are funny.

My suggestion is to make a new muscle (meme) tag to encompass all these different memes.

The only reason to tag it as bara would be for me the name "BarBara". But this shouldn't count. Given the bodytype, I think she rather looks like the bodybuilder type and not the typical bara. She looks more like this, tbh it really looks like this was the template, and not like this post #4688804.

Guaro said:

The only reason to tag it as bara would be for me the name "BarBara". But this shouldn't count. Given the bodytype, I think she rather looks like the bodybuilder type and not the typical bara. She looks more like this, tbh it really looks like this was the template, and not like this post #4688804.

Well, that's the issue. Sure, the drawing has a girl face, but at the end of the day it's basically a faceswap of a bara body with a female face.

I don't know whether it should be tagged as bara, but if someone is searching for bara parody and won't see that post, the tagging system imo has failed.

For what's worth we've historically tagged those as 1girl + manly, since it's not uncommon to make this kind of parody (1girl solo manly), and none of these currently has the bara tag. So using manly instead of bara would be the way we've always done things.

I forgot we had the manly tag when I made this edit but this seems to be the better approach as it is a parody of another tag already.

If manly is the tag to be used for these kinda things, I feel like it needs serious tweaking. The wiki and the tag name. I always found the tag dumb but now it can serve an actual purpose.

Notice how most of the replies so far have been "this is not bara". The concept of bara is more complex than just buff dudes. I wish it was that easy so there would be no confusion.

If this was the case, basically all Dragonball Z would be bara. Which it isn't.

The uploader was right not to add the tags that kept going back and forth. And it should go back with the initial tags.