The ryona tag is currently defined as:
"A subset of sadism, mostly depicting women in extreme pain or bruising, with a particular focus on its sexualised depiction."
This definition allows for posts of men under the same conditions to be included under the tag. The "Other names" field confirms this, as 逆リョナ and 男リョナ are used exclusively when the aggrieved are male.

However, in practice, there are exactly 0 images with the ryona tag in which men are the subjects of the tag. I believe this is a good thing because most people who would be interested in seeing one gender in pain aren't interested in seeing the other in pain.

I have identified 29 posts which I believe qualify for the conditions of ryona featuring male subjects. I am proposing that the ryona tag be made explicitly gendered (as it already is in practice) and that a reverse_ryona tag be created for ryona featuring men.

I don’t know anything about ryona, so I’m wondering, is the target obvious to ryona fans if you use ryona and reverse_ryona or would something like ryona_(female) and ryona_(male) be clearer? Or going by some of the futa tags, something like ryona_on_female and ryona_on_male?

That's a fair question. I should've explained a bit more. The two "Other names" I mentioned before, 逆リョナ and 男リョナ, translate literally to "reverse ryona" and "male ryona" and they correspond on pixiv to exactly the tag that I'm proposing. ryona_(female) and ryona_(male) would be perfectly clear way of expressing the meaning of the tags through their names. It's arguably better than my suggested naming scheme, but I'm not 100% sure about it. The ryona tag already has 741 posts under it, so changing the tag's name would take a BUR. I would guess that it's on a considerable number of blacklists and I don't know how BUR's interact with that sort of thing.

In theory if some variation of ryona_(female)/ryona_on_female and ryona_(male)/ryona_on_male got made as tags, they could still both implicate a more general ryona tag.

Is there any reason why male focus + ryona wouldn't work, in the same vein as it does for most non-gendered fetishes?

Potential related discussion: reverse rape was converted to femdom + rape as a result of topic #1489.

feline_lump said:

Is there any reason why male focus + ryona wouldn't work, in the same vein as it does for most non-gendered fetishes?

Wouldn't this search fail to find any images where male characters are subjected to ryona while female characters are present? My blacklist prevents me from finding examples but this seems like a pretty obvious reason why male_focus isn't reliable in cases like this.

iridescent_slime said:

Wouldn't this search fail to find any images where male characters are subjected to ryona while female characters are present?

When their presence is more than just a hand or something, yes. Most of the ones I've found are unsuitable for male_focus. Given how lopsided the post count between male ryona and female ryona is, there's no way that someone who only likes seeing men in pain would wade through the entirety of the ryona tag for the images that male_focus doesn't apply to.

I think reverse ryona is fine. There's no need to overthink this. Ryona is normally understood to be for female characters only, and reverse ryona is the most commonly recognized term outside Danbooru for ryona against males.

I don't think see a need to try to combine male and female ryona together, or put them under an umbrella tag. That's like trying to combine yuri and yaoi together, or loli and shota together. Usually highly gendered fetishes are kept separate for a reason.