Do either/both of these two questions fall under our "recommendations" close reason?

Question

Two recent questions have been flagged for closure as recommendation requests but (at the time of writing) have not actually been closed:

1. Have there been any works of literature featuring the elements from the "After man" series?
2. Are there any Scooby-Doo books for adults?

The second of these has also attracted disagreement between high-rep users in comments as to whether or not it's really closeworthy. So I'm bringing the discussion to meta.

Should either/both of these questions be closed as "reading recommendations"?

Answer 1

Question #1: should be closed.

Although the question is posted with reference to specific book(s), it's asking about any books which use particular elements:

Have there been any works of literature featuring [...]
has anyone ever made up stories based upon such [creatures]?

This seems no better than the original examples of bad recommendation questions which made us declare them off-topic for this site. I've already voted to close it.

Question #2: not a recommendation question.

This question is asking about the existence of books in a specific franchise, namely Scooby-Doo. It's clearly scoped and will be answerable by a scooby-doo expert. There's no risk of subjective answers proliferating out of control (the main problem with recommendation questions), because it would even be feasible to provide a list of all Scooby-Doo books in a single post and go through them to check which ones, if any, are for adults. It's more comparable to questions like How many Red Dwarf books are there? - strictly contained within a single franchise and therefore reasonably answerable.

The only reason I could see for closing this one is as Primarily Opinion-Based, due to the fact that it can be hard to draw the line between a book for children and a book for adults. But I think a lot of modern fiction, especially in a franchise like Scooby-Doo, is clearly marketed for one or the other, and it's feasible to make that distinction here.

Answer 2

I think question #2 should be closed on the basis of being "too broad" and have voted as such.

For my birthday, one of my kids bought me a copy of Podkin One-Ear, a fantasy novel aimed at children. I read it and enjoyed it, for its imaginative setting and well-drawn characters if nothing else.

So: is it really a children's book?

The question is rhetorical and I don't want to debate it. Its simply to make the point that the issue with question #2 is that any answer threatens to spiral into a debate about what is and is not an "adult" book. It is, therefore, too subjective to answer properly.

Answer 3

For the sake of offering a different perspective on these questions, I propose that we interpret them literally instead of as implicit recommendation questions. In other words, interpret questions asking, "Are there any X?" or "Have there been any X" as yes-no-questions, unless there is something in the question body that suggests that the intent is something else.

Hence, question 1 can be answered with yes providing only a single example as evidence; without evidence, it remains unanswered.

Question 2 is also worded as a yes-no-question and a single example would suffice as evidence in an answer. However, the issue with that question is how to determine whether a Scooby-Doo book is for adults (for adults only??), so the decisive criterion you need for your evidence is opinion-based. Therefore, you can close that question without referring to the "recommendation" close reason.

Answer 4

Question 1 is an open-ended list-based question, and so IMO close-worthy.

Open-ended list-based questions such as this one ask "Are there any works that meet such-and-such criteria?" On the one hand, it's hard to prove a negative and give a definite no; maybe there are such works, but potential answerers just don't know of them. And just because there's no such book today doesn't mean that someone won't write such fiction in future. On the other hand, if there are several such books, then there are as many answers as there are books; there is no comprehensive answer. So I think this question was correctly closed. See also the discussion in this meta answer.

Question 2 is correctly closed as well.

It has the same "are there any ... " structure as Question 1, but unlike that one, it is scoped narrowly to a single series. The difficulty is that "for adults," as asked, is opinion-based. One could change the question by asking whether any of the books were marketed as YA or general fiction as opposed to being in the children's section. In theory this is answerable by researching all the titles to see how the publisher categorized them. Or more simply, by looking at the publishers' imprints and seeing whether any of those are marketed toward adults. The trouble is that there are so many Scooby-Doo books and they are still being published. Even if there aren't any such books today, who's to say that next year, some publisher wouldn't have the bright idea of publishing a Scooby-Doo book for adults? So again, the question is hard to answer definitively. Questions that lack definitive answers are not a good fit for the SE format, and as such this question was correctly closed.