I've been seeing a lot of... we could refer to them charitably as "debates" over the Tag What You See rule on e621. The moderators tend to be in rather strict defense of the system, and I can see why. Hard-and-fast rules are easier to enforce and fighting over "gray areas" cannot exist when there are none to be spoken of.

Here is an issue, though. When I, in particular, want to search for art of a character, I usually go to e6 first. The problem, though, is that the Tag What You See rule will cause me to omit certain art from my search unless I should happen to already know what the art contains.

Say I go searching for explicit art concerning a canonically male character, and I want, specifically, to see gay art containing them. The issue is, in several pictures they are depicted with female proportions and tagged "female".

The search I would likely input in this case would be something to the effect of "character male/male rating:e". The issue becomes immediately apparent if I turn to my only option, and additionally one I wouldn't know of without preemptive knowledge of what I'm searching for: "character male/female rating:e". In addition, after this search to find the missing pieces I would have to search through, possibly, dozens of pages of false positives (specifically this male character with a female partner.)

It's currently a little past midnight and I'm not exactly full of bright ideas. But I feel the system can be improved somehow. I'm not here to start personal arguments, nor to get yelled at by mods. All I have are suggestions.

For one, I see potential in a system not unlike the "Do Not Post" list. That is to say, all posts are considered Tag What You See unless the tagging individual is the artist concerned.

But, as I can, like many, see this causing inevitable uproar when abused in the future, I think the true solution may lie in the ambiguous_gender tag or some variation thereof... perhaps something like gender_tags_against_canon.

Or something to that effect. In this case I could search for:

"character ~male/male ~gender_tags_against_canon" to whittle down my search while still being able to find all the pieces I'm looking for.

It's not the most well-thought-out of ideas, and it probably has some glaring holes, but I feel perhaps with time they could be brushed up and we could improve the site's tagging system a little. Your thoughts?