There has always been a lot of contention over charr and gendering. For those of you who aren't familiar with Guild Wars, both male and female charr have flat chests. Flat chests aren't a problem in and of itself as there is nothing out of the ordinary about this (Australia notwithstanding), however partially due to their lore as a war-centric society the female charr are often depicted as well-toned and muscular, and their build ends up overlapping a lot with what we tag as cuntboy.

The result of which we end up with 3 parties involved in tagging them:

• Those who are familiar with Guild Wars, tag charrs as female when they have canon female characteristics; fluffy tail is a commonly cited trait here.
• Those who are more familiar with gender guidelines here, attempt to retag the more masculine ones as cuntboy (if a pussy is present) or sometimes ambiguous_gender.
• The admins who work to break up tag wars by making a judgement call on how feminine the charr looks.

At first look this seems like standard "background info versus TWYS" gender debate, which it kind of is, however the practical side of things say that the gender tags on charrs are constantly changing due to these tagging conflicts. This has understandably caused a lot of frustration, both for the users who want to search for charrs they like and for the users who dedicate their free time to help tag them.

Considerations:

There are other species (sergals, scalies, etc.) as well as feral which have had similar conflict in the past (though they usually aren't disputed as much as charrs are, for whatever reason). However I would like everybody to try to keep this discussion focussed on charrs specifically. This is just meant to keep us focussed and on-topic. If we want to make changes, we can always use the discussion here as a framework for changes elsewhere. I will mention a couple of these later in this post to draw a parallel or comparison, but the focus is still mainly regarding the policy on charrs.

Also, I know that there have been many discussions and ideas in the past about adding features such as per-character tagging, something that may or may not solve the issues here, but since features like this don't currently exist, it is outside the scope of this thread and I'd like to ask that we leave discussion about this for another time.

What are everyone's thoughts on this?

Options:

These are just some of my thoughts on where we might be able to go with this. Feel free to suggest changes to these or even suggest a completely different plan altogether.

My personal preference is Option 2.

I think one of the main issues here is the gender tagging policy seems to currently treat anthropomorphism as binary, demanding the presence of breasts and other feminine human traits as the resemblance to human structure reaches a certain point. I think perception of this point may also be skewed by the tradition for other fictional species with the same approximate level of anthropomorphism to be given breasts. As well as the general tendency in popular culture to shift females of an anthropomorphic species closer in general to full anthropomorphism than males.

Charr do not conform to this, and as such female charr are being identified as male, solely because they do not share the anthropomorphic variance we have come to expect from exposure to other media.

I would like to argue that this warrants a compromise somewhere along the lines of the rules for tagging the gender of 'feral' creatures. Charr just aren't anthropomorphic enough to conform to human physiology to the point that we can call them entirely humanoid.

In a relaxed standing position, a charr will hold its body angled forward, with its neck curving in a manner that causes it to be the highest point of the body (with the possible exception of horns), with its head held roughly in line with its shoulders.
In addition to this, charr are shown to possess long arms and heavily digitigrade legs, with which they are frequently seen running on all-fours when their hands are not otherwise occupied.

To summarise my argument, I feel that charr do not conform to human physiology to the point that we can expect them to share human gender differences, and that perception of this fact is clouded by the cultural expectation that female anthropomorphic characters will be more anthropomorphised than males of the same species.

Edit: It also may be worth pointing out that the centre image under "mixed characteristics" in the second post is also tagged with the "Charrgen" tag, in addition to the source claiming the character is a hybrid.

At this point, I'd consider it to be common knowledge among the userbase, expecially among the ones that actually want to search for Charr.

So my vote goes for option two. Just stick the guidelines in the wiki, so those who aren't familiar with the species can still tag it.

'course, it'll will be trouble in the long run when users start trying to apply it to other species. But it still seems like best option out of three bad ones.

I've always thought that a basic understanding of the species in question is relevant anyway. A Pikachu with a "heart" tail end is clearly exhibiting female characteristics for the species, even if you can't see a vagina, for instance. Is TWYS really supposed to prevent taking into consideration the gendered characteristics of any species beyond humans?

That seems odd to me, if so. It would seem like a rejection of reality. And incredibly anthropocentric.

And ultimately inconsistent. How would it be possible to tag something with "canine penis", for instance, if you didn't have the "background information" about what a canine penis looks like? Why is that background information substantially different from an understanding of a species' gendered traits?

Clawdragons said:
I've always thought that a basic understanding of the species in question is relevant anyway.

It's considered to be common knowledge for real-life animals. For example, a headshot portrait of a feral rooster can be tagged as male.

But the same doesn't apply to fictional species. It depends on the admin, but in most cases we've been told to tag those as ambiguous on the basis that it's outside knowledge and 'not everyone is familiar with the species'.

I've always found that a bit inconsistent. I'm sure that not everyone is familiar with the sexual dimorphism of all the real life animal species either.

Genjar said:
I'm sure that not everyone is familiar with the sexual dimorphism of all the real life animal species either.

I'm not even sure everyone is familiar with the taxonomy of all the real life animal species, given the number of non-Pokemon posts tagged Hyena+Canine

(I once tagged a Tasmanian Devil post that got retagged as Canine too)

I'm personally liking 2 or even option 3, since I can't stand females being tagged as cuntboy in any degree, and would have blacklisted it by now but haven't due to female charr ALWAYS getting incorrectly tagged as such. They have characteristics that define them as female (the faces in particular, horns and tails) that anyone looking for or familiar with charr (who are the people searching in the charr tag anyway) would know to pick out. Tagging all females as cuntboys would give the impression to someone unfamiliar with the race that all charrs are male/cuntboys, which is not the case in the slightest (I would hope they realize that the cuntboys are actually females, as it's common sense to come to that conclusion I would hope ;-;). If I'm a user looking for art of female charr, I know what a female charr looks like and will search for "female charr". If all the "proper" female charr (without tits) were tagged as cuntboy, I'd get a whole load of inaccurate female charr art, and would be wondering where the lore-friendly female charrs are.

I would prefer they remain tagged as flat_chested female because it fits the bill just fine, but obviously some don't agree with that stance. Female ferals are almost always drawn without breasts and teats, but aren't tagged as cuntboys. Some scalies in anthro form are breastless, like dragons and lizards, and they aren't tagged as cuntboys either.

And let's take a look at sergals, shall we? Another fictional species, since that's more in the realm of what we're comparing. Some females are drawn with breasts, however looking through rain_silves shows proof otherwise. I believe female sergals are canonically breastless but I can't find a proper source without extensive searching. All the following is tagged female (and should likely have flat_chested added).
post #426338 post #323873 post #44477

(I realize the first post says to stay on topic but these are completely valid points lending to the argument of female charr being breastless and being tagged PROPERLY as female.)

Female charr have been established as breastless, and anyone looking for female charr would be using those terms and would likely be a fan familiar with their breastlessness anyway. So while I would prefer a fourth option where we just keep tagging female charr as flat_chested female, option 2 or 3 is a decent compromise, I suppose.

Kida said:
So while I would prefer a fourth option where we just keep tagging female charr as flat_chested female, option 3 is a decent compromise, I suppose.

The way I see it, option 2 is the option that would allow tagging "flat_chested female".
As is, simply continuing to tag as such creates tag-wars when somebody rigidly following the current TWYS and gender tagging rules becomes involved.

Hatfox said:
The way I see it, option 2 is the option that would allow tagging "flat_chested female".
As is, simply continuing to tag as such creates tag-wars when somebody rigidly following the current TWYS and gender tagging rules becomes involved.

Yeah, I reread the options and realized option 2 fits most (just woke up, pardon my half-brain'd post). The wiki page on charr clearly states what the female traits are, and the fans of charr (who are aware of the gender differences) are the ones most likely to be searching for and looking in the tag, hence they should get accurate results based on what a female charr is. If I'm looking at a female charr in art, I'm looking at a female charr. I know what it is, and I'm tagging what I'm seeing (a flat-chested female).

Refreshed the page after posting and spotted the edits =P

While the wiki does give a brief description of charr gender differences, I believe it has been argued in previous forum threads that currently the wiki itself counts as external information for the purposes of TWYS.

(Speaking of waking up, I should get to sleep now.)

Genjar said:
It's considered to be common knowledge for real-life animals. For example, a headshot portrait of a feral rooster can be tagged as male.

But the same doesn't apply to fictional species. It depends on the admin, but in most cases we've been told to tag those as ambiguous on the basis that it's outside knowledge and 'not everyone is familiar with the species'.

I've always found that a bit inconsistent. I'm sure that not everyone is familiar with the sexual dimorphism of all the real life animal species either.

I know many more people who are familiar with the sexual dimorphism of certain Pokemon (again, the Pikachu example comes immediately to mind) than who are familiar with the sexual dimorphism of certain real animals. An example regarding a fairly common real species that causes a lot of confusion is that dolphins have a genital slit, but you can still tell males and females apart because males have two smaller slits (one for the penis and one for the anus) while females have one long continuous genital slit in which the anus is located as well.

Back to the topic at hand, though... Honestly, I sort of feel that "cuntboy" is almost indistinguishable from female + flatchested, except in cases were there is dialogue explaining the situation. I think, if anything is causing mistags and violations of TWYS, it is the cuntboy tag, and if we were going to try to do anything to fix this situation, the most reasonable thing to do would be to take a serious look at the cuntboy tag.

Clawdragons said:
Honestly, I sort of feel that "cuntboy" is almost indistinguishable from female + flatchested, except in cases were there is dialogue explaining the situation. I think, if anything is causing mistags and violations of TWYS, it is the cuntboy tag, and if we were going to try to do anything to fix this situation, the most reasonable thing to do would be to take a serious look at the cuntboy tag.

I was just thinking this, actually. Why does cuntboy even have to be a term, when they resemble flat-chested females right from the get-go? Some of them you can tell they're male (lions with manes, or a more masculine face for example) with a vagina instead of a penis, but dickgirls are more obvious, as they have dicks and breasts. However, some (straight) men are really into females with little to no breast-sack and "cuntboy" just seems like a mis-tag in that regard. Someone looking for flat-chested females to admire would look at a cuntboy and say "hey that's a flat-chested female" unless they had prior knowledge (or a tag in the side) that the character was male (and that prior knowledge isn't supposed to be used in tags anyway, stated in earlier arguments?).

Saying cuntboys are more muscular doesn't fit either, since a majority of "cuntboys" have very feminine musculature. If I'm looking for a muscular "cuntboy", I'd just search for muscles + flat_chested + female. Or even muscular_female + flat_chested.

The more I think about it, the more I realize cuntboy is a fairly useless/subjective tag. There's literally nothing to say that a cuntboy is a boy aside from a flat chest. Which some females possess. So the tag doesn't make sense from that perspective. If they have muscles, tag them as muscular females that are flat-chested. If they have a masculine or feminine face, perhaps we can start new tags for those characteristics.

I dono how much I will contribute to this discussion, even though I'm likely (good reason to assume so as well) the main reason this discussion is taking place. I tried to clean the tags up and ended up in a multi-front tag war over it. Finally had enough and needles the admin using tickets. And what I suspected would happen has, the discussion has avalanched towards no change as the others have in the past. We need a black and white rule for this or it will continue in a vicious circle. And I for one am getting tired, of both fighting with fans and learned guild wars users, and admin who come in and yell at me for upholding the tagging guidelines. It leaves one feeling both underappreciated, annoyed, and very confused.

First of all the fact that you KNOW these things is part of tag what you see, keep in mind the second half is "not what you know".
Using obscure knowledge for tagging is bad. The pickachu and charr tail differences in gender are and should be seen as obscure as you have to either, be told about it, be a fan of the content, or done research on the matter. All three is considered outside knowledge.
Common knowledge would be the fact that female ferals don't have breasts like humanoids do, it is a world wide knowledge.

I remember it used to be "when tagging approach the subject as if you did not know what (in this case charr) are, had never played guild wars, or heard about it. What do you see? A creature with no breasts fairly humanoid, with a vag, cuntboy.

Now consider that the description box is there for information that the artist might wish to present, including and not limited to gender information that can not be used in the tags.

Now, flat chested.
Flat chested does not mean that the characters can have pecs instead of flatness. Females do not develop male pectoral muscles.
Hell flat chested is even wrong as typically it means the female has some breast tissue, but below an A cup. But that can be discussed another time.

When I did my cleanup spree I found busts of charr (portrait from the neck up) tagged as female when they should have been ambiguous, and a few tagged herm because they had the fluffy tails but a penis.

I do believe there was a point not to many years ago where it was promised to the user base that there would be no more exceptions after the mlp name rule change. At this point I don't know what to do about this however it should not lean one way simply because people are tired of the fighting, nor should it be influenced by a species popularity.

Look at the image, don't use game knowledge, think of it as seeing it for the very first time. Now answer this: "does this look like a female? Or a girly cuntboy?"
For me...most of them look like girly cuntboys.
I only tagged the ones that could definitely be seen as such, as such. I left others alone due to hip size and shape (and a few due to admin).

Say your searching for females, say you don't like cuntboys. Now say you someone suddenly uploads a bunch of female charr, a few have breasts so you favorite them. But the rest look like cuntboy.... suddenly the blacklist fails spectacularly as you are getting things in your search that you don't want to see.

And finally I'm going to bring up something I feel I need to.
During an argument on a post another user stated that the fact it wasn't fixed for over a year. This has no bearing on tagging. Nor does the fact that he complained that suddenly his favorites where disappearing due to my tagging efforts. Also doesn't claim bearing on tagging as tags are not there for personal gratification. Nor for labeling personal opinion or what you want in your favorites. They are to help users search for posts.

Tldr: either way I have a strong suspicion that this will either end up indecisive or in overwhelming support of the fan base.

Esme_Belles said:
Say your searching for females, say you don't like cuntboys. Now say you someone suddenly uploads a bunch of female charr, a few have breasts so you favorite them. But the rest look like cuntboy.... suddenly the blacklist fails spectacularly as you are getting things in your search that you don't want to see.

Say I'm looking for female charr, ACTUAL female charr, and get a bunch of inaccurate breasted art because I have cuntboys blacklisted. Suddenly my blacklist fails spectacularly because I'm not getting the things in my search that I want to see.

Your argument doesn't really hold up. I hope it does fall in support of the fanbase because they're the ones looking for charr.

If someone doesn't like how female charr look because they look like cuntboys, they blacklist "female charr" with "-breasts" to see the one that have actual breasts. Done, simple, over with.

Bolded because I just realized this is the entire solution to this thread. Honestly. Everyone wins.

Kida said:
Say I'm looking for female charr, ACTUAL female charr, and get a bunch of inaccurate breasted art because I have cuntboys blacklisted. Suddenly my blacklist fails spectacularly because I'm not getting the things in my search that I want to see.

Your argument doesn't really hold up. I hope it does fall in support of the fanbase because they're the ones looking for charr.

If someone doesn't like how female charr look because they look like cuntboys, they blacklist "female charr" with "-breasts" to see the one that have actual breasts. Done, simple, over with.

Bolded because I just realized this is the entire solution to this thread. Honestly.

You fail to see it isn't JUST about the blacklist. I for one don't have any genders on mine so I have no personal gain in any of this discussion other than keeping the tagging system working in a way that Wount destroy itself over time.

This can work...but it can also fail. The problem here is that tagging something that LOOKS like a cuntboy, female, is in basic violation of the tagging policy. Hence the need to find a concrete way to solve this problem.

I have never played guild wars, nor done research on charr. Every scrap of information I have is from users on here which is outside information. To me... whenever I get told to tag a charr the way you wish it to be tagged my brain does "BULLSHIT!!!" Then it turns to "so what are we going to change next?"

Esme_Belles said:
You fail to see it isn't JUST about the blacklist. I for one don't have any genders on mine so I have no personal gain in any of this discussion other than keeping the tagging system working in a way that Wount destroy itself over time.

This can work...but it can also fail. The problem here is that tagging something that LOOKS like a cuntboy, female, is in basic violation of the tagging policy. Hence the need to find a concrete way to solve this problem.

I went over why cuntboy is useless/subjective in my above post, as it can be corrected to utilize adjective tags + female (or we even just tag genitals/chest features from this point on and rid of gender tags, big leap, I know [Disclaimer: Not a serious suggestion, and likely just a topic for another time that popped into my mind]) in pretty much all cases. I don't see cuntboys, I see females with flat chests. Hence, I tag what I'm seeing (and people looking for small/flat-chested females look for those tags). Cuntboys are outside knowledge in this case; all of these look like flat-chested females to me.

post #698195 post #696681 post #692298 post #689323

For blacklist purposes, someone can blacklist "female flat_chested" or "female pecs" or "female muscular" to avoid chicks (vagina-wielders) with pecs/small chests. For search purposes, same thing. Cuntboy definitely needs a looking-over.

Esme_Belles said:
I have never played guild wars, nor done research on charr. Every scrap of information I have is from users on here which is outside information. To me... whenever I get told to tag a charr the way you wish it to be tagged my brain does "BULLSHIT!!!" Then it turns to "so what are we going to change next?"

That's great, users looking for charr art because they are fans who know what they're looking at are having their favorites and searches destroyed by your insistence on a broken system and an admittedly subjective tag.

purple.beastie said:
Even though only people who know about charrs will search for them, charr images still have lots of other tags on them and the blacklist should function correctly for people searching those tags.

Just a thought.

Kida said:
If someone doesn't like how female charr look because they look like cuntboys, they blacklist "female charr" with "-breasts" to see the one that have actual breasts. Done, simple, over with.

I pretty much addressed that with that statement. Also, started another thread with a proposition to replace cuntboy with "flat-chested_female" so it makes more sense (and I absolutely wouldn't oppose female charr being tagged with it because they have a masculine chest, I won't lie).

purple.beastie said:
Sorry, missed that. I agree that would handle the issue without too much fuss, but I will say that if an exception for charrs leads to enough other exceptions it could make it unnecessarily difficult to use the blacklist effectively.

I totally understand. That's why I started the aforementioned discussion ( forum #166284 ); the whole reason I hate the proposed female charr categorization is that they're being labelled "cuntboys", when they're not boys or male, erasing the fact that they're ladies with no breast sacks (I find this demeaning to anthro scalies with no breasts as well). The type of chest is influencing the name of the tag when the genitals should be, as they're more defining of the creature's sex (in my opinion). I don't have as much of an issue with dickgirls because in most cases, they look feminine with a dick slapped on, but cuntboys look feminine too, and are better off being labelled as flat-chested females.

I've been paying attention to this thread, but I wanted to mention a couple things related to tagging/blacklisting. Edit: This was meant to be a short post. ;_;

• Blacklist line: cuntboy -charr - This allows cuntboy to be blacklisted with an exception for charr.
• muscular_female - Though this doesn't apply to all "female" charr, it is a useful alternative to muscles female for searching purposes (though it is still fairly undertagged).
• flat_chested is kind of informal. Regardless of what it should mean, it has come to mean is female/girly ambiguous characters that are flat chested. As such, it doesn't really help for tagging/searching charr any more than tagging them female. The only thing it does help slightly is for blacklisting flat chested characters that are on the borderline between female and cuntboy, but the tagging isn't really consistent enough to be relied on for this.
• Cuntboy doesn't mean "female sans breasts", and it never did.

Kida said:

The more I think about it, the more I realize cuntboy is a fairly useless/subjective tag. There's literally nothing to say that a cuntboy is a boy aside from a flat chest. Which some females possess. So the tag doesn't make sense from that perspective. If they have muscles, tag them as muscular females that are flat-chested. If they have a masculine or feminine face, perhaps we can start new tags for those characteristics.

What the tag is for is masculine characters with a pussy.

post #137657 post #363179 post #531081

There are other ways to pull up these characters other than using the cuntboy tag, but they aren't consistent enough to work. For instance, we could say that muscular_female -breasts might pull this up, however breasts aren't always tagged, or there might be other characters with breasts in the same post that would exclude this specific build from showing up, or the character may be masculine but not really muscular.

New tags like masculine_face, broad_shoulders, or narrow_hips might work in theory, but they will probably not work that well in practice. Even if we got everyone on board with tagging these features it would likely be forgotten about in a few months time when the hype and motivation dies down. What we would be left with is a half-finished project and an increasing number of cuntboy characters in the female tag with no easy to blacklist them.

This could all be dealt with as an ongoing maintenence issue, but we are still left with the fact that the cuntboy tag is one of the more commonly blacklisted tags, and these aren't suitable replacements for it.

Kida said:
I can't stand females being tagged as cuntboy in any degree

I would hope they realize that the cuntboys are actually females, as it's common sense to come to that conclusion I would hope ;-;

This is more of a gender politics, language, and semantics issue and is outside the scope of TWYS. We don't care what they are, just what they look like.

Put another way, if there was a way to tag female without using the name "female" we would drop what we were doing and change over to that in an instant. The trouble is keeping it short, simple, intuitive, and not subject to searching error when the number of characters is greater than 1. For example, a post with an orgy might have breasts, penis, muscles, a masculine face, and thick thighs in it, but no way to distinguish searching-wise that that they are all on the same character.

Kida said:

(I realize the first post says to stay on topic but these [sergals] are completely valid points lending to the argument of female charr being breastless and being tagged PROPERLY as female.)

No worries. Honestly I wrote some of the OP with sergals in mind. (in fact I kept typing "sergal" instead of "charr" :X)

Clawdragons said:
That seems odd to me, if so. It would seem like a rejection of reality. And incredibly anthropocentric.

The reason is partly practical. Human characteristics influence the art of even feral characters (even subtlety), so it is easy to fall back on when other things are ambiguous. Real species are also a lot easier to handle because they are more fixed (generally speaking) than fictional species.

Clawdragons said:
And ultimately inconsistent. How would it be possible to tag something with "canine penis", for instance, if you didn't have the "background information" about what a canine penis looks like? Why is that background information substantially different from an understanding of a species' gendered traits?

"Background information" applies in the context of "tagging (lore/bio/etc.) in a way that contradicts physical appearance (TWYS)". Even using English or knowing that a character is a charr and that charr is from Guild Wars and that Guild Wars is a video game is all technically outside information, but not something that actually contradicts TWYS.

"Background information" also partially applies to misc. things that are mostly irrelevant for tagging. For instance we don't imply princess_celestia -> princess or draenei -> alliance, the former because it isn't always going to conform to TWYS, the latter because it is overly specific lore irrelevant to searching and tagging.

Clawdragons said:
A Pikachu with a "heart" tail end is clearly exhibiting female characteristics for the species, even if you can't see a vagina, for instance. Is TWYS really supposed to prevent taking into consideration the gendered characteristics of any species beyond humans?

Yes and no. A issue with pikachus are the large amount of art that contradicts this difference. Female characters with the "male" tail shape but no other (human) "male" characteristics are still tagged female because it's a common way to draw the tail. It's a nice detail for those familiar to pokémon but it's not something that is consistent or common enough knowledge to rely on for tagging.

It's also a bit of an issue with later games. For instance, if the creators of pokémon suddenly decided that female charmanders should have a blue flame instead of a red flame, do we retag all the prior charmanders as cuntboy? Dimorphism aside, for tagging purposes this would be a fairly minor detail and could should probably be disregarded to keep things simple.

(slightly irrelevant to discussion) This type of thing would probably be more of an issue with what I'll call "FA-invented species" where character owners may invent differences so that we would tag it as a different gender than what is seen. I haven't really seen this in practice, but I could see it coming up. Which is why I made the note about limiting it to select species.

Esme_Belles said:
Tldr: either way I have a strong suspicion that this will either end up indecisive or in overwhelming support of the fan base.

I wouldn't mind working on a compromise for the fan base to keep them tagged consistently, but TWYS will always come first. Likewise, I believe that there are many charr posts that should still be tagged cuntboy regardless of the options I gave in the OP.

(After this discussion, I plan to manually go through every charr post to conform to whatever decision we make here. We can take it from there.)

Kida said:

That's great, users looking for charr art because they are fans who know what they're looking at are having their favorites and searches destroyed by your insistence on a broken system and an admittedly subjective tag.

The system is broken because users might have to be subjected to the word "cuntboy" instead of "female"?

purple.beastie said:
Other than the added complexity and required development time, is there any reason we shouldn't just have a separate TWYK system? That way you could search something like 'charr canon:female'.

The added complexity and required development time is the main reason. There have been many discussions on this in the past (I'll link a few in a moment) but this isn't currently an option for us as the system isn't programmed to handle this differently.

canon:female might be a nice universal alternative to charr_(female), but it doesn't change the fact that we'd still tag some charr as female, others as cuntboy.

Edit: forum #136716 forum #157216 forum #163041 forum #155451 (there are many more, but these are just a few more recent ones)

If it was for me to decide I would probably go for strict anthropocentric tagging of male/female/cuntboy/dickgirl/herm/ambiguous_gender as TWYS. In case of ambiguous_gender and only then I would recommend male_(canon)/female_(canon)/cuntboy_(canon)/dickgirl_(canon)/herm_(canon) (these could imply ambiguous_gender).

This approach maintains strict TWYS but with the limited set of additional tags outside knowledge would be allowed where it is useful for disambiguation.

This is close to parasprite's option 3 but why stop at charr if there might be other species with similar problems? I suggest not to use patchwork solutions for sinlge species but approaches that address the same problem for all species at once.

parasprite said:
Yes and no. A issue with pikachus are the large amount of art that contradicts this difference. Female characters with the "male" tail shape but no other (human) "male" characteristics are still tagged female because it's a common way to draw the tail. It's a nice detail for those familiar to pokémon but it's not something that is consistent or common enough knowledge to rely on for tagging.

It's also a bit of an issue with later games. For instance, if the creators of pokémon suddenly decided that female charmanders should have a blue flame instead of a red flame, do we retag all the prior charmanders as cuntboy? Dimorphism aside, for tagging purposes this would be a fairly minor detail and could should probably be disregarded to keep things simple.

To be clear, I specified that a heart-shaped tail end was a female characteristic, but I did not say that a lack of a heart-shaped tail was a male characteristic.

As to the cuntboy discussion, if cuntboy is supposed to be applied to masculine characters with female genitalia, wouldn't a far simpler solution be to have a masculine_female tag? That seems generally less ambiguous to me.

Edit: this also fits in well with the girly tag, which seems to me to be the opposite end of the spectrum: feminine_male, in most cases.

parasprite said:
What the tag is for is masculine characters with a pussy.

post #137657 post #363179 post #531081

Did you happen to look at the other thread where I mentioned alternate terms/language for these? flat-chested_female (referring to genitals) + masculine_appearance would work for those characters. Also, I find those are an uncommon appearance in the tag, as most artwork of "cuntboys" depict them as very feminine in nature.

parasprite said:
however breasts aren't always tagged,

Huh, I'm typically really diligent about this and thought others were as well... note to self: make tagging breasts and their sizes a personal project.

parasprite said:
or the character may be masculine but not really muscular.

That's why I mentioned masculine_appearance as a possible tagging opportunity in that other thread.

parasprite said:
New tags like masculine_face, broad_shoulders, or narrow_hips might work in theory, but they will probably not work that well in practice. Even if we got everyone on board with tagging these features it would likely be forgotten about in a few months time when the hype and motivation dies down. What we would be left with is a half-finished project and an increasing number of cuntboy characters in the female tag with no easy to blacklist them.

I would personally devote a lot of my time to making sure the newly proposed changes were tagged accurately, to save female charr from a cuntboy-labelled fate, haha.

parasprite said:
The system is broken because users might have to be subjected to the word "cuntboy" instead of "female"?

Yes, because none of the charr females are cuntboys. In fact, none of the art of charr females that I've seen in the charr tag are cuntboys in any regard; I've only seen charr dickgirls. If there was art of a cuntboy, it would be extremely unique and noticeable, as I haven't seen one yet. You'll notice that charr cuntboy is empty for a reason; no one has uploaded a piece of it yet. All the horns and tails on "cuntboys" in the charr tag signify female charr, I personally ensured of it with every piece because the charr tag is my baby and I want to make sure it's easy for charr fans to find what they're looking for, since it's a relatively niche interest.

As an artist who has wanted to draw my charr characters/have them drawn, the possibility of my charr being labelled cuntboys just because they lack breasts makes me (and probably other artists/character owners) very uncomfortable, from a personal standpoint. It's not a term I want associated with my art or my characters, and this can be something others feel as well, which would limit the archives here on e6 just because of a language issue. This is partially why I suggested changes to dickgirl/cuntboy in that other thread; an archival site like this should strive for relatively neutral/not-offensive language to ensure a more positive portrayal of the art and the site overall.

Kida said:

Yes, because none of the charr females are cuntboys. In fact, none of the art of charr females that I've seen in the charr tag are cuntboys in any regard; I've only seen charr dickgirls. If there was art of a cuntboy, it would be extremely unique and noticeable, as I haven't seen one yet. You'll notice that charr cuntboy is empty for a reason; no one has uploaded a piece of it yet. All the horns and tails on "cuntboys" in the charr tag signify female charr, I personally ensured of it with every piece because the charr tag is my baby and I want to make sure it's easy for charr fans to find what they're looking for, since it's a relatively niche interest.

As an artist who has wanted to draw my charr characters/have them drawn, the possibility of my charr being labelled cuntboys just because they lack breasts makes me (and probably other artists/character owners) very uncomfortable, from a personal standpoint. It's not a term I want associated with my art or my characters, and this can be something others feel as well, which would limit the archives here on e6 just because of a language issue. This is partially why I suggested changes to dickgirl/cuntboy in that other thread; an archival site like this should strive for relatively neutral/not-offensive language to ensure a more positive portrayal of the art and the site overall.

But see this right here is what is wrong with your view on this subject. Popularity does not trump tag what you see. If we tagged how everyone wanted to tag the system would be as bad or worse than rule34 or the other booru. There is nothing offensive about the names nor tags. It is simply what they are known as, and not just here.

Either way with the addition of the extra gender discussion thread you are getting off topic. Which is pretty much what happened to every other charr thread ever made.
I have a feeling no matter what anyone says unless they agree with you your gonna not be happy.

On that note I'm keeping an eye on it but I Wount be responding again unless I can contribute, and with kida leading the charge... I can't.

Kida said:
You'll notice that charr cuntboy is empty for a reason; no one has uploaded a piece of it yet.

There were at least a few dozen posts in that search when I wrote this post; those were retagged by someone within the last day or so (many of which seem to be your edits). The only thing this provides evidence for is that the gender tags on charr are constantly in a state of flux, not that there are no charr with cuntboy characteristics.

parasprite said:
There were at least a few dozen posts in that search when I wrote this post; those were retagged by someone within the last day or so (many of which seem to be your edits). The only thing this provides evidence for is that the gender tags on charr are constantly in a state of flux, not that there are no charr with cuntboy characteristics.

It's been empty for a long while, however. I retagged them because Esme was (incorrectly) adding them back in there recently (within the last week or two), despite female charr being tagged as such for a long time. Also, none of the female charr ending up in that tag are truly cuntboys, as stated.

Esme_Belles said:
But see this right here is what is wrong with your view on this subject. Popularity does not trump tag what you see. If we tagged how everyone wanted to tag the system would be as bad or worse than rule34 or the other booru. There is nothing offensive about the names nor tags. It is simply what they are known as, and not just here.

I already stated why tagging a female member of a specific species, where the subject of the art is definitely female, is incorrect. Also, I am tagging what I'm seeing. Me, and anyone else looking for charr art, is seeing a female charr. I'm not wrong, I'm stating facts. There are plenty of other anthro species, female and feminine, that have no breasts. This does not make them cuntboys (and with the images parasprite showed above of "real" cuntboys, a majority of female charr don't fall under that visual definition either).

Esme_Belles said:
I have a feeling no matter what anyone says unless they agree with you your gonna not be happy.

On that note I'm keeping an eye on it but I Wount be responding again unless I can contribute, and with kida leading the charge... I can't.

The sly digs and borderline insults aren't really helping your case and are truly offtopic in this discussion. :v Just wanted to point out that I'm attempting to remain civil and constructive in this debate, whilst your posts come off as very condescending.

I'm not a big fan of going in circles with my words, honestly. I really feel like this statement was pretty much the best thing I said in the thread, as it provides a solution where everyone wins, people can blacklist the subject if they don't like it, and the fans get accurate tags for their characters and artwork.

If someone doesn't like how female charr look because they look like cuntboys, they blacklist "female charr" with "-breasts" to see the one that have actual breasts. Done, simple, over with.

Kida said:
It's been empty for a long while, however. I retagged them because Esme was (incorrectly) adding them back in there recently (within the last week or two), despite female charr being tagged as such for a long time. Also, none of the female charr ending up in that tag are truly cuntboys, as stated.

The posts that I saw in there were all correctly tagged based on current standards, which don't give much (if any) weight to species-specific characteristics. This thread was made to discuss that policy and how we might be able to work with our current guidelines to make the tagging of them more consistent, as well as play nicely with both non-charr searches and cuntboy blacklisting expectations.

parasprite said:
The posts that I saw in there were all correctly tagged based on current standards, which don't give much (if any) weight to species-specific characteristics. This thread was made to discuss that policy and how we might be able to work with our current guidelines to make the tagging of them more consistent, as well as play nicely with both non-charr searches and cuntboy blacklisting expectations.

Right, thanks for the reminder of the thread's purpose. Thinking it over, couldn't we add both tags to female charr? People blacklisting cuntboy wouldn't see female charr, while people searching for female charr would get the results they're looking for.

As much as I don't like labeling them as such, it's doable. I do still think a new tag would be suitable for female charr, as well as sergals, scalies, etc (flat-chested_female VS "cuntboy"/male_with_pussy), as proposed in my latest post over in the other thread. I wouldn't mind trudging through all 1700 cuntboy posts (that's actually not as many as I thought) to put them in their respective categories, either.

Clawdragons said:
As to the cuntboy discussion, if cuntboy is supposed to be applied to masculine characters with female genitalia, wouldn't a far simpler solution be to have a masculine_female tag? That seems generally less ambiguous to me.

Edit: this also fits in well with the girly tag, which seems to me to be the opposite end of the spectrum: feminine_male, in most cases.

I didn't notice this because I posted around the same time, oops. This is pretty similar to what I'm suggesting, it's a very good point and falls in line with the secondary discussion. Only since manly applies to manly men and girly applies to girly men, they would instead be changed to tags like feminine male and masculine male with "neutral"/basic (haha) males in between, and female characters having the same variants.

Edit: manly is super vague anyway? I try searching for manly female and I get results with females and masculine_men in them... Hm. This is why masculine/feminine male/female/appearance should probably exist as tags!

I still think the core of this issue is

charr do not conform to human physiology to the point that we can expect them to share human gender differences, and perception of this fact is clouded by the cultural expectation that female anthropomorphic characters will be more anthropomorphised than males of the same species.

After that it's more a question of whether this cultural expectation should be a part of TWYS. Does over a decade of TV and video games count as external knowledge?

Kida said:

The sly digs and borderline insults aren't really helping your case and are truly offtopic in this discussion. :v Just wanted to point out that I'm attempting to remain civil and constructive in this debate, whilst your posts come off as very condescending.

oyi. your reading into my posts a bit too much hun.
and I might be reading into yours a bit to much as well...however I am not being condencending, nor am I trying to insult you.
to me you seem like unless things go your way you will argue the points to death, or be very unhappy about the decision...
you haven't had an open mind since I posted, instead you've stomped on anything ive said, claimed I am incorrect in my tagging (are you an admin? has an admin told you im incorrect?), which is why I said "if your leading this discussion, I cant contribute"...because anything I say will automatically be shot down unless I agree.

as for the off topic, you brought up another forum post having to do with renaming the genders you find "insulting". that is most certainly off topic since this thread is about Charr and their gender and how we need to find a way to tag them without everybody coughing up hairballs... not if you find the cuntboy, dickgirl genders offensive.

Esme_Belles said:
to me you seem like unless things go your way you will argue the points to death, or be very unhappy about the decision...

Says the one who is doing exactly that? Nobody else had issues with the way female charr were being tagged, that's why that front remained peaceful for months and everyone was content. Literally no one but you has raised complaints about them being "cuntboys" in the past year. I have not actually seen anyone that blacklists/avoids cuntboys verbally complaining about female charr. Not even once. Plenty of curious inquiries, but never a complaint. However, you'll notice that users HAVE verbally complained about you changing the tags from female to cuntboy and having images erased from their searches due to their blacklist settings.

Esme_Belles said:
claimed I am incorrect in my tagging

Because you are. Female charr =/= cuntboys. Like I said, most female charr don't even fit the visual definition that parasprite gave of "cuntboys". Hell, a female Charr is even used as an example for flat_chested in the Wiki: http://puu.sh/jlXFI/13534246a9.png

Esme_Belles said:
as for the off topic, you brought up another forum post having to do with renaming the genders you find "insulting". that is most certainly off topic since this thread is about Charr and their gender and how we need to find a way to tag them without everybody coughing up hairballs... not if you find the cuntboy, dickgirl genders offensive.

It was not off-topic. It is a perfectly valid suggestion to create a new tag for female charr and other feminine, breastless anthros, since they don't fit the definition of cuntboy that I mentioned above. Won't be responding to you anymore unless it's actually about this topic, since your responses only serve to derail it. Nothing personal.

To Kida:

Kida said:
Says the one who is doing exactly that? Nobody else had issues with the way female charr were being tagged, that's why that front remained peaceful for months and everyone was content. Literally no one but you has raised complaints about them being "cuntboys" in the past year. I have not actually seen anyone that blacklists/avoids cuntboys verbally complaining about female charr.

They where not complaining, nor where they tagging because most of those who used to do what I was doing have given up on it being solved, like I did they too would get unbelievable backlash from people like you and aldv...something, my browser's being a bitch right now or I would look the name up, it was a never ending tag war. They just simply got tired, I however have not, but im getting close.

as for saying I am incorrect "because I am" you don't make that call. parasprite and the other admin do.

________________________________________________________
To the entire thread:

Heres how I see them, alright?

Female, this is due to the size of the waist to chest to hip ratio. Back when husky had to comment I didn't understand the cuntboy tag all that much so it has no bearing for this argument at the moment.
post #467078

This one is ambigious, but before I got to it it was female.
post #466540

this one could in my mind swing both towards female, and cuntboy.
post #514802

this one is obviously a male.
post #535407

and in this one...we have a male (which was tagged at different points herm, then dickgirl), a cuntboy or yes I agree a flat chested female charr, and an ambigious charr (the blue one).
post #695621

as you can see I have my valid reasons for tagging these the way I do, I don't just go oh look, charr with pussy, CUNTBOY! I look at the image and try to evaluate the gender. does it have a feminine shape? is it TOO feminine? how about the face, is the face feminine? is it masculine? does the charr have a feminine shape but muscular? does it have pecs?

if we go the fan base route then posts of what appear to be male charr but have fluffy tails will become tagged as herm, because why if it has a fluffy tail then it must also have a pussy even though it is not visible. at second worst it would become a dickgirl, even though this tag requires the anatomical display of breasts.
should this happen it opens the gate way for everyone to tag whatever they know about the character or species. arctica from the front but no pussy visible? auto herm for she's always herm.
its a vast slippery slope that needs to be treaded carefully least we destroy the tagging system in our attempts to please everyone.

also a heads up, my browsers are taking a crap on me o I need to either reply with my kindle (frustrating and slow) or it will take 5-10 minutes between refreshing the pages and posting replys. so my replys will be getting very slow

So... wait a sec. It's based off of what you see/your criteria. What about what I see, or about what other charr fans see? Their input doesn't count, despite them having a different opinion from yours? We all see female charr. Every one of those examples you linked, apart from the "obviously male" one, is a female charr. The one with a dick in the last example is a female/dickgirl, due to her hair, facial structure, and horns. There are major, obvious identifiers for female vs male charr within the species. The differences in the face can be seen here: Male faces Female faces And the entire page is here for reference. We wouldn't tag a male charr as herm just for having a fluffy tail, we would tag one as herm if both genitals were visible. But breasts are not genitals or an indicator of "female", as evidenced by the flat chested definition and examples that I linked previously.

And you can't say that established species differences aren't taken into account when making tags or tagging pictures, since nidoran female and male have their own tags, as do rathian and rathalos. The latter two examples were proven to have significance in their gender-specific differences in this thread: forum #162360

I will personally go through all 400 charr posts to tag them as charr, charr_(male), charr_(female), etc. to keep the females from being labelled something they're not, if it's really necessary. :v

Sighs, what the fans "see" is affected by what they "know".

I'm getting tired here so that's it for my posts tonight... hopefully someone else will take up the discussion in till I wake up.
Honestly this is just going in circles....

Esme_Belles said:
Sighs, what the fans "see" is affected by what they "know".

Your point? rathian and rathalos are tagged as their own species because that's what monster hunter fans know them as. You're telling me that it's not valid info due to it being knowledge you have to gain by playing or looking them up, and that they should all just be tagged "dragon" or "wyvern" with the other species tags removed because that's all you can "see"? Charr are just anthro cats; I can't actually "see" Charr because they're a fictional race. So let's just take the whole race, alias it to cat and imply anthro and horn, yea? Because that's all they are; anthro cats with horns.

Your argument is full of fallacies and holes, and it doesn't hold up.

I will be quite honest, I don't know what the opposition is trying to accomplish at this point. Female charr are "non-male characters with no visible breasts", as is the definition of flat chested. female states that "If a character has only female genitals apparent, or is otherwise in some way visibly female (breasts, lack of mane, et cetera as appropriate to species), it should be tagged as female." Hence, female charr are tagged with flat_chested female. They fall under all the tagging rules in that regard, and match both definitions of the tags. If they're muscular females, there's a tag for that too!

cuntboys are male with a pussy instead of a penis. "They are rather easy to mistake them as flat chested females or, in the case of non-mammals, breastless females, the main criteria to spot one should be the shoulder-to-hip ratio, or simply the width of the character's hips." Thing is, charr are a fictional race, more feral than anthro, indicated by their stance and build, and so do not apply to the hip ratio rule. As a species, they have their own unique indicators for male and female (listed above), same as rathian and rathalos. They are female, they are charr, that is what they should be tagged as. Nobody (except Esme) has complained in the last year that they should be tagged as cuntboy, hence, I would think it's safe to assume those who are blacklisting cuntboy aren't having any issues with female charr.

Since I have to point it out again, if someone doesn't want to see female charr because they look too similar to cuntboys... they can blacklist them, very easily. It won't change the fact that the lovely charr ladies are, indeed, ladies.

Kida said:
So... wait a sec. It's based off of what you see/your criteria. What about what I see, or about what other charr fans see? Their input doesn't count, despite them having a different opinion from yours?

I don't usually like to be this blunt, but tagging-wise we got to where we are now literally by ignoring what (any) fans see in favor of a more consistently defined set of physical attributes. It doesn't work perfectly, but it is consistent enough to provide predictable searches.

Keep in mind that the tagging on charrs aren't limited to just people searching specifically for charrs; they will show up in more generic searches like male and female as well.

Kida said:
And you can't say that established species differences aren't taken into account when making tags or tagging pictures, since nidoran female and male have their own tags, as do rathian and rathalos.

If you'll notice, nidoran♂ and nidoran♀ don't actually imply male and female, nor should they. The gender tags are applied irrespective of whether it is nidoran♂ or nidoran♀, otherwise an implication would make perfect sense to do.

parasprite said:
I don't usually like to be this blunt, but tagging-wise we got to where we are now literally by ignoring what (any) fans see in favor of a more consistently defined set of physical attributes. It doesn't work perfectly, but it is consistent enough to provide predictable searches.

Keep in mind that the tagging on charrs aren't limited to just people searching specifically for charrs; they will show up in more generic searches like male and female as well.

charr females are still technically females according to the definition of female + flat_chested in the wiki. A lack of breasts does not make one any less female, otherwise feral females wouldn't be tagged as such. The female wiki article even gives some vague leeway to species-appropriate exceptions.

This would also be why I proposed new ways to divvy up the "cuntboy" "gender": "flat-chested_female" and "male_with_pussy", as well as "feminine/masculine_appearance" or masculine/feminine_male/female over in that other thread and a little bit further up in this one as well. Would resolve the whole debate fairly quickly.

Kida said:
The female wiki article even gives some vague leeway to species-appropriate exceptions.

That text is actually written in 2010 and is somewhat outdated (it actually predates the TWYS page [though not the rule itself]), I'm surprised I never actually noticed that was there. :V

Yeah, the gender wikis need a lot of work; howto:tag gender is actually the go to wiki page on this topic and is much more up-to-date.

Kida said:
This would also be why I proposed new ways to divvy up the "cuntboy" "gender": "flat-chested_female" and "male_with_pussy", as well as "feminine/masculine_appearance" or masculine/feminine_male/female over in that other thread and a little bit further up in this one as well. Would resolve the whole debate fairly quickly.

male_with_pussy is something that is likely to get mixed in with both maleherm and male (we don't tag cuntboy as male) and it still wouldn't fix the issue here because many of the charr/sergal/scalie posts here would still fall under male_with_pussy and not be tagged female anyways. The name change is a nice thought, but it wouldn't actually fix the issue here.

masculine/feminine_appearance would be nice in theory (and a little more straightforward than masculine_face or the like), but this would apply to more than just intersex and would be useless for this context.

Also, girly is used to describe feminine males without a pussy.Manly was made to be the female equivalent, but (naturally) it never got used that way.

purple.beastie said:

Another issue, as I understand, is that there's currently no way for a user to prevent canon tags from affecting their wildcard searches. I don't know how difficult it would be for the developers to implement an ignore list of some kind.

We have the blacklist already, but it doesn't work for wildcard searches. Besides implying them all to a master tag as a workaround, I don't think this would be easy to implement on the programming side (though I could be wrong about this).

Mainly I'm just not really convinced that it won't affect or confuse normal TWYS gender tagging (e.g., "They are canon female, why do I have to tag male?").

My initial post has been shown very little feedback or acknowledgement from both admin and users, I'm getting the feeling it has something to do with the lack of a userpic and almost nonexistent profile stats so I guess it's time to change things up.

Clawdragons said:

Back to the topic at hand, though... Honestly, I sort of feel that "cuntboy" is almost indistinguishable from female + flatchested, except in cases were there is dialogue explaining the situation. I think, if anything is causing mistags and violations of TWYS, it is the cuntboy tag, and if we were going to try to do anything to fix this situation, the most reasonable thing to do would be to take a serious look at the cuntboy tag.

Personally I'm a huge fan of the cuntboy tag, but it's hard to deny that there are a lot of images that slip into either category depending on who tags them first. This post for instance was posted recently as female and after thinking "this looks like a borderline case" I followed the source trail to discover the character is identified by its owner as male/cuntboy.
post #700294

A lot of these images slip through the cracks and go unnoticed by dedicated taggers. Which I am hesitant to become due to having seen far too many past arguments on the gender of pictured characters, largely from male heterosexual-identifying users accidentally finding an ambig/girly male attractive. (Instead I just laugh it off when I see obvious scrotum on an allegedly solo female character with nobody complaining) However charr posts are disproportionately noticable due to the big red and purple tags binding them together, so this is currently where all the effort in correcting the cuntboy tag is directed in lieu of the time and energy it would take to comb through the masses of female posts (not all of which are actually tagged flat_chested) to correct other posts one might deem to show a vaguely masculine body type. I'm not going to say that cuntboys are just flat-chested ladies, but rather that there are already far too many arguably-mistagged images to be focussing all the attention on posts of a single species which the wiki and a reasonable portion of the community identify as female. Remind me again why the wiki is external information when from a charr post I can navigate to the charr page faster than I can navigate to any of the pages reminding me of TWYS and gender tagging

Considering one of the arguments at work here is that "female" searchers do not wish to see female charr body types, is anyone actually complaining about the current presence of some of these body types in non-charr posts?

Esme_Belles said:

should this happen it opens the gate way for everyone to tag whatever they know about the character or species. arctica from the front but no pussy visible? auto herm for she's always herm.
its a vast slippery slope that needs to be treaded carefully least we destroy the tagging system in our attempts to please everyone.

I for one am in favour of allowing Admins the last word on species traits as per

parasprite said:

• <insert slippery slope argument here> - Simply put, this isn't something that we would readily extend to other species unless there is a very good reason to do so. However, I know that implementing a guideline like this might cause concern with how gender is tagged elsewhere, possibly leading to more and more "exceptions", which is why I've included it as a talking point.

• Species characteristics would likely need to be specifically sanctioned for use by admins to control the potential for mistagging. Fortunately, there are a limited amount of species that this might affect, and charrs might work well as a trial run to see how well it works in practice.

and potentially drawing a line in the sand when it comes to specific characters rather than a species.
As far as I understand, Artica I am forever torn by my hatred of the mis-term 'artic' and my distaste for incorrectly displayed proper nouns belongs to a species which largely conforms to human structure, and for which hermaphrodism is an abnormal trait. (not that it would be apparent, as these days Artica is easily the poster character for the species regarding furry artwork)

It could also be worth mentioning that Artica has been known to take time off from having a penis, so I don't see it as too much of a stretch to conclude shi could also lose the vagina, though there appear to already be many posts featuring Artica tagged dickgirl with minimal complaints compared with this charr issue, possibly due to the fact that female-configuration herms and dickgirls are both already in the realms of non-standard gender, and are arguably the two non-standard genders that are most easily mixed.

Esme_Belles said:
if we go the fan base route then posts of what appear to be male charr but have fluffy tails will become tagged as herm, because why if it has a fluffy tail then it must also have a pussy even though it is not visible. at second worst it would become a dickgirl, even though this tag requires the anatomical display of breasts.

If we take the route of allowing species-based non-human gender differences to be used when determining gender, it would make sense to enforce tagging dickgirl over herm in the above examples. As for breasts being a prerequisite for the dickgirl tag, I can see MANY breastless ponies under feral dickgirl, and would like to refer to my previous suggestions that charr are removed enough from human gender traits to qualify for feral-like tagging rules.

When it comes to individual characters we can tag as how it appears under new rules and the owner of that individual character can be told to deal with it, as I understand has been done in the past when a character-owner has taken issue when their character's identified gender differs from their physical gender.

For some specific examples I'm going to get lazy and use Parasprite's

post #533512
Following the source trail shows that this character is identified by its owner as male, however the only distinguishable male trait (female face, female horns, female tail, lack of masculine muscle definition) is a penis, and so, female body + male genitalia – female genitalia = dickgirl.

post #673275
Is a rather tricky example, as the image pictures a character displaying one female trait. (male face, arguably ambiguous horns as forward-curving horns are on occasion a female trait, wide male body with heavy muscle definition, male genitalia, apparent female tail)
However, the image is also tagged as charrgen, with the source trail implying a charr+worgen hybrid. This could spark some discussion of its own, as on my own I am unsure whether becoming hybrid with a tailless species is a reasonable explanation for an otherwise entirely out-of-place trait.
My personal opinion is this image should remain male and receive the hybrid tag, with possible exemption from charr rulings due to being a hybrid species.

post #695621
The primary debatable point with this image is the centre charr's torso. Even if new rules are introduced for charr physiology, I can see arguments for the pectoral muscles to be considered a male marker. However apart from the upper chest, the rest of the torso is relatively smooth, which would be more typical of a female specimen than male. Female face, hair, and horns in addition to this would make me comfortable tagging this character as dickgirl, while I would tag the other two as female.

Kida said:

female states that "If a character has only female genitals apparent, or is otherwise in some way visibly female (breasts, lack of mane, et cetera as appropriate to species), it should be tagged as female."

Kida said:

Thing is, charr are a fictional race, more feral than anthro, indicated by their stance and build, and so do not apply to the hip ratio rule. As a species, they have their own unique indicators for male and female

Kida said:
charr females are still technically females according to the definition of female + flat_chested in the wiki. A lack of breasts does not make one any less female, otherwise feral females wouldn't be tagged as such. The female wiki article even gives some vague leeway to species-appropriate exceptions.

And here is where we find my initial argument being almost entirely glossed over again. The entire problem here is that just because charr are well on the way to being anthropomorphic, that the current rules consider them too anthropomorphised for feral tagging exceptions with no middle ground.

I always find it really weird viewing media in which female characters are depicted as more human-like than their male counterparts. A mild example would be Swat Kats, where male characters have distinctive muzzles and (often shown bare) paws for feet, while female characters might as well be anime catgirls and are seen walking around in very narrow high heels more often than not.

A much more extreme (and recent) example is League of Legends, with many typically anthropomorphic male characters available, yet the closest any female character gets is ears, tails, and some facial markings on an otherwise entirely human character.

I realise this is a very long post (it won't even let me preview), and I apologise for any formatting I could have used more efficiently, but I feel all this needed to be said.

Burned myself making tea so unlucky me doesn't get to sleep just yet.

@hatfox my apologies, I was not trying to ignore you. I am for the admins final approval as well... but if you mean on an image basis (and not the discussion here) then it gets... depressing when you have a 50/50 chance to be told to stop or be banned for something that on other posts was agreed with. It becomes confusing and annoying.

As for the artica and the other non charr mentions I made I was using those as an example of what can happen should it get out of hand.
For example when the names loophole was added after mlp fans had fillies over a bunch of posts and such, users did not understand or did not care to fully read the change. Suddenly we had users mis tagging left and right quoting the new rule change.

Changes can be beneficial. But can also do a lot of harm if not done carefully.

I'm all for a new set up to fix this, or an alternative. However! It shouldn't break the system and shouldn't cater to one...section?.. of the user base. It also should be easy to implement and use. We normal users can only search a few tags at any given time unless we have been upgraded to a higher status than "member". So if it's purely tag based it may become more trouble than it's worth...

Anyway it is 2am here. Pain meds are finally kicking in so I will be going offline now for good tonight. Let's see what a new day brings to the discussion.

Hatfox said:
My initial post has been shown very little feedback or acknowledgement from both admin and users

Sorry, I initially wanted to be more hands off with the thread but I ended up joining in later and never got to responding to yours specifically (partially because I didn't have much to add to it).

I do think you have some solid points and some good insight into the situation, particularly with this:

Hatfox said:
the general tendency in popular culture to shift females of an anthropomorphic species closer in general to full anthropomorphism than males.

This is definitely a society-driven feature, but it's really hard to ignore once you realize it. It may or may not help this thread, but I thank you for putting it into words like this.

Hatfox said:
A lot of these images slip through the cracks and go unnoticed by dedicated taggers. Which I am hesitant to become due to having seen far too many past arguments on the gender of pictured characters, largely from male heterosexual-identifying users accidentally finding an ambig/girly male attractive.

I'll admit, I laughed at this.

Hatfox said:
Remind me again why the wiki is external information when from a charr post I can navigate to the charr page faster than I can navigate to any of the pages reminding me of TWYS and gender tagging.

It is and isn't. The wiki is open for anyone to edit as long as that particular page isn't locked (few pages are). I think a little bit of history may put this into context:

Traditionally, it has been used more akin to wikipedia and mostly written by people interested in the subject. The pages end up having a lot of information irrelevant to tagging ("Nintendo was founded in 1889 by so and so...") but have also been used to enforce guidelines for tagging. The issue is that we have had a lot of people editing the wiki in favor of their own ideas about how things should be tagged, sometimes without consulting the forums, admins, or even taking into account how it's currently being tagged.

More recently, the wiki has been getting cleaned up little by little. Outdated information is being pruned, pages are now being condensed/moved/updated long after they have been aliased or their definitions changed, and it has become much closer to a tagging dictionary than e6's furry wikipedia.

A "tagging dictionary" also emphasizes describing current usage over prescribing definitions (though both happen, even for traditional dictionaries). Ideally we can match both together to strengthen the tagging system, but as a freely editable medium we don't take it as an authority, only as a helpful resource for usage.

Put another way, if a user puts something like "pikachu with heart tails should be tagged female" or "my character is a cuntboy" it will have no bearing on what how we actually tag it. It wouldn't count any more or less as external information.

Considering one of the arguments at work here is that "female" searchers do not wish to see female charr body types, is anyone actually complaining about the current presence of some of these body types in non-charr posts?

Not charr specifically, but not having cuntboys tagged as cuntboy bothers people more than most genders on here (for whatever reason).

Hatfox said:
If we take the route of allowing species-based non-human gender differences to be used when determining gender, it would make sense to enforce tagging dickgirl over herm in the above examples. As for breasts being a prerequisite for the dickgirl tag, I can see MANY breastless ponies under feral dickgirl, and would like to refer to my previous suggestions that charr are removed enough from human gender traits to qualify for feral-like tagging rules.

Ferals are definitely a whole separate subject, ponies just happen to have a greater proportion of ferals compared to most furry art (I've actually done my homework on this one :V. I hate sounding like I'm just brushing something under the rug but I think it's better if we leave that for another discussion; I just don't want us to lose sight of the thread is all.

When it comes to individual characters we can tag as how it appears under new rules and the owner of that individual character can be told to deal with it, as I understand has been done in the past when a character-owner has taken issue when their character's identified gender differs from their physical gender.

This is familiar territory and takes up more admin hours than you could imagine.

Hatfox said:
For some specific examples I'm going to get lazy and use Parasprite's

I'm going to be kind of lazy here and just refer to them by number (except the last, which I find worth highlighting).

The first I think probably fits better under male than dickgirl, but it's a pretty ambiguous build, being somewhat more chibi (for lack of a better word) compared to other charrs on here, which doesn't help much.

The second I agree with. The species-specific traits are probably a little muddled due to the hybrid features, but overall the build is far too masculine to fit within dickgirl.

post #695621

The third one I wanted to specifically highlight. When looking for the examples in the OP I couldn't help but think "the middle character here is a fantastic example of a (canon) dickgirl charr". Given that the other traits are consistent across posts (which they seem to be), I find that this might actually fit well enough within dickgirl to be tagged that way. Disclaimer: Do not mistake this for an admin ruling. This is only meant to be a talking point, nothing more.

Hatfox said:
And here is where we find my initial argument being almost entirely glossed over again. The entire problem here is that just because charr are well on the way to being anthropomorphic, that the current rules consider them too anthropomorphised for feral tagging exceptions with no middle ground.

They haven't been addressed specifically, if that is what you mean.

I realise this is a very long post (it won't even let me preview), and I apologise for any formatting I could have used more efficiently, but I feel all this needed to be said.

Notice how I split the OP into a few chunks? This is pretty much what prompted me to do that. We really need to scrap that preview button and start over. There's really no good reason that it should have to contact the server. :V

parasprite said:
They haven't been addressed specifically, if that is what you mean.

I feel like this is a way forward. If I'm going to aim for another on-site example and call out housepets!

We have a popular piece of media in which a female main character, grape_jelly_(housepets!), did not experience significant design evolution as the artist began adding more feminine human traits to later-introduced anthropomorphic characters.

My point being that (to my knowledge) there is no rule exception here as these characters are not feral[/b], yet the following posts are all tagged female with no tagging disputes.post #550136 post #541367 post #446373 post #100359
post #109199 post #118626 post #116050 post #112042
post #183340I do not believe this is supported by TWYS in its current form, and I cannot easily find any record of a ruling being made regarding this series or character. So we have a case of a popular anthropomorphic character without glaringly obvious human gender traits who is consistently tagged female without opposition.

Esme_Belles said:
mlp fans had fillies over a bunch of posts

I just went looking for what happened there for the first time. By that point I was avoiding female MLP posts, so I didn't catch the drama.
Wow.

Esme_Belles said:
Changes can be beneficial. But can also do a lot of harm if not done carefully.

I'm all for a new set up to fix this, or an alternative. However! It shouldn't break the system and shouldn't cater to one...section?.. of the user base. It also should be easy to implement and use. We normal users can only search a few tags at any given time unless we have been upgraded to a higher status than "member". So if it's purely tag based it may become more trouble than it's worth...

I'm almost scared to ask what might happen in a worst case scenario if the previous TWYS exception was so disastrous. Best case scenario, flat chested females get tagged flat_chested female, and cuntboys get tagged cuntboy, but I'm willing to admit that being the internet, it's possible it could somehow turn into a major shitstorm.

I mean, even my own examples are starting to come from outside the scope of the fixes I desire (as Grape from Housepets! is not a species), which begs the question of whether to extend the proposed non-human sexual characteristics clause further than just specific species (in which case how the hell do you decide whether something should have human characteristics or not without everything going back to being a case-by-case basis), or to just leave part of this hole open. Though I can't help but wonder how much more than this other popular individual characters already get away with which charr do not as their posts tend to be of many different characters.

I'm with you on tag-based fixes though. If that's the end result of this I'm just going to start running a separate search for charr by itself when I'm browsing so I don't miss anything that gets mistagged.

Typically when posts that should have been tagged one way are not retagged it is due to either those of us who consistently tag posts have either avoided, is too much trouble to fix (like the charr), missed due to blacklisting, or don't know any better. I typically don't tag female posts that have been misstagged the same goes for posts that should have been tagged other ways. Including but not limited to cuntboys. The charr I tend to target because no on else wants to bother with the massive pain of duking it out with other users. I also used to untag posts with gay where it doesn't apply. (still do though thanks to the m/m change its better)
Herm posts which cleared up as others took up slack during my bouts of illness. And dickgirls.
I am stubborn and bossy, a bad combination to be sure as it has gotten me in trouble in the past but it works as well because I hunt down these....anomalies, these breaks... with a ruthlessness bordering on obsession. Where others shrug and give up I bite down and rip it to pieces, lol.

Anyway back on topic.
Don't mind me pain meds cause me to ramble.

So, we agree that we have large-scale TWYS violations untouched for reasons including but not limited to popularity and source material, with multiple cases involving deviance from traditional human features. With charr simply being an easy discussion-starter due to canon female features bearing a resemblance to some masculine body types in humans.

Charr aren't even the most ambiguous Guild Wars race posted here. The following two recent asura posts are currently tagged male/male (as they are on their source page) which, as one familiar with Guild Wars races, confused the hell out of me because of the feminine hairstyle on a girly face with the only other real gender indicator being about a 1/4 of what could be a scrotum visible in one image.

post #701156 post #701157

Regardless of the hole in TWYS which non-human-configured posts fall through, we currently have a double standard where we say that popularity isn't an excuse for TWYS deviation, but ignore other deviations which are too popular[/i] to enforce without massive backlash. In addition, there are species and characters with popularity low enough to fly under the radar, such as Snowskau's tetton.As for rule amendments, would the previous TWYS exception have passed if not for the popularity of a single television series?

POW!
Posted and tagged female by an admin, likely just because the entire species looks feminine by default
post #701764

There isn't even a source link to back this one up.

this thread is full of people using common mistaggings as proof why tagging genders based on external knowledge is allowed.................

Man I wonder if someone from ArenaNet will ever find this thread LOL

More that the current rules are widely deviated from already or one would not be able to call them "common mistaggings" for various reasons and personal or popular opinions. Also less "why tagging genders based on external knowledge is allowed" than why tagging gender based on human traits doesn't work when human traits stop being relevant. As the rules already recognise in the case of ferals.

Grape Jelly would fall into ambiguous_gender in most of those examples, yet due to source popularity is seen as female.

The asura pics should probably go male/ambiguous, but they have been tagged male/male due to the poster's knowledge of source content, and outside of this thread will likely remain unnoticed due to relative obscurity.

The braixen is a great example of the grey area between what we define as "feral" and when anthropomorphism switches out animalistic features for human ones. To my knowledge there are no canon gender differences for braixen, but they're too anthropomorphised for feral tagging and by human standards they lean toward a female appearance, so TWYSers will determine feminine features, and ambiguous posts such as this will be tagged closer to female.

This is relevant to the thread as charr are an example of a race designed without entirely human features in mind, but instead canon females lean closer to an untoned male human body type. Draw a vagina on the braixen and it'll stick to female for the rest of this site's lifetime. With the exception of current tags due to someone retagging before an official decision had been made, similar images of charr have been flipped from ambiguous to cuntboy as soon as genitalia is shown.

Back to the braixen example, slap a pair of balls on that behind and you've got yourself a male tag, and for the sake of the argument we'll throw in "girly". But an admin themselves has determined that without genitalia or even external information this is reasonably identifiable as female, so why male+girly and not dickgirl when if we swap the body-type perception and genitalia we get cuntboy and not female+masculine?

Hatfox said:
by human standards they lean toward a female appearance, so TWYSers will determine feminine features, and ambiguous posts such as this will be tagged closer to female.

We go by human traits because we are humans, and as humans we find these traits the most intuitive to understand. In case of the lack of any human-like features we mostly tend to fall back on genitals or ambiguous out of convenience, to keep things consistent, and help ensure that searches are relatively predictable.

I don't generally support species-specific tagging because tends to be complicated and breaks the mentality of TWYS, which is both to focus on the art itself (Tag What You See) and to keep tagging simple and easy for others to understand (Not What You Know).

That being said, as much as I enjoy discussing ferals and other species, I'd appreciate if we could keep the main part of the discussion focussed on charrs, else we might lose sight of what this thread is about.

I think I'm just about done.

All I can really add is that I'm not sure how much can be solved without closing up some of the larger issues. This said, I would to see some degree of change from the way charr have previously been tagged.

Other than charr and maybe tetton, though they're few and far between I'm really too much of a casual user to mind the way things are tagged for the most part. I'm just a sucker for following my train of thought to the end of the line.

Time to bring unsexy back.
Someone just argued with me over a charr gender war that I was engaged in when this thread started.
I have yet to see a conclusion...

Sorry admin but I'm bringing this back up...please don't make me attempt to force a conclusion, I know that will only end in me getting the hammer. But I'm not gonna sit around and have people telling me I'm an idiot "because, fluffy tails" when the tags are in mid coin flip... at the moment both of us are correct and neither will give ground.
If I get a decision then I can either tag them or retreat.

If there WAS a conclusion and I missed a notification or something post here so we can be done an over with this b.s.

I apologize for the lack of updates on this one, but some real life stuff came up and I haven't had a chance to get everything organized. I'll be addressing this and the related gender wikis first thing tomorrow.

Oh, sure, you bring up the odd sexual dimorphism of charrs, but sexual dimorphism for pokemon isn't the same.

Sometimes, I worry about you because of things like this. You might have a stress-related psychological problem that needs to be addressed. (I'm half-serious, btw)

ShylokVakarian said:
Oh, sure, you bring up the odd sexual dimorphism of charrs, but sexual dimorphism for pokemon isn't the same.

It really isn't, unless you're talking about anthro pokemon. We're all human here. Anyone reasonable would consider human sexual dimorphism > fictional animal sexual dimorphism when it comes to determining gender.

As long as this doesn't end with charr females being incorrectly tagged as cuntboys, I think we'll all be fine. Nobody has complained about charr females looking like cuntboys (except Esme despite them not even being interested in the species to begin with), while COUNTLESS members have expressed that they want them correctly tagged as females. Artists have even been offended and requested takedowns of art because it was tagged incorrectly. We really want to piss off artists and lose great content over that?

Also, if I'm looking for female charr, I'm going to search for female charr, as will anybody else who wants to see lady charrs.

If someone doesn't like how female charr look because they look like cuntboys, they blacklist "female charr" with "-breasts" to see the one that have actual breasts. Done, simple, over with.

parasprite said:

Options:

These are just some of my thoughts on where we might be able to go with this. Feel free to suggest changes to these or even suggest a completely different plan altogether.

Option 1: Informal guidelines (little to no change)

Tag the more masculine female charr as cuntboy, others as female, and so on.

This isn't a change exactly but in this option we might instead set specific guidelines for how charr would be tagged, including a general rule about when ambiguous_gender should be tagged. Obvious species-specific characteristics may be mentioned but not relied on for actual tagging.

Benefits:

• Follows closely with our current guidelines about gender tags.
• Besides actually writing the guidelines, this requires the least amount of change to actually implement.

Drawbacks:

• Nothing much is changed, so the problems of tag warring will likely still exist. The difference is that we would be attempting to put a plan in place for when tagging issues do occur.
• Wouldn't do much to help the predictability of searching charrs.

Option 2: Partial "exception"

Give more leeway to tagging female charr as female. That is, we may allow some canon characteristics to influence tagging charr as long as they are still within the realm of TWYS. This is all under the assumption that the physical appearance of a character doesn't outwardly conflict with their canon gender (e.g., a very masculine female charr with a pussy would still get cuntboy, but a more ambiguous one might have more leeway than before to be tagged as female).

This is a pretty bold proposal, and I know it may not be very well received, but I think it might be a workable compromise that is worth exploring.

Benefits:

• Charr gender tagging would be more consistent and predictable.
• Potentially a handful of other species could be treated this way, for example:
• Real species: Lion males with large manes, peafowl coloring differences, some characteristics specific to ferals (namely the lack of breasts), scalies without breasts (the more ambiguous ones).
• A select few imagined species that are well-known and have consistent characteristics, which we might partially honor, such as sergals.
• What this would not cover: Minor characteristics being the difference in gender, such as "males have a forked tail, females have a spade tail" when they otherwise look the same. In other words "female charr have a fluffy tail" is not enough to tag them as female by itself, but it might give slightly more weight when it is seen with other characteristics than it is currently.

Drawbacks:

• <insert slippery slope argument here> - Simply put, this isn't something that we would readily extend to other species unless there is a very good reason to do so. However, I know that implementing a guideline like this might cause concern with how gender is tagged elsewhere, possibly leading to more and more "exceptions", which is why I've included it as a talking point.
• Uses some outside information (canon knowledge), even if it is limited to very specific characteristics, and only in certain circumstances.
• May be a fairly drastic change, requiring more careful planning than the other options.
• Species characteristics would likely need to be specifically sanctioned for use by admins to control the potential for mistagging. Fortunately, there are a limited amount of species that this might affect, and charrs might work well as a trial run to see how well it works in practice.

Option 3: New tags

Add new tags for charr_(female) and charr_(male), similar to nidoran♂ and nidoran♀. This would not influence normal gender tagging guidelines whatsoever (i.e., charr_(female) could still be tagged male, cuntboy, etc.).

I added this as my "crazy idea" option because I thought it might be worth bringing up as a possibility, even if I think there is probably little we can do to offset the drawbacks on this one, and it probably wouldn't work that well in practice.

Benefits:

• Simple and elegant in theory, at least possibly for this one case.
• You can still (for example) blacklist cuntboy with an exception for charr_(female).
• Besides the temporary confusion, this option is fairly simple to reverse if problems arise (i.e., we can just alias the new tags to charr and there's little to no cleanup needed after that).

Drawbacks:

• Likely to be confused TWYS gender.
• Likely to cause people to start trying to tag genders of other species this way (e.g., horse_(female) or lemur_(dickgirl)) which we want to avoid since that is not what the suffix is meant to convey.
• charr_(male) would likely be undertagged compared to charr_(female).

I'm preferential to option 2. I feel that Charr are enough of a heavily canonized, extremely well-recognized species that it should just be assumed that the end-user at least has a basic understanding of what a Charr is (Steam did a poll back about 2 years ago and found that 60% of all Steam users played GW at one point, and it has been the second or third most popular MOBA/MMO games of all time at several different points with >10 million players).

They're simply SO recognizable that TWYS is a disservice in this specific case. It would be akin to someone going through and tagging every single feral wolf that doesn't have visible genitals with "cuntboy" simply because it doesn't have a visible penis, but also doesn't have breasts. It doesn't take into consideration perspective (in which case ambiguous_gender would be the appropriate tag outside of some very blatant context clues) or artistic license for the sake of a "clean" pic (simply genital omission for the sake of art). By the current tagging standards, you could not say that person was incorrect (just an ass).

ShylokVakarian said:
Oh, sure, you bring up the odd sexual dimorphism of charrs, but sexual dimorphism for pokemon isn't the same.

Sometimes, I worry about you because of things like this. You might have a stress-related psychological problem that needs to be addressed. (I'm half-serious, btw)

Beanjam said:
It really isn't, unless you're talking about anthro pokemon. We're all human here. Anyone reasonable would consider human sexual dimorphism > fictional animal sexual dimorphism when it comes to determining gender.

bring it to the sexual dimorphism thread please, this is about charr.

Esme_Belles said:
bring it to the sexual dimorphism thread please, this is about charr.

Don't be a butt, you know perfectly well that that thread didn't exist when either of us posted.

Alright here's the scoop.

1. Breasts will be de-emphisized for tagging gender with charrs, and treated more akin to ferals in that respect. However, since they are almost all anthro, human characteristics will still have the greatest influence here.

2. By themselves, minor characteristics like "fluffy tails" and horn shape are not enough to indicate gender and can easily be overridden by body type and genitals. However, canon characteristics may influence gender tagging as part of the overall picture.

For instance:

• An ambiguous/feminine body type with canon female charr characteristics may be tagged female.
• An obviously masculine body type with canon female charr characteristics may still get tagged male or cuntboy (if a pussy is present).
• Mixed masculine/feminine characteristics need be handled on a case-by-case basis as before.

As a general rule, safe posts will have more leeway with this than explicit, but TWYS rules still need to be followed.

3. A general reminder. Cuntboy doesn't just mean "flat chested female". Cuntboy requires both a masculine body type and a pussy in order to tag it.

4. Since there was a great deal of confusion over how this should be handled, no records will be given for the recent tag wars. Records will still be given if/when new tag wars arise.

5. Going forward, all tag wars should be reported so that they can be handled by an admin. This is something that should be done before you get involved, not after.

I've already started work on manually tagging the images to reflect these guidelines and leaving comments where I can, but I still have a lot to go through (which will be finished within a day or two).

If you need or have questions about an admin ruling, feel free to PM myself or one of the other mods.

Beanjam said:
Don't be a butt, you know perfectly well that that thread didn't exist when either of us posted.

its actually been there for awhile..if it wasnt then i apologize, my migraines trip me up often enough that its really embarrassing....