Topic: ambiguous_gender tags on Pokemon

Posted under General

So, there are declared visual differences between male and female Pokemon for some species, as an example:
Male Pikachu has a flat ended tail
http://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/b/b2/Spr_5b_025_m.png
Female Pikachu has a forked tail end
http://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/6/6e/Spr_5b_025_f.png

Is this sufficient to change an otherwise ambiguous gender tag, to a specified gender tag?
I don't mean it to override obvious gender hints, i.e. breasts, penis etc.
But in the case where there's no other given information to determine gender would it be sufficient?
Or would it fall under "outside information"?

Edit: Whoops, should have been in the tags forum. My bad.

Updated by Foobaria

http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_by_gender_ratio

Look for: Biology > Gender differences

I agree that some pokemon have gender via small details and whatnot.

Hammie said:Pokemon for some species, as an example:
Female Pikachu has a forked tail end
http://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/6/6e/Spr_5b_025_f.png

Gender differences
A female Pikachu has a v-shaped "dent" at the end of its tail. Male Pikachu do not have this dent. In Black and White, male Pikachu have less black covering their ear, though this is only shown in frontal sprites.

Updated by anonymous

furballs_dc said:
But it requires outside info. Not sure this would work.

Knowledge of the difference between male and female genders is automatically outside knowledge.

I suppose the appropriate comparative question is in a real life situation, if an animal was easily determined as male vs. female without looking at genitals, i.e. horns on a bull, would we tag it as ambiguous or with a gender?

Updated by anonymous

Char

Former Staff

I think the problem with this is that people aren't necessarily going to stick to what's "canon" when it comes to official character designs. Example: I have seen a million and a half pictures of female pikachus that didn't have the forked tip on their tail; their gender was defined using some other method (long eyelashes, smoother fur, higher cheekbones, wider hips, paler/pastel coloring, etc).

If we allowed gender tagging based on traits particular to certain species, then we set a precedent for doing the same for character owners. For instance, a character owner could say that the only time their character is female is when their fur color pattern is reversed, and that they're male any time their fur color pattern is normal. However, we would NOT deem this as valid information when actually tagging the posts on e621, since we're then once again relying on outside information to figure out what gender something is supposed to be.

If we were talking like, photos of actual animals, then I could probably lean the other way on this. But artwork tends to not really care too much about reality or what's canon.

Updated by anonymous

Yeah, not only had I never heard of that tail thing before, I'd never even noticed the difference. (Then again, I'm unobservant as a rule.)

Updated by anonymous

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