The muscles tag has bloated beyond all reason. Where it used to represent characters who were blatantly (often somewhat ridiculously) muscular, it has become used on every picture that has visible muscles. Simple visual musculature (and characters who just happened to be athletic) was originally the job of the toned tag, which has languished.

This can't even be blamed on the wiki entries. They're perfectly appropriate to the jobs the tags used to perform.

Since the problem wasn't caught sooner, fixing the muscles tag would be a huge project now. It clearly benefits from significant bad tagging momentum. What should be done?

I have recently "fixed" the toned tag.
I do have my blacklist, so there are some that I definitely have missed, but from the ones that I can see it has gone from about 20 pages to about 10, or something like that.

Although yes, the muscles tag is redonk. I can't really argue for what it should be since I'm not the one who searches for it to begin with :3

There are tags like hyper that covers some parts of the muscles tag, but I don't know how far one goes into the other or if they are becoming synonymous.

I seem to remember us having a discussion here on the forum about this not that long ago...

What's the exact difference between toned and muscular and where does slim fit in if it should be used at all?
How about posting some noticeable examples?

How about making the gradient even finer and add "hyper_musculature" since "hyper" itself doesn't imply extreme musculature, it's enough if there is a "hyper_penis" or other hyper genitalia for the image to be "hyper".

I think in case of doubt it's better to have one more tag, than one less. I'd rather look at one more image I don't like when doing a specific search than missing one I like.

And then I saw that lean is aliased to leaning and I cried.

Der_Traubenfuchs said:
What's the exact difference between toned and muscular and where does slim fit in if it should be used at all?
How about posting some noticeable examples?

Slim seems pretty much synonymous with toned.
Toned implies musculature that is visible, without necessarily being the focus of the image... we had a pretty good definition of it in the last thread, I think...

The last thing said was "A character that would be seen as muscular IRL should be tagged muscles. If otherwise fit but not bulky, tag toned"

Toned:
post #277660

Borderline to muscles:
post #275469

Definitely muscles:
post #294468

Maybe slim could be used to describe the ones that aren't necessarily muscular but still thin?

Couldn't find anything like that, but this was as close as I got...

slim:
post #34558

EDIT: Here's the last thread, if someone's interested in reading what has been said about it already.
The focus is a bit different though.
http://e621.net/forum/show/56143

@Kimpumomo:

sorry, but in what way is the second picture borderline muscles, and the 3rd definitely muscles?

If anything, the 2nd picture is definitely muscles and the third is huge_muscles/hypermuscles.

KiwiPotato said:
@Kimpumomo:

sorry, but in what way is the second picture borderline muscles, and the 3rd definitely muscles?

If anything, the 2nd picture is definitely muscles and the third is huge_muscles/hypermuscles.

"...the overall topology of their body is still relatively smooth and within "normal" proportions"
I'd say that that picture shows a character that is borderline "within "normal" proportions".

As I wrote in the other thread, my view on this is a bit skewed and I know this, but I won't remove the tag from every picture that has above average muscle mass.

As Der_Traubenfuchs said:

Der_Traubenfuchs said:
I'd rather look at one more image I don't like when doing a specific search than missing one I like.

Again, this is just my view on things and the way I've gone about tag cleaning.

Using toned in this manner is obviously not very intuitive for anyone. I propose that toned be removed from its position as an identifier in the spectrum of different sized muscles, and muscles' sizes be tagged in the same way as those of breasts and penises.

Any visible muscles should be tagged with muscles, and all of the following should imply it.

• small_muscles for the sizes of muscles you might find on an obviously below-averagedly muscled human
• big_muscles for the sizes of muscles you might find on an average to above-average human bodybuilder
• huge_muscles for the sizes of muscles you would only find on a human who has obviously had extensive help from steroids
• hyper_muscles for the sizes of muscles larger than those you would ever find on a human no matter what

Again, as with sizes of breasts and penises, all of the above should be relative to size of the frame of the character the muscles are attached to.

MaShCr said:
words

The only problem I have is the wording "obviously below-averagedly muscled human"

In my view, an "obviously below-averagedly muscled human" has no visible muscles :P and the average is what we now have as toned.

Even though I agree that this system would be more intuitive, the job of tagging all these is going to be a pain... T_T

I would even go as far as removing muscles and using just the system just proposed. :3

I have got it now, listen guys:

(lean for, well, lean furrys, is it necessary?)
muscles aliased to -> visible_muscles
big_muscles implicates -> visible_muscles
huge_muscles implicates -> big_muscles
hyper_muscles implicates -> huge_muscles

Visible_muscles makes more sense than "muscles" and clearly defines what it's all about.
Small_muscles seems to be useless. Instead of small_muscles just don't use the muscles/visible_muscles tag.

And abandon the underused and badly defined "toned".

Responsible admins, listen to our plight and give us salvation. With a few people we should be able to fix this in no time!
Due to my slightly changing preferences regarding my furry men, I would definitely use this tags a lot.

What is inadequate about the existing tags muscles and toned exactly?

Kimpumomo said:
The only problem I have is the wording "obviously below-averagedly muscled human"

In my view, an "obviously below-averagedly muscled human" has no visible muscles :P and the average is what we now have as toned.

Yea, the one thing that makes muscles unique is that when they're small, that usually means they're not visible. We could probably do away with small_muscles on this reasoning.

Der_Traubenfuchs said:
Redundant prefixes and crazy implication chains

In all honesty most of that sounds like a terrible idea. Sorry.

null0010 said:
What is inadequate about the existing tags muscles and toned exactly?

They're too similar and their proper use as it currently stands isn't obvious to the average searcher/tagger.

How about wiry and muscular instead?

wiry makes me think of males, rather than all genders. other than that wiry could be a suitable replacement for toned.

null0010 said:
How about wiry and muscular instead?

We're not talking about body types here, just the sizes of muscles themselves. That's not to say we couldn't also standardize body types (wiry, muscular, fat, skinny, etc.), just that it's not the intended topic here and may warrant its own thread.