There's a lot of confusion in the names of fantastic creature names, both on this site and in popular culture. Since "lamia" and "naga" are both used to describe the same creature (snake taur), but have been changed on this site to describe different entities, I feel an executive decision should be made regarding other mythological monsters:

A goat/human hybrid is called both a "faun" and a "satyr". Satyrs were originally horse-like nature spirits in ancient Greek myths, but the Romans conflated them with their own nature spirits, the goat-like fauns. Faun has also been suggested as a term for cervine hybrids.
post #1636345 post #1326623 post #1572785 post #874067 post #66100 post #66099

"Siren" is used to describe merfolk and various avian creatures. They were originally portrayed as birds with human heads, then as harpy-like bird humanoids, then as mermaids. Many of the current tagged images are unrelated to any myth, instead depicting a monstrous humanoid race made by modeseven.
post #1349048 post #95370 post #403427 post #152160 post #1026748

Spidertaur's wiki page claims it is the more feral version of the more humanoid drider. However, they are tagged interchangeably, without noticeable differences between them. Driders originate from Dungeons & Dragons, while spidertaur as a name has little to no usage in fiction.
post #1012476 post #1554475 post #1369369 post #287236 post #756519 post #567730

and naga aren't the same, one is non-snake upper body with snake tail and one is anthro snake upper body with snake tail. They're also not quite taur, taur is when the torso of a humanoid or anthro is put where the head of a feral animal ought to go, where as with naga and lamia they're more combined at the mid-section of both the humanoid and the snake.
Or to say it more simply naga and lamia are "50/50" and taurs are more like "50/90".

I believe that lamia and naga are both considered split_form along with merfolk and the suchlike. But that tag is relatively new and hasn't found much usage.
In the wiki definition it also seems to include taur, which I'm not really sure if it should. But I'm kind of digressing, here.

On the topic of driders and spidertaurs the topic has come up before, about a year ago, seems like people wanted the tags to get aliased together but that never really seemed to go anywhere, no alias request was ever filed. I'd probably be for aliasing the two tags together as well.

Yeah, some of those are obviously different if you check the wiki. Out of those, siren is the one tag that hasn't been cleaned yet. And the usage of faun \ satyr was an admin decision, so I'm not touching that.

The spidertaur edit seems to have slipped past the radar without anyone noticing. It's too specific, the first sentence is correct but the second isn't. Drider is just a subtag of spidertaur, like drow is to elf.

darryus said:
I believe that lamia and naga are both considered split_form along with merfolk and the suchlike.

Lamia definitely, but I'm not sure about naga. Since both halves are 'snake', same species, the upper half is just more anthrofied. Which is not quite what split_form was made for.

Genjar said:
Lamia definitely, but I'm not sure about naga. Since both halves are 'snake', same species, the upper half is just more anthrofied. Which is not quite what split_form was made for.

But they're still split form, like, the upper half of it is anthro from and the lower half is feral form.
Ehh... I don't know. Maybe it shouldn't include naga I'm not really sure, I know the wiki says "species" but that wiki page was written by a guy who had like a hundred something tags at the time it was written.

:\ :/

darryus said:
But they're still split form, like, the upper half of it is anthro from and the lower half is feral form.

Okay, that's a good point. Though tagging it for both does it make it less useful for searches.

Maybe we should've made two tags instead: split_species (e.g. half-fish/half-human, etc) and split_form (e.g. half-anthro/half-feral, etc). Hm.

Genjar said:
And the usage of faun \ satyr was an admin decision, so I'm not touching that.

What was the decision? faun was aliased to satyr until very recently, and I haven't seen any recent announcements about it.

darryus said:
Lamia and naga aren't the same, one is non-snake upper body with snake tail and one is anthro snake upper body with snake tail.

I don't mean they're the same, just that that the terms are used interchangeably in many places. What this site calls a lamia is called a naga on other websites.

klorpa said:
What was the decision? faun was aliased to satyr until very recently, and I haven't seen any recent announcements about it.

They're unaliased now? Something must have changed then, but I have no idea how they're supposed to be tagged. For a while it was used as a form tag instead of species: any creature with humanoid upper half and hoofed lower half was to be tagged as a 'satyr' regardless of if the lower half is goat or deer, or even a sheep or....

I don't mean they're the same, just that that the terms are used interchangeably in many places. What this site calls a lamia is called a naga on other websites.

Yep, those are used inconsistently everywhere. But here we use them by our wiki definitions. And surprisingly, it has worked well. I expected that they'd require far more clean-up in the long run, but was wrong about that.

Genjar said:
They're unaliased now? Something must have changed then, but I have no idea how they're supposed to be tagged.

Neither do we. We unaliased it a few weeks ago after deciding that satyr and faun should probably be different things, however, none of us were quite able to define what those things were at the time. We agreed that the original alias had happened a bit too quickly.

Honestly, I'd meant to start a thread about it, but I am so busy right now it's ridiculous :C

Okay, so I've been typing for a while and I feel like if I post what I have here, I'm gonna totally derail the mythological critter conversation which SHOULD TOTALLY HAPPEN :D

So! forum #263478

tl;dr - satyrs were horses, fauns were goats, deer are recent inventions. Because of this, no matter what is chosen, it'll be wrong, so best to discuss this a bit more carefuly. I have a few ideas, and a nervous breakdown.

I will comment on the other topics here in a moment, I"m just terrified my computer is gonna crash, and wanna get this posted.

klorpa said:
"Siren" is used to describe merfolk and various avian creatures. They were originally portrayed as birds with human heads, then as harpy-like bird humanoids, then as mermaids. Many of the current tagged images are unrelated to any myth, instead depicting a monstrous humanoid race made by modeseven.

the modeseven stuff should be tagged as their own species. Nope.

AS for sirens... as you say, they were birds with woman's heads in early greek art, later, females, with bird legs, while a bysantine encyclopedia said tht they were either women with bird heads from the best up--or the exact opposite.

So... post #220915 post #1234878 are close to a traditional siren.

Around the 4th century, Christianity did its thing and sirens were instead used as an allegory for 'worldly tempations" and prostitutes, rather than.. y'know... mythology.

I'm not really sure when sirens started being depicted as merfolk, but it was a few centuries ago.

Merfolk hve been in many cultures aroudn the world and can be anythign from benevolent or violent.

Interestingly, a greek legent has Alexander the Great's sister Thessalonike being turned into a mermaid after her death. Sge would ask sailors on ships if King Alexander was alive, and if you gave the incorrect answer, she'd become enraged and destroy everyone on board with a terrible storm. (this is interesting because there are several modern ghost stories, asially out of asia, where a ghost asks you a question, and the wrong answer will cause you a lot of trouble, like death.)

Harpies, anyway, were also a lot liek sirens, only they didn't sing and were more active-- hunting rather than luring pray in etc.

and I could prattle on about mermaids and myth and lore for HOURS, but.

in our modern society, we know mermaids as mermaids, and that sirens are kind of like fish, and the bird things are all harpies.

So, we should probably tag kinda like that. I hesitate to suggesst that siren should be disambiguated, but that might be best.

Spidertaur's wiki page claims it is the more feral version of the more humanoid drider. However, they are tagged interchangeably, without noticeable differences between them. Driders originate from Dungeons & Dragons, while spidertaur as a name has little to no usage in fiction.
post #1012476 post #1554475 post #1369369 post #287236 post #756519 post #567730

Most spider taurs are inspired via dnd and aren't really a mythologial anything.

Mostly, they're just a taur

Genjar said:
Maybe we should've made two tags instead: split_species (e.g. half-fish/half-human, etc) and split_form (e.g. half-anthro/half-feral, etc). Hm.

Not too late to change :D

I kinda like like that.

requires more thought.

I'm all out of thought.

Apparently, the Greeks at some point believed in bull satyrs too. Romans seem to have fixed it to goat characteristics, and introduced the female of the species. But the common point between all of them (except for all-human satyrs at some point which, come on, what's the point?) is that their bodies are half-human and half-animal, which isn't necessarily the same thing as a hybrid. I say, make faun and satyr aliased and apply to any creature with their upper half human and lower half a hooved animal, and count as humanoid, possibly as hybrid if you so fancy. Full-body hooved creatures, now back in popularity thanks to Elora's redesign it seems, appear to be wholly a modern invention and should be just hybrid anthros. It's like the difference between lamias and nagas.

As for the sirens, I'd say disambiguate that term between harpies, to cover the usual human-bird monsters of various configurations, and merfolk, which also have their own variations.

I'd say driders should be kept to D&D-related material, as they failed to "hit the mainstream", as it were. Leave it as a niche tag, since they have little D&D art, but implying spidertaur. Everything else goes to spidertaur only.

Genjar said:
Okay, that's a good point. Though tagging it for both does it make it less useful for searches.

Maybe we should've made two tags instead: split_species (e.g. half-fish/half-human, etc) and split_form (e.g. half-anthro/half-feral, etc). Hm.

Isn't chimera kind of already a tag for "split_species"?

darryus said:
Isn't chimera kind of already a tag for "split_species"?

Not realy, chimera is for characters with clearly defined traits specific to any number of recognizable species. split_species would generally be restricted to 2 species, traits also would be defined in such away that it would basicly appaers as halves of 2 bodies tacked together rather than a random patchwork of traits...a more discreet mixing of traits from the 2 species on the other hand may be considered hybrid.

As far as "sirens" go, from a tagging standpoint I would not really consider it a proper species at this point but rather a descriptive term similar to cannibal or vegaterian. The only unifying factor thru out history has been in the way they hunt there prey. Sirens generally are depicted as one and the same to mermaids in most mainstream media...

OneMoreAnonymous said:
I'd say driders should be kept to D&D-related material, as they failed to "hit the mainstream", as it were. Leave it as a niche tag, since they have little D&D art, but implying spidertaur. Everything else goes to spidertaur only.

I can agree with drider being a spidertaur with a drow torso, just as a centaur is a equine_taur with a human torso.

The arachne tag is used to describe spidertaur creatures, and should probably just be aliased to said tag.
post #38153 post #16241 post #655816 post #1136312

Yep. The name is even short for drow spider, so it wouldn't make much sense to use it for generic spidertaurs.

Implicate drider -> spidertaur, and it should be fine. Alternately, alias drider -> spidertaur and make a new drider_(d&d) subtag?

Though I'm not sure what to do about this subtype:
post #703280

Fully humanoid body with extra spider parts. Significantly different from standard spidertaur. Is spider humanoid a better fit for those than spidertaur?

Genjar said:
Yep. The name is even short for drow spider, so it wouldn't make much sense to use it for generic spidertaurs.

Implicate drider -> spidertaur, and it should be fine. Alternately, alias drider -> spidertaur and make a new drider_(d&d) subtag?

Though I'm not sure what to do about this subtype:
post #703280

Fully humanoid body with extra spider parts. Significantly different from standard spidertaur. Is spider humanoid a better fit for those than spidertaur?

*squints* this might be a place for unusual_form? For all that that tag is used.

Otherwise... spiderhumanoid seems befitting to me

I find myself wondering the same things about post #1428037