I'm not sure where to post this, but I'm super confused.

According to the TWYS policy, the only time you should tag with knowledge gained outside of the picture is regarding character names. That's fine, I get that. But why is it that pictures of Digby and Isabelle (two sibling characters from Animal Crossing) are labeled as "incest"? There is no way to judge this within the picture itself, and the fact they're related is outside knowledge.

Even more confusing, I've seen pictures of Digby by himself that are tagged as 'Ambiguous Gender', even though they are part of a series in which Digby is male - one picture in this series is the same level of 'ambiguous' as the other two, yet is able to be tagged as 'Male'.

So, what is it: can we use outside context when tagging pictures or can't we? What dictates when we can and when we can't, especially when the example above with the Digby set is inconsistent?

There is a tag for incest_(lore) but incest seems to exist separately? I guess those images just need to be changed over manually; if they're separate tags then the non-lore form is meant for images where they look related.

laikthechu said:
I'm not sure where to post this, but I'm super confused.

According to the TWYS policy, the only time you should tag with knowledge gained outside of the picture is regarding character names. That's fine, I get that. But why is it that pictures of Digby and Isabelle (two sibling characters from Animal Crossing) are labeled as "incest"? There is no way to judge this within the picture itself, and the fact they're related is outside knowledge.

Incest is one of the rare exceptions to the full TWYS policy, because frankly, in the majority of cases, there are few to no physical traits that can be used to visibly confirm relatedness. If incest were held up to the full standards of TWYS, it would suddenly become virtually non-existant, which would be problematic to the current tagging system in a lot of ways.

laikthechu said:
Even more confusing, I've seen pictures of Digby by himself that are tagged as 'Ambiguous Gender', even though they are part of a series in which Digby is male - one picture in this series is the same level of 'ambiguous' as the other two, yet is able to be tagged as 'Male'.

That would be because we tag based on individual images, not what's happening in other images belonging to the same pool. If a character has few to no visible physical traits to identify them as one gender, or they have enough traits, each, that suggest two different genders, for it to be hard to tell which is correct; then they get tagged ambiguous. Full stop.

jacob said:
Incest is one of the rare exceptions to the full TWYS policy, because frankly, in the majority of cases, there are few to no physical traits that can be used to visibly confirm relatedness. If incest were held up to the full standards of TWYS, it would suddenly become virtually non-existant, which would be problematic to the current tagging system in a lot of ways.

Yeah, but isn't that the whole idea behind the new lore tag category? Honestly I was wondering the same thing as OP. Should new posts containing incest only be tagged with "incest_(lore)" unless it is definitely clear from the image because of e.g. dialogue. Although that would probably mean that we also need a lore version of all the relation tags like "siblings".

And if we keep the "incest" tag like it was treated before in what situation would you use the "incest_(lore)" tag?

jacob said:
That would be because we tag based on individual images, not what's happening in other images belonging to the same pool. If a character has few to no visible physical traits to identify them as one gender, or they have enough traits, each, that suggest two different genders, for it to be hard to tell which is correct; then they get tagged ambiguous. Full stop.

But it's still not consistent even within those images. Two of them are the same, in that the character's gender isn't immediately visible. In fact, the one tagged as 'male' instead of 'ambiguous' is slightly more ambiguous, I'd say, because he's facing away from the viewer.

skulblakka said:
Yeah, but isn't that the whole idea behind the new lore tag category? Honestly I was wondering the same thing as OP. Should new posts containing incest only be tagged with "incest_(lore)" unless it is definitely clear from the image because of e.g. dialogue. Although that would probably mean that we also need a lore version of all the relation tags like "siblings".

And if we keep the "incest" tag like it was treated before in what situation would you use the "incest_(lore)" tag?

It will be a good practice to assume that incest is lore unless suggested in the image itself. Yes, all family member tags will need lore counterparts. Although that is going to be difficult to police. Subtle contextual details can suggest character relations in an image. It's especially tricky in comics. When implemented you'll likely find comics switching between lore and non-lore tags with each page.

Personally I handled relation tags similar to species tagging. I try to find what the artist says the species is and then judge whether the typical or stereotypical design matches that species. If I feel that yes these characters look like they could be related, then I will tag as such. If they look very different (even different species), or if it is difficult to determine if the stereotypes fit, then lore makes more sense.

Isabelle and Digby are an example of two characters that are not visibly obvious that they are related, or that they are twins. Unless explicitly implied in the image, these characters would probably need lore tags to reference any familial relationship.

skulblakka said:
Should new posts containing incest only be tagged with "incest_(lore)" unless it is definitely clear from the image because of e.g. dialogue.

Dialog and text isn't supposed to be used for tagging, beyond the text itself. e.g. japanese writing gets tagged japanese_text and dialog gets tagged dialog, but you wouldn't tag based on what the text/dialog says.

laikthechu said:
But it's still not consistent even within those images. Two of them are the same, in that the character's gender isn't immediately visible. In fact, the one tagged as 'male' instead of 'ambiguous' is slightly more ambiguous, I'd say, because he's facing away from the viewer.

It might help if you were to give a link to the series/pool in particular you're talking about, but from the sound of things, one or more of those pics is simply tagged incorrectly.

laikthechu said:
According to the TWYS policy, the only time you should tag with knowledge gained outside of the picture is regarding character names.

Exceptions to TWYS include character names and, by extension, incest. You can also consider outside information when applying species tags as mentioned by thevileone.

laikthechu said:
I've seen pictures of Digby by himself that are tagged as 'Ambiguous Gender', even though they are part of a series in which Digby is male

Tags are applied on a per post basis only using information visible in that post. It doesn't matter what was tagged in other posts in a series. This is part of TWYS.

laikthechu said:
the one tagged as 'male' instead of 'ambiguous' is slightly more ambiguous, I'd say

If you think a specific post is mistagged you can start a thread to ask the community, ask a mod, or once you're proficient, fix it yourself.

furrin_gok said:
There is a tag for incest_(lore) but incest seems to exist separately?

The incest and incest_(lore) tags are equivalent and will be combined, see forum #283608.

leomole said:
If you think a specific post is mistagged you can start a thread to ask the community, ask a mod, or once you're proficient, fix it yourself.

The specific post they're talking about is already admin-locked.
I mean, I've gotten a lock reverted before but it takes some pretty specific argument you can back up with TWYS itself.