It seems like there is some inconsistency with how alternate_species are handled on the site.

According to the wiki alternative_species are meant for when a character is drawn as a different species, yet we have pages after pages of pokemon drawn as a humanoid using the tag humanoidized, which implicates alternate_species.

It doesn't help with the matter that one of the thumbnails for humanoidized is a generic flareon drawn as a humanoid. post #247865

The same inconsistency can be found in the humanized wiki page with a generic chespin drawn as a human. post #385656

To my knowledge species aren't characters, so a species drawn as another species should not have these tags at all.

I guess it comes down to the blurry grey area fictional species have between characters and traditional species - for example, they don't get implicated to their "parent" species (e.g. lucario to canid); you can draw a character cosplaying as a Pokemon species and it'll get tagged with the Pokemon, but a character wearing a fox_costume wouldn't get tagged as a fox.

I would agree with removing the alternate_species tag from humanoidized though, because unlike the humanized tag, there are "degrees" of humanoidization - at which point are each of these considered an alternatve species?
post #30118

jockjamdoorslam said:
I guess it comes down to the blurry grey area fictional species have between characters and traditional species - for example, they don't get implicated to their "parent" species (e.g. lucario to canid); you can draw a character cosplaying as a Pokemon species and it'll get tagged with the Pokemon, but a character wearing a fox_costume wouldn't get tagged as a fox.

That is a good point, by the way they are tagged, individual Pokemon species are more or less tagged as if they are characters in their own right. Though from how I'm seeing it- if someone were looking for humanoidized Pokemon, there's already the pokemon_humanoid tag to specifically isolate those characters.

The big problem I'm seeing is in regards to other IPs that are big enough that people would want to search for them, but not big enough that it warrants an overarching tag. Take Monster Hunter, and someone wants to find humanoid versions of a Rathian: there is no tag that combines Rathian and Humanoid for the same character like rathian_humanoid. And creating one would inevitably end up opening the door for duplicating foo_humanoid tags between many, many different species, creating more clutter than I think is worthwhile.

I'm flip-flopping between whether the characters-only restriction is useful or not. humanoidized being applied to species and characters does give a little bit of extra context: rathian humanoidized would be more likely to pick up the desired character than not, where rathian humanoid would likely pick up duo or group posts involving separate Rathian and Humanoid characters. Yet, at the same time, with regards to generic individuals of more traditional species, the definition gets much more murky and difficult to handle: since we already have humanoid versions of traditional species tags like fox_humanoid, would humanoidized just be slapped on them all by default?