Hello, I have a question

As far as I understand it, you can only make one alias from a tag, is that right?
Or can you alias one tag to multiple tags?

My example
if you take the tag

female_dominating_male

and you want to alias it up in two tags like

dominant_female and submissive_male

can you just do:

.
alias female_dominating_male -> submissive_male

Or will that not work? If not what would be the solution.

The application would be later for these types of tags
see: *_dominating_*

I already did a BUR on the simple version of this

https://e621.net/forum_topics/31207
https://e621.net/forum_posts/319327

Thanks for the help in advance.
Prokura

prokura said:
if you take the tag

female_dominating_male

and you want to alias it up in two tags like

dominant_female and submissive_male

female_dominating_male does not necessarily mean there is a submissive_male, so an alias to that might not even be accurate in the first place.

can you just do:

alias female_dominating_male -> dominant_female

.
alias female_dominating_male -> submissive_male

Or will that not work? If not what would be the solution.

You cannot alias one tag to two other tags. It is only A -> B.
What you can do is implicate them together, i.e., dominant_female is implicated with female_dominating_male.
And if submissive_male was valid in this case, it can also be implicated with female_dominating_male.

The application would be later for these types of tags
see: *_dominating_*

You should take cues from how the *_penetrating_* tags are organised.
E.g., male_penetrating_female implies male_penetrating and female_penetrated.

So female_dominating_male can imply female_dominating and male_dominated.

It wouldn't work, although I have long been of the opinion that it should. Longstanding aliases like solo_male have no sensible target otherwise.

thegreatwolfgang said:
You cannot alias one tag to two other tags. It is only A -> B.
What you can do is implicate them together, i.e., dominant_female is implicated with female_dominating_male.
And if submissive_male was valid in this case, it can also be implicated with female_dominating_male.

You should take cues from how the *_penetrating_* tags are organised.
E.g., male_penetrating_female implies male_penetrating and female_penetrated.

So female_dominating_male can imply female_dominating and male_dominated.

Thanks yes, I was aware that _penetrating_ tags are quite similar to _dominating_ tags, but I didn't look in that right now but
I will see what I can find there and how that works.
At least my question is answered, and it is not possible as I thought with two alias, so good to know

thegreatwolfgang said:
female_dominating_male does not necessarily mean there is a submissive_male, so an alias to that might not even be accurate in the first place.

I know what you mean but if we now start to assume we are now dominating the unwilling as well we can soon start applying tags like female_domiating_male_willing and female_domiating_male_uncooperative ffffffffffu....:D
it's not that we have technically right now 13 or 14 different "genders" (I'm serious) I can give you a list.

With 13 X 13 genders we already end with 169 different tag combinations and that only on this type of tag.
(...rant deleted...)
Don't get me wrong I like to find stuff here with one click but maybe sometimes we will just have too many tags to actually find the tag we want to use.
I sometimes already get lost in the list of tags on the left side

wat8548 said:
It wouldn't work, although I have long been of the opinion that it should. Longstanding aliases like solo_male have no sensible target otherwise.

wat8548 that is why I didn't want to start with the alias on the simple xyz_dominating Tags https://e621.net/forum_posts/319296
because I still might think we need to keep them with the xyz_dominating_xyz tags, at least if that's the direction this is going, just like the _penetrating_ tags ...

Still getting the whole system changing back to simple tag combinations like dominant_female and submissive_male might be better and more simple to use for the long run, but I think I'm up against of too much resistance from the community to push that throw
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em

thegreatwolfgang said:
female_dominating_male does not necessarily mean there is a submissive_male, so an alias to that might not even be accurate in the first place.

For someone to be in a dominant role, someone has to be in a submissive role. An otherwise dominant character can be forced into a submissive role by another dominant character, but two characters can't be dominant to each other any more than two characters can be tops to each other. So for a female to dominate a male, the male has to be (either willingly or forced) submissive to the female. If the male isn't submissive, the female hasn't dominated.

watsit said:
For someone to be in a dominant role, someone has to be in a submissive role. An otherwise dominant character can be forced into a submissive role by another dominant character, but two characters can't be dominant to each other any more than two characters can be tops to each other. So for a female to dominate a male, the male has to be (either willingly or forced) submissive to the female. If the male isn't submissive, the female hasn't dominated.

Exactly thanks

prokura said:
wat8548 that is why I didn't want to start with the alias on the simple xyz_dominating Tags https://e621.net/forum_posts/319296
because I still might think we need to keep them with the xyz_dominating_xyz tags, at least if that's the direction this is going, just like the _penetrating_ tags ...

That doesn't make any sense. We don't have both xyz_penetrator and xyz_penetrating tags, why would xyz_dominating and dominant_xyz be any different? They're literally synonymous. This is exactly what aliases are supposed to be used for.

Back to the original post...

prokura said:
As far as I understand it, you can only make one alias from a tag, is that right?
Or can you alias one tag to multiple tags?

My example
if you take the tag

female_dominating_male

and you want to alias it up in two tags like

dominant_female and submissive_male

can you just do:

alias female_dominating_male -> dominant_female

.
alias female_dominating_male -> submissive_male

Or will that not work? If not what would be the solution.

A tag can't alias multiple tags. In this particular case, female_dominating_male would have to remain a valid tag, and would implicate dominant_female and submissive_male. Just like how male_penetrating_female is a valid tag that implies male_penetrating and female_penetrated.

watsit said:
Back to the original post...

A tag can't alias multiple tags. In this particular case, female_dominating_male would have to remain a valid tag, and would implicate dominant_female and submissive_male. Just like how male_penetrating_female is a valid tag that implies male_penetrating and female_penetrated.

Thanks for the conformation
I assumed so as well but wanted this confirmed...the whole idea behind of the question is more or less obsolete anyway right now

watsit said:
For someone to be in a dominant role, someone has to be in a submissive role. An otherwise dominant character can be forced into a submissive role by another dominant character, but two characters can't be dominant to each other any more than two characters can be tops to each other. So for a female to dominate a male, the male has to be (either willingly or forced) submissive to the female. If the male isn't submissive, the female hasn't dominated.

Pardon my lack of knowledge in this area, I tend to refrain from using the dominant/submissive tags, but what makes a character submissive?
Could there be a situation whereby a female is dominating a male, but the male does not appear/is unable to be submissive?
E.g., A dominant_female riding the corpse of a dead male, or a macro dominant_female stepping/crushing a male character to death (without them knowing beforehand)?

Sorry for the extreme examples, but I thought of examples like these and imagine that it might not fit the submissive_male tag.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Pardon my lack of knowledge in this area, I tend to refrain from using the dominant/submissive tags, but what makes a character submissive?

From the submissive wiki:

Any character who is part of the BDSM subculture, taking part in a power exchange (partial or total) within a relationship. This doesn't have to be sexual; dominant/submissive relationships can entirely exclude sex.

The dom takes control over the sub; this can be in the form of dictating their diet, what they wear, or even more intimate things.

So the submissive character would be the one that has control taken away from them by someone else, and the dominant character would be the one that takes control from someone else.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Could there be a situation whereby a female is dominating a male, but the male does not appear/is unable to be submissive?

I would say no. If a character doesn't appear to have control taken from them, a character can't be said to have taken that control. And as the wiki says:

For this tag to apply, the submissive character must be visible rather than just implied.

If you can't tell there's a submissive character, if a character being submissive is simply implied at most, you can't tell there's a dominant character, it can't be more than equally implied. Consequently, this would also mean tag combinations like submissive solo and dominant solo should be invalid.

watsit said:

I would say no. If a character doesn't appear to have control taken from them, a character can't be said to have taken that control.

And as the wiki says:
If you can't tell there's a submissive character, if a character being submissive is simply implied at most, you can't tell there's a dominant character, it can't be more than equally implied. Consequently, this would also mean tag combinations like submissive solo and dominant solo should be invalid.

I didn't mean implied submission, what I meant by "does not appear" is "does not appear to be submissive" or more specifically responsive to the dominant character.
It is worth noting that in the dominant wiki, it states that "[cases] can be intensely physical, sometimes traversing into sadomasochism."

My question is, say a dominant character is using a dead body of a character for their pleasure, does that make the dead body submissive?

thegreatwolfgang said:
My question is, say a dominant character is using a dead body of a character for their pleasure, does that make the dead body submissive?

No, because the dead body does not have control taken from them, as it has no control to take. It's an inanimate non-conscious non-living lump of flesh. And there wouldn't be a dominant character in that scenario either. A character pretending to act dominant by being rough with a non-living object doesn't make make them dominant, as it's fundamentally lacking the act taking control of another. Just like a character pretending to have sex by humping a pillow doesn't make it sex, as it's fundamentally lacking sexual activity between two or more characters.

watsit said:
If you can't tell there's a submissive character, if a character being submissive is simply implied at most, you can't tell there's a dominant character, it can't be more than equally implied. Consequently, this would also mean tag combinations like submissive solo and dominant solo should be invalid.

Dominant/submissive solo posts could occur in cases where an offscreen character is acting as the dominant/submissive. This is common in first person POV, such as post #2926404 - pretty clearly dominant.

Also, I think a solo character in a bondage situation is enough to warrant the submissive tag, even if there is no dominant present.

scaliespe said:
Dominant/submissive solo posts could occur in cases where an offscreen character is acting as the dominant/submissive. This is common in first person POV, such as post #2926404 - pretty clearly dominant.

That's not actually a valid instance of first person view:

The first person view wiki says:
The character should be a part of the picture. See pages on unseen_character (unfitting for first person view) and solo_focus (fitting in some instances) for further guidance.

If there is no other person and the character is just looking at the viewer/fourth wall, use looking_at_viewer instead.

An offscreen character is definitionally not part of the picture. Some part of the character has to be visible, like the hands, muzzle, body, or feet. Only seeing one side of a power dynamic is like only seeing one side of sex. For tagging purposes, we need to see both for the tag to apply, the other character being implied to exist isn't enough since there's other scenarios the image can be depicting. We can't see the offscreen character to know what's going on at the other end, and just as we can't assume there's someone on the other of this leash (it could be connected to a wall mount or some pole, or it can be unconnected to anything), we can't assume there's someone on the other end of this leash (for the same reason).

scaliespe said:
Also, I think a solo character in a bondage situation is enough to warrant the submissive tag, even if there is no dominant present.

I wouldn't say that's true. People can get themselves into bondage situations. Especially in art and fantasy where anything is possible, if you can't see another character, you can't say someone is being submissive to that hypothetical dominant character.

Okay, regardless of that image not technically being first-person, it is solo, which was my point. Of course, if it was true first-person, it wouldn’t be solo, and it wouldn’t apply to the point I’m making.

My point is that it should still be considered dominant because it depicts what is easily recognizable as what would be a dominant character in a BDSM situation. Same with solo bondage - even if they did it to themselves, they are engaging in submissive behavior. Suggesting otherwise, I think, is akin to suggesting that all rating:safe images must be tagged as ambiguous_gender because we can’t see what’s in their pants. We have enough evidence in the image to state that a character is assuming a submissive or dominant role, even without a visible partner. Moreover, I think the tags are more useful in pointing not to a specific role in a sexual encounter, but in pointing to general submissive or dominant behavior, even if only one character is present. It’s still easy enough to find situations where one character is actually dominating another by searching dominant submissive while retaining the ability to find solo images of a character exhibiting either dominant or submissive behavior.

What you’re proposing would mean that dominant and submissive should not be separate tags at all, if they can’t exist separately in any instance. In that case, they’d be better off being aliased to bdsm or something like that. It also implies that bdsm solo shouldn’t exist. This would make it much harder to find solo images of dominant or submissive behavior, since we would no longer have a tag that applies to domination or submissiveness outside of a BDSM scenario.

watsit said:
No, because the dead body does not have control taken from them, as it has no control to take. It's an inanimate non-conscious non-living lump of flesh. And there wouldn't be a dominant character in that scenario either. A character pretending to act dominant by being rough with a non-living object doesn't make make them dominant, as it's fundamentally lacking the act taking control of another. Just like a character pretending to have sex by humping a pillow doesn't make it sex, as it's fundamentally lacking sexual activity between two or more characters.

Hmm, so while you can tag the post with male/female and other gender related tags (e.g., male_penetrating_female), you can't do the same with dominant/submissive because there is no power play involved (as the character can't react to it).

What I'm getting here is that one cannot exist without the other due to no power exchange being involved, so acting dominant doesn't make one dominant.

In that case, wouldn't it be best to imply all dominating_* -> submissive and all submissive_* -> dominant?
Since fundamentally, there cannot exist a scenario whereby a dominant character is present without any submissive characters, and vice versa.

scaliespe said:
My point is that it should still be considered dominant because it depicts what is easily recognizable as what would be a dominant character in a BDSM situation. Same with solo bondage - even if they did it to themselves, they are engaging in submissive behavior. Suggesting otherwise, I think, is akin to suggesting that all rating:safe images must be tagged as ambiguous_gender because we can’t see what’s in their pants.

While I see where you're coming from, I just think that creates a slippery slope where people will just start tagging what they want for a character being dominant/submissive even when there's no direct indication of them being so. As it is, people are way too liberal with applying dominant and submissive tags, sometimes just because two characters are having sex (and a bottom is obviously submissive to a top, of course /s). Submissive_pov is way over tagged too, as it's quite often used when no part of the submissive character can be seen and the tagger just thinks the viewer should feel submissive, and sometimes just because it's a low-angle view that the tagger is interpreting as being a submissive viewer.

thegreatwolfgang said:
In that case, wouldn't it be best to imply all dominating_* -> submissive and all submissive_* -> dominant?
Since fundamentally, there cannot exist a scenario whereby a dominant character is present without any submissive characters, and vice versa.

Perhaps. The individual submissive and dominant tags come across as a bit extraneous, since one always indicates the other. Kind of like how penetrating and penetrated can't exist independently, something being penetrated means something is penetrating and vice-versa, so both are aliased to penetration. Having a single tag to indicate domination+submission is occurring may work better (if there's a single word for that, I don't know, or maybe dominant/submissive as one tag could do the job).

watsit said:
While I see where you're coming from, I just think that creates a slippery slope where people will just start tagging what they want for a character being dominant/submissive even when there's no direct indication of them being so. As it is, people are way too liberal with applying dominant and submissive tags, sometimes just because two characters are having sex (and a bottom is obviously submissive to a top, of course /s). Submissive_pov is way over tagged too, as it's quite often used when no part of the submissive character can be seen and the tagger just thinks the viewer should feel submissive, and sometimes just because it's a low-angle view that the tagger is interpreting as being a submissive viewer.

Submissive_pov is its own big mess that needs to be cleaned up - though, since you mention it, I have to wonder if it would be useful to have a tag like submissive_viewer, since there are a lot of images that are clearly intended to be a submissive POV, but don’t qualify as first-person due to the POV character not being visible. It might help to reduce the number of mistags in submissive_pov to have an alternative that these images do qualify for.

As for submissive and dominant, one problem is the fact that these words are often used interchangeably with giving/receiving or penetrating/penetrated. The penetrated partner may not be submissive in a BDSM sense, but they are sometimes considered submissive in the sense that they are (often passively) receiving. Hence some of the mistagging. With that in mind, I think it would be more useful to restrict the use of dominant/submissive to BDSM, even having both tags imply BDSM. If a non-BDSM post comes up in a search for BDSM because someone incorrectly applied the submissive/dominant tag, it would be more obvious and more likely to be fixed. We’d also be able to specify a stricter boundary for use of the tag in its wiki page: ask yourself if the image qualifies as BDSM-related, and if not, find a different tag to use.

In the context of BDSM, any given character can only be either dominant or submissive in any given situation. So, regarding the 435 pages of results for bdsm solo, all of them (ignoring those that are simply mistagged in some way or another) should be able to be identified as either submissive or dominant - otherwise, the post probably shouldn’t be tagged as bdsm in the first place. Looking through the search results, however, you can see that most of them clearly fit into one box or the other, which is why I think submissive solo should still be legitimate. If anything, it would help sort these solo BDSM-themed posts according to which one you’re looking for.

Edit: also, note that characters can be submissive to non-characters like tentacles and fucking_machines.

scaliespe said:
Submissive_pov is its own big mess that needs to be cleaned up - though, since you mention it, I have to wonder if it would be useful to have a tag like submissive_viewer, since there are a lot of images that are clearly intended to be a submissive POV, but don’t qualify as first-person due to the POV character not being visible. It might help to reduce the number of mistags in submissive_pov to have an alternative that these images do qualify for.

Saying the viewer is submissive seems a bit too subjective, IMO. The issue with submissive_pov, aside from being used on non-POV/first-person-view images, is the subjective nature of the viewer being submissive. People will too readily tag it because they feel submissive looking at it, while others may not. Like post #2997837, I don't see that as "me" being submissive, but whoever tagged it finds a character about to top with a mischievous smirk to be "dominant" of a "submissive" viewer, despite no visible power play. Or post #2999229, just because it's a low-angle view implying the viewer is giving oral.

Instead, I'd prefer something like a leashed_viewer tag for images like post #2998066. Something that describes what's actually visible, instead of subjective determinations of whether the viewer is "submissive" and the lone visible character is "dominant" over an unseen character.

scaliespe said:
As for submissive and dominant, one problem is the fact that these words are often used interchangeably with giving/receiving or penetrating/penetrated. The penetrated partner may not be submissive in a BDSM sense, but they are sometimes considered submissive in the sense that they are (often passively) receiving. Hence some of the mistagging. With that in mind, I think it would be more useful to restrict the use of dominant/submissive to BDSM, even having both tags imply BDSM.

Yes, I would like the dominant/submissive tags to imply BDSM and only be used for BDSM contexts, rather than indicating "who's on top". Having it imply BDSM won't fix people mistagging it though, it would just mean BDSM will get mistagged with it, so something more drastic would be needed. Maybe a crackdown on people that keep using it without any apparent power-play in the image.

scaliespe said:
In the context of BDSM, any given character can only be either dominant or submissive in any given situation. So, regarding the 435 pages of results for bdsm solo, all of them (ignoring those that are simply mistagged in some way or another) should be able to be identified as either submissive or dominant - otherwise, the post probably shouldn’t be tagged as bdsm in the first place. Looking through the search results, however, you can see that most of them clearly fit into one box or the other, which is why I think submissive solo should still be legitimate. If anything, it would help sort these solo BDSM-themed posts according to which one you’re looking for.

We don't really tag "themes", though. Particularly, -philia tags are mostly all aliased away (vorarephilia for themes relating to an attraction to the consumption of a living creature, zoophilia for themes relating to an attraction to non-human animals, somnophilia for themes relating to an attraction to sleeping characters, etc), and instead tag what we see happening (vore for a character actually being consumed, bestiality for a non-feral having sex with a feral, and sleep_sex for someone having sex with a sleeping character). And even the philias that do remain depend on an action happening (e.g. poképhilia depends on a pokémon and non-pokémon in a sexual or intimate act, rather than simply relating to an attraction to pokémon).

Though vore does have its own issues of being overtagged in cases of imminent_vore, which is explicitly not vore itself.

scaliespe said:
Edit: also, note that characters can be submissive to non-characters like tentacles and fucking_machines.

Tentacles are in a weird spot. They're technically not treated as a character for tagging purposes, even though they are an independently acting organism. I can see why there's difficulty considering them a character, but it also makes for weird setups where an image is solo despite having two independent actors (e.g. tentacles penetrating a character is not technically sex because there's not two characters, but it's not masturbation either because it's not a character pleasuring themself).

I wouldn't consider fucking_machines to imply the character getting fucked by it is submissive. If it was a living machine, i.e. it's own character, then maybe, but not an automated one.

watsit said:

Instead, I'd prefer something like a leashed_viewer tag for images like post #2998066. Something that describes what's actually visible, instead of subjective determinations of whether the viewer is "submissive" and the lone visible character is "dominant" over an unseen character.

That works. submissive_pov has all the same problems, though. I wonder if it might just be better to get rid of it in favor of more concrete things like leashed_viewer - and then we don’t have the issue of whether or not the POV character is actually visible. It seems like most people using the tag aren’t checking for a visible character anyway.

Yes, I would like the dominant/submissive tags to imply BDSM and only be used for BDSM contexts, rather than indicating "who's on top". Having it imply BDSM won't fix people mistagging it though, it would just mean BDSM will get mistagged with it, so something more drastic would be needed. Maybe a crackdown on people that keep using it without any apparent power-play in the image.

I think it would actually help with mistagging simply because BDSM is likely a widely searched tag. It’s much more likely that someone will say “I searched for BDSM, so why is this here?” and remove the offending tag. Of course, it would still need to be monitored.

We don't really tag "themes", though. Particularly, -philia tags are mostly all aliased away (vorarephilia for themes relating to an attraction to the consumption of a living creature, zoophilia for themes relating to an attraction to non-human animals, somnophilia for themes relating to an attraction to sleeping characters, etc), and instead tag what we see happening (vore for a character actually being consumed, bestiality for a non-feral having sex with a feral, and sleep_sex for someone having sex with a sleeping character). And even the philias that do remain depend on an action happening (e.g. poképhilia depends on a pokémon and non-pokémon in a sexual or intimate act, rather than simply relating to an attraction to pokémon).

Though vore does have its own issues of being overtagged in cases of imminent_vore, which is explicitly not vore itself.

Well, BDSM is sort of a theme already. Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, Masochism - it’s kind of an umbrella of discrete but related things.

Regarding the -philia tags, it is worth noting that we still have various *_fetish tags which seem to be doing the same thing, but aren’t aliased away, ie. tail_fetish diaper_fetish nipple_fetish. Though regarding something like zoophilia, I’d expect that to just be tagged on anything involving a feral character being sexualized in any way, which is effectively the same thing as feral rating:e. Not too useful.

Despite some potential for vagueness, I think “theme” tags can still be useful, the case of imminent_vore being a potential example of that. Having both vore and imminent_vore (and possibly other clearly vore-related things that can’t imply vore, like mawshot) imply some vore-theme tag would be useful for searching or blacklisting, as opposed to having to use each of the related tags individually.

I wouldn't consider fucking_machines to imply the character getting fucked by it is submissive. If it was a living machine, i.e. it's own character, then maybe, but not an automated one.

Not by itself, no. If the character is in bondage, however, I would think it counts as submissive behavior. The whole “bondage with fucking machine” thing is a staple of BDSM.