(Foreword: What's written about the 'cub' tag in this post also applies to the 'young' tag, and maybe the 'child' tag)

The 'cub' tag is one of the most important tags on this website, for obvious reasons. It's also one of the most controversial and hotly contested tags, which has lead to problems and frustrations for various users. Over my time on the site, I have learned that the cub tag is applied to any small/cute character regardless of their age even though this is not described on cub's wiki page ... Furthermore, the wiki page for the more broad tag of young specifically states "Adults that look young should rarely, if ever, be tagged young." However, it seems that staff tend to be overly cautious with the cub tag. It seems to me that as soon as one user complains that an image should be tagged as cub, it will be tagged as cub and possibly locked by staff, even if everyone else disagrees. The removal of a cub tag is something no user should ever do, even if it's done in good faith and is the correct application of the tag.

Now don't get me wrong, I do understand why this is done. Cub art is controversial and potentially problematic. It's one of the most common forms of art that the typical user does not want to see, so staff do everything in their power to make sure nothing cub-like gets through to users unless they want it. It's been told to me that it's a source of frustration for the staff when they have to deal with so many users complaining about cub-like art they didn't want to see, and I sympathize. It's astounding to look at the tickets page and see how many people try to report an image and have it taken down for being 'pedophilia'.

This overly-liberal application of the cub tag comes with various problems, however:

1. It can be frustrating for those searching for the tag
It is clear that the main application of the cub tag is for the purpose of the blacklist. If I'm not mistaken, and correct me if I am, cub is part of the global blacklist and/or automatically applied to new user accounts. I'm sure the majority of users do not want to see cub art, so the tag is used to hide it unless one chooses to see it. However, there is another side to this coin. There are some users who do like cub art and want to search for it. Some users will browse the cub tag because it's what they like to see. For these users, it can be frustrating or annoying to instead get shown a lot of art that is not of cub characters, but have been given the cub tag 'just in case'. Inconsistent application of the tag to any one image that 'looks kinda like a cub' is a problem and annoyance. When such people search for the cub tag, we're not looking for 'cubs as well as every character that is small, cute, or drawn in a chibi-artstyle'. It bloats the search results with images we're not looking for, instead of images where it can be indisputably argued that the character is a cub.

2. It can lead to unfair disagreements
Discussion of whether an image should be tagged as 'cub' or not never goes well. As stated before, staff tend to lean more heavily into the side of caution and apply the cub tag as soon as anybody complains, even if their complaint is disagreed with by more users or their comment is given lots of downvotes to show disagreement. Sound arguments of a character being drawn in a particular cute or chibi artstyle, or being of a species that is naturally small and short, or matching depictions of the character elsewhere that aren't tagged as 'cub', are usually ignored. The experience I've seen is that if a user honestly believes an image should not be tagged as 'cub', there's nothing they can do about it, and if they try then they'll be punished for doing so, and that's not very fair. I have more than once also come across users who make it their entire goal to tag as many images as 'cub' as possible, and it's usually done in a hasty indiscriminate way. Only one such user (that I've seen, anyway) has been cautioned for adding it too much.

3. It can be insulting (or worse) for artists
I have seen multiple cases of artists, or users on the artist's behalf, upset that an image is tagged as 'cub' because said artist does NOT draw cub art. Obviously, an artist who doesn't draw cub and especially one who is against cub art would not want their art to be associated with the 'cub' tag. That's a very problematic and potentially defamatory problem. If you are an artist who has never drawn cub and doesn't want anything to do with the subject matter, and you see one of your pieces of art on this site tagged as cub, what are you supposed to do? How is that going to make you feel? As stated before, some artists have a very cute and/or chibi-like artstyle, and some characters or species just look young-ish. To have this site say "Yeah, that's a child, you've drawn a child in porn here" to this artist...that's NOT a good thing. I don't know of any examples, but I wouldn't be surprised if an artist decided to file for DNP because this site insisted that their artwork was underaged.

So that's really the current state of the cub tag, from the perspective of one who consumes the content. It's not the best. But here's my potential solution for it. This has been ruminating in my brain for a long while and I honestly think it would work.

Basically, a new tag. I don't know what it would be called, but for the purposes of discussion I'll just call it "cublike". Basically, the 'cublike' tag would fulfill the purposes that the current 'cub' tag already exists for. It would be applied to actual cubs, as well as any images that contain characters with child-like proportions, appearances, chibi-artstyles, and any such images that concerned users complain about. Meanwhile the 'cub' tag would be reserved for actual cubs, potentially as a new "Lore" tag, which could even possibly be based on the source's tags. Basically, all 'cub' images will be 'cublike', but not all 'cublike' images will be 'cub'. Furthermore, the 'cublike' tag would be the one applied to the global blacklist/new users' blacklists, and would be the one that could be more safely used by users who don't want to see anything that's even close to a cub.

This addresses problem #1 by still allowing for the general public to avoid images that may or may not be a cub, just to err on the side of safety, while allowing perusers of cub art to more definitively search for the art they're looking for.

This addresses problem #2 by lessening the stigma associated with removing the cub tag, easing discussion of whether or not it could be applied, by having the 'cublike' tag apply regardless.

And finally it addresses problem #3, at least to an extent, because if you say to an artist "that character is small and cute and resembles a young character" is a lot better and less problematic than outright stating "that character is underaged". An artist who doesn't draw cub art would hopefully have less issue with their art only being tagged as 'young-looking' instead.

Thank you for listening. This has been on my brain for a long long time and it's been bothering me the entire time. I hope you'll consider this, as to me I can't see many downsides to this change and plenty of upsides.

sexygriffon said:
Over my time on the site, I have learned that the cub tag is applied to any small/cute character regardless of their age even though this is not described on cub's wiki page ...

That is not what the ticket response said.

1. It can be frustrating for those searching for the tag
...
Inconsistent application of the tag to any one image that 'looks kinda like a cub' is a problem and annoyance.

That's an annoyance users will have to face then for the effective blacklisting of young/cub content. The wiki literally states to err on the side of caution when applying this tag, rather than to discourage its use.

The reason behind it is because everybody has their own criteria of what cub looks like, and there is no fixed checklist when it comes to evaluating actual cub content.
Just like the artistic quality of artworks, everybody has their opinions and its up to the mods to determine which is acceptable and which is not.
Some may pass as cub and some may not, and this is entirely under the discretion of the mods.

2. It can lead to unfair disagreements

And it's entirely within your privilege to remove cub from posts that you find is unjustly tagged as such (though you would need to have a very good reason to do so with multiple posts and not come off as tagging abuse).
Otherwise, you can also report posts that you feel does not meet the characteristic of cub.
Sometimes, -cub is also added into the tag lock to prevent it from being tagged again.

3. It can be insulting (or worse) for artists
...
If you are an artist who has never drawn cub and doesn't want anything to do with the subject matter, and you see one of your pieces of art on this site tagged as cub, what are you supposed to do? How is that going to make you feel?

Issue a takedown of your artwork if you don't like e621's tagging system.

Artists have complained of many, many different things before in regards to tagging (and not necessarily that of cub), and we have repeatedly stated that it does not represent their beliefs in artworks but rather for the sake of searching for posts.

But here's my potential solution for it. This has been ruminating in my brain for a long while and I honestly think it would work.

Basically, a new tag. I don't know what it would be called, but for the purposes of discussion I'll just call it "cublike". Basically, the 'cublike' tag would fulfill the purposes that the current 'cub' tag already exists for. It would be applied to actual cubs, as well as any images that contain characters with child-like proportions, appearances, chibi-artstyles, and any such images that concerned users complain about. Meanwhile the 'cub' tag would be reserved for actual cubs, potentially as a new "Lore" tag, which could even possibly be based on the source's tags. Basically, all 'cub' images will be 'cublike', but not all 'cublike' images will be 'cub'. Furthermore, the 'cublike' tag would be the one applied to the global blacklist/new users' blacklists, and would be the one that could be more safely used by users who don't want to see anything that's even close to a cub.

This addresses problem #1 by still allowing for the general public to avoid images that may or may not be a cub, just to err on the side of safety, while allowing perusers of cub art to more definitively search for the art they're looking for.

This addresses problem #2 by lessening the stigma associated with removing the cub tag, easing discussion of whether or not it could be applied, by having the 'cublike' tag apply regardless.

And finally it addresses problem #3, at least to an extent, because if you say to an artist "that character is small and cute and resembles a young character" is a lot better and less problematic than outright stating "that character is underaged". An artist who doesn't draw cub art would hopefully have less issue with their art only being tagged as 'young-looking' instead.

We are not sugar-coating it, renaming a tag does not make people dislike it less. As a matter of fact, the exact same problems can happen with this new tag.

It's basically saying to users: "We don't believe it's cub, but we feel it looks very similar to cub, so here's another tag for it."

We have never made the claim that whatever the artist has drawn is cub. Like I said before, the tag has no weight whatsoever to the artist's own beliefs.

Having a lore based tag, however, may help address the issues you raised, but not in the way you have put it. Something akin to underaged_(lore) and not_underaged_(lore) may be helpful, but it will need further discussion for its validity and implementation.

+1 for adult_(lore) and underaged_(lore)

If we can dispute gender rulings via lore tags, why not age?

I like the idea of two new lore tags for underage and adult characters

cloudpie said:
+1 for adult_(lore) and underaged_(lore)

That's a bit vague. "Adult" can also be more of a social view of someone's self-sufficiency or expected responsibilities than physical age (e.g. an independent 17 year old living on their own can be seen as an adult by society, while a mentally handicapped 22 year old who's dependent on the care of others may not be). And underaged isn't clear either, since it depends on the action in question. The drinking age is 21 in some places, so a picture of a 20 year old drinking beer is underage. The US federal age of consent is 18, but various US states and other countries are different, and many places also have Romeo and Juliet laws where the relative age of two people is taken into account, so someone who's 16 years and 364 days old doing it with someone who's 17 years old exactly would not be underage, but a 17 year old would be underage with a 19 year old.

If you just mean to have under18_(lore) and 18plus_(lore), that's a bit coarse. There are more general tags relating to age than just those two (baby, child, and teenager just for the under-20s), so I'd start with those if there's to be lore variants.

watsit said:
If you just mean to have under18_(lore) and 18plus_(lore), that's a bit coarse. There are more general tags relating to age than just those two (baby, child, and teenager just for the under-20s), so I'd start with those if there's to be lore variants.

Yeah, under_18_(lore) and over_18_(lore) is what I meant. I considered baby_(lore), child_(lore), teenager_(lore), and adult_(lore), but thought it might be too much. Plus, 18 and 19 year olds are legal adults but still teenagers. I suppose that system would still be better though since it is more detailed

Rather than "teenager", I think "adolescent" would be a better choice (if we divide these things that way). It describes a relative stage of maturation rather than a specific age range that only really applies to humans and characters modeled after them.

cloudpie said:
Yeah, under_18_(lore) and over_18_(lore) is what I meant.

The problem with that distinction is that people can make the claim that their characters are only "of age" at X years and not necessarily at 18 years. The lore tags should reflect how we are tagging age, such as child_(lore), teenager_(lore), etc.

cloudpie said:
Yeah, under_18_(lore) and over_18_(lore) is what I meant. I considered baby_(lore), child_(lore), teenager_(lore), and adult_(lore), but thought it might be too much. Plus, 18 and 19 year olds are legal adults but still teenagers. I suppose that system would still be better though since it is more detailed

Gotta say, under_18 is a bit too high for me. Japan has an R-15 and R-18, while in my case "Teen and up" is okay in art, so under_13 would probably cover that more comfortably. Sadly, over_13 would be the more important side if I wanted to swap around a bunch of tags in my blacklist, but I don't see there being a strong enough case for the over side to go that low. Maybe prepubescent_(lore) and pubescent_(lore)? Pubescent especially has a stronger case for it.

thegreatwolfgang said:
The problem with that distinction is that people can make the claim that their characters are only "of age" at X years and not necessarily at 18 years. The lore tags should reflect how we are tagging age, such as child_(lore), teenager_(lore), etc.

Hey, child_(lore) would work well for a blacklist and teenager_(lore) for an exception.

The only problem I see with age lore tags is how they would be applied to posts where a character is changed from their canonical age.
Are lore tags still applied in posts where the artist specifically undoes that bit of lore like what would be the case here? The page on lore tags doesn't comment on this, but it would seem consistent with their purpose that they do, but then, we'll just have a parallel problem to what we're already dealing with. Aged up characters will be blacklisted and aged down characters won't.

thelibertineyeen said:
The only problem I see with age lore tags is how they would be applied to posts where a character is changed from their canonical age.
Are lore tags still applied in posts where the artist specifically undoes that bit of lore like what would be the case here? The page on lore tags doesn't comment on this, but it would seem consistent with their purpose that they do, but then, we'll just have a parallel problem to what we're already dealing with. Aged up characters will be blacklisted and aged down characters won't.

Lore tags only apply the artist's intentions. If the artist doesn't say anything on the manner and it looks different from normal canon, we assume the artist intended it to be different from canon.

furrin_gok said:
Gotta say, under_18 is a bit too high for me. Japan has an R-15 and R-18, while in my case "Teen and up" is okay in art, so under_13 would probably cover that more comfortably. Sadly, over_13 would be the more important side if I wanted to swap around a bunch of tags in my blacklist, but I don't see there being a strong enough case for the over side to go that low. Maybe prepubescent_(lore) and pubescent_(lore)? Pubescent especially has a stronger case for it.

Hey, child_(lore) would work well for a blacklist and teenager_(lore) for an exception.

And of course with the United States being the global superpower currently, 18 is what's considered of age on English speaking websites.

aversioncapacitor' said:
United States being the global superpower -> 18 is what's considered of age on English speaking websites.

uhm... I doubt that this is the right causality. A website has to follow the laws, of the country, where it is hosted. And not the laws of the country with the biggest political impact on the world. Or do I understand your statement wrong?

dubsthefox said:
uhm... I doubt that this is the right causality. A website has to follow the laws, of the country, where it is hosted. And not the laws of the country with the biggest political impact on the world. Or do I understand your statement wrong?

It might be better to say Amero-European powers (especially since the internet services we have tend to be based in those countries,) but most industrialized countries recognize 16-18 as the age of consent with very few exceptions, and those exceptions tend to be when the participants are already close in age to each other.

The idea that 12-year-olds should be allowed to put out to whomever whenever is a fringe view the modern world, to put it generously.

Unilaterally a bad idea.

Sounds good on the surface but considering the current climate on social media due to groups like exodus cry and the "Fanti" movement, this literally opens people up to harassment.

Cub is definitely a tag that needs to be looked at in how its used or applied but adding age lore tags is... a nightmare waiting to happen.

demesejha said:
Sounds good on the surface but considering the current climate on social media due to groups like exodus cry and the "Fanti" movement, this literally opens people up to harassment.

Cub is definitely a tag that needs to be looked at in how its used or applied but adding age lore tags is... a nightmare waiting to happen.

How would age lore tags lead to increased levels of harassment from either of those groups?

wat8548 said:
How would age lore tags lead to increased levels of harassment from either of those groups?

Exodus Cry is a non-profit that's trying to ban all porn. This person seems to think that we'll somehow attract their attention if we try to perfect our labelling of taboo material, I guess, despite us having so much material for them to do so if they actually cared.

demesejha said:
Unilaterally a bad idea.

...this literally opens people up to harassment.

...but adding age lore tags is... a nightmare waiting to happen.

how? If someone wants to hate on artists who draw underage characters... they search for... young

sexygriffon said:
Basically, the 'cublike' tag would fulfill the purposes that the current 'cub' tag already exists for. It would be applied to actual cubs, as well as any images that contain characters with child-like proportions, appearances, chibi-artstyles, and any such images that concerned users complain about.

Doesn't the actual chibi tag already do most of that? Maybe more posts with age ambiguous characters should just be tagged chibi?

furrin_gok said:
Hey, child_(lore) would work well for a blacklist and teenager_(lore) for an exception.

Wasn't the whole reason for putting explicit cub art on the global blacklist to save e6 some legal or pr trouble? I'm all for lore tags distinguishing prepubescent characters from underage teen characters, (as somebody who appreciates both but for different reasons) but they should both be on the global blacklist. Most people who consider fictional porn with prepubescent characters an unacceptable moral affront will probably feel the same way about fictional porn with under age teens. (or at least they should if they want to be consistent)

thanks for responding to my last post btw

thelibertineyeen said:
Doesn't the actual chibi tag already do most of that? Maybe more posts with age ambiguous characters should just be tagged chibi?

Wasn't the whole reason for putting explicit cub art on the global blacklist to save e6 some legal or pr trouble? I'm all for lore tags distinguishing prepubescent characters from underage teen characters, (as somebody who appreciates both but for different reasons) but they should both be on the global blacklist. Most people who consider fictional porn with prepubescent characters an unacceptable moral affront will probably feel the same way about fictional porn with under age teens. (or at least they should if they want to be consistent)

thanks for responding to my last post btw

Cub being on the global blacklist was to placate Cloudflare, IIRC.

Also, you know, you can edit your own blacklist.

a underage_(lore) tag would definitely be useful... especially for art where there are characters clearly depicted that have a weird body shape that makes it kind of difficult to see which age they are (for example Finn_the_human from adventuretime... hes below the age of 18. 12 at the start and 17 at the end of the series) but thats difficult to see from the body shape, yet theres porn of it that shows finn exactly the same as in the cartoons...
another thing it would be useful for is for characters that look adult or atleast 18+ but are in fact -18. stuff like this also happens irl... for example, my younger brother when he was 16 looked like he was atleast 18 or 19. so on the day of elections here the cops asked him why he wasnt at the voting boots or if he voted already and he had to explain and show his ID that he was below the age of 17 and therefore could not vote.
people who wanna see porn here on e621 and do not wish to see anything underage prob dont wanna see underage characters either of which they know the characters are in fact underage the way they are depicted even tho they dont have the correct tag for it. so yeah, it doesnt matter imo whether people get offended by it or not that their art gets tagged with an underage lore tag. they should atleast have done the research to know that the character they are drawing is 18+ or not, that mistake is entirely to blame on the artist and none else.

basian said:
people who wanna see porn here on e621 and do not wish to see anything underage prob dont wanna see underage characters either of which they know the characters are in fact underage the way they are depicted even tho they dont have the correct tag for it. so yeah, it doesnt matter imo whether people get offended by it or not that their art gets tagged with an underage lore tag. they should atleast have done the research to know that the character they are drawing is 18+ or not, that mistake is entirely to blame on the artist and none else.

You're misunderstanding how lore tags work: they are entirely dependent on the say-so of the artist, nothing to do with "canon" information. An artist would be entirely within their rights to claim "This character has been aged up to 18" without changing a single thing about their design, as indeed many artists already do, and that would make the post ineligible for the underage lore tag.

watsit said:
That's a bit vague. "Adult" can also be more of a social view of someone's self-sufficiency or expected responsibilities than physical age (e.g. an independent 17 year old living on their own can be seen as an adult by society, while a mentally handicapped 22 year old who's dependent on the care of others may not be). And underaged isn't clear either, since it depends on the action in question. The drinking age is 21 in some places, so a picture of a 20 year old drinking beer is underage. The US federal age of consent is 18, but various US states and other countries are different, and many places also have Romeo and Juliet laws where the relative age of two people is taken into account, so someone who's 16 years and 364 days old doing it with someone who's 17 years old exactly would not be underage, but a 17 year old would be underage with a 19 year old.

Common usage of the word is largely irrelevant. We can pretty much define tags however we like here as long as it doesn’t cause too much mistagging. In this case, adult_(lore) would be perfectly fine to mean “not young.”

I think age-based lore tags would be a good idea for numerous reasons. I think it would be best if they were analogous to our current age tags, the same way we have lore gender tags corresponding to each gender - but with the addition of adult in this case, since we wouldn’t tag adult normally, presuming that all results for -young are adults. The same would not be true of lore tags, where we would actually need a tag to identify characters who appear young but are stated by the artist to be not young.

So, basically:

• adult_(lore)
• young_(lore)
• baby_(lore)
• toddler_(lore)
• child_(lore)
• adolescent_(lore)

I changed teenager to adolescent as I think it’s much less arbitrary, referring to physical characteristics rather than numerical age, keeping in line with the other three young tags. Also, teenager has the problem of including 19-year olds, which are generally not considered underage.
From dictionary.com:

Adolescence

the transitional period between puberty and adulthood in human development, extending mainly over the teen years and terminating legally when the age of majority is reached; youth.

I think the regular teenager tag should be swapped out for adolescent as well, but that’s a debate for another time.

wat8548 said:
You're misunderstanding how lore tags work: they are entirely dependent on the say-so of the artist, nothing to do with "canon" information. An artist would be entirely within their rights to claim "This character has been aged up to 18" without changing a single thing about their design, as indeed many artists already do, and that would make the post ineligible for the underage lore tag.

well, not to be rude, but idgaf what an artist says about that when they draw a character they dont even own... if the character is underage in canon and the artist draws porn of the underage character with that character looking exactly the same as in canon... then idc how old the artist says the character is in the art... itl still be underage to me cause they did absolutely nothing at all to make the character look even a bit older.

scaliespe said:
So, basically:

• adult_(lore)
• young_(lore)
• baby_(lore)
• toddler_(lore)
• child_(lore)
• adolescent_(lore)

You could also include lore tags analogous to the current mature_* and old tags. Though I'm not sure if they'd be used nearly as much as sub-tags of young.

I also think it's a bit odd that mature is disambiguated, so that it has no general parent tag, unlike the other age-based tags.

lonelylupine said:
Cub being on the global blacklist was to placate Cloudflare, IIRC.

Also, you know, you can edit your own blacklist.

I don't think that was TheLibertineYeen's point. If something is underaged by lore, then regardless of appearance it should also be on the default blacklist. Yes, you can modify your blacklist yourself, but that should be done to remove that line if you are okay with seeing it, same as the current cub blacklist.

basian said:
well, not to be rude, but idgaf what an artist says about that when they draw a character they dont even own... if the character is underage in canon and the artist draws porn of the underage character with that character looking exactly the same as in canon... then idc how old the artist says the character is in the art... itl still be underage to me cause they did absolutely nothing at all to make the character look even a bit older.

Doesn't matter what you give a fuck about or not, lore tags are based on artist intentions, not the show's official lore.

*sigh* well I mean I do agree with a lot of what you are saying, it is also very frustrating to see characters or even just species like some pokemon that just get tagged as cub or young when they really aren't. I just mainly hope that whatever happens they don't ever decide to just sucker out and ban that content all together like so many other sites have done. It really makes no sense how people can see art and think its promoting or even the same as the real thing.
Though regardless of what staff say if what you are saying is true and users are going out of their way to tag so many posts as cub and really not getting into trouble for marking things that aren't real cubs as cubs but people who are trying to fix it do get punished then I would think that something needs to be tweaked or fixed because that just doesn't seem fair. But that's really just my two cents. A real tag that is for things that are real cubs would be very nice and a tag for things that are just things that look like it could be cub or young.

Yeah I know not really adding anything to the topic but I wanted to at least give a bit of my thoughts.

lunarmoka said:
I just mainly hope that whatever happens they don't ever decide to just sucker out and ban that content all together like so many other sites have done. It really makes no sense how people can see art and think its promoting or even the same as the real thing.

I highly doubt that this site is going to outright ban a tag, while this site does have its strict, non-negotiable rules,which i cant seem to locate right now... the overall feel of this is that other sites dont tend to provide tools like blacklists, but at the same time, dont have as strict of a tagging rule. like for example, FA's tagging guidelines are non-existsnt, inkbunny is still user dependent, but viewers can also add community tags.

Adding onto the topic, I believe some sort of age lore tag may be helpful in rectifying the issue at hand. I believe that, in general, most people would consider <13 as underage at the bare minimum.

This issue is one of the many, many reasons why I very strongly disapprove of the TWYS policy as a whole, but I have no arguments about that which haven't already been shot down in flames and there's no point in fighting that.

Issue #3 that OP mentions in particular can potentially destroy an artist's life in this day and age. This is the kind of thing that somebody on Twitter will use as evidence to launch a doxxing attack.

I don't know how to handle this, all I can do is shake my head in disapproval in general at the underlying causes.

Edit (...well, several edits): Sorry, I definitely snapped here due to personal past trauma. I worry about web attacks and anything that could possibly lead to one, alright?

lendrimujina said:
Issue #3 that OP mentions in particular can potentially destroy an artist's life in this day and age. This is the kind of thing that somebody on Twitter will use as evidence to launch a doxxing attack.

The alternative can potentially get viewers arrested, jailed, and be registered sex offenders for the rest of their lives.

No matter which way you do it, you're going to have unhappy people. Whether it's some art getting labelled as cub against the artist's wishes (who's adamant that they don't draw cub porn), or some art being treated as not cub against users wishes (who don't want to see anything that could potentially look like cub porn). Here's the thing, though. In jurisdictions where this legally matters, I don't think the artist's claim has any bearing on whether a piece of art depicts a child or not. If the law sees you with something they think is a young character, the artist saying "It's not cub!" means zilch. Consequently, people who blacklist cub/young for legal reasons depend on anything that could be construed as cub/young not getting through the blacklist, regardless of whether the artist says it's cub or not. We can debate whether people should be getting upset at seeing fictional cub porn, but I strongly disagree that an artists' pride and ego takes precedence over legally endangering viewers. I mean, it's not like I think these kinds of laws over fictional content should exist either, but sometimes you just have to be practical in the face of them.

lendrimujina said:
I don't know how to handle this, all I can do is shake my head in disapproval in general at the underlying causes.

I can agree there. We have a woeful lack of chill pills to hand out to people to better deal with fictional content.

thegreatwolfgang said:
That is not what the ticket response said.

Yes it is...?

thegreatwolfgang said:
And it's entirely within your privilege to remove cub from posts that you find is unjustly tagged as such (though you would need to have a very good reason to do so with multiple posts and not come off as tagging abuse).

I did this and received a record for it.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Otherwise, you can also report posts that you feel does not meet the characteristic of cub.

I did this and was told to do it myself.

thegreatwolfgang said:
We have never made the claim that whatever the artist has drawn is cub. Like I said before, the tag has no weight whatsoever to the artist's own beliefs.

Slapping the "Cub" tag onto artwork does indeed construe the claim that what the artist has drawn is cub. There's no disclaimer on the page to say "We can't definitively say this character is underaged or not and we're tagging it just in case" all the artist will see is that their art is tagged as "cub".

thegreatwolfgang said:
We are not sugar-coating it, renaming a tag does not make people dislike it less. As a matter of fact, the exact same problems can happen with this new tag.

I'm not renaming it, I'm restructuring it. The "CUB" tag would still exist.

watsit said:
I strongly disagree that an artists' pride and ego

The issue brought up by LendriMujina is not the artists' "pride and ego", but their potentially losing their livelihood. We do live in cancel culture times.

This problem isn't going away, it's being argued again ... In fact, let's take this post as an example. The bunny character in here has never been depicted as a cub and was always intended to be of age but in a small, cute body. If my changes were put into place, this would not be tagged as "Cub" because it's not a cub. However, it would likely be tagged as "cublike" (Again, that doesn't have to be what the tag is called, it's just a placeholder name). Calling something cublike does not insinuate that the character is underaged. It's like saying someone looks young. Now then, users that blacklist "cublike" (including the global blacklist) would not see this image, because they wouldn't want to see anything that looks young, and that's cool. People who are actually searching for "cub" artwork also won't see this as the bunny is not underaged, and that's also cool.

All "cub" art would be "cublike", but not all "cublike" would be "cub". The "cub" tag would imply the "cublike" tag.

lendrimujina said:
I very strongly disapprove of the TWYS policy as a whole

This whole thing really frustrates me, because in a lot of way I do strongly support the TWYS policy. I honestly do believe it does a lot of good. This though, in my eyes, is one of its shortcomings and I honestly, truly believe my proposal would fix it or at least alleviate it.

sexygriffon said:
Slapping the "Cub" tag onto artwork does indeed construe the claim that what the artist has drawn is cub.

And the fact of the matter is that to many people, what they've drawn does look like cub. There's no way around that, regardless of any tag. "But I said they're over 18" doesn't change what it looks like, and there are places that don't care one bit what the actual ages (in as much as drawn characters even have actual ages) are, only what it looks like.

sexygriffon said:
The issue brought up by LendriMujina is not the artists' "pride and ego", but their potentially losing their livelihood. We do live in cancel culture times.

Compared to users potentially getting jailed and being registered sex offenders, I'll take protecting against the latter. Moreover, if these artists depend on not being associated with cub art, they're walking on thin ice by drawing something that can be so easily interpreted as cub. If they want to keep drawing things like that, insisting it's not cub while saying everyone else that's wrong for thinking it looks like cub, that's their pride and ego talking.

sexygriffon said:
This problem isn't going away, it's being argued again ... In fact, let's take this post as an example. The bunny character in here has never been depicted as a cub and was always intended to be of age but in a small, cute body. If my changes were put into place, this would not be tagged as "Cub" because it's not a cub. However, it would likely be tagged as "cublike" (Again, that doesn't have to be what the tag is called, it's just a placeholder name). Calling something cublike does not insinuate that the character is underaged. It's like saying someone looks young.

So you're still saying these artists draw young-looking characters, insinuating they drew something that looks underage. You think people will stop caring that a character looks underage if you just avoid the word "cub" and use another term in its place? Whatever tag you could come up with is still representing the same idea. The vast majority of people complaining about the "cub" tag being on their art are likely to still complain about any kind of "looks underage" tag.

sexygriffon said:
Yes it is...?

No, it isn't. The ticket stated "childlike body shape / proportions", and not "any small/cute character".
With your logic, cute & small characters like Pikachu & Mew would by default be considered cub, which would be an extremely erroneous way of tagging things.

I did this and received a record for it.

Tagging based on what you know (e.g., lore knowledge) is not how we tag things, we tag based on what we see.
Thus, for cub & young tags, tagging is very subjective to what the tagger sees and can be subject to differing opinions.

I would suggest checking the tag history first before you change tags since you may unknowingly be engaging in tag wars (i.e., back-and-forth tagging/argument) and be seen as tagging abuse.
If you see such a thing, just report the post and have an admin do the final decision.
We tend to lean towards having the tag rather than removing them, since it's better to be overtagged rather than undertagged (and subsequently have people complain in the comments).

I did this and was told to do it myself.

If nobody is against your tag change, then it's all good.
If somebody undos your tag change, then report it for formal judgment.

If you engage in back-and-forth tagging/tag wars, then you are subject to being labelled as tagging abuse.

Slapping the "Cub" tag onto artwork does indeed construe the claim that what the artist has drawn is cub. There's no disclaimer on the page to say "We can't definitively say this character is underaged or not and we're tagging it just in case" all the artist will see is that their art is tagged as "cub".

That's why I was suggesting having a lore tag to clarify that it isn't the case in reality.
Lore tags act as a means of addressing people's concerns that the tagging does not reflect their actual beliefs.

I'm not renaming it, I'm restructuring it. The "CUB" tag would still exist.

The problem will still exist with people perceiving cublike as insulting, just as they did with cub initially.
Why do you think the term cub has such a strong stigma surrounding it?
What is stopping cublike from suffering the same fate as the former?

Y'all would save yourselves some trouble by restricting yourselves to characters that actually look like adults rather then constantly edging yourself to the cub cliff and then acting all surprised when you fall off of it. I have actually minor characters that I draw and and they look older than other people's supposedly full adults. I've been approached multiple times about making NSFW art involving them, I tell them up front that they're minors out of basic duty, and those people would be so surprised. You've spoiled yourselves so much on big heads and slender or stout bodies that you have apparently forgotten that these are the identifying markers of children.

Some of you people need to have some serious self-examination about why you think it is acceptable to sexualize almost all the aspects of childhood, yet the supposed age of the character (who isn't real and wouldn't have intrinsic intellectual development anyway) is somehow not. It makes no sense, and you're lying to yourselves about something.

70% of this thread is about age_(lore) tags. Maybe we should do that. But before creating a post in the Lore Tags Crowdsourcing thread, we should agree to the right therms we want to use.

As scaliespe suggested:

• adult_(lore)
• young_(lore)
• baby_(lore)
• toddler_(lore)
• child_(lore)
• adolescent_(lore)

I thought this would be good. But adolescent is even more vague than teenager. I had to Google it, because I didn't know this therm before, and it showed some bar graphs that showed adolescence reaches from the age of 10 to 25 with several sub categories. All these categories end at the age of 20 or go past it.

This could be a better solution:

• adult_(lore)
• underage_(lore)
• young_(lore)
• baby_(lore)
• toddler_(lore)
• child_(lore)
• teenager_(lore)

The therm teenager is used for characters within the age of 13 to 19. teenager_(lore) could be combined with either underage_(lore) or adult_(lore) to clarify their age.

(I'd also suggest to unalias underage -> young, and imply underage -> young, so we can get that straight too)

I've said it elsewhere but I believe we're at a point where underage tagging is set in stone. I haven't seen administration publicly acknowledge any issue with underage tagging other than when site function itself breaks (i.e. when Cloudflare blocked loli/shota searches.)
These threads are screaming at a wall and you're going to have to deal with the tagging we've got. Characters that look childlike are gonna get tagged cub regardless of their age, and lets face it the people who're gonna pull out the cancel batons aren't gonna be stopped by an all characters are 18+ disclaimer. Don't expect the artists might get offended/pull out to be persuasive either, if Tsampikos and Whygena are any examples to go by, doubling down on tagging enforcement until artist-pullout solves the issue is the preferred option.
One of your examples in the OP is locked as not-young and the person giving the artist a hard time over it is banned, so it's not as if administration doesn't have an internal standard they're holding to, it's just not the standard you'd like.

So, i'm not sure why the cub tag in particular is the contentious debate here.

On the point about characters that look like cubs but aren't/ are confirmed adults but look underage, wouldn't the shota/loli tag work for that? Although shotas/lolis are depictions of underaged kids, it has been more associated with the chracater's design, more than the actual age of the chracter. that's where the 100 year old loli jokes came from, and underaged teenagers with designs/body types that are mature aren't tagged shota/loli. Point is, i feel this whole debate about the DESIGN of a character, despite of age canon or otherwise could be solved with those 2 tags.

BUT, the problem comes from the fact that shota/loli are aliased as Explicit. Which is still a problem i'm not too sure of.

Just Spit balling ideas here, no offense for anyone

watsit said:
And the fact of the matter is that to many people, what they've drawn does look like cub. There's no way around that, regardless of any tag. "But I said they're over 18" doesn't change what it looks like, and there are places that don't care one bit what the actual ages (in as much as drawn characters even have actual ages) are, only what it looks like.

So you're still saying these artists draw young-looking characters, insinuating they drew something that looks underage. You think people will stop caring that a character looks underage if you just avoid the word "cub" and use another term in its place? Whatever tag you could come up with is still representing the same idea. The vast majority of people complaining about the "cub" tag being on their art are likely to still complain about any kind of "looks underage" tag.

You're overlooking the entire point of this being that there is a difference between "Looks underage" and "IS underage". No it won't magically fix everything, but it would make things better, especially for the crowd who is trying to actively SEARCH for cubs.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Tagging based on what you know (e.g., lore knowledge) is not how we tag things, we tag based on what we see.
Thus, for cub & young tags, tagging is very subjective to what the tagger sees and can be subject to differing opinions.

I would suggest checking the tag history first before you change tags since you may unknowingly be engaging in tag wars (i.e., back-and-forth tagging/argument) and be seen as tagging abuse.
If you see such a thing, just report the post and have an admin do the final decision.
We tend to lean towards having the tag rather than removing them, since it's better to be overtagged rather than undertagged (and subsequently have people complain in the comments).

Look, I strongly believe that the record I received was not correct, and I followed the procedure of reaching out to NMNY as written in multiple places on this site, but after months I never received a response. I did what you suggested and made an edit removing the cub tag in good faith that was NOT based on lore knowledge, but was given a record for claiming lore knowledge anyway. I tried to get this disputed but all my protests fell on deaf ears...

thegreatwolfgang said:
If nobody is against your tag change, then it's all good.
If somebody undos your tag change, then report it for formal judgment.

...hence why I decided it was in my best interest to just never touch the cub tag again, either to add it or remove it, so as to not risk getting another record just for a good-faith edit. This is what based my "unfair arguments" point in the original post.

thegreatwolfgang said:
The problem will still exist with people perceiving cublike as insulting, just as they did with cub initially.
Why do you think the term cub has such a strong stigma surrounding it?
What is stopping cublike from suffering the same fate as the former?

As I have to keep reminding you, "cublike" is just a placeholder because I couldn't think of a good enough sounding name, but that doesn't mean coming up with such a name is impossible. And as mentioned above, there is a difference between "Looks underage" and "IS underage".

dubsthefox said:
70% of this thread is about age_(lore) tags. Maybe we should do that. But before creating a post in the Lore Tags Crowdsourcing thread, we should agree to the right therms we want to use.

Yeah, people really took that one tiny sentence of my post and ran with it, huh? It mostly just stemmed from me thinking "I want a tag that gives me cubs when I search for it, and not a bunch of non-cubs that just look vaguely cub-ish based on one person's opinion."

sexygriffon said:
And as mentioned above, there is a difference between "Looks underage" and "IS underage".

Which is entirely lore-based. Any tag that differentiates between the two would have to be a lore tag and not a general one.

Spotted canonically_underage in the recent wiki changes, looks like someone has begun tagging them already.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Spotted canonically_underage in the recent wiki changes, looks like someone has begun tagging them already.

That's certainly appreciated, but that deals with an entirely different issue than the ones brought up in this thread. We'd need the opposite... canonically_overage.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Spotted canonically_underage in the recent wiki changes, looks like someone has begun tagging them already.

That shouldn't be a general tag, that kind of thing should be a lore tag which can only be approved by admins, and since the admins haven't indicated they want something like that from past discussions, that tag shouldn't be used.

If I may share an experience I've had as an artist... I've recently seen my artwork on here getting tagged as "cub" even though my characters aren't. Normally, I wouldn't mind ignoring this kind of thing and just let people tag how they want, but FurAffinity has already temporarily banned me once for artwork that is both on FA and another website, but was tagged as cub on that different website in the past. They said I'd be permanently banned the next time, so the tagging matters a lot in my case. I could just remove the tags, but in at least one case, the cub tag has been locked by a site admin here, so I cannot remove it unless I make a good enough case to the admins. My only alternative to save my FA account is to file for a ConditionalDNP and just remove all my artwork to prevent the cub tag being put on my art that doesn't actually contain underaged characters. But I'd really rather not have to get to that point. I don't know the logic the mods for FA are using, but the fact that e621's wiki page for cub leads by saying "A cub is a young, underaged, furry character." doesn't bode well for my account status. I don't know what I'm supposed to do.

milachu said:
FurAffinity has already temporarily banned me once for artwork that is both on FA and another website, but was tagged as cub on that different website in the past.

Did FA moderation state that they tempbanned you for a having a cub tag on a third-party site?
I fail to see what a tag on e621 has to do with FA decision.

hexen said:
Did FA moderation state that they tempbanned you for a having a cub tag on a third-party site?

Based on this post from an artist I'm watching, they'd ban someone for content that's not even posted to said site.

https://inkbunny.net/j/452921-MorgueBuddy-fa-permaban

the_shinx said:
Based on this post from an artist I'm watching, they'd ban someone for content that's not even posted to said site.

https://inkbunny.net/j/452921-MorgueBuddy-fa-permaban

Which really just goes to show how toxic and bad FA is, since Mila here is/sounds afraid of FA performing repercussions when it isn't FA's job to police other site's content.

Maybe you should reconsider your sites of choice for hosting artwork, Milachu. From my experiences, FA's a furry dictatorship that snowballed into being the most well-known furry artwork hosting site; it's by no means the best hosting site, I'd give that title to e6 since, so long as you upload your own artwork, the only thing you'd have to deal with is an immovable TWYS system and having to report comments instead of hiding them on your own, but even those are mitigated by an active public that can do that for you. So long as you follow e6's rules, you'll not be judged harshly for whatever content you host off-site (and other users doing so are breaking the rules).

hexen said:
Did FA moderation state that they tempbanned you for a having a cub tag on a third-party site?
I fail to see what a tag on e621 has to do with FA decision.

Patreon is also well known for banning users who post content that violates their TOS on other websites.

https://e621.net/posts/3344486
https://e621.net/tickets/110517

Can we fix this cub nonsense? Please?

sexygriffon said:
Can we fix this cub nonsense? Please?

It's a difficult issue to fix, as shown by how there's still no workable solution despite this thread and the many before it. Exchanging the cub tag for looks_like_cub isn't likely to assuage the issue people have with people saying their art looks like cub. And it's not e6's fault if FA takes an iron fist to art based on how other sites' tags work. At the end of the day, the characters look young, so whatever tag cub/young would be exchanged with will carry that connotation of "the character looks young", and if FA's going to throw a fit because e6 tags the character as looking young, the precise word used for the tag isn't going to matter.

If nothing about this changes, I feel morally obligated to find all posts on this site that are both tagged as cub and sourced from FurAffinity, and contact each of these artists suggesting they get their art off of this site otherwise FA might ban them. That certainly wouldn't be good...

Maybe things wouldn't be so bad if the mods didn't give a 3-word, dismissive response when an artist types out a long, hard-thought reasoning in their ticket for why cub shouldn't apply. It kind of comes off as rude.

sexygriffon said:
If nothing about this changes, I feel morally obligated to find all posts on this site that are both tagged as cub and sourced from FurAffinity, and contact each of these artists suggesting they get their art off of this site otherwise FA might ban them. That certainly wouldn't be good...

Might be better to suggest they get their art off FA. If e6 tags it as cub, that's because it looks like cub to some people. Artists removing their art from here won't change that. Even if the art is not posted here, FA can still make a determination on its own that it looks like cub to them, against the artist's claim to the contrary, and they'll get in trouble all the same (it's happened before, people getting their art removed because FA itself determined it's cub, and eventually banned when it happened enough). If you're going to suggest anything, suggest they post it here instead of FA, since we don't care whether some people think it looks like cub or not, it's allowed regardless, unlike FA.

sexygriffon said:
I feel morally obligated

I hate it when folks try and pull this card out when they don't get their way. There's nothing morally right or wrong here, there's nothing black or white or clam to make that this change will help anyone in the end. More so when it's pretty much subjective and has no real common ground that everyone feel the same as you. More so when said artist made cub art from the get go and get contacted and told their art is on this site. Real helpful there.

sexygriffon said:
If nothing about this changes, I feel morally obligated to find all posts on this site that are both tagged as cub and sourced from FurAffinity, and contact each of these artists suggesting they get their art off of this site otherwise FA might ban them. That certainly wouldn't be good...

Maybe things wouldn't be so bad if the mods didn't give a 3-word, dismissive response when an artist types out a long, hard-thought reasoning in their ticket for why cub shouldn't apply. It kind of comes off as rude.

I did TL;DR but like, why does FAs policies have to reflect on our TWYS policy?

Isn't looks like young generally how it's determined whether an artistic depiction is young or not, from a legal standpoint? Since y'know artistic intention and character ages are intangible abstraction and easily falsifiable.

watsit said:
It's a difficult issue to fix, as shown by how there's still no workable solution despite this thread and the many before it. Exchanging the cub tag for looks_like_cub isn't likely to assuage the issue people have with people saying their art looks like cub. And it's not e6's fault if FA takes an iron fist to art based on how other sites' tags work. At the end of the day, the characters look young, so whatever tag cub/young would be exchanged with will carry that connotation of "the character looks young", and if FA's going to throw a fit because e6 tags the character as looking young, the precise word used for the tag isn't going to matter.

I still wanna just push for using shota and loli for the umbrella terms of "looks_like_cubs" situation. Those 2 tags focus more on appearance than actual age of the character.

I've decided to use it for most of doneru's stuff since their ages are ambiguous to straight up 1000 year old aliens who's lived forever. Bht i know his stuff is very much shota/lolicon stuff. Which is why i used those tags instead of cub, no big problems have gotten from me using it so far.

benjiboyo said:
I still wanna just push for using shota and loli for the umbrella terms of "looks_like_cubs" situation. Those 2 tags focus more on appearance than actual age of the character.

I've decided to use it for most of doneru's stuff since their ages are ambiguous to straight up 1000 year old aliens who's lived forever. Bht i know his stuff is very much shota/lolicon stuff. Which is why i used those tags instead of cub, no big problems have gotten from me using it so far.

But loli/shota are specifically for sexualised depictions of young characters. They're not a replacement for young or cub, and anything that looks young must still be tagged young alongside them.^{Besides that they both inherently imply young}

All right, I went out for dinner and got some fresh air, gave this some more thought. I want to say that it was never my intention to get angry at anybody, offend anybody, hurt anybody's feelings, or speak ill of the mods. If you felt that way, I'm sorry. This is just a particularly frustrating thing for me.

I'm just gonna lay it out in terms that fall more in line with how the site operates. So here I go...

This site runs off of Tag What You See. Per the wiki page, "A cub is a young, underaged, furry character." Age cannot be seen. Age is a number, and a representation of how long someone has been alive. It's not something you can see.

"But you can easily tell by looking if someone is at a very young age."

Yes you can...in the real world. This is the furry world, where it's perfectly normal to see a dick go up someone's ass and right out their mouth. Normal real world logic doesn't always apply. If it's a picture of a human child, or a human-like anthro, then sure, you can probably see their age. But if it's a feral animal, you can't see as easily. If it's a species, real or fake, that is naturally short and small, you can't see the age. If an artist's artstyle is particularly cutesey so that adults and children end up looking the same, you can't see the age. You can't see age.

Proposal to fall in line with the site's TWYS rule:
-Rename "Cub" to "Young Appearance" or something similar...Regardless of a character's actual age, you can visually see if they look young or not, which is what the mods keep saying. Regardless of the points I myself brought up earlier about artists' feelings on the matter, it is more applicable to TWYS to name the tag as such.
--Mitigates the issue constantly brought up in comments of users saying "They said this character is over 18, it's not a cub!!1!one". Doesn't have to be a cub to look young, and the tag name reflects it.
--As a renaming and not a new tag, anyone currently using 'cub' in their blacklist to hide all tiny characters won't have a problem.
-Keep the "Young" tag as it is. A person can be young without being underaged, so there's a more grey area there and I think it works fine.
-Keep the "Child" tag, which is only supposed to be applied to humans if I understand correctly.
-New lore tag: "Underaged_(lore)"
--When is the Underaged tag used? When dialogue says the character is underage. When context clues show as such with an adult of the same species next to it. If the artist says so. If the tags in the source say so.
--When should the Underaged tag not be used? When the source is Furaffinity or any other site that does not allow cub art.
-Remove the vague term of "Cub" from tags altogether. Considering the site's move over to more official terms, I think we should just leave cub behind. It causes too many arguments.

idk how proposals work around here, should I just make an Update Request thread or whatever it is?

sexygriffon said:
Proposal to fall in line with the site's TWYS rule:
-Rename "Cub" to "Young Appearance" or something similar...Regardless of a character's actual age, you can visually see if they look young or not, which is what the mods keep saying. Regardless of the points I myself brought up earlier about artists' feelings on the matter, it is more applicable to TWYS to name the tag as such.
[..]
-Keep the "Young" tag as it is. A person can be young without being underaged, so there's a more grey area there and I think it works fine.
-Keep the "Child" tag, which is only supposed to be applied to humans if I understand correctly.
[..]
-Remove the vague term of "Cub" from tags altogether. Considering the site's move over to more official terms, I think we should just leave cub behind. It causes too many arguments.

You do not understand correctly.
young = appears underage
cub = young + anthro or feral
child = appears to resemble a 3-12 year old (assume human body type/proportion standards)

Cub is not the "underage tag" here, that would be young.

This site runs off of Tag What You See. Per the wiki page, "A cub is a young, underaged, furry character." Age cannot be seen. Age is a number, and a representation of how long someone has been alive. It's not something you can see.

Which is why administration operates based on their internal interpretation of human-standard appearances. You and artists may not like what it is, but administration does have visual criteria standards for this kind of thing. And once they've developed such standards they will hold onto them throughout any and all criticism, right down to causing artists to pull out of the site.^{It's happened before with the defined pectoral muscle standard for determining whether a character's body is male or female causing many posts of Tsampikos' mikhaila_kirov to be tagged male or andromorph, and Whygena's reggie_(whygena) to be tagged female.}
You are unlikely to move administration, and administration is unlikely to engage with this discussion.

Normal real world logic doesn't always apply.

It doesn't matter. If it's designed in a way that remotely resembles young human body type/proportions, as per the determination of staff, it's going to get tagged young. That's how it's going to work on any site that cares about forming distinction around underaged-appearing characters.

sourced from FurAffinity

Any given post being on FA also does not mean it complies with FA's own standards, it could instead simply mean the post has not yet been examined by Furaffinity's moderation team.

It's sad to see that people won't let go of this and are causing artists to leave this platform because of what they do to their art...

Use the right tags people! Use the RIGHT tags!!

solenoid4lyf said:
It's sad to see that people won't let go of this and are causing artists to leave this platform because of what they do to their art...

Why should FA's mistakes dictate how e621 runs? I doubt this situation will hemorrhage artists to the degree the gender tags did before lore tags were added in.

Use the right tags people! Use the RIGHT tags!!

They are. If it looks young, it gets tagged as young. Just looking at the picture, how would we know otherwise?

sexygriffon said:
-New lore tag: "Underaged_(lore)"

Actually, I think the tag ought to be something like canon_adult_(lore), if the idea is accepted. The point of a lore tag is to add in information that is contrary to TWYS. We already know the character looks young; the lore would be that they're not young.

magnuseffect said:
cub = young + anthro or feral

Cub is not the "underage tag" here, that would be young.

Why do we even need the cub tag then?

Also if that's the case for young, someone should probably remove the following from its wiki page: "Adults that look young should rarely, if ever, be tagged young."

clawstripe said:
Actually, I think the tag ought to be something like canon_adult_(lore), if the idea is accepted. The point of a lore tag is to add in information that is contrary to TWYS. We already know the character looks young; the lore would be that they're not young.

Fair point, I agree.

magnuseffect said:
But loli/shota are specifically for sexualised depictions of young characters. They're not a replacement for young or cub, and anything that looks young must still be tagged young alongside them.^{Besides that they both inherently imply young}

I’m not saying it should replace young or cub. Well my intention is for a compromise for situations of characters with a young appearance but of age. Of course it should still be aliased young, but i’m personally against the whole shota/loli being inherently Q/E rated. Of course one single voice from me alone ain’t changing things, but i’m trying to spitball ideas here for that compromise.

sexygriffon said:
Why do we even need the cub tag then?

Actually, the answer is quite simple. To combine two things in one tag. Like for gender_penetrating_gender you search for it, instead of gender_penetrating gender_penetrated.
And you use cub instead of young ~feral ~anthro

sexygriffon said:
Also if that's the case for young, someone should probably remove the following from its wiki page: "Adults that look young should rarely, if ever, be tagged young."

That's true. It gives those, who draw underage characters, but simply call them adults, too much room to argue about the TWYS rule.

sexygriffon said:
someone should probably remove the following from its wiki page: "Adults that look young should rarely, if ever, be tagged young."

holy heck, how long has that been there... 7years? and it was added by an admin, not just some random person, jeeze. that seems so counter to the whole ethos of the site.

darryus said:
holy heck, how long has that been there... 7years? and it was added by an admin, not just some random person, jeeze. that seems so counter to the whole ethos of the site.

Seems that a janator has taken care of it. Thanks tsukemono!

dubsthefox said:
It gives those, who draw underage characters, but simply call them adults, too much room to argue about the TWYS rule.

I've always interpreted that to refer to characters that look like young adults but don't look young.
But I can see where there's space for semantic confusion given that we're talking about usage of the word young outside of the young tag. It should probably be something more like Characters that look like a young adult should rarely, if ever, be tagged young.

It should also be pointed out that canonically underage characters who don't look young don't get tagged young.
A significant number of legoshi_(beastars) posts depict him in a state of appearance he only held while canonically underage, but as he is most often drawn with adult proportions and figure, young rarely applies. I don't know if you meant to say those who draw underage-appearing characters, but I feel like this is an area where it pays to be semantically-precise given that an underage character could just as easily refer to a plausibly-adult character being referred to by its creator as underage in one instance and as an adult in another.
It still wouldn't be a good argument for them to make for that reason that appearance is what is cared about, though. Any argument is still based in bypassing TWYS.

Having made an example from Beastars I feel the need to point out there are a number of people^{It's a common argument to stumble upon if you happen to see Twitter discourse on which content is immoral to interact with} who may feel that canonically-underage characters need to be tagged as underage regardless of appearance, though I don't see anything changing on that front either, and even if it did it would be incredibly difficult to make many arguments on which side of legally an adult such a character would be in any given depiction.

I was going to open up a new thread to discuss this, but seeing as this thread is already getting a lot of traffic and since MagnusEffect brought up teens - I figure I'd rant here bring this up here - maybe this would be better off in a new thread?

The teenager tag has some serious issues with how it's used, and to make matters worse, the wiki page is a single, short sentence for a subject that really needs to have more said.

Usually, I'd just go ahead and start fixing it myself - rewrite the page with some (hopefully) reasonable criteria and slowly work through, retagging posts that are clearly not in line with TWYS, but age tags effect a lot of people's blacklists and are specifically a sensitive/controversial issue, and for all the tagging I've done, I rarely touch age related tags.

I couldn't figure out a way to sum this up as nice neat paragraphs so here's a list of concerns/issues...

The major, overarching problem with teenager is a constant lack of following TWYS:

• Characters that look indistinguishable from adults are frequently tagged as teenager on a whim or clearly based on outside information/canon. (And fixing these posts is likely going to be... annoying... as MagnusEffect said "there are a number of people who may feel that canonically-underage characters need to be tagged as underage regardless of appearance" who will add these arguably invalid tags back, particularly on questionable or explicit images)
• This post #3305915 is a prime example - not to make this a personal gripe, but I had removed the teenager and young tags, I really don't think there's any visual information in this image to support a TWYS application of "teenager". Based on the comment section, the user who added the tags back, frankly, seems to be working backwards from their preferred interpretation of canon information to justify "she looks like a teen to me", I'd change it back, but I think this would just spark a tag war. Perhaps I'm wrong? But I genuinely don't see it.
• Heavily stylized cartoon characters and kemono style characters end up tagged as teenagers despite identical characters being considered adult (or at least, not specifically teenagers)

• on the opposite end, you have characters that are indistinguishable from children being tagged as teenagers, not as much of a problem to me, as if they're more childlike in appearance, the "young" tag is completely warranted, but I'm not so sure if they should be tagged as teenager

We really need some tight standards for TWYS when it comes to teenaged characters, a wiki page with solid criteria - eg. proportions, height, comparison to other, clearly older characters in the same image, or comparisons to older depictions of the same character - and a tag clean up.

Can we also add something to the 'young' wiki page that echoes what we're constantly being told about how young is applied to not-young characters based only on appearance? Maybe it can be worded in a disclaimer kind of way. Along the lines of...

"Images tagged as young do not necessarily feature underaged characters. The tag is used based only on a character's appearance and not their canonical age. The application of the young tag should not be taken as an indication that the artist has drawn underage art."

Y'know, just something to say "Yes we KNOW it's not actually a cub, but we have to do it and this is why" that people can read on the wiki page.

magnuseffect said:
I don't know if you meant to say those who draw underage-appearing characters

This, yes. I was thinking about obvious underage looking characters
*cough* post #3335146 *cough*

sexygriffon said:
Can we also add something to the 'young' wiki page that echoes what we're constantly being told about how young is applied to not-young characters based only on appearance? Maybe it can be worded in a disclaimer kind of way. Along the lines of...

"Images tagged as young do not necessarily feature underaged characters. The tag is used based only on a character's appearance and not their canonical age. The application of the young tag should not be taken as an indication that the artist has drawn underage art."

Y'know, just something to say "Yes we KNOW it's not actually a cub, but we have to do it and this is why" that people can read on the wiki page.

Having in mind that the TWYS rule determines any tag (-lore/meta tags), this shouldn't be necessary. But linking the tag_what_you_see rule wouldn't hurt either.

siral_exan said:
Which really just goes to show how toxic and bad FA is, since Mila here is/sounds afraid of FA performing repercussions when it isn't FA's job to police other site's content.

Maybe you should reconsider your sites of choice for hosting artwork, Milachu. From my experiences, FA's a furry dictatorship that snowballed into being the most well-known furry artwork hosting site; it's by no means the best hosting site, I'd give that title to e6 since, so long as you upload your own artwork, the only thing you'd have to deal with is an immovable TWYS system and having to report comments instead of hiding them on your own, but even those are mitigated by an active public that can do that for you. So long as you follow e6's rules, you'll not be judged harshly for whatever content you host off-site (and other users doing so are breaking the rules).

And, before someone thinks I'm off-topic, FA's stance on cub artwork is something that contributes to the negative stigma of cub artwork. Inkbunny and other sites don't exactly help, but the most humorous reason I remember hearing for e6 to remove cub artwork, is so it can be more like FA...

1.) Hahaha

2.) More like PayPal's dictatorship. The FA ban was in response to them getting cut off from PayPal.

3.) Having used both sites for well over a decade, I can't say they has been a single point in their concurrent history that FA has been the more "toxic" site. Whenever I see someone say otherwise, minimal digging turns up that did something inexcusable and are mad they suffered consequences for it.

yetanothertemp said:

darryus said:
holy heck, how long has that been there... 7years? and it was added by an admin, not just some random person, jeeze. that seems so counter to the whole ethos of the site.

Seems that a janator has taken care of it. Thanks tsukemono!

What on earth are either of you talking about? The current revision of the page has that sentence struck through, not actually removed, for some reason - a flourish that was added by Kemonophonic. tsukemono appears nowhere in the version history. Meanwhile, the first version to feature some form of the offending sentence was authored by Magenta-Magic, who as far as I can see is not and has never been an admin.

wat8548 said:
Seems that a janator has taken care of it. Thanks tsukemono!

What on earth are either of you talking about? The current revision of the page has that sentence struck through, not actually removed, for some reason - a flourish that was added by Kemonophonic. tsukemono appears nowhere in the version history. Meanwhile, the first version to feature some form of the offending sentence was authored by Magenta-Magic, who as far as I can see is not and has never been an admin.
[/quote]

I'm an idiot. I was looking at the cub page

The:"character who would appear to be underage", part is kinda wrong, if teenager implies young.
And:"Often used to describe those under the apparent age of 13 as well as younger-looking teenagers.", is true, but can be misleading. Some people think one who is 18 is not a teen anymore.

I ask here, before changing anything. This wiki is rather dangerous to edit, in my opinion.