I saw an image of Charlie ( https://e621.net/posts/3120080?q=smiling_friends ) that is looking pretty dire in the approval department. 3 of 3 reviewers believe it is not relevant.

I would like to argue that the main characters of Smiling Friends do in fact qualify as relevant, as they are non-human.

TWYS: if you watch the show, you'll see plenty of visibly human characters juxtaposed with the main characters, whose character designs are visibly very different. It's safe to say based on that alone that the main characters are non-human by TWYS rules.

Canon/word-of-god: Zach himself said that the main characters are non-human "critters" that live alongside in-universe humans.

To my understanding, furry isn't the requirement for being relevant to e621. The requirement is that at least one character in any image is non-human, with a few caveats like it can't be a solo human being tentacle fucked because the tentacles don't count as a character, etc. This rule does allow images that depict pokemon trainers fucking their pokemon, or to my understanding, solo images depicting humanoid characters such as trolls and elves. I'm not sure what the stance is on very human-looking characters like Hylians from the zelda universe.

Correct me if I'm wrong or missing something here.

Read this - topic #27998.

TWYS means what you see in the image itself, not other images or the source material. If a character in a given post looks human, it's treated as human, regardless of how the show treats them. So it will depend on whether the moderators consider the design to be too human (or a given depiction of them is too human), and considering cartoons can have rather deformed humans that are still treated as human, these characters do look pretty close to the line.

A human with a deformed face is still a human.

Now hold on just a minute. This seems hypocritical.

Characters follow different TWYS rules (the "tag what you know" exception), because they are allowed to use outside context. A picture depicting a female version of bowser would be tagged bowser and crossgender, because from outside context, we know that character is Bowser, and that he's canonically male. Why does the same logic not apply to a show like Smiling Friends where we know, from outside context, that a character is non-human? There's even a tag for the species. We can tag sergals, dragons, synths and other fantasy creatures, so critter_(smiling_friends) should count as non-human too, even though with zero context it looks like a deformed human.

If we purely followed TWYS and didn't allow any outside context at all, then it would be impossible to tag things like incest, crossgender, characters, fantasy species, etc.

An excerpt to further expand on that:

For example, an image depicting a female bowser would be tagged bowser and crossgender, even though there is no information in the image by itself that indicates bowser is canonically male, or that the character is bowser. This may seem like an absurd concept, but I find myself regularly looking at the species section when looking at images with pokemon in them. Pokemon's this wildly popular franchise, but I for one barely know any of them.

Characters, fantasy species, tags like crossgender, incest, mother_and_daughter, etc are impossible to tag without this exception, which would be problematic because no tag = no blacklist and no search, and people would be fighting over unwanted subject matter in their feed, subject matter that can only be known if one is familiar with the source material. Somebody who has never played a mario game in their life may be unaware that Bowser is canonically male, especially if they were introduced to the franchise by bowsette memes. That doesn't make it okay to remove the crossgender tag from said images. So the same logic should apply to critters. Just because people haven't watched SF doesn't mean it's okay to take images depicting characters that are known to be non-human, and mark them as not site-relevant just because they "look human". Bowsette looks like a female humanoid, and yet images with that character are tagged with bowser and crossgender. How could you possibly know that without the outside context?

edit: emphasis added

hungryman said:
Now hold on just a minute. This seems hypocritical.

Characters follow different TWYS rules (the "tag what you know" exception), because they are allowed to use outside context. A picture depicting a female version of bowser would be tagged bowser and crossgender, because from outside context, we know that character is Bowser, and that he's canonically male. Why does the same logic not apply to a show like Smiling Friends where we know, from outside context, that a character is non-human? There's even a tag for the species. We can tag sergals, dragons, synths and other fantasy creatures, so critter_(smiling_friends) should count as non-human too, even though with zero context it looks like a deformed human.

If we purely followed TWYS and didn't allow any outside context at all, then it would be impossible to tag things like incest, crossgender, characters, fantasy species, etc.

Characters follow both TWYS and TWYK, so long as there's some visual evidence to suggest that it is the character you are allowed to tag their name. Species, however, are not characters and do not receive such leniency, so whatever their species is known to be is irrelevant to what they are tagged, following TWYS. You're arguing apples to broccoli in all this, whatever the characters' names are and whatever their species are, are two different things and are irrelevant to each other. Tags like incest_(lore) and crossgender, tags that depend on knowledge of the character in order to get tagged, have been / should probably be moved to the lore category, but that is besides the point.

The way these characters are treated will not change just because you know them to be a certain species. If you haven't read it already, maybe you should read TWYS to try to get a better understanding of what you're discussing. It's not a perfect system, but there is no such thing as perfection and the flaws it has are more manageable than the flaws of other systems that other sites use. TWYS is why we have an effective blacklist, can reliably find expected results when specifically searching for something, and can be self-sufficient when tagging an image (no need to look for the words of god, and visit the artist / character owner to tag our posts). If you don't like that, you can always go to sites like DA, FA, HF, Inkbunny, or Pixiv instead.

Let's play a game of spot the human:

post #3016193 post #3179738 post #3135460
post #3178203 post #3177901 post #2960432

Just edit all smiling friend uploads to have pointy ears or angel wings post #2527728

faucet said:
Let's play a game of spot the human:

post #3016193 post #3179738 post #3135460
post #3178203 post #3177901 post #2960432

Monkey tail, Horse cock, human
Elf ears, cat ears, human with tentacles.

furrin_gok said:
Monkey tail, Horse cock, human
Elf ears, cat ears, human with tentacles.

This is, really pedantic and almost intentionally misses the point others are making. Not to mention the fact that the characters in smiling friends are almost certainly not human, especially considering much like the op mentioned, there are many EXPLICITLY human characters, and they are nothing like the characters in question here.

Further this isnt a case like SU where they are literally just technicolor humans with a rock (for the most part), these are actively inhuman designs which is what this site is for.

I vote against Smiling Friends being on the site in general. Other people have said why already so I won't repeat them.

matrixmash said:
I vote against Smiling Friends being on the site in general. Other people have said why already so I won't repeat them.

One person has said they dont want it. And gave no reason. Saying "i vote no the evidence sp3aks for itself" when there is none is neither convincing nor helpful.

Personally don’t think they look that human compared to all the elves on here that just have pointy ears. But that’s just my thoughts on it. The pink one doesn’t look human at all to me, imo

I think there being humans that don’t look like these critters in the show is honestly worth taking into account

This is coming from someone who isn’t familiar with the show other than what I’ve seen online, tho

demesejha said:
This is, really pedantic and almost intentionally misses the point others are making. Not to mention the fact that the characters in smiling friends are almost certainly not human, especially considering much like the op mentioned, there are many EXPLICITLY human characters, and they are nothing like the characters in question here.
Further this isnt a case like SU where they are literally just technicolor humans with a rock (for the most part), these are actively inhuman designs which is what this site is for.

That's really pedantic and almost intentionally misses the point.
Pointy ears, animal cocks, wings or tails? Those are decidedly traits that aren't human. Charlie and Pim? Just look like a kid's attempt to draw a human, no actual definite traits that are "not human".
So what if there are actual humans also in the show? That's irrelevant to the design of Charlie and Pim, the design of "poorly drawn human".

But is it within the furry culture?

Smiling friends to me is about as human as the funny yellow things with hair-shaped heads in the Simpsons. But they may also be interpreted as the author's mental states and personalities.

demesejha said:
This is, really pedantic and almost intentionally misses the point others are making.

As if the post he was responding to wasn't also. Putting Smiling Friends characters next to less cartoony anime humanoids is of course going to make Smiling Friends characters stand out as looking inhuman (about the only way it could be a more disingenuous comparison is if they used princess_zelda or link). If you were to put them next to the likes of The Simpsons, Family Guy, or other more toony human characters, though, the differences would become much less stark:
post #1389528 post #3140933 post #2663103
post #3140947 post #2947331 post #2419711

I got pretty lucky with the bottom middle example, that the video thumbnail happened to pull that particular frame of a human caricature for comparison. It's actually hard to find posts with similar looking toony human characters as a focus to better compare because... they tend to get deleted as human-only or too-human content.

Also, in searching for examples, I've come to realize some people are really loose with their definition of toony.

imo they aren't relevant to e6

but, as far as the uploading_guidelines say:

The things that make humans not-human under our rules are visible, anatomical deviations from the standard human

and the characters do show a clear lack of ears, so one could interpret that as a visible anatomical deviation

Now yes that's absolutely bullshit and an argument that's clearly just dancing around semantics. But so is the argument to allow elves to be posted when they're literally just humans with slightly pointy ears. You either allow or forbid both sides, not just one

Well ... I kinda think I'd seen a similar Topic before ...
Yes, This is the one I remembered : https://e621.net/forum_topics/31714

Then, It'd be necessary to take time to think, for me.

It's ridiculous enough that Pim and Charlie are counted as a human when they both canonically are not human (they're Critters) but they don't even look human without already knowing that, and it's a hundred times stupider when you consider that elves are allowed despite being and looking infinitely more human. If elves are allowed just because of their ears then Charlie and Pim should pass with flying colors, nevermind everything else.

rakushunx said:
It's ridiculous enough that Pim and Charlie are counted as a human when they both canonically are not human (they're Critters) but they don't even look human without already knowing that, and it's a hundred times stupider when you consider that elves are allowed despite being and looking infinitely more human. If elves are allowed just because of their ears then Charlie and Pim should pass with flying colors, nevermind everything else.

Round head, upright bipedal stance, no included things that are markedly non-human, only missing things. A human whose ears were cut off is still a human.

"They're critters not humans" is What You Know, stop relying on the word of creator. When in doubt, trust the statements of those who haven't watched the show.

furrin_gok said:
Round head, upright bipedal stance, no included things that are markedly non-human, only missing things. A human whose ears were cut off is still a human.

"They're critters not humans" is What You Know, stop relying on the word of creator. When in doubt, trust the statements of those who haven't watched the show.

Those are general statements. Might as well say "He has two arms and two legs." He doesn't look like a human, he is merely humanoid, same as half the shit on this site.

A human whose ears were cut off is still a human.

He's objectively not though, so...that's wrong. And his ears aren't "cut off," he objectively doesn't have them. He has no ears to cut off.