Hi there!

I noticed that post #2555458 and its child, post #2559459, are locked to remove the "lynel" tag. The historical post changes #2555458 and post changes #2559459 show that the tag was locked after the conclusion of a small edit war, with the following reason given one year ago:

Cannot infer that this is lynel without the upper body being visible

However, I would like clarification on this. It seems to me that there is sufficient information within the picture to demonstrate that the character penetrating Kass is a lynel, given the distinctive bandages wrapped around the legs, the red hair sprouting out just above the hooves, the long, red-haired tail, and the brown fur overall. Indeed, comparing the character in the animation's brown fur, bandages, red-haired tail, and red hair above its hooves against the lynel's in-game model shows a perfect match in all distinctive features of the species fucking Kass in this animation.

As described in e621:tag what you see (explained),

Therefore, for every post on the site, it can be assumed that e621's tagging system is actually saying "this post appears to contain X" rather than "this post definitely contains X".

There is more than enough information in the animation to demonstrate that it appears to depict a lynel, even if we cannot conclude that it definitely depicts a lynel. It would be more surprising if this turned out not to be a lynel, given the fur colouration pattern, quadrupedal body shape, and bandages all being consistent with the lynel species. In fact, it seems to me that the evidence is overwhelming enough that we are equally well justified in tagging the picture "lynel" as we are applying the tags "horse", "taur", or any of the other species tags attributed to the animation right now.

Huh, for some reason it appears that my thread submitted twice. Apologies for that! Mods/admins are welcome to delete topic #35313.

yeah, this lock should have been -taur +feral, and really shouldn't have removed lynel. the form of the character can't be determined other than being a quadraped, but it's pretty clearly using the same design as lynels in BotW even if, from the viewing angle, we can't tell that it's a taur like lynels generally are.

In the same way that we do not assume a character that otherwise appears to be human actually has animal ears offscreen, we do not assume that a character that otherwise appears to be equine is actually a centaur. As per the TWYS policy, we can tag the character in post #2555458 as an equine but not a lynel.

monroethelizard said:
the fur colouration pattern, quadrupedal body shape, and bandages all being consistent with the lynel species

e6 does not use fur color as part of TWYS because recolors are so common in furry art. It is considered to provide zero information about a character's species. For similar reasons clothing and accessories and bandages are not used in determining a character's species.

monroethelizard said:
comparing the character against the lynel's in-game model

With few exceptions, outside information is not used in TWYS.

Consider this: If you were a typical e6 user, with no knowledge of fictional species, searching for equine feral_penetrating_anthro avian and post #2555458 did not show up, would you not feel shortchanged?

tl;dr: TWYS is absolute on this site and is a double-edged sword

leomole said:
In the same way that we do not assume a character that otherwise appears to be human actually has animal ears offscreen, we do not assume that a character that otherwise appears to be equine is actually a centaur. As per the TWYS policy, we can tag the character in post #2555458 as an equine but not a lynel.

The species tags would be completely useless if we followed this reasoning strictly. You don't need to see a penis to tag a character as male or a pussy to tag a character female, so you don't need to see every anatomical feature possible to tag a lynel or some other species, as long as what we do see is consistent with it and is a likely candidate. Humans are a bit of a special case since this site doesn't allow human-only content, so where things like fur color or markings may be used to distinguish species normally (where color/markings would be the deciding factor, e.g. a horse vs zebra), it's not enough to break through the human-only rule. e.g. post #3513951 is tagged hypno_(pokémon) even though all we see of it are yellow hands and legs; if the blaziken were a human, the post wouldn't be allowed as it would be considered human-only, but since the post is allowed due to the blaziken, it should be tagged as a hypno fucking a blaziken since that's the most likely scenario being depicted, not a human fucking a blaziken.

Several species tags may as well be nuked if you needed 100% verifiable proof the character is that species with no possibility it's something else.

leomole said:
Consider this: If you were a typical e6 user, with no knowledge of fictional species, searching for equine feral_penetrating_anthro avian and post #2555458 did not show up, would you not feel shortchanged?

That speaks to a separate issue regarding fictional or mythological species that are based on real species. E.g. searching horse anthro_penetrating_human and not finding post #3565810 because it's technically a pegasus, which isn't tagged horse despite being based on one. Or fox human_on_feral and not finding post #3493939 because it's a fennekin, which isn't tagged fox despite being based on one.

Watsit brings up several good points, and I agree wholly with their reasoning. I'll also add some additional thoughts below.

leomole said:
Consider this: If you were a typical e6 user, with no knowledge of fictional species, searching for equine feral_penetrating_anthro avian and post #2555458 did not show up, would you not feel shortchanged?

As a fairly typical e6 user, I came across this matter when I searched for kass_(tloz) lynel and this animation did not show up. I would surmise that most users who come across this animation immediately see the distinctive features of the lynel and can tell that it is a lynel despite the upper body being out of frame. ("Distinctive features" being the characteristics I outlined in the original post: fur/hair length, distribution, and colouration; bandage presence and placement; quadruped body shape; tail length; and more.)

If post #2555458 does not merit the lynel tag under this strict interpretation of TWYS, it seems that most images depicting Kass with lynels should not be tagged with lynel, as they show even fewer distinctive features of the lynel species than this animation does. Following the reasoning outlined here, post #1285958, post #1520108, and post #2061465 should all have the lynel tag removed and replaced with the equine tag. Yet it surely seems like a mistake to depopulate most of the search results for kass_(tloz) lynel given the several images that ostensibly depict this pairing.

In fact, it's fairly common for lynel images to not depict the lynel's upper body -- e.g., post #3378519, post #2363517, post #1862951, post #1862952. If TWYS is to be interpreted in such a way as to restrict post #2555458 from including this tag, then a third of the lynel tag shall be depopulated for showing just the lower body of the lynel.

Coming back to the question leomole posed once more:

leomole said:
If you were a typical e6 user, with no knowledge of fictional species, searching for equine feral_penetrating_anthro avian and post #2555458 did not show up, would you not feel shortchanged?

If this is a problem, perhaps the solution is that lynel should implicate equid. Lynels are evocative of equines in a number of respects. But setting that discussion aside for the moment, it shall most certainly be an even greater problem if searching for lynel fails to return nearly half of the images which ostensibly depict lynels, simply because these drawings do not depict the entire body.

EDIT:
In fact, there's nothing about post #2555458 implying that it depicts a horse rather than another equid species. The animation shouldn't even be tagged equine under a strict TWYS interpretation.

EDIT 2:
Fixed an incorrect post link.

leomole said:
e6 does not use fur color as part of TWYS because recolors are so common in furry art. It is considered to provide zero information about a character's species.

Out of curiosity, are colour patterns considered to carry information about a species' identity? For instance, a striped tail on a lemur might imply that the character is a ring-tailed lemur rather than belonging to another genus of lemur.

In the same way, the colour pattern of the quadruped beast in post #2555458 is consistent with a lynel, along with the constellation of other pieces of information all implying that it is a lynel. None of these contextual clues independently guarantee that it is a lynel, but taken in sum, it seems more likely than not that the creature is a lynel under TWYS.

leomole said:
Consider this: If you were a typical e6 user, with no knowledge of fictional species, searching for equine feral_penetrating_anthro avian and post #2555458 did not show up, would you not feel shortchanged?

And I'd flip that around. Consider: a typical e6 user and you distinctly remember an animation of a lynel fucking kass, so you search for lynel kass male/male and post #2555458 did not show up, would you not question what happened to that animation? The technicality of "there's a small chance that maybe it could be something else" flies in the face of how we're supposed to tag, given the most likely scenario of what we see. Maybe someone spilled the mayo, maybe the poor lucario is becoming human, maybe this is mta_crossgender tribadism. If we only tagged what is 100% verifiable from looking at the image, most tags would be useless.