hi, i was just wondering cause word etymology interests me and ive been looking for a way to refer to characters with glowing eyes and shadowed faces, so i was wondering, does anybody have a clue where "fecharis" comes from? ive searched google but nothing really comes up. the closest ive gotten is the spanish fechar, which can mean to close or cover something, but that seems more related to closing openings like doors or turning something off. it would be strange to just have no origins for this, so id love to know. thank you!

majoravoidjester said:
hi, i was just wondering cause word etymology interests me and ive been looking for a way to refer to characters with glowing eyes and shadowed faces, so i was wondering, does anybody have a clue where "fecharis" comes from? ive searched google but nothing really comes up. the closest ive gotten is the spanish fechar, which can mean to close or cover something, but that seems more related to closing openings like doors or turning something off. it would be strange to just have no origins for this, so id love to know. thank you!

I don't really know the origins of this word to be used when refering to conceled faced characters
and sometimes I even forget about the tag entirely, which i why I have it put into my tag glossery for when I edit images.

All I know it "If you know the word you JUST know what it is".........it is what it is.

I thought at first it might be something to do with, like, the cinematographer for Dracula, but I legitimately cannot find anything... who made the tag? Ask them.

closetpossum said:
I don't really know the origins of this word to be used when refering to conceled faced characters
and sometimes I even forget about the tag entirely, which i why I have it put into my tag glossery for when I edit images.

All I know it "If you know the word you JUST know what it is".........it is what it is.

yeah, its a really underrated tag, and the fact that the word itself is entirely unknown doesnt help.

votp said:
I thought at first it might be something to do with, like, the cinematographer for Dracula, but I legitimately cannot find anything... who made the tag? Ask them.

i looked it up in the tags, but theres no user listed as the creator, so i have no clue. maybe this is just a mystery thatll never be solved...

Post history for all instances where "fecharis" is added as a tag shows several edits by user #151090 (@Helio) three years ago, where they replace "featureless". There are a handful of other edits after that where other users start duplicating the tag.

Seems like a classic case of citogenesis.

I had the same question and DMed Helio about it near the beginning of the year, asking:

Hi, I noticed that you were the user that created the Fecharis tag, and after searching online to no avail, I couldn't find the origin of the word or usage that doesn't lead back to e621. What does the word mean? Is it loan word from another language? A reference to something? I'm truly curious.

Helio responded:

the original tag was taken so i needed to switch what was tagged over to something else

For whatever reason, I didn't press them to directly answer the question, or explain what the "original tag" was. I probably just forgot about the DM. Maybe I'll ask again for clarification, but it has been eight months.

As my DM says, most results on Google are posts uploaded to e621 that have been reuploaded automatically to other image booru sites and a few instances of people adopting the term based on its e621 usage. "Fechar" is a word in Portuguese, a verb meaning "close" "shut" or "conclude", using Google translate. My best guess is that Fecharis is a mutation of a misunderstanding of this word?

We really should find better tag name because nobody is going to intuitively know what's apparently a gibberish term. "Featureless face" is a little too ambiguous and a misnomer, since these characters do have features, but they're very simplified, but "fecharis" is meaningless and undertagged because of it.

I say kill fecharis forever, use some combination of dot_eyes, mouthless, shadowed_face and/or mask where appropriate and then come up with additional tags (simple_mouth? dot_mouth?)

lekkiyo said:
I wouldn't mind e621 having its own weird neologism. It seems to be used rather consistently, and describes something we don't really have any other tag or combination of tags for
But if being technically accurate is key, it could just be aliased to a new term.

Thanks for reminding me. I'm a moderator on r/neologisms, and this would be a good post for there .

lendrimujina said:
Thanks for reminding me. I'm a moderator on r/neologisms, and this would be a good post for there .

I think a simpler etymology is that it's just a corruption of "featureless". It's got nothing to do with Japanese though, in spite of the use of "r".

lafcadio said:
I think a simpler etymology is that it's just a corruption of "featureless". It's got nothing to do with Japanese though, in spite of the use of "r".

I didn't say anything about Japanese. I referred to Maplebyte's speculation that it might be Portuguese.

If you're referring to the use of the JP reference mark (※), I would put an asterisk there if Reddit's use of markdown didn't screw with them.

Also, thanks for pointing out that stray alveolar tap. I copied the pronunciation of "fechar" from Wiktionary because I wasn't sure how the "ch" was pronounced, and that R wouldn't carry over into an English loanword.

As for the etymological section being a tad complex, I can't say with certainty any more than you can. I also wanted to be clear that it wasn't me who coined the term.

lafcadio said:
I say kill fecharis forever, use some combination of dot_eyes, mouthless, shadowed_face and/or mask where appropriate and then come up with additional tags (simple_mouth? dot_mouth?)

that doesn't work at all since there's multiple versions of featureless face. It's not always just dotted eyes or a mask.
If getting rid of the tag is your goal you seperate the unity this tag already brings.

Your solution is bringing another headache entirely. "Let sleeping dogs lie". It's getting the job done and it's doing good work.

closetpossum said:
that doesn't work at all since there's multiple versions of featureless face. It's not always just dotted eyes or a mask.
If getting rid of the tag is your goal you seperate the unity this tag already brings.

Your solution is bringing another headache entirely. "Let sleeping dogs lie". It's getting the job done and it's doing good work.

These are all supposed to be equivalent. Truly the picture of a unified tag. No, this is a chance to improve searchability by actually tagging things that people understand instead of having one user decide on an unachievable ideal. Otherwise, this is looking like the start of some weird Mimiff-tier nonsense. User comes up with a weird neologism, populates several thousand posts with it that otherwise have nothing in common, a few innocent users add it to more posts because they don't know any better, and then a forum post pops up asking "Where's this from?" All we're missing now is a bunch of increasingly insane replies about it.

lafcadio said:

"Face" not shadowed but featureless

post #3517356 post #2690220

"Face" shadowed and featureless

post #2961745

"Face" shadowed with glowing features

post #3503592 post #348931 post #2968361 post #547871 post #999388

Mask

post #280410 post #3518524 post #721537 post #771687 post #1172127

No mask or concealing headwear, they just look like that

post #3442836 post #3440014 post #505565 post #1647047 post #2244946 post #2187243 post #2053715 post #2081590

These are all supposed to be equivalent. Truly the picture of a unified tag. No, this is a chance to improve searchability by actually tagging things that people understand instead of having one user decide on an unachievable ideal. Otherwise, this is looking like the start of some weird Mimiff-tier nonsense. User comes up with a weird neologism, populates several thousand posts with it that otherwise have nothing in common, a few innocent users add it to more posts because they don't know any better, and then a forum post pops up asking "Where's this from?" All we're missing now is a bunch of increasingly insane replies about it.

...yeah, a bunch of those pics, especially the ones where the characters just have black eyes or black eye markings, don't fit the definition in any sense of the word. Whether one likes the tag or not, those are just flat-out mistagged. If Zasp qualifies, then so would Sandbag and Pikachu.

I still think it's a perfectly cromulent word, and there's a definite specific aesthetic that seems to be the intent, but if it wants to be a useful tag, the definition needs to be narrowed.