Despite the initial silliness of the question, they are very different. Currently Null bulges are included in the null tag. The rest of the tag regards characters that lack genitals, while a null bulge is most often not a lack of genitals, but instead a permanent encasing of them, so despite sharing the term null, they're very different and null bulge images stick out like a sore thumb in the rest of the null tag. I think it will be better to split the tags off from eachother once and for all and define null bulges as not a lack of genitals, but encased genitals or a different kind of genitals of their own.

"Null" shouldn't just be the lack of genitals, that's featureless_crotch. Honestly, I'm not sure I see the point of null when featureless_crotch exists; given that wiki describes it as "A 'quasi-gender' denotation of characters who specifically lack sex organs", that seems indiscernible from a character simply not having genitals drawn on them. The wiki's examples are all things I'd just tag featureless_crotch on and not think of as "null"/"quasi-gender" related.

watsit said:
"Null" shouldn't just be the lack of genitals, that's featureless_crotch. Honestly, I'm not sure I see the point of null when featureless_crotch exists; given that wiki describes it as "A 'quasi-gender' denotation of characters who specifically lack sex organs", that seems indiscernible from a character simply not having genitals drawn on them. The wiki's examples are all things I'd just tag featureless_crotch on and not think of as "null"/"quasi-gender" related.

I think the separation of Null and featureless crotch is very important because there's a difference between images where the genitals aren't drawn so that the artist can draw attention away from them, because genitals are unimportant or counter productive to the point of the image vs images where the fact that the character does not have genitals is the point. I like the later, but the former does nothing for me, and majority of images in featureless crotch are the former. A lot of images in featureless crotch have the character's crotch mostly obscured, or draw the character's crotch that ways as a stylistic choice, rather than to say that there's anything abnormal about the character's body. It's a similar usage to the difference between foot_focus and feet simply existing in an image. It's not exactly the same, but it's the best comparison I can make.

Null ideally should be the difference between
post #3174329 and post #3977056,
post #3332137 and post #3500086,
post #2217982 and post #3942604,
or post #3709337, and post #1600149.

There also is the possibility of characters that have no genitals, but do have something on their crotch, or characters that have a featureless crotch, but have genitals elsewhere on their body, but both those cases would be niche.

oozeenthusiast said:
I think the separation of Null and featureless crotch is very important because there's a difference between images where the genitals aren't drawn so that the artist can draw attention away from them, because genitals are unimportant or counter productive to the point of the image vs images where the fact that the character does not have genitals is the point.

I feel that's too ambiguous. There are artists that don't draw genitals, or do draw an alternate "safe" genital-less version of an image, but aren't trying to draw attention away from the area. Whether a character simply didn't have genitals drawn on them, vs explicitly doesn't have genitals "in lore", seems too much based on artist intent rather than anything particular in the image. As a lore tag I could see it, but with featureless_crotch and crotch_focus being available, "null" seems superfluous and not TWYS.

watsit said:
I feel that's too ambiguous. There are artists that don't draw genitals, or do draw an alternate "safe" genital-less version of an image, but aren't trying to draw attention away from the area. Whether a character simply didn't have genitals drawn on them, vs explicitly doesn't have genitals "in lore", seems too much based on artist intent rather than anything particular in the image. As a lore tag I could see it, but with featureless_crotch and crotch_focus being available, "null" seems superfluous and not TWYS.

It's no more ambiguous than other tags we have for camera positions, poses, or the size of objects. All art has an element of interpretation.

the null tag should not be tagged on characters with null bulges it definitely makes the tag less useful.

watsit said:
I feel that's too ambiguous. There are artists that don't draw genitals, or do draw an alternate "safe" genital-less version of an image, but aren't trying to draw attention away from the area. Whether a character simply didn't have genitals drawn on them, vs explicitly doesn't have genitals "in lore", seems too much based on artist intent rather than anything particular in the image. As a lore tag I could see it, but with featureless_crotch and crotch_focus being available, "null" seems superfluous and not TWYS.

it's based on context, kinda like loli/shota vs just young. if the has no visible genitals dispite not wearing any clothes to cover the area it's always featureless_crotch no mater the context, if that character is in a suggestive/sexual situation where the lack of genitals is not just an artstyle decision and is actually part of the character than it's also null.

while a null bulge is most often not a lack of genitals, but instead a permanent encasing of them

Null_bulge is kind of ambiguous. It can clearly be a permanently encased penis post #3922512 post #4005217 or the character might possibly have NO genitals under the bulge post #3141975 post #3140473. I think distinguishing these two types could be helpful, but I realize the latter variety is basically ambiguous by definition, so I don't know if there would be too much gray-area? Though, perhaps chastity_bulge is kinda already meant to tag the former kind? It's weird though because it seems to be a type of null_bulge that requires a lock_symbol (or another icon?) by Wiki definition ("A bulge without any icons is only a null_bulge"), but it currently doesn't imply null_bulge nor lock_symbol for some reason.

Null ideally should be the difference between...

Agreed, though historically I've tagged things like post #3977056 as just featureless_crotch (and rating:questionable and whatever made it questionable, which is usually spread_legs). I've generally thought of null as for situations where something more explicitly sexual is going on, or the fact that the character is null is more central to the picture's "meaning":

...But I'll admit that I'm drawing some rather arbitrary lines between featureless_crotch and null, so perhaps it would be less arbitrary as OozeEnthusiast showed, including stuff like like post #3977056 as null. It's worth noting that there is a sizeable amount of these, and currently only a small portion are tagged null: featureless_crotch spread_legs rating:q.

Are anus_only characters inherently null? post #1959168 post #2944745 I've historically tagged them as just featureless_crotch + anus_only, but I guess I've historically avoided adding the null tag to begin with.

crocogator said:
Are anus_only characters are also inherently null? post #1959168 post #2944745 I've historically tagged them as just featureless_crotch + anus_only, but I guess I've historically avoided using the null tag to begin with.

Uhh yeah, I think so? at least most of the time, yeah.

Honestly, anus_only is kind of a problem tag, already. It seems like its definition has been stretched a bit thin, as it used to pretty much just be characters that only have an anus, but as time has gone on it now includes stuff like characters wearing easy access clothing that covers the genitals but not the anus, characters wearing pussy tape, characters with chastity devices, characters sitting in such a way that just their anus is visible over the edge of their seat, and a bunch of stuff that probably should be tagged with anal_only instead.

do we think null should maybe be moved over to being a lore tag? it is something that is potentially based on artist intention rather than just the raw content of a post.

darryus said:
do we think null should maybe be moved over to being a lore tag? it is something that is potentially based on artist intention rather than just the raw content of a post.

I've tried to talk about this before but the threads never got any real traction.
Some quick points I want to highlight

• null and nullo are potentially conflicting tags, with the latter purportedly being for characters who had genitals but had them surgically removed.
• Users will occasionally tag these interchangably regardless
• lock_bulge should be merged with chastity_bulge and is not null
• Users will continue tagging these as null regardless, as that's the colloquial association among the communities that use them
• nullification is a mess.

yeah, mistags were like half of the reason I was thinking about this; I thought that changing it to a lore tag might help, since most of our lore tags are related to gender identity (or they were prior to the familial relation tags being moved over). so that association might dicorage it being tagged on characters with bulges or whatever.

I was also thinking about if we should change the tag name to null_gender as the tagname but I'm not a huge fan since it's decidedly not a gender tag as null characters can present as male or female or ambiguous.

darryus said:
I was also thinking about if we should change the tag name to null_gender as the tagname but I'm not a huge fan since it's decidedly not a gender tag as null characters can present as male or female or ambiguous.

I do think it needs to be a lore tag in any case, since it depends on artist intent. Null characters, those that explicitly don't have genitals, are visually indistinguishable from featureless_crotch characters, those that don't have genitals visible because the artist didn't want to draw them. Even if attention is drawn to the lack of genitals, there's no saying why they don't have any; it could still be that the artist didn't draw them for some reason, rather than because the character doesn't have them "in lore".

In that case, null_(lore) or null_crotch_(lore) would be fine IMO.

If we do go the route of making null a lore tag, we should make a new featureless_crotch_focus tag for images where it's displayed prominently.