Hi everyone, I recently saw a post and came across this comment (comment #7438707) regarding a previous post from the same artist:

lilyanida said:
sadly gotta start tagging stuff with the cub tag whenever uploading
i definitely don't need another negative feedback for just one post

The post in question:
post #4101906

I understand the staff said this post in specific is cub. Regardless on where you may stand on this, this got me wondering, considering only TWYS, what could be some visual references to draw the line between small characters and cub? For example, these posts:
post #591727 post #3472751 post #2483726
depict a pikachu with a short body and (at least according to me) cub-like features. Furthermore, the first post depicts a pichu, defined in the wiki as a baby pokemon, and yet the post doesn't have a cub tag, which confuses me even more.

As a side note, I understand the artist from the post in question carries some controversy from the past, and I DO NOT wish to stir up any drama. I also understand staff's decisions are the final word when it comes to locked tags. I just want to be as precise as I can when tagging and blacklisting myself.

Thanks in advance, Cheers!

furrylover121 said:
Furthermore, the first post depicts a pichu, defined in the wiki as a baby pokemon, and yet the post doesn't have a cub tag, which confuses me even more.

"Baby pokemon" is an in-lore classification for the first evolutionary stage of certain pokemon. It doesn't correlate to the age or looks of a character.

watsit said:
"Baby pokemon" is an in-lore classification for the first evolutionary stage of certain pokemon. It doesn't correlate to the age or looks of a character.

I keep seeing people say this, but like, it is a bit more than that. the fact that all baby pokémon are egg group undiscovered but evolve into pokémon with actual egg groups does kinda imply that in-canon they are, in fact, prepubescent.

I feel that for lore tagging, at least that should be a consideration or maybe we just shouldn't have nuked the baby_pokemon tag.

None of those thumbnails are really cub? Size_difference != cub

darryus said:
I keep seeing people say this, but like, it is a bit more than that. the fact that all baby pokémon are egg group undiscovered but evolve into pokémon with actual egg groups does kinda imply that in-canon they are, in fact, prepubescent.

post #4095814
ah yes now imagine how insane you would be if showed you that nidoran's can only breed in the basic stage or first evolution for yall, nidorina/nidorino and nidoqueen/nidoking can't breed only the first evo

and so called baby pokemon are just normal like any other pokemon, if you give a fine good look at this very informational wiki page you can see right there and i quote it

Baby Pokémon can be of any age, since they do not grow or change in appearance until they evolve, which can be delayed indefinitely.

Note that this tag is NOT to be used for Pokémon that just happen to be young, and is specifically for those categorized as "baby Pokémon".

darryus said:
I keep seeing people say this, but like, it is a bit more than that. the fact that all baby pokémon are egg group undiscovered but evolve into pokémon with actual egg groups does kinda imply that in-canon they are, in fact, prepubescent.

Baby pokemon can't breed (in series lore), so in that sense they would be prepubescent as they've not reached the stage of puberty to be able to reproduce. But we're talking about magical animals, it's an evolutionary stage that they can be in for decades, if not their whole lifetime. Baby pokemon can be adults.

darryus said:
I feel that for lore tagging, at least that should be a consideration

Lore tags are only for the artist's intent, not for the copyright's intent. All that matters is what the artist says about the character ages.

I think I'd support reinstating baby_pokemon, NOT to imply young or anything (maybe someone's drawn a big bara riolu, lol) but just because some people might want to blacklist all baby pokemon. Sadly I don't have a source to point to but I remember seeing in an artist's TOS before that they don't draw any pokemon in the baby pokemon category because it makes them uncomfortable. I imagine that person can't be the only one.

lilyanida said:
post #4095814
ah yes now imagine how insane you would be if showed you that nidoran's can only breed in the basic stage or first evolution for yall, nidorina/nidorino and nidoqueen/nidoking can't breed only the first evo

that's only nidorina and nidoqueen, actually the male half is in monster/field throughout. also if I'm not mistakenm this might just be the anime, but there is some instanses of wild nidoqueens seen with eggs/children and it's only caught nidoqueens/nidorina that have this trait.

watsit said:
Baby pokemon can't breed (in series lore), so in that sense they would be prepubescent as they've not reached the stage of puberty to be able to reproduce. But we're talking about magical animals, it's an evolutionary stage that they can be in for decades, if not their whole lifetime. Baby pokemon can be adults.

until they hit level 100 and then they're stuck like that.

I mean, either way I don't see why baby_pokemon needed to get aliased, it seems like it'd be at least as useful of a categorization as stuff that was kept around like legendary_pokemon and fossil_pokemon.

darryus said:
I mean, either way I don't see why baby_pokemon needed to get aliased, it seems like it'd be at least as useful of a categorization as stuff that was kept around like legendary_pokemon and fossil_pokemon.

Some people have complained about those too. But as we've aliased away things like fire_pokemon, it makes sense for baby_pokemon to follow suit. Plus, there were issues with people tagging baby_pokemon on any young pokemon (even those not classified as a "baby pokemon"), and people would get upset at their posts being tagged baby_pokemon as it gave the connotation of a baby/young character when they drew an obviously older looking riolu or pichu. People would try to tag cub just because a post was tagged baby_pokemon. It was messy.

watsit said:
Some people have complained about those too. But as we've aliased away things like fire_pokemon, it makes sense for baby_pokemon to follow suit. Plus, there were issues with people tagging baby_pokemon on any young pokemon (even those not classified as a "baby pokemon"), and people would get upset at their posts being tagged baby_pokemon as it gave the connotation of a baby/young character when they drew an obviously older looking riolu or pichu. People would try to tag cub just because a post was tagged baby_pokemon. It was messy.

I don't think the pokémon type tags ever really had a significant amount of utility, though it was pretty much just just tag bloat. I could definitely see people blacklisting baby_pokemon the same way they might blacklist canonically younger characters like cream_the_rabbit or the child characters in MLP.

I don't think we should be considering frequency of mistags a reason to invalidate a tag, usually that's when we change tag names to be less ambiguous.

darryus said:
I don't think the pokémon type tags ever really had a significant amount of utility, though it was pretty much just just tag bloat. I could definitely see people blacklisting baby_pokemon the same way they might blacklist canonically younger characters like cream_the_rabbit or the child characters in MLP.

I don't think we should be considering frequency of mistags a reason to invalidate a tag, usually that's when we change tag names to be less ambiguous.

Actually it is taken into consideration. For example, ruined_orgasm.
Topic: Ruined_Orgasm Tag Aliased to Invalid_Tag
It was deemed unsalvageable and got aliased to invalid tag, and interrupted_orgasm took its place, instead of directly aliasing ruined_orgasm to interrupted_orgasm

furrylover121 said:
Hi everyone, I recently saw a post and came across this comment (comment #7438707) regarding a previous post from the same artist:
The post in question:
post #4101906

I understand the staff said this post in specific is cub. Regardless on where you may stand on this, this got me wondering, considering only TWYS, what could be some visual references to draw the line between small characters and cub? For example, these posts:
post #591727 post #3472751 post #2483726
depict a pikachu with a short body and (at least according to me) cub-like features. Furthermore, the first post depicts a pichu, defined in the wiki as a baby pokemon, and yet the post doesn't have a cub tag, which confuses me even more.

As a side note, I understand the artist from the post in question carries some controversy from the past, and I DO NOT wish to stir up any drama. I also understand staff's decisions are the final word when it comes to locked tags. I just want to be as precise as I can when tagging and blacklisting myself.

Thanks in advance, Cheers!

Personally, I would have tagged all of these as cub. In any case, it’s better to err on the side of caution regarding young tagging, as such content may actually be considered illegal in some countries and we don’t want any of our users to have to worry about that.

As for how to tell, I like to compare with real-life examples of animals or humans to determine proportions. Take Eevee, for example. If you compare an average on-model Eevee drawing to a picture of an adult fox and a young fox, its proportions will probably look closer to that of the young fox. Look at head/body ratio, limb/torso ratio, and overall limb length. Usually a young animal will have a larger head and shorter legs than an adult. Beware of chibi art, which will usually have a cartoonishly oversized head but (if the character is still meant to look like an adult) a normal limb-to-torso ratio, whereas actual young characters will normally have distinctly shorter limbs. Why a fox? I dunno, Eevee kinda looks like a fox. There’s obviously going to be some variation between species, so it’s not super clear-cut when it comes to ferals, but my best advice is to just give it your best guess and try to err on the side of caution.

Humanoid/anthro Pokémon are much easier to determine, like Riolu. On-model Riolu distinctly has the proportions of a human child, probably in the 6-10 year-old range, whereas Lucario is much more adult-like. Also, there are lots of resources online specifically for comparing human proportions at various ages, so using some of those measurement charts to compare with the characters in artwork will make the job quite a bit easier.

scaliespe said:
Personally, I would have tagged all of these as cub. In any case, it’s better to err on the side of caution regarding young tagging, as such content may actually be considered illegal in some countries and we don’t want any of our users to have to worry about that.

As for how to tell, I like to compare with real-life examples of animals or humans to determine proportions. Take Eevee, for example. If you compare an average on-model Eevee drawing to a picture of an adult fox and a young fox, its proportions will probably look closer to that of the young fox. Look at head/body ratio, limb/torso ratio, and overall limb length. Usually a young animal will have a larger head and shorter legs than an adult. Beware of chibi art, which will usually have a cartoonishly oversized head but (if the character is still meant to look like an adult) a normal limb-to-torso ratio, whereas actual young characters will normally have distinctly shorter limbs. Why a fox? I dunno, Eevee kinda looks like a fox. There’s obviously going to be some variation between species, so it’s not super clear-cut when it comes to ferals, but my best advice is to just give it your best guess and try to err on the side of caution.

Humanoid/anthro Pokémon are much easier to determine, like Riolu. On-model Riolu distinctly has the proportions of a human child, probably in the 6-10 year-old range, whereas Lucario is much more adult-like. Also, there are lots of resources online specifically for comparing human proportions at various ages, so using some of those measurement charts to compare with the characters in artwork will make the job quite a bit easier.

This is the direction I wanted this conversation to take, sorry for mentioning baby pokemon tags in specific as is it a topic that could be better discussed in another forum post.

That being said, I agree with some of the criteria you mentioned, however, I think we could use some objective guidelines or a system in place to effectively tag cub, young, etc. For me it feels like right now we're in a position where it's subject to the discretion of the user tagging, because we "feel" or "think" a post is cub or not.

As for related to exclusively pokemon, let's consider this post:
post #4091966
We know Charmeleon is the evolution of Charmander, therefore it would be logical to assume is an "older" version of this pokemon. However, assumptions don't matter when it comes to TWYS. That's why (again, not challenging staff's decision) I would like to know what process of thinking would consider this post as cub, and the comments seem to voice theirs concerns too.

darryus said:
I don't think the pokémon type tags ever really had a significant amount of utility, though it was pretty much just just tag bloat. I could definitely see people blacklisting baby_pokemon the same way they might blacklist canonically younger characters like cream_the_rabbit or the child characters in MLP.

I don't think we should be considering frequency of mistags a reason to invalidate a tag, usually that's when we change tag names to be less ambiguous.

brother in christ is that hard to just blacklist "pokemon young"?

scaliespe said:

Humanoid/anthro Pokémon are much easier to determine, like Riolu. On-model Riolu distinctly has the proportions of a human child, probably in the 6-10 year-old range, whereas Lucario is much more adult-like. Also, there are lots of resources online specifically for comparing human proportions at various ages, so using some of those measurement charts to compare with the characters in artwork will make the job quite a bit easier.

huh this is pretty funny because i did a cleanup on the posts from talentlesshack giving fair reason to why that posts shouldn't have cub tag, i am a fair person and gave fair reason, not to mention that for some reason but this post post #3432312 got tagged with cub by NotMeNotYou without not even having something in there, almost feels like everything was tagged mindlessly with the cub tag and whatever that got caught in the cross fire that would be "correct tagging" just went got tagged with cub.
like i said i removed cub tag in a bunch of posts and gave fair reason if you wish to check yourself then click me make your own judgement but i atleast gave fair reason and not putting cub tag in everything
and still it got ignored even after contacting RD about the posts and me giving fair reason before a ton of posts got locked with the tags
RD said i should contact NMNY because she stands by her actions, that was 4 days ago and got no response

furrylover121 said:
This is the direction I wanted this conversation to take, sorry for mentioning baby pokemon tags in specific as is it a topic that could be better discussed in another forum post.

That being said, I agree with some of the criteria you mentioned, however, I think we could use some objective guidelines or a system in place to effectively tag cub, young, etc. For me it feels like right now we're in a position where it's subject to the discretion of the user tagging, because we "feel" or "think" a post is cub or not.

glad that you got your own response, however, it's good to think as well for posts with pokemon that looks too ambiguous to be either older or young, because that's where all pokemon are, ambiguous of age, the time(if not the only) that it was considered of age it was the famous old treecko.
if pokemons or even any other character looks ambiguous of age, should be the artist's call if it is young or not

As for related to exclusively pokemon, let's consider this post:
post #4091966
We know Charmeleon is the evolution of Charmander, therefore it would be logical to assume is an "older" version of this pokemon. However, assumptions don't matter when it comes to TWYS. That's why (again, not challenging staff's decision) I would like to know what process of thinking would consider this post as cub, and the comments seem to voice theirs concerns too.

yeah neither me or the artist and also users of e621 understands to why that charmeleon post got locked with cub, many people have concerns that the e621 staff have some sort of personal beef with talentlesshack as it has been said by other users, i like to advice that if they really think that said posts isn't fair for having the cub tag locked then they should report the one who locked the tags, it's in their right to do so if posts doesn't correlate to the cub tag, and this goes to other tags as well it's not exclusive to the cub/young tag, the staff aren't gods who are always right, even if their decision can be final, if you think they did something wrong it's your call to report the said user

I think the right call is, as Pokémon are species who evolve instead of age, cub can't be applied to any species in one broad stroke. That's what FA is doing. Don't be like them.

But if it's blatantly infantile (such as in diapers) or anthro with childlike proportions, then yeah it's cub.

I'm going to side with Hack on this one.
Even by the "evo = age" argument, in no universe is Charmeleon cub.

Oh, jeez. Are we opening this can of worms?

I'm for it, but this is effectively a policy change for handling the previously unchecked exception of not tagging the myriad smol franchise creatures as cub. Previously, this was not proactively monitored by admins (cub was recently tagged on a bunch of TalentlessHack's pokemon posts by staff), so the situation with the smols was allowed to play out, which guaranteed the outcome where none of them would have the cub tag. Franchise fandoms get positively incensed when their smols with childlike proportions get labeled cub, so any attempts at doing so were met with tag removals from a decentralized group who don't really know much about tagging, which became the status quo. I had given up on this many years ago.

I think the logical breakdown is similar to what happened with anthro getting the nudge that, yes, bipedal franchise animals (e.g., lucario) are still anthro because they are anthro-shaped, regardless of preconceived fandom notions that they are like wild animals. People used to doubt that, but there was a subtle change in perception and tagging once rules got enforced and enough people were corrected. Some people thought that "anthro" had a very rigid definition, that anthro = human-shaped animal person when it is really humanoid-shaped animal creature (strictly speaking, all anthros are humanoids, just not how e621 defines humanoid).

How this relates to cub? Same pattern. I think average furries expect that cubs must look very human-like and follow expected human bodily development when in fact the tag here means "young-looking animal." The problem, of course, is that we don't know the bodily development of most franchise smols, because by canon they have never visibly aged. Fandoms would rather not be associated with an icky label if they don't have to be, so they opt for the interpretation that their smols don't have bodily development. To tag them cub means we're applying regular anthro and feral body development and sizing. For example, riolu doesn't get size-checked against other riolus (2 feet tall by canon); instead, riolu gets size-checked against normal anthros (5-8 feet tall adults, let's say). This is the only way cub can ever get uniformly tagged on smols.

The smols' fandom bloc will riot if this change approaches consistency across this site, because this is currently the outlier, the first step. The workload is, let's start with, 10K old posts that would need the cub tag (probably much more) to maintain consistency with the TalentlessHack cub tags. If those 10K cub tags aren't locked on, then they will get removed en masse, meaning perhaps 100 users "vandalizing" tags and needing records to get this change through their collective skulls. Because this is a change. If there isn't a concerted effort to forward this tagging doctrine, then it will all get undone and come to nothing.

...I'm gonna be honest, I'm not quite sure what you're saying, Abadbird, but that may be from brain being a little frazzled right now.

Pokemon comes with a few hurdles that complicate things on top of complications (a few of which are already mentioned) on top of more complications: which is ultimately why there's instances of 'baby pokemon' not being treated as baby pokemon. Sometimes it's just stupid and one doesn't want to be defined by dubious game logic. Unfortunately, the TWYS formula kinda depends on people considering of not only the content but also the origin of the things in the picture, and that's part of where this is all breaking down, and that falls apart further when you throw in stigmas and more.

Having run into this midway, it really did look like a bizarre nightmare of FA drama somehow falling into here. I feel like some of these issues and drama are more to do with how some folks handled it all mixed with opinions... but admittedly it's not even a week old yet, so there's no hard reason to assume everything is burning yet (people are just genuinely afraid to be booted and harassed from yet another major furry location, and I can't blame them for that).

I think several of Talentless things are unfairly locked, and I can understand how some may feel a preference to marking them cub otherwise, but the question is are we marking it so because we feel forced to, because we're rudely imposing, or is there an actual qualification that means it did in fact require to be marked and it doesn't matter?

Just because something looks humanoid doesn't mean it follows our understand of humanoid logic: We are talking about creatures that conjure things out of thin air, sometimes 'evolve' clothes/notclothes, and has a being that in theory has been around since the start of the planet giving birth to various pokemon species while dying out that for some reason people think is a child because it's tiny and it giggles—it can friggin transform into a whale. Nothing about its size and shape is relevant when you can turn into anything you want to be. Mewtwo is younger than Mew by a longshot and I bet no one thinks twice about that.

So does that mean we need some sort of guide about how to deal with creatures and art styles that don't follow Real Life mechanics? Maybe. It may also just mean people need to learn a little tolerance and understand there's gonna be little differences in viewpoints and styles (and that most of us probably don't think that hard about porn or otherwise). We can take our time to work out a guide and it doesn't need a hard deadline, or find other ways to try and ease things a little that's fair for all and not just pampering.

If you like pokemon but not 'baby' pokemon, blacklist the baby names like suggested. It's 20 or so names and apparently blacklists are a thing. If you like baby pokemon but not porn of them... I will refrain from asking why you're looking for those on *here* of all places when other spots already have sfw settings you can probably search as well and find them first, but you probably know how to use blacklist tags to do that as well... and this will be endless if I keep going, sorry. >.<

Edit: Figures I think of something more clever to say after posting, but..

Ultimately the problem right now is the TWYS system itself: The system works when everyone 'plays nice' together, considers situations, origins, and etc, but it falls apart when anyone starts pushing some sort of entitlement or agenda (good or otherwise). This is part of why it's something that needs moderation, but moderators are humans too, so as I'm not familiar enough with E6 to try and dig deeper and not crazy enough to actively question mod reasons for risk of being targeted (unless information is offered openly and all to show less risky). Ultimately someone is gonna lose to this because there's no perfect answer, I just don't think it right that hack gets the short end of this particular stick.

Edit2: Also, having recently learned about lore tags, it might be useful to some degree if the category is higher up with the artist/character sections so if the art is 'meant' to be one thing over another, that's advertised before the public tags others potentially change? Still technically allows the one thing, i wasn't even aware they were a thing cause I almost never notice them. Granted, somewhat moot when you're supposed to add the tags regardless of lore as well but... details. At least it gives the artist/poster the ability to actively make the claim to counter the other tags and make them visible versus easily missed.

cold-dragon said:...

This really keeps circling back to "but they are pokemon and pokemon canonically don't age or are actually adults or...." etc. and that just doesn't matter here. It's the 1,000 year old loli trick. I don't know the canonical age of the pokemon I've been locking cub on, nor does it matter. I view them objectively as I come across them; my criteria is child-like proportions such as big, bulbousy heads, short, stubby limbs, lack of otherwise feral features like claws and hind leg shapes, etc. TalentlessHack's posts are getting locked a lot because they get reported a lot and that's usually when I find them. They get tagged as cub because they appear to be cub. I have nothing against that, but we absolutely need the blacklist to function for cub stuff.

rainbow_dash said:
I view them objectively as I come across them; my criteria is child-like proportions such as big, bulbousy heads, short, stubby limbs, lack of otherwise feral features like claws and hind leg shapes, etc.

At least for non-anthro/human(oid) characters, doesn't it depend on the species? Genuine question, I'm not completely sure how the rules are supposed to be applied here. Ferals aren't held to the same standard as humans, I thought, since they aren't anthro and can't be compared to human-like proportions for age.

watsit said:
At least for non-anthro/human(oid) characters, doesn't it depend on the species? Genuine question, I'm not completely sure how the rules are supposed to be applied here. Ferals aren't held to the same standard as humans, I thought, since they aren't anthro and can't be compared to human-like proportions for age.

Well, you could for common/real life animals. Eevee is a fox, dog, cat, thing. You can have literal cubs of those animals be the point of reference.

Of course the tricky part comes from something like... Oh i dunno, a budew or something.

I don't think it matters if they're humanoid or not in this case for species dependent based on what RD said. I appreciate the reply to things by the way.

And comparing them to real life animals is part of what starts this circle anyways: it doesn't really work cause they only superficially look like animals we know, and many have argued the flaws of using them to reference pokemon in the FA issues (in part because comparing realistic anatomy to cartoon anatomy has plenty of flaws in itself).

So it still circles back to what RD said. It's their take on things and basically their opinion/whatever the rest of the mod team can convince them on if compromise. I can see enough of the logic with the 'loli trick' but I don't agree with the mindset in general.

Which sucks, but I'm not gonna try to win a fight that's basically on opinion and dealing with the masses. -_-; I'm going to lose here.

The alternative to TWYS definitely would be apt to said strife, Cold-Dragon. Vastly more so. It's the only thing that can be remotely objective (appearances versus intents), and still has a ton of gray areas.

alphamule said:
The alternative to TWYS definitely would be apt to said strife, Cold-Dragon. Vastly more so. It's the only thing that can be remotely objective (appearances versus intents), and still has a ton of gray areas.

I presume there's multiple alternatives, but since my concern is more about accuracy of some claims and opinions based on viewpoints, I'm not sure which one you're suggesting for here since I wasn't talking about 'use this way it's clearly better.'

I can understand the complications that come up with a pokemon like Pichu when you tackle on 'baby pokemon' and so on, but I don't think pikachu or charmeleon were ever really viewed as children in any real context to anyone that was otherwise a pokemon fan (and I daresay any that did already had a leaning which means they're coloring it based on that). But I could be wrong. The fact they were labeled as such is why I have the concerns. If this is because they're all from a kid show... we have thousands of examples of sexualizing those from those things so it's a bit of a stretch argument (cause then we'd be covering so much more already).

The reason FA's changes were bad is because their new logic for determining cub results in artists getting kicked off the site and having their livelihoods wrecked, not because the logic is unsound in itself. It doesn't help that a vocal contingent of FA users have been known to harass artists who produce art they deem insufficiently pure. As e6 (mostly)* doesn't have the same puritanism problems and complaining about the subject matter of a piece of art is a bannable offence, the tags and blacklists are free to function as they should.

If it looks like a cub and quacks like a cub, it's a cub. Everybody who objects to TWYS is only doing so because of social pressure from toxic elements of the fandom and/or because they are in denial about their own preferences. The correct solution to this is not to argue with reality, it's self-acceptance and liberal use of the block button. Anything else is just charging down a blind alley.

* I still resent the forced login for cub images, but even this is technically better than FA's policy of forcing login for every explicit image regardless of content.

benjiboyo said:
Well, you could for common/real life animals. Eevee is a fox, dog, cat, thing. You can have literal cubs of those animals be the point of reference.

That said, this does produce the unsettling implication that fucking a juvenile dog is off the table but fucking an adult dog is A-OK. In the end, all furry art is offensive to a significant swathe of the general population. The sooner furry puritans and those who give them oxygen realise this, the better.

Okay. Question. Where did the cub tagging issue start, exactly?

Is it from users who all were suddenly sick of certain proportions and decided to voice their distaste at the same time, or is it a controversy stirred from what is essentially a clerical oversight?

That is to say, do people actually want these Pokemon to be labeled cub, or are we having a debate as to what cub even entails? It sounds like a case of the latter to me, which is also what is causing mayhem at FA at the moment. If there is no demand by the userbase to label Pokemon stuff as cub, then is there actually an issue?

The tags are there to serve the users. If the users are fine with not labeling it cub, then it's not something to be concerned about. If rulings are getting in the way of the user experience, then the ruling is what is causing the issue, not the tag nor the content being tagged. As such, the ruling is what should be disposed of.

You can get into whatever pedantic details about the series' lore or what have you, but in the end this is about the instability caused by a change that--to my knowledge--was not asked for. As they say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". I've seen folks consistently be incensed by art pieces being designated as cub, but hardly anyone complaining about pieces not being labeled as such outside of the staff of whatever site is in question.

This seems like a non-issue that is entirely in the staff's hands to deescalate. If the FA situation isn't enough to show how bad of an idea such a ruling is, then I don't know what will. Seems very straightforward to me.

I think a lot of people (and a lot of people on-site don't often interact with its inner workings) miss that What You See is specifically in cross-reference to (often vague and opaque) defined tagging standards.
Due to how intentionally-removed the administrative process is from the layman user, the best advice I can give to people is stop caring about tags. e621 uses a different standard than many consumers of furry pornography and no amount of kicking and screaming will shift it. This already happened with sex (gender) tagging disputes and the response was supplementary lore tags, with core tagging remaining as-is.

celadonsissy said:
The tags are there to serve the users. If the users are fine with not labeling it cub, then it's not something to be concerned about. If rulings are getting in the way of the user experience, then the ruling is what is causing the issue, not the tag nor the content being tagged. As such, the ruling is what should be disposed of.

Administrative position is that what the user wants aligns with site standards. Every time fans of a specific thing have disputed tagging, administration has reiterated that the only thing that matters is what the hypothetical ambivalent-ideal user with no attachment to or interest in the subject matter would see the post. You^{anyone reading this} are not the user, the user is hypothetical. The rules are not for the benefit of your personal ideals, they are for pure bureaucratic Order.

celadonsissy said:
Okay. Question. Where did the cub tagging issue start, exactly?

Is it from users who all were suddenly sick of certain proportions and decided to voice their distaste at the same time, or is it a controversy stirred from what is essentially a clerical oversight?

That is to say, do people actually want these Pokemon to be labeled cub, or are we having a debate as to what cub even entails? It sounds like a case of the latter to me, which is also what is causing mayhem at FA at the moment. If there is no demand by the userbase to label Pokemon stuff as cub, then is there actually an issue?

"We," the collective furry art fandom, are having a debate as to what constitutes depiction of underage characters. e621 and FA are drawing a hard line and standing back. Closed-system bureaucracies are not people to be argued with.
But yes, this has been escalating for at least a year now^{the Milachu event, May 2022} and brewing for longer, with sporadic threads complaining about the site allowing underage depictions.

On-model or mostly on-model baby pokémon (also a lot of other LC pokémon like litleo, buneary, and a lot of the starters) should pretty much always be tagged as young. Of artists want to draw on-model pichus, they should be ready for thst stuff to be tagged as young.

There are ways to make characters seem older without actually changing their proportions; wrinkles or other defining lines on the face, scars maybe, facial_hair, general aura of cynicism, probably other obvious stuff I'm not thinking of. If an artist doesn't want to add that to their characters or change proportions, then they're drawing young characters.

magnuseffect said:
^{the Milachu event, May 2022}

Hot take, even ignoring the proportions, Lantha is omega child-coded, especially in Milachu's older comics.

"FurryLover121" said:
...

It seems really silly to me that a Charmeleon would get tagged cub. Are we going to add a Kobold -> Young tag implication too? Because that post does not look like cub to me at all; if I had no idea what Pokemon was, I'd assume it was just a kobold.
Charmeleon rating:e has 25 pages, Charmeleon rating:e cub has less than 1.

Is the parent company for Bad Dragon, which owns e621, itself owned by Furaffinity or it's own parent company?

Is there currently any US legistlation, or a push to sign one into law, which requires e621's compliance, if it is not owned or otherwise legally affiliated with Furaffinity?

If neither of those things, is e621 using the same payment services, or a payment service owned by the same parent company, and their shared source of processing transaction has revised their policy that requires compliance?

And if none of these things,
Is this effectively like the hypothetical of Twitter adopting a policy that Facebook has, when they are completely seperate entities, because Facebook is recognized as having more users and traffic and is "The bigger website"?

letforeverdieslow said:
Is the parent company for Bad Dragon, which owns e621, itself owned by Furaffinity or it's own parent company?

Is there currently any US legistlation, or a push to sign one into law, which requires e621's compliance, if it is not owned or otherwise legally affiliated with Furaffinity?

If neither of those things, is e621 using the same payment services, or a payment service owned by the same parent company, and their shared source of processing transaction has revised their policy that requires compliance?

And if none of these things,
Is this effectively like the hypothetical of Twitter adopting a policy that Facebook has, when they are completely seperate entities, because Facebook is recognized as having more users and traffic and is "The bigger website"?

e621's policies have been like this for many years now, there have been no changes, TWYS has been around a long time. There is no connection to Fur Affinity in any way, shape or form.

letforeverdieslow said:
Is the parent company for Bad Dragon, which owns e621, itself owned by Furaffinity[..]

It's more likely Furaffinity is responding to happenings here than the inverse. But it's driven by users who aren't affiliated with either site and have even stronger views on what appears young than the administration.

faucet said:
e621's policies have been like this for many years now, there have been no changes, TWYS has been around a long time. There is no connection to Fur Affinity in any way, shape or form.

Well.
You can't tell a userbase it's free to decide what something is and then say it can only make a predetermined conclusion.
I was about to argue for what is already being acted on and not by the administration, but the userbase itself.

And I'm not about to move goal posts around when I already agree with where they are and have been.

letforeverdieslow said:
You can't tell a userbase it's free to decide what something is and then say it can only make a predetermined conclusion.

just because tagging is a crowd-sourced effort does not mean there has ever been any freedom as to what deserves what tags. tagging has never been a situation where a user can "decide" on anything, there are no decisions in tagging, there is only applicable and inapplicable.

The only "freedom" in tagging is wherever administration hasn't yet noticed what's out of place. (Which is a lot of areas, and likely what gives people the idea that it's so fluid.)
It's like how hundreds of artists make a living selling Pokémon porn but only a handful of notable artists have actually been slapped by the legal system for it.

"the thread" said:
okay but what does cub mean... exactly?

My dudes, it's simple. Tag what you see. If you see cub, tag cub. If you do not see cub, do not tag cub. If somebody later comes along and sees cub, it is their job to tag cub. If somebody later comes along and does not see cub, it is their job to remove cub. It is not your job to try and predict what others see.

twys says:
Sometimes users are just going to disagree over what is "seen" in a post or not. This is simply an expected consequence of having a TWYS policy. These situations will often need intervention from an administrator in order to resolve.

potentialgoat said:
My dudes, it's simple. Tag what you see. If you see cub, tag cub. If you do not see cub, do not tag cub. If somebody later comes along and sees cub, it is their job to tag cub. If somebody later comes along and does not see cub, it is their job to remove cub. It is not your job to try and predict what others see.

Something I'm not seeing pointed out is that arguing about it is causing people to come at it because it pisses people off. Ever since the Dacad thread there's been possibly a single user registering serial ban evasion accounts just to tag war with people (instead of anyone reporting the posts for admin decision.) It's a bit of a win-win for them because if nobody reports it they get to make people mad every time they flip the tag, or if they report it it either locks young and people get mad at the admins instead, or it locks not-young and they move on to the plentiful remaining posts that aren't locked yet.

magnuseffect said:
Something I'm not seeing pointed out is that arguing about it is causing people to come at it because it pisses people off. Ever since the Dacad thread there's been possibly a single user registering serial ban evasion accounts just to tag war with people (instead of anyone reporting the posts for admin decision.) It's a bit of a win-win for them because if nobody reports it they get to make people mad every time they flip the tag, or if they report it it either locks young and people get mad at the admins instead, or it locks not-young and they move on to the plentiful remaining posts that aren't locked yet.

While I don't disagree with the basis of 'it pisses people off' I think it loses weight as a reasoning given there's at least one mod who basically agrees with the various things being cub by their opinion even if the creator doesn't, which is kinda where this particular topic started in.

furrylover121 said:
post #4091966

Some admin disabled the comments and hid them making it a paradoxical post with both no comments and the lol_comments tag.

Someone is salty that people were questioning the admin decision publicly apparently.

deadoon said:
Some admin disabled the comments and hid them making it a paradoxical post with both no comments and the lol_comments tag.

Someone is salty that people were questioning the admin decision publicly apparently.

I disabled the comments there, yes. It had become an uncontrollable slaughterhouse of comments fighting back and forth that were only leading to users getting banned.
I'm not salty that people question the decisions of the administration. Everyone is more than welcome to do so via reports or emails to management. But when it just becomes a slap fight in the comments, that's when we must step in more.

rainbow_dash said:
I disabled the comments there, yes. It had become an uncontrollable slaughterhouse of comments fighting back and forth that were only leading to users getting banned.
I'm not salty that people question the decisions of the administration. Everyone is more than welcome to do so via reports or emails to management. But when it just becomes a slap fight in the comments, that's when we must step in more.

And disabling them hides them, which makes gives it a completely different perspective to those who saw the before and after. Also I said publicly, your suggesting privately, very different circumstances there. I've made a private report here before, it was "resolved" and nothing ever happened, so forgive me if I am a bit skeptical of your intentions there.

rainbow_dash said:
I disabled the comments there, yes. It had become an uncontrollable slaughterhouse of comments fighting back and forth that were only leading to users getting banned.
I'm not salty that people question the decisions of the administration. Everyone is more than welcome to do so via reports or emails to management. But when it just becomes a slap fight in the comments, that's when we must step in more.

This reply implies that this supposed "slap fight" was between users and not between users and staff. But it was between users and staff. And only users against staff.

On top of that, from your wording, you're implying users getting banned was somehow completely out of your hands and an unfortunate circumstance instead of the reality, where you were the one threatening people not only with warnings, but outright removing people from the site.

On top of that, said threats were specifically targeted at people submitting a ticket about the staff's decision about the piece, saying they were in "bad faith" and qualified as abuse of the site's tools. A user who participated in these exchanges was even banned over very similar "bad faith" challenges on top of downvoting comments. Not posts, comments. Pay special attention to the name of the staff member who dealt the punishment: https://e621.net/user_feedbacks?search%5Buser_id%5D=366553

On top of that, the argument between users and the staff was about how the piece was locked as cub when the unanimous user sentiment was that it simply was not. An argument that was stopped cold in its tracks with you invoking "Site Admin said so, so this conversation is over" before shortly hiding the comment section and essentially locking it.

And I can confidently say all this because these comments still exist. I present to you all a reverse chronological history of the post's comments:
https://e621.net/comments?commit=Search&group_by=comment&search%5Border%5D=id_desc&search%5Bpost_tags_match%5D=talentlesshack+charmeleon+

For posterity's sake, if for whatever reason those comments stop working, have this highlight of a comment:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/249007650715598860/1120911547351449680/image.png

It wasn't "uncontrollable". It was an issue that should have been handled by the community invoking TWYS, but was unilaterally questioned by users since staff (1 person, effectively) outright violated that and gave no ground.

celadonsissy said:
A user who participated in these exchanges was even banned over very similar "bad faith" challenges on top of downvoting comments. Not posts, comments. Pay special attention to the name of the staff member who dealt the punishment: https://e621.net/user_feedbacks?search%5Buser_id%5D=366553

I'd say pretty comfortably that indiscriminate mass undoing of tag edits is bad faith.

also, most of these people arguing in this comment section were a loud, minority, judging by the fact the comment votes are rarely bigger than ±7. no one on the staff's side even knew that the comment section was a war zone until after the comments were locked, so the sample of users in there is extremely not representative of the general user base.

_{also, several of them had previous negs/nuturals and they all had like 2-digit to low 3-digit tag counts, so...}

magnuseffect said:
Administrative position is that what the user wants aligns with site standards. Every time fans of a specific thing have disputed tagging, administration has reiterated that the only thing that matters is what the hypothetical ambivalent-ideal user with no attachment to or interest in the subject matter would see the post. You^{anyone reading this} are not the user, the user is hypothetical. The rules are not for the benefit of your personal ideals, they are for pure bureaucratic Order.

I read someone use the term 'layman'/'layperson' to in reference to RPGs. i.e. Someone that is supposed to not be involved in the current session but an 'anybody'. You have a hypothetical 'average' person's POV. I'm not into the DnD scene so not sure if they actually do that, though. It was an original fiction about someone that wrote said games ('systems').

LOL@darryus That reminds me of the E-H comments on galleries. Yeah, a LOT of +3/4-point votes and then they all get nuked because from same multi-accounter. Shockingly(sarcasm), it's almost always galleries with content critical/supportive of a certain party.

lilyanida said:
brother in christ is that hard to just blacklist "pokemon young"?

huh this is pretty funny because i did a cleanup on the posts from talentlesshack giving fair reason to why that posts shouldn't have cub tag, i am a fair person and gave fair reason, not to mention that for some reason but this post post #3432312 got tagged with cub by NotMeNotYou without not even having something in there, almost feels like everything was tagged mindlessly with the cub tag and whatever that got caught in the cross fire that would be "correct tagging" just went got tagged with cub.
like i said i removed cub tag in a bunch of posts and gave fair reason if you wish to check yourself then click me make your own judgement but i atleast gave fair reason and not putting cub tag in everything
and still it got ignored even after contacting RD about the posts and me giving fair reason before a ton of posts got locked with the tags
RD said i should contact NMNY because she stands by her actions, that was 4 days ago and got no response

glad that you got your own response, however, it's good to think as well for posts with pokemon that looks too ambiguous to be either older or young, because that's where all pokemon are, ambiguous of age, the time(if not the only) that it was considered of age it was the famous old treecko.
if pokemons or even any other character looks ambiguous of age, should be the artist's call if it is young or not

yeah neither me or the artist and also users of e621 understands to why that charmeleon post got locked with cub, many people have concerns that the e621 staff have some sort of personal beef with talentlesshack as it has been said by other users, i like to advice that if they really think that said posts isn't fair for having the cub tag locked then they should report the one who locked the tags, it's in their right to do so if posts doesn't correlate to the cub tag, and this goes to other tags as well it's not exclusive to the cub/young tag, the staff aren't gods who are always right, even if their decision can be final, if you think they did something wrong it's your call to report the said user

RD is a she ? that is new

alphamule said:
LOL@darryus That reminds me of the E-H comments on galleries. Yeah, a LOT of +3/4-point votes and then they all get nuked because from same multi-accounter. Shockingly(sarcasm), it's almost always galleries with content critical/supportive of a certain party.

I think I've said this before, but sometimes I kinda wish we had a system like that here. or... maybe not the proportional voting system, but at least some way of being able to tell a user's contribution level on comments and forum posts and stuff. being able to tell if a user is a "regular user" vs "dedicated tagger" vs "person who might be coming from off site to dogpile after someone complained on Twitter" without opening the user profile.

darryus said:
I think I've said this before, but sometimes I kinda wish we had a system like that here. or... maybe not the proportional voting system, but at least some way of being able to tell a user's contribution level on comments and forum posts and stuff. being able to tell if a user is a "regular user" vs "dedicated tagger" vs "person who might be coming from off site to dogpile after someone complained on Twitter" without opening the user profile.

TBF, the points don't matter on that site. If you game it with +3 accounts, you'll just get them all wiped. If you use a +22 account, then it barely increases faster than the common +10 or so accounts because something's already at 120+ points. What really matters is active users in a specific genre or something. Actually, that applies here as well, heh.

You rarely get people who realllllllly should have known better get sent to the moon for 1000 years. Stuff like cheating in Hentaiverse, suddenly finding themselves with a level 1 character with no items, etc. :P

alphamule said:
TBF, the points don't matter on that site. If you game it with +3 accounts, you'll just get them all wiped. If you use a +22 account, then it barely increases faster than the common +10 or so accounts because something's already at 120+ points. What really matters is active users in a specific genre or something. Actually, that applies here as well, heh.

yeah, I mean, even just going by base MP and ignoring + and - votes.
the mood over there is generally pretty chill, maybe even bordering on a little hugboxy, you don't often see people get into real arguments on there, so having slightly more weight behind your words never really means much. not that having 5 vs 20 MP has any tangible meaning with how obfuscated it is. I guess it's supposed to be an estimate of how much uhh... stake, I guess, a user has for the site... but does the dude that no-lifed HV for months really have the same stake as the person who donated to the site or uploaded a bunch of good galleries?

I think arguments/discussion (especially on site policy) is a little bit more common on e6, so having a way to tell how much stake a user holds is a bit more important. and a bit more tangible since we have public user profiles.