I think things are even getting a little off-track splitting hairs over the differences between source based and individual work based tagging. I think a better question for actually resolving anything here is

How close does a statement need to be to the post in question or the source work to count as a valid Lore Source?

I don't believe I've ever seen a clear site-doctrine statement on this, it's just been a vague if the artist says X and the need hasn't really come up because people don't tend to fight over lore tagging. Well it's here now. People are fighting over whether in the lack of a clear artist statement, there is enough evidence in the source work to class Rivet as trans by default. What is the requirement for a tagging-valid artist statement, and what are the requirements for source-canon statements?
Secondarily,

What happens when successive works of a source franchise contradict past works?

This is a known frequent element of serial writing.
Personally I'm of the view that

• Whichever work you are currently viewing is the one that "Is Canon."
• Characters or other elements should not be tied too hard to any one specific work, as they may appear in others of the same franchise with vastly different canon.

We need more than petty argument about this; we need a clear site-doctrine stance.

snpthecat said:
(As far as I know) They never explicitly said she was cis, so I don't think that's the best example here, since character owner doesn't say anything, the next in order of importance is the artist.

A better example is one where the character is explicitly stated male, but was gender bent to female, and twys for the image wasn't able to tag it as female. By order of importance, the character owner which stated the character was male would win despite the artist intending female.

"New faces:

Play as Ratchet and Rivet, a mysterious new female Lombax from another dimension."

https://insomniac.games/game/ratchet-clank-rift-apart/

azero said:
"New faces:

Play as Ratchet and Rivet, a mysterious new female Lombax from another dimension."

https://insomniac.games/game/ratchet-clank-rift-apart/

I don't think anyone should ever treat anything stated in a piece of promotional material as canon or even close. these are usually written by PR managers with no relationship to the development or creative teams

magnuseffect said:
I think things are even getting a little off-track splitting hairs over the differences between source based and individual work based tagging. I think a better question for actually resolving anything here is

How close does a statement need to be to the post in question or the source work to count as a valid Lore Source?

I don't believe I've ever seen a clear site-doctrine statement on this, it's just been a vague if the artist says X and the need hasn't really come up because people don't tend to fight over lore tagging. Well it's here now. People are fighting over whether in the lack of a clear artist statement, there is enough evidence in the source work to class Rivet as trans by default. What is the requirement for a tagging-valid artist statement, and what are the requirements for source-canon statements?
Secondarily,

What happens when successive works of a source franchise contradict past works?

This is a known frequent element of serial writing.
Personally I'm of the view that

• Whichever work you are currently viewing is the one that "Is Canon."
• Characters or other elements should not be tied too hard to any one specific work, as they may appear in others of the same franchise with vastly different canon.

We need more than petty argument about this; we need a clear site-doctrine stance.

Trans is only avilable as a lore tag because there is nothing visual that distincguish trans folks from cis folks, especially if they fully pass. This is why it was made into a lore tag. Most posts where the character is trans in universe will most probably be tagged trans_(lore) without any opinion from the artist being considered. Same for the opposite scenario, a character originally cis that is made trans by the artist will be considered over the canon.

That rule goes for family tags, sexuality tags and adult_(lore) as well and I believe in some situations where the character is depicted as young, but is an adult canonically adult_(lore) still gets added to posts.

What youre saying is really only true for the gender lore tags. It's not an excuse for the rules which aren't all that tangible and well explained, it is the wild west true, but that's how it alqays worked I reckon and if the artist intended for that character to be depicted as trans than trans_(lore) is valid.

wolfmanfur said:
(...) Most posts where the character is trans in universe will most probably be tagged trans_(lore) without any opinion from the artist being considered. Same for the opposite scenario, a character originally cis that is made trans by the artist will be considered over the canon. (...)

Any biased or otherwise inconsistent application of any rule can only cause problems down the line.

sipothac said:
I don't think anyone should ever treat anything stated in a piece of promotional material as canon or even close.

Why not? Both Playstation and Insomniac refer to her as female, I am sorry but I don't see how much more evidence you need. She is officially female, besides, the whole thing about females lombax lacking a tail for all we know, could only apply to the main universe, Rivet is from another universe, with a different set of rules.

these are usually written by PR managers with no relationship to the development or creative teams

You don't know that, this is merely an assumption you made. You are using a "what if" scenario and threating it as a fact, while ignoring official sources.

On the other hand, I do agree with OP that the lore tags should stay IF the artist said so, however I can also understand the confusion in regards to *_(lore) tags, until now I always assumed that lore = canon.

I feel there should be a distinction between official lore and artist lore, specially when it comes to copyrighted characters.

azero said:
You don't know that, this is merely an assumption you made. You are using a "what if" scenario and threating it as a fact, while ignoring official sources.

it's not hypothetical, I've seen several examples of press releases, advertisements, etc. that just contain information that's just straight up contradictory to the canon of the media. like the promotional material for Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection that states the Zero series takes place thousands of years after it actually does or the advertisement for the original Mario Bros. arcade game that states a Mario and Luigi are Janitors for some reason.

sometimes this can go even beyond the promotional material and effect the story synopsis given in the actual manual for the games. remember that pink hedgehog originating from Sonic CD? that's actually Princess Sally if you read the manual. not to mention the nonsense of silver age comic book covers that quite often had next to nothing to do with anything that actually happened in the comic and were just what these days we'd call clickbait.

in general, you should never treat random pieces of promotional material as canon. you don't know who wrote it, you have no idea of the veracity, you don't know of the creative or development team signed off on it.

sipothac said:
it's not hypothetical, I've seen several examples of press releases, advertisements, etc. that just contain information that's just straight up contradictory to the canon of the media.

This happens in more places than you may think. Hyrule Historia, for example, is an official release detailing info about The Legend of Zelda series, but contains notable contradictions and errors. It also introduces the official Zelda timeline, which contains errors with respect to the stories of certain games (and is itself a contradiction, as prior to publication, the developers would rebuke the idea that there's continuity between the main games). Since publication, they've been rather non-committal about acknowledging it, to the point that Breath of the Wild, which was made after that publication, was set 10s of thousands of years into the future so that there's no direct connection with the previous games anymore (and contains things that prevents it from fitting into that established timeline). To me that indicates they weren't happy with the "official timeline" and tried to do a big reset, and yet people still try to link it all together.

I assume we can at least agree that press releases, advertisements, etc, are official material. The people and companies involved were authorized to make it, and there had to have been some oversight to ensure it wasn't completely off the rails. But who determines official canon beyond that?

sipothac said:
it's not hypothetical, I've seen several examples of press releases, advertisements, etc. that just contain information that's just straight up contradictory to the canon of the media. (...)

The problem with your argument is that in regards to Rivet you have no counter-evidence: the only official information says that Rivet is female. Until other official data exists that somehow contradicts this fact, your argument holds no water.

azero said:
(...) besides, the whole thing about females lombax lacking a tail for all we know, could only apply to the main universe, Rivet is from another universe, with a different set of rules.

We don't even know if that's really a rule in Ratchet's universe, either. We've only ever seen one other female lombax.

azero said:
On the other hand, I do agree with OP that the lore tags should stay IF the artist said so, however I can also understand the confusion in regards to *_(lore) tags, until now I always assumed that lore = canon.

I feel there should be a distinction between official lore and artist lore, specially when it comes to copyrighted characters.

I agree.

sipothac said:
in general, you should never treat random pieces of promotional material as canon. you don't know who wrote it, you have no idea of the veracity, you don't know of the creative or development team signed off on it.

But these aren't random pieces of promotional material, these are found on the official sites, and until either Insomniac and/or Sony comes out and states otherwise, this is the canon we have. It is the closest if not the only official statement we can get on the matter, at least for now.

I am not saying that it can't change in the future, but for the time being, she is canonically female. Of course, this doesn't apply to fanart for obvious reasons, the keyword being fanart.

temp7 said:
We've only ever seen one other female lombax.

Lets just say that zonkpunch showed us that there are a lot more lombaxes on the way ;)

wolfmanfur said:
What youre saying is really only true for the gender lore tags. It's not an excuse for the rules which aren't all that tangible and well explained, it is the wild west true, but that's how it alqays worked I reckon and if the artist intended for that character to be depicted as trans than trans_(lore) is valid.

I'm not sure you understand what I'm saying at all. I'm in complete agreement that if the artist intends for a character to be depicted as trans, they should be tagged trans. But if you read my posts on the previous page I'm pointing out that this thread exists because people are fighting over posts with no author statement attached to their source.
If there's an artist statement attached to this post somewhere else,^{say, maybe they said somewhere that every depiction of Rivet they make is trans} we're apparently expected to mindread through the internet or be able to dig through 2+ years of TwitterX history to find it. Yet over the course of this argument a site moderator has taken a stance that such posts with no relevant information attached can still be lore tagged.

temp7 said:
Any biased or otherwise inconsistent application of any rule can only cause problems down the line.

Biased, maybe.... inconsistent? No. It's as consistent as "if the character is depicted as trans in a drawing then they're trans" whether it's canon or fanon.

temp7 said:
The problem with your argument is that in regards to Rivet you have no counter-evidence: the only official information says that Rivet is female. Until other official data exists that somehow contradicts this fact, your argument holds no water.

That's besides the point and all the folk who used the lore tags to mean "canon lore" need to stop, they're functionally the same as general tags, except these can be tagged without visual elements.

temp7 said:
We don't even know if that's really a rule in Ratchet's universe, either. We've only ever seen one other female lombax.

I agree.

That's besides the point.

magnuseffect said:
I'm not sure you understand what I'm saying at all. I'm in complete agreement that if the artist intends for a character to be depicted as trans, they should be tagged trans. But if you read my posts on the previous page I'm pointing out that this thread exists because people are fighting over posts with no author statement attached to their source.
If there's an artist statement attached to this post somewhere else,^{say, maybe they said somewhere that every depiction of Rivet they make is trans} we're apparently expected to mindread through the internet or be able to dig through 2+ years of TwitterX history to find it. Yet over the course of this argument a site moderator has taken a stance that such posts with no relevant information attached can still be lore tagged.

I haven't read the entirety of this trashfire, so excuse me for not paying attention to what was said previously. I think I agree with the mods on this, to some extent at least. Having an artist make a statement each time they draw a character is not conductive to help prevents tag warsand it causes everything to lag behind when tagging. Lore tags should have better guidelines, but a thing I reckon is best practise with these tags is to assume if elements indicate that a character might be trans, for example a pride flag or they have the 'general' tag crossgender, then it can be tagged. same goes for gay_(lore), lesbian_(lore) etc.

edit: The post you've linked was vandalized by Temp7 and the mod reverted their changes, Temp7 actually changed the tags on over 10 posts for no discernible reason and no explanation, even stating that Rivet is not trans in the canon lore which isn't what the lore tags are meant to be used for anyway.

wolfmanfur said:
but a thing I reckon is best practise with these tags is to assume if elements indicate that a character might be trans, for example a pride flag or they have the 'general' tag crossgender, then it can be tagged. same goes for gay_(lore), lesbian_(lore) etc.

post #2715270
Please look at the example post I've repeatedly linked. A SFW shoulders-and-up bust with no visual indicators. It doesn't even have a general gender tag attached.
If information is being taken from anything here, it's from interpretation of franchise lore, which is also what is being fought over, as there is no positive statement that Rivet is trans within her source game or from her IP owner. And if there was, where does site ruling expect a tagger to be able to look to determine this?

Hard disagree on tagging trans on every instance of the crossgender tag. Crossgender doesn't mean trans, and should still require artist statement.
Not to mention that anyone who considers Rivet trans-by-default would likely disagree with gynomorph Rivet being tagged crossgender.

wolfmanfur said:
edit: The post you've linked was vandalized by Temp7 and the mod reverted their changes, Temp7 actually changed the tags on over 10 posts for no discernible reason and no explanation, even stating that Rivet is not trans in the canon lore which isn't what the lore tags are meant to be used for anyway.

Misunderstanding lore tags in the edit reason does not affect whether the lore tags are valid or not for that post.
There is no artist statement attached to this post one way or the other, if there's justification for the lore tags being there in the first place it comes from somewhere else.

magnuseffect said:
Yet over the course of this argument a site moderator has taken a stance that such posts with no relevant information attached can still be lore tagged.

To be fair, he likely wasn't aware of what happened in this thread. The wiki change was reverted back to what NMNY said on the matter after I brought it up in my edit reason.

magnuseffect said:
If there's an artist statement attached to this post somewhere else,^{say, maybe they said somewhere that every depiction of Rivet they make is trans} we're apparently expected to mindread through the internet or be able to dig through 2+ years of TwitterX history to find it. Yet over the course of this argument a site moderator has taken a stance that such posts with no relevant information attached can still be lore tagged.

we probably ought to have some standing rule that if the source link does not provide evidence that the artist considers a character to be trans (or anything else lore tag relevant), the content of the post dosn't provide any context that would let a viewer infer a character being such, and there's nothing that indicates the character's idenity/status on their wikipage, then the edit reason should link to something that does.

the burden should be on the user adding the lore tags to provide evidence that the lore tags are valid.

_{edit: also, you can't you can't just assume that the product of what was likely a mass undo was evidence that the moderator was 100% of the position that the re-added tags were valid.}

sipothac said:
we probably ought to have some standing rule that if the source link does not provide evidence that the artist considers a character to be trans (or anything else lore tag relevant), the content of the post dosn't provide any context that would let a viewer infer a character being such, and there's nothing that indicates the character's idenity/status on their wikipage, then the edit reason should link to something that does.

the burden should be on the user adding the lore tags to provide evidence that the lore tags are valid.

_{edit: also, you can't you can't just assume that the product of what was likely a mass undo was evidence that the moderator was 100% of the position that the re-added tags were valid.}

Oh and on top of that, if a linked artist has put lore tags on their own work, then that's final.

sipothac said:
the burden should be on the user adding the lore tags to provide evidence that the lore tags are valid.

Bingo.

magnuseffect said:
Misunderstanding lore tags in the edit reason does not affect whether the lore tags are valid or not for that post.
There is no artist statement attached to this post one way or the other, if there's justification for the lore tags being there in the first place it comes from somewhere else.

And still no clarification after all this time. I suppose we're expected to research every single artist's opinion beforehand.

sipothac said:
we probably ought to have some standing rule that if the source link does not provide evidence that the artist considers a character to be trans (or anything else lore tag relevant), the content of the post dosn't provide any context that would let a viewer infer a character being such, and there's nothing that indicates the character's idenity/status on their wikipage, then the edit reason should link to something that does.

the burden should be on the user adding the lore tags to provide evidence that the lore tags are valid.

_{edit: also, you can't you can't just assume that the product of what was likely a mass undo was evidence that the moderator was 100% of the position that the re-added tags were valid.}

Agreed.

temp7 said:
I suppose we're expected to research every single artist's opinion beforehand.

You can literally just ask the artist directly... they don't bite

cloudpie said:
You can literally just ask the artist directly... they don't bite

So that's a "yes."

temp7 said:
So that's a "yes."

Yep! But it's really not hard. The artist should already know you're posting their work here because you got their permission first, I hope. So it shouldn't really be going super out of your way to send another quick message asking about a character's gender or whatever.

cloudpie said:
Yep! But it's really not hard. The artist should already know you're posting their work here because you got their permission first, I hope. So it shouldn't really be going super out of your way to send another quick message asking about a character's gender or whatever.

You say that as if every image on e6 was uploaded with the artist's explicit permission first. If that was the case, there wouldn't be any takedowns at all.

With that in mind, I ask the question that MagnusEffect already asked - How close does a statement need to be to the post in question or the source work to count as a valid Lore Source? We are seeing images get tagged without any artist statements at all.

temp7 said:
You say that as if every image on e6 was uploaded with the artist's explicit permission first. If that was the case, there wouldn't be any takedowns at all.

With that in mind, I ask the question that MagnusEffect already asked - How close does a statement need to be to the post in question or the source work to count as a valid Lore Source? We are seeing images get tagged without any artist statements at all.

The lore wiki pages were modified and locked yesterday to remove words "canonically" and "owner or creator," so I think we can safely remove the "source work" part of the question, at least.

werideatdawn said:
The lore wiki pages were modified and locked yesterday to remove words "canonically" and "owner or creator," so I think we can safely remove the "source work" part of the question, at least.

We still don't have an answer to the rest of it, though. What is the requirement for a tagging-valid artist statement, and how close does a statement need to be to the post in question to count as a valid Lore Source?

cloudpie said:
So it shouldn't really be going super out of your way to send another quick message asking about a character's gender or whatever.

I'm hesitant to endorse private DMs as a source. Anyone could just say oh yeah I talked to the artist privately and they said this and then that statement is unverifiable unless an admin specifically gets into it. And several of these posts haven't been tagged trans at upload, but months afterward (with no sources added.)
I'm in agreement that ideally it should be somewhere that a tagger can simply click a link to verify things. Hell, I'm even right now in the process of digging into artist galleries to update direct post links when for whatever reason an artist's main gallery is as far as the source links take you. (There was one set of posts so far where the only source link was the artist's Patreon link, but trans intent was visible if you went out of your way to find the FA posts.)

It might not be as deep an issue for someone's OC but right now we're talking about a character that's being claimed as a trans icon to the degree that if an artist has been drawing her with a dick then she's apparently trans-until-proven-otherwise. It may even be the case that for the same reasons as users here are tagging her as trans, artists may be drawing her under trans-intent-as-a-given without providing any statement or indicators.

^ Seems to me that the desire for publicly-verifiable information on artist intent, and the need to .. not bother the artist with excessive requests from each individual uploader of their work, points towards a need for an index, something like a (CHARACTER , ARTIST, [optional date]) : (lore_flags, source_link) mapping.
That would probably require additional coding, but could facilitate looking up relevant source information based on either character tag or artist tag. eg. showing relevant lore-source links on the character's wiki page.

cloudpie said:
You can literally just ask the artist directly... they don't bite

I feel like it's probably best to not go into DMs to ask artists if each of their chatacters are trans or not, that seems a bit weird... like, if an artist/character owner wants people to know that a character is trans it'll stated be somewhere, right?

I dunno, despite the fiction/reality thing, asking someone that in private to add lore tags to their characters... for some reason that kinda almost feels like outing someone to me.

I think the best option is to just not add trans lore tags to a character unless they're "openly" (?) trans or whatever

sipothac said:
(...) I think the best option is to just not add trans lore tags to a character unless they're "openly" (?) trans or whatever

By that logic, Rivet doesn't get a trans_(lore) tag in most of the contested cases seen so far.

Also, that would be redundant, since in such cases the implication would be visible in the image already: no need for a lore tag if you can see it in the picture already.

temp7 said:
By that logic, Rivet doesn't get a trans_(lore) tag in most of the contested cases seen so far.

Yes, that is true. In the case which launched this thread, the source images were tagged "transfemme", which is an easy source to cite when tagging lore. In general, you shouldn't tag lore (especially for fanart of characters not owned by the artist or commissioner) without bringing a source, which really isn't that onerous a restriction since you can find pronouns on every character sheet these days.

I can see in the future trans characters in corporate IP appear more often.
I wouldn't want, and I don't think I'm the only one, to see these characters being headcannon as cis by some artist.

As for fan characters and original creations, I feel like the creator should also have a final say on wether their characters are cis or trans.
Especially if they're their fursona.
I'm also of the opinion that using their character and how should have their permission but that's an other topic.

And because double standards are bad, let's just have the creator have the final say, not the artist, as the rule when it come to trans lore tags.

They don't need to be "openly" trans, merely a mention by the creator that they are is enough.

Are you suggesting that only the trans lore tags (and possibly gender tags) be decided by the creator of character and the other lore tags be decided by artist? Or all of them? There's a couple of problems with both options. (In fairness, current system has its own faults, but better the devil we know than the devil we don't)

kamril said:
They don't need to be "openly" trans, merely a mention by the creator that they are is enough.

Then we get page 1 of this thread where someone is arguing that Rivet was designed as trans because a single person who was on the committee that designed Rivet once said that no, she wasn't designed as trans, but they support the idea.

kamril said:
I wouldn't want, and I don't think I'm the only one, to see these characters being headcannon as cis by some artist.

That doesn't mean you can stop them from doing it. In fact, if you don't want to see this, you should be more in support of artists determining the presence or absence of trans lore tags, otherwise you wouldn't be able to blacklist the type of art you're objecting to.

kamril said:
They don't need to be "openly" trans, merely a mention by the creator that they are is enough.

There is no distinction between a character being "openly" trans (whatever that means) and their creator saying they are, because fictional characters aren't real.

kamril said:
And because double standards are bad, let's just have the creator have the final say, not the artist, as the rule when it come to trans lore tags.

because double standards are bad we'll have a standard that's different for trans lore tags vs all of the other lore tags?

kamril said:
They don't need to be "openly" trans, merely a mention by the creator that they are is enough.

that is literally what I meant when I said that, if a character has been stated to be trans then they're openly trans, at least to us. I was just advocating to not poke artists/creators about characters' trans status because it puts them in an awkward position.

magnuseffect said:
Then we get page 1 of this thread where someone is arguing that Rivet was designed as trans because a single person who was on the committee that designed Rivet once said that no, she wasn't designed as trans, but they support the idea.

that reminds me of that time wikipedia people were arguing about garfield's gender because jim davis said he presents himself without any specific gender, so boys, girls and enbies could relate to him.
https://mashable.com/article/garfield-gender-debate-rages-on

we need to stop taking everything related to gender so literally, its just a label

wolfmanfur said:
that reminds me of that time wikipedia people were arguing about garfield's gender because jim davis said he presents himself without any specific gender, so boys, girls and enbies could relate to him.
https://mashable.com/article/garfield-gender-debate-rages-on

we need to stop taking everything related to gender so literally, its just a label

This seems more to be an issue of taking whatever weird roundabout ways possible to say "XYZ Character is ABC Group!" and just latching onto them while refusing under any circumstances to let go, even when other options are more clear, and, to be honest, make more sense anyway. The whole Samus thing has always baffled me because the "NOOO MIIIINE" thing seems to be claiming that she's trans... instead of just, y'know, not having much of a personal concept of gender in general, being raised by giant fuckin' warrior-race bird aliens and all.

As for artist intent... alas, I can't really say I care too much what an artist has to say when it comes to characters they don't even own, and I'd say to just slap a Crossgender tag on such circumstances and call it good. I can't see a way to handle this that doesn't turn the lore tags into something even more pointless than they already are, given the point of them existing to begin with was to appease artists and commissioners who were getting angry their characters were getting tagged as shemale/cuntboy (now: gynomorph/andromorph), to bridge the gap between search functionality and the comfort of artists regarding their personal characters and the characters of those who been drawn by them. I don't think we really need to, logically, have the same "respect" when it's a "borrowed" character in the first place.

votp said:
The whole Samus thing has always baffled me because the "NOOO MIIIINE" thing seems to be claiming that she's trans... instead of just, y'know, not having much of a personal concept of gender in general, being raised by giant fuckin' warrior-race bird aliens and all.

Consider that Binary Transgender and Agender don't tend to play nice together in practice. The latter is interested in the removal or bypassing of binary gender while the former is interested in its enforcement.^{so long as you can pick which one you conform to}
People voice confusion about Heartbeat's characters not conforming to gender while the devs are publicly TERFs. And topically to Rivet, Sam Maggs' statement that she had to fight to have breasts and other gendered elements removed from Rivet's design doesn't seem to matter as much.

votp said:
(...) As for artist intent... alas, I can't really say I care too much what an artist has to say when it comes to characters they don't even own, and I'd say to just slap a Crossgender tag on such circumstances and call it good. I can't see a way to handle this that doesn't turn the lore tags into something even more pointless than they already are, given the point of them existing to begin with was to appease artists and commissioners who were getting angry their characters were getting tagged as shemale/cuntboy (now: gynomorph/andromorph), to bridge the gap between search functionality and the comfort of artists regarding their personal characters and the characters of those who been drawn by them. I don't think we really need to, logically, have the same "respect" when it's a "borrowed" character in the first place.

Exactly. A character's lore is decided by their owner, not any random person who happens to draw said character.

Question: if this is the case, 1: doesnt this sort of invalidate the way we use the tag at all?
Ive been thinking of this a lot and

How about all the artists who draw alphys with a dick, and say they headcanon her as trans?

There is not a single post with alphys as the focus that has the trans lore tag. So?

This means the rule is enforced arbitrarily

temp7 said:
Exactly. A character's lore is decided by their owner, not any random person who happens to draw said character.

This should be the only time it matters but the bent of the thread is otherwise

demesejha said:
Question: if this is the case, 1: doesnt this sort of invalidate the way we use the tag at all?
Ive been thinking of this a lot and

How about all the artists who draw alphys with a dick, and say they headcanon her as trans?

There is not a single post with alphys as the focus that has the trans lore tag. So?

This means the rule is enforced arbitrarily

This should be the only time it matters but the bent of the thread is otherwise

what's stopping you from going and tagging those posts with trans_(lore)?

demesejha said:
Question: if this is the case, 1: doesnt this sort of invalidate the way we use the tag at all?
Ive been thinking of this a lot and

How about all the artists who draw alphys with a dick, and say they headcanon her as trans?

There is not a single post with alphys as the focus that has the trans lore tag. So?

This means the rule is enforced arbitrarily

a tag not being applied in all the places where it would be valid does not mean that a rule is enforced arbitrarily, it means that people don't add the tag enough.

sipothac said:
a tag not being applied in all the places where it would be valid does not mean that a rule is enforced arbitrarily, it means that people don't add the tag enough.

In this case, it is indeed arbitrary: in how many years of Undertale content being on this site, not one Alphys post was tagged, "trans_(lore)". Rivet hasn't been around nearly as long, yet she was given this tag already. The fact that Rivet was tagged in such a short time indicates an obvious issue that demesejha and I have been pointing out from the start: Alphys isn't tagged trans_(lore) because no one considers Alphys to be trans in canon.

Rivet - despite lack of in-game evidence or official statement - is considered trans in lore... by some fans. So Rivet gets tagged according to their assumptions. This is happening despite the purpose of lore tags: to support character owners who dislike how TWYS policy handles their characters.

To top it off, the current wording on the wiki explicitly favors artists over character owners.

I don't typically get personal, but I'm sitting on a negative record for tagging vandalism because I misunderstood "lore" to mean lore. Not because I set out to deface this wiki, or spread hate. This is self-defeating, and it can only get worse. We need to either rename the tag to accurately reflect it's purpose, or change the tag's function to match what "lore" truly means.

temp7 said:
I don't typically get personal, but I'm sitting on a negative record for tagging vandalism because I misunderstood "lore" to mean lore. Not because I set out to deface this wiki, or spread hate.

To quote from the negative record in question: "Stop instigating tag wars." As a general rule, no matter how correct you believe yourself to be (you were wrong in this instance, but I've seen identical records given out for people who were in the right), if a tag edit you made gets reverted more than once, you should report the post and ask staff to lock it one way or the other.

wat8548 said:
To quote from the negative record in question: "Stop instigating tag wars." As a general rule, no matter how correct you believe yourself to be (you were wrong in this instance, but I've seen identical records given out for people who were in the right), if a tag edit you made gets reverted more than once, you should report the post and ask staff to lock it one way or the other.

The full quote is, Stop instigating tag wars. Artist interpretation overrides canon, and a trans pride flag in a tweet in plenty enough of an "official statement".

The tweet in question was not made by anyone affiliated with Insomniac games, so it's not an official statement at all. Even in the first few posts of this thread, the entire premise of this decision was being questioned based on the definition of "lore".

wat8548 said:
To quote from the negative record in question: "Stop instigating tag wars." As a general rule, no matter how correct you believe yourself to be (you were wrong in this instance, but I've seen identical records given out for people who were in the right), if a tag edit you made gets reverted more than once, you should report the post and ask staff to lock it one way or the other.

I think this is a more complex and concerning case, quite honestly. While there were a number of posts with clear trans intent, the fact there were any posts with trans intent in the source at all appears to have resulted in the moderator's assumption that all of these edits were equal and malicious, and ruled the whole selection of involved posts as trans_(lore) with no sign of administrative research.
Note that there were artist-uploaded without lore tags posts such as this one which contain trans-intent tagging in their FA source... which wasn't easy to find until I bit the bullet and went digging myself as the artist had only linked their Patreon.
I get that we don't have transparency into what exactly the process was, but it has the appearance of a Moderator reverting every edit without checking the source validity of every post. The action against Temp7 at account level is justified by some of their edits ignoring visible trans intent within the sources, but many posts did not have linked sources at all, or their sources contain no such clear intent but were still reverted with the others.

This is such a touchy area that I didn't end up feeling like going out on a limb and editing the tags myself,^{as comfortable as I am discussing the theory and mechanics of tagging from a hardline bureaucratic perspective, I'm opposed to many aspects of the system and find edge-cases in particular to be draining. As opposed as I am to trans-by-default Rivet especially when she was designed with her gendered elements de-emphasised, artists wanting to depict her as trans should be allowed to have the tag and I'm not ready to be the one that polices them for failing to take e621 policy into account on offsite posts.} but I think I've added sources to the contested posts wherever I could find them so that others can take a look. The many Guoh posts in particular are even likely to be made with trans intent but the only indicators at all are that the artist nearly-exclusively draws Rivet with male genitals, and other Twitter users commenting about trans Rivet.

magnuseffect said:
I think this is a more complex and concerning case, quite honestly. While there were a number of posts with clear trans intent, the fact there were any posts with trans intent in the source at all appears to have resulted in the moderator's assumption that all of these edits were equal and malicious, and ruled the whole selection of involved posts as trans_(lore) with no sign of administrative research.

Looking at the record's linked source, there were a number of posts where they removed the tags multiple times. As wat8548 said, regardless if they were right or wrong, the posts should've been reported to request a tag lock rather than getting into a tag war (and in this case, they happened to be wrong, and given an explanation for why the tags apply).

watsit said:
Looking at the record's linked source, there were a number of posts where they removed the tags multiple times. As wat8548 said, regardless if they were right or wrong, the posts should've been reported to request a tag lock rather than getting into a tag war (and in this case, they happened to be wrong, and given an explanation for why the tags apply).

The explanation being that a trans flag in a tweet made by someone other than the character's creator is an "official statement".

That's not even getting into the Alphys example given earlier. The trans_(lore) tag is being interpreted as the character being officially trans: not as an artist statement isolated to the image in question. That is a problem.

watsit said:
Looking at the record's linked source, there were a number of posts where they removed the tags multiple times. As wat8548 said, regardless if they were right or wrong, the posts should've been reported to request a tag lock rather than getting into a tag war (and in this case, they happened to be wrong, and given an explanation for why the tags apply).

My argument is not that tag warring was an acceptable action, but that the tag reversions made as a result of the eventual report were unilateral based on observing a small sample when they should have all been investigated on a case-by-case basis.

temp7 said:
The trans_(lore) tag is being interpreted as the character being officially trans: not as an artist statement isolated to the image in question. That is a problem.

If there's a better name for what the tag is meant to be for, it can be suggested. But it's not a problem unique to that tag. Given how many people interpret humanoid to mean anything with human-like proportions, or feral to mean looking or acting savage or bestial, etc. People will use tags incorrectly with how the site defines them to be used, and as long as it doesn't get too out of hand so as to need invalidating, we can only do our part to educate and clean up misuse.

watsit said:
If there's a better name for what the tag is meant to be for, it can be suggested. But it's not a problem unique to that tag. Given how many people interpret humanoid to mean anything with human-like proportions, or feral to mean looking or acting savage or bestial, etc. People will use tags incorrectly with how the site defines them to be used, and as long as it doesn't get too out of hand so as to need invalidating, we can only do our part to educate and clean up misuse.

The simple fact is that the word "lore" has a very specific meaning used by virtually everyone in regards to fiction That - as demonstrated by the example already given - is how the tag is being used across the site. Whether this site chooses to officially recognize this fact or not.

Secondly, the fact that this tag treats artists as overriding character creators and owners doesn't make any sense - lore tags were created in the first place because of character owner's complaints, so the official stance right now is plainly contradictive to the intended function of lore tags.

This situation would be fixed immediately if lore tags actually meant lore. As in, what the character owner/creator says. The opinion of a random artist using a character they do not own is not lore.

temp7 said:
The simple fact is that the word "lore" has a very specific meaning used by virtually everyone in regards to fiction That - as demonstrated by the example already given - is how the tag is being used across the site. Whether this site chooses to officially recognize this fact or not.

Ironically missing the mark. This discussion was made because you removed the trans tag from every Rivet post while it was previously added by "virtually everyone". So, you can hardly use that argument because even you disagree with how they use those tags. In fact, it is because artist depiction matters more than the character owner's wishes that art of Rivet that does not actively attempt to make her trans should not have the tag.They took the fact that Rivet was trans from a misquote by somebody from the development team, and that's external lore information.

Secondly, the fact that this tag treats artists as overriding character creators and owners doesn't make any sense - lore tags were created in the first place because of character owner's complaints, so the official stance right now is plainly contradictive to the intended function of lore tags.

What are you gonna do if an artist draws her holding a trans pride flag and saying "I'm trans"? Would the canon still override the artist's work?

This situation would be fixed immediately if lore tags actually meant lore. As in, what the character owner/creator says. The opinion of a random artist using a character they do not own is not lore.

Clearly, it wouldn't. Somebody from the staff who made the game said they would have liked her to be trans, it was taken as gospel and look where we are now. This is why artist opinjions matter more than character owners' and if this is what folks went by when tagging those posts it wouldnt have been a problem to start with..

wolfmanfur said:
Ironically missing the mark. This discussion was made because you removed the trans tag from every Rivet post while it was previously added by "virtually everyone". So, you can hardly use that argument because even you disagree with how they use those tags. In fact, it is because artist depiction matters more than the character owner's wishes that art of Rivet that does not actively attempt to make her trans should not have the tag.They took the fact that Rivet was trans from a misquote by somebody from the development team, and that's external lore information.

Oh no, I'm not missing anything at all. I removed the tags for two reasons:

1. The wiki page on lore tags at the time did not specify that artists override creators. That was changed after I changed the tags.
2. It was called a lore tag, creating a simple failure in intuition in the first place.

So you cannot act as if I was just willfully ignoring site rules.

wolfmanfur said:
What are you gonna do if an artist draws her holding a trans pride flag and saying "I'm trans"? Would the canon still override the artist's work?

As posted above, not one person has tagged Alphys as trans_(lore) under any circumstances, regardless of artist interpretation. Not just me: not a single one of the how many thousands of people editing tags on this site. Rivet has been tagged, though. What does that tell you? It should tell you that users aren't adding the tag based on artists interpretations in any case.

wolfmanfur said:
Clearly, it wouldn't. Somebody from the staff who made the game said they would have liked her to be trans, it was taken as gospel and look where we are now. This is why artist opinjions matter more than character owners' and if this is what folks went by when tagging those posts it wouldnt have been a problem to start with..

What do you mean "This is why artist opinjions matter more than character owners"? It hardly justifies anything, nor does it make tagging easier or clearer on this site at all. This thread is full of comments from multiple users saying that trans_(lore) tags are difficult and even comparing them to walking on a razor's edge. I get the feeling they are literally afraid of trying to tag anything as trans_(lore) at all.

It's not really fair to say that Temp7 was being malicious, when both users were changing the tags it was evident that it was with the whole hearted believe that it was the correct course of action to the understanding of the tag at the time. Arguably both were in the wrong for engaging in tag wars in the first place, rule of thumb is if you need to replace a tag more then twice the best choice is to report the image in question to staff and ask for official ruling.

However, this discourse did have have silver lining. Due to the vague nature of the wikis pretense they've since all been standardized and officially regulated to avoid future confusion. All that being said I think it's a good time to let this forum die as the goals of it has been achieved.

A different forum should probably be made to discuss better alternatives for the tag name with a designated name should be created if that topic wants to be talked about.

versperus said:
It's not really fair to say that Temp7 was being malicious, when both users were changing the tags it was evident that it was with the whole hearted believe that it was the correct course of action to the understanding of the tag at the time. Arguably both were in the wrong for engaging in tag wars in the first place, rule of thumb is if you need to replace a tag more then twice the best choice is to report the image in question to staff and ask for official ruling.

However, this discourse did have have silver lining. Due to the vague nature of the wikis pretense they've since all been standardized and officially regulated to avoid future confusion. All that being said I think it's a good time to let this forum die as the goals of it has been achieved.

A different forum should probably be made to discuss better alternatives for the tag name with a designated name should be created if that topic wants to be talked about.

I think it would be more efficient to handle that here, for several reasons.

1. The relevant information is already part of this thread.
2. The topic has been raised and discussed in this thread already, very early on.

That in mind, I don't think renaming the tag to reflect it's current usage is a good idea, nor do I even think it's really possible. I just stated that the current use of the tag is the issue, not the name. The lore tags were made to address the concerns of character owners and creators, and the current usage simply isn't doing that.

If we're going to keep the tag as is, there needs to be a justification as to WHY we need to respect artists opinions over actual character lore. As Votp said:

votp said:
(...) As for artist intent... alas, I can't really say I care too much what an artist has to say when it comes to characters they don't even own, and I'd say to just slap a Crossgender tag on such circumstances and call it good. I can't see a way to handle this that doesn't turn the lore tags into something even more pointless than they already are, given the point of them existing to begin with was to appease artists and commissioners who were getting angry their characters were getting tagged as shemale/cuntboy (now: gynomorph/andromorph), to bridge the gap between search functionality and the comfort of artists regarding their personal characters and the characters of those who been drawn by them. I don't think we really need to, logically, have the same "respect" when it's a "borrowed" character in the first place.

temp7 said:
I just stated that the current use of the tag is the issue, not the name. The lore tags were made to address the concerns of character owners and creators, and the current usage simply isn't doing that.
[...]
If we're going to keep the tag as is, there needs to be a justification as to WHY we need to respect artists opinions over actual character lore.

The lore tags were created to deal with the fact that sometimes information about an image is relevant to tag that's not TWYS. Various non-TWYS tags have creeped in over time (incest, crossgender, etc), and there's been a regular issue of the same character being tagged differently between images in a series/comic, so a proper tag category for tagging the lore of an image was made as a concession, rather than giving special treatment to certain non-TWYS tags for an ostensibly TWYS system.

It's already been explained why taking character owner over the artist for lore tags would create more problems than the reverse. People do make alternate interpretations of others' characters, be it a person's character with permission or a corporate-owned character that has a following. If we take the character owner over the artist, a character can never be tagged differently with lore tags regardless of how obvious the artist intent is. R34 and AUs become a lot messier if we have to go with the original character owner for lore tags over the intent with the depiction.

If we take the artist's intention over the character owner, the character owner has recourse if they don't like a given interpretation. The problem is less likely to be with the tags themselves, but more the depiction having the intent of being undesirably different -- e.g. a canonically trans character being depicted with a "straight pride" colors while saying something like "I'm not trans, trans is abuse", the character owner is unlikely to care that the post is tagged trans_(lore) -- so a takedown solves the problem. While if we take the character owner over artist, there's no way to tag what the artist intends if it differs from official depictions, no matter how obvious the difference is and regardless of the character owners' feelings, or lack thereof, on the matter, e.g. my Fox and Krystal idea not being tagged incest_(lore) when it's obviously meant to be since Nintendo is silent on the matter.

watsit said:
The lore tags were created to deal with the fact that sometimes information about an image is relevant to tag that's not TWYS. Various non-TWYS tags have creeped in over time (incest, crossgender, etc), and there's been a regular issue of the same character being tagged differently between images in a series/comic, so a proper tag category for tagging the lore of an image was made as a concession, rather than giving special treatment to certain non-TWYS tags for an ostensibly TWYS system.

Then why isn't crossgender a lore tag?

watsit said:
It's already been explained why taking character owner over the artist for lore tags would create more problems than the reverse. People do make alternate interpretations of others' characters, be it a person's character with permission or a corporate-owned character that has a following. If we take the character owner over the artist, a character can never be tagged differently with lore tags regardless of how obvious the artist intent is. R34 and AUs become a lot messier if we have to go with the original character owner for lore tags over the intent with the depiction.

Yet this comment exists. to quote:

magnuseffect said:
post #2715270
Please look at the example post I've repeatedly linked. A SFW shoulders-and-up bust with no visual indicators. It doesn't even have a general gender tag attached.
If information is being taken from anything here, it's from interpretation of franchise lore, which is also what is being fought over, as there is no positive statement that Rivet is trans within her source game or from her IP owner. And if there was, where does site ruling expect a tagger to be able to look to determine this?

Hard disagree on tagging trans on every instance of the crossgender tag. Crossgender doesn't mean trans, and should still require artist statement.
Not to mention that anyone who considers Rivet trans-by-default would likely disagree with gynomorph Rivet being tagged crossgender.

Multiple single images were tagged trans_(lore) without any AU context, or even evidence that the tag is relevant in the first place. This has not been addressed.

In addition, it has been pointed out numerous times already how confusing things currently are, and how the reaction to accidental mistagging based on this confusion has been unilateral and indiscriminate.

watsit said:
If we take the artist's intention over the character owner, the character owner has recourse if they don't like a given interpretation. The problem is less likely to be with the tags themselves, but more the depiction having the intent of being undesirably different -- e.g. a canonically trans character being depicted with a "straight pride" colors while saying something like "I'm not trans, trans is abuse", the character owner is unlikely to care that the post is tagged trans_(lore) -- so a takedown solves the problem. While if we take the character owner over artist, there's no way to tag what the artist intends if it differs from official depictions, no matter how obvious the difference is and regardless of the character owners' feelings, or lack thereof, on the matter, e.g. my Fox and Krystal idea not being tagged incest_(lore) when it's obviously meant to be since Nintendo is silent on the matter.

"(...) if we take the character owner over artist, there's no way to tag what the artist intends if it differs from official depiction (...)"

The simple fix is not tagging what the artist intends in the first place. Ergo, Tag What You See policy. Compared to all the confusion thus far, I don't see why specifically tagging artist intent needs to be relevant at all.

temp7 said:
Compared to all the confusion thus far, I don't see why specifically tagging artist intent needs to be relevant at all.

I think I brought it up earlier but a lot of the groundwork for lore tags comes from common fan-complaints about characters like mikhaila_kirov being tagged andromorph because her pectoral musculature is "too defined to be female", and reggie_(whygena) being tagged female because they're often stylised with no muscle detailing at all. Which has to be handled on a per-artwork basis when even the characters' creator for reasons such as, potentially due to the drama here, Whygena wound up actually drawing fem-Reggie, and apparently wound up landing on shapeshifter-lore

For a lot of things you can't really say there is a concrete unchanging "canon lore" for anything in art, merely a state attached to a specific work. For other examples there's the elephant-in-the-room of early R&C female lombaxes apparently having breasts and no tail, and many other long-running fictional works feature slipups and re-writes of stuff.
Topically I'm a reader of the Warriors series, which features book-to-book canon changes, different authors writing the same scenes from different perspectives with completely different characters present, characters flipping from one gender to another between books (and then having kids), and an author being pretty assertive that cats normally have 5 toes on their hindpaws. They don't.
I saw another conversation recently about kzinti and how they're different depending on which IP they're in, with Star_Trek Kzinti being different from Known Space Kzinti.

temp7 said:
Then why isn't crossgender a lore tag?

There's a messy set of aliases and implications to deal with, and requests take time. See topic #31169.

temp7 said:
Multiple single images were tagged trans_(lore) without any AU context, or even evidence that the tag is relevant in the first place. This has not been addressed.

I'm not sure what you mean by "has not been addressed". What else needs addressing that hasn't been answered in this thread?

temp7 said:
Then why isn't crossgender a lore tag?

Yet this comment exists. to quote:

Multiple single images were tagged trans_(lore) without any AU context, or even evidence that the tag is relevant in the first place. This has not been addressed.

I literally just said that pictures of Rivet which do not depict her as trans should not be tagged because it is the artist's decision to not depict her as trans.

you must be kidding

magnuseffect said:
I think I brought it up earlier but a lot of the groundwork for lore tags comes from common fan-complaints about characters like mikhaila_kirov being tagged andromorph because her pectoral musculature is "too defined to be female", and reggie_(whygena) being tagged female because they're often stylised with no muscle detailing at all. Which has to be handled on a per-artwork basis when even the characters' creator for reasons such as, potentially due to the drama here, Whygena wound up actually drawing fem-Reggie, and apparently wound up landing on shapeshifter-lore

Okay then. How does any of that affect this specific situation with Rivet?

magnuseffect said:
For a lot of things you can't really say there is a concrete unchanging "canon lore" for anything in art, merely a state attached to a specific work. For other examples there's the elephant-in-the-room of early R&C female lombaxes apparently having breasts and no tail, and many other long-running fictional works feature slipups and re-writes of stuff.
Topically I'm a reader of the Warriors series, which features book-to-book canon changes, different authors writing the same scenes from different perspectives with completely different characters present, characters flipping from one gender to another between books (and then having kids), and an author being pretty assertive that cats normally have 5 toes on their hindpaws. They don't.
I saw another conversation recently about kzinti and how they're different depending on which IP they're in, with Star_Trek Kzinti being different from Known Space Kzinti.

I understand what retcons are. However, this isn't such a matter. What's going on here is a tag being accidentally misused due to confusing and even contradictory standards that have nothing at all to do with official changes, and everything to do with fan opinions being given unnecessary weight.

watsit said:
(...) I'm not sure what you mean by "has not been addressed". What else needs addressing that hasn't been answered in this thread?

The fact that it has not been addressed. The burden is actually on you to show where these concerns have been dealt with. If they had, this discussion would not be ongoing.

I don't want to come across as offensive, but I think you're just outright dismissing the concerns of multiple users at this point, on multiple topics. You didn't even attempt to address anything in this comment beyond crossgender tags, which are arguably the least concerning thing there.

temp7 said:
The fact that it has not been addressed. The burden is actually on you to show where these concerns have been dealt with. If they had, this discussion would not be ongoing.

Can you define "it"? I honestly don't know what you mean. This thread has a number of digressions and incidental side comments, so maybe I overlooked something, but as far as I know there has been responses to the primary concerns brought up.

If you mean some people aren't happy with the current answer, that will always be the case no matter what the answer is. If you mean mistags have and continue to happen with the trans tags, that's nothing new; the trans tags aren't the first, nor will be the last, to suffer bouts of mistagging (and I'd argue other tags like humanoid and big_dom_small_sub are far worse). Flipping the tag category on its head won't stop mistags, it will cause different (and likely more) posts to be mistagged.

temp7 said:
I don't want to come across as offensive, but I think you're just outright dismissing the concerns of multiple users at this point, on multiple topics. You didn't even attempt to address anything in this comment beyond crossgender tags, which are arguably the least concerning thing there.

What hasn't been addressed yet?

temp7 said:
Multiple single images were tagged trans_(lore) without any AU context, or even evidence that the tag is relevant in the first place.

It's been said multiple times that if you see a mistag or a missing tag, you can fix it. Just make sure that's what the tag is for, and you're not engaging in a tag war.

temp7 said:
In addition, it has been pointed out numerous times already how confusing things currently are, and how the reaction to accidental mistagging based on this confusion has been unilateral and indiscriminate.

It's been explained that putting official canon ahead of artist intent will cause more confusion and more problems with the tags. As for the admins' reversions, you'll have to ask them, but if I were to make a guess, it's probably easier for them to mass undo a user's edits when they know a number of them have been wrong, then to look through each change individually to figure out which were valid or invalid. I know when I asked them about it once, an admin did tell me they could mass undo the edits a particular user had been making (when they added an incorrect tag to a lot of posts).

temp7 said:
The simple fix is not tagging what the artist intends in the first place. Ergo, Tag What You See policy. Compared to all the confusion thus far, I don't see why specifically tagging artist intent needs to be relevant at all.

Because the tags are to inform about the image. Whether it's TWYS or TWYK, the tags relate to the particular post they're on. The artist's intent is most relevant to the given image as they're the one that created the art being tagged.

watsit said:
There's a messy set of aliases and implications to deal with, and requests take time. See topic #31169.

at this point I'd kinda perfer crossgender wasn't moved into the lore category at this point, honestly.

all of the lore tags have a very consistent hierarchy of how/when the tags apply and the crossgender tags just aren't tagged quite the same way, and them being moved over would muddle it up and potentially add to the confusion. they do have a shade of TWYK, but not in the same fashion as lore tags.

watsit said:
Can you define "it"? I honestly don't know what you mean. This thread has a number of digressions and incidental side comments, so maybe I overlooked something, but as far as I know there has been responses to the primary concerns brought up.
(...)
What hasn't been addressed yet?

Again, multiple single images were tagged trans_(lore) without any AU context, or even evidence that the tag is relevant in the first place:

magnuseffect said:
post #2715270
Please look at the example post I've repeatedly linked. A SFW shoulders-and-up bust with no visual indicators. It doesn't even have a general gender tag attached.
If information is being taken from anything here, it's from interpretation of franchise lore, which is also what is being fought over, as there is no positive statement that Rivet is trans within her source game or from her IP owner. And if there was, where does site ruling expect a tagger to be able to look to determine this?

Hard disagree on tagging trans on every instance of the crossgender tag. Crossgender doesn't mean trans, and should still require artist statement.
Not to mention that anyone who considers Rivet trans-by-default would likely disagree with gynomorph Rivet being tagged crossgender.

While the trans_(lore) tag on that image was eventually reverted, the situation has not been addressed. You and I both know from simple intuition that many, many people will interpret "lore" literally. I know I did. Also, there were two people involved in the tag war: only one was punished for tag-warring, and their edits were initially mass-reverted without even a basic review of the situation or the images in question. The other didn't get so much as a neutral record for the incident.

^ Ergo, adding trans_(lore) tags and edit warring, is worse than removing trans_(lore) tags and edit warring. Even if many of the tags aren't supposed to be there.

All that you've done so far is act like this has all been addressed, and then ask for clarification of what's being asked.

watsit said:
If you mean some people aren't happy with the current answer, that will always be the case no matter what the answer is. If you mean mistags have and continue to happen with the trans tags, that's nothing new; the trans tags aren't the first, nor will be the last, to suffer bouts of mistagging (and I'd argue other tags like humanoid and big_dom_small_sub are far worse). Flipping the tag category on its head won't stop mistags, it will cause different (and likely more) posts to be mistagged.
(...)
It's been said multiple times that if you see a mistag or a missing tag, you can fix it. Just make sure that's what the tag is for, and you're not engaging in a tag war.

If only there weren't users expressly avoiding adding trans_(lore) tags in general because the current system is so vague and difficult to apply. Meanwhile, a lot of images are still tagged as such without any evidence at all. That is inconsistent.

watsit said:
It's been explained that putting official canon ahead of artist intent will cause more confusion and more problems with the tags. (...)

And given the evidence so far, I highly doubt that outcome. Most of the problem comes from calling this a lore tag and then using it as an opinion tag: that is inconsistent. Call it what it is and there will be far fewer misunderstandings. This whole thread wouldn't even exist.

watsit said:
Because the tags are to inform about the image. Whether it's TWYS or TWYK, the tags relate to the particular post they're on. The artist's intent is most relevant to the given image as they're the one that created the art being tagged.

I find it amazing that the characters in the image don't count under TWYS policy, considering that you can in fact see them. And again, you and I both know from simple intuition that many, many people will interpret the word "lore" literally, regardless of any wiki entry.

sipothac said:
at this point I'd kinda perfer crossgender wasn't moved into the lore category at this point, honestly.

all of the lore tags have a very consistent hierarchy of how/when the tags apply and the crossgender tags just aren't tagged quite the same way, and them being moved over would muddle it up and potentially add to the confusion. they do have a shade of TWYK, but not in the same fashion as lore tags.

Thing is, with the way lore tags currently function, crossgender should be a lore tag.

temp7 said:
Thing is, with the way lore tags currently function, crossgender should be a lore tag.

well no. crossgender is just "character is presented as a gender they generally do not present as in canon media" regardless of artist interpretation of a character's "true" gender/sex, there's still an element of TWYS with these tags. and the tags necessarily function like this since the xty_crossgender tags imply gender tags.

where as all lore tags have the artist intention > canon depiction, and have a tagging standard entirely dissimilar to TWYS.

sipothac said:
well no. crossgender is just "character is presented as a gender they generally do not present as in canon media" regardless of artist interpretation of a character's "true" gender/sex, there's still an element of TWYS with these tags. and the tags necessarily function like this since the xty_crossgender tags imply gender tags.

where as all lore tags have the artist intention > canon depiction, and have a tagging standard entirely dissimilar to TWYS.

Like I said: "character is presented as a gender they generally do not present as in canon media" is literally an artist's interpretation.

temp7 said:
Like I said: "character is presented as a gender they generally do not present as in canon media" is literally an artist's interpretation.

that's not the definition of "interpretation" that I was using in this sentence. I know that "artist's interpretation" has a few definitions, but I meant it as "understanding of the referenced work" not "resultant adapted work".

temp7 said:
Like I said: "character is presented as a gender they generally do not present as in canon media" is literally an artist's interpretation.

This is correct, crossgender should be a lore tag.

sipothac said:
well no. crossgender is just "character is presented as a gender they generally do not present as in canon media" regardless of artist interpretation of a character's "true" gender/sex, there's still an element of TWYS with these tags. and the tags necessarily function like this since the xty_crossgender tags imply gender tags.

where as all lore tags have the artist intention > canon depiction, and have a tagging standard entirely dissimilar to TWYS.

I can see where you're coming from, but putting it in lore seems to be slightly better because general tags should ostensibly be TWYS, not TWYK. It's in this sort of limbo where it's uneasy in either category since it's canon lore and not artist (of image) lore.

A close equivalent to the crossgender tag category uneasiness is incest_(lore). But it's on the other side of the coin, where it's been decided that it's the artist's opinions that takes precedence over the canon. This might cause problems in let's say, a hypothetical where artist draws family members from popular media having sex, but stating that in the image they aren't family members.

demesejha said:
This is correct, crossgender should be a lore tag.

And then we run into the issue of this: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/17090143/

This artist considers the canonically male Rocket J Squirrel to be female, and draws them as such. So if I were to upload this image here... should I add a crossgender tag? If I don't, people who blacklist crossgender will see what they plainly don't want to... but if I do, I'm guilty of 'tagging abuse' by not respecting artists over creators like the rules say I should.

This situation is ridiculous. It should be very, very obvious why creators should take precedence over artists, yet we are having this discussion.

EDIT: turns out it is indeed here already.

temp7 said:
And then we run into the issue of this: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/17090143/

This artist considers the canonically male Rocket J Squirrel to be female, and draws them as such. So if I were to upload this image here... should I add a crossgender tag? If I don't, people who blacklist crossgender will see what they plainly don't want to... but if I do, I'm guilty of 'tagging abuse' by not respecting artists over creators like the rules say I should.

This situation is ridiculous. It should be very, very obvious why creators should take precedence over artists, yet we are having this discussion.

This is why crossgender was originally a general tag and not a lore tag. That was already explained to you, but you decided to conveniently forget it.

You will never receive a record for "tagging abuse" on upload unless it is repeated or really bad offenses. For example, not tagging gore on pictures that feature gore.

We are having this discussion because you vandalized the tags on dozens of posts. This could have been avoided if you asked politely here why those posts had the tag an d someone would have answered.