The bulk update request #5616 is pending approval.
remove alias twink (0) -> femboy (147437)
Reason: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twink_(gay_slang)
while yes a lot of twinks are girly, not all of them are
Topic: unalias twink -> girly
Posted under Tag Alias and Implication Suggestions
I’m giving this a +1. Here’s why:
Girly (at least on e621) refers to male characters who appear more feminine than masculine. Very similar, if not identical, to femboys.
Twinks, on the other hand, is a more generalized term that may include ‘girly’ characters, but don’t necessarily have to be such. Twinks can also describe skinny/athletic men who look like adolescent boys (though still within legal age of consent).
If you ask me. I’d say unalias the two tags and then have girly imply twink.
The problem is that with anthropomorphic characters, the line between twink and girly is much more blurry than it is with humans. Unless you pretty much require crossdressing before you label a post "girly", it's a very subjective judgment call.
zenith-pendragon said:
Twinks, on the other hand, is a more generalized term that may include ‘girly’ characters, but don’t necessarily have to be such. Twinks can also describe skinny/athletic men who look like adolescent boys (though still within legal age of consent).
I think that's starting to split hairs. There may be some edge cases, but I feel there would be too few to be concerned about next to people using girly and twink interchangeably, resulting in girly characters only being tagged twink and vice-versa, causing people to need to use both when they want either. Also since we TWYS, a character that looks adolescent would be treated as such regardless of their "actual" age.
Twink is a character archtype rather than an observable trait. I don't think it should be aliased to girly, but rather than becoming it's own tag, I think it should be invalidated like how bimbo is.
Whatever gets done with the tag afterwards, the fact that femboy and twink are currently aliased to the same tag implies they mean the same thing, which they objectively do not.
Previous thread creating this alias: topic #31345
It was not a popular decision at the time either.
the definitions that people are using for "twink" of that I'm seeing in this thread and the one linked by wat, it's effectively an amalgam of athletic (sometimes), girly (mostly), slim (usually), and teenager (maybe) male/maleherm/andromorph characters.
to me it seems like the closest analogue is girly, or maybe slim but that tag is applicable to all genders, where as girly is exclusively for the three man-genders.
I'd like to reiterate that while "twink" and "girly" might be distinct concepts in the real world, with anthropomorphic characters things become a lot muddier. Facial features become a lot less important to masculinity and femininity, so I'm not sure how how you'd consistently tell the difference without requiring girly to include crossdressing.
vulpes_artifex said:
I'd like to reiterate that while "twink" and "girly" might be distinct concepts in the real world, with anthropomorphic characters things become a lot muddier. Facial features become a lot less important to masculinity and femininity, so I'm not sure how how you'd consistently tell the difference without requiring girly to include crossdressing.
There's no way the boundaries are sufficiently unclear that either of the characters in this post should full into the "girly" side of the divide:
girly doesn't necessarily require crossdressing, but the overall impression should be of an exaggerated, drag queen-esque caricature of Western femininity to be eligible for the tag. Think long hair, pink accessories, lipstick, that kind of thing. You know how, in classic anthro cartoons, you can usually tell the one female character apart because she's the only one who has human hair? That's basically how the concept of "girly" applies to anthros. It's an inherently human-centric concept, so any character designs intended to be interpreted as "femboys" are not going to lean too heavily into biological realism. I think your concerns about hypothetical girly ferals are severely overblown.
wat8548 said:
There's no way the boundaries are sufficiently unclear that either of the characters in this post should full into the "girly" side of the divide:
I mean, I'm not sure if I'd consider either of them them "twinks" either, so...
sipothac said:
I mean, I'm not sure if I'd consider either of them them "twinks" either, so...
It was probably intended to refer to the bottom one, judging by the size of the butt (and etymology of the word "twink"). This is also a good example of why I don't think the twink tag is valid on its own, which makes the fact that it is heavily polluting a popular valid tag even worse.
wat8548 said:
girly doesn't necessarily require crossdressing, but the overall impression should be of an exaggerated, drag queen-esque caricature of Western femininity to be eligible for the tag.
Nah, just someone who comes across as feminine, were it not for a visible cock/bulge/balls. It needn't be an exaggerated caricature, a male with a perfectly natural feminine body or face works too. I can see that green one being tagged girly. A bit on the edge of applicability perhaps, but not one I'd call foul over.
wat8548 said:
There's no way the boundaries are sufficiently unclear that either of the characters in this post should full into the "girly" side of the divide:I agree. neither character is twink, and definitely not girly.
what do you all think about an androgynous_male tag? the idea was brought up in topic #41299 and I thought it might be applicable to this situation. if I understand correctly, at least part the current problem is that we have no term for a male character whose build/body type fails to conform to any "masculine" standard but also dosn't swing far enough in the other direction to be considered girly. this tag would be kind of be that exact thing.
I think the term has more potential than twink since I still feel like "twink" has some terminological overlap with "girly" that "androgynous" wouldn't. I still have some potential misgivings that I voiced in the above linked thread, but it might be a decent tag.
sipothac said:
what do you all think about an androgynous_male tag? the idea was brought up in topic #41299 and I thought it might be applicable to this situation. if I understand correctly, at least part the current problem is that we have no term for a male character whose build/body type fails to conform to any "masculine" standard but also dosn't swing far enough in the other direction to be considered girly. this tag would be kind of be that exact thing.
No. I don't know what you mean by "masculine standard", but pretty much the only standard this site has is "no boobs". We have the manly tag for caricatures of masculinity, same as how girly is (supposed to be) for caricatures of femininity, but the scope of TWYS male body types is much wider than that.
Part of the problem with "twink" as a tag is that, if defined objectively, it could probably be applied to the majority of male posts on the site. A slimline build with neither a lot of fat nor muscle is an incredibly popular furry body shape, and not just because it's easy to draw. Even if an "androgynous_male" tag could be objectively defined, aliasing twink to it would cause just as many mistags as the current girly alias is doing.
Twinks aren’t always femboys I agree with this
keysmasher123 said:
The bulk update request #5616 is pending approval.remove alias twink (0) -> femboy (147437)
Reason: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twink_(gay_slang)
while yes a lot of twinks are girly, not all of them are
Also E6 users have zero idea what a femboy is, the logic seems to be whatever isn’t a big muscly man is a femboy which is just not true
Surprised nobody's brought up yet that the most accurate place to point the twink alias would be slim_male.