I'm gonna start with a question first before actually making a bur and potentially wasting some admin's time.

Would sexless and/or genderless be aliased as Null?

Hell, what're your guys' thoughts on the tag in general?

If sexless and/or genderless or some other words are valid to be aliased, i'll make the bur. If not, then it stops there.

This is in accordance with donovan's great cub purge, i plan on a follow up bur for young_null and the suite of aliases and implications it brings.
Wanna cover all bases on young_[gender]

Should be invalidated IMO, it's basically just featureless_crotch. The null wiki says "While a null character may have a featureless crotch, featureless_crotch also applies when genitals are simply ignored or not drawn", but there's no visual distinction between "ignored or not drawn" and "not there". It's ambiguous as to whether a featureless crotch is intended to be "no genitals" or genitals simply not drawn (or erased for public/sfw version). E.g.
post #4336998 post #4465653 post #4166431

watsit said:
Should be invalidated IMO, it's basically just featureless_crotch. The null wiki says "While a null character may have a featureless crotch, featureless_crotch also applies when genitals are simply ignored or not drawn", but there's no visual distinction between "ignored or not drawn" and "not there". It's ambiguous as to whether a featureless crotch is intended to be "no genitals" or genitals simply not drawn (or erased for public/sfw version). E.g.
post #4336998 post #4465653 post #4166431

I think null is specifically for sexual/suggestive content involving a featureless_crotch, so invalidating it would make it much harder to find such content in a sea of characters not wearing pants.

themasterpotato said:
I think null is specifically for sexual/suggestive content involving a featureless_crotch, so invalidating it would make it much harder to find such content in a sea of characters not wearing pants.

According to the wiki, it's "A 'quasi-gender' denotation of characters who specifically lack sex organs." It's not necessarily about being sexual/suggestive, but a character that expressly has no genitals as opposed to genitals being merely not drawn. As my examples show, you can have a featureless_crotch as a focus for a character, even sexual/suggestively, that's not Null, making the two indistinguishable. There is nullo for instances where genitals were removed with visible indication (e.g. scars, urethral hole only), and lock_bulge. But null itself is not TWYS.

watsit said:
According to the wiki, it's "A 'quasi-gender' denotation of characters who specifically lack sex organs." It's not necessarily about being sexual/suggestive, but a character that expressly has no genitals as opposed to genitals being merely not drawn. As my examples show, you can have a featureless_crotch as a focus for a character, even sexual/suggestively, that's not Null, making the two indistinguishable. There is nullo for instances where genitals were removed with visible indication (e.g. scars, urethral hole only), and lock_bulge. But null itself is not TWYS.

What if we made the requirements for using the tag more strict? I do agree that a lot of posts tagged null probably are indistinguishable from just featureless_crotch, but there are also posts where it is pretty obvious that a character is intended to have no genitals, such as:
post #3080655 post #3136374

I will also add, one of the highest voted post in this site, features a null character

post #3585141

null should be just be aliased to null_(lore), it effectively functions the same way that any of the lore gender tags do, i.e. is used separately from the standard seven gender categories (a null character can be male or female or ambiguous_gender), and is applied mostly through external knowledge and occasionally by contextual evidence.

also, I don't believe that having <adjective>_null tags are necessary.

watsit said:
According to the wiki, it's "A 'quasi-gender' denotation of characters who specifically lack sex organs." It's not necessarily about being sexual/suggestive, but a character that expressly has no genitals as opposed to genitals being merely not drawn. As my examples show, you can have a featureless_crotch as a focus for a character, even sexual/suggestively, that's not Null, making the two indistinguishable. There is nullo for instances where genitals were removed with visible indication (e.g. scars, urethral hole only), and lock_bulge. But null itself is not TWYS.

I thought the same, but when I tried reporting a certain user who keeps adding the tag, this was the response:

According to the wiki, it can be tagged based on visuals alone. These appear correct

I don't know if there's much to add to this discussion that hasn't been said in all the previous threads on this. It's kind of a mess, but it kind of has to be. Renaming it null_(lore), as sipothac suggested, might work. "Null" covers a lot of things in practice, but basically, it gets tagged when the artist tries to draw attention to the fact the character lacks genitals.

benjiboyo said:
Would sexless and/or genderless be aliased as Null?

Maybe? But null is generally only tagged if the crotch is visible, and sexless/genderless sounds like it might get tagged on a fully clothed character based on external knowledge, so I dunno. Though, if we change null into a lore tag, I guess that wouldn't be an issue.

sipothac said:
null should be just be aliased to null_(lore), it effectively functions the same way that any of the lore gender tags do, i.e. is used separately from the standard seven gender categories (a null character can be male or female or ambiguous_gender), and is applied mostly through external knowledge and occasionally by contextual evidence.

also, I don't believe that having <adjective>_null tags are necessary.

I disagree on it being lore, i do think null is very much a visible thing you can see, i will however agree that it's usage IS extremely... Iffy as of now.

My definition of null is very much the visible sex of a character, which would be the lack of genitals from the get go. I can't see it as a lore tag.

crocogator said:
Maybe? But null is generally only tagged if the crotch is visible, and sexless/genderless sounds like it might get tagged on a fully clothed character based on external knowledge, so I dunno. Though, if we change null into a lore tag, I guess that wouldn't be an issue.

Hmm, fair.

benjiboyo said:
My definition of null is very much the visible sex of a character, which would be the lack of genitals from the get go. I can't see it as a lore tag.

How is that any different from featureless_crotch? A character that lacks genitals has a featureless_crotch, and it's entirely on the intent of the artist/character owner for whether it was an artistic choice (e.g. to make a SFW piece, or a censored version for public viewing, or to not spend too much time adding unneeded details to the piece) or part of the character's background info. That's the quintessential use of lore tags. I don't see a functional difference between post #4166431 and post #3080655, as they're both drawing attention to the crotch area which is a featureless_crotch (the latter even has the excuse that it's a plushie, something that wouldn't have genitals any more than any other inanimate object; irrespective of anything else, we wouldn't tag null for a tree, so I don't see why we would for a plushie).

sipothac said:
null should be just be aliased to null_(lore), it effectively functions the same way that any of the lore gender tags do, i.e. is used separately from the standard seven gender categories (a null character can be male or female or ambiguous_gender), and is applied mostly through external knowledge and occasionally by contextual evidence.

also, I don't believe that having <adjective>_null tags are necessary.

crocogator said:
I don't know if there's much to add to this discussion that hasn't been said in all the previous threads on this. It's kind of a mess, but it kind of has to be. Renaming it null_(lore), as sipothac suggested, might work. "Null" covers a lot of things in practice, but basically, it gets tagged when the artist tries to draw attention to the fact the character lacks genitals.

Maybe? But null is generally only tagged if the crotch is visible, and sexless/genderless sounds like it might get tagged on a fully clothed character based on external knowledge, so I dunno. Though, if we change null into a lore tag, I guess that wouldn't be an issue.

We're going to have to wait to make an alias request for null_(lore) yet since there's still a pending one involving null.

benjiboyo said:
I disagree on it being lore, i do think null is very much a visible thing you can see, i will however agree that it's usage IS extremely... Iffy as of now.

My definition of null is very much the visible sex of a character, which would be the lack of genitals from the get go. I can't see it as a lore tag.

it often difficult to tell the difference between it and just normal featureless_crotch, in a majority of cases it's pretty much just knowing what a character is or trying to divine artist intent. I don't think that it makes sense to try to tag it as a general tag.

it's worth noting that not all lore tags would be entirely impossible to determine through context given by a single post (there's even a visibly_trans tag for characters with scars from gender affirmation surgeries visible). it's more that they're just more useful when posts can have the tag added without dealing with TWYS.

Hmm, all right, this is gonna be odd but...
I think we could invalidate it honestly. I still don't see it as a lore tag, but the idea of it being replaceable with featureless crotch has suade me.

I propose actually, that we make a fetureless_crotch_focus, or featureless_crotch_play for the when it's focused or used in sexual acts.

How's that sound?

benjiboyo said:
I propose actually, that we make a fetureless_crotch_focus, or featureless_crotch_play for the when it's focused or used in sexual acts.

I don't think featureless_crotch_focus is needed, featureless_crotch crotch_focus would be suitable if crotch_focus was used more. Something like featureless_crotch_play may not be a bad idea.

How would featureless_crotch_play differ from null_stimulation?

crocogator said:
How would featureless_crotch_play differ from null_stimulation?

By not giving the impression that the character is Null. A character can just have a featureless crotch and not be Null, but still have their crotch played with in a suggestive or sexual manner. Granted I'm not fond of the name featureless_crotch_play, but null_stimulation carries the connotation that the character is Null, which they aren't necessarily.