In their current state loli and shota are awkward hybrid tags that people disagree on the definitions of, much akin to the erstwhile cub. The current wiki pages define them as:

A Loli [Shota] is a female [male] character who resembles and appears to be young. This phrase is used to refer to humans, humanoids, and anthros alike. * Note: This should only be tagged for explicit and sexually suggestive content.

In regards to gender shota does not currently imply male and people have asked for loli's implication to female to be removed (topic #40890). It seems that many people what them to operate similar to how brother_(lore) and sister_(lore) do (covering male andromorph maleherm and female gynomorph herm respectively).

In regards to form, loli/shota exclude ferals and taurs, similar to how cub excluded humans and humanoids. (loli ~feral ~taur -human -humanoid -anthro returns 12 pages of results, while young female -loli ~feral ~taur -human -humanoid -anthro returns 194).

There is also disagreement on whether or not loli/shota should be restricted to questionable/explicit posts (topic #28252).

Various other disputes and disagreements have been collated by Alphamule in topic #39572.

I am in favor of aliasing loli and shota away to young_female and young_male. Some cleanup would need to happen first (~loli ~shota intersex returns 24 pages currently _{(though intersex isn't always referring to a young character)}), but I think it will be for the best in the long run, as those are the most agreed upon parts of the definitions and what people who are searching for loli/shota are most likely to be looking for (as a bonus, this would also give us a big leap forward in the young_[gender] tagging project).

Some people have said that loli/shota should instead be aliased to a blanket sexualized_young tag, or that they should be implied to it and a third, new tag be created for intersex and/or ambiguous characters.

The second option is a nonstarter, it doesn't solve any of the problems listed above and creates new ones. The first however, I think is only misguided. If that were to happen 99% of all young questionable/explicit posts would have to be tagged with sexualized_young as well, which is never going to happen. People are simply not going to remember to tag sexualized_young on something they've already tagged as young and explicit. This makes sexualized_young a useless tag for blacklisting purposes.

I would propose that we instead create a blanket nonsexualized_young tag to cover that 1% of questionable/explicit posts that are exceptions to the rule. We already have a few existing tags that are similar in concept, such as adult_on_adult and adult_focus. This would allow people to blacklist young -nonsexualized_youngeffectively.

As for the subordinate tags, most of those can be aliased a similar way (lolidom to either dominant_young or dominant_female, loli_penetrated to either young_penetrated or female_penetrated, pregnant_loli to underage_pregnancy, etc.).

However, there are a few that pose issues:

Oppai_loli:

Used when a child character has notably adult-sized breasts, but otherwise retains their child-like proportions.

We could alias this to something like busty_young (akin to busty_feral), or to exclude adolescents maybe busty_child? idk

Lolidonk:

Used for under aged females that have large butts in comparison to the rest of their body. This is much like the tag Oppai_loli, where a under aged female has large breasts in comparison to their body.

The proper Japanese term for this is kyojiri_loli and would be better defined as having adult-sized/developed hips and butt, but retaining otherwise child-like proportions. I don't know how to rename this one.

Like with cub, we'd have to deal with young_human/young_humanoid/young_anthro as well as young_<gender>. There would also be people who used it for taurs or something.

Mentioning, there's been a lot of progress on that. Getting the form and gender tags was a pain on some searches. Like, feral_boy and feral_girl actually being often used for feral_male and feral_female was definitely bad tagging. It also seemed to be used for young_human(oid)/anthro_on_feral which is about as bad.

Meanwhile, cub was aliased to young, so I hope the same for these tags. The sooner the better.

pleaseletmein said:
I would propose that we instead create a blanket nonsexualized_young tag to cover that 1% of questionable/explicit posts that are exceptions to the rule. We already have a few existing tags that are similar in concept, such as adult_on_adult and adult_focus. This would allow people to blacklist young -nonsexualized_youngeffectively.

Huge in favor of this. I don't support any removal of loli/shota without something like this to serve the same functionality. Though I forsee disagreement over what counts as "sexualized."

I think aliasing them both to young might be the best solution. Many people use them as per their colloquial meaning (childlike bodytype) regardless of twys gender and cleaning them up first won't solve that problem long-term. Are there many posts that feature these tags but neglect to tag gender?

Edit: actually, does anyone mind if I start a thread dedicated to establishing this tag?

oopsitripped said:
Edit: actually, does anyone mind if I start a thread dedicated to establishing this tag?

go ahead, the name definitely needs some workshopping.

Can we get a set:lolicollapse and set:shotacollapse to make it doable, please? I... would not easily be able to add that many posts to a set.

Hmm, checking these was interesting:
loli -female 0 results. (Obvious reason)
loli intersex solo NOT 0 results. Said reason .
shota -male NOT 0 results. Not consistent .
shota intersex solo
The duo posts I'd have to add proxies like loli male/herm.

https://e621.net/post_versions?lr=1761641&search[updater_id]=1761641 -> post #4016700 I have a bad feeling that more work is ahead.

I do not like aliasing away the decade+ of effort in tagging sexualized minors to just gendered minors, even if young -rating:s accomplishes most of the same.

At least alias to

young_female_sexualized
young_male_sexualized

No significant difference in meaning wherever sexualized gets put in this word salad tag, so use the variant that will show up in autocomplete when tagging young*, the root tag we want people to use now. And implicate all the gendered variants down to young_sexualized. These are things people want. We all know that.

I don't like loli and shota (and girly) getting tagged for intersex characters for their feminine or masculine body shape. This idea came from incorporating parts of our gender tagging flowchart into other gendered tags, but I think that only worsens search results. As it turns out, characters having a similar body but different genitals usually results in vastly different content with different appeal.

I can work on verifying that shota ~andromorph ~maleherm and loli ~gynomorph ~herm contain the correct sexualized genders. The amount of posts in the shota search is about what I do multiple times each day for my project anyway.

pleaseletmein said:
99% of all young questionable/explicit posts would have to be tagged with sexualized_young as well, which is never going to happen.

If loli and shota, which are very undertagged, are not required tags now, then the hypothetical young_sexualized tag isn't required either. The cub aliasing thread had the same misconception, although I'm not sure anyone actually verbalized it. Every tag is undertagged. Tagging is either perfect or undertagged. A tag being undertagged doesn't make it bad or broken, but frequent mistags is a problem. In the case of cub, the e621 community outside these forums had collectively decided that older young characters shouldn't get tagged cub, per absolutely nothing, and they enforced that definition contrary to the wiki, implications, and staff. That's why that tag was broken. Blacklisting cub, loli, shota, or young_sexualized instead of young or young -rating:s has always seemed like a silly mistake if that person doesn't want to see young porn.

pleaseletmein said:
I would propose that we instead create a blanket nonsexualized_young tag to cover that 1% of questionable/explicit posts that are exceptions to the rule.

Such a tag is only a nice-to-have but inessential. Not having it blocks no AIBUR. Having it tagged well does not affect any decisions about loli and shota because these tags are very undertagged and they don't cover all forms anyway, if their wikis are strictly followed.

i've personally stopped using them knowing that, it should be aliased away.
it's the constant discourse on what it should be aliased to is what's keeping me conflicted and making me hesitant on using it on a regular basis, ever since the cubpocalypse.

Like I said in the other thread, I think there's a case for both, considering the sensitive nature of the content. I'm happy as long as we have some way to fill this purpose, but it would be a shame to see all the tagging effort put into these tags go to waste.

The longer I look at this search young -rating:safe -loli -shota -young_penetrat* -young_finger* -young_fist* -young_rape* -exposure_to_minor -older_on_young -young_on_old -adult_*_young -adult_on_* -teenager_on_younger -young_intersex -young_*morph -young_*herm the more I realize how impossible it will be to populate a nonsexualized_young tag without loli/shota to sort the negatives into. Every instance of nonsexualized_young should be in that search, the only issue with the search right now is regular undertagging and loli/shota's lack of coverage. If those two tags were removed completely, then the search would be completely inviable with no way to whittle it down even theoretically.
If we just alias loli/shota to a sexualized_young tag and have the rest of the tags in that search (sans adult_on_adult) implicate it, that would be a huge chunk of useful information. It would also mean less cleanup work beforehand.

abadbird said:
I can work on verifying that shota ~andromorph ~maleherm and loli ~gynomorph ~herm contain the correct sexualized genders.

shota intersex -young_male cleared
loli intersex -young_female cleared

...for now. Except for a few SFWs I'm too lazy to open. And I'm never touching Corruption of Champions to tag anything. lmao. Both tags now follow their wiki genders. Yes, I tagged young_[gender] for all the young characters that I could gender, so all the previously mistagged intersex characters are still easily findable under their young_[gender] tag. I phoned in a handful of decisions because, frankly, people had tagged things that were barely visible or not at all, which I couldn't verify, and a decision was needed.

abadbird said:
shota intersex -young_male cleared
loli intersex -young_female cleared

...for now. Except for a few SFWs I'm too lazy to open. And I'm never touching Corruption of Champions to tag anything. lmao. Both tags now follow their wiki genders. Yes, I tagged young_[gender] for all the young characters that I could gender, so all the previously mistagged intersex characters are still easily findable under their young_[gender] tag. I phoned in a handful of decisions because, frankly, people had tagged things that were barely visible or not at all, which I couldn't verify, and a decision was needed.

loli solo intersex There actually wasn't too many to tag. Tried my best to tag this old post: post #63682 (Flash)
loli intersex -solo Only 5 pages, so not that bad, actually. Going through all of these would greatly clear way for the loli alias like mentioned in Massive project et al?
loli intersex -solo young_intersex Drilling down to less results... There were missing tags like young_on_young.
loli intersex -solo -young_intersex