Topic: Regarding "cub" tag removal and why this is the worst decision in this site's history.

Posted under Tag Alias and Implication Suggestions

Also, would it be better to have a tag called "young_looking", like how there's a tag called "girly" for males?

steel_snake said:
Lolis isn't a character who is young in sexual situations. Culturally, in Japan, it's a body type for fictional female characters that are petite, the same with shotas.

please look up the origin of the term "lolita" before saying this again. also what the -con suffix in terms like lolicon and shotacon mean.

What's the current discourse on this?
Will the term come back?

This thread has been super lively lately
and just curious what's the current flow
of the ocean, Dood

The whole premise of this thread is inherently incorrect.
E621 staff definitely made worse decisions than this =P

definitelynotafurry4 said:
Did you just post a reddit image to try to explain what loli means to a furry art archive..?

Couldn't find another source at the moment, but it shows what loli means.

steel_snake said:
Also, would it be better to have a tag called "young_looking", like how there's a tag called "girly" for males?

General tags generally don't care about lore (crossgender being a major exception), young vs. young_looking is a distinction without a difference.

steel_snake said:
Couldn't find another source at the moment, but it shows what loli means.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita

"lolita" originates from a novel in which the protagonist marries a woman so that he can get closer to, and eventually sexually abuse her 12-year old daughter. the term eventually just became synonymous with the sexualization of young girls in general.

as the term gained world-wide usage, in Japan the term for a person with a sexual obsession with young girls or a "lolita complex" became referred to as a "lolicon" (a portmanteau of the two words), eventually the terms "shotaro complex" and "shotacon" evolved to describe a similar situation but with boys. "loli" and "shota" also becoming the way to refer to young female and male characters who are sexualized.

steel_snake said:
When I said "couldn't find another source(...)," I meant a source for the picture that disagrees with your statement.

Also Wikipedia for Loli:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolicon

"...lolicon (..) is a genre of fictional media which focuses on young (or young-looking) girl characters, particularly in a sexually suggestive or erotic manner(...)."

"young looking" == "young" under TWYS

also, believe what you want to believe, I guess. but uhh... there's a reason people don't use the words in polite conversation. and there's no denying that the term originates from a book about a pedophile.

lafcadio said:
General tags generally don't care about lore (crossgender being a major exception), young vs. young_looking is a distinction without a difference.

I'm not referring to the cross-gender tag - if anything, cross-gender should be put as a lore tag, but that's a different topic - I'm referring to the girly tag. A good example of the girly in use is the character Reggie by Whygena. In some SFW images, Reggie looks female, but lore-wise, he's male.

steel_snake said:
I'm not referring to the cross-gender tag - if anything, cross-gender should be put as a lore tag, but that's a different topic - I'm referring to the girly tag. A good example of the girly in use is the character Reggie by Whygena. In some SFW images, Reggie looks female, but lore-wise, he's male.

No, I understood perfectly what you are talking about.
Girly has an actual purpose when contrasted against female and the broader male tag.
young_looking would never serve any purpose that is not already fulfilled by the young and adult (lore) tag pair.

definitelynotafurry4 said:
Did you just post a reddit image to try to explain what loli means to a furry art archive..?

It's a surprisingly detailed and accurate breakdown on what would constitute a young character here. Some folks should take notes.

Updated

lafcadio said:
young anthro -young_anthro
In comparison, adult (lore) is only tagged on young characters. young_looking can't be a combo tag for young adult_(lore) because all adult (lore)s are young.
I get the distinct impression that you haven't read the wikis for any of these tags.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that "young_looking" should replace the tag chain "young" + "adult_(lore)".

The main reason why I argue this because of Decad ban for his "minor-coded" posts. There's no such thing as "minor-coded" characters. They either look or act young, or the other way around.

steel_snake said:
I guess what I'm trying to say is that "young_looking" should replace the tag chain "young" + "adult_(lore)".

That would just be worse in every possible way. Again, adult_(lore) can't be standalone. It will only ever apply to young characters. The young adult_(lore) tag combo already suggests that one of the characters is a legal adult with the appearance of a youth.
Character owners will hate it because, ultimately, you're still insinuating the character is young/loli/shota/etc., but you are removing the adult_(lore) disclaimer.
It's also awful for browsing because the meaning of adult_(lore) is immediately clear, but if some John Doe saw young young_looking in the tag list, I can bet you a bunch of them would just automatically assume both tags mean the same thing.
If you were to make young_looking mutually exclusive with young, suddenly random users who blacklist young get exposed to a lot of gross young/loli/shota/etc. art that they are not interested in seeing, all because it's tagged with young_looking instead of young.

hjfduitloxtrds said:
um no adult_(lore) is tagged on young looking characters who are not actually young.

Characters who look young, regardless of their established age, are tagged as young. Characters who are established to be adults but look young are young adult_(lore). It is exactly as I described.

lafcadio said:
That would just be worse in every possible way. Again, adult_(lore) can't be standalone. It will only ever apply to young characters. The young adult_(lore) tag combo already suggests that one of the characters is a legal adult with the appearance of a youth.
Character owners will hate it because, ultimately, you're still insinuating the character is young/loli/shota/etc., but you are removing the adult_(lore) disclaimer.
It's also awful for browsing because the meaning of adult_(lore) is immediately clear, but if some John Doe saw young young_looking in the tag list, I can bet you a bunch of them would just automatically assume both tags mean the same thing.
If you were to make young_looking mutually exclusive with young, suddenly random users who blacklist young get exposed to a lot of gross young/loli/shota/etc. art that they are not interested in seeing, all because it's tagged with young_looking instead of young.

Then we add "young_looking" to the default blacklist, and add it to those who have "young" blacklisted.

As for those who assume, they'll make an 'ass' of 'you' - as in themselves - and 'me.'

Updated

lafcadio said:
Characters who look young, regardless of their established age, are tagged as young. Characters who are established to be adults but look young are young adult_(lore). It is exactly as I described.

But then you should've said: "It will only ever apply to adult characters who look/are tagged young," not, "It will only ever apply to young characters."

steel_snake said:
Then we add "young_looking" to the default blacklist, and add it to those who have "young" blacklisted.

As for those who assume, they'll make an 'ass' of 'you' - as in themselves - and 'me.'

how about we just tag characters that look like children as young?

and then we don't have to worry about confirming they're actually a 9000 year old dragon, or whether they have been transformed to look like a child via some fictional magical/scientific method, or that the character has "systemic hypoplasia".

steel_snake said:
Then we add "young_looking" to the default blacklist, and add it to those who have "young" blacklisted.

I am not aware of any mass-blacklist-update function existing. You would need to speak to an e621 developer to get that added, and try to actively justify why we should replace the obvious adult_(lore) with young_looking. The world's strongest rhetorician could show up in this forum thread and I still don't think they'd be able to do it.

steel_snake said:
As for those who assume, they'll make an 'ass- of 'you' - as in themselves - and 'me.'

Cute little cliché, but it is utterly meaningless and does not move the dialogue forward. If you think that my assumption is wrong, either make a real argument or just live with your opinion contradicting mine.

steel_snake said:
But then you should've said: "It will only ever apply to adult characters who look/are tagged young," not, "It will only ever apply to young characters."

I trust that you are a reasonable adult who can understand context clues when I talk about the use of the young tag.

Where are you even trying to go with all these disconnected arguments? What is your perfect vision for young and the related tags, if young young_* adult_(lore) isn't good enough for the userbase?

lafcadio said:

Where are you even trying to go with all these disconnected arguments? What is your perfect vision for young and the related tags, if young young_* adult_(lore) isn't good enough for the userbase?

I'm trying to poke holes in your argument as you do the same with mine.

In the best scenario, 'young_looking' would be used for adult characters who look young. There will be no need for the 'young' tag in those posts unless there is an actual character that is young in the image or video. It can still be blacklisted in the default blacklist, and for those who live in countries where they ban anything that involves fictional characters in sexual situations who are or look young.

I suppose an opposite tag called 'mature_looking' would be created for characters that are young but look older than their listed age.

I hope my thoughts are clear.

steel_snake said:
I'm trying to poke holes in your argument as you do the same with mine.

In the best scenario, 'young_looking' would be used for adult characters who look young. There will be no need for the 'young' tag in those posts unless there is an actual character that is young in the image or video. It can still be blacklisted in the default blacklist, and for those who live in countries where they ban anything that involves fictional characters in sexual situations who are or look young.

I suppose an opposite tag called 'mature_looking' would be created for characters that are young but look older than their listed age.

I hope my thoughts are clear.

You know what? I'll cede a point. Technically, it does seem currently impossible or overly complicated to find a young_looking adult and an intentionally young character in the same post.
The current practice is that the former character will require young adult_(lore) all on their own, and adding search terms like duo or -age_difference will definitely result in false positives.
On that basis alone, there does appear to be some theoretical unmet need, but at the same time I don't think the young_looking/mature_looking pair is the best solution.

  • No mass-blacklist-updater exists to seamlessly integrate this new tag. In most other cases, we could simply rely on implications to result in correct blacklist behavior, but not here!
  • The tag name young_looking is still not ideal for differentiating from young.
  • Lore counterparts for the age_difference tags would probably work much better for two young-looking characters who are actually different ages, and likewise for two adult-looking characters who are actually different ages.
  • How many posts could there possibly be that depict young_looking adults with actual youngs?

lafcadio said:
You know what? I'll cede a point. Technically, it does seem currently impossible or overly complicated to find a young_looking adult and an intentionally young character in the same post.
The current practice is that the former character will require young adult_(lore) all on their own, and adding search terms like duo or -age_difference will definitely result in false positives.

looking through all adult_(lore) young_on_young it dosn't seem like that common of an occurrence; as far as I can tell there's only post #4275608 and maybe a few others.

if it was necessary I guess we could say that young_(lore) could also be applied to posts like this on top of posts that have a character that looks older than they are. so like, in theory young adult_(lore) young_(lore) could include posts where two (or more) young characters, one who's canonically underaged, and one who's not are interacting. there'd be some overlap with stuff like post #4579688, but they're both uncomon enough that it wouldn't really be a big deal.

Updated

What would be the difference between young_looking and just young? Since based on TWYS, those are the exact same thing...

lafcadio said:
(crossgender being a major exception)

there's an argument for it to BE a lore tag, at least the common varient. i understand the use of it when selfcest is happening between hetero sexual partners. but a solo picture of sonic the hedgehog being crossgendered to be female is technically a twyk.

benjiboyo said:
there's an argument for it to BE a lore tag, at least the common varient. i understand the use of it when selfcest is happening between hetero sexual partners. but a solo picture of sonic the hedgehog being crossgendered to be female is technically a twyk.

personally I think the most important thing for the lore category is to keep its tagging standards as consistent and solid as possible. the thing about crossgender (and also the other alternate_* tags) is that it's not tagged on the same standard as the current family of lore tags, tags like those are always based character's series of origin, where as with lore the bottom line is always artist intention.

alphamule

Privileged

sipothac said:
loli still implies female and has done for quite some time

I've said a couple of times that I think shota and loli would be more useful (and less annoying) if they were also applicable to young andromorph and maleherm characters, and young gynomoroh and herm characters respectively.

I made a BUR on the subject that got some mixed reception.

In practice, they were rarely used for that, so you have female locked tags on non-female posts. :shrugs:

steel_snake said:
Lolis isn't a character who is young in sexual situations. Culturally, in Japan, it's a body type for fictional female characters that are petite, the same with shotas.

sipothac said:
please look up the origin of the term "lolita" before saying this again. also what the -con suffix in terms like lolicon and shotacon mean.

Screwy bit is you're both right...

steel_snake said:
I'm trying to poke holes in your argument as you do the same with mine.

In the best scenario, 'young_looking' would be used for adult characters who look young. There will be no need for the 'young' tag in those posts unless there is an actual character that is young in the image or video. It can still be blacklisted in the default blacklist, and for those who live in countries where they ban anything that involves fictional characters in sexual situations who are or look young.

I suppose an opposite tag called 'mature_looking' would be created for characters that are young but look older than their listed age.

I hope my thoughts are clear.

What you're proposing feels like it's incompatible to Tag-What-You-See, since it requires taggers be familiar with the source material about the character depicted in each piece of art, or the artist themselves doing the tagging if it's an OC. In any picture without dialog, which is most of them, there would be no way to tell the adolescent-looking girl was actually a 1000 year old vampire without doing a lot of research on the character within the picture. That's a lot of work for the small pool of volunteer taggers that spend their free time adding and verifying tags on pics posted here. This sort of situation is what lore tags were designed to help communicate, as has been discussed, and it's why I agree with the decision to use the adult_(lore) tag.

While I don't think lolis or shotas should be given special treatment, I will agree with the point DimoretPinel brought up that the looks that define late teens makes the cutoff of what is teenager (thus young) vs young_adult (thus not young) very blurry, and leads to inconsistent enforcement. As a software developer myself who relishes in logic puzzles, I would love for a more solid definition to work off of, but words themselves map loosely to concepts, and I don't see there being a better way than what the staff have come up with currently, at least not without abandoning TWYS. I definitely don't want that to happen, since we see what happens on other art sites where tags are inconsistent and some artists who are clearly drawing adolescent or younger underage porn refusing to mark their art as such.

dimoretpinel said:
Instead of young_looking i propose either ambiguous_age + young or ambiguously_young. Most of the discourse is coming from edge case posts where it's hard to tell if the character is a minor or not.

This could be a good solution to the "1000 year old loli" problem that comes with unblacklisting adult_(lore). And with situations where artstyle is the main issue. "Is this a chibi or a child?" is a more troublesome dilema than "is this an adolescent or an adult" imo, because in the later case the adolescent tag could be used alongside adult_(lore) to make exceptions to blacklists.

Unfortunately I think it's a blue and black vs white and gold situation much of the time. Some of the posts being argued about are blatantly young imo, while with others I can't see how anyone would get that impression.

Removing cub was dumb because before this, it was a convenient way to search for young looking characters in art without including mostly humanoid stuff like elves, goblins, etc. I can understand aliasing a slur into less offensive terms, but what I can't understand is actively removing functionality of a tag that was used to separate young humanoids and young non-humanoids. Now searching for "cub", because it's aliased to "young", muddles the search with a bunch of crap I'm not looking for, especially when the "young" tag includes VERY OBVIOUSLY ADULT CHARACTERS, FULLY GROWN BREASTS AND ALL. I'd argue "young" is MORE misused than "cub" ever was, yet you don't see anyone want THAT tag gone.

notasexualdodo said:
Why did you people want this???

notasexualdodo said:
Are you even aware of what the users of your own site want???

Pick a lane here, did people want it, or not? You imply that people wanted it to happen then are speaking for a group of people that seems to be very small in wanting cub to stay around and implying that they are the larger group. There are a total of 3 downvotes to 36 upvotes in favor of nuking the tag...

See here for the discussion on the BUR: https://e621.net/forum_topics/41659

definitelynotafurry4 said:
Pick a lane here, did people want it, or not? You imply that people wanted it to happen then are speaking for a group of people that seems to be very small in wanting cub to stay around and implying that they are the larger group. There are a total of 3 downvotes to 36 upvotes in favor of nuking the tag...

See here for the discussion on the BUR: https://e621.net/forum_topics/41659

"You people" referring to the very small minority who voted for this. The ones who don't speak for the vast majority of the site. I thought it was clear what I meant, but apparently it wasn't.

notasexualdodo said:
"You people" referring to the very small minority who voted for this. The ones who don't speak for the vast majority of the site. I thought it was clear what I meant, but apparently it wasn't.

Alright, so I've compiled a list of people in this thread that have made a clear and obvious opinion about one way or the other, and by my count it is 16-9 with obviously stated opinions on axing the cub tag. If more people were wanting to keep the tag, don't you think that they would... idk... speak up louder? Most, and I mean the overwhelming majority, do not care about the change either way and probably have noticed absolutely no difference in every day usage of the site. 40 people voting on a BUR is quite a lot, when most don't even get 5 votes. So it attracted more than the normal amount of people by about 800%.

Furthermore, where exactly is your proof that people wanted to keep this tag being the majority of users? It's not on the side showing the majority to prove that, if there truly is a silent majority for this, then they needed to speak up and vote on the BUR before it was accepted. I don't see how that's the fault of the site administration?

notasexualdodo said:
"You people" referring to the very small minority who voted for this. The ones who don't speak for the vast majority of the site. I thought it was clear what I meant, but apparently it wasn't.

That very small minority consists of many of the people that curate and decide tags. If you want a say in it, vote on these requests. If we waited for some arbitrary number of votes, or god forbid a majority vote, we'd never get anything approved. 40 votes on a single BUR is VERY high. Unusually high. Most will receive 10 at most, and typically even less than that.
The fact of the matter is that most don't care about the specific tags as long as they can find what they're looking for, or blacklist properly. Blacklist coverage only increased, so there should be no issues there. Learning to search with different tags can take time, but isn't impossible. There's even an explanation on the cub wiki.

And as many have said before yet no one has done yet, anyone is free to make a BUR to attempt to unalias cub from young. Make the BUR, gather up supporters for it. This is a two way street, and if you can manage enough backers, this can be undone. Though, I seriously doubt it will get enough support to be undone.

notasexualdodo said:
Removing cub was dumb because before this, it was a convenient way to search for young looking characters in art without including mostly humanoid stuff like elves, goblins, etc. I can understand aliasing a slur into less offensive terms, but what I can't understand is actively removing functionality of a tag that was used to separate young humanoids and young non-humanoids. Now searching for "cub", because it's aliased to "young", muddles the search with a bunch of crap I'm not looking for, especially when the "young" tag includes VERY OBVIOUSLY ADULT CHARACTERS, FULLY GROWN BREASTS AND ALL. I'd argue "young" is MORE misused than "cub" ever was, yet you don't see anyone want THAT tag gone.

^this +1

notasexualdodo said:
That's a bunch of unnecessary steps added to what was previously a very simple search, and also cumbersome to memorize. Why did you people want this??? Are you even aware of what the users of your own site want???

Probably not. It's not about what users want. It's about what the site staff wants.

definitelynotafurry4 said:
Alright, so I've compiled a list of people in this thread that have made a clear and obvious opinion about one way or the other, and by my count it is 16-9 with obviously stated opinions on axing the cub tag. If more people were wanting to keep the tag, don't you think that they would... idk... speak up louder?

They are speaking up louder. We're complaining pretty loudly right here right now.

hjfduitloxtrds said:
They are speaking up louder. We're complaining pretty loudly right here right now.

Despite a few speaking out, there have still been less complaints than there was support. And we can just turn the argument right around on you, you are a loud minority. If this change was so controversial, why wasn't there many topics and many complaints proclaiming it should be changed back? So for there has only been a handful of users. And once more, no one has actually tried to start the process to reverse it.

Stop complaining endlessly and actually start the process. If you believe in it so much, surely you'd be willing to get the ball rolling?

alphamule

Privileged

definitelynotafurry4 said:
Pick a lane here, did people want it, or not? You imply that people wanted it to happen then are speaking for a group of people that seems to be very small in wanting cub to stay around and implying that they are the larger group. There are a total of 3 downvotes to 36 upvotes in favor of nuking the tag...

See here for the discussion on the BUR: https://e621.net/forum_topics/41659

I mean, yeah, there's the telephone poll selection bias issue, and the infamous Alf Landon poll (on postcards), but there's no damn way the bias is that skewed. Technically, the votes on alias/implication/BUR requests don't actually 100% matter, because if people don't explain their reasons and it's not obvious, the BURs will often silently age out (any before 2021 for example). They can get approved/rejected based entirely on the arguments put forward by responders to the request, as well. People also edit their scripts after feedback from thread readers so the votes can change (usually to the positive).

notasexualdodo said:
"You people" referring to the very small minority who voted for this. The ones who don't speak for the vast majority of the site. I thought it was clear what I meant, but apparently it wasn't.

Don't know what to say, here. This is just the nature of volunteer organizations. Next time be more active. :(

definitelynotafurry4 said:
So it attracted more than the normal amount of people by about 800%.

That tells me that it was a very very interesting issue to a LOT of the regulars. As in, even people that have it on blacklist showed up?

I was cleaning up the cub tag set:cub_apocalypse and there was a ton of stuff that should not have been there according the definition. Taurs, humanoids, and not just ferals and anthros. I'm not sure how cub was easier to search.

alphamule said:
I was cleaning up the cub tag set:cub_apocalypse and there was a ton of stuff that should not have been there according the definition. Taurs, humanoids, and not just ferals and anthros. I'm not sure how cub was easier to search.

I quite literally never ran into any taur posts with "cub" tagged, probably because most such posts weren't highly voted. Humanoid posts had the tag rarely. It's funny how this whole thing only happened because nobody bothered curating erroneously tagged posts, and instead the admins went with the nuclear option. As an e621 regular, all this does is exacerbate the issue because there's no way in hell all the previously cub-tagged posts have been separated into proper categories with specific tags.

Anyway, I think there needs to be some clean up in the "young" tag as well if the site administration REALLY is that adamant that it's a valid substitute. Also, funny how this whole thing hinged on the decision of 30 something people when 99% of the site didn't even know something this cataclysmic was going on. We've had lesser things get the announcement treatment but this got jack squat. I'm convinced the admins knew this and used it to their advantage just so they didn't have any objections. I can guarantee that 95% of the site doesn't check the forums, meaning only forum dwellers knew this happened at all. You can't pull the "nobody came to vote" card when you don't even bother announcing that such an important event is happening. Why did the andromorph/gynomorph tag change get an announcement and not this?

notasexualdodo said:
Also, funny how this whole thing hinged on the decision of 30 something people when 99% of the site didn't even know something this cataclysmic was going on.

I will reiterate again that NOTHING would be approved if it needed to involve any percentage of site users. Most users simply do not care. We'd never get anything done if we had some arbitrary vote threshold to get something accepted.

notasexualdodo said:
Why did the andromorph/gynomorph tag change get an announcement and not this?

We had an announcement planned, but the North Carolina legal issues took precedence. By the time that's gone around enough, it's far too late to make any announcement.

notasexualdodo said:
Anyway, I think there needs to be some clean up in the "young" tag as well if the site administration REALLY is that adamant that it's a valid substitute

Young is not the substitute for cub. Young_anthro and young_feral replaced cub's functionality. The young tag already existed, cub implied it.

notasexualdodo said:
It's funny how this whole thing only happened because nobody bothered curating erroneously tagged posts, and instead the admins went with the nuclear option.

first of all, if no one wanted to curate the tags, explain the fact that young_feral and young_anthro went from zero posts to currently being more populated than cub ever was, all in a matter of months.

it wasn't a lack of motivation it was a lack. of. want.

it was a bad tag, with a weird use case, and (almost) none of us liked it. the young_<form> tags are more consistently defined, easier to tag, and, ultimately, more useful. if we left cub up it would have more or less just been a parent tag to young_anthro and young_feral which would be supremely pointless.

second of all, it wasn't the nuclear option. we've used the remains of cub to populate young_anthro, young_feral, and young_taur. as well as all of the other new tags we created during and directly before the cubpocalypse. it birthed an entire new tag family.

alphamule

Privileged

sipothac said:
first of all, if no one wanted to curate the tags, explain the fact that young_feral and young_anthro went from zero posts to currently being more populated than cub ever was, all in a matter of months.

it wasn't a lack of motivation it was a lack. of. want.

it was a bad tag, with a weird use case, and (almost) none of us liked it. the young_<form> tags are more consistently defined, easier to tag, and, ultimately, more useful. if we left cub up it would have more or less just been a parent tag to young_anthro and young_feral which would be supremely pointless.

To be fair, you should probably include the number that got scripted by DMC. Still, yeah, a lot of them (many many thousands!) were done manually.

lafcadio said:
young anthro -young_anthro

The thing that gets me is just how many images currently show up for that search but shouldn't. The search young anthro -young_anthro solo should be an impossible combination yet returns over a quarter of the amount of pages as the above search(104 with solo, 394 without, at 120 posts per page), likely the vast majority of cases are simply missing the young_anthro tag. As for how many don't have the solo tag but still should have young_anthro, I can only guess at how high that number might be. Not that I think this is an argument against the tag, just a point as to how many posts are still missing the young_anthro tag, almost 12.5k with solo and probably at least half that without I would guess.

savageorange said:
multiple_scenes will often catch you when trying to construct queries that should be strictly empty. Fortunately adding -multiple_scenes to this query doesn't seem to change the total much.

young -baby -toddler -child -adolescent should definitely be empty though, not sure how long these age tags have been around for but IMO these are orders of magnitude more useful than the anthro/feral distinction most people are focusing on.

blackchameleon said:
The thing that gets me is just how many images currently show up for that search but shouldn't. The search young anthro -young_anthro solo should be an impossible combination yet returns over a quarter of the amount of pages as the above search(104 with solo, 394 without, at 120 posts per page), likely the vast majority of cases are simply missing the young_anthro tag. As for how many don't have the solo tag but still should have young_anthro, I can only guess at how high that number might be. Not that I think this is an argument against the tag, just a point as to how many posts are still missing the young_anthro tag, almost 12.5k with solo and probably at least half that without I would guess.

The tags are new, the majority of scripted edits and the focus was on the cub posts due to those tags being a compromise for getting rid of the cub tag. So yes, there are a number of posts missing the young form tags. They also weren't tagged cub before, which is the crux of the issue with the cub tag.

oxbridge said:
young -baby -toddler -child -adolescent should definitely be empty though, not sure how long these age tags have been around for but IMO these are orders of magnitude more useful than the anthro/feral distinction most people are focusing on.

Realistically, broader tags will always be used more than narrow tags. It doesn't matter much to us as young is the primary blacklist target.
Either way, the tagging of age groups isn't really relevant to this discussion.

steel_snake said:
The main reason why I argue this because of Decad ban for his "minor-coded" posts. There's no such thing as "minor-coded" characters. They either look or act young, or the other way around.

Dacad got banned because they can't let it go. An artist that already has objectively-young art in the first place should just stop caring about tagging.
But instead they kicked up so much of a fuss about it they had a serial ban evader making batches of sleeper accounts just to shotgun the young tag onto Dacad's posts because they were eventually gonna flip out hard enough about it to get themself banned over something that doesn't even matter.

Edit: Oh hmm, I actually haven't been paying much attention here and didn't realise they got banned for failing to tag in the first place rather than tag-warring they were doing before.
I'm a bit more uneasy about that.

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steel_snake said: The main reason why I argue this because of Decad ban for his "minor-coded" posts. There's no such thing as "minor-coded" characters. They either look or act young, or the other way around.

Dacad got banned?

I don't like the term "something-coded" personally because it depends to the people and is quite vague...

zombieastronaut said:
I highly doubt a user that search cubs there wants to see human lolis/shotas or teens but from now on they have to.

I don't particularly mind shotacon or lolicon, but I'll be honest I find furry characters way more visually attractive....

What would REALLY piss me off is if e6 just did what FurAffinity and Fchan did and flat out BAN ALL CUB ART COMPLETELY....

It doesn't SEEM like that will happen any time soon, but the FA users probably weren't expecting it to happen either....

Anyway, if you wanna go to a website where HUMAN ANIME CHARACTERS ARE NOT ALLOWED, there's always InkBunny.

Will InkBunny ever pull a FurAffinity???? Jeeze, I sure as heck hope not! : P

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ginkei said:
Dacad got banned?

I don't like the term "something-coded" personally because it depends to the people and is quite vague...

"coded" sounds like something Twitter or Tumblr would say, lol....

And back in the old days, like... middle 2000s... Fchan was having a similar debate....

They couldn't make up their minds about what is Cub and what is NOT CUB.... so they tried to compromise and make the TOON board.... for the "cute and cartoony" characters such as Buster Bunny, Tails, Kit Cloudkicker, Klonoa etc... all the really CUTE characters that the Fchan staff KNEW THEY COULDN'T JUST GET RID OF cuz they are "popular bread and butter characters." Any Furry Website that would BAN TAILS ART would have to be outta their gawd damn minds.... Tails is a STAPLE of early Furry Fan Art.... back in the early years of this fandom NOBODY was going over the cartoon characters with a Fine Tooth Comb trying to determine if it was "problematic" or not before drawing their art... lol... the oldskool Furry Artists just didn't give a damn! AND THEY STILL SHOULDN'T GIVE A DAMN.... it's a drawing... not a Real Person... so who cares?....

And back in the early years, the artists were drawing Non-Anthro R34 of Lion King, Balto, Scooby and a ton of other stuff... and nobody cared... nobody was screaming "BAN THAT ARTIST" lol... but now the militant, radicalized Twitter and Tumblr Furries will demand your head on a stick if you so much as even IMPLY that 2D Feral is acceptable, lol.... (look up what happened to Hearth Fox... it was undeserved harassment... an absolutely unfair smear campaign).

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veruke_assault said:
(look up what happened to Hearth Fox... it was undeserved harassment... an absolutely unfair smear campaign).

Can you provide a link, please? Nothing really pops up when I search.

calydor said:
Can you provide a link, please? Nothing really pops up when I search.

It's all over Twitter... and I despise Twitter (and Tumblr)....

Basically, Hearth Fox (the owner of the Wiggle Fox puppet) came to the defense of their friend "Kaim" because they were being attacked for liking Feral Artwork and having a Feral Fursona... a bunch of Twitter Idiots equated this to being a Zoophile... and when Hearth said "But it's just a drawing. Fictional characters aren't real" the Twitter Idiots went nuts and started dragging Hearth through the mud all over Twitter.... the entire thing was petty and stupid and pointless... but that's Twitter & Tumblr for you.

veruke_assault said:
"coded" sounds like something Twitter or Tumblr would say, lol....

And back in the old days, like... middle 2000s... Fchan was having a similar debate....

They couldn't make up their minds about what is Cub and what is NOT CUB.... so they tried to compromise and make the TOON board.... for the "cute and cartoony" characters such as Buster Bunny, Tails, Kit Cloudkicker, Klonoa etc... all the really CUTE characters that the Fchan staff KNEW THEY COULDN'T JUST GET RID OF cuz they are "popular bread and butter characters." Any Furry Website that would BAN TAILS ART would have to be outta their gawd damn minds.... Tails is a STAPLE of early Furry Fan Art.... back in the early years of this fandom NOBODY was going over the cartoon characters with a Fine Tooth Comb trying to determine if it was "problematic" or not before drawing their art... lol... the oldskool Furry Artists just didn't give a damn! AND THEY STILL SHOULDN'T GIVE A DAMN.... it's a drawing... not a Real Person... so who cares?....

And back in the early years, the artists were drawing Non-Anthro R34 of Lion King, Balto, Scooby and a ton of other stuff... and nobody cared... nobody was screaming "BAN THAT ARTIST" lol... but now the militant, radicalized Twitter and Tumblr Furries will demand your head on a stick if you so much as even IMPLY that 2D Feral is acceptable, lol.... (look up what happened to Hearth Fox... it was undeserved harassment... an absolutely unfair smear campaign).

Sorry for the late reply but I really dislike how characters are now "coded" so even some who are drawn as adults and have adult behaviour can be labelled as too young...

I find it curious how Tails is fine but people draw the line at Cream despite that Tails is merely two years older than her in canon (well, before Sega removed characters age).

SD/Chibi is a tricky one since AC characters are mostly adults (aside from rare exceptions) but most people agree that they're all adults.

It's sad since anthro means having human features, not just being humanoid.

Lion King has anthropomorphised animals (albeit non humanoid). Shame that feral is assimilated as bestial despite how they can communicate and have human expressions on their face.

ginkei said:
Sorry for the late reply but I really dislike how characters are now "coded" so even some who are drawn as adults and have adult behaviour can be labelled as too young...

"coding" would generally mean that behavior is taken into account, along with design and everything else.

ginkei said:
I find it curious how Tails is fine but people draw the line at Cream despite that Tails is merely two years older than her in canon (well, before Sega removed characters age).

Tails is generally depicted about as mature and competent as the rest of the core cast. he lives on his own and pretty much everyone, both core and supporting cast, including Eggman, treat him as a competent expert and have mountains of respect for him, with the only real exception being Sonic who treats him like a little brother a lot of the time.

Cream is always depicted as very child-like, always referring to every character older than her with preceding "mr." or "ms.". both in gameplay and in external media she's always shown with one or more of her guardian characters, Gemerl, Cheese, or Vanilla. and everyone treats Cream as a kid.

also, the canon ages never made sense, even ignoring the fact that at the minimum two years have necessarily past between the the initial beginnings of the Eggman Empire in SStH and the Eggman War in Forces and yet characters didn't age. as far back as SA1, none of the characters gave ever acted the ages that their bios stated that they were.

ginkei said:
I find it curious how Tails is fine but people draw the line at Cream despite that Tails is merely two years older than her in canon (well, before Sega removed characters age).

Tails is "grandfathered" in the fandom, if you try to retcon him always as a "young male anthro" it would break most furry pages lol.

ginkei said:
I find it curious how Tails is fine but people draw the line at Cream despite that Tails is merely two years older than her in canon (well, before Sega removed characters age).

A lot of miles_prower -young -aged_up is missing either aged_up or young, either because the uploader forgot or people are trying to avoid tagging young on an obviously young character but that's its own can of worms (that's shared by a lot of small Pokemon and Spike from MLP). The remainder tends to be stuff where his entire body isn't visible.

People draw their own lines, and they aren't always neatly logical ones. I'm personally uncomfortable with Tails unless he visibly looks like an adult, but that's just me.

Anyways, your post seems misguided to me. The entire young tag is based on appearance and proportions, not "coding".

The rule of thumb I use is to throw out everything I know about the character entirely - if someone's random OC was drawn with these proportions, would I assume them to be young? If that's a yes and I see it while browsing I'll usually give it a tag as I have young blacklisted.

'Course, no one's perfect, if someone else removes it, oh well, I guess, unless I feel it's egregious enough to ask for a staff check.

nimphia said:

Anyways, your post seems misguided to me. The entire young tag is based on appearance and proportions, not "coding".

Coding is a straightforward enough word, it doesn't deserve scare quotes. Coding is a general aspect of any type of communication that arises from the fact that one thing can resemble another and hence evoke it (intentionally or otherwise). In the case of visual language, 'appearance and proportions' would constitute at least a majority of any possible coding involved.

Since resemblances are everywhere, so is coding.

savageorange said:
Coding is a straightforward enough word, it doesn't deserve scare quotes. Coding is a general aspect of any type of communication that arises from the fact that one thing can resemble another and hence evoke it (intentionally or otherwise). In the case of visual language, 'appearance and proportions' would constitute at least a majority of any possible coding involved.

Since resemblances are everywhere, so is coding.

I understand what coding is, I'm just saying that people aren't adding the young tag to images because of some vague idea of being young-coded, like the message I was replying to was suggesting, but rather based specifically on appearance. They used the quotes first, not me :P

dba_afish said:
"coding" would generally mean that behavior is taken into account, along with design and everything else.

I personally find it "icky" when character are "color-coded" because of what it implies.

also, the canon ages never made sense, even ignoring the fact that at the minimum two years have necessarily past between the the initial beginnings of the Eggman Empire in SStH and the Eggman War in Forces and yet characters didn't age. as far back as SA1, none of the characters gave ever acted the ages that their bios stated that they were.

Sega has never been consistent yeah... Especially when Classic Sonic went from "younger version of Modern" to "alternative dimension version of Sonic"...

Glad they removed canon ages in their site because Generation's birthday was retconned.

nimphia said:
A lot of miles_prower -young -aged_up is missing either aged_up or young, either because the uploader forgot or people are trying to avoid tagging young on an obviously young character but that's its own can of worms (that's shared by a lot of small Pokemon and Spike from MLP). The remainder tends to be stuff where his entire body isn't visible.

People draw their own lines, and they aren't always neatly logical ones. I'm personally uncomfortable with Tails unless he visibly looks like an adult, but that's just me.

Anyways, your post seems misguided to me. The entire young tag is based on appearance and proportions, not "coding".

The rule of thumb I use is to throw out everything I know about the character entirely - if someone's random OC was drawn with these proportions, would I assume them to be young? If that's a yes and I see it while browsing I'll usually give it a tag as I have young blacklisted.

'Course, no one's perfect, if someone else removes it, oh well, I guess, unless I feel it's egregious enough to ask for a staff check.

I think that the furry/anthro community is biased against male characters:

It's easier to tell that a female is younger because of her flat chest (although adult women with little to no breasts are a thing) and lack of hips whereas a male can look juvenile but still be adult because they can be seen as twinks or femboys.

In a similar way: male characters can be naked aside from boots and gloves whereas females need clothes all over their bodies.

ginkei said:
In a similar way: male characters can be naked aside from boots and gloves whereas females need clothes all over their bodies.

There’s 80 pages of solo, safe-rating nude females. So I’m gonna say no on that :V

donteven said:
There’s 80 pages of solo, safe-rating nude females. So I’m gonna say no on that :V

There's plenty of misratings both on S and Q floating around mostly because people try to rate based on how covered the character is rather than what the character is doing or how they're posed. Especially on older images. I fix a lot of 'em. T-T

(Every time I see an image with massive nipple outlines misrated as safe I cry a little.)

Like, post #4658617 is undoubtedly showing more skin than post #4646848, but the latter is Q because she's posed suggestively, while the former is just standing there.

That's getting off topic though.

I wouldn't say there's so much a gendered dooble standard as I would that like said above, it's a little harder to distinguish young from twink sometimes with male characters. post #1249066, post #4088987, and post #4491454 were tagged young but I have no idea why because they look like standard twinks, meanwhile I see way younger looking pics of Tails and the like go untagged and people will go to war if you add the tag.

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