The tag alias #70962 shota -> young_male is pending approval.

Reason: Per the wiki: "A shota is a male character who resembles and appears to be young."

I don't see the purpose of having a separate tag for a Japanese word when we already have an English tag for this concept.

There is already precedent in other e621 aliases:

• We already alias "futa" and "futanari" to intersex.
• See the discussion in https://e621.net/forum_topics/44534 here's an excerpt: "we really should only be using loanwords like this when there's no way to describe something concisely in english"
• See the discussion in https://e621.net/forum_topics/43574 Topic: "loli" and "shota" are horrendous tags.
• See the discussion in https://e621.net/forum_topics/42186 Topic: The Loli/Shota Problem "In their current state loli and shota are awkward hybrid tags that people disagree on the definitions of"
• Creating this alias will have similar impact on functionality as aliasing cub to young. It cleans things up, makes things clearer, avoids mistagging, and has little to no practical downsides for searching.

The wiki also says "This should only be tagged for explicit and sexually suggestive content.", so you can just search for young_male rating:explicit or young_male sex to get explicit or sexual content.

I have no strong opinion on the alias at the moment, but if we go through with it, we should probably also alias loli -> young_female.

There's also the adult_on_loli and adult_on_shota tags that will need to be dealt with somehow.

shota intersex needs some cleanup if shota only applies to male.

novusuna said:
I have no strong opinion on the alias at the moment, but if we go through with it, we should probably also alias loli -> young_female.

There's also the adult_on_loli and adult_on_shota tags that will need to be dealt with somehow.

Those are not the only ones.

There are already many BURs trying to alias away the terms loli and shota [1] [2]

coffeeco said:
shota intersex needs some cleanup if shota only applies to male.

shota -male is a better area to clean up, intersex can apply to other characters in the post

I think that the fact that the tags are part of the default tag list means that they probably shouldn't be changed like this. I'm also still of the opinion that these tags' definitions should just be expanded to be applicable to intersex characters as well. see: topic #40890.

if we do intend to do away with these tags, I feel like we ought to have some inverse tag to replace it. that being a tag for non-safe posts containing only young characters who are not involved with anything explicit or questionable; posts like post #4009946, which shows the moment of conception as well as a second scene with the mother and father with the resulting baby.

dba_afish said:
if we do intend to do away with these tags, I feel like we ought to have some inverse tag to replace it. that being a tag for non-safe posts containing only young characters who are not involved with anything explicit or questionable; posts like post #4009946, which shows the moment of conception as well as a second scene with the mother and father with the resulting baby.

topic #42191

dba_afish said:
I think that the fact that the tags are part of the default tag list means that they probably shouldn't be changed like this.

What is the default tag list? I have not heard of this before.

And no, just because it's on a list doesn't mean the tag shouldn't change. It is a redundant tag since we already have the more descriptive young_male, it should go away just like futanari and cub did.

aaronfranke said:
What is the default tag list? I have not heard of this before.

e621:blacklist#default

snpthecat said:
e621:blacklist#default

It also says:

Important!
Please keep in mind that unless you are logged in, any posts containing the tag young and a rating other than Safe will not be displayed regardless of changes to your blacklist.

So for logged-out users, young ~rating:e ~rating:q posts will still be excluded even without shota, making shota's presence on the default blacklist redundant.

The default blacklist can be changed, and those are redundant anyway because young -rating:s is already on there (and loli/shota are only supposed to be used on questionable/explicit posts).

pleaseletmein said:
(and loli/shota are only supposed to be used on questionable/explicit posts).

And the existence of shota rating:safe posts is evidence that this tag is frequently mistagged, another reason to replace with young_male, which is what users tagging shota on rating:safe posts thinks that it means.

aaronfranke said:
And the existence of shota rating:safe posts is evidence that this tag is frequently mistagged, another reason to replace with young_male, which is what users tagging shota on rating:safe posts thinks that it means.

looking at the contents of shota rating:s (as well as loli rating:s) there are quite a few posts, that, despite being rating:s, the characters still have a shota/loli vibe to them.

I've made a BUR thread expanding this to loli and adding more requests for related tags
topic #44941

Be careful of cases like: shota -male intersex
Technically, the tag probably needs disambiguation?

The problem with this is that the shota and loli tags are ONLY for sexually explicit or suggestive pictures- in fact, then-staff members had added that condition years ago, here and here. Conversely, the young tag and its gendered variants encompasses all ratings and situations. In fact, in a way, the reverse should be happening: the shota and loli tags should be implicated to young, and also to young_male and young_female, respectively.

Of course, it can be argued that the shota and loli tags could be effectively replaced with searches for "young -s", "young_male -s", etc, as it would give the same results. However, I believe it is reckless to just scrap long-established tagging methodology and toss all sexualized cub/young into the same pool and make everyone have to enter an additional search term to find it. I was also vehemently opposed to the cub -> young aliasing that happened not long before the 12 July catastrophe, but this would probably be even more disruptive.