The tag alias #71815 null -> null_(disambiguation) is pending approval.

Reason: See topic #45796, topic #45771, topic #27736, topic #38913, and topic #41719.

I'm not sure what else I am supposed to do here. Every proposal I make has people voting "meh" or saying they want something different. I just want to have a null_(lore) tag so that I can tag characters that are canonically null.

aaronfranke said:
I'm not sure what else I am supposed to do here.

Get everyone to agree on what should be done with null, easy
I also assume that the other meh voters aren't that enthused about dumping the entirety of the null tag into a disambiguation tag

snpthecat said:
Get everyone to agree on what should be done with null, easy
I also assume that the other meh voters aren't that enthused about dumping the entirety of the null tag into a disambiguation tag

mostly this, so a mupdate first would be necessary if we are going to disambiguate.

but also, I just don't see much of an argument for disambiguation in general, an alias to lore should be fine.

dba_afish said:
mostly this, so a mupdate first would be necessary if we are going to disambiguate.

but also, I just don't see much of an argument for disambiguation in general, an alias to lore should be fine.

The problem is that the existing wiki suggests the tag should be used regardless of lore such as for featureless crotches.

Anyway, regardless of disambiguation or alias, can we at least get an admin to create the null_(lore) tag so that we can start converting posts to it? Or null_gender_(lore)?

Bump. There should be a null_(lore) or null_gender_(lore) tag.

nonbinary_(lore) already covers canonical genderlessness, as stated in genderless_(disambiguation)'s wiki article.

Is that not what you're looking for?

lendrimujina said:
nonbinary_(lore) already covers canonical genderlessness, as stated in genderless_(disambiguation)'s wiki article.

Is that not what you're looking for?

null is when a character lacks genitals, not lacks a gender, necessarily. a null character can still present and/or identify as male or female.

lendrimujina said:
nonbinary_(lore) already covers canonical genderlessness, as stated in genderless_(disambiguation)'s wiki article.

Is that not what you're looking for?

Yes, nonbinary_(lore) covers canonically genderless characters, so the issue is what to do with canonically genital-less characters. Featureless_crotch is often the result of censorship (or at least to make a particular scene/character less sexualized), rather than what's canon. That's where null_(lore) would come in. The difference between a canonically null character vs. a featureless_crotch drawn as censorship is theoretically purely lore. However, controversy arises because null is generally tagged for when a featureless_crotch is important to a picture, even when it may very well still be censorship. Essentially, it's often used as a sort of featureless_crotch_focus tag. Even outside of those cases, it tends to get tagged in situations like when a featureless_crotch is stimulated (null_stimulation) or when a character loses their genitals through transformation (nullification) or even on some null_bulge posts rather than featureless_crotch. These particular situations don't really require lore to tag. This has been discussed to death in several threads linked in the BUR reason.

crocogator said:
Yes, nonbinary_(lore) covers canonically genderless characters, so the issue is what to do with canonically genital-less characters. Featureless_crotch is often the result of censorship (or at least to make a particular scene/character less sexualized), rather than what's canon. That's where null_(lore) would come in. The difference between a canonically null character vs. a featureless_crotch drawn as censorship is theoretically purely lore. However, controversy arises because null is generally tagged for when a featureless_crotch is important to a picture, even when it may very well still be censorship. Essentially, it's often used as a sort of featureless_crotch_focus tag. Even outside of those cases, it tends to get tagged in situations like when a featureless_crotch is stimulated (null_stimulation) or when a character loses their genitals through transformation (nullification) or even on some null_bulge posts rather than featureless_crotch. These particular situations don't really require lore to tag. This has been discussed to death in several threads linked in the BUR reason.

dba_afish said:
null is when a character lacks genitals, not lacks a gender, necessarily. a null character can still present and/or identify as male or female.

So it's not really eligible for a lore tag, is it?
Maybe I'm just confused about this, I thought genitals were 100% TWYS, and giving artists the option to ignore them is pretty much the entire reason for lore tags as a category in the first place. We don't have "penis_(lore)" and "pussy_(lore)".

I will admit I probably have some bias due to the nullification fetish specifically tending to creep me out (it is on my blacklist), but even disregarding my personal distaste, this does seem a bit inconsistent... and I don't want to, like... have every machine, ghost, etc. blacklisted because I'm trying to avoid a fetish I don't like.

lendrimujina said:
So it's not really eligible for a lore tag, is it?

It's based on external information, as you can't reliably distinguish a null crotch from a "censored" featureless crotch visually.

Incidentally, while I'm upvoting the BUR, I'm doing so because "null" can mean a lot of things that have nothing to do with this debate, not because of my admittedly not-very-qualified opinion on this particular matter.

Wow I missed some Null threads in my time away (Hi I'm one of the example OPs)
Upvoting because there's too many kinds of Null and I don't like 'em bundled as equivalents. The one caveat is that nullo should probably also be aliased to be thorough. I haven't kept up on how well that one gets tagged as written.

lendrimujina said:
So it's not really eligible for a lore tag, is it?
Maybe I'm just confused about this, I thought genitals were 100% TWYS, and giving artists the option to ignore them is pretty much the entire reason for lore tags as a category in the first place. We don't have "penis_(lore)" and "pussy_(lore)".

The lore tags get used for indicating the sex of characters who fall under ambiguous by TWYS standards, in addition to being for gender identification. Yeah this is messy as hell and I'm pretty sure the head admin has in the past stated they don't fully relate to the distinction between Sex and Gender because their first language/culture doesn't facilitate it, so I'm not sure if that will ever separate. (correct me if I'm wrong)

I will admit I probably have some bias due to the nullification fetish specifically tending to creep me out (it is on my blacklist)

I don't believe a distinction is thought about by most taggers, but I do personally believe as a person interested in the topic, that there is a distinct difference between types of null and that difference should be taggable.

and I don't want to, like... have every machine, ghost, etc. blacklisted because I'm trying to avoid a fetish I don't like.

I've also personally argued in the past that entities that do not naturally possess genitalia outside of an anthropomorphised state shouldn't be automatically assumed to have sex organs or gender, and thus these examples shouldn't be null-taggable unless there's a very specific character case.

The null tag really needs something done. It's frustrating to try find content where character actually is null and explicitly does not have genitalia (not as in cartoon nudity, but as in no reproductive organs at all in still clearly sexual content where genitalia would be expected to be visible), when the tag is largely populated by posts where characters clearly have genitalia, and the character's genitalia is just blocked away for chastity reasons.

rupikonna said:
The null tag really needs something done. It's frustrating to try find content where character actually is null and explicitly does not have genitalia (not as in cartoon nudity, but as in no reproductive organs at all in still clearly sexual content where genitalia would be expected to be visible), when the tag is largely populated by posts where characters clearly have genitalia, and the character's genitalia is just blocked away for chastity reasons.

Yeah, that's the thing... I guess you could say there's three types of characters that get tagged "null":

1) vaguely suggestive cartoon nudity that focuses on a featureless_crotch. It can also be searched with something like featureless_crotch ~spread_legs ~butt ~suggestive rating:q:
post #4684180 post #4372643
2) The character has a featureless_crotch that is contextually or canonically relevant. May or may not have an anus.
post #4313962 post #4137204
3) The character has a null_bulge or similar. It may be up to interpretation whether or not they have genitals underneath:
post #4420408 post #3697130

Though, the lines between 1, 2, and 3 might get blurry on occasion.

So what goes into null_(lore)? Everything (i.e., we're just renaming the tag)? Would it be "none of 1, all of 2, and some of 3 depending on context and lore"?

crocogator said:
So what goes into null_(lore)? Everything (i.e., we're just renaming the tag)? Would it be "none of 1, all of 2, and some of 3 depending on context and lore"?

more or less the latter one, yeah. it'll just be a lot easier to define bounds for it if it's not attempting to be a TWYS tag like it currently is.

dba_afish said:
more or less the latter one, yeah. it'll just be a lot easier to define bounds for it if it's not attempting to be a TWYS tag like it currently is.

Alright, that makes sense.

crocogator said:
Yeah, that's the thing... I guess you could say there's three types of characters that get tagged "null":
So what goes into null_(lore)? Everything (i.e., we're just renaming the tag)? Would it be "none of 1, all of 2, and some of 3 depending on context and lore"?

1) vaguely suggestive cartoon nudity that focuses on a featureless_crotch. It can also be searched with something like featureless_crotch ~spread_legs ~butt ~suggestive rating:q:
post #4684180 post #4372643

No, there are many popular artists^{example mochiri, though much more of the examples are on their Twitter} who make their bread-and-butter out of riding the line of suggestive content with stylistically-featureless characters. True null should be a lore tag situation and not for stylistically-sfw depictions.

2) The character has a featureless_crotch that is contextually or canonically relevant. May or may not have an anus.
post #4313962 post #4137204

Yes.

3) The character has a null_bulge or similar. It may be up to interpretation whether or not they have genitals underneath:
post #4420408 post #3697130

This is the area I need to talk about the most:

• lock_bulge is a chastity_device, not null
• null_bulge often is used as icon-less lock-bulge with perhaps more intangible mechanics around it and may or may not be truly null, situationally.

Both of the above are frequently tagged as null but are very distinct from your Cat 2

Your examples are also missing a fourth category of the "nullo" which comes from real-world terminology and are characters who used to but no longer have genitalia, often through visibly evident surgical procedures which leave a urethral orifice^{a crotch feature!} and cannot be shoveled into penectomized/eunuch because:

• Female characters can be "nullo"d
• Some users tag fantasy-null depictions as nullo, leading to false positives

Though, a bottom line is that even if a lore tag is used to distinguish between the chastity cases and agenital, people are likely to adopt the lore tag onto the chastity cases because that's just how people have it internalised, see dba afish's post above. The important functionality to enable is that people can find their preferred flavour of null-ID posts while maintaining an agreed upon separation between Realistic, Fantastical, and both varieties of Bulge.
Having a unified tag^{no null/nullo confusion split} and then allowing users to filter by which features are/are not present^{featureless; penectomized/eunuch/whatever the fem eq/urethra_only; null/lock bulges} would be an ideal.

Bump. Can an admin please create a null_(lore) or null_gender_(lore) tag?

I am still opposed to that for reasons I mentioned before (we don't have other genital lore tags, genderlessness is already covered by other tags, and far many images unrelated to the null fetish would get caught in the crossfire which is a problem for people like me who are creeped out by and want to blacklist said fetish).

lendrimujina said:
I am still opposed to that for reasons I mentioned before (we don't have other genital lore tags[...]

we literally do, though? stuff like gynomorph_(lore), herm_(lore), and andromorph_(lore) are all used to say "this character has penis and/or vagina, even if you can't see it right now".

lendrimujina said:
[...]genderlessness is already covered by other tags[...]

null and genderless are not synonymous. nulls are able to present as feminine, masculine, or androgynous and likewise are able to identify as feminine, masculine, or non-binary.

dba_afish said:
we literally do, though? stuff like gynomorph_(lore), herm_(lore), and andromorph_(lore) are all used to say "this character has penis and/or vagina, even if you can't see it right now".

null and genderless are not synonymous. nulls are able to present as feminine, masculine, or androgynous and likewise are able to identify as feminine, masculine, or non-binary.

I'll concede on the first point. But not the second, since OP wants to cover both sexual anatomy and gender identity.

Also, it doesn't address my blacklist concerns.

aaronfranke said:
a null_(lore) or null_gender_(lore) tag

lendrimujina said:
But not the second, since OP wants to cover both sexual anatomy and gender identity.

when was this stated? I'm pretty sure the only time gender identity has been has been mentioned was in response to you bringing up nonbinary_(lore).

lendrimujina said:
Also, it doesn't address my blacklist concerns.

the thing is that null, as-is, is already effectively a lore tag, it's being tagged based heavily on external context. it's already being used to differentiate post #1708291 from post #2116524 which, without external knowledge, are more or less identical on this front. effectively nothing would change by moving the current population to null_(lore).

and furthermore, none of the _^(vaguely) related null* tags are going to be changed, either. nullification will still exist, nullo will still exist, null_bulge, null_stimulation whatever, they're not being changed.

you can still blacklist all of this stuff.

lendrimujina said:
I'll concede on the first point. But not the second, since OP wants to cover both sexual anatomy and gender identity.

No? I want to tag characters that canonically have no sexual anatomy.

My friend's character that caused me to open this discussion is a female-presenting she/her character with canonically no genitals.

I was offering null_(lore) and null_gender_(lore) as alternative names for the same thing, not two tags, just in case people found "null" confusing by itself. Could also be null_sex_(lore), null_genitals_(lore), whatever. But null_(lore) works great and I would be happy with just that.