The tag implication #64622 fakemon -> fan_species is pending approval.

Reason: By definition fakemon are a kind of fan species (and there have been semantics arguments about what to count as one in the past), and the much less IP-specific fan species tag as it is right now is very barren compared to how many there actually are.

I don't even think fan_species should be a tag, as fan-made species are even less divorced from a franchise than a character can be. Such a thing would indicate that a character of a fan species is automatically a fan character, which isn't something I'm willing to support either.

Even still, the whole point of fakemon is that they aren't Pokemon, Digimon, Pal, or whatever. They simply share some design or styling principles, but otherwise aren't required to have any attachment to a franchise.

watsit said:
I don't even think fan_species should be a tag, as fan-made species are even less divorced from a franchise than a character can be. Such a thing would indicate that a character of a fan species is automatically a fan character, which isn't something I'm willing to support either.

Even still, the whole point of fakemon is that they aren't Pokemon, Digimon, Pal, or whatever. They simply share some design or styling principles, but otherwise aren't required to have any attachment to a franchise.

Then... what exactly qualifies them as one if it's not a connection to a "mons" franchise? Where is the line to be drawn?
We can't say arbitrarily nonspecific design elements, look at the whole kerfuffle over fecharis. And the wiki page doesn't even say anything about design or style.

lendrimujina said:
Then... what exactly qualifies them as one if it's not a connection to a "mons" franchise? Where is the line to be drawn?

Nothing would qualify them as a fan species IMO, since I don't think that's a worthwhile tag. What would make faunazon a Pokemon fan work? What franchise ties would musweat have? And it's been joked about, with a kernel of truth, how Pals are basically fakemon (enough so that some of them could've been tagged as actual pokemon, the differences being so minor that it could be chalked up to character individuality, or be tagged as a pokemon+fakemon hybrid, were they not in their own non-Pokemon-branded game).

lendrimujina said:
We can't say arbitrarily nonspecific design elements, look at the whole kerfuffle over fecharis. And the wiki page doesn't even say anything about design or style.

fakemon is a somewhat arbitrary classification. Basically if the creature's design makes you think it could have been a pokemon, digimon, etc. There aren't really hard rules to it. For an implication like this to be considered, IMO, fakemon would have to be restricted to those that could be tagged fakemon + pokemon/digimon/etc (where there are clear elements of specific species from that franchise the creature is modeled on to be tagged as a hybrid of it). That would exclude many existing fakemon, though.

Pikablu (Pikachu with blue palette, right?) comes to mind as a classic example.

Looked it up. The fake instructions trope was popular for a time.
https://gaming-urban-legends.fandom.com/wiki/Pikablu
https://pokegods.fandom.com/wiki/Pikablu

watsit said:

fakemon is a somewhat arbitrary classification. Basically if the creature's design makes you think it could have been a pokemon, digimon, etc. There aren't really hard rules to it. For an implication like this to be considered, IMO, fakemon would have to be restricted to those that could be tagged fakemon + pokemon/digimon/etc (where there are clear elements of specific species from that franchise the creature is modeled on to be tagged as a hybrid of it). That would exclude many existing fakemon, though.

If they aren't meant to be tied to a collectible monster franchise, then I'd argue that they should be excluded from the "fakemon" category.

But honestly? I think our disagreement here is over something that's just plain not clearly defined enough. There's a bigger underlying problem here.

IMO, if it's meant to be an IP-agnostic design category, then there has to be some sort of established standards. Other arbitrary tags (such as the aforementioned fecharis) have died in the past because they couldn't firmly establish their thresholds.

I don't really like the "fakemon" tag to begin with, it actively gets less useful if we expand it to other IPs like Digimon, Palworld, and Yo-Kai Watch, as somebody who searches fakemon digimon is not *necessarily* looking for fake versions of Renamon and co.
At the same time, having separate versions for all the non-Pokémon IPs doesn't seem terribly practical either, nor does it seem practical to exclude things like Lilo & Stitch experiments, or Sonic the Hedgehog badniks.

lafcadio said:
I don't really like the "fakemon" tag to begin with, it actively gets less useful if we expand it to other IPs like Digimon, Palworld, and Yo-Kai Watch, as somebody who searches fakemon digimon is not *necessarily* looking for fake versions of Renamon and co.
At the same time, having separate versions for all the non-Pokémon IPs doesn't seem terribly practical either, nor does it seem practical to exclude things like Lilo & Stitch experiments, or Sonic the Hedgehog badniks.

So we're in agreement that there's a definition issue here. Can't even necessarily restrict it by genre because that line is blurred sometimes.

lendrimujina said:
If they aren't meant to be tied to a collectible monster franchise, then I'd argue that they should be excluded from the "fakemon" category.

Well, I think whether or not they're meant to be tied to a franchise is inconsequential, it's a question about whether they are. People can always change their minds or take a concept in a different direction, so even if a creature is meant to be tied to a franchise, what matters is if it can be separated from the franchise without significantly changing it (e.g. if someone basically takes a lucario, adds more spikes and makes it look a bit more like a dragon with wings and some scales, but still is primarily based on a lucario, then yeah, it can't be separated from Pokemon without redesigning the creature into something different, whereas if someone makes a unique creature design that's not obviously based on an existing pokemon, they always depict it as a pokemon in the pokemon world, until one day they decide to depict it in an image that has no ties to Pokemon and subsequent images may or may not have anything Pokemon-related with it, it can be separated from Pokemon without changing it). If it can be separated, we can't guarantee it always will be in a fan work, thus making the implication a problem.

lendrimujina said:
But honestly? I think our disagreement here is over something that's just plain not clearly defined enough. There's a bigger underlying problem here.

Yeah, that could be. I'm not really happy with "fakemon" as a tag either because it can get so arbitrary (and I don't think it would be easy to fix by simply changing the definition/wiki). Incidentally, I've noticed it starting to get tagged on things I'm pretty sure it shouldn't; characters like juniper_(coffeefly), who is an alolan_vulpix that happens to have green accents instead of blue (normal) or pink (shiny), or pokemon_fusions that are merely a mix of two or more pokemon like vaporunny, or spliced appendages like this monstrosity, without any non-pokemon elements.

lafcadio said:
At the same time, having separate versions for all the non-Pokémon IPs doesn't seem terribly practical either, nor does it seem practical to exclude things like Lilo & Stitch experiments, or Sonic the Hedgehog badniks.

Agreed - What if we aliased fakemon to fan_species, and had it encompass all of these?

wandering_spaniel said:
Agreed - What if we aliased fakemon to fan_species, and had it encompass all of these?

That seems fair, really.

The word "fakemon" is inherently tied to the Pokémon franchise, anyway, what with it being a pun on the word "Pokémon". The moment it let other franchises into its umbrella, it lost its intended scope.

wandering_spaniel said:
Agreed - What if we aliased fakemon to fan_species, and had it encompass all of these?

Not all fakemon are fan_species. The tag would need an in-depth purge of anything that's not directly and inextricably tied to a preexisting work before such an alias could be made, followed by continuous cleanup from people tagging fakemon on creatures that are considered fakemon by their respective fandoms but aren't directly tied to a preexisting work.

lendrimujina said:
The word "fakemon" is inherently tied to the Pokémon franchise, anyway, what with it being a pun on the word "Pokémon".

Digimon is there alongside Pokemon, ending in -mon all the same. Many Pals are basically fakemon to begin with, so a fakepal is a fakefakemon.

watsit said:
Not all fakemon are fan_species. The tag would need an in-depth purge of anything that's not directly and inextricably tied to a preexisting work before such an alias could be made, followed by continuous cleanup from people tagging fakemon on creatures that are considered fakemon by their respective fandoms but aren't directly tied to a preexisting work.

That's not exactly helping the case against it being a term that's ill-defined to the point of uselessness.

There currently being no separation between things explicitly meant to be fake pokémon versus original species with arbitrarily monlike/animesque traits is exactly the problem we're talking about here. That's going to have to be fixed in some way already, there's no getting around the need for an in-depth retagging.

lendrimujina said:
That's not exactly helping the case against it being a term that's ill-defined to the point of uselessness.

Not trying to help it, as I said before "I'm not really happy with "fakemon" as a tag either because it can get so arbitrary". I wouldn't shed a tear if it were done away with, I'm just saying aliasing to fan_species wouldn't be a good way to do it as it would just make fan_species inherit the same problem (and many more).

watsit said:
Not all fakemon are fan_species. The tag would need an in-depth purge of anything that's not directly and inextricably tied to a preexisting work before such an alias could be made, followed by continuous cleanup from people tagging fakemon on creatures that are considered fakemon by their respective fandoms but aren't directly tied to a preexisting work.

...Why? Non-general tags (such as species) don't need to strictly follow TWYS

wandering_spaniel said:
...Why? Non-general tags (such as species) don't need to strictly follow TWYS

We still try to avoid pointlessly arbitrary tags, even if they could fit under some partial TWYS exception. If something is a fakemon/fan_species only because of the creator's say so, regardless of what it looks like, what function would it have beyond being a vanity tag? Especially since something being a fan_species would have the knock-on effect of any character of that species being a fan_character, regardless of any franchise content being visible, making that tag worse than it already is.