Topic: What is the policy on tagging a character who is not pictured in the scene?

Posted under Tag/Wiki Projects and Questions

Are character tags limited to visual depictions of the characters, or can they be tagged if they are mentioned in dialogue? I recently came across two edge cases I was unsure about:

  • post #4823504 features a character narrating a scene in which they are not pictured.
  • post #5000874 features a character speaking to a character they have vored (and mentioning them by name), but the character is not visually depicted.

beholding said:
Noted, thank you. This should probably be added to the how-to-tag guide.

As much as I agree with that, the how-to-tag system all works on a TWYS system - Tag What You See. As far as I know, there are only a small handful of tags that do not apply to this, being Lore tags, but that is because it provides context for a picture and the things involved in the picture.

bird-tm said:
As much as I agree with that, the how-to-tag system all works on a TWYS system - Tag What You See. As far as I know, there are only a small handful of tags that do not apply to this, being Lore tags, but that is because it provides context for a picture and the things involved in the picture.

Character tags are a grey area in regards to TWYS, though. From the how-to-tag guide:

Tags in the Character and Species categories are partially dependent upon TWYS: that is, external information can be used to help identify what character or species is supposed to be depicted in the post in cases where it isn't obvious, but it cannot actively conflict with what is seen in the post. For example, you can tag character a if the artist claims that a disembodied hand in the post belongs to character a, unless the hand looks nothing like character a and instead looks exactly like it belongs to character b. In that case, TWYS overrides the artist's word.

I figured that "Characters must be visually present to be tagged" was probably the case, but this doesn't explicitly say so, and there are a lot of mistagged posts.