So, can someone decide or come to a consensus how to tag Charrs' genders?

For anyone who has never heard of Guild Wars 2, I can understand it is hard to tell the genders apart when it comes to charr. However, if you've touched the game/done some reading, they have very obvious secondary sex characteristics (tail, horn and ear placement, face structure), making the gender easy to tell. So tag what you see doesn't really apply here, since different people will see different things based on experience

Somwthing like this would open the gates for stuff like pokemon where shorter fangs or a notched tail make the difference.

http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_with_gender_differences

Tag what you see still applies to the charr thing listed as, with no outside information, gender is not obvious :o

Kaik said:
...So tag what you see doesn't really apply here, since different people will see different things based on experience

No, they see the same thing, but people who have external knowledge just sometimes try to tag badly.
TWYS applies.

Betting this was brought on because of my recent sweep of the charr tags, and then fixing the erroneous ones?

I just wish that there were some actual consensus, and that it were consistent across all the species.

Because I find it somewhat annoying that we can tag Charr gender by the facial features, but can't do the same for other races such as Iksar. Even though there's far more obvious difference between males and females in that species.

Genjar said:
I just wish that there were some actual consensus, and that it were consistent across all the species.

Because I find it somewhat annoying that we can tag Charr gender by the facial features, but can't do the same for other races such as Iksar. Even though there's far more obvious difference between males and females in that species.

By face? Really? What, did they have girly eye lashes? :P

CamKitty said:
By face? Really? What, did they have girly eye lashes? :P

These, for example:
post #265908 post #366281 post #254327

All tagged as female, and I'm almost sure I've seen some admin decisions saying that that's how we're supposed to tag them. But on the other hand, Iksar can't be tagged as female by facial features (see post #258564). So it seems very inconsistent to me.

Genjar said:
These, for example:
post #265908 post #366281 post #254327

All tagged as female, and I'm almost sure I've seen some admin decisions saying that that's how we're supposed to tag them. But on the other hand, Iksar can't be tagged as female by facial features (see post #258564). So it seems very inconsistent to me.

Fist one looks somewhat feminine, 2nd looks male, 3rd I would tag ambiguous personally.
First one could be ambiguous too if you really wanted, but there's a slight feminine quality to it.

Halite said:
Fist one looks somewhat feminine, 2nd looks male, 3rd I would tag ambiguous personally.
First one could be ambiguous too if you really wanted, but there's a slight feminine quality to it.

The only way of knowing for certain whether a charr is male or female involves either playing Guild Wars 2--hence how those pictures Genjar posted are tagged as female, given these are horn, hair, and facial features they have within the game--or seeing them nude, which isn't the kind of thing that should be relied on.

Should we just mark any that don't have features explicitly recognizable as male or female with an ambiguous gender tag?

Misappropriated said:
The only way of knowing for certain whether a charr is male or female involves either playing Guild Wars 2--hence how those pictures Genjar posted are tagged as female, given these are horn, hair, and facial features they have within the game--or seeing them nude, which isn't the kind of thing that should be relied on.

Should we just mark any that don't have features explicitly recognizable as male or female with an ambiguous gender tag?

That is the point of the ambiguous_gender tag, yes.

Misappropriated said:
The only way of knowing for certain whether a charr is male or female involves either playing Guild Wars 2--hence how those pictures Genjar posted are tagged as female, given these are horn, hair, and facial features they have within the game--or seeing them nude, which isn't the kind of thing that should be relied on.

Should we just mark any that don't have features explicitly recognizable as male or female with an ambiguous gender tag?

Well the problem is, that people tag ambiguous_gender regardless of which features are visible (especially the tail, which is the most prominent feature) unless they're completely nude. And even then female charr get tagged as "cuntboys" sometimes...

Kaik said:
Well the problem is, that people tag ambiguous_gender regardless of which features are visible (especially the tail, which is the most prominent feature) unless they're completely nude. And even then female charr get tagged as "cuntboys" sometimes...

I'm just not sure it's fair to ask everyone viewing or tagging those images to be aware of those kinds of distinctions when it comes to the characteristics varying between charr genders. Though...yeah, tagging female charr as cuntboys probably isn't doing much to help the situation, either.

Just seems a bit silly and lazy to tag everything ambiguous_gender if no genitals are dangling around. :T

Kaik said:
Just seems a bit silly and lazy to tag everything ambiguous_gender if no genitals are dangling around. :T

It's not lazy, it would presumptuous to tag it otherwise :o

Kaik said:
Well the problem is, that people tag ambiguous_gender regardless of which features are visible (especially the tail, which is the most prominent feature) unless they're completely nude. And even then female charr get tagged as "cuntboys" sometimes...

The TWYS rules says you cannot use external knowledge to tag.
You have to tag as though you were generic person who doesn't have any specialized knowledge.
So "tail", not a valid gender decider, particularly because you can easily draw an otherwise obviously male charr with a "female" tail, because art.

Someone should make a male charr who's fluffed his tail and trimmed his horns to make him look female. Wouldn't that just mess with people >:3

Tokaido said:
Someone should make a male charr who's fluffed his tail and trimmed his horns to make him look female. Wouldn't that just mess with people >:3

And that's the point, you can do that.
It's not even hard, furries will draw anything.
That's why TWYS is the only sane method of tagging.

Halite said:
And that's the point, you can do that.
It's not even hard, furries will draw anything.
That's why TWYS is the only sane method of tagging.

This, so much this.

The tagging system HAS to be so objective because furry stuff, or art in general, is so subjective :o

Halite said:
And that's the point, you can do that.
It's not even hard, furries will draw anything.
That's why TWYS is the only sane method of tagging.

Yeah, I guess that's the point I was trying to make. The only people who would notice would be the hardcore Guild Wars fans, everyone else would treat the image as normal, probably assuming that the charr in question was just your normal effeminate male cat-thing.

This is why the char must be tagged as ambiguous_gender, just like most herms who aren't showing genitalia will be tagged as female... but I guess a lot of people have trouble with that one too.

Yeah... Tagging them as ambiguous_gender might be the only solution that actually works, without causing massive tag wars.

Though it kind of sucks from the users perspective: if someone searches for female Charr, they probably don't expect to see breasts. And they might not even think of looking for accurately drawn females under ambiguous_gender.

Normally I stay out of tag discussions, especially ones like this, since I've seen them bring out the worst in otherwise nice people, but I feel like I've got two cents to throw in, so I'll go ahead and stick my neck out.

Genjar said:
Yeah... Tagging them as ambiguous_gender might be the only solution that actually works, without causing massive tag wars.

Though it kind of sucks from the users perspective: if someone searches for female Charr, they probably don't expect to see breasts. And they might not even think of looking for accurately drawn females under ambiguous_gender.

If the primary function of tags is to provide results as accurate as possible for searching and blacklists, then what would the problem be with tagging images like post #281250 as both female and cuntboy? That way, people who want to find Charr females can find them, while those who search for cuntboys find an image that they might want to see.

Not saying it's 100% perfect, but it's certainly functional in most cases. For instance, I could see someone who wants to search for Charr females, but has cuntboy blacklisted having a bit of frustration, though making an exception like "cuntboy -charr -female" in their blacklist would easily fix that issue.

The main issue I see would probably just be getting people to know to tag them like that in the first place, honestly.

CamKitty said:
Somwthing like this would open the gates for stuff like pokemon where shorter fangs or a notched tail make the difference.

http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_with_gender_differences

Tag what you see still applies to the charr thing listed as, with no outside information, gender is not obvious :o

For the Pokemon, that would be a nightmare, since aside from the really obvious ones, like female Pikachu having a heart-shaped notch in their tails, it seems most artists overlook gender differences entirely. A lot of them are just too subtle. That said, I don't know if admins have made any official ruling, but I have seen heart-shaped-notch-in-tail Pikachu getting tagged as female as long as no evidence to the contrary (like a penor) is presented.

But nobody would be able to reasonably tell if an otherwise ambiguously-gendered Lucario's chest spike is long enough to be considered "male," and what if it's just a "girly" Lucario who got shoved into the lockers by that Machoke who made the football team back in high school?

So yeah. Nightmare.

At some point, though, some outside knowledge gets brought in. Otherwise, how would we tag their species as Lucario, Pikachu, or Charr without it being explicitly stated in the image in the first place?

Blodsho said:
Normally I stay out of tag discussions, especially ones like this, since I've seen them bring out the worst in otherwise nice people, but I feel like I've got two cents to throw in, so I'll go ahead and stick my neck out.

If the primary function of tags is to provide results as accurate as possible for searching and blacklists, then what would the problem be with tagging images like post #281250 as both female and cuntboy? That way, people who want to find Charr females can find them, while those who search for cuntboys find an image that they might want to see.

Not saying it's 100% perfect, but it's certainly functional in most cases. For instance, I could see someone who wants to search for Charr females, but has cuntboy blacklisted having a bit of frustration, though making an exception like "cuntboy -charr -female" in their blacklist would easily fix that issue.

The main issue I see would probably just be getting people to know to tag them like that in the first place, honestly.

You can't be both female and a cuntboy.
They are separate things.

...
At some point, though, some outside knowledge gets brought in. Otherwise, how would we tag their species as Lucario, Pikachu, or Charr without it being explicitly stated in the image in the first place?

Generally speaking it's a question of what a typical person would know.
We aren't saying tag like you don't know anything at all, if that was the case there would be no tags.

Halite said:
You can't be both female and a cuntboy.
They are separate things.

Generally speaking it's a question of what a typical person would know.
We aren't saying tag like you don't know anything at all, if that was the case there would be no tags.

You're right, a person can't actually be both. But they can look like one or the other depending on who you ask, and that's where the ambiguous_gender tag comes in to the rescue. At least, normally.

As Genjar pointed out above, in this specific case (which is to say that I am absolutely not advocating that every post tagged ambiguous_gender should get the tags for every possible gender tag someone believes they might fall into), it ends up kneecapping the ability of people wanting to search for female Charr, particularly newer users and lurkers who may not be entirely savvy on the full scope of the tagging system and how we do things around here.

While it is certainly possible to draw a female Charr with breasts and a more feminine body type so that it doesn't fall into the ambiguous realm (there are even a few posted here already, those who want to find more accurate ones get shafted a bit if we split them up by tagging them as ambiguous.

Addressing your second point, briefly: Would you say that the typical person would know enough about what Charr look like to be able positively ID one and tag it, but at the same time not know enough to know what the typical body type of the females are and thus tagging it as female would be outside knowledge? I'm not saying it's directly contradictory, but I feel like that's a very thin line to walk.

On a lot of female Charr posts, some people see a cuntboy, some see a female Charr, and if that's too much outside knowledge, then there's at least some out there who would say it's a flat-chested, female, demon/feline hybrid. A valid case can be made for both cuntboy and female tags on a lot of female Charr posts (as well as the ambiguous_gender tag, of course).

Ultimately, I suppose what I'm trying to get at with my suggestion is that I don't see how adding more tags to a post can necessarily be a bad thing, as long as those tags are both relevant and help the tagging system do it's job better in specific corner cases like this.

Sorry for the length, by the way. I had a lot of points to hit and I'm not as great at boiling things down as I'd like to be sometimes.

Blodsho said:
You're right, a person can't actually be both. But they can look like one or the other depending on who you ask, and that's where the ambiguous_gender tag comes in to the rescue. At least, normally.

As Genjar pointed out above, in this specific case (which is to say that I am absolutely not advocating that every post tagged ambiguous_gender should get the tags for every possible gender tag someone believes they might fall into), it ends up kneecapping the ability of people wanting to search for female Charr, particularly newer users and lurkers who may not be entirely savvy on the full scope of the tagging system and how we do things around here.

While it is certainly possible to draw a female Charr with breasts and a more feminine body type so that it doesn't fall into the ambiguous realm (there are even a few posted here already, those who want to find more accurate ones get shafted a bit if we split them up by tagging them as ambiguous.

That's not what ambiguous gender is for.
Ambiguous gender is for if there isn't enough information in an image to determine gender, like above, if it's only showing a face.

If there's a vagina depicted, there's gender identifying information, ambiguous_gender is not a valid tag.

Addressing your second point, briefly: Would you say that the typical person would know enough about what Charr look like to be able positively ID one and tag it, but at the same time not know enough to know what the typical body type of the females are and thus tagging it as female would be outside knowledge? I'm not saying it's directly contradictory, but I feel like that's a very thin line to walk.

On a lot of female Charr posts, some people see a cuntboy, some see a female Charr, and if that's too much outside knowledge, then there's at least some out there who would say it's a flat-chested, female, demon/feline hybrid. A valid case can be made for both cuntboy and female tags on a lot of female Charr posts (as well as the ambiguous_gender tag, of course).

If you had a set of 20 images, and 5 of them were images of charr, a normal person with no outside information would be able to identify those images as 5 members of the same species.
They might not know the name of the species, but that's not the issue, they can identify them as members of a species.

If you had the same experiment with 5 images of "female" charr, and 5 of them are females and 5 are cuntboys, then the normal person would say there's 5 female images and 10 cuntboys.

Ultimately, I suppose what I'm trying to get at with my suggestion is that I don't see how adding more tags to a post can necessarily be a bad thing, as long as those tags are both relevant and help the tagging system do it's job better in specific corner cases like this.

Sorry for the length, by the way. I had a lot of points to hit and I'm not as great at boiling things down as I'd like to be sometimes.

The problem is that it directly contradicts the tagging rules system of this whole website.
You're saying to avoid some small disagreements that we should just completely ignore the way tagging works on this website.
That is a bad thing.

Halite said:
That's not what ambiguous gender is for.
Ambiguous gender is for if there isn't enough information in an image to determine gender, like above, if it's only showing a face.

If there's a vagina depicted, there's gender identifying information, ambiguous_gender is not a valid tag.

You're right, fair enough. Sorry about that.

If you had a set of 20 images, and 5 of them were images of charr, a normal person with no outside information would be able to identify those images as 5 members of the same species.
They might not know the name of the species, but that's not the issue, they can identify them as members of a species.

If you had the same experiment with 5 images of "female" charr, and 5 of them are females and 5 are cuntboys, then the normal person would say there's 5 female images and 10 cuntboys.

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on those, however.

For the first, they may know that it is a species of some kind, and that they're the same species, but unless we assume that the average person knows specifically what a Charr is, they would see something along the lines of a demon feline hybrid, and would likely tag it as such.

For the second, if the 5 females and 5 cuntboys really result in a response of "10 cuntboys" every time, then I feel like we wouldn't be here. Not everyone draws the line between cuntboy and flat-chested females at the same place. I took a quick look through charr ~female ~cuntboy solo -breasts and there's definitely a few that I would call female without a doubt, as well as many that I would tag cuntboy. But at the same time, I can see where people would disagree, and in at least one case, I'm not even sure which way to go myself.

The problem is that it directly contradicts the tagging rules system of this whole website.
You're saying to avoid some small disagreements that we should just completely ignore the way tagging works on this website.
That is a bad thing.

I thought the purpose of TWYS is to be as objective as possible in order to facilitate searches and blacklists. If one side sees one thing, and another sees something else, and nobody can objectively say that one side is wrong or come to any kind of decision, then why wouldn't it be valid to tag it as both? I'm not saying to ignore anything.

It might just be because I'm tired, but I feel like I'm really missing something, so honest question: How is it contradicting the tagging rules, exactly?

Blodsho said:
You're right, fair enough. Sorry about that.

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on those, however.

For the first, they may know that it is a species of some kind, and that they're the same species, but unless we assume that the average person knows specifically what a Charr is, they would see something along the lines of a demon feline hybrid, and would likely tag it as such.

For the second, if the 5 females and 5 cuntboys really result in a response of "10 cuntboys" every time, then I feel like we wouldn't be here. Not everyone draws the line between cuntboy and flat-chested females at the same place. I took a quick look through charr ~female ~cuntboy solo -breasts and there's definitely a few that I would call female without a doubt, as well as many that I would tag cuntboy. But at the same time, I can see where people would disagree, and in at least one case, I'm not even sure which way to go myself.

I thought the purpose of TWYS is to be as objective as possible in order to facilitate searches and blacklists. If one side sees one thing, and another sees something else, and nobody can objectively say that one side is wrong or come to any kind of decision, then why wouldn't it be valid to tag it as both? I'm not saying to ignore anything.

It might just be because I'm tired, but I feel like I'm really missing something, so honest question: How is it contradicting the tagging rules, exactly?

The way that TWYS works, if there is a dispute as to what is visible in the image, or at least the interpretation of the visible information, the solution is to discuss and attempt to find a solution of which is correct.
If no solution between the 2 possibilities can be found, then you ask the admin/moderation team for a ruling on the answer.
That ruling is what gets tagged.

Tagging both isn't TWYS, it's just tagging everything that might be interpreted from the image.

Halite said:
The way that TWYS works, if there is a dispute as to what is visible in the image, or at least the interpretation of the visible information, the solution is to discuss and attempt to find a solution of which is correct.
If no solution between the 2 possibilities can be found, then you ask the admin/moderation team for a ruling on the answer.
That ruling is what gets tagged.

Tagging both isn't TWYS, it's just tagging everything that might be interpreted from the image.

Only nit I have to pick is that it wouldn't be tagging what "might" be interpreted, but rather what "currently is" being interpreted. I wasn't suggesting it be done preemptively.

Other than that, fair enough. There's only ever allowed to be one right answer. That's what I was missing.

Ok so, yes, tagging Charr genders is kind of a mess and it's probably going to have to stay that way. Allow me to explain:

1. Charrs are already a heavily anthropomorphic species. Anthropomorphism is the attribution of HUMAN characteristics to something. Therefore, human characteristics are what people are looking for by default, which means that human-like facial features are what they're depending on to clue them in as to whether the character is male or female (assuming no other obvious male/female features are present on the body). Often, the only noticeable distinction is the inclusion of longer eyelashes or hair, such as post #488276, post #486631, post #471379, and many others. Other traits such as lighter complexion and higher cheekbones are also possible, but often much more subjective.

2. It's true that we WOULD allow the tagging of genders of certain species based on non-human traits, such as a deer with antlers being tagged male. However, these are commonly known animals with commonly known traits; it's expected that many, if not most, users would be aware of these traits already, and therefore fits their idea of "tagging what they see". This is simply not the case for Charrs, as well as MANY other species both real and fictional.

In short, Charrs are definitely a case where TWYS is simply going to fall a little short, but I think we're just going to have to appeal to the majority on this one, which means following TWYS. Yes, it kind of sucks for those users who are familiar with the gender-specific traits of Charrs, but even still, this only affects those Charr images where you legitimately can not tell if the character is female, which shouldn't be a large amount of posts.

Char said:
lots of sensible things

Best possible ruling I can think of.

I don't mean to sound rude to any Charr fans, but the majority of users here just don't know the differences between the two genders, and probably don't pay much mind to it. You'd have to have a dedicated Charr (or at least Guild Wars) specific rule 34 image board to implement anything allowing you to tag based off of game knowledge, because you'd have to assume that the majority of the user base knkows this information. That's just not the case on e621.

EDIT: Someone who's really dedicated to the cause could possibly set up separate sets or pools or whatever that have every "male char" and "female charr" they can find? Regardless of what they're tagged, you could put all the males in one, the females in another.

Heh, Char clarifying Charrs