Not bad :D

So... It's a male or a female? e621 tags logic is like trying to understand life itself, it makes no sense.

NoNameDude said:
its male, i even added the male tag but some1 removed it :P

If something looks female, it gets tagged as female.

Ebnetboy said:
i drew it as male, thats why i added the ♂ :P

It doesn't look like a male. The ♂ is tagged because the male symbol is present. The character, however, looks female and will be tagged as such.

when there's a ♂ character pointing towards a character like this, isn't it just one step away from the character saying "i'm male"? i understand the "tag what you see" rule, but in this image, what i'm seeing is a male-symbol pointed directly at a (in my opinion) ambiguous character. i feel like that should be enough to tag this image as male (or, once again, at the very least ambiguous). certainly not female–no one looking at this image in full would assume or think that this character is a female.

in summary: if the tag what you see rule is meant to have tags put on images so that anyone entering the image without any background knowledge would assume it's one thing, then this image seems like it should be male due to the symbols presented.

meowmcmeow said:
when there's a ♂ character pointing towards a character like this, isn't it just one step away from the character saying "i'm male"? i understand the "tag what you see" rule, but in this image, what i'm seeing is a male-symbol pointed directly at a (in my opinion) ambiguous character. i feel like that should be enough to tag this image as male (or, once again, at the very least ambiguous). certainly not female–no one looking at this image in full would assume or think that this character is a female.

in summary: if the tag what you see rule is meant to have tags put on images so that anyone entering the image without any background knowledge would assume it's one thing, then this image seems like it should be male due to the symbols presented.

If you understand the TWYS rule then you should also understand that we don't tag gender according to anything but appearance of the character. What some text or some symbol describes is not used in determining the proper gender tag used in the tag list. The symbol itself gets tagged (hence the ♂ in the tag list) but that is not used for gender tagging (hence female in the tag list).

In short: we tag appearance, not by text. A male symbol on an image will not determine the gender tag used for the character(s) depicted.

Ratte said:
If you understand the TWYS rule then you should also understand that we don't tag gender according to anything but appearance of the character. What some text or some symbol describes is not used in determining the proper gender tag used in the tag list. The symbol itself gets tagged (hence the ♂ in the tag list) but that is not used for gender tagging (hence female in the tag list).

In short: we tag appearance, not by text. A male symbol on an image will not determine the gender tag used for the character(s) depicted.

But this character doesn't really have any visible sexual characteristics. No visible genitalia, no visible breasts or other secondary sexual characteristics. It's just a "cute" character, but that's how most furries are drawn, male or female-and it's a pokemon, Sylveon specifically, which looks the same whether it be male or female(and are in fact overwhelmingly male at a ratio of 87.5% male).

If not male, this picture should at least be tagged "ambiguous_gender". Seems like the exact kind of image that tag exists for.

This was exactly what I was looking for. An adorable male sylveon

Ebnetboy said:
thats what why i drew the ♂ its meant to show the sylveon saying its male why else would i have added it?

I tried the same thing at my Primarina earlier, but it didn't work as well. :D

bleph said:
But this character doesn't really have any visible sexual characteristics. No visible genitalia, no visible breasts or other secondary sexual characteristics. It's just a "cute" character, but that's how most furries are drawn, male or female-and it's a pokemon, Sylveon specifically, which looks the same whether it be male or female(and are in fact overwhelmingly male at a ratio of 87.5% male).

If not male, this picture should at least be tagged "ambiguous_gender". Seems like the exact kind of image that tag exists for.

I second this.

Ratte said:
It doesn't look like a male. The ♂ is tagged because the male symbol is present. The character, however, looks female and will be tagged as such.

That's stupid. There isn't any visible genitalia, no boobs, and the Sylveon itself doesn't even look female; it just looks like a normal Sylveon.

The only thing that would make it "seem" female is the maid outfit he's wearing, but female isn't the only gender to wear such.

Therefor I think it should atleast tagged as ambiguous, not female.

Dubzy said:
That's stupid. There isn't any visible genitalia, no boobs, and the Sylveon itself doesn't even look female; it just looks like a normal Sylveon.

The only thing that would make it "seem" female is the maid outfit he's wearing, but female isn't the only gender to wear such.

Therefor I think it should atleast tagged as ambiguous, not female.

This is why I dislike the TWYS system sometimes, it makes tags so misleading, and you see it all the time, especially with things like Pokémon. You know what I see? A male symbol pointing to a Sylveon, that should immediately tell me this Sylveon is male, not the clothes it's wearing telling me it's female.

The female tag on this seems to be based purely on body shape, but it's still conflicting. The face looks masculine to me, i think this is ambiguous_gender. Ribbons and colors don't count as sexual characteristics.

Y'all forget that there's a corollary to the TWYS rule, and that is in regards to gender, what the artist tags is what goes.

E: Oops, not really. My badz.

So your really telling me the artist can't tag art that they made and have it stand? That is absurd. If you draw your charecter, and then you had someone come and tell you that it isn't the sex you assigned to it, how the fuck would you feel?

22xander said:
So your really telling me the artist can't tag art that they made and have it stand? That is absurd. If you draw your charecter, and then you had someone come and tell you that it isn't the sex you assigned to it, how the fuck would you feel?

I really dont understand why this rule still exists. You'd expect the author's own tags would be the most logical way to tag stuff but apparently not.

Ivaruk said:
This was exactly what I was looking for. An adorable male sylveon

Must have been hard to find considering you couldn't have used the male tag.

For the record, I'd say ambiguous_gender would work better in this case, it's just not a clean cut case, in which case ambiguous gender would be the default go to solution.

Salnalus said:
This is why I dislike the TWYS system sometimes, it makes tags so misleading, and you see it all the time, especially with things like Pokémon. You know what I see? A male symbol pointing to a Sylveon, that should immediately tell me this Sylveon is male, not the clothes it's wearing telling me it's female.

It's not perfect, but nothing is. Anyway, clothes aren't supposed to be used for sex determination anyway, that's why we have tags like crossdressing in case a male character wears stereotypically female clothing.

Chokfi said:
So your really telling me the artist can't tag art that they made and have it stand? That is absurd. If you draw your charecter, and then you had someone come and tell you that it isn't the sex you assigned to it, how the fuck would you feel?

That's not what the tags mean and not what they are for. That's what you should use the description box for, there you can tell the viewer what they are supposed to see if the artist is so inclined. Tags are supposed to facilitate objective searching only, nothing else, which is why subjective or non-physical or emotional aspects aren't considered, as it would undermine the search function.

jpkurihara said:
I really dont understand why this rule still exists. You'd expect the author's own tags would be the most logical way to tag stuff but apparently not.

Depends what kind of logic you apply, the most logical for the author? Absolutely. The most logical for the end user? Maybe, but most likely not.

Without TWYS the tags would would devolve into the utter crap you see on most gallery sites, and I'm not exaggerating, it can be pretty bad. Media archives and the objectiveness that comes with it tend to be superior in pretty much all cases, it's the few extraordinary cases which cause problems.

The only viable solution except from TWYS is to have two sets of tags, kind of like they have on Inkbunny where you have "assigned" and "suggested" tags.

TWYS rule is just stupid overall mods fix your rules or else the rules arent gonna be good and your gonna get extremely hated